“Free Palestine!” Aaron Brushnell screams, spitting fire. It was agonizing to watch him, a cop pointing a gun at his body and yelling at him as he continued to scream, becoming possessed by flames. It was a metaphor for the American experience; beyond violence, the state has no response to any of our needs, even if we are quite literally burning.
Back in December, a Black Atlanta woman self-immolated in front of the city’s Israeli embassy. She draped herself with a Palestinian flag as she announced what she was going to do. If you look for her name, the only pieces of information you might find are mentions of property damage, or Zionists calling it an act of antisemitic violence. There is no mention of her, her current state, where she is, or how to tangibly support her. That was intentional.
In November, an unidentified man self-immolated in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He held a sign with a few simple words – Stop the genocide in Congo. His act connects to Cedrick Nianca’s self-immolation in 2011. Cedrick, like Aaron, screamed, “Congo na nga, Congo na nga,” or “My Congo, my Congo.” His last words a prayer, full of love for his home and his people. In 2010, a Tunisian street vendor by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze, inciting the Arab Spring. Their deaths are part of a lineage of resistance by self-immolation that needs to be contextualized.
There is an etymological history behind the designation of martyr in Palestinian resistance groups. During the Second Intifada, martyrdom rose beyond its relationship with religion, as secular Palestinians leaned into it as a way to turn their despair into freedom fighting. Today, martyrs are abundant and eternal in education curricula, visual arts, community events, ceremonies, funeral processions, leaflets, and posters throughout Palestine. Martyrs are symbols of the ongoing struggle against military occupation. Abu al-Ezz, a member of the Jenin Brigades, told Al Jazeera, “There is no way Israel will leave us with any choice except that of armed resistance.”
Unlike Aaron, Mohamed, the unnamed self-immolators, and Cedrick sacrificed themselves to protest racialized capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. Under desperate circumstances, they did it for the liberation of their own. Aaron did it because he no longer wanted to be a part of the systems that subjugate people like Mohamed, the unnamed self-immolators, and Cedrick. His complicity was part of his reckoning; he used himself to bring attention to genocide in Gaza because of the role he played in maintaining empire.
For Aaron, solidarity with Palestinians was a righteous cause to call attention to. He knew his life as an active duty serviceman did not come at the expense of other people. There was no fanfare and no heroics to it. He was very real about it: “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
Watching him walk with the bottle of accelerant, talking to his Twitch live feed, the ease with which he poured gasoline over himself showed someone who was full of purpose. He was committed to a struggle bigger than himself, even if we discourse about the ‘how.’ We can’t depoliticize his act of self-immolation without talking about genocide. We cannot talk about the framing of death by suicide without thinking about why his death bothers people so much, as opposed to the cause he wanted to bring attention to. Arguably, if people only talk about this protest using the framework of so-called “mental health,” they are not worth convincing in the first place. I think speaking to people who pathologize empathy is a waste of time.
Aaron’s story reached Palestine and Yemen, setting a precedent for Arab nations. One person said Aaron’s shoelaces held more honor than all the Arab nations combined. Arab leaders have watched the horrors in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon for over 142 days and have sat in silence and complicity. For the resistance and for people impacted by the American and Israeli war machine, Aaron is a narrative tool, a story of sacrifice, bravery, and principles. If a white American man can see what is happening in Gaza and defy the empire he pledged allegiance to, neighboring Arab countries have no excuse not to intervene. Lionizing him post-mortem is a call to response from those who have Palestinians, Yemenis, and Lebanese people to face death, disease, and destruction alone.
“The Front expressed its full solidarity with the soldier’s family and all the American sympathizers who took a honorable stance and whose struggle and pressure to stop the genocide on the Strip have not ceased, confirming that the act of an American soldier sacrificing his life to draw the attention of the American people and the world to the plight of the Palestinian people, despite its tragic nature and the great pain it involves, is considered the highest sacrifice and medal, and the most important and poignant message directed to the American administration, that it is involved in the war crime in Gaza and that the American people have awakened and are rejecting this American involvement, calling on the American administration to stop this support and bias for the Zionist entity.
The Front sent a message to the Arab soldier to take this American soldier who sacrificed his life for a noble cause like the Palestinian cause as an example and role model, and to leave the trenches of waiting, incapacity and move to the trench of confrontation in support of Palestine and its people who are being slaughtered, besieged, and starved in full view and hearing of the world and just a few kilometers from Arab lands and meters fom the borders.”
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Central Media Department, February 26, 2024
Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, half the population starving in the North and the other half awaiting a ground invasion in Rafah. In Sudan, 15,000 people have been killed, 10 million people have been displaced, and 4 million girls and women are at risk of sexualized violence. My interpretation of Aaron’s words, “This is what our ruling class has decided to be normal” ties our permacrises – the crisis of affordability, mass death as a result of shooting sprees and pandemics, genocides in other countries, state violence, denying Black and brown refugees asylum, and a crumbling social safety net that says we cannot feed you or house you, but we can ship you to prison if you’d like – and that’s just at home. Is this the normal Americans wanted to go back to so badly? This is necropolitics.
Necropolitics is a manifestation of capitalism, white supremacy, mass incarceration, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism. It maintains the status quo. It is a violent phenomenon, a death cult, one that Achille Mbembe calls a “social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”
Aaron was part of this living dead, an active component of the United States death machine. Aaron was just another person wrapped up in it, just another disposable thing for the American empire to ruin in pursuit of its agenda. Necropolitical normalizers talk about mental illness as though it is a stain. If you are mentally ill (disabled), you are not worth saving. These narratives focusing on Aaron will likely not make it past the 24-hour news cycle. And so Aaron’s sacrifice will be reduced to a case of madness, discarding him into the annals of history for those who will remember him.
But what is madness? What is considered “ill” here? Psychosomatic responses to our living conditions are natural responses. Who can see what we have seen over the last four months and be completely unaffected by it? Images and voices and video and death have burned through our collective consciousness.
I have seen babies suck on dates, a way for their mothers to stave off starvation for another day. I have seen boys pick up their neighbors off the floor, piece by piece, and delicately place them into plastic grocery bags. I have seen fathers beg their daughters for forgiveness, wiping the soot from their faces and adjusting their clothing before covering them with shrouds. I have seen people run away from fire bands raining from the sky into the uncertainty of the dark. I have seen entire housing blocks, schools, and places of worship turned into rubble, laced with bullet holes and mortar shells. I have seen men cry out to the world, interrupting live media broadcasts, begging for intervention. I have seen women in Khartoum detail the abduction of their small children, on top of women in Jenin detailing the abduction of their fathers and uncles and cousins, on top of hunger striking students at Brown, on top of the medication boycott by Victor I. Cazares. Juxtaposed with live-streamed genocide, I have seen influencers taking on new deals with corporations on the BDS list. Headlines calling Muslim communities jihadists and terrorist sympathizers. Schools refusing to investigate hate crimes committed against Palestinian students, despite their campuses becoming sites for biochemical warfare. I have seen Neo Nazis march through the streets of Nashville and through New Jersey into Lower Manhattan with zero police presence while using illegal chokeholds against professors, artists, and high school students, pinning them down under the weight of their knees until the person gasps, “I can’t breathe!” It brings me back to George Floyd and Eric Garner, and it makes me want to sleep for a week. Our social contract is broken, yet the ruling class continues to make its demands, demanding decency and decorum.
Nothing changes.
Time stops for no one.
If suicide is immoral, let’s talk about philosophy — if we use the philosophy of morality, we need to ask ourselves, who dictates the terms? We cannot take cues from a society that is immoral in nature, from its very creation onwards. We cannot accept the definition of morality from an empire that thought that the extermination campaign against Indigenous people was a God-given right. We cannot accept morality from a country that has kept enslavement and segregation alive in its institutions from public health to education, policing, and prisons. A place that says it's okay to carpet bomb brown people and force labor from Africans for the sake of technological advancement. A place that says it is okay for people to freeze to death outside, it is okay to evict people who cannot pay their bills, it is okay to refuse care for the sick and elderly, force people into having children they cannot afford – this is not a place that has a shred of morality to stand on.
In this case, morality – a white, Western supremacist concept – is where the ableist claims that Aaron was mentally ill comes from. After all, ableism is part of the root system of necropolitics. They can successfully convince people that he wanted to kill himself anyway and that he wasted his life becoming a radical pro-Palestinian leftist. Liberal pundits will say giving your life for a political cause is a sign of insanity, which is really ironic for a country that needs the blood of its people to maintain its death grip across the globe. The only acceptable death is death serving your country.
Genocide is a stain on our humanity. You cannot wash it or burn it away. Aaron knew this, the unnamed Atlanta woman knew this, the unnamed Congolese man knew this, Cedrick knew this.
In the U.S., genocide is normal, and any response against it is an anomaly that needs to be pathologized, institutionalized, or incarcerated. 16 veterans die by suicide every day; some are houseless, and others are at risk of substance misuse. Women go missing or are murdered in army barracks. If the U.S. military apparatus is unmoved by its own type of collateral damage, how could this protest have a material effect? Will Aaron’s act of selflessness be a cautionary tale, weaponized by the ruling class against those of us who chose not to be silent? Will we make his sacrifice mean something? Will we put into practice our refusal to be complicit in genocide? Will we recommit to struggling with one another with renewed energy?
In his final Facebook status, Aaron wrote, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
May Aaron’s memory be a blessing to all who knew him, and may he be a kindling in our fight for liberation.