For the Love of Justice

Reflections on Aaron Bushnell’s horrifying act of defiance

People leave notes and flowers during a vigil for U.S. Air Force active-duty airman Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli Embassy on February 26, 2024 in Washington, DC. Bushnell died after setting himself on fire while live streaming, according to published reports, in front of the Israeli Embassy in protest over the Gaza war. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

From the moment on Sunday afternoon when I heard the news about airman Aaron Bushnell setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, he and his horrifying act have been on my mind.

Thanks to social media, gaining widespread public attention for oneself and one’s favored causes has never been easier. This has incentivized a lot of performative outrage that sometimes manifests itself in acts of protest, from environmental activists throwing soup on paintings in European museums to pro-Palestinian demonstrators halting traffic in major cities by sitting down en masse in the middle of roadways.

I will admit, I’m not usually impressed with such deeds, especially ones that disrupt public highways and streets. I don’t think they do much to advance the aims of the activists. In fact, I think they often backfire, generating ill-will among ordinary citizens inconvenienced by the protest. (As for the activists hoping to fight climate change by destroying works of art, I don’t even grasp what they think they’re doing with their lives.)

But there’s a deeper reason for my harsh judgment, which is that I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.

The love of justice can be noble, but it can also be incredibly destructive. (This is hard to see if you conveniently associate such love exclusively with positions staked out by your ideological or partisan allies. In reality, the political ambitions of one’s opponents are often fueled by their own contrary convictions about justice and its demands.) My liberal commitments therefore make me maximally suspicious of most examples of “street politics,” especially forms of it in which the activists risk very little and primarily appear to be engaging in a spiritually fulfilling form of socializing with likeminded peers.

Bushnell’s Propaganda of the Deed

But Bushnell’s act of self-immolation belongs in a different category altogether—one distinct from just about every other form of protest, (And not because it was a symptom of “mental illness,” which is how we increasingly describe, and dismiss, any act that diverges from the norms of ordinary politics or middle-class life.)

Bushnell could have written an op-ed. He could have joined, organized, or led a march and delivered a speech. He could have built up a loud social-media presence and used it to accuse the United States of complicity in genocide and publicize the accusation. He could have leveraged his position in the Air Force to draw added attention to his dissent from Biden administration policy in the Middle East. He could even have embraced terrorism and sought to gain entry to the Israeli embassy with a weapon or explosive (an act that likely would have harmed his cause, generating sympathy for the Israeli government and its war on Hamas in Gaza).

But Bushnell didn’t do any of these things. Instead, a few hours before his act of protest, he posted the following message on Facebook:

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.

Then, as he walked toward the Israeli embassy, live-streaming his progress, Bushnell stated:

I will no longer be complicit in genocide…. I am 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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

And then, like a small number of other intensely committed individuals down through the decades, he doused himself in a flammable liquid and set himself ablaze, opting to sacrifice his own life in a public act of excruciating self-torture, without doing anything at all to harm anyone but himself, in order to draw attention to what he considered an ongoing, intolerable injustice.

The Courage of Bushnell’s Convictions