Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Aaron Bushnell remains to be cremated and scattered in a free Palestine.
Law enforcement officials said Bushnell put his phone down before dousing himself in accelerant and igniting the flames, while screaming: “Free Palestine.” It has now been revealed that the serviceman wanted his remains to be cremated and later scattered “in a free Palestine, if a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land.”
US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell wrote in his will that he wanted his ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine before setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.
The 25-year-old, from San Antonio, Texas, declared he “will no longer be complicit in genocide” as he walked up to the embassy while live streaming on video platform Twitch shortly before 1pm on Sunday. On Monday, the Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Bushnell died from his injuries.
Acts of self-immolation are rare, but they have a clear intent: to use a grotesque display of self-sacrifice to draw the public’s attention to an issue, to force them into moral witness. This was the intent of the most famous self-immolation suicide protester, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who set himself on fire in Saigon in June of 1963 to protest against the treatment of Buddhists by the Catholic-run government. And in America, it was the aim of Norman Morrison, the most famous of several Vietnam war-era self-immolators in the United States, who set himself on fire outside the Pentagon, directly beneath the office of the defense secretary Robert McNamara. These people become vivid symbols of their struggles, their deaths acting as indictments of the political systems that oppress and fail them.
The grim truth is that self-immolation is making something of a revival as a leftwing protest tactic in the United States. David Buckel, an environmental activist, self-immolated in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in protest of the climate crisis in 2018. Another climate activist, Wynn Bruce, took his own life in the same manner on the steps of the US supreme court in 2022. Nor is Bushnell the first protester to self-immolate in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza: a woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December; police say that a Palestinian flag was found at the scene.