Thoughts on the sublime martyrdom of Aaron Bushnell

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. Soren Kierkegaard

Whatever was going through the mind of US airman Aaron Bushnell, as he walked towards the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC intent on self-immolation, it was not mental illness as his legion of detractors claim.

No, here was a young man intent on sending humanity a message not just in our time but for the ages. It was an act of self-sacrifice forged in the crucible of psychosis that has long been presented to us as the best of all possible worlds.

The moral injury inflicted on every right thinking person over the course of Israel’s five months of genocidal slaughter has been tantamount to placing us all on a rocket ship back in time to every genocide there has been. In the process it has forced us to reappraise and examine all the received truths by which we were conditioned to believe in the very concept of Western ‘civilisation’.

Aaron Bushnell made the decision to rebel against those received truths, and in the process expose them for the sham and the lie they are.

Perfectly lucid, calmly and with the purpose of a man pure of heart and with complete fidelity to a cause greater than self, he walked a few short steps to the entrance to the Israeli Embassy in…