His name was Aaron Bushnell, the US soldier who set himself on fire last Sunday in front of the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, at 3500 International Drive Northwest, in the diplomatic district of the capital. A member of the US Air Force from San Antonio, Texas, 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell was hospitalized in very serious condition and died due to the severity of his burns.
In an email, sent shortly before the gesture, the airman announced to the newspapers: “Today, I will carry out an extreme gesture of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
The soldier filmed and broadcast his desperate gesture live on Twitch, saying:
I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am on the verge of making an extreme gesture of protest. But compared to what they are experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what the ruling class has decided is normal.
Last December, a protester set himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.
The episode has shaken American public opinion, bringing to mind similar episodes that occurred during the Vietnam War.
Several cases of self-immolation occurred in the mid-1960s, and they had a strong impact throughout the world, fueling the growth of the movement protesting the war in Vietnam. The first case was that of Alice Herz, 82 years old, a peace activist who set herself on fire on March 16, 1965 in Detroit. In her farewell letter she mentioned her Buddhist predecessors. She died in hospital ten days later.
Public reaction was particularly strong when, a few months later, on November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker from Baltimore, set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon. Morrison had studied religion at Wooster College in Ohio, then attended Western Theological Seminary (now Pittsburgh Presbyterian Seminary) for a year. In 1962 he moved with his family to Baltimore, where he organized prayer meetings.
Morrison’s wife recalls that on November 2, 1965, at lunch, they were discussing an article describing the bombing of villages and the killing of children in the Vietnam War. She then left the house to pick up her two older children from school, while her husband stayed home with their one-year-old daughter, Emily. When she returned home she found no one there, without explanation.
Norman Morrison’s self-immolation occurred not far from the office of Robert McNamara, then head of the Pentagon, who was present and an eyewitness to the tragic event. Norman Morrison left behind his wife and three children (Morrison took his youngest daughter with him to the Pentagon and set himself on fire before her eyes). The reasons for his action were confusingly described in his farewell letter to his wife.
The Catholic Roger Allen Laporte should also be remembered in this first wave of self-immolations. On November 9, 1965, he sat in the lotus position in front of the Dag Hammarskjölda Library, part of the UN complex in New York, and set himself on fire.
Morrison’s gesture may have been inspired by Thích Quảng Đức and other Buddhist monks, who had set themselves on fire in protest against the South Vietnamese president, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem.
Translation by Paul Rosenberg
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