Suicidal protests

A few weeks ago, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the fate of Gazan citizens at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. His death joins similar acts of protest going back decades. That someone would die by setting themselves on fire is horrific, and it raises questions about what leads to such drastic steps, and what it means for the cause they died for. There is more to Aaron’s story that hasn’t been part of the discussion around his death as we respond to it and to the desperate situation Gazan civilians find themselves in. This article will explore those responses.

When I first heard of Aaron’s death, it reminded me of another young man’s death in 2018. John Chau was an evangelical Christian who felt that God was calling him to contact and save the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, in the eastern Indian Ocean, from the devil and from hell. As John grew up in the 1990s, he was enamored with stories of adventurous missionaries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After he graduated from Oral Roberts University, he began evangelism training and a hobby of backwoods camping, becoming part of a subculture of young male missionaries who were pious, celibate, and looking for adventure.

John became fixated on bringing the saving word of God to the North Sentinel Island inhabitants and he refused to reconsider his call because biblical steadfastness meant that any other way of perceiving a call from God was wrong. His faith and spiritual life were all about what he could accomplish, not what God would do through him. In the months before John was killed by inhabitants after setting foot on their island, his childhood home in Oregon had burned in a wildfire, and his physician father was being investigated for writing improper prescriptions. John’s last diary entries had a feel of finality, as if he were also suicidal, but didn’t or refused to recognize it.

Aaron Bushnell came from a somewhat similar Christian background, where he was raised in a closed, strict evangelical community on Cape Cod. He was told what to believe growing up, and when he graduated high school in 2020, he joined the Navy and was told where to serve, what to do, and where to eat and sleep. In his off hours while serving in Texas, John started spending time with a group centered around socialism and social justice, and they worked together to serve the needs of the homeless. During this time, he realized that he was suffering from emotional problems related to his childhood, and that he had traded extreme religious values for extreme anarchist and anti-imperialist ideas. Before his suicidal self-immolation, John had left a manifesto protesting the wholesale destruction of Gaza and death of tens of thousands of civilians caught between Hamas and Israel.
 
Both John and Aaron had suffered some form of trauma, and lived in an extreme form of belief that did not give them flexibility or ability to accept perspectives different from their own. Their faith and their ideas were very self-centered, John’s because of hubris, Aaron’s because he had never owned his ideas or beliefs. They both had lost a sense of community, and home, and could not see a future where they could find both, even if it was different from before. In isolation, they had idealized or romanticized their causes and could not see or accept the wider reality surrounding them.

Some Christians who celebrated or found no fault with John’s perceived martyrdom cited Martin Luther King, Jr. as a similar martyr, but MLK didn’t go out seeking death, and he built a community that went with him as he fought for racial justice. Some who hold Aaron’s death as righteous have compared him to Thich Quảng Đức (Tih wan duc), a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1967 in Viet Nam to protest the treatment of Buddhists at the hands of Catholic government officials. However, Quảng Đức was surrounded by other monks who had experienced similar treatment, and he never talked about himself, only the injustice he was protesting. Aaron was alone, shouting “Free Palestine”, and live streaming his death. There is an inescapable drama from a death for a cause, but John’s and Aaron’s drama of their lives and their deaths eclipsed the causes they said they died for. They have been elevated as martyrs by their supporters, in ignorance or rejection of the context of their lives. Martyrs can give energy and focus to a cause as Breonna Taylor’s death has done for corrupt police practices, but John’s and Aaron’s deaths were driven by needs apart from their causes.

21st century martyrdom is driven by political and ideological extremes, fighting each other for attention in the loud and chaotic social media world. Extremism finds nothing useful in the middle where nuance, consideration, and thoughtfulness lie. The extremes are where raw emotion and power are found to combat what seems like overwhelming odds against stopping an injustice. Action does come from both the middle and the extremes, with the difference being a thought out, calculated action versus a violent reaction. In the end, actions like Aaron’s and John’s can be driven by narcissism that is a cry for help. Despite their horrific suicides, we need to be able to mourn their deaths and recognize the tragedy of their circumstances apart from whatever feelings we have for the causes they died for. Grief, anger, frustration, and despair are all part of mourning a loss, but they do not serve well as the reason to support the cause. They are better at motivating us to address injustice itself.