Rev Left Radio - Man on Fire: Aaron Bushnell's Sacrifice for Palestine

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Rest in Peace, Aaron. Free Palestine!  "To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity." - Thich Nhat Hanh in a letter to MLK Jr. regarding the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monks

It's Aaron Bush now. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme active protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

I think this is a deeply emotional topic. I mean, the cause of his self-immolation is already a deeply emotional topic. And then there's this entire fallout from this event that is really repulsive on social media, people of various stripes of liberal, conservative reactionary. on the far right you have people just straight up mocking and making fun of him making memes about it um like 13 year old edge lords and then on the liberal side you just have these truly soulless heartless human beings who are just completely dismissing it as uh as mental illness one of the things that sticks out to me is um this the complete lack of almost anyone taking a step

back to try and absorb and process this tragedy of course we're all quick to you know if we have social media to go out there and drop our hot takes and immediately start going to to battle with people who have terrible takes and human takes but there's just a complete inability and a complete unwillingness apparently for huge swaths of people to just refuse to look this in the eye to take a moment of regardless of what your opinion is to be humbled by this you know incredibly courageous and selfless act of self-sacrifice, even before you can generate your hot take, right? Just to have a profound moment of reflection.

But that's obviously not very possible in today's ecosystem. But I guess the first place to probably start, we're going to get into all of this. And, you know, this is not a super scripted or outlined episode. This is going to be very organic for better or worse. But I feel like that's the best way to sort of address something like this. But, you know, how about Allison if you want to just come in and kind of give us a breakdown of of exactly what happened. I'm assuming 98% of people know what happened, but, you know,

a basic refresher will help orient whoever doesn't. Yeah. So yeah, to summarize kind of just the chain of events that happened. So on February 25th, which was on Sunday, Aaron Bushnell walked in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., streaming on his phone, having sent links to the stream to actually a couple of sources based on what we are seeing now ahead of times. And on stream, declared, I'll just read the exact quote of what he said. I'm an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm 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 is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal, end quote.

And after making that statement, he poured some sort of flammable liquid over himself, took out a lighter and lit himself on fire and proceeded to yell free Palestine until he collapsed. In the really horrific video, you can also see the response of police or in maybe secret surface pulling a gun on him and yelling at him to get on the ground and not administering help. There's another person who, it is still in what I've looked at, unclear. They have been an EMT who yells at the police officer saying, I need a fucking fire extinguisher, not guns. And that is sort of what is in the video.

Aaron died in the hospital later on as a result of the wounds that were, you know, that resulted from that action. So, yeah, I mean, that's what we're responding to. I think, you know, like Brett said, most people have seen it at this point or know what happened. It has become a trending topic on social media. There have been responses to it in the mainstream. Early on, it did kind of look like the attention. of mainstream news was going to be to be very obscurantist about what happened. The very early

headlines didn't make any reference to it being an act of protest, didn't talk about his statements at all. But over time, all of that has kind of come forward in many ways because of the fact that it was filmed, right, which allowed people to see what actually happened. Um, so in the wake of that, I think, you know, Brett hit at this very clearly. One of the things that I just fucking hate about our society and social media is that everyone needs to post their take on something, right? That there's this impulse to do that. And we've seen that in all sorts of directions. We've seen that with people saying this was the act of a crazy person and therefore should just be discarded out of hand. We've seen that with people saying that, you know, this is an action. I saw someone say

this is a violent action towards first responders who would be traumatized by it. In one of like the most horrifically opportunist liberal framings that I've seen. There have been all of these reactions, right? And in a sense, I think the thing that I want to emphasize is that that grosses me the fuck out in a lot of ways that everyone needs to have a hot take on something like this. But also, it says something about the kind of action that it is, right? It's the kind of action that sort of demands a response from us in a way. And that's kind of what's complicated about something like this. When someone takes an action like this and gives up their life in this way, you know, that is meant to evoke feelings of horror discomfort and pain in us in a way that is meant to respond. And so part of why I want to do this episode is to talk about the horrible reactions that we've seen, but also like how we as humans who are committed to liberation and humans that are committed to fighting for justice in the world and want to believe that things like genocides aren't inevitable and can be defeated, how we have to respond to something like this. At the end of the day,

were here talking about what Aaron did, but I also really just want to foreground that in that moment, Aaron wasn't calling attention to himself, right? He was calling attention to the people of Palestine who he correctly pointed out are going through something which is, you know, unbelievably larger in scale than what he experienced. And the action that takes place should remind us, of course, that over the last so many months and over the years of this occupation and this genocide that's been going on. Many, many, many, many Palestinian people have met the exact same fate that Aaron did. And we need to remember to center that as well, because his action was taken in order to push us to see that and to push us to confront that and push us to do

something about that. So, sorry for getting a little teary on the podcast, but yeah, that's what happened. And I think we need to talk about it. So with that said, I think one of the things that I want to kind of get into that we can go back and forth on is I think the most horrific liberal response to this, which has been to try to just dismiss this thing with this language of mental health, right? And so to say, this is a crazy person. This doesn't have political content. It doesn't mean anything. This is a mental health crisis and it's a act of suicide that should be understood just as a crisis of mental health, where mental health is understood not as a product of social. relations that might cause us to suffer mentally, but is understood as its own innate kind of craziness that just needs to be cured. And that seems to be kind of the go-to line in the liberal media. It seems to be kind of the go-to line in Zionist media generally for pushing back against what happened here and trying to tell us that there's no lessons to be learned here. There's nowhere to look. We don't need to interrogate or self-reflect or take action in the wake of this.

yeah i'm just curious brett what your thoughts are on that framing but that framing this is how it's wrong and how we push back against it yeah well i mean the first thing is to say that i can obviously sense the emotion in your voice there's going to be emotion in mind how could we be human and see that and not be emotional and then see what why he did it and not be emotional right it's tragedy on top of tragedy um of course if you know we ever had a chance to reach out to him we would advise him against you know self-immolating we want him around sounds like a wonderful human

being with a huge heart but at the same time it is what it is and it happened and we will do nothing but honor and defend him and his actions against all comers and that's the least we can do for him and we'll continue to

scream from the tops of whatever platform we have from the tops of our lungs even if I'm in a padded room by myself carry on that message of Palestinian humanity because at the end of the day as I said publicly after the event

is he burned his life away to bring attention to Palestinian humanity and that is a wonderfully selfless I mean in the deepest sense of that word act to engage in now to go to the question of mental health and we'll be jumping around a lot

throughout this conversation but this is the main sort of thing lodged and launched by by liberals of all sorts this you know this is a main talking point of Zionists I mean many of the Zionists are even crueller you know mocking him like fascist like the fascists that they are but here's some here's some things that speak against the idea that this is inherently mentally mental illness right because as I also said publicly there are a lot of people in this world and in this country for sure that can't fathom, who basically worship the self, worship the ego, they can't fathom

living and dying for something bigger than yourself, they can't fathom the act of martyrdom, they can't fathom selfless acts of annihilation like this, because they're constitutionally incapable of engaging with existence on that level. And so a lot of this cowardice and this narcissism and this attempt to make it a mental illness thing stems from a lot of people's utter inability to even imagine somebody being moved in this way to do such an act. But there are some trends against it. The first thing is to say there is absolutely zero evidence that has come out so far. We're only two, three days out. We always allow for more information to come out. I'm not saying anything dogmatically. There's lots we don't know. But there's not a shred of evidence

thus far to suggest he was mentally ill in any way. so right away people launching that as if it's just a given they have zero evidence other than the act itself right the other thing i will say he went about making a will he he situated where his cat was going to go right handed it off to a neighbor i've heard these things online of course not every single thing can be verified i can't track down the source of everything but it seems pretty clear at this point pretty uncontested at this point that he made a will he has a long history of very consistent values vouched for by his friends and his family. So this is a long-term political ideology and orientation to the world that makes him care about other people, that wants to build a better world. I think he referred to himself as an anarchist. So he is on the revolutionary socialist

left. And there is a, there's, you know, archived posts on Reddit where he makes very clear his political values, which align, obviously we're Marxists, but aligns very, very well with what we believe and most of you listening believe. One of the things the Zionists, one of the lows that the Zionist stoop to today was creating a fake post, archived post where Aaron ostensibly said that death tall Jews completely made up, completely fabricated, shared by all the ghouls and goblins you can imagine on Twitter. I saw it being shared so far and wide, literally post with tens of thousands of likes, tens of thousands of retweets. But, you know, to To be a Zionist is to be a liar, is to be a deceiver.

The two things go hand in hand. So that's not particularly surprising, although it is disgusting, that they're trying to make him an anti-Semite for standing up to Palestinians. And they have to literally fabricate evidence towards this end, which is, I mean, regardless of what you think, disgusting act of depravity. I mean, really revealing the inhumane nature of their own souls to not only be against what he stands for or whatever, not only to mock. him, but actually to fabricate reputational slander after a human being has died. And the other thing

is that he talked to his friend beforehand, right? There's stuff coming out today, again, a lot of this still needs to be tracked down and verified, but a close friend of his says that, who knows if this is true or not, but a close friend said that Aaron told him that he was aware of intelligence

inside the military, that there were boots on the ground, that American soldiers were actively in the tunnels under Gaza. Another account, which is not an anecdote about him, but is a fact, is that he was in the Air Force. And I forget the exact details of this, but it was very clear that the Air Force in particular was being marshaled by the U.S. government and Central Command to take a more active role in assisting Israel. So these all put him in a deep, deep moral bind, and this is how he expressed it. Now, the last thing I'll say before I hand it back over to Allison is there's something to be said for being sane in an insane society. There's something to be said that if you adopt the values and the premises and the assumptions of mainstream American culture in 2024, there is a sort of implicit insanity in that.

We're supposed to just have this insane cognitive dissidents. We're supposed to accept that these people that are politicians represent us, that we actually have a democracy. on one hand we're supposed to fight for the self-determination of Ukrainians on the other hand we're supposed to squash the fight for self-determination among Palestinians it is it's it's crazy making and to have somebody with such cutting moral clarity and such a immoral disgusting country like the united states of america seems insane to people who have bought in to that ideology and so that's another level but the last thing i want to say is there are many instances in which self-immolation has not only been used as a political tactic historically,

but have been lauded by the liberal establishment of this country. And I'll give a few examples off the top of my head. 2012, I believe, the beginning of the Arab Spring started with a vendor in Tunisia self-immolating, right? Obama came out and gave a pretty moving speech about this person's humanity, etc. Of course, this is feeding into U.S. imperial interests. Not the mere fact of the Arab Spring or Arabs wanting democracy, but the destabilizing effect and the open opportunities for U.S. imperialism to enter that conflict. Right.

So Obama already comes out, liberal hero, praising a self-immolator in Tunisia. In 2016, an 18-year-old Tibetan. right self-immolated um to protest uh the chinese government whatever you whatever you believe about that that is something that aligns interestingly with the liberal establishment hillary clinton publicly held up a picture of the person who self-immolated mourned him and lauded him as a hero in 1969 um jean paulik um self-immolated in uh checkoslovakia uh in the prague spring right against the soviet union radio free europe in 2019 did a 50th year anniversary eulogy

commemorating his sacrifice and his bravery, right? The Ukraine guy, a couple years ago, blew himself up to destroy a bridge that Russia could use to get military forces, deeper into territory, etc. Adam Kinsinger, one of the politicians

in Congress, came out and totally supported that Ukrainian tipped his cap to him, said this is a heroic act of selfless sacrifice for a greater cause. Once this happened with Aaron Bushnell. That same asshole comes out and say suicide is never laudable. This is disgusting that you are praising somebody who committed suicide. Of course, everybody just brings up his old tweet and quote tweets it out to show his hypocrisy. So, so that's how liberals react when something fits their agenda, right? When something doesn't, they immediately call it mental illness. Now, we would be hypocrites. And I'm sorry I'm going on a long time. I'll let you talk at length. We would be hypocrites if we also did the same thing. I don't necessarily agree with. with Hillary about the role of Tibet and China, but I respect and value and can see why a Tibetan might want to take such extreme actions. Regardless of my political beliefs, I am stunned into silence by somebody who's willing to do that. Now, there are critiques of the Soviet Union. I'm generally a supporter of the Soviet Union and it's as a socialist experiment for all its flaws and failures. There are issues with the Prague Spring. There are certainly elements of foreign governments who are trying to support movements like that.

The fact that an 18-year-old, I think he was 18, 20 years old, self-immolated to protest that, regardless of my personal beliefs, I am stunned into silence. Same goes for Tunisia and even the Ukrainian. Of course, I despise Ukrainian government and his leadership. I despise the Americans using Ukrainians as a fodder and a proxy for their fight against Russia. But as a Ukrainian person, another country invading your country, and you sacrifice yourself in an act to, try to slow that invasion down regardless of the politics surrounding it, I understand and I am humbled once again into silence. There's not an ounce of me in all of these situations where me and the people who self-immolated probably had different politics. In every single instance, I am fully and completely

willing to not mock or denigrate them, to not call them mentally ill, and to even find real value and something admirable in such an extreme action. So I would say that that is how we avoid that hypocrisy of being it turned around on us oh well when a guy does it when you support him it's fine when a guy does it and you don't support him it's not fine well i can i can remain completely morally spiritually politically consistent and recognize the humanity of those actions despite possible political agreements and the fact that so many other people in 2024 united states and beyond can't do that says so much about them nothing about aaron it says everything about them allison yeah there's a lot of different directions to go there i think

off the top on the question of hypocrisy, right? I think that what is important to emphasize here is that I think you're right. We see the hypocrisy of the liberal sort of establishment and the foreign policy establishment within liberalism in particular and this attempt to kind of say this is a tactic that inherently negates any meaning, right? That inherently is problematic can never make a meaningful political statement, except when we like it, of course. And I think the reason for that is because the meaning of it and the political content of it is so fucking undeniable at this point, right? Which is that anyone who isn't actively choosing self-delusion by embracing Zionist propaganda can see you can just fucking go on the internet and see that there's a genocide happening right now. It is not hidden

for maybe the first time in history. It is actually probably harder not to see it than to see it at this point. It is everywhere. You have to be lying to yourself not to recognize that. And when someone takes an action that demands that we look, the liberal hypocrisy is all they have because they can't answer the reality of what Aaron was pointing to. They can't answer the absolute fundamental truth of the statement that this is just a fraction of what's happening in Palestine. And so that has to be distracted from. It has to be ignored. We have to divert over and over and over again so that we don't look at what is actually happening in occupied Palestine right now with our fucking tax money, that you and I, everyone listening to this, are funding, right? That has to be distracted from. That has to be pushed back against. And we're never allowed to actually see it. And I think that it is so important that in response to this, we look, we see what was being called attention to you and we pay attention to it seriously. There's this quote from a New Yorker article that I put into my notes that someone had retweeted that I think is really sort of fascinating that I'll just read real quick talking about self-immolation, not in this context. But I think the quote still gets at something that's relevant here. And the author says, fire is the most dreaded form of all deaths. The sight of someone setting themselves on fire is simultaneously an insertion of intolerability and frankly of moral superiority. You say I would never have the guts to do that. It's not that he's trying to tell me something, but that he's commanding me. This isn't insanity. This is a terrible act of reason, end quote. And I think that terrible

act of reason is exactly what, you know, liberalism and imperialism wants to make us impossible for us to see the fact that there is a logic that got us here. There is a world that brought us to this point where this isn't necessarily an insane thing to do. And I want to be clear, should you go do this? No, for the love of fucking God, please don't go do this. Should you emulate this? No, absolutely not. But you should see the logic that was at play here and you should take that and use that to motivate you, to go organize, to go join people on the ground who are taking action now, right? That is what needs to be taken away. The command that is built into that is it the command to copy? It is the command to go do something with your life sustainable

over the long term that will let you push back. And that looks like structured organizing with the many incredible groups here that you have in the United States that are doing that. Again, there are things happening that you can go participate in, and that is what you should do in the wake of this. But I think aside from that question of whether or not there's a logic here that you can't call insanity, I also hope that we all take this as a moment to reflect on sort of the weaponization of mental health and mental illness by liberalism that I think we'll increasingly see used to push back against actions that are taken by radicals and revolutionaries, right? Mental illness gets treated as this thing that is wrong with us. You have

a disorder, you have depression, you have anxiety, etc. And I'm not, I think, a 100% constructionist about mental illness like some people are, but the way it gets talked about, there's never any attempt to discuss what causes that, right? What causes someone to be depressed? What causes someone to have anxiety. And I'll tell you that my depression and my anxiety that I do experience in my life right now, I think are being caused by fucking genocide being done with the money that I'm forced to pay the government. It's not a thing that happens in the absence of the conditions in which I exist. And so mental illness isn't just a thing that we can say, oh, you have to throw out everything that person believed or did because they were mentally ill.

Mental illness is produced by material conditions. And mental illness in the face of genocidal violence being done by our government is actually not an insane thing to respond with, to have anxiety, to have oppression. The face of these things isn't unreasonable. It is produced by specific conditions. But I also think that if we have to throw out the views of everyone or the actions of our mental illness, then we have to throw out, according to some of the most recent data, 25% of the United States opinions, right?

25% of people in this country are receiving support. for mental health care. And that's just receiving report support. And that's at any given time, right? Over the course of an entire life, it's much more. Yeah. Exactly. And that's just the people who are getting medical treatment, right? So it's not even talking about people who are experiencing symptoms that we would consider mental illness. And so to throw that out, I think is so dangerous. And I think this weaponization of mental illness as an apolitical category totally cut off from the world that we're living in needs to be rejected, not just in this case, but in every case will there will be weaponized going forward. Every time someone takes an action that isn't

within, you know, the ways that liberals believe we should act, which is basically voting and maybe peacefully protesting, this is always going to fucking get thrown at them. And so pushing back against it now, I think is really, really important and really crucial for us to do. Yeah. I mean, even peacefully protesting, there's so much, so much, you know, to, to denigrate that. A BDS movement is unacceptable, literally making laws against it. If you disrupt anybody at any time for any reason you'll have a bunch of people and a bunch of figures in the establishment you know to call you uh you know a criminal and there's no especially when it comes to Israel there is zero zero forms of protests that are acceptable to the establishment and are

acceptable to zionists literally college kids on campus just literally saying free palestine Palestinians are human we shouldn't be slaughtering them their faces are plastered on fucking trucks driven around town by zionists calling them anti-semites trying to ruin their careers you have fucking freaks and assholes like Bill Ackman coming out and saying like nobody this billionaire fuck who does who belongs to the wrong end of a guillotine talking about I don't want anybody out here who's a business owner never hire these young 18 19 20 year old kids who just have the audacity to see the humanity of Palestinians and now that they should have their entire lives their entire careers their entire education wiped out because some

billionaire asshole happens to be a fucking psycho Zionist I mean this is this is this is is the sickness of it. And yes, there is a deep liberal weaponization of therapeutic language, of progressive and social justice language. I've often said one of the best innovations of the last 10 years of liberalism is this utter co-option of identity politics language used against, you know, class politics and anti-imperialist politics. You saw it, you know, reach its sort of absurd culmination in a Hillary Clinton campaign with the Obama boys and the Bernie Bros. But we see it in a million different ways. We even saw it on Twitter. And not to get into Twitter beefs, but, you know, somebody comes out and says, don't say rest in power to Aaron Bushnell.

You know, this is specifically for black people. And regardless of the actual reality or truth of that claim, the fact that your first instinct is to try to wag your finger at other people for the language they're using when a human being just lit themselves on fire for Palestinian humanity, I think speaks a lot to the baseline liberal default position in today's society. There's also this element of, you know, obviously we can talk about hypocrisy all day. But if you go over to Iraq or Afghanistan, Vietnam, whatever, and you go and kill people for your country and you die in an IED explosion or something, you're a hero, you know, if you're just, if you're wounded, the VA might not take care of you, but they'll bring you out during the Super Bowl and say, what a patriot, what a hero, if you do that exact same thing against war, you're mentally ill. you're a criminal you're a crazy anarchist right they and of course the fact that he's an anarchist is immediately used in the colloquial derogatory sense of chaos um by these fucking media outlets these fucking assholes and that speaks to another point that alison brought up earlier that i really want to bring a fine point to which is the media would not first of all when they

were forced to cover it they did it in the shittiest way possible um but if they weren't forced to cover it they probably wouldn't have and how do i know that because a few months ago. It has come out in light of this incident. A woman in Atlanta self-immolated for Palestine. We don't know her name. We don't know any details. I never remember a single headline talking about it. Certainly

not talking about the reasons that she did it. And one of the things that points again to Aaron's stable mindset is precisely that I think on some level he knew that if he did not do this the right way, he would also utterly be silenced

and obliterated by the media. The media is functionally, mainstream media these days is functionally state media, because corporations and the American government have been so integrated that for-profit corporate media is just state media in the United States. And this is not a good look for the military, for the Biden administration, for the establishment, for anybody in both parties who supports this, for any media outlet, who continues to support this, and there will be a day when it is common sense that what Israel is doing right now is disgusting evil war crimes and genocide and ethnic cleansing. There will be a day when that is understood broadly by everybody. Just like broadly today, we understand the Iraq war

was fucking disgusting, was an utter failure, was premised on lies. There were some people back then saying that. They were called terrorist sympathizers. They had their careers ruined. They were utterly silenced in the media. They were bullied into silence, right? A generation later, half a generation later. Every single politician who was pushing that lie, fucking frothing at the mouth for war, now says, I'm against the Iraq War, you pieces of shit.

That day will come when the New York Times and high-ranking politicians in both parties agree that this was a disgusting fucking event. The U.S. should never have supported it. It will go down in history and will be taught to kids as a disgusting act of extreme

ethnic violence and cleansing and genocidal mass murder in our history books. It's only a matter of time. But we have to live through this insanity of the majority of at least the people with wealth and power in this country, with all the platforms and all the, all the amplifiers. We have to live in this world where they're all acting like this is completely normal, that Israel are the good guys, etc. It is fucking disgusting. And what Aaron does here is he just explodes, that hypocrisy, explodes that silence. refuses to let people continue on like this is normal.

And then if you are one of those people who insists on continuing on and dismissing this act, you go down in history because you're writing this out on Twitter, you're writing this in your headlines of the New York Times, you're writing all this shit down. You will go down in history as being wrong. And Aaron self-immolated, and regardless of what he was trying to accomplish, that is one of the accomplishments, is to just make everybody stop for a second and say,

what in the fuck are we doing? And that will go down in history, I think, as an incredibly brave act, like the Buddhist monks who self-immolated during the Vietnam War and protest of the corrupt South Vietnamese puppet regime, right? And like all these other people historically who have self-immolated as a form of protest. He will find his place in history amongst those people who are lauded. But right now we get to see every single person in this country, or at least 90% of them, you know, show their heartlessness and put it on full display and actually walk around with a swagger as if they're proud of it. And it is disgusting, but one day history will be very

conclusive about who these people are. Really quick, Alison, you said something about a constructivist approach to mental illness. Can you flesh that out a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I guess the thing that I'm getting at is sort of mental illness is like an interesting thing because the disorders that we talk about as mental illness are primarily defined, not in terms of, like, their ideology, i.e., what causes them, where they come from, they're defined in terms of their symptoms, right? So if you look at, like, the DSM, diagnostic criteria are symptom-based, right? Does this person experience this thing, this thing, this thing? And in a sense, I think that's not a bad thing. Having very functionalist definitions of illness can definitely serve a purpose. But one of the issues that happens as a result of that is that we often don't ask ourselves, where do these symptoms come from, right? So someone can say, well, there's this thing called depression that produces these symptoms. But then the question that, you know, I think has to be given to that is, well, where does depression come from? What is depression? Right. And I know, at least in a lot of my

life, I feel like in the late 90s, early 2000s, very much part of the attempt to sort of normalize talking about mental illness was to give a neurochemical explanation for it. So the thing I, yeah, the thing I always heard, right, is, well, some people have chemicals in their brain that are balanced, right, and we, and therefore we get the medication, that balances it, and that resolves the symptoms. And that was, like, probably maybe meant to be kind of a white lie about, you know, mental health to normalize it for people, to get people used to medication.

But when you actually kind of get into the research around this, it's a lot more complicated than that. In fact, how mental health medication like SSRIs work, whether they actually change chemistry in a meaningful way, is actually highly debated. The neurochemical view is debated. There's some evidence in favor of it. There's some evidence against it. But it is one attempt at giving an explanation. And I was kind of contrasting that with the constructionist view, which kind of says mental illness is produced by the social context in which it emerges, right? So the society that we live in, the symptoms within people. And I definitely lean strongly towards the constructivist side. I'm not willing to discount that there's also not neurochemical aspects of it or even genetic aspects. But I lean towards that constructionist view in many ways, I think.

Yeah, and I agree. But there's, of course, a way that you could take that so far where you completely obliterate these other variables. Right. So absolutely, yeah. That was helpful. And you mentioned that you have sort of struggled a little bit. I mean, how could anybody with a brain and a heart not?

I have, too. And I've noticed this in my life. And at certain moments, it's sort of unclear to me when I'm not fully thinking about it. Like, damn, I do have this low-level depression. It's nipping at my heels. I'm trying to do everything I can to stay ahead of it. And working out, eating healthy, getting good sleep, spending meaningful time with my family and friends. So I am sort of keeping a lid on it.

But it's always there. It peaks out at night, like when I'm laying in bed by myself or I'm driving alone in a vehicle. I start to feel that sense of hopelessness. And yeah, there is one way in which you're like, why, why, why, what's going on? Like, I'm eating right. I'm exercising right. You know, I'm doing all the, it's like, no, it's like you live in a fucking insane society collapsing. You live in a blood-soaked empire in its last sort of era.

And the monstrosity of that, the depravity of that, the struggles of that. I mean, even just the day-to-day struggles of constantly being broke, of, you know, of constantly being, like, everything is so fucking expensive going to buy groceries for my family and just like going negative in my bank account and then my bank hits me with a $35 fee for going under under zero dollars or whatever and just like fuck everywhere I look and then and then I open up to against all good fucking idea I open up fucking Twitter and that's another point I sort of wanted to make well one thing it just to end up that depression point is of course I'm okay and it's not about me but a lot of you are out there probably feeling that as well and it it behooves us

to try to understand that precisely in terms of the context in which we're living and not to do the thing where you're like, I must have a chemical imbalance. Maybe I should sort of jump on some medicines to deal with it. I'm not saying don't do that if it's gotten that far, but we really do need to understand mental health in its context. But over to Twitter, I think that is that as a medium, right? That as a medium, regardless of whether it's conscious or not, is a form of psychological warfare, not only because there are literally intelligence operatives and deep state bots and not only are they're the worst, most depraved psychos on the planet and not only are their bloodthirsty Zionists, but the medium itself is crazy making because you will be

flipping, scrolling through and literally you will see errand screaming free Palestine on fire. Then you'll see a stupid fucking meme about nothing. And then you'll see a Zionist calling fucking college kids anti-Semites. And then you'll see like some funny joke that went viral and has 127,000 likes, right? And then it's just like that, that right there, just in and of itself, is absolutely bewildering and emotionally chaotic as fuck for any mind to be dropped into that. And the whiplash you get from scrolling, especially as all these horrors are being presented to us in real time with the ephemera and the, and the, the meaninglessness of so much else around it. And then Elon Musk's 13-year-old level a meme that he posts, you know,

and then some insane racist person just saying the N-word. And then it's like, yeah, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like, how could anybody be mentally well spending anything like serious amounts of time on that app? But it sucks you the fuck in. Especially when an event like this happens, I find myself up 11, 12, 1 in the morning, in my bed, scrolling, looking, seeing. And it is fucking obliterating my mental health. but then there's a certain sort of guilt I would feel from turning away from it.

It's like almost feel like I had this morbid responsibility to look and see, not just Aaron's act of self-immolation, but what's going on in Palestine and around the world, in the Congo, in the Sudan, you know, in Europe, in my own country. All over, people are suffering. People are miserable, homelessness, a housing crisis, a mental health crisis, young people, mental health crisis. it is you know it's it's it's absolutely fucking brutal and there is no way out because we are embedded in this rotting society and I don't really have the answer I don't really know I don't really know how to stay same and how to not be fucking depressed all the goddamn time there are active things you can do organizing you know political education you absolutely can and should do those and those are a healthy way to deal with feelings of hopelessness but even that can sometimes feel hopeless you know

It feels sometimes hopeless that, you know, I want to make a change. I'm doing everything that my society says you can do to make a change. And yet there's no change happening. And that's brutal. So, again, no answers. But Twitter, the medium of Twitter in particular itself, and this is not a new or, you know, deep insight. This is just a raw, brute fact that we're all faced with every day. It's just psychologically disorienting.

And I do think the powers that be. and then Mossad and the CIA and the FBI and the deep state, they take advantage of that and they know what they're doing. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, I think mass traumatization is useful for them, right? Like, it is easier to deal with a population that is in a state of constant traumatic stress

who doesn't know how to act on that. That people who are in a functional state and able to act on things. I, you know, some people would call that a conspiracy theory take, I think. But I just really think that is absolutely the case. And yeah, I relate so much to the Twitter experience. So just scrolling it and knowing that it's just making everything feel worse, but not being able to stop, right? And that weird sense of like a responsibility to bear witness to what is happening with also not being able to bear witnessing what is happening.

And I think, yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of difficulty there. And I think, you know, what is making this hit close to home for so many people is that this is a statement that expresses that frustration and that hopelessness that many people feel, right? This is a statement that kind of points directly at those feelings, and it's hard, you know, and it's hard to feel hopeful about changing things. And yet, I think one of the difficult things is one of the things that I hope that we always return to whenever we talk about anything is that we have to be hopeful to some extent, right? We have to maintain enough hope to keep fighting and to keep doing things. And, you know, I will just say, like, pointing towards some of that

hope, I think so often it's easier to be like, oh, organizing and not explain what that means, right? But I think in the context of the U.S. right now, which is where many of our listeners live and where many people are feeling this kind of hopelessness, like, there are things that I want, that I'm seeing every day that inspire me in ways that do give me hope. I've said it before, but I honest to God think that the Palestinian youth movement is probably the seed of a vanguard in this country, honestly, in terms of what they are doing. I've never seen a group so committed to confrontational, meaningful action, to fucking shutting down events at politicians' houses, to being in the face of politicians whenever they show up in public here in L.A. and telling them you're not fucking welcome in the city, right? To actually taking action that's not just marching on the street, but is actually disrupting. I see that from them so consistently in a way that is such an escalation from a lot of what we've seen. of protest movements in this country in the past, right? And I think that's really inspiring. And one of the things that I also want to say about where I get hope looking at that organization

in particular is having gone to their marches and hearing them get up there and connect this struggle to the struggle for national democracy in the Philippines, hearing them connect this struggle to anti-black violence in the United States and the need to fight it, I've never so consistently seen an organization that is made up of the members of a diaspora being genocided, being willing to say, and this is part of a fucking global fight against imperialism, right? And so when I see some of the stuff that they're doing, it gives me hope and it gives me a lot of reassurance that there is real work building the seed of something bigger here, something that can extend beyond this genocide when it's finally over to fight

the system that made this genocide happen. So I see hope there. And I also have watched in the universities here in California, the beginning of divestment campaigns happening militancy in terms of pushing back and shutting down meetings of administration and trying to force these demands and trying to make these things happen. I've seen it in a level of student organizing on campuses here that are state schools that are often understood as very depoliticized, seeing people getting out and pushing back and organizing both students and faculty. And this is a very concrete way where university level divestment isn't just symbolic protests, it's actually fucking cutting the funding for this stuff, right? Those campaigns

are picking up speed. People who would have never engaged with them are engaging with them. So both on the national level and on these smaller scales, I do see work that is happening that can materially disrupt Zionism, can materially disrupt the genocide that is going on. And I think that that is important and that's meaningful. And I know our listener base is all over the place to the extent to which elections matter at all. But I do think that the fucking Biden losing Dearborn, Michigan to undecided last night, fucking does something. Right. I I actually do think that campaign matters. I think that sends a message. Fucking Trump won Michigan by like 11,000 votes, right? And so the reality of what that means is a big fuck you to all these politicians who are funding this and making this happen. So there is work being done. There is sustainable work being done. And every day I feel so fucking bogged down by just the sense of all these people I know are working their asses off to fight this and the killing is still happening. But I think it is important to say we do still fucking need to keep working our asses off. We do need to keep organizing. And there are gains and momentum being

made, even when it feels hopeless. And I hope that at the end of the day, when an action like this happens, it can revitalize us, right? I think that's what Aaron would have wanted. I think that was the point of this action, isn't to make us sink into despair, but to do something, to ourselves say that we will not be complicit with genocide that is happening, because we are all complicit in it here in the United States. We're all funding it, right? And I hope that we can just find it in ourselves to take that and do more and to work on these campaigns that I think are long term that exert pressure structurally and are going to be necessary. And I hope that's the kind of action that people are inspired to right now. Yeah. I think that's incredibly

well said, incredibly important to remember. I've actually tried to get on a member of the Palestinian youth movement, but it has fallen through just because they're so busy with these various actions and whatnot. But I still hold out hope that we can have them on. I would still love to have if you have a connect locally to try to make it happen again you and i could interview them together be really fun um really important you know um there's also you know like i love seeing like code pink go into these uh the congressional buildings and confront figures like nancy pelosi make them incredibly uncomfortable every time she walks out of her office you have somebody from code pink like it is a really you know israel is committing a genocide you

have blood in your hands etc those people should be constantly constantly harassed they should never feel at peace, Jewish voices for peace, doing shut-ins and shutdowns. So there are movements happening that are incredibly important. And then you zoom out. And one of the things that I saw that kind of brought me to tears today was this super cut video of these protests in fucking every country. From Morocco to the U.S., to Brazil, to all these different places where the streets are absolutely packed with people of every different cultural, religious, ethnic, racial background in every possible city and nation state that you can imagine carrying out these protests.

And there is this sense in which the entire world is really woken up and is moved for this. And that doesn't cash out immediately in change, but those are the tremors before an earthquake. And that's the thing. Change is coming. I don't know what kind of change it's going to be. I don't know if it's going to be good, bad, or ugly, or all three. I don't know if America is descending into fascism, into collapse, into vulcanization, into some sort of progressive renewal. I do not know, but dialectics and the laws of the universe and of society tell us very clearly that only thing that is constant is change.

And this process that we're living through is a crisis. It's a de-legitimization process of the media, of both parties, of our political structures, of the Supreme Court of the United States, of all of the, these things that have been taken for granted for so long of course that process of people realizing them for what they actually are seeing through them it's a long torturous fucking process and it feels like everything is ending it feels apocalyptic it feels like nothing is changing even though there are billions of people wanting the slaughter to stop and yet it doesn't and that feels crazy and that feels unacceptable and that is deeply depressing but these things are processes and they play out over time. And so I do know that we are living in a period of time

that will be memorialized in history books. This is not, you know, just peacetime. This is not just normal functioning of society time. This is deep crisis, chaos, global change time. And it is completely destabilizing psychologically on the individual level, socially and politically on the collective level. But it has to be. And every other iteration, throughout all of human history where you have big change of any sort this is the process that occurs and so i do get i do get some hope um from that for sure i also wanted to uh i wanted to uh i wanted to read a statement i made and respond to a sort of seemingly good faith criticism um that i got and i just you know i'll read this and i'll you can take it from there but my

my initial thoughts i you know writing it down is sometimes better than saying it extemporaneously but but i Quoted Aaron, screaming free Palestine. So I said free Palestine. Gut-wrenching and draw-dropping to watch a man set himself on fire to bring attention to other people's plight. But that's the thing. In the final analysis, it's not other people. It's us over there and we are them over here. Every struggle is connected, as is every single human life. Everything is interconnected in ways we can't even fully comprehend. We can block this reality out and become small in the process. Or we can feel it in our bones and in our hearts and become more fully human, more tragically and beautifully human. Aaron's sacrifice is meaningful insofar as we take inspiration from it and let it deepen our capacity to love one another.

And importantly, let it deepen our resolve to fight for a world worth living in, a world where people don't need to set themselves on fire, to bring more attention to other human beings being slaughtered in mass for colonialist land grabs and military domination and profit. and genocidal racism may his sacrifice be a candle in the darkness helping us to see the urgency of our times and to respond selflessly to our historical obligations and then i had somebody on on twitter reach out and they said i am in no way trolling and i fully agree free palestine but i'm just saying i personally don't see much benefit in what he did and i'm not ready to call it good what am i missing and this this person's name is actually normie so that's kind of funny like regular regular guy jack just asking a regular ask question but it's a fair question and

my response it was off the cuff um that you know obviously i could word it perhaps better um and people could disagree with this but i said in my opinion it doesn't matter whether we deem it good or whether its impacts are immediately obvious he did an incredibly brave and selfless act to bring heightened attention and urgency to an ongoing genocide he literally burned his life away to amplify the humanity of Palestinians. It need not be utilized or utilize a bull or agreed with or disagreed with. It simply is. If anything, it should be a moment of reflection and a call to deepen our love and our resolve to fight for a better world.

He went supernova for other people. That's the message. That's the means and the end. And I think that's important because there is this sort of utilitarian element that comes into play as like, okay he did this but nothing's changed so what was the fucking point of doing it and i think that's an incredibly shallow way to view it and i don't think erin for a second thought that this act was going to bring an immediate end to the conflict that wasn't the point the point is he felt so deeply for other human beings he couldn't go on and then you add in that layer of i'm in the military my job

my career the way I pay my rent is actively involved in murdering these people and so I don't want to speak for him I don't want to presume anything on his part but it feels like and not that we agree we would never don't ever do anything like this but there's an element of almost repentance in that act radical radical repentance in that act to burn your life away for those people and in your military garb right in a country in a country that lods and applauds and doesn't take care of you you can be homeless you're homeless vets all over this country doesn't take care of you but will give you a nice little spectacle and a pat on the head and call you a hero and he did it in his in his military fatigues and he did it for other people and that in and of itself is everything you need to know it doesn't need to be utilized it doesn't need to be a cause and effect relationship where immediately the problem is solved for it to be deeply and profoundly important and deeply and profoundly human, right?

Yeah. No, I think, I agree with all that. And I think there's kind of two thoughts that pop into my head. The first is as I think you're gesturing towards right or wrong or good or bad or useful or not, aren't useful questions for us to ask right now. The thing happened, right? It fucking happened. It can't be undone.

And I think that's important is someone did this thing. And now here we are. And the question we should be asking ourselves, is it were they justified all of these good, bad kind of normative questions? The question we should ask ourselves is, what do we do now? Right? That is the question. How do we exist in the wake of this and what kind of actions do we take? Another thought that really pops into my head, I think, is that at the end of the day, if this was bad, if it was unjustified, if we do want to apply those terms, then it's on us to fucking make a world where,

people don't have to do that, right? Then it's really on us to take that action. But I think, you know, we talked about this on our last episode, this Mao quote that I want to kind of use to frame this discussion real quick, right? So this is famously from Serve the People, which was a Mao speech, where Mao, he says, all men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Zuma Chin said, though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. To die for the people, is weightier than Mount Ty, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather. I think about that in two ways here. One, I think about that when I think about a soldier doing this, right? So as you pointed out, if a soldier dies fighting for fucking oil, in the eyes of the U.S., they're a hero, but in the eyes of liberation, in the eyes of the people, in the eyes of a fight for justice, that's a death that's as light as a feather, right? That is exactly what Mao is talking about there. But when someone dies fighting for the people, there's a weight to that. So good, bad, wrong, right? I don't know. But heavy, I do know. That I do know. I do feel a weight that is meaningful here. And again, because what I always want to go back to is that he wasn't pointing to himself. He was pointing to other people. I think of all of the heroes in Gaza right now, which takes the form of people engaging in armed resistance in fighting back who have died. Or it takes the form of some of the most horrific things that I've seen of people running into gunfire to take wounded people.

and getting shot themselves and killed while running into that gunfire to try to save somebody. And you can look at that, right? And you can say, well, what is that accomplished? Now there's two dead people instead of one. But you're asking the wrong question, right? It's not whether it's good or bad or whether it accomplishes something. It's that that is a death that is heavier than Mount Thai, right? That's a death to serve the people and to fight for liberation of humanity. And that's really what matters. And so I think we need to look to these heroes that Aaron was pointing us to who are laying down their lives and to, you know, fight for freedom to fight against colonialism and occupation. And you could try to apply all

those same metrics there and they don't work because that's not how the world works and that's not how struggle works. It's not a fucking moral category. It's a life or death struggle for liberation. And that's the only framework that I can see in his death and all of the deaths of the martyrs in Palestine are the heaviest things I can think of. And that's really all I can offer on that. Yeah. And it is worth it's worth totally noting

that the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, the PFLP and even Hamas have both put out deeply moving statements showing their full, full support and honoring, not support of the actual act, but a complete

admiration for that and tying it to the fact that the American people are not their government and that there is an anger amongst the American people and that Aaron's sacrifice is this explosion that gets the whole world's attention, even if only for a moment, gets the entire world's attention and makes it very clear that people that live here are not our government. We hate this shit. We hate these motherfuckers. and and I think if one of the things Aaron did is he made that known to the world as well it made it very clear there are human beings here there are human beings here and and I think

the fact whether you know you want to debate this and is this good or all that nonsense the resistance in Palestine have sent their you know opened their hearts they have honored Aaron they have been stunned into love and and compassion for Aaron and his family and have made that incredibly clear from the PFLP to Hamas, right? Ideologically, totally different parts of the political spectrum. But they are comrades in a struggle of national liberation. And they realize what Aaron did in the momentous, monumental, selfless act of solidarity that it ultimately was. And for me, that is all I need to know. Because it doesn't matter what some dip fucking shit on Twitter thinks. The Palestinian resistance, the

Palestinian people themselves have taken note. They've looked over and they've seen there are human beings here too. And we care about you. And Aaron went above and beyond what any of us could or even should do. Not only did he go above and beyond what we could do. He went above and beyond what we should do because that is such an extreme act. But he did it and he did it for Palestinians. And he handed his life over even just for a moment of burning realization of what's going on in Palestine.

and that is immediately recognized by the Palestinians themselves. And I think that that speaks volumes right there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't, yeah, do you have much more else to say here? It's hard to think where to go from here. No, I mean, honestly, not really. I want to say to people listening to this, right?

Like, you know, Brett and I wanted to talk about this because we're reeling, right? And I suspect you all are as well. and October feels so long ago at this point and this shit is still going on, right? And that's hard and that weighs on all of us and, you know, hopefully us talking about this can help you process some of that, right? Hopefully you can get something out of that.

And yeah, the thing that I want to emphasize at the end of the day is like, we're not saying to go do this, please fucking don't, right? Don't go do that. But we are saying that what we all need to do, us included and you, is to double down on our commitment right now, right, and our commitment to fight against this genocide. And when I say this genocide, I

don't just mean, like, what's happened since October 7th? I mean, what's happened since fucking Zionism began, right? And we need to double down on the commitment to fight back against that and the ideology that is a part of that. And to fight for a world where colonialism in all of its forms, wherever it fucking exists, is impossible, right? And where we will all see colonialism for what it is, which is one of the greatest crimes against humanity that's ever been committed, whether its manifestation was Zionism, whether its manifestation was settler colonialism in the U.S., colonialism in India, one of the most horrific things that has ever been done into reality itself, and we need to fight against that. So, you know, I don't know.

All I can say at the end of the day is just keep on fucking fighting. And I hope that's what we can all take away from us. Yes. And Aaron is in our hearts, Aaron's friends and family. In our hearts, I can't imagine what his family and friends are going through. And that's another aspect of this, but we honor Aaron. We understand on some level as much as we possibly can why he did what he did. We will defend him against all comers. And, you know, as small of a gesture as it is, of course, we dedicate this episode to the memory of Aaron Bushnell and to all Palestinians and to the people in the Congo and to the people in the Sudan and people anywhere who are being unjustly murdered, unjustly oppressed, unjustly dominated by the forces of

exploitation, of imperialism, of colonialism, and of fascism. And we can do nothing other than stand in awe at what Aaron did and continue on the fight and let his act act as a fire under all of our asses to keep fighting for a world in which an Aaron Bushnell could live out his entire life and not have to take such extreme action. Love and solidarity.