When Fiery Words Fail

Aaron Bushnell didn't self-immolate to "raise awareness" of the Gaza genocide but to expose the limits of protest in the face of incorrigible power. One year later, he was right.

This article first appeared in The Nation on March 19, 2025 under the title “What Aaron Bushnell Is Still Teaching Us.”

It may seem like a distant memory, but it was only just over a year ago—February 25, 2024—that 25-year-old Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington in an act of protest against the Gaza genocide.

In live-streamed remarks just before his self-immolation, Bushnell declared: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am 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’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He then set himself alight. The last words of his life were “Free Palestine.”

There were two broad responses to Bushnell’s protest and death. The first, from the political and media establishment, was mostly patronizing, mawkish, and bereft of serious reflection. Performative sorrow and confusion quickly gave way to cold deliberation over why he chose such a macabre form of protest, followed by gratuitous speculation about his mental health and “cultish” religious upbringing. Pathologizing Bushnell was the easiest way out of what Mark Fisher calls the “possibility of politicization.” Even some who recognized the political nature of Bushnell’s act rushed to flatten his message by insisting he was a coward for dying by suicide. As far as political obfuscation goes, however, the Biden administration’s response stands out as a master class. Bushnell’s death was treated like a natural disaster, with then–White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre calling it “a horrible tragedy” while completely ignoring its political context. Gaza was not even an afterthought; it was simply absent.

Amid these shallow and evasive reactions, a second response emerged from students, activists, and alternative media figures who shared Bushnell’s revulsion at the United States’ involvement in the Gaza genocide. For them, there is no mystery: Bushnell set himself ablaze to express his rejection of the genocide, expose its gravity, and presumably galvanize action that would hasten its end.

Bushnell’s sympathizers take his parting words as an unambiguous expression of his protest’s core logic and intent. The only debate is whether his act was effective and laudable or ineffective and tragic.

Yet between the feigned stupefaction of the ruling class and the sympathetic if varied conclusions of activist circles, an important consideration was usually missed: What if, beyond his immediate message about Gaza, Bushnell intended to dramatize the limitations of confronting power through gestures of speech—including a protest as bold and fatal as his own? What if the message behind Bushnell’s protest was not “Take notice, we need to do something,” but rather “Take notice, this changes nothing”? Permitting the obvious point that the Gaza genocide drove Bushnell to perform what he called “an extreme act of protest,” there is still reason to believe he knew—and sought to tell us—that his self-immolation would occasion no change. Perhaps that was his point.

Notably, Bushnell qualified his “extreme protest” by claiming that “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” This is no minor addendum. In the context of his broader message, Bushnell arguably meant: “I can burn myself to death in public and nothing will come of it, even if many are horrified by my act—this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

We may never know exactly what the words this and normal refer to in Bushnell’s final statement. Analyzing them with closer scrutiny indicates multiple possible referents: Gaza’s suffering, Bushnell’s impending immolation, the apathy and culpability of the ruling class, and our collective impotence as eager but defeated spectators. What we do know, however, is that anti-war activists have been yelling fiery words demanding change since the genocide began, and that Bushnell was not oblivious to this fact. His statement was different—it was about when fiery words fail. His protest was both a rejection of the idea that human life is expendable and an acknowledgment that, for so many, it already has been.

Intending Failure

Reflecting on Bushnell’s protest in TomDispatch last year, Nan Levinson admits she was initially puzzled by his act. As she came to terms with his reasons for committing it, however, more questions arose. Was Bushnell’s protest effective? And why, despite being so clear, did his message about Gaza not resonate more widely? Perhaps, Levison guesses, it is because “witnessing someone dying in flames, even online, is simply too disturbing to let witnesses easily absorb its intended message.” She says “the shock…of the image of him burning to death seemed, if anything, to blot out the purpose.” The implication here is that Bushnell’s protest was a clear but unsuccessful call to action, as he sought but failed to garner “widespread attention” and did not “make a dent in Israel’s belligerence or limit the weaponry and intelligence his country still sends Israel.” But is that what Bushnell was after? Nowhere in his statement does he ask anyone else to take action. Levinson, like many others, conflates the inspiration for Bushnell’s protest with its intended purpose. She assumes that because he protested in response to the Gaza genocide, his direct aim was for his self-immolation to end it. Taking this view, we have no choice but to conclude Bushnell failed.

There is another way to understand the “failure” of Bushnell’s protest: as a premeditated part of its message. Whatever else it may be, self-immolation is an act of dissent that reflects systemic social and political failure. It is both a consequence of political foreclosure and a stark illustration of its scale. Accordingly, Erik Baker notes that asking “whether self-immolation is good or bad, justifiable or non-justifiable, effective or ineffective is in large part to miss the point.” We must understand Bushnell’s act as part of a broader history of anti-war activism where self-immolation conveys what Baker calls “the near-total impotence of protest—and even public opinion as such—in the face of a military apparatus completely insulated from external accountability.” Setting oneself on fire in protest has little to do with shocking the world in the hope of putting an end to war. Rather, as Baker writes, it is a way “to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.”

This, then, is what Levinson’s interpretation misses. If anything, the “image” of Bushnell’s protest was not numbing but revealing, as it showed that even the most horrifying death cannot shake power’s indifference. Taking Levinson’s view risks framing the establishment’s passivity as the consequence of misguided tactics or decisions on the part of dissenters. Yet Bushnell’s point was precisely that we have reached the end of the road with “effective messaging” on Gaza; there is nothing left to say. After all, the deaths of Palestinians—many of them, like Bushnell’s, livestreamed to the world—carry a message more visceral and urgent, yet the genocidal war machine was no more impeded by their cries than by his. Had the people of Gaza died with some indefinable kind of decorum instead of a “too-disturbing,” bloody impropriety, would the genocide have stopped?

If anti-war protests have historically aimed to sway power and reverse foreign policy, that was almost certainly not Bushnell’s goal. In The Nation, Daniel Bessner notes that “[w]hen it comes to changing US foreign policy, mass action alone has never realized the dreams its advocates have set out for it. While protest movements are preferable to lethargy, inaction, and nihilism, by themselves they are just not enough.” Bushnell appears to have (ironically) acted on this understanding, namely, that protest is insufficient because, as Bessner says, “the US national security state has been specifically designed to prevent the solutions” anti-war activists seek. We can see this plainly realized, for example, in the incredible disparity between the hopes and consequences of last year’s student-led encampment protests across college campuses. Despite the protesters’ best efforts, they did not bring about an end to the genocide or institutional complicity in it but faced severe repercussions, including police brutality, arrest, disciplinary action, the threat of deportation, and protracted harassment. By the time Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, secured a ceasefire deal just days before Joe Biden’s presidency ended in early January, the protests had dwindled to near silence. More importantly, the Trump-led ceasefire was driven by far more sinister ambitions: the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, followed by US occupation.

This is not to say the protests were meaningless or pointless—after all, they galvanized a generation of students around the cause of Palestine—but that they were trapped in a political environment designed to preclude their effectiveness. Responding to the college encampments, Samuel Catlin notes that protests typically aim “to direct public attention in exactly the opposite direction. A protest demands that we look toward it, but only so that it can reroute our gaze to the thing being protested.” What happened, however, is that “the mass media turn[ed] away from the referent and toward the protest” in the propagandistic effort to relocate “the theater of war” from Gaza to the American college campus. The protests became a self-contained spectacle and vector for debates about free speech, antisemitism, vandalism, and other issues in which Gaza was a footnote. A similar dynamic played out in the media and political establishment’s response to Bushnell’s protest: virtually no discussion of the Gaza genocide, but much scrutiny of his mental health and personal history.

If the “Streisand effect” describes how attempts to suppress information paradoxically draw more attention to it, the “Gaza effect” describes how amplifying a cause leads to muted responses and misdirected attention. But this “effect” is not the fault of the protesters—reframing dissent to neutralize its impact (e.g., by labeling protesters as mentally ill or violent) is a mechanism of establishment power and propaganda. Bushnell’s protest diverted attention from Gaza for the same reason it spurred no action (except further protest, including another self-immolation in Boston): because confronting its political significance means challenging a consensus reality on Palestine the establishment wishes to maintain. Even when the concerns of Bushnell and the college protesters were acknowledged, it was often to cynically capitalize on public demands for a ceasefire by promising meaningful action while ensuring no meaningful change. As the repression proceeded, “official statements” were offered to plausibly deny accusations of inaction. The Biden administration, for example, repeatedly claimed to be “working around the clock for a ceasefire” while, in reality, escalating support for the genocide. These statements served to preempt and deflect accusations of complicity; when criticized, officials could point to their words and say, “We are working hard to address your concerns.” To echo Amy and David Goodman, this allows the ruling class—including corporate Democrats who LARP as “resisters”—to “complain politely, and then resume their deferential posture to enable the next disaster.”

The difference between Bushnell and the campus protesters is just that his message was not directed at those liable for Gaza’s suffering, but to us—to highlight that the situation is worse than we might imagine, and that our capacity to effect change is more limited than we believe. This is especially evident in his final words. Rather than calling for an end to genocide, he grimly declared he would “no longer be complicit” in it. Bushnell’s protest thus pushes back against a political moment where “making a statement” is considered a legitimate form of action. For him, the only road to action—the only statement left—was that of perdition.

Beyond Truth

Belén Fernández argues that Bushnell “put Western corporate media to shame” because, unlike them, he spoke “truth to power.” But did he? If anything, Bushnell exposed the limits of this idea. The ruling class already knew the truth about Gaza and still chose to abet its annihilation—that was his point. Noam Chomsky has long argued that speaking truth to power is futile because the powerful already know the truth—they simply do not care. The real task, he insists, is to speak truth to the powerless, to empower them and confront the ruling class together. Salman Sayyid puts it more plainly: “Truth and power are not opposite relationships—only power can speak to power.”

Yet even this perspective understates the complexity of our present moment. Returning to Mark Fisher, the idea of speaking truth to power misunderstands how the space of belief operates in the age of capitalist realism. One defining feature of our age, he notes, is “the overvaluing of belief—in the sense of inner subjective attitude—at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” The same logic applies to Gaza. The ruling class can profess horror at genocide while actively enabling it, precisely because acknowledgment and action have become uncoupled. It is not simply that power can only speak to power; rather, claims to truth are often wielded to justify expressions of power that flagrantly contradict it.

But the bigger problem with Chomsky’s “speak to the powerless” model is that it assumes the powerless need the truth revealed to them, when in reality, they already know it—and they know the powerful know it too. Bessner is right to note that in the 2020s, “we all know the horrors of the American Empire, and yet these horrors persist[.]” If awareness alone were enough, the world might look very different today. The challenge is not uncovering hidden truths but confronting a system that is fully aware of its own brutality and continues undeterred.

Murmurs from today’s “culture wars” insist that our troubles stem from the fact that we now live in a “post-truth” era in which objective reality has lost its appeal with the masses. The implication here is that an embrace of truth is the key to a more humane society. Setting aside the fact that opposing factions of the so-called culture wars proclaim dominion over the truth (this is the hidden object of the “wars”), this attitude neglects a significant reality to which Fisher points our attention: believing in the truth is no guarantee of correctly acting on it and may even serve to justify or preclude action with the power one knowingly possesses. Gaza bears this out. The “truth” of the genocide—the tens of thousands slaughtered, the children under the rubble, the famine and disease—has never really been in dispute, even from Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That did not stop either of them from consistently supporting Israel.

As we continue to debate whether “truth” exists or matters on the sidelines, the ruling class will continue to weaponize, recontextualize, and reframe truth in ways that align with their interests and enable them to maintain or enhance their power behind a pretext of moral concern.

Consider how the establishment responded to Bushnell’s self-immolation versus Mohamed Bouazizi’s, the Tunisian street vendor who set off the Arab Spring in 2010. Shadi Hamid makes an interesting observation in The Washington Post about the double standard surrounding these two protests, noting “I don’t recall anyone wondering whether [Bouazizi] was mentally ill.” President Obama lionized Bouazizi and said the conditions which led to his self-immolation were “not unique” because he faced “the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world—the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity, only this time something different happened.” Obama added that “there are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years,” likening Bouazizi to various renegades in American history—among them Rosa Parks and the Boston Tea Party patriots.

The reason Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation did not spark the same concern as Bouazizi’s among the establishment has nothing to do with knowing the truth in one case and missing it in the other. The truth of Bouazizi’s protest was instrumentalized to justify “benevolent” American involvement in the Arab Spring. Bushnell’s protest didn’t serve US interests. He thus had to be made into a symbol of self-centered psychological despair and illness. Here, then, we must observe a limitation to Samuel Catlin’s suggestion that protests function to seize and redirect the gaze. Framing protest as an effort to capture and redirect attention presupposes that those in power are not already aware of the issues protesters seek to expose. It also risks shifting blame onto protesters when they “fail” to redirect focus as expected. As Bessner notes, most of the time, protest is ignored, especially when the strategy is to “speak truth to power.” Perhaps this is because, per Fisher, protest has become “a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism.”

Bessner thinks that these realities should push the anti-war left to recognize that if it “ever hopes to change US foreign policy, it needs to move beyond the shibboleths of the past.” He contends that the left “must stop fetishizing information politics and mass protests and instead must develop an institutionalist understanding of how state power functions.” This means spending “less time disabusing people of myths they no longer believe or organizing mass protests that go nowhere.” Bessner may be correct, and he helps us understand why protests, including ones as extreme as Bushnell’s, are bound to be drowned out in a world increasingly impervious to outrage because it already knows the truth. Yet even if everyone knows what is happening in Gaza, it remains crucial that some pretend not to know or feign detachment as passive spectators. This furnishes the political environment in which, and the consensus reality against which, activists find themselves fighting and struggling to succeed.

At the very least, Bushnell’s protest forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the systems we live under and our own complicity within them. In this regard, he “succeeded” in revealing the cruelty of a world that demands protest but treats it as background noise in the end. To the extent that protest remains morally urgent, its practical limits are continually exposed in the face of power. And if that is the case, then maybe the question Bushnell’s death leaves us with is not whether we should resist, but whether we are capable of imagining a form of resistance that power cannot ignore.