On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty senior airman in the United States Air Force assigned to the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron in San Antonio, Texas, approached the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., dressed in his military fatigues. It was around midday, and he had just set up a Twitch livestream under a new account, featuring a Palestinian flag and the phrase “Free Palestine.” As he walked toward the embassy gates, Bushnell declared, “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 positioned his phone on the ground, doused himself with fire accelerant, and set himself ablaze. “Free Palestine!” Bushnell cried out as the flames surrounded him, his body ultimately succumbing to the burns that night.
Unsurprisingly, the Left heralded him as a martyr.1“Leftists PRAISE ‘martyr’ Aaron Bushnell for setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy and dismiss mental health concerns: ‘He had moral clarity'” – Germania Rodriguez Poleo, February 2024 – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13127485/Air-Force-engineer-Aaron-Bushnell-set-fire-outside-Israeli-embassy-pro-Palestine-protest-belonged-Christian-cult-SUPPORTS-airstrikes.html They lauded his clarity of mind and his unwavering commitment to opposing “colonization.” Mainstream media outlets tried to frame the incident as a tragedy, questioning his mental health or personal background, while downplaying his overt political motives. Conservative commentators largely dismissed it as evidence of mental instability, radicalization, or misguided extremism, warning against any celebration that might inspire imitators and criticizing those who praised it as promoting a dangerous precedent. But regardless of which angle on the narrative one chose to take, it was impossible to deny Aaron Bushnell’s explicit, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid, anti-colonization convictions as his rationale. A few hours before his death, Bushnell posted the link to his video stream on his social media page with the following caption:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” 2https://web.archive.org/web/20250323044312/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-what-we-know.html
Though such a call to action would fall upon deaf ears if preached to a Right-wing audience, Leftists had no choice but to admire his bravery. To them, he wasn’t just some political activist trying to make a point. He died a soldier, fighting the very system they, too, had dedicated their lives to combating.
For the Left, he was a martyr.
And yet this label—so typical of modern Leftist political tactics—is particularly difficult for the average onlooker to grasp. After all, it’s not as if Bushnell was directly collaborating with the Israeli military to facilitate the Gaza massacres. But even if he was, could he not have simply stopped? Suffered the fate of a deserter instead of committing suicide? In what way did taking his own life stop the “colonizers?”
A rational question, no doubt, but one that fails to understand the framing in which Bushnell would be a hero. Indeed, the act wasn’t about personal heroism in the conventional “martyr-for-a-cause” sense, but rather, in the context of those around him, it was an act of defiance. Insofar as liberalism is opposed to apartheid, slavery, genocide, and imperialism, Bushnell would indeed be a martyr for the liberal cause.
Opposing Vietnam
But not every soldier for liberalism wears a soldier’s uniform. On November 2, 1965, a Quaker man3https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/10/25/fire-norman-morrison sat at the kitchen table, discussing the war in Vietnam with his wife. The newspapers informed him of a recent U.S. bomber raid on a Vietnamese village, destroying it completely. Like so many of the reports coming out of Vietnam at the time, the news left 31-year-old Norman Morrison troubled. He had been praying for guidance for some time now, and that morning, he knew what he had to do.
That afternoon, Morrison hopped into his Cadillac and made his way to the Pentagon, taking his 11-month-old daughter along for the ride. He arrived at the Pentagon just as Dusk approached, and with the setting sun behind him, he climbed the retaining wall, doused himself in kerosene, and set himself on fire. Some witnesses say he was attempting to communicate at the time, though no one could identify what he was saying. Other bystanders yelled at him to “drop the baby,” as the flames engulfed his body.
Norman Morrison died, his body littered with second and third-degree burns. His daughter, miraculously, was unharmed.
The event was shocking. One does not normally associate such violent ends with works of pacifists, yet a man incapable of stopping a U.S. bomber crew by himself has few other options. Morrison may have lived as a Quaker, but he did not die as such. Like Bushnell, Morrison was no mere protestor, but a man who would fight to the fiery end. Some called him a lunatic; others, a hero.
“Norman Morrison is a true hero in the highest sense. He did not give his life in killing others to “keep his country free,” he took his own life to keep his country from taking away the freedom of others.”
– Irma W. Simon4“Letters To the Editor” – The Baltimore Sun, November 5, 1965
Such a bold perspective reveals an important insight: the physical target of this kind of violence is largely irrelevant. The two self-immolating radicals were war heroes for the liberal cause, and though they may not have died on the literal battle grounds of the genocides they disproved, they managed to fight all the same.
Expanding The Notion Of Martyrdom
The stories of Aaron Bushnell, Norman Morrison, and others like them reveal a feature of radical commitments that can sometimes go unnoticed in the public eye. It defies pragmatism, and yet it possesses a normative presence in public discourse. It is something of a paradox, yet it has come to redefine our sense of martyrdom in the 21st century. While most historical conceptions of the topic focus on dying at the hands of others, this evolution includes deaths better described as “active declarations”—a death that not only takes the initiative but eliminates the need for a persecutor entirely. Under a more primitive paradigm, everything you could possibly support would get categorized in one of two ways:
- Things you would die to defend.
- Things you would not die to defend.
While this certainly helps sort out the nature of things we truly value to the point of death, it leaves out a second dimension of the matter. In addition to what we support, we must also consider what a person could be against. By including this second dimension, we get two more buckets in which a person could categorize things:
- Things you would die to oppose
- Things you would not die to oppose.
With these concepts, we double the possible circumstances by which we categorize matters of death and martyrdom. It is not enough to consider that a person would die for something. We must also now consider the fact that he might die to oppose something. Further complicating this matter is the fact that none of these categories is mutually exclusive. The modern conception of martyrdom may include any combination of “for” and “against” motivations, blurring the distinction between a soldier’s cause and a martyr’s.
The Negative Witness
This expansion leads us to our current phenomenon: the emergence of the “negative witness,” or what some might call an anti-witness. Where the traditional martyr’s death was in upholding something tangible—a faith, a nation, a people—the negative witness dies against an abstraction: an injustice, a system, an idea. The negative witness does not die for a flag or a creed; he dies to denounce what he feels he cannot fight. Though the concept of a negative witness has always existed in some form, modernity saw its rebirth. It gave people a new way to give their lives to oppose causes that are, by nature, intangible. The negative witness thus turns martyrdom inward, making the act of dying itself a form of protest.
Some suggest that the Left’s obsession with suicide is merely a form of sickness. A “worldview of death,” as they call it, where the love of life is replaced by a fascination with destruction and decay. Some point to the phenomenon of transgenderism, insisting that their fixation on self-harm is rooted in a deep-seated hatred for one’s own body. While this may explain some of the phenomenon, it fails to explain the broader trend of self-destruction among the Left. It makes far more sense to frame these patterns as a kind of anti-martyrdom, in which the act of dying is not an expression of despair, but a declaration of opposition. Just as a Christian martyr gives their life to bear witness to Christ, the negative witness gives their life as a testament of their opposition.
To Christians, this act of kamikaze is often perceived as irrational. What good does it serve for a man to kill himself to oppose Christ (who has already won)? And yet, for only the most secularized of intellects, such an act makes perfect sense. Just as the atheist marvels at the man willing to die for his faith, the Christian marvels at the man willing to kill himself to prove his opposition to someone else’s faith.
In this way, the current landscape blurs the outward distinctions between martyrdoms—acts of self-sacrifice for or against a cause that can sometimes appear eerily similar. Yet the chasm of interpretation, and the meaning ascribed by different paradigms, remains as wide as ever. Even when the act itself may confound easy categorization, those witnessing it remain divided by an unbridgeable gulf of meaning.
With the rise of the mid‑witted notion of a “woke Right,” it would hardly surprise me if these dimmest of conservatives tried to recast Aaron Bushnell as a kind of dissident right‑wing figure. Now, as the phrase “not dying for Israel” becomes perceived as a kind of anti-semitic phrase5https://www.adl.org/resources/article/overt-antisemitic-and-extreme-anti-israel-rhetoric-continue-spike-after-us, we must ask how such a clear and common-sense sentiment could be so easily misconstrued as a kind of hate speech. The answer is clear. For the Right, “not dying for Israel” is a statement of what you are not willing to die for, while for the Left, it is a statement about what you are willing to die to oppose. Once again, conservative Americans may be baffled by the idea that expressing your desire not to die for a foreign country would be considered a form of “anti-Israel rhetoric,” but this is precisely why the gap between the two paradigms is so wide. The disagreement does not stem merely from differing postures on various political positions, but from opposing conceptions of what counts as loyalty, what ought to be considered hatred, and what can truly be considered martyrdom; matters intrinsic to the Left’s and Right’s respective perceptions of themselves.
Some may be tempted to ask: “If the godless are willing to burn themselves alive to protest what they perceive as injustice, what does it say of a Church that will not even endure mockery, discomfort, or social exile for the sake of the truth?” A clever question, no doubt, as it conceals the false parallel in which those who self-immolate as a negative witness are akin to those who suffer for righteousness’ sake. Yet the resemblance is only superficial. If the question were phrased more honestly, it would ask, “If the pagans’ hatred of Christ drives them to suicide in order to spite His Church, what does it say of a Church that may, at times, handle persecution poorly?”
The fact of the matter is Christ does not need HIs people to become negative witnesses for His sake. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul shared how he felt about death, writing, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:21) Yet no matter how badly Paul wanted to be with Christ, Paul knew that he was still needed on this earth to labor for Christ’s Church. “I am in a strait betwixt two,” He wrote, “having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.” And therein lies the greatest difference between the Left’s anti-witness and the Christian martyr. One refuses to live on an earth inhabited by what he hates, while the other’s indifference to death frees him to stay or depart as love requires.
Sources:
- 1“Leftists PRAISE ‘martyr’ Aaron Bushnell for setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy and dismiss mental health concerns: ‘He had moral clarity'” – Germania Rodriguez Poleo, February 2024 – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13127485/Air-Force-engineer-Aaron-Bushnell-set-fire-outside-Israeli-embassy-pro-Palestine-protest-belonged-Christian-cult-SUPPORTS-airstrikes.html
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- 4“Letters To the Editor” – The Baltimore Sun, November 5, 1965
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