The west is clever (or perhaps lucky) to have exported its warfare for the past eighty years. It is easy to tell yourselves that war is the proper way of the world, the proper way to defend your way of life, when you send that war off to foreign parts so that you do not have to see how the protection of your way of life obliterates another.
Distance makes it easy to convince yourself that this is the sane way that the a world works.
Maybe it’s that disconnection that makes war such an easy sell to voters. Because they do not have to see it. They do not have to clean up the bodies of family members from the rubble of their homes. They do not have to watch a husband or wife or child go from individual to meat in the blink of an eye.
They do not have to smell how flesh bubbles and fat boils. I guess that stench doesn’t carry across an ocean.
Perhaps that’s the way to make them stop sending war abroad? To make them smell it. To make them see it.
It is disingenuous to assume the rationale of the wilful dead. I won’t, unlike corpo media, try to rationalize U.S. Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell’s demonstration in any other language than his own; “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”. I won’t belittle him like corpo media or emergency services are wont to do by implying mental health issues to extremism. Bushnell explained his actions in the only way he himself saw fit.
He killed himself in a self-made inferno, wanting a ‘free Palestine’, while a cop pointed a gun at him so that he would “lay down on the ground”. That makes the same kind of sense that genocide does, whether exported or imported.
It obviously made sense to him to light himself on fire in front of the Israel embassy in Washington D.C.. He was only 25-years old, and yet this was the moral course of action in an immoral world. He took what “our ruling class has decided to be normal” out of the abstract and illustrated the grim reality of it. He thought it was important enough to push you out of your comfortable deniability so that you could wake up to the same smell that the victims of your elected officials’ policies do every day.
It’s hard to say whether it’ll do any difference. Thich Quang Duc’s famous self-immolation on the streets of Saigon didn’t end the Vietnam war. When another protester did the same in Atlanta back in December it sure didn’t stop Israel’s genocide. Abstraction is a powerful tool. So too is dehumanization. Not even the smell of napalm in the morning might be capable of breaking those delusions.
But by Odin does the sacrifice of self, the likes of Bushnell’s send a loud message!
It’s just a shame that to deaf people, it doesn’t matter how loud your message is…
/Sebastian Lindberg 27/2-2024
WastedWords 