#capitalist harm

[felt-texture]

capybaras eating jair bolsonaro

[dailyanarchistposts]

On Sunday, February 25, we received an email from a person who signed himself[1] Aaron Bushnell.

It read,

Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people. The below links should take you to a livestream and recorded footage of the event, which will be highly disturbing. I ask that you make sure that the footage is preserved and reported on.

We consulted the Twitch account. The username displayed was “LillyAnarKitty,” and the user icon was a circle A, the universal signifier for anarchism—the movement against all forms of domination and oppression.

In the video, Aaron begins by introducing himself. “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the US 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’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The video shows Aaron continuing to film as he walks to the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, puts down the phone, douses himself in a flammable liquid, and sets himself alight, shouting “Free Palestine” several times. After he collapses, police officers who had been watching the situation unfold run into the frame—one with a fire extinguisher, another with a gun. The officer continues pointing the gun at Aaron for over thirty seconds as Aaron lies on the ground, burning.

Afterwards, police announced that they had called in their Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit.

We have since confirmed the identity of Aaron Bushnell. He served in the United States Air Force for almost four years. One of his loved ones described Aaron to us as “a force of joy in our community.” An online post described him as “an amazingly gentle, kind, compassionate person who spends every minute and penny he has helping others. He is silly, makes anyone laugh, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He is a principled anarchist who lives out his values in everything he does.”

Aaron’s friends tell us that he has passed away as a consequence of his injuries.

All afternoon, while other journalists were breaking the news, we discussed how we should speak about this. Some subjects are too complex to address in a hasty social media post.

The scale of the tragedy that is taking place in Gaza is heartrending. It exceeds anything we can understand from the vantage point of the United States. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 12,000 children. More than half of all inhabitable buildings in all of Gaza have been destroyed, along with the majority of hospitals. The vast majority of the population are living as refugees with little access to water, food, or shelter.

The Israeli military is now planning a ground invasion of Rafah that will add untold numbers of casualties to this toll. It is not hyperbole to say that we are witnessing the deliberate commission of genocide. All available evidence indicates that the Israeli military will continue killing Palestinians by the thousand until they are forced to stop. And the longer this bloodshed goes on, the more people will die in the future, as other governments and groups imitate the precedent set by the Israeli government.

The United States government bears equal responsibility in this tragedy, having armed and financed Israel and provided it with impunity in the sphere of international relations. Within Israel, the authorities have effectively suppressed protest movements in solidarity with Gaza. If protests are going to exert leverage towards stopping the genocide, it is up to people in the United States to figure out how to accomplish that.

But what will it take? Thousands across the country have engaged in brave acts of protest without yet succeeding in putting a halt to Israel’s assault.

Aaron Bushnell was one of those who empathized with the Palestinians suffering and dying in Gaza, one of those haunted by the question of what our responsibilities are when we are confronted with such a tragedy. In this regard, he was exemplary. We honor his desire not to stand by passively in the face of atrocity.

The death of a person in the United States should not be considered any more tragic—or more newsworthy—than the death of a single Palestinian. Still, there is more to say about his decision.

Aaron was the second person to self-immolate at an Israeli diplomatic institution in the United States. Another demonstrator did the same thing at the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on December 1, 2023. It is not easy for us to know how to speak about their deaths.

Some journalists see themselves as engaged in the neutral activity of spreading information as an end in itself—as if the process of selecting what to spread and how to frame it could ever be neutral. For our part, when we speak, we presume that we are speaking to people of action, people like ourselves who are aware of their agency and are in the process of deciding what to do, people who may be wrestling with heartache and despair.

Human beings influence each other both through rational argument and through the infectiousness of action. As Peter Kropotkin put it, “Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.”

Just as we have a responsibility not to show cowardice, we also have a responsibility not to promote sacrifice casually. We must not speak carelessly about taking risks, even risks that we have taken ourselves. It is one thing to expose oneself to risk; it is another thing to invite others to run risks, not knowing what the consequences might be for them.

And here, we are not speaking about a risk, but about the worst of all certainties.

Let’s not glamorize the decision to end one’s life, nor celebrate anything with such permanent repercussions. Rather than exalting Aaron as a martyr and encouraging others to emulate him, we honor his memory, but we exhort you to take a different path.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

These words of Aaron’s haunt us.

He is right. We are rapidly entering an era in which human life is treated as worthless. This is obvious in Gaza, but we can see it elsewhere around the world, as well. With wars proliferating around the Mideast and North Africa, we are poised on the threshold of a new age of genocides. Even inside the United States, mass casualty incidents have become routine, while an entire segment of the underclass is consigned to addiction, homelessness, and death.

As a tactic, self-immolation expresses a logic similar to the premise of the hunger strike. The protester treats himself or herself as a hostage, attempting to use his or her willingness to die to pressure the authorities. This strategy presumes that the authorities are concerned with the protester’s well-being in the first place. Today, however, as we wrote in regards to the hunger strike of Alfredo Cospito,

No one should have any illusions about how governments view the sanctity of life in the age of COVID-19, when the United States government can countenance the deaths of a million people without blushing while the Russian government explicitly employs convicts as cannon fodder. The newly-elected fascist politicians who govern Italy have no scruples about consigning whole populations to death, let alone permitting a single anarchist to die.

In this case, Aaron was not an imprisoned anarchist, but an active-duty member of the US military. His LinkedIn profile specifies that he graduated from basic training “top of flight and top of class.” Will this make any difference to the US government?

If nothing else, Aaron’s action shows that genocide cannot take place overseas without collateral damage on this side of the ocean. Unfortunately, the authorities have never been especially moved by the deaths of US military personnel. Countless US veterans have struggled with addiction and homelessness since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans commit suicide at a much higher rate than all other adults. The US military continues to use weapons that expose US troops to permanent brain injuries.

Members of the military are taught to understand their willingness to die as the chief resource they have to put at the service of the things they believe in. In many cases, this way of thinking is passed down intergenerationally. At the same time, the ruling class takes the deaths of soldiers in stride. This is what they have decided will be normal.

It is not willingness to die that will sway our rulers. They really fear our lives, not our deaths—they fear our willingness to act collectively according to a different logic, actively interrupting their order.

Many things that are worth doing entail risks, but choosing to intentionally end your life means foreclosing years or decades of possibility, denying the rest of us a future with you. If such a decision is ever appropriate, it is only when every other possible course of action has been exhausted.

Uncertainty is one of the most difficult things for human beings to bear. There is a tendency to seek to resolve it as quickly as possible, even by imposing the worst-case scenario in advance—even if that means choosing death. There is a sort of relief in knowing how things will turn out. Too often, despair and self-sacrifice mingle and blur together, offering an all-too-simple escape from tragedies that appear unsolvable.

If your heart is broken by the horrors in Gaza and you are prepared to bear significant consequences to try to stop them, we urge you to do everything in your power to find comrades and make plans collectively. Lay the foundations for a full life of resistance to colonialism and all forms of oppression. Prepare to take risks as your conscience demands, but don’t hurry towards self-destruction. We desperately need you alive, at our side, for all that is to come.

As we wrote in 2011 in reference to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi,

Nothing is more terrifying than departing from what we know. It may take more courage to do this without killing oneself than it does to light oneself on fire. Such courage is easier to find in company; there is so much we can do together that we cannot do as individuals. If he had been able to participate in a powerful social movement, perhaps Bouazizi would never have committed suicide; but paradoxically, for such a thing to be possible, each of us has to take a step analogous to the one he took into the void.

Let’s admit that the kind of protest activity that has taken place thus far in the United States has not served to compel the US government to compel a halt to the genocide in Gaza. It is an open question what could accomplish that. Aaron’s action challenges us to answer this question—and to answer it differently than he did.

We mourn his passing.

[1] In the email, Aaron specified his pronouns as he/him.

[punk-in-roll]

You come to me… on the day of Gerard ways birthday… and you tell me my car failed it’s MOT…?

[thesewersofparis]

adds a 4th step to skincare routine after adding the 3rd only like 3 years ago

[butchfeygela]

blah blah blah society sees the dykes as aggressive bc of capitalism assigns masculinity as working class character. .what ever. sure, can we say that without making it sound like an indictment of masculine working class butches?,

or like maybe can we talk about historical reality of butch as a working class identity bc of how butchness did (and still does) relegate us to the fringes and thts effect on employment.

like i legitimately saw someone in the notes talking abt how this is why we need more love and representation for bougie butches like deep throat my fucking boot.

[corpus-incorporated]

current frame of mind is i think of everything in stock market terms now. i don’t know jack shit about economics i dont invest in anything but i will be talking about how my stocks are doing all the fucking time. not stocks i own but stocks that are me, the value of the stocks of me the company. which is REALLY funny considering my url here. it’s not just me too if something or someone does well at anything i go OHHHHH X STOCKS ARE SKYROCKETING and if something goes poorly it’s like OHHHHH THE STOCKS ARE PLUMMETING FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY. this is the new it’s jover and we’re so back. this isn’t something that’s gonna catch on though it’ll probably just be this micro joke amongst my friends for a while lol

[thechronicmasochist]

I'm applying for a pre-graduate program bc my long shot pipe dream is to get a PhD. But never in my life have I ever sat down and considered that this might be something within reach. so when the application asks me "why do you want your PhD?" my brain makes panicky static noises bc it feels like someone asking me "why do you want to walk on water?" or "why do you want to figure out how to stand on the moon?" obviously because it's cool as hell, to say I did, to unlock the gender neutral title of "Dr." and to spend another handful of years sucking on the government's sweet financial aid teat. And for the queers.

[moodr1ng]

i fully agree that the phenomenon of ai art taking over artist jobs is concerning and fucked up, but also ppl now say "itll make people give up art/not want to make art bc you cant get paid for it" and i just.. i dont think people typically get into art expecting to live off of it you guys. im p sure art is not generally considered a stable, assured career, and also the semi-professional artists who are losing work to this (because its not industry artists, people employed by game or animation studios or under contract for comics, etc losing work, its semi-amateur artists who do commissions for supplementary income) were not and are not getting the benefits of stable and decent employment for art already. if "i cant make money off this" turned people off of digital art, there wouldnt be many people getting into it to begin with

[dailyanarchistposts]

Yesterday an active-duty Air Force soldier named Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy. His last words were “Free Palestine.” Of the cops responding to the scene, some pointed guns at him while others sought to extinguish the flames; the image of a cop pointing a gun at a man on fire is the most American thing I have ever seen.

On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon). In South Vietnam, Buddhists were an oppressed majority, ruled by a Catholic minority—the Buddhist flag was banned, Catholics were chosen for all the better jobs, and protesting Buddhists were being murdered in the streets or sent to concentration camps.

So Thích set himself on fire and calmly burned in front of hundreds of spectators on a public street. There’s a film of it, and I’m not big into “watch people die on film,” but some moments in history are worth seeing. He didn’t cry out; he just sat in lotus position, engulfed in flames. Afterwards, the cops tried to take his remains, but thousands of angry protestors took him back, and they re-cremated him for a proper funeral. His heart didn’t burn. It solidified in the fire. Today it is today a sacred relic. I have no explanation for this.

Other monks in Vietnam followed his example. By the end of the year, the CIA led a coup and toppled the Catholic dictator of the country. This isn’t “the US being good,” mind you, they’d been propping the asshole up in the first place. Thích’s sacrifice is often credited as what brought down that regime.

Two years later, the first American set herself on fire in protest of the Vietnam war. Alice Herz was a German Jew, 82 years old. She’d seen some shit. She’d fought for feminism in 1910s Germany, helped bring about the Weimar Republic, fled Germany to France only to end up in a Nazi concentration camp. Survived. Made it to the US. Lived in Detroit and became a Unitarian. Then one day she wrote a letter about how horrible the Vietnam war was, went out to the street, and set herself on fire. She wasn’t the last. In South Vietnam and the US alike, Buddhists and Quakers and Catholics set themselves on fire in service of the same cause.

When a 16 year old Catholic named Ronald Brazee set himself on fire in October 1967, a Catholic Worker named Father Daniel Berrigan wrote a poem for him called “In the Land of Burning Children”

He was still living a month later I was able to gain access to him I smelled the odor Of burning flesh And I understood anew What I had seen in North Vietnam I felt that my senses Had been invaded in a new way I now understood the power of death in the modern world I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold

The Dutch resistance to the Nazi Occupation was characterized by a unique nonviolence, focusing primarily on hiding Jewish people and acts of sabotage. This wasn’t necessarily an ethical or even strategic decision, but one forced onto them by circumstance—according to one resistance fighter, since the Dutch government maintained a firearms registry before the invasion, the Nazis were able to acquire that list and go door-to-door to disarm the Dutch population.

But what the Dutch resistance lacked in firearms it made up for in mass participation. Roughly a million people were involved in sheltering people, secreting people away, striking, or helping those who were doing such things. The two most active groups were churches and communist organizations.

The Nazis responded with collective punishment. The occupiers cut off food supplies inside the Netherlands, blockading the roads between farms and cities. The entire population of the country went hungry during what’s called the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. Between 18-22,000 people starved to death. Four-and-a-half million people were living off of something like 600 calories a day each. A whole generation of children born or living at the time suffered lifelong ailments. Audrey Hepburn grew up in Occupied Netherlands (and as a preteen performed ballet to raise money to support the resistance). Her time in the hunger winter left her with lifelong ailments like anemia.

In case the parallel I’m drawing is not obvious, Gaza is currently being starved by the Israeli government.

Quite notably, quite worth understanding in the modern context, the Hunger Winter persisted despite relief efforts until the Allied forces liberated the Netherlands from the fascists in May 1945.

Aaron Bushnell was twenty-five years old when he died. He sent a message to media outlets before his act: “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

He posted on Facebook: “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.”

His last words, engulfed in flames, were “Free Palestine.”

I know that what stopped US involvement in Vietnam was the military victory of the Vietnamese people against US forces, combined with the direct action action efforts of the American Left that made the war harder to execute. I know what ended the Nazi occupation was the Allied invasion. I know what stopped legal chattel slavery in the US was the deadliest war in our country’s history. I also know that what stopped Jim Crow was… nothing. Nothing has stopped it, not completely. The long, hard, thankless work of a combination of reform and direct action has mitigated its effects somewhat.

I can’t say I think others should follow Aaron’s example. I doubt he wanted anyone to. An act like this needs attention, not imitation. What we can follow is the moral courage. What we need to decide for ourselves is how to act, not whether or not to act. I don’t have any answers for me, and I don’t have any answers for you.

I can say that he shouldn’t be forgotten, that he ought to be remembered when we ask ourselves if we have the courage to act.

I can also say that it takes an incredible number of people doing an incredible variety of work to effect change. That poet, Father Daniel Berrigan, did a lot more than write poetry. He and others in the broader Catholic Left raided draft offices and burned records, directly impacting the US’s ability to send young men off to die in an imperialist war. A group of people who came out of their movement (but were primarily Jewish and/or secular) raided an FBI office and uncovered the spying and disruption that was done of the peace movement under the name COINTELPRO.

A vibrant and militant counterculture sprang up, drawing Americans away from the clutches of conservative propaganda. They built nationwide networks of mutual aid and they helped draft dodgers escape the country.

An awful lot of American soldiers in Vietnam directly defected, enough that “fragging” entered the English language as a verb for throwing a grenade at your commanding officer.

As for the Hunger Winter, it was not ended until the Nazi party was ended through force of arms, but its worst effects were alleviated by the bravery and thankless work of uncountable people who cobbled together meals from nothing or who organized to bring food aid in across German lines.

In the US now we’re seeing a growing movement opposed to our country’s collaboration with the genocidal regime in Israel.

It’s impossible to know if it will be enough. When you pile straw onto the proverbial camel, you never know which straw will be the last. We just keep piling.

And in the meantime, we remember names like Aaron Bushnell, Ronald Brazee, Alice Herz, and Thích Quảng Đức.

[hometownrockstar]

When i was younger i had a brief hyperfixation on radiation and nuclear war movies made during the 80's cold war times but it was brief because after like a week of it i got so viscerally depressed that i had to make myself stop engaging with it and i also have a deep fear of radiation poisoning tho i wouldnt pinpoint the start of it to THAT moment i'd always been scared of it but yeah. But anyways my response to it now at the moment is to learn about nuclear power and learn all the ways it is done safely and the benefits it can provide :-) this doesnt stop the fear of radiation posioning and worse case scenarios obviously but i still like to learn about stuff because if you don't know about it its easy to jump to the worst conclusions to fear about it. Radiation in general is very feared by the populace so i wanna know about it so i dont be afraid of common misconceptions i might take as fact. Also energy is very cool to me i have considered working in the field before whether its wind or solar or electrical pylons hehe

[fellhellion]

The dumb skimpy outfits of those rich teenagers that beat Miguel’s ass that one time are such such dumb sexualised design but also man. The way Dita accidentally drowns in the river even as Miguel tried to save her and it’s the last panel of that little story. There’s nothing beyond that. No reaction panel from our spiderman. It’s just a tragic senseless waste, sourced in nothing more than the capitalism rotting Nueva York from the inside out and resulting in kids kicking up Downtown and believing the lives there serve no greater purpose than as a resource for their own entertainment

[tears-exe]

Frustrating thing about trying to heal and get better

When I can and the body/brain needs to

I need to sit in the discomfort and let the emotions run their course

Because I can let go, but it still needs to be processed.

So here I am

4am

Wanting to cry and feeling so much hurt

And its such a struggle

I want to lock it away and be done with it

But I know how badly that hurts in the long run.

I'm not wallowing or focusing on it

I'm just letting it be

But there's so much and it cuts so deep emotionally.

It can be so overwhelming

But I know how much it will help to let the brain/body/heart do its thing

Recovery is possible

[surpriserose]

we need to destroy every self help book tbh

[anarchocasism]

and ANOTHER THING. its so obvious when someone who claims to be a radical has never had any experience with poverty. they either 1) show very little understanding for class dynamics 2) are constantly looking for the correct group of poor people to hate (in the u.s. they mainly hate rural southerns or poor republicans) 3) talk about poor people like theyre all stupid or infants 4) never mention or really consider class. while saying they belong to ideologies based on class struggle. they just genuinely dont think about it.

[zo1nkss]

I've noticed that the whole "forgetting to reply to messages for days on end" thing has become like. A common occurance for just about everyone I see or talk to or engage with online.

And ik we're all talking about it like "A Neurodivergent Thing" but we really need to adress the fact that neurotypicals are definitely experiencing this on an equal scale and I'm starting to think it's less about neurotype and more about the arnosphere of constant unquestionable availabilith that society has taught us we must provide everyone who we know IRL and online.