Our theme for the month of March is “light.”

This post discusses suicide.

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. 

Free Palestine!

— Aaron Bushnell’s last words

On February 26, 2024, Aaron Bushnell was the second person in the United States to self-immolate in the name of a free Palestine. The first, an unidentified woman in Georgia, survived her attempt to self-immolate on December 1, 2023. Bushnell lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC as a demonstration of his commitment to the people of Palestine and refusal to participate further in Palestinians’ suffering.

While political self-immolation has existed for centuries, the act with the greatest influence—the inciting act for hundreds more in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—was that of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức on June 11, 1963, in protest of the persecution of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Twenty-nine others, primarily Buddhist monks and nuns, followed suit in the country over the next decade.

Political self-immolation is fueled by the belief that extreme, grotesque, ultimate displays of conviction can kindle public awareness and lead to meaningful and just change. In a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of Quảng Đức and subsequent Buddhist self-immolations: “There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.”

The first known political self-immolation in the United States happened on March 16, 1965, when eighty-two-year-old Alice Herz set herself on fire on a Detroit street to protest the Vietnam War. Nine more residents of the United States protested the Vietnam War by self-immolation over the following five years.

After 1970, self-immolation became rare in the United States, and between 1980 and 2010, according to official records, an average of only two political self-immolations per year were completed worldwide. Over this period, in August 2005, the second and third recorded political self-immolations in Israel protested the removal of Israeli settlers and military presence from Gaza.

In the 2010s, three movements brought self-immolation into sharper relief than any previous injustice. Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, self-immolated on December 17, 2010. Bouazizi’s death sparked protests across the country. Less than a month later, the Tunisian regime fell and the flame of political unrest had ignited the Arab Spring. In India, fourteen people self-immolated for the statehood of Telangana, which was granted on June 2, 2014. And to draw attention to human rights abuses in Tibet, 161 Tibetans, along with eight others from France, India, and Nepal, self-immolated between 2011 and 2022.

Over that same decade and into the 2020s, political self-immolation began to rise in the United States. Unlike in prior waves, almost all actors cited different causes, including homelessness, climate change, government corruption, and social injustice.

Self-immolation in the United States is often linked to mental health crises and suicidal ideation, both by self-immolators themselves and by their families, friends, and political representatives. This link can be used to depoliticize their deaths—to ignore the individuals’ stated political goals and refocus any potential “blame” toward an illness or personal state of mind, divorced from the person’s socioeconomic context and convictions about justice.

Yet mental illness and suicidal ideation do not render a person unable to understand injustice in the world. Linda Zhang wrote in an open letter to the New York Times, “the world still considers environmentalism to be something noble, something additional, rather than something necessary,” before self-immolating on July 18, 2020. Rev. Charles Moore was a death penalty abolitionist and gay rights advocate who invoked his faith in his choice of extreme protest: “This decision to sacrifice myself was not impulsive: I have struggled all my life (especially the last several years) with what it means to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insistence that Christ calls a person to come and die seriously.” Former LGBT rights lawyer David Buckel saw his death as a symbol of the mass devastation of climate change: “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” In his last words, Bushnell asserted that his “extreme” final act was less than the extreme violence Israel has wrought against Palestine.

I do not advocate self-immolation, but I refuse to hand-wring over tactics rather than focus on the cry for justice. I want Palestinians to live, to experience love and joy and safety in their homes and with their families. I want the same for those who object to colonization in Palestine. I want the same for everyone, despite living in a world where many people want life and prosperity only for themselves.

I will honor Aaron Bushnell. I will honor the 31,302 Palestinians Israel has killed in the past 154 days. Free Palestine.

Image: Talia Jane

Gwyneth Findlay

Gwyneth Findlay is an editor living in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she mentally and physically collects world maps. She graduated from Calvin in 2018 with a degree in writing and minors in French and gender studies.