On February 25, a twenty-five-year-old member of the United States Air Force named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in a gruesome public suicide spectacle outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Proclaiming “Free Palestine” as his body was engulfed in flames, Bushnell live-streamed his self-immolation on Twitch, and the video has now been seen by millions worldwide.
To most who can stomach the devastating display, the natural reaction is a blend of horror and pity. To a segment of the activist class, however, Bushnell’s act has been lauded as a brave act of protest. The progressive public figure Cornel West, who holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Seminary in New York City, posted a tribute on X, praising the “extraordinary courage” of the young airman who “died for truth and justice.”
One wonders if there would be a Bonhoeffer Chair anywhere if the eponymous German Protestant pastor had offed himself instead of letting the Nazis do it. But there does seem to be some confusion about how martyrdom works nowadays. In a recent article in Time magazine about Bushnell’s death, the author falsely asserts that burning oneself to bits was the sort of thing early Christians did. Coincidentally, on the same day I read the Time article, I happened to be re-reading the short account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, who had a vision of his death and told his associates, “I must be burned alive.” Nonetheless, the document makes clear, “we do not praise those who come forward of their own accord, since the gospel does not teach us to do so.”
Despite the eighty-six-year-old Bishop Polycarp’s premonition, it was, of course, the emperor’s goons who did him in. Likewise, no one would praise Bonhoeffer’s contemporary, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, if he had lit himself up at the gates of SS Headquarters on Albert Street in Berlin in 1943. Nor indeed would it have been a courageous act–let alone a theologically efficacious one–if Our Lord had hurled himself into Gehenna instead of being obedient unto death on the cross at Pilate’s command.
Correcting the record on the official Christian view of suicide and sacrifice takes two minutes. Much more pressing and difficult, however, is prescribing a way out of the despair that Bushnell’s death obviously signifies to most of us. A video of a guy burning himself alive just seems like end-of-the-world stuff to me. It has hit me as a lightning strike from the cloud of despair that hangs over our heads. The long shadows are getting even longer.
How did we get here?
When I first saw reports of Bushnell’s fiery suicide, I immediately thought of an image that has haunted me since childhood. I remember as a twelve-year-old thinking I was beyond being scared. It was a matter of honor and a personal triumph to be able to buck up and watch a Nightmare on Elm Street movie at a sleepover around that age. But one day I was flipping through discs at the music store, and I came upon the self-titled debut release by Rage Against the Machine. On the cover is a cropped version of one of the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs by Malcolm Browne, who captured the self-immolation of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963. To this day, the image gives me the shivers; and I am far from alone in the media for equating Browne’s photo with Bushnell’s video. It has been making the rounds and keeping people like me up at night.
In Browne’s photos, Quảng Đức is seated in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, where he set himself ablaze in protest against the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government, led by Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. (As it happened, Diệm was assassinated later in 1963 during a CIA-sponsored coup). Quảng Đức’s suicide became iconic almost overnight, inspiring copycats down to the present day. Rage Against the Machine capitalized on the image to sell anti-establishment lyrics that riled up young people, and especially young men.
In the wake of Bushnell’s suicide, there was one mildly sympathetic re-post about the shocking event on the X account of Rage guitarist Tom Morello, along with another re-post about Quảng Đức, mistakenly saying he killed himself in protest against the Vietnam War. In any case, for anyone to look at a man engulfed in flames of his own doing and take inspiration from it is, mercifully, the kind of thing only the most brainwashed or brain-damaged youth fails to grow out of. But apparently, Bushnell may have been just such an exception, having dabbled in anarchism after growing up in a group, described by some former members as “abusive,” that also happened to be pro-Israel, making his rebellion appear to be more personal than political.
Whatever the case, Bushnell did not escape his most recent iteration of self-destructive idealism. To call it courageous, as Cornel West does, is to miss its more obvious comparison to a school shooter or a terrorist, but with the violence directed only back at the aggressor himself.
After Quảng Đức, the list of known self-immolators continued to grow in the second half of the twentieth century, ticking way up in 1965 and 1966, with a significant number of additional Vietnamese monks and nuns, a half dozen or so Tamil-language advocates in India, several American anti-war campaigners, a handful of anti-communists behind the Iron Curtain, and various other malcontents here and there. It was a small but disturbing trend.
Around this same time, the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard released his eleventh feature film, Masculin-Féminin, an unsettling study of youth culture. The protagonist, Paul, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, is a young pipe-dreamer fresh off his obligatory military service. His Leftist hijinks take the form of pontificating about the superiority of Bach to pop music, asking girls uncomfortable questions about birth control, and scrawling some anti-American or anti-Gaullist graffiti.
At one point in the film, a man with a knife approaches Paul, and the viewer anticipates a mugging or an assault; but, instead, the aggressor turns the knife on himself and jabs it into his own stomach, to Paul’s astonishment. But more significantly, for our purposes, in another scene, a man approaches Paul asking for a match. When Paul gives him the whole box and the man walks away, Paul becomes agitated and begins to follow him; but his girlfriend, Madeleine, tells him that the man has just set himself on fire off screen. The story simply moves on, almost comically. Such was the banality of these acts of despair in the modern world, even before the tumultuous events of 1968. At the end of Masculin-Féminin, we learn second hand that Paul has died in an accident, and Madeleine, now pregnant, does not know what to do with herself. “J’hésite,” she declares. The viewer, too, may be at a loss for the meaning, although he likely still finds the thought of burning alive undesirable.
This search for meaning takes a different shape for a different kind of agitator in an unforgettable scene of self-immolation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, Nostalghia (1983). Here we meet a zealot named Domenico, who mutters things about St. Catherine, and who desires to walk across a pool named after St. Catherine with a lit candle. He is evidently brilliant but clearly disturbed. The locals mostly think Domenico is batty, and the viewer eventually learns that he once had a family and kept them locked inside for years out of fear of corruption by the world. Near the end of the film, Domenico climbs atop a statue and unleashes a torrent of ravings that come across as part Francis of Assisi and part Unabomber manifesto. He concludes, “We must go back to where we were, to the point where you took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water.”
Domenico’s words are convicting and convincing at first, until suddenly we realize there is no hope undergirding any of them. It is not a call to action after all, but an expression of reactionary fatalism–the black pill. Domenico orders a lackey to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on a boombox before he douses himself in gasoline and puts his Zippo to his overcoat. A couple of cars full of carabinieri finally roll up much too late, and no one in the crowd seems particularly moved or bothered. Meanwhile, the film’s protagonist Oleg Yankovsky, a Soviet poet, undertakes Domenico’s strange feat of carrying a fragile flame across the pool. Here is that tiny but powerful virtue of hope after all. The Truth illuminates, not consumes.
And this brings us back to true martyrdom, and how to move beyond despair, by way of two more interconnected films.
In another Jean-Luc Godard picture called Vivre sa vie (1962), we meet a young woman named Nana, who is at the end of her rope. She is getting a divorce, and her ex-husband has custody of her child. She wants to be an actress, but the men who encourage her have nefarious intentions. She is not making enough money at the record store where she works, and she finally turns to prostitution. But shortly before she makes this desperate choice, she goes to the movies. As Nana sits in the dark, she is mesmerized by one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The look on Nana’s face as her eyes well up with tears conveys ultimate longing. It is as if she asks, and we with her, why has God not chosen me like He chose Joan? What can I die for, and therefore live for? Sadly, things do not go well in the end for Nana; but perhaps her tale may be cautionary for us.
As we watch The Passion of Joan of Arc with Nana, Godard shows us the scene where Joan is told that she will be burned at the stake. “God knows our path, and we understand it only at the end of the road,” she explains. As Chesterton said of Joan, “she chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.” Joan burned, but she was the exact opposite of a self-immolator. Perhaps as clearly as any martyr’s story in the history of the Church, Joan’s fate shows how when one forces the bad guys to really do their worst, it becomes a testimony to the glory of Him who defeats death itself. Joan, like Polycarp, does not seek death, but does not fear it. Indeed, Joan says in the film that death will be her deliverance–it is her obedience, not her activism, that is courageous. At the very end of The Passion of Joan of Arc, a title card tells us, “The protective flames surrounded Joan’s soul as she rose to heaven.” Man’s weapons of annihilation become God’s instruments of salvation.
In some misguided way, Cornel West’s ghastly post about Aaron Bushnell’s choice to incinerate himself may be aiming at the hope that animated Joan’s life and ultimately made her a saint. But no one really buys it. Unlike Joan’s execution, Bushnell’s death is not going to inspire a nation in any positive way, even if his cause was righteous. On the contrary, we must now pray it does not encourage other desperate people to copy him. As an event unto itself, or in relation to the short twentieth-century tradition of self-immolation protests, Bushnell’s death just makes the void bigger and harder to get around. The temptation to stare into this void, paralyzed, continues to grow among people of all ages.
But if, like Nana in Vivre sa vie, a shocking moment of public despair mysteriously turns our attention to the saints who were burned up for the sake of Kingdom of Heaven, perhaps some good may come of this evil. May we sing with the three youths in the Book of Daniel, “Bless the Lord, fire and heat, sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever.”
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It makes a certain amount of sense for a Buddhist to use suicide as a means of protest, since a Buddhist will expect to be reincarnated anyhow. My understanding is that Islam considers suicide every bit as much a mortal sin as does the Catholic Church, though, and I doubt Muslims are as hopeful regarding extenuating circumstances.
You raise complicated interreligious questions…
About BUDDHISM, Pope John Paul II labeled this religion of self-annihilation from an evil world as “by and large an ‘atheistic’ system” (“Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” 1994, p. 86). About ISLAM, suicide is prohibited, and some ways are identified to help prevent it. But, on the other hand, Islam is a fractious and sectarian collage (some might say polyhedral!), and the jihadists recruit suicide bombers partly by claiming that the bomber atones fully for past sins and enters directly into paradise (your “extenuating circumstances” on steroids?).
In 2006 Pope Benedict delivered his “REGENSBERG LECTURE” in which he faulted the West for its lopsided rationalism (which we notice now offers few arguments against suicide), and the world of fideistic Islam on the grounds that, for example, terrorist bombing is not compatible with real religion. The West offered very little response, while riots broke out across the Muslim world in protest that the academic pope had quoted in passing a broad remark about Islam from the 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus. The murder of a Catholic nun in Egypt might well have been related.
Of the West, Benedict wrote equally critically and broadly: “In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid …A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures” (n. 58).
To your point and about Islam, yes, suicide is prohibited and steps are taken to prevent it. But, on the other hand, Islam is fractious and sectarian, and the jihadist recruit suicide bombers partly by claiming that the stressed (?) bomber atones for past sins and enters directly into paradise (your “extenuating circumstances” on steroids?). Under Islam we have suicide bombers and October 7, while in the West we have suicide-by-cop, and other mass shootings. The hour is late…
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But, of despondent Western rationalism, or of Islam’s distant, inscrutable, and fatalistic Allah…WHAT IF the truly self-disclosing Divinity is One, Triune and Incarnate? The LOGOS such that “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:8-9).
I was not entering into the merits, relative or absolute, of any form of Buddhism or Islam. I brought up Buddhism because self-immolation as protest is best known for being performed by a Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War. The monk’s reasoning was wrong, but at least it fit within a largely consistent framework. I brought up Islam because the vast majority of those living in the Gaza strip are Muslims. If I were Muslim myself, I would probably argue for suicide bombers along the same lines as the rule of Double Effect in Catholic moral theology, but I think it would actually be harder to apply this argument to a mere protest — the desired “good” effect being of smaller effect and less certain.
9/11/2001 and 72 virgins?
This article’s points about Joan of Arc would have been better served by looking at what historians have written about the many eyewitness accounts from people who were at her trial and execution, since these tend to confirm the article’s point far better than the film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. That film also has the problem of being contradicted on certain important points by these eyewitness accounts which describe how the transcript was falsified by the pro-English judge and the guards manipulated her into a fake “relapse” by taking away her dress and forcing her to put the soldier’s outfit back on so the judge could condemn her. The quote from the film (“God chooses our path…”) is not historical although it’s close to her actual views. Nonetheless, eyewitnesses said that she was understandably distraught at the thought of being burned alive rather than calmly accepting it (she had thought she would be rescued). This would frankly better suit the article’s main point anyway: she certainly wasn’t seeking death since she was terrified of it.
Fair points, but I take some issue with this: “eyewitnesses said that she was understandably distraught at the thought of being burned alive rather than calmly accepting it.” I think the film depicts her accepting it, but not calmly. Right after she is told she will be burned alive, her face really shows terror. That’s the genius of the performance – it transcends the words of the transcript. So human, and yet so subtly depicts her human will choosing God’s will.
There are a great many people struggling with mental health issues these days & some don’t survive the struggle. May this poor man rest in peace. Amen.
Very true, but the leftists that jumped on this latest anti Israeli bandwagon helped push much thinking in the wrong direction.
Yes, sadly.
It really would not have been any better if he had burned himself to death protesting in favor of the Israeli side, or in favor of Ukraine, or in protest of the illegal immigration crisis. Suicide by self-immolation does not do any good for anybody. Mental illness is not merely the most generous assumption, it’s also the only one that makes sense.
While I think his efforts were misguided I think it’s a stretch to equate him with terrorists. He was passionate, to a fault. He did it because he didn’t want his government to make him commit war crimes, and I guess he also wanted to die. I just think it’s awful that anyone has been pushed far enough to choose this. He deserved peace, the people of Palestine deserve peace, everyone deserves peace and love
If someone responds to your,”Peace be with you,” with a ‘bullet’ instead of “and with your spirit,” what are you supposed to do? Was Hamas being fired on in Oct?
The United States has well over a million active duty on the military payrolls. Yes, I imagine most here yearn for the day when they will beat swords into plowshares, but it doesn’t look like we’re getting any closer.
Hamas’s attack wasn’t justified, but Israeli settler and IDF soldiers murdered hundreds of Palestinians in 2023 prior to Oct. 7.
As Clint Eastwood says to Gene Hackman near the end of the film Unforgiven, as he is about to execute/murder him, “we all deserve it”. So, no, we all do not “deserve” peace. Most of us truly “deserve” the opposite, that is why we need a saviour.
The children of Palestine do not deserve what is happening to them, but many of the adults do, every one who in any way supported or supports Hamas. There is a difference between “innocent civilians” and “non-combatants”, and many of the adult civilians in Gaza may not deserve the first designation. We Christians, servants of the Prince of Peace, must with all our abilities seek to bring the peace of His rule to Gaza and everywhere, and find some way to break the cycle of fear and hurt and vengeance that is going on. It will not come through some secular belief that everyone “deserves” peace.
I do not justify what Israel is doing, but then no one has threatened to exterminate my entire people and faith. I recently watched on TCM the 80’s era French documentary “Shoah”. It is a mesmerizing 10 hour (your read that right) film, consisting entirely of interviews with people who from one perspective or another had witnessed the various aspects of the Holocaust. One of the people interviewed towards the end of the film was a retired Mossad leader. He described his experience as a young man visiting the Warsaw ghetto after all of its inhabitants had either died or been put on trains, and the Jewish leader, who had tried and failed to protect his people, had committed suicide. All that remained were bloated dead bodies up and down the streets. His final comment to the interviewer was “If you could lick the surface of my heart you would die, because it is covered with poison”. So though I do not support nor justify what Israel is doing, I think it is understandable and that any approach to “peace” must take into account what has happened to the Jewish people and what Hamas (and other Moslem groups) have threatened to do again. The Moslems of Palestine have many other Moslem countries where, if there were any true Moslem “brotherhood”, they could find refuge. There is no other Jewish nation. It is all very sad and stomach churning, and we need to be careful that our own hearts are not poisoned.
Pope Francis has just announced his prayer intention for the month of March. It is to pray for those threatened by martyrdom in our day. He told of visiting a refugee camp in Lesbos where a moslem widower told him of the martyrdom of his wife who was a Christian. Terrorist had entered their home and threaten her if she did not denounce the cross. She refused and was murdered right in front of him. He had no bitterness but wanted the Holy Father to know of her love and faithfulness. Pope Francis then went on that he had been told by an authority he trusted that there were more Christion martyrs today than there were in the early church. This brought to my mind the Columbine killings years ago. The murderers had reportedly shot anyone who did not renounce Christ. The media later vigorously. denounced the reports as false. “Myth” it seems is the favorite word in our Age Of Lies. Several months afterward Our Sunday Visitor interviewed one of the “myths”. It was a protestant girl who had refused to renounce Jesus and was shot but survived her wounds. The OSV interviewer asked wasn’t she afraid to refuse their demand? She replied “I was afraid not to!” Her words were burned into my memory .This young lady probably never heard of the Catholic term “Confessor of Christ” but she certainly was one! I don’t want to be put to the test but I will never forget those words. I hope and pray that I will be “afraid not to” profess Christ when in such peril.
see internet: Church Leaders Accuse Nigerian Military Of Being Complicit In The Murder Of Christians 3/2/24
We are not allowed to seek out martyrdom, in no small part because we might fail the test and become apostates. That said, we should rejoice in those who pass the test, and we should venerate them.
God runs this world thus to give options for everyone, eternal life or eternal death. Some conclude very early that there is no hope, some hopes to live till death and a few saints await with Hope to enter into the paradise.
It is remarkable how GOD called Aaron Bushnell to destroy himself up in this selfless act and in doing so to make himself a sign for us all.
(sarcastically) Good to see the Communist-like Censorship Board is at work in Catholic News organizations.
The only way to keep us free and safe is to lock us away from society and its scarry ideas.
Right… Or, it could be that CWR moderates all comments. Let’s go with that, as it’s the truth.
After all most normal sane people wouldn’t choose to follow a religion that declares Suffering and poverty and weakness and death to be the greatest interest for mankind. I’m sorry to have been raised in it and wish only for GOD to let it now end.
Not sure what religion you are referring to, but it certainly isn’t the Catholic Faith, which says suffering, while very real, has meaning because of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ:
1500 Illness and suffering have always been among the gravest problems confronted in human life. In illness, man experiences his powerlessness, his limitations, and his finitude. Every illness can make us glimpse death.
1501 Illness can lead to anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God. It can also make a person more mature, helping him discern in his life what is not essential so that he can turn toward that which is. Very often illness provokes a search for God and a return to him. …
1503 Christ’s compassion toward the sick and his many healings of every kind of infirmity are a resplendent sign that “God has visited his people”104 and that the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Jesus has the power not only to heal, but also to forgive sins;105 he has come to heal the whole man, soul and body; he is the physician the sick have need of.106 His compassion toward all who suffer goes so far that he identifies himself with them: “I was sick and you visited me.”107 His preferential love for the sick has not ceased through the centuries to draw the very special attention of Christians toward all those who suffer in body and soul. It is the source of tireless efforts to comfort them.
1504 Often Jesus asks the sick to believe.108 He makes use of signs to heal: spittle and the laying on of hands,109 mud and washing.110 The sick try to touch him, “for power came forth from him and healed them all.”111 And so in the sacraments Christ continues to “touch” us in order to heal us.
1505 Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.”.112 But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the “sin of the world,”.113 of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1500-05)
“There is a difference between ‘innocent civilians’ and ‘non-combatants’….” Are you a spokesman for Al Qaeda? That, of course, was their excuse: that people working the World Trade Center may have been “non-combatants”, but that they were hardly “innocent civilians”. You would have us go through the list of victims one by one to separate the mere “non-combatants” from the “innocent civilians”. Oh, and I suppose we should do the same for Israeli victims. Since Israel has compulsory military service, you have service personnel, veterans, and soon-to-be service personnel, which might make it hard to find “civilians”, innocent or not. But if you go down the road you have indicated, be always prepared to answer the question of whether the victims of terrorism somehow really deserved it. That is the choice you have made.
This was a reply to Mark above, but it seems to have fallen outside the thread.