“I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man apparently said before setting himself alight and repeatedly shouting “Free Palestine!”
Looks like he was an anarchist comrade.
Seems weird that an anarchist was a US soldier. Maybe he joined before he came to the political beliefs he held as he burned, or perhaps he came to these beliefs because of what he saw in the army.
That happens quite a lot when you recruit teenagers with the promise of tech job skills.
Removed by mod
Excuse me, what?
It is incontrovertibly ON TOPIC to point out the fact that his dying words were FREE PALESTINE followed by a scream of DEATH AGONY because he was ON FIRE. His remarks factually did not conclude in the reported way. This is not a joke. I disagree it is crass or insensitive (Whose sensibilities am I supposed to have offended, precisely? More importantly: why the fuck should I care that their feelings are hurt by my pointing out the message he died to scream to the world?), and regardless it is factual and relevant. Go back and watch again if you don’t believe me, if you have the courage.
“Crass jokes” aren’t prohibited by your badly written rules even if it were a joke.
Your moderator indiscretion is what is crass here, if anything. Shame on you.
Nah i’m with the mods on that one, it came off way too much like you were laughing at them.
Well, I’ll be the first to admit it’s very hard to tell what a person’s intent is through text alone. I could have provided more context. I suppose it felt to me like it didn’t need context because it was seared into my brain.
Anyone who still visits reddit, how [deleted] is this story over there?
Edit: I’ve created a torrent for the video if anyone wants to help seed. His sacrifice in bringing attention to the US-sponsored genocide in Palestine must not be forgotten.
deleted by creator
What story?
Self immolation as a form of protest. For anyone unaware of it there was a Buddhist monk who immolated themself to protest the oppression of Buddhists by the Catholic PM of Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thích_Quảng_Đức
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine_(album)
https://time.com/3791176/malcolm-browne-the-story-behind-the-burning-monk/
For anyone unaware - it happened at least 160 times since 2009 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_protests_by_Tibetans_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations
censored video: https://twitter.com/taliaotg/status/1761944158636331247
catbox archived: https://files.catbox.moe/khy3kv.mp4
Couldn’t find uncensored version. Uncensored belowFucking Christ my hearts beating so fast. Goddamn i didn’t want to see that but i watched it cus i thought i owed it to him… Goddamnit.
And also shout out to the “hero” pointing his gun at his smouldering corpse as if it will lunge at him any moment.
Goddamnit
At least one of them went “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”
I read about this and saw the censored version last night. I nearly threw up seeing the uncensored version now. I feel similar to you.
And to all the shitheads on twitter downplaying this as “glorifying mental illness,” fuck the lot of them.
Uncensored version here https://files.catbox.moe/rez1vs.mp4
I’ve created a torrent for the video if anyone wants to help seed.
I’ve created a torrent for the video if anyone wants to help seed. His sacrifice in bringing attention to the US-sponsored genocide in Palestine must not be forgotten.
Noticed that the MSM is barely touching the story or if they are, with little contextual detail. Am I the only one who has noticed this?
I’m not able to connect to it.
Just leave it open, it’ll find peers eventually.
Link doesn’t work.
It’s a magnet link. Copy the link address and put it in your torrent client.
“law enforcement drew guns at the burning man” 💀
This is so sadly America it’s not funny.
Mirror?
Do a Google search and you can probably find it. I saw more photos on mastadon and reddit.
He was too innocent for this world. I don’t know what to say other than I promise I will never forget him and that I’ll try to spread his message and do everything I can to help free Palestine.
having viewed the video now, i initially found myself surprised i was not more horrified. my best guess as to why is this - what seemed most notable to me was his apparent sanity and intentionality in making this choice. he chose the where and when of his death and intended it to matter.
I couldn’t believe how long he stayed on his feet after he could no longer scream. Rest in Power Aaron.
He stopped feeling pain because shock set in about 30 seconds into it, I could get more graphic but that’s about how long it took for his eyes to get to fucked up to close them.
God damn, this is brutal. I watched it and it gave me absolute chills. The world won’t forget this man’s bravery and sacrifice, even if the media doesn’t cover it.
Oh the country will forget. By Friday there will be something else.
There’s going to be some big presidential debate drama. Bidens going to forget to wear socks or Trumps going to go tanning again… The important stuff.
I’m waiting with baited breath
Wanna bet?
We won’t forget.
Removed by mod
kindly shut the fuck up now
It’s nowhere in the news cycles here in Europe. Sadly, maybe we won’t forget but the world is already neglecting it. I wish he hadn’t done it, we’ve seen enough death already.
More bravery in this one man than all of the IDF combined. Rest in power!
Removed by mod
This guy is very brave, but everyone taking about the embassy security drawing weapons when they arrive. Of course they would. They don’t know what was planned, if it was a suicide bombing gone wrong, our whatever else. I’m not pro cop but I don’t understand why people are surprised by this. They are security
What, exactly, would a gun do if he was a suicide bomber?
Stop him before he got any closer to the embassy. Obviously a gun won’t stop him from commiting suicide, but it could easily be the difference between one person dying and a much larger act of terrorism
There’s a metal fence. What would he even get close to?
Considering the security forces had no idea whether he was working alone or what was happening, they obviously didn’t think they could rely on the metal fence.
Look, I’m all for a free Palestine and I agree that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. I also think that voluntary membership in any American or Israeli law enforcement makes them complicit in the heinous acts perpetrated by American cops and the IDF, respectively. I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you and I agree a lot more than we disagree on these issues. I’m just saying, from the PoV of the security forces at the Israeli embassy, this was a potential threat to the embassy and their job is literally to prevent threats from harming the embassy. Without any further information to go on, their decision to draw guns first and get the extinguisher second is reasonable.
If he wasn’t alone what would shooting him accomplish? You still haven’t actually presented a compelling reason he needed to be kept under a gun.
I think it’s understandable that people untrained for a situation like this would fall back on the default, I know I wouldn’t know what to do, but calling that “reasonable” as if it really makes sense in hindsight is a stretch.
If he wasn’t alone what would shooting him accomplish? You still haven’t actually presented a compelling reason he needed to be kept under a gun.
Once Bushnell was on fire and had stopped moving toward the gate/fence, you are correct, he didn’t need to be kept under a gun. However, if he had started to move in a threatening way or if he had been working with a larger group, having the guns drawn could have saved crucial seconds if someone else began to act in a threatening way. The security forces simply didn’t know what the fuck was happening, and in that situation, it is better to have the guns drawn and to be ready for the worst case scenario.
I think it’s understandable that people untrained for a situation like this would fall back on the default, I know I wouldn’t know what to do, but calling that “reasonable” as if it really makes sense in hindsight is a stretch.
That’s fair. I can get behind calling it “understandable” instead of “reasonable”
Shoot the suicide bomber before a bigger boom. What if there was another person? Another thing? We can’t know, they can’t know. We know now, due to hindsight.
They are security. They secure scenes. They aren’t paramedics.
I am not making pro cop statements here, but all the comments about “ohhh the cop arrived to a dangerous scene with a weapon drawn!” Is like saying “the garbage man picked up the garbage bin when he drove past my house!” Duh!
He’s on fire! Shooting him wouldn’t stop a bigger boom!
I’ll give the cops this: they probably were not trained on what to do if someone lights themselves on fire. They just fell back on basic training.
It’s murica, they weren’t trained at all.
They did the one thing they were trained to do – Pull first ask
questionsfor fire extinguishers later
shoot out the fire or scare the guy so much he stops being on fire – only options
Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won’t change anything, and how there’s no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.
I would also like to kind of point out here, that “this won’t change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing”, is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, you know? And that’s mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.
Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they’re doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should’ve probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.
Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I’ve seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don’t really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).
But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.
Now, in this case, there’s not as clear of a process, because there’s not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren’t a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they’re much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.
But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It’s almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That’s the power of these protests. We’ve already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it’s being reported about as poorly as you’d expect.
I’m not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I’d generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn’t ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.
If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.
Rest in power
A rare hero. Not what I expected from the US.
