On February 15, 2024, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. According to the New York Magazine, the 25 year old Air Force member set up his phone for a livestream before setting himself on fire while shouting messages of protest against the Israel-Hamas war. He died just a few hours later due to the wounds he sustained.
Although the event was publicly perceived as unusual, Bushnell’s act is not particularly unique. Self-immolation has a long history as a form of protest. A 2000 essay written by Sallie B. King, professor emerita at James Madison University, mentions multiple Vietnamese Buddhist monks self-immolating in protest of the Vietnam war, and at least one American doing the same. Furthermore, The Washington Post says that similar self-immolations have been committed in protest of the Iraq War, the Tunisian government and climate change.
There is an established pattern of self-immolation as a form of protest, but how effective is it? Sean Goff of the University of Louisville conducted a study on the socio-political phenomenon by examining core mobilization following self-immolations in both India and South Korea. He found that while the self-immolations in South Korea substantially impacted the country’s pro-democracy movement, its impacts in India were limited due to social stratification and other socio-political variables.
Many people have negative views on self-immolation. During the Vietnam War Tina Morrison’s father’s self-immolation outside the Pentagon in protest of the war. While it is unclear her personal position on the matter, as a child she said “It didn’t stop the war;” the war didn’t end until 10 years after his suicide.
Another very common form of self harm protest is the hunger strike, in which the protestor refuses to eat for an extended period of time. The Cambridge University Press positions hunger strikes as a more effective means of protest. They conducted an empirical analysis of thousands of hunger strikes between 1906 and 2004, and found that approximately 75.5 percent of hunger strikes resulted in a positive outcome.
Given self-immolation’s comparative lack of reliability, what drove Aaron Bushnell to such a drastic form of protest? While the answer to this question remains unknown, some speculations are being put to rest. According to Joseph Pierre, a health sciences clinical professor at UCLA, mental illness is an assumption that people cannot reliably make.
In the livestream leading up to his death, Bushnell said, “I am 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.” With 30,000 Palestinians killed in the conflict, Bushnell’s humane understanding and empathy, demonstrated by his act, was clear to many.
