@igd_news Love the nice little tidbits they drop at the end: “Some online have claimed that to rationalize his actions, Bushnell must have been mentally unstable. The history of self-immolation does not necessarily support that claim. According to Time magazine, self-immolation as an act of protest dates back centuries, as far back as an old Hindu practice of ritual suicide called sati and Catholic persecution during the Roman Empire. It was brought to international attention when photojournalist Malcolm Browne captured the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc while he was actively burning in 1963. In the years that followed, several American citizens set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War. More recently, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in 2010 directly started the Tunisian Revolution and is credited as one of the main causes of the Arab Spring. In the United States, multiple people have self-immolated to protest inaction against climate change, first in 2018, then in 2020, then in 2022. Bushnell became the second American to do so in protest of Israeli military action in Gaza, following an unidentified person who self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta on Dec. 1, 2023.”

Fascists will be fascist, do not let them denigrate Aaron’s memory or diminish the movement for the liberation of Palestine.
از رود تا دریا

@Radical_EgoCom

I wanna highlight a couple disagreements I have with this post, hope that’s okay.

First, what does ‘violence’ mean in this context Think about it, why does the movement’s attempts at liberation and the empowerment of the people get classed as violence but the state’s reliance on war and police brutality and its upholding of capitalist property law don’t get acknowledged as violence? The state is often defined as a polity with a territorial monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, while that isn’t a conclusive definition, it is crucial to understanding this discrepancy. The average person doesn’t question the state’s violence because justifications for it have been shoved down their throat since they were a toddler and so it’s been legitimized almost to the point of being viewed as a law of nature. The glorification of war and pigs is not treated by fascists the same way revolutionary ‘violence’ is treated because ultimately, it’s not about the violence itself. We could be absolutist pacifists and never kill a fly but still viewed as terrorists by fascists because it is not and has never been about violence itself. The violence in their eyes is not the physical force but the aim, i.e. the revolution. We are not nearly as legitimized as the state is in the eyes of many.

As such, fascists will always attempt to discredit any and all revolutionaries and will go to extreme lengths to do so with supreme disregard to reality, including disregard to whether or not the revolutionary in question was violent. Think about how heavily the capitalist-owned news outlets misportrayed George Floyd’s autopsy or how many fascists earnestly believe Tortuguita shot first or how the killers of Nex Benedict claim that Nex throwing water in response to months-long bullying justified murder. Fascists rely upon misinformation because noone would be fascist if they were properly informed and this will include misinformation about the nature of our actions. We will be misportrayed regardless of whether or not we are violent.

I think it’s also important to mention how harmful this line of thinking often is and its resemblance to completely and utterly nonsensical respectability politics. We appeal to the people through facilitating mutual aid and free association and other forms of libertaire prefigurative politics, not by worrying ourselves about what fascists and capitalists will maliciously insist about us. If we occupy ourselves primarily with conforming to how they perceive us, we will cease to be revolutionaries.

As for specific instances of revolutionary force, all libertaire revolutions ever have required physical defence in some form. From the 1936 Spanish Revolution to the Free Soviets in Ukraine to the revolutionaries in Korea and Manchuria to the AANES, physical defence of the revolution has proven necessary. Thích Quảng Đức's self-immolation inspired countless anti-Vietnam War protests which facilitated Vietnam’s (Maoist, but nonetheless) revolution. Various self-immolations incited people to revolution during the Arab Spring.

Demonstrations which only use force against capitalists, fascists, and others who actively and directly threaten the wellbeing of the people will always be justified and so will completely willing and consensual acts of defiance such as Aaron Bushnell’s choice to become a martyr for the movement. On the other hand, ‘propaganda of the deed’ as the murder of innocents/noncombattants is dictionary definition terrorism and is actual violence.