On Sunday, February 25, we received an email from a person who signed himself Aaron Bushnell.
It read,
Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people. The below links should take you to a livestream and recorded footage of the event, which will be highly disturbing. I ask that you make sure that the footage is preserved and reported on.
We consulted the Twitch account. The username displayed was “LillyAnarKitty,” and the user icon was a circle A, the universal signifier for anarchism—the movement against all forms of domination and oppression.
In the video, Aaron begins by introducing himself. “My name is Aaron Bushnell. 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.”
Aaron Bushnell’s action reminded me immediately of Malachi Ritscher. Aaron has already been added as a Wikipedia “See also” link, so I’m not the only one.
The lesson from Malachi’s death is that the State doesn’t care about our lives, and the media will show its complicity with a blackout. The same media outlets will spin wall-to-wall coverage of a mass shooting, so concern for copycats is not their motivation. While the intention was to shock the complacent masses to action, instead the message reverberated as trauma through the activist community.
This is a very difficult thing to talk about, and Crimethinc did both Aaron and its readers justice by writing such a nuanced obituary.