One year ago Aaron Bushnell, an active duty member of the US Air Force, made the ultimate sacrifice. His self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. came as the Gaza Health Ministry reported nearly 30,000 deaths, with atrocities mounting—the murder of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, relentless strikes on hospitals and refugee camps, and the deliberate blockade of aid. Meanwhile, Genocide Joe pushed for an emergency $14.3 billion aid package to Israel with unwavering bipartisan support, backing its devastating assault under the rubric of self-defense.

Aaron’s act of extreme self-sacrifice was also a damning indictment of a protest movement that was quickly running out of steam and ideas. His act galvanized other veterans to stage their own protests, to destroy medals and burn US flags. Aaron’s sacrifice inspired students who pushed through inertia and malaise to launch last spring’s encampment movement that represented a real expression of defiance against the genocide. As we wrote last year, immediately following the self-immolation: 

Aaron’s message is clear: Give your life to this cause. Unless you make personal sacrifice and dedicate yourself to the struggle, you will come out of this genocide and go back to your regular life, and the enemy will have won from that. The energy from the mass protest will vanish, like it always does, cyclically, with every wave of mass protests. To really fight this, you can’t just be a protester. You have to be a revolutionary. You can’t just be a dissident voice at a dinner party. You gotta flip the fucking table. This is a wake-up call to all who have been on the sidelines, and it’s a call to everyone who’s been protesting and posting since October 7th to get real and throw down. 

Aaron said: “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal”. The snipers sent into working hospitals. The kidnapping and torture of doctors. The flour massacre. The evisceration of whole families. The Al-Shifa Massacre. The open use of torture and sexual assault at the Sde Teiman concentration camp. The Israeli occupation of Syria. The US-Israeli-Saudi aggression against Yemen. 

This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Millions of people living under permanent US sanctions, denied food and medicine. Decades of low-intensity and hybrid war against peoples and countries who have done nothing to the US except exist outside their spheres of influence. The immigrants who flee that devastation and come to the US to do menial and back-breaking labor are forced to live in the shadows, hunted by the ICE gestapo. 

This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. An electoral circus that offers a “choice” between ugly America-first nativism, and a woke imperialism, promising to build the “most lethal military”, both cheered on by braying crowds. 

A year after Aaron’s sacrifice, the Gaza ceasefire, heroically won by the Palestinian resistance is tentatively holding, freeing thousands of kidnapped Palestinian hostages from the Israeli dungeons. Meanwhile, the US-Israel war machine, while trying to sabotage the ceasefire, is turning the genocide to the West Bank, hoping to carry out the ethnic cleansing that it couldn’t accomplish in Gaza, aided by the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. The campuses, lit up in part by the spark of Aaron’s extreme act have once again gone silent. People who were once inspired to take risks to stop genocide, have once against started playing it safe. 

A year after Aaron’s sacrifice the challenges are even more stark. Where are the people who will find the means, even when they’re unpopular, to stand up to US imperialism, to defy repression, and disrupt business as usual with audacity and daring? 

Aaron Bushnell, presente! 

“My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. 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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

Free Palestine!
Free Palestine!
Free Palestine!”
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-Aaron Bushnell