Abecedarian for those who burn
- By Shailja Patel
From Vietnam to Gaza by Carlos Latuff, image courtesy of the artist.
Editor’s note: It has been 200 days since Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire to protest the United States-Israel genocide in Gaza. In solidarity and unwavering resistance, we offer this found abecedarian, drawn from “Burnt Offerings” by Erik Baker, and other sources.
Aaron Bushnell’s final post on Facebook before his death: Many people ask: what would I do if I was alive during slavery? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it right now
Ali’s on the grill, the settlers chanted, celebrating how they burned alive eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents in their home
Bullets still have their place, of course, as do the more ancient tactics of siege and starvation, but wars since the early twentieth century have probably lit more people on fire than all prior military conflicts in human history
But of course there are less painful ways for protestors to attract eyeballs
But we still have our bodies, and it is in the nature of fire to refuse containment
But the purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire
But fire is no longer up to the master class to control
Christian socialist of Jewish ancestry Alice Herz fled the Nazis and settled in Michigan during the war, but was denied US citizenship because she refused to vow to defend the nation with arms
Curtis LeMay, US strategic air commander in the US war on Korea estimated that his forces killed twenty percent of the North Korean population, We eventually burned down every town in North Korea
Colonial courts burned to death thirteen alleged black conspiracists in the US South in 1741
Daniel Ellsberg recalled that estimates of the death toll from a US nuclear first strike excluded the consequences of firestorms
Despite years of controversy and chastisement from human rights groups, Israel has used white phosphorus yet again in its ongoing genocidal operation in Gaza and its concurrent attacks on southern Lebanon
Eventually the nerves will burn and the flames eating at the skin won’t feel like anything at all
Eventually the US phased out napalm in favor of an ostensibly new fuel mix, carried in MK-77 bombs, which essentially does the same thing as napalm
For most people who perish from immolation, it is the smoke inhalation rather than the heat; they choke to death on the fumes of their own flesh
For the bravest and most selfless, who decided not to be part of the genocide, from Rafah, the last refuge of the displaced: we will never forget you Aaron Bushnell, tweeted Ahmed El-Madhoun
George W Bush bombed the Iraqi city of Fallujah with white phosphorus in 2004, inflicting, two decades later, the highest rate of birth defects in the world
He died so Palestinian children might live, says the sign lofted high by a child in a kuffiyeh on the streets of DC
Hero all over the world – when was the last time you could say that about an American? says a viral tweet
Immolation seems like an atavism
In Ellsberg’s own assessment, taking firestorms into account would have doubled the official estimate, to over a billion people dead
Incineration has become a perfect military machine: precious few humans involved, except those who are burned
In all, at least 100 people set themselves on fire in the US and Vietnam to protest the war
In February 1991, during the first US invasion of Iraq, Gregory Levey doused himself in paint thinner and perished in a fireball on the town common of Amherst, Massachusetts, leaving behind a small cardboard sign that read, simply, peace
It illuminates our powerlessness in negative space, but it also affirms the irreducible core of our freedom, that small flame of agency that no repression can extinguish
In 1859, two weeks after John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, the black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet wrote: A box of matches in the pocket of every slave, and then slavery would be set right
Just as Bushnell was preceded by a woman, yet to be identified publicly, who burned herself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, there may or may not be additional self-immolators before the slaughter comes to an end
Japan, in the final months of the war, was one great conflagration
June Jordan wrote, after Sabra and Shatila: I was born a Black woman / and now/ I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room
Khan Younis burn surgeons in one hospital in were performing ten amputations each day, without anaesthetic, even though the hospital was overflowing with hundreds of patients with burns waiting for surgical care
Likely the most enthusiastic user of white phosphorus today is Israel
Lowly IT guy, Aaron Bushnell, in the bowels of the US Air Force, the mightiest incendiary device that humans have ever constructed
Malachi Ritscher, an experimental musician in Chicago, set himself on fire on the side of the Kennedy expressway during the morning rush hour to escape complicity with the barbaric war the U.S. was then waging
Many of us like to ask ourselves, What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Aaron Bushnell wrote
Most comfortable white Americans who were alive during slavery did not think of themselves being alive during slavery —they were just alive
Man on fire for a city of children on fire says a breaking meme
Muhammad Ali in 1967: Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs
Nine days earlier, Lyndon Johnson had authorized the use of napalm in Vietnam
Napalm sticks to kids some GIs engraved on their Zippo lighters
On one awful night in March 1945, U.S. bombers burned 100,000 residents of Tokyo to death and left a million more homeless
On March 16th, 1955, Alice Herz set herself on fire at a busy intersection in Detroit
One slaveowner said that he’d burn all his slaves rather than let the Yankees have them
Perhaps this is why Aaron Bushnell did it: he was already burning
Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the girl in the photo, regained the ability to move properly a full decade after her entire back was scorched by napalm at nine years of age
Quaker anti-war activist Norman Morrison took his one-year-old daughter, Emily, to the Pentagon on November 2, 1965
Roger Allen LaPorte, a member of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement and a former seminarian, emulated Morrison a week later in front of the UN building in New York
Standing beneath Robert McNamara’s office, Morrison handed Emily to someone nearby, doused himself in kerosene, and struck a match
Slave-burning was a widespread colonial practice, including in the Northeast; in 1713, New Jersey passed a law authorizing the burning of law-breaking slaves at the stake
The US dropped 32,557 tons of napalm on North Korea between 1950 and 1953
Ten times as much napalm torched the peasantry of Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s
This is all, in theory, illegal
The Detroit Free Press headline read: Human Sacrifice Is Dead of Burns
Union soldiers, vindictive Confederates and slaves revolting against their masters torched cities, plantations and human beings across the south
Very little that ordinary people can do arrests the progress of war, when war consists primarily of unelected men in undisclosed locations pouring fire on the heads of people we will never know on the other side of the world
World War II was when firebombing really came into its own
We will likely never know exactly how many thousands of people burned to death
White American Protestants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were especially preoccupied with the fires of hell
Explanation of his actions on Facebook shortly before his death. Many people ask: what would I do if I was alive during slavery? What would I do if my country was committing genocide
You’re talking about the most excruciating pain that you could ever experience, one expert says
Zippo lighters were the incendiary device chosen by US Marines to torch grass huts of Vietnamese villagers. Some engraved on their Zippos: Death from Above and Napalm Sticks to Kids
Zionism does not appear in Erik Baker’s essay, but it’s the first word starting with Z that comes to mind
Z appears in these words in Erik Baker’s essay:
Herz Nazis citizenship Gaza
dozens authorized civilization Gaza
blaze-authorizing Nazis outsized Gaza
SHAILJA PATEL is the author of Migritude and Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. Twitter: @shailjapatel
