Aaron Bushnell’s act was a highly political one, as he said in his own words. There are some lessons we can learn from him, and from his act, to be better political fighters for good. Here are some basic ones:
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Aaron made a point of wearing his uniform. He was telling us: I am doing this as an American soldier. In doing so, he brought more honor to American uniforms than we have seen in decades. Aaron put actual meaning, a love for humanity, into an American symbol in an era where all symbols have become vacant of meaning, cold, cynical, and violent.I hope that every soldier in every military looks at his act and uses it to undo at least some of the benumbing effect of their national propaganda. I especially hope so for members of the American military. Aaron was your brother. One of yours. You need to love and understand him.
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Aaron was from San Antonio, which is not a small town by any measure but is nevertheless not Manhattan. American boys just like him have been joining the American military since forever, and they usually come from smaller towns and cities, from migrant communities, and from black neighborhoods. They are not the children of Holywood producers and Pulitzer Prize winners, they are the children of farmers and teachers, bus drivers and corner shop owners, workers, builders, mechanics; America’s working class. Generation after generation, American elites make a mockery of their naivety and innocent belief in what America stands for, and send them to kill and die in imperial wars from which they return broken, suicidal, drug addicts, homeless, and traumatized for life. Those cavalier elites, in their columns and “think tanks”, play their stupid, inhumane war games, showing the same contempt for the lives of American soldiers as they do for the foreigners they send them to hunt and destroy. Beautiful American kids like Aaaron Bushnell pay the price for this. But for the column writing and donor class it is nothing. They never pay for anything. They just go on to the next campaign. America’s deformed class system is present nowhere as it does in its wars. We should keep this too in mind when lucrative donor-owner bodies push for war with Iran when no child of their own is going to pay with their life for it.
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Do not dignify those who speak ill of Aaron with an answer. Never get dragged into their twisted, amoral pseudo-reasoning (which is just a sadist’s playtime). Never defend. Always attack. All we need to be saying right now is: you are so dedicated to insane mass murder of innocents that American patriots have started to kill themselves not to partake in it.
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To Aaron’s detractors we should be saying: You will mock Aaron, we will elevate his memory and character. You will make light of Gaza’s suffering, we will remember it forever. You will remain blind to its humanity, we will see it as a symbol for the ages. But you and only you will have to live with what you have become in the name of lust, sorry, indifference, for innocent blood. You will live to regret your own stupidity and heartlessness, and we will be there to rub your face in it.