PicoBlog

See https://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0060/immolation.pdf Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002 by sociologist Michael Biggs

It seems likely that this act of self-immolation will have required some identification with a sense of guilt and even if Aaron might not have been personally guilty, in some way he internalised American complicity in the Israeli genocide on the way to transforming it into a hoped-for collective expiation.

There must also have been an enormous amount of moral anger. The particular tragedy here was that it was turned in upon the self. Others would certainly express a similar anger, or rage, outwards in violent acts directed at others.

I can only speculate that such a person must have imagined, or hoped at some level, that his extreme, and extremely shocking, act would mobilise and concentrate such horror amongst the perpetrators and enablers of the genocide that it would somehow force them to confront their own guilt through omission and commission, and bring about an end to the slaughter.

To watch the video, the sight and sound (as he screamed 'Free Palestine' through the pain) faces spectators with the horror of what they'd hitherto been only half-experiencing whilst trying to suppress its impact; as if to say, 'This has shocked you:  now do something about it.'

But others can dismiss it.  As I suppose the psychopathic government in Israel can dismiss it:   after all, Israelis have been dismissing equal and even greater suffering for 75 years while the world watched and permitted it; what's one 25 year old emotional blackmailer disillusioned with his US army service?  And the Americans, with a legacy of racism and their own supremacist exceptionalism, what's it to them?  Just another futile gesture by some oversensitive snowflake who'd somehow managed to sneak through the military selection interviews.

But the thing moiders my thoughts and conscience.  What kind of person feels the perpetration of a wickedness so much that he, or she, doesn't turn the anger of it into some voluntary and heroic outward expression, for instance the way some Just Stop Oil protesters have undertaken highly dangerous actions such as climbing with life-threatening danger up high gantries over motorways, or stepping out into fast traffic on a motorway carrying banners to save life on Earth from the impending climate catastrophe; or elsewhere at other times, those who stood with suicidal courage in front of invading army tanks.

I might want to argue that dangerous, heroic actions directed outwards onto the world, always risking personal death, are more likely to bring about major change in that world than an act which superficially in itself might appear to amount to nothing more than simply another casualty in an ongoing genocide. And yet I think I might be wrong, for it feels, deep down, as if there's something -- *something* -- profoundly different, almost archetypal, about this kind of anger mobilised inwards against the self as an act of sacrifice, some kind of transcendent transfiguration.  Perhaps such an act, done publicly, even as it destroys the person performing it, creates the opportunity to summon up the very best of those witnessing it. It destroys apathy, indifference, complacency and awakens the slumbering conscience to action.

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