"All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?
"The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.
"And with what are these on fire?
"With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
- Buddha’s “Fire Sermon”
June 11th, 1963. After dousing himself with gasoline at a busy road intersection in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức sat down to die in a blazing fire. The Mayahanist Buddhist monk was protesting the persecution of his fellow Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.
Photographs of his self-immolation circulated around the world, drawing attention to the policies of the Diệm government. John F. Kennedy said of one photograph, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one." Malcolm Browne won the World Press Photo of the Year for his photograph of the monk's death.
- Wikipedia
President John F. Kennedy intended to reduce and eventually withdraw troops from Vietnam, a plan cut short by his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. His defense secretary was former Ford motor company boss Robert McNamara, whose tenure continued under President Lyndon Johnson. In his 1996 memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara writes:
Antiwar protest had been sporadic and limited through the fall of 1965 and had not compelled attention. Then came the afternoon of November 2, 1965. At twilight that day, a young Quaker named Norman R. Morrison, father of three and an officer of the Stoney Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death within forty feet of my Pentagon window.
The Baltimore Quaker handed his infant daughter off to a bystander, doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire in protest of the Vietnam War. Just a week later, antiwar protester Roger LaPorte died in a similar act of self-immolation in front of the United Nations building in New York.
Two weeks after this, an estimated 20,000 to 35,000 antiwar protestors marched on the White House. While it can’t be said for certain that the deaths of Morrison and LaPorte were sparks that turned the flames of sixties antiwar protest into a nationwide conflagration, they can certainly be described as tinder.
I write the above to give some context to the story of US air serviceman Aaron Bushnell, who died in protest of the war on Gaza.
On February 25, Bushnell approached the gate of the Israel embassy in Washington wearing his military fatigues. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said into his camera. “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.”
Elizabeth Woodworth writes, “After realizing that his life was not worth more than the lives that are being destroyed in Palestine, Aaron Bushnell imagined a way to “turn our eyes to Gaza” and its enormous human losses, while adding his life to theirs.”
Bushnell set up his camera on the ground, walked a few paces and turned his back on the embassy. He doused himself with an accelerant and ignited it, repeatedly yelled “Free Palestine” until he collapsed in a consuming fire.
As Woodworth noted, the legacy media’s response to Bushnell’s act was predictable:
What to call what’s happening in Gaza, from the perspective of empire? Decades ago, MIT media critic Noam Chomsky and economist Edward S. Herman offered a useful distinction between “nefarious bloodbaths,” “benign bloodbaths,” and “constructive bloodbaths.”
Nefarious bloodbaths are those committed by enemies of US empire: terrible, awful catastrophes worthy of official condemnation, sanctions and even military response. Benign bloodbaths are committed by allies in areas where the US has little strategic interest: unfortunate acts, hastily and perhaps stupidly executed, but certainly not barbaric in intent. Constructive bloodbaths “have strongly favourable results for American (primarily corporate) interests.”
There are also “mythical bloodbaths,” which are either without any foundation in fact or minor events expanded into legendary tales.
From the perspective of empire, what has happened - and still happening - in Gaza is something like a “benign bloodbath” with constructive elements.
Writes Chris Hedges:
The coalition forces intervened in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds following the first Gulf War. The suffering of the Kurds was extensive, but dwarfed by the genocide in Gaza. A no-fly zone for the Iraqi air force was imposed. The Iraqi military was pushed out of the northern Kurdish areas. Humanitarian aid saved Kurds from starvation, infectious diseases and death from exposure.
But that was another time, another war. Genocide is evil when it is carried out by our enemies. It is defended and sustained when carried out by our allies.
A few pertinent numbers. The latest death toll estimate stands at 31,470 Palestinians and about 1,139 people killed in Israel since October 7 Hamas attack. Yet the former may well be a gross undercount. Ralph Nader argues there may be as many as 200,000 Palestinian deaths to date.
This doesn’t appear unlikely. As of Jan. 17, Israel had dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times the tonnage that the U.S. dropped over six years on Iraq. Refugee camps have been obliterated, along with densely populate areas hit by 2,000 pound “bunker buster bombs” with a kill radius of a thousand feet. (So much for targeting Hamas alone.) In December of 2024, satellite technology revealed the bombing was more intense than in the Ukraine, Syria or even during the Second World War. All this in an area only 20 miles long and five miles wide. The intent is to make Gaza uninhabitable and turn a piece of Palestine into a page in history books.
An optical delusion of consciousness
The Fire Sermon is not an instruction kit on self-immolation; it’s a reminder that the only thing permanent is change, and that we’re all burning our wicks down to nothing. All our fixed beliefs, with all their baggage, are built on the shifting sands of sense perception in a world of constant transformation. Burning.
The corrective to all forms of grasping attachment is the awareness that all of us - from the lowliest wageslave to the greatest celebrity - live, love and die. We all pop into this local universe with an unknowable expiry date. How can such awareness not awaken some greater sense of compassion - a word that literally means “to suffer with”?
As Albert Einstein observed (from a perspective inspired by Spinoza’s pantheism rather than Buddhist non-attachment):
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
(It’s worth adding that Einstein was neither atheistic nor gentile. And while he supported the creation of a Jewish national homeland in the British mandate of Palestine, he was opposed to the idea of a Jewish state “with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.” His conception was of a bi-national state, both Jewish and Arab.)
Whether it comes out of pantheism, Buddhism, or just common decency, this wider sense of connection runs counter to limiting notions of religious fundamentalism - particularly the belief that the local god of a desert tribe got into the real estate business thousands of years ago, promising his ‘chosen people’ a small stretch of land into perpetuity. That belief, and the belief that the past horrors of the Holocaust somehow justifies any state violence, has become a powerful accelerant in othering an entire population of people - with any criticism of Israel smeared with that all-purpose thought stopper, “antisemitism.”
Two days after the Hama-led attack of October 7, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared that he ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza City with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” being permitted. “I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals,” he said.
Such untermenschen rhetoric from Israeli leaders, making no distinction between enemies and innocents - and the concomitant destruction of Gaza - has horrendous echoes of time when human beings were swept into ovens on the basis of their ethnicity. A fire of hate that was fueled by claims of absolute power and absolute certainty. The kind of claims that invariably lead to atrocities.
All things are on fire. With the fire of passion, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
Who By Fire
Examine the face in the extraordinary photograph at the top of this page. It doesn’t appear to be he the portrait of someone in agony as their body is consumed by flames. It looks like someone who, composed in meditation, is calmly resigned to being reduced to ash.
There’s a direct line from Thích Quảng Đức to Norman Morrison to Roger Laporte to Jan Palach to Aaron Bushnell. They hailed from different parts of the world and different belief systems, yet they chose to address the banality of evil through acts so horrifically memorable the world couldn’t fail to notice.
You may have noticed an additional name in the above list. Writes Chris Hedges in his memorial to Aaron Bushnell:
I was in Prague in 1989 for the Velvet Revolution. I attended the commemoration of the self-immolation of a 20-year-old university student named Jan Palach. Palach had stood on the steps outside the National Theater in Wenceslas Square in 1969, poured petrol over himself and lit himself on fire. He died of his wounds three days later. He left behind a note saying that this act was the only way to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had taken place five months earlier. His funeral procession was broken up by police. When frequent candlelit vigils were held at his grave at Olsany cemetery, the communist authorities, determined to stamp out his memory, disinterred his body, cremated it and handed the ashes to his mother.
During the winter of 1989, posters with Palach’s face covered the walls of Prague. His death, two decades earlier, was lionized as the supreme act of resistance against the Soviets and pro-Soviet regime installed after the overthrow of Alexander Dubček. Thousands of people marched to the Square of Red Army Soldiers and renamed it Jan Palach Square. He won.
Those words of Jacob Bronowski were incredibly inspiring, Leonard Cohen equally so, and placed within an article that was both thought provoking and insightful. Great work!
It feels like we're living in an inverted reality where up is down, heroes are 'mentally unstable,' the wicked is good, the weak are seen as strong and vice versa.
Aaron Bushnell made the ultimate sacrifice and it will resonate for decades, in the hearts and minds of all who care about honor, decency and love.
Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell.
Free Palestine!🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸❤️🩹