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The problem is, as far as I see it, that this doesn't change minds. Thousands of children are dead now. Unless you're totally ignorant of that, in which case you will be totally ignorant of why he killed himself in this manner, it's not going to make you suddenly care about Palestine when exponentially more dead children who didn't die by their own hand will not.

no speech louder than this

It's loud about the strength of this guy's conviction but it provides no actual argument or information. I don't think it's cause to change one's opinion about Biden's foreign policy one way or another. In fact, I'd go further and say that it probably should be ignored as much as possible in order to avoid motivating other people to do the same thing.

Self immolation started the Arab Spring.

We have no idea what still happen.

This strategy presumes that the authorities are concerned with the protester’s well-being in the first place.

Actually, it presumes access to media outlets/social media who will help build pressure on authorities. It's a pressure campaign tactic whose success or failure relies on building outside, non-state civil society support. By failing to engage with why people resort to tactics like hunger striking or self-immolation and just making shit up, the piece fails to really make its case.

While I don't support self-immolation as a tactic, the mentality this critique relies on enables the abuses that lead people to self-immolate or go on hunger strike to start with.

BTW about 98% of everything CrimethInc publishes is exactly this off-base and unhelpful.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
-- Aaron Bushnell

I think it is done to pressure the regular people to overthrow the government. Showing how important the issue is and how much he sacrificed himself just to motivate people, that everybody else can sacrifice far less by risking arrest overthrowing the government.

They meant it to be a disservice.

[...] in an apparent protest against the Israel-Hamas war [...]

The article is just blurring the act, censoring its force gained by sacrifice, and mis-attributing its target. One can easily say, after having been exposed to hundreds of similarly malicious wording in public accountings of acts usually consisting of protests not in line with the local authority, that this is very deliberate and made to utilize even the last thing a person does to raise awareness about a systemic unjust treatment.

Someone with zero context about the situation could easily understand this act with different intent.

Jan Palach self immolated in Prague to protest the invasion of Soviet forces at the end of the Prague Spring.. there are monuments to him around the city. It seems lighting youself on fire aint what it used to be

I've seen people on Reddit blaming "leftist circlejerk holes" for "radicalizing" him (apparently Aaron had a Reddit account)

I felt the urge to get off Reddit more than ever.

Sure made a hell of an impact on me.

This form of protest goes back a long way - famously by Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war.

It’s also very similar to hunger strikes, in my opinion. There was Bobby Sands and his comrades, of course. There were hunger strikes protesting the brutal conditions at Guantanamo Bay, resulting in force feeding techniques condemned as torture by the international community.

Do all of the people performing acts of self harm in protest to bring attention to a situation they consider intolerable suffer from mental health issues? Do people who join the Marines and put their lives at risk in the infantry because they think they’re “defending their country” have mental health issues? Do drone pilots, who in no way put themselves at risk of harm but who absolutely and knowingly end up killing arbitrary civilians have mental health issues?

If you ask me, I’d say yes to all of those. I’d say the same about politicians who pass laws to ban medical care to patients, and I’d say the same about the people who vote for them.

So people protesting via self-immolation, protesting via hunger strike, joining the military in a role that risks death are suicidal. People joining the military in a way that causes death, or who pass legislation that causes death, or who elect politicians who pass legislation that causes death are homicidal.

What should we do about all of that?