In the US, total deaths from fire and burning declined steadily and significantly over the course of the 20th century, a trend paralleled in much of the rest of the world in recent decades. Building materials are safer, open flames are less necessary for lighting and heating, and fire-response infrastructures are more robust. For most of us, most of the time, fire is innocuous, confined to stovetops and grills and lighters. There is one important exception. Beginning in World War I, modern warfare has vastly multiplied the range of available methods for burning people to death. Bullets still have their place, of course, and more ancient tactics of siege and starvation, but wars since the early 20th century have probably lit more people on fire than all prior military conflicts in human history.
Scholars often associate the rise of political self-immolation in the 1960s with the rise of television: a spectacular form of protest for the society of the spectacle. But of course there are less painful ways for protestors to attract eyeballs. The reality is that self-immolation registers the near-total impotence of protest—and even public opinion as such—in the face of a military apparatus completely insulated from external accountability. It the rawest testament to the absence of effective courses of action. 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, there is very little that ordinary people can do to arrest its progress. But we still have our bodies, and it is in the nature of fire to refuse containment.
To ask whether self-immolation is good or bad, justifiable or non-justifiable, effective or ineffective is in large part to miss the point, which is that it is an option, whether anyone else likes it or not. 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. Since Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation this week in protest of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his detractors have warned about the risk of “contagion,” suggesting that his protest will encourage imitators (who, they imply, share his alleged mental instability). There may or may not be additional self-immolators before the slaughter comes to an end, just as Bushnell was preceded by a woman, yet to be identified publicly, who burned herself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December. But the purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.
Erik Baker, “Burnt Offerings: Aaron Bushnell and the age of immolation,” n+1, February 29, 2024.
