26 February 2024. Aaron Bushnell 25 years old.

An active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force set himself on fire yesterday outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest of the Biden administration’s enabling of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m 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.”

“He is one of the most principled comrades I’ve ever known,” said Xylem, who worked with Bushnell to support San Antonio’s unhoused residents. “He’s always trying to think about how we can actually achieve liberation for all with a smile on his face,” said Errico.

Children, women and men in Gaza are being burned alive, are suffocating to death under collapsed buildings, are having operations and amputations without anaesthesia, are starving to death, are watching their loved ones die in front of them, are experiencing suffering of a degree that very few of us here in the west can even imagine. And our ruling class is absolutely attempting to normalize this for us. (Caitlin Johnstone).

Aaron’s last words were “Free Palestine”.

A police officer showed up pointing a gun at the man’s burning body; I guess that’s just what American cops do when they aren’t sure what to do. Someone who was actually trying to save the man reportedly yelled “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!” (Caitlin Johnstone).

You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it (Caitlin Johnstone).

Comments: This shows that even people living so far off are so traumatised … Just imagine the what the Palestinians are going through. I feel so sad about what this poor man went through and how his loved ones must be feeling … I wonder what spin the government is going to put on this story … Had the war on Gaza ‘pushed him over the edge’, as the saying goes? Probably. It was too much for a sensitive soul to bear.

Last December a protester set herself on fire outside the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta, Georgia USA.

Aaron, of course, was not guilty of the crimes committed in Gaza.  The only ones guilty of these crimes, however, are those who directly carry them out or provide direct support (arms, intelligence, etc.) to the culprits.

Imagine if this had happened in front of the Kremlin – it would be front page news all over the Western world by today. Bendith arno a’i deulu. Blessings on his soul. Blessings on his family and friends.

A LETTER TO THE CHILDREN OF GAZA: “We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us, reporters, we will stand outside the border with Gaza and protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much, but it is something. We will tell your story again. Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.”

pic.twitter.com/av1Xzibx9n

Christopher Lynn Hedges is a sixty-seven years old American prize winning journalist, author, commentator and Christian Presbyterian minister.

“Corporate culture, like all cultures of death, makes war on love, truth, justice and beauty and numbs us to the questions about the search for meaning and the struggle to face our mortality”. Words from a sermon 20 January 2019. ‘The Issue Before Us is Death’.

The Western ‘Cult of Death’ has reached a new level of depravity in the Israeli/ Anglo- American war on the Palestinians. ‘Our’ Westminster/Whitehall government IS complicit in the Ethnic Cleansing/Forced Transfer/Massacre/Torture of 2.3 million Palestinians.

What would Georg Trakl (d.1914) make of the horrors of Gaza 2024, as well as the illegal settlements on Palestinian soil? Gaza is in West Asia not the Occident, for ‘occident’ is a term for the West, traditionally comprising anything that belongs to the ‘Western world’, which Zionist Israel clearly does.

Occident- III – by Georg Trakl

You mighty cities

Built from stone

On the plain!

So speechless

The homeless one follows

The wind with dark forehead,

Bleak trees by the hill.

You widely dusking rivers!

In storm clouds

The scary afterglow

Frightens enormously.

You dying people!

Pale wave

Breaking on the beach of night,

Falling stars.

While Palestinians are being massacred, white supremacist Jews are ‘dying’ … in a very real sense … dying slowly … slowly … the rubble of Gaza an open grave for what was always a Zionist nightmare.

‘Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution’ – wrote C P Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ 1904.

1904 … 1914 … 2024 … ‘a kind of solution’! Really ! ‘And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer’ … Really!

The barbarians around us

tear apart our best powers,

before they can be cultivated

and only the firm, deep insight into this

fate can save us, and prevent us at least

from perishing in an unworthy manner.

We have to seek what is excellent, and

hold to it as we can, to strengthen and

heal ourselves …

Holderlin from a letter to his half-brother

Karl Gok 4 June 1799.

What Israel’s genocidal slaughter has done, over and above the cruel and devastating destruction of Gaza and its people, is to rip apart the façade of the West’s championing of its secular ‘Holy Trinity’ of Human rights, Democracy and International law, thus unveiling, in a new and stark way, for all to see, the triple monsters of US hegemony, a revived Western militarism and the European superiority-complex vis a vis the rest of the world.

(The original meaning of ‘apocalypse’ is ‘the unveiling’. One of those rare moments in history – often a traumatic event – when we are challenged to re-evaluate everything in our lives; ourselves, our country, our planet, in fact, everything. It’s the moment when we open our hearts to see ‘that’ which we prefer to keep hidden).

The Zionist genocidal war on Gaza is an apocalyptic event.

Jimmy James & The Vagabonds – Now Is The Time https://youtu.be/8rj1So21b_A?si=t1bOZUA0nIhusLco via @YouTube

Now is the time to set things right
Now is the time we should unite
We don’t need revolutions
We just need to open our eyes
Revolution is no solution we ought to realize
Now is the time to set things right
Now is the time to see the light …

Take a look around
What a mess we’re living in
God created love
And man
He created sin. (1976 Jimmy James & The Vagabonds)

‘Rouze up O Young Men (and Women) of the New Age …for we have Hierlings in the Camp … Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers … (William Blake).

I had thought of calling this ‘Edgar’s Gazan Prayer’ or ‘Prayer for Gaza’. But the more I reflected on it, it’s really ‘Edgar’s Prayer for the West’ or even better ‘Edgar’s Prayer for All of Us’.

“I am both Astonished and Outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people who were persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons …

That the descendants of the people who are today the decision-makers of the State of Israel, that they could not only Colonize an entire people, partly Drive them out of their land and seek to Expel them for good …

But also, after the massacre of 7 October 2023, engage in a real Massive Slaughter on the Populations of Gaza and continue, incessantly, hitting Civilians, Women, and Children.

And to see the Silence of the world. The Silence of the United States, protectors of Israel. The Silence of (most) of the Arab states. The Silence of the European states, who claim to be defenders of Culture, Humanity, Human Rights.

We are living through a Horrible Tragedy, and, powerless as we are in the face of this thing that is unleashing …

I say: Bear Witness! Keep Bearing Witness.

Because, the only thing that remains if we cannot resist concretely, is to Testify.

To Testify!

Let’s Resist in our Minds. Let’s not be Fooled. Let’s not Forget. Let’s have the Courage to face things Head-on.”

Edgar Morin, philosopher and sociologist, now 102 years young, is one of France’s most revered intellectual figures. He was a Jewish WW2 resistance fighter, who fought as a lieutenant in De Gaulle’s ‘Fighting France’. A true polymath, he has contributed to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, visual anthropology, ecology, education and systems biology.

Elephant’s tea party Robur Tea Room Sydney 24 March1939 by Sam Hood

In 1814, Ivan Krylov, the Russian poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled “The Inquisitive Man”, which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial. In his novel ‘Demons’, Dostoevsky wrote: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum …”

Swan, Pike And Crawfish

When partners can’t agree
Their dealings come to naught
And trouble is their labor’s only fruit.
____________

Once Crawfish, Swan and Pike
Set out to pull a loaded cart,
And all together settled in the traces;
They pulled with all their might, but still the cart refused to budge!
The load it seemed was not too much for them:
Yet Crawfish scrambled backwards,
Swan strained up skywards, Pike pulled toward the sea.
Who’s guilty here and who is right is
not for us to say-
But anyway the cart’s still there today.

A picture and a poem for our PM Rishi and his cabinet … for all those ‘real men’, in Westminster and Whitehall.

‘But the new barbarian is no uncouth Desert-dweller; he does not emerge From fir forests; factories bred him; Corporate companies, college towns Mothered his mind, and many journals Backed his beliefs. He was born here. The Bravura of revolvers in vogue now And the cult of death are quite at home Inside the city’. WH Auden 1947 

bravura: great technical skill and brilliance shown in a performance or activity …