The Fire This Time

The self-immolating politics of despair

---

In November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima made a somewhat farcical attempt at a coup, seizing control of the commandant’s office on a military base with the help of a handful of followers, and demanding the restoration of the emperor to supreme power. When, predictably, these actions had no effect, he ritually disemboweled himself and instructed his followers to cut off his head.

I bring Mishima’s political suicide up to reflect on Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and America’s support thereof. I could have begun this post with some other instance of political suicide: Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation sparked the Arab Spring—or, even more apropos, Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon (and his one-year-old daughter) to protest the Vietnam War. I chose Mishima because I feel reasonably confident none of my readers will sympathize with the cause for which he killed himself which, I hope, will make it easier to understand the meaning of suicide as a political gesture. That meaning, it seems to me, is fundamentally rooted in despair.

To be clear: I’m not saying it is rooted in mental illness. I’m sure that some people who kill themselves for political reasons are first and foremost suffering from suicidal ideation, and some of them may be suffering from psychotic delusions. I don’t think most of the people who have killed themselves for political reasons can be so easily dismissed, however, and anyway I am wary of pathologizing extreme emotional states without some justification apart from the emotional states themselves. But I do think despair—the absence of hope—is the right way to describe the emotional state that leads to suicide, and that in the case of political suicide what we’re talking about is political despair, the belief that political change is absolutely necessary, but also nigh impossible.

Consider Mishima in that regard. He believed, profoundly, that Japanese society in the late 1960s was profoundly sick, and that there was a real risk of a Communist revolution in consequence. The only hope for Japan was to return to militarism and worship of the emperor as a divine being. He had taken concrete steps to pave the way for such a radical change, recruiting right-wing college students to his Shield Society and training them as a paramilitary force. But for whatever reason, in November 1970 he became convinced that dramatic action was both necessary and could be efficacious. Hence the coup attempt.

But the attempt was an abject failure, and I think that’s the essential context for understanding the resort to seppuku. The seizure of the commandant’s office did not prompt anything to happen, did not galvanize the nation or even the soldiers on the base. So, having failed, Mishima killed himself in the ritual fashion appropriate (as he saw it) to a noble warrior, who could only honorably respond to failure with suicide.

Now consider Bouazizi, whose situation could not, at first glance, have been more different. His wares and equipment had been confiscated by the police for plying his trade without a permit, the last straw in what he felt was a sustained campaign of harassment that made it impossible for him to earn a bare living. He tried to complain to the governor and was turned away unheard. It seemed to him that the system was determined that he should die. So he showed them precisely what they were doing to him by setting himself on fire.

Unlike Mishima, Bouazizi’s action was a “success” in that it galvanized his whole country—where feelings of being ground down by the authorities and squeezed by rising prices were widespread—to rise up, ultimately leading to the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship and the restoration of democracy (though that democracy isn’t doing so well lately). But for all that he has been retconned into the founder of a movement, my understanding is that Bouazizi’s act was fundamentally one of personal desperation.

That framework may not seem to fit someone like Norman Morrison or Aaron Bushnell. For one thing, both were fundamentally bystanders to the conflicts they were protesting; they could not reasonably have felt the kind of personal dishonor or desperation that Mishima or Bouazizi did. But I think they did, in a political sense. On the one hand, they obviously felt a profound sense of empathy for those suffering and dying in Vietnam and Gaza respectively, and a profound sense of culpability simply from being Americans (who were doing the killing in Vietnam and abetting it in Gaza). That’s not enough, though, to justify suicide. In addition to feeling that they were doing the killing, they had to feel that they could not stop. By that, I don’t just mean that they couldn’t personally end the wars in question—it would require a truly grandiose self-conception to believe that this was the responsibility of any ordinary person—but that they could not even, by any action short of death, dissociate themselves from the killing, or do anything efficacious toward bringing it to an end. The feeling of complicity is joined, in other words, to a feeling of powerlessness, leaving death as the only way out. That’s why I call this an act of political despair.

To further support that conclusion, consider two alternative choices these individuals could have made: to conduct a hunger strike, or to engage in suicidal terrorism. Both actions would, like self-immolation, turn their lives into weapons for the cause. A successful hunger strike ends either with political change or death; the only way a hunger strike fails is if it is broken, either by the striker giving up or by the authorities forcing nutrition. But while it’s an extreme, radical political act, it’s also a fundamentally hopeful one, rooted in the belief that the prospect of death will, in itself, create pressure for change. On the other hand, suicidal terrorism is an extremely potent form of direct action, one that is very hard to stop without extraordinary protective measures, and that therefore may give pause to any society, no matter how committed it is to the cause being opposed (unless, as in Israel’s case, that cause is viewed as existential). As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather, Part II upon seeing a Cuban rebel blow himself up to kill his target, it means they can win. Again, the action is extreme, but fundamentally rooted in the hope that truly radical action can make a direct difference. In between hunger striking and suicide terrorism are those who throw themselves bodily in the path of those they see as the oppressor—not juvenile antics like gluing your hands to a public road to inconvenience commuters, but standing in front of a bulldozer or a tank.

But why kill yourself without taking some of the other bastards with you, or without even creating a practical or political problem for them? I believe the answer—not necessarily in all cases, but in many, and in Bushnell’s—is precisely the sense of powerlessness, of a lack of practical options, even radical ones, that constitutes political despair.

They appear to disagree with each other, but the foregoing is why I basically agree both with my friend Damon Linker, who feels compelled to respect the supreme self-sacrifice of someone like Aaron Bushnell—even in a cause he disagrees with—and Graeme Wood, who points out that political suicide is frequently inefficacious or even counterproductive, and that the Palestinian cause in particular has hardly benefitted from its association with a ready willingness to die. When I contemplate the war in Gaza, political despair feels like all too rational a response. I can’t help but respect someone who faces that despair directly, and acts accordingly, without flinching. But I can’t help but be horrified, appalled, even disgusted, that anyone would think they were doing the world a service by leaving it because they can no longer bear to live with such injustice.