{"id":256155,"date":"2024-03-04T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=256155"},"modified":"2024-03-01T06:36:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T06:36:42","slug":"aaron-bushnell-johan-galtung-rest-in-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/aaron-bushnell-johan-galtung-rest-in-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Aaron Bushnell & Johan Galtung, Rest in Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

29 Feb 2024<\/em> – The world recently lost two principled opponents of war, but under drastically different circumstances. Johan Galtung<\/a> died on 17 Feb at the age of 93. The Norwegian sociologist was known as the father of peace studies, and spent his life researching conflicts and fostering dialog in pursuit of peace.<\/p>\n

\n

Aaron Bushnell<\/a> was just 25 years old. He was an active duty member of the US Air Force. On Sunday, 25 Feb, Aaron Bushnell started a live video stream as he walked toward the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will no longer be complicit in genocide,\u201d<\/em> Bushnell said. \u201cI am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine<\/a> at the hands of their colonizers, it\u2019s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Standing at the embassy\u2019s gate, with the video still running, he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire. His final words, shouted several times as the flames consumed him, were \u201cFree Palestine! Free Palestine!\u201d<\/em> As an officer pointed a gun at Aaron, a second officer yelled, \u201cI don\u2019t need guns. I need a fire extinguisher.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Aaron was formally declared dead hours later.<\/p>\n

Earlier that day, he posted a link to the live stream, with the caption,<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of us like to ask ourselves, <\/em><\/p>\n

‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you\u2019re doing it. Right now.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Levi Pierpont was a friend of Aaron\u2019s. They met in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, days after Aaron\u2019s death, Levi said<\/a> they both joined the military<\/p>\n

\u201cto explore the United States, to explore the world, to meet people from other backgrounds.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He went on,<\/p>\n

\u201cover the years, both of us shifted in our beliefs regarding war, largely because of what we saw in the military, because we were a part of it. I know that he and I both were encouraged by people on YouTube that were writing video essays about social justice movements in the United States.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI did end up getting out as a conscientious objector,\u201d<\/em> Levi continued. \u201cWe spoke throughout that process. And at the time that I began to make headway with the process and it began to near its end \u2014 I got out in July of 2023 \u2014 he felt like he was already close enough to his own end date that he decided not to take the same path. And I understood that, because the conscientious objector process can take over a year.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Johan Galtung<\/a> was also a conscientious objector, as a young man in Norway. As a child, Nazi Germany occupied his country, and imprisoned his father. In one interview, he recalled how his mother made him read the newspaper to learn the names of political prisoners who the Germans had executed the day before, to see if his father was among them, to spare her the pain of reading the list. His father survived, but the war forever changed Johan. He devoted his life to bridging divides, and finding creative solutions to real-world conflicts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI look forward to the U.S., instead of intervening militarily, starting solving conflicts,\u201d<\/em> Galtung said on Democracy Now!, in April 2012.<\/a> \u201cYou have so many bright people in this country, so many well-educated people. Solving conflict, you have to talk with the other side, or the other sides. You have to sit down with Taliban and al-Qaeda people or people close to al-Qaeda. You have to sit down with Pentagon people, State Department people. And you have to ask them, \u201cWhat does the Afghanistan look like where you would like to live? What does the Middle East look like where you would like to live?\u201d You get an enormous amount of very thoughtful people having very deep reflections.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Levi Pierpont mourns the loss of his friend, and wishes Aaron hadn\u2019t taken his own life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to. I would have done anything I could to stop him. But, obviously, we can\u2019t get him back,\u201d<\/em> Levi said on Democracy Now!. \u201cI would have told him that this wasn\u2019t necessary to get the message out. I would have told him that there were other ways.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having expressed his deep sorrow, Levi concluded,<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t have thoughts of suicide. He had thoughts of justice. That\u2019s what this was about. It wasn\u2019t about his life. It was about using his life to send a message.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world lost two principled opponents of war. Johan Galtung died on 17 Feb at the age of 93; known as the father of peace studies, he spent his life researching for peace. Aaron Bushnell was just 25 years old, a member of the US Air Force. On 25 Feb he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":256156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3245],"tags":[3246,3143,2642,1817,2914,2009,900,87,865,88,809,1142,427,95,70,1594],"class_list":["post-256155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-johan-galtung-memorial","tag-aaron-bushnell","tag-anti-hegemony","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-anti-militarism","tag-anti-nato","tag-anti-war","tag-biography","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-johan-galtung","tag-obituary","tag-palestine","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-war-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256155"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256159,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256155\/revisions\/256159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}