The Self-immolation of Matt Nelson
Gaza, Matt Nelson, Aaron Bushnell, and the Ancient Tradition of Self-Sacrifice
Another citizen of the U.S. has sacrificed his life in protest of the decimation of the Palestinian people. On September 11, Matt Nelson lit himself on fire outside the Consulate General of Israel to New England, in Boston. Emergency workers who responded to Nelson’s protest transported him to Massachusetts General Hospital. He was pronounced dead four days later, on September 15.
Before pacing outside the Consulate and eventually igniting himself, Nelson recorded a cogent statement of his principled objections to U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
“My name is Matt Nelson and I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We call ourselves the greatest nation in history yet we spend more on weapons of war than we do on educating our children, helping the homeless and ensuring all Americans have equal rights, and protecting the environment combined.”
Nelson’s criticism of U.S. spending resounded Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s denunciation of the U.S.’s prioritization of weapons of war over “programs of social uplift.” Nelson, like King before him, linked U.S. military spending to a dogmatic embrace of capitalism. “We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex,” said Nelson. “Most of us are too apathetic to care.”
Nelson concluded his video statement by explaining that his self-immolation was meant as a demand for the U.S. “government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and support the [International Criminal Court] indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”
Momentum Builds Against Israel’s Decimation of Gaza and the Palestinians
Less than three months after Nelson’s self-immolation, pressures have mounted against Israel’s military onslaught in and around Gaza. Momentum has also continued to build against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ continued support for Israel’s conduct of the war.
On November 14, the U.N. Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices concluded that “the policies and practices of Israel...are consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” As evidence for their claim, the committee specified that
“targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid—resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths—and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law. Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionately killed en masse in Gaza, while in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli colonial settlers, military and security personnel have continued to violate human rights and humanitarian law with impunity.”
Two days before the release of the U.N. report, the Biden-Harris administration announced that it would not hold Israel accountable for failing to meet the government’s demand, made in October, that at least 350 aid trucks be allowed into Gaza each day. The decision not to hold Israel accountable came as eight aid groups jointly stated that Israel “not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza.” Costs of War contributor, Stephen Semler, determined that Israel has permitted an average of just 54 aid trucks into Gaza, each day, since the Biden-Harris administration issued its letter insisting on improved humanitarian aid within 30 days.
But the Biden-Harris administration’s inaction is being increasingly challenged. On November 20, 2024, 19 U.S. senators voted in favor of legislation to block shipping the sale of some military equipment to Israel. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the votes for Senator Bernie Sanders’s “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” present the Senate’s first concerted challenge to the administration’s unwavering support for the Israeli siege of Gaza. Senators’ endorsement of limiting military aid to Israel was also a rare rebuke of the powerful lobbyist organizations, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI).
Pressures continue to mount against Israel internationally as well. The day after the vote to limit military shipments, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Netanyahu and Gallant stand charged “for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.”
Human rights lawyer, Reed Brody, told Drop Site News that the issuance of the warrants is “a watershed event in the history of international justice.” Brody, who is council and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, noted that the ICC’s decision to seek the arrest of the Israeli leaders marks the first time in more than 21 years that the ICC has sought the arrest of a “pro-Western official.”
“Indeed, no international court since World War II has done so. Up until now, the instruments of international justice have been used almost exclusively to address crimes by defeated adversaries as in the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, powerless outcasts, or opponents of the West such as Vladimir Putin or Slobodan Milošević.”
If Matt Nelson were still alive, today, he would undoubtedly mourn the continued loss of innocent Palestinian life, now estimated to exceed 100,000 deaths. Yet we must imagine he would be encouraged by the progress being made on one of his core demands, that support be given to “the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.” Of course we are nowhere near a happy ending.
Matt Nelson, Aaron Bushnell, and the Ancient Tradition of Self-Sacrifice
The very thought of self-immolation is shocking. We are viscerally repulsed by the inherent destructiveness of the act. We are also consternated by the idea that a person would willfully inflict such unthinkable pain and injury upon themselves. This was particularly true for an eyewitness of Matt Nelson’s public burning in Boston. “It was awful to see him on fire, not fighting against the flames or screaming for help,” wrote an X user identifying as Andrea Canez. “He was just enduring the pain!”
Yet we would be mistaken to presume that those who would sacrifice their lives in this admittedly disturbing manner are necessarily mentally ill. Following U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell’s February 25, 2024 self-immolation I wrote,
“Many commentators reactively categorized Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation as evidence of psychological sickness. A more thorough and honest analysis reveals Bushnell’s concern for the soul-shocking and historic bloodletting in Gaza and his decision to give his life so that others would live exemplifies important parts of the humanistic conception of mental well-being and human excellence.”
Elsewhere I noted the inability to see Bushnell as anything but a “crazy” person who simply committed suicide exposes a problem the pioneering humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow described, in Religions Values and Peak-Experiences (1964) as
“‘the ultimate disease of our time’: ‘valuelessness,’ or what was variously described as ‘anomie, amorality, anhedonia, rootlessness, emptiness, hopelessness, the lack of something to believe in and to be devoted to.’”
A key characteristic of this valuelessness, wrote Maslow, is that “people have nothing to admire, to sacrifice themselves for, to surrender to, to die for.” Many today would suggest that such thinking is characteristic of irrationality or even “sickness.” Yet the identification of fundamental values for which one is willing to both live and, yes, even sacrifice themselves for has been the very moral backbone of intellectual, spiritual, and social justice movements the world over.
The best-known figure in Western philosophy is a man who preferred death, in 399 BCE, over renouncing his love of wisdom and virtue. The Christian religion was founded on self-sacrifice including the willing martyrdom of people like Justin and Perpetua who, following the example of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, knowingly chose to die before violating their deepest moral convictions.
The pioneering 16th-century Italian freethinker, Giordano Bruno, became a martyr to freedom of expression when he chose a death sentence over recanting beliefs deemed heresy by the Catholic church authority. On February 17, 1600, Bruno was stripped naked, gagged, and burned alive at the stake.1
And it was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who, conscious of the constant threats against his life, declared, “if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, in a sense he is not fit to live.” And as we all know, neither Justin, Perpetua, Bruno, nor Rev. King were exalted in their own time. The fruits of their sacrifice took generations to fully blossom. Like so many other agents of change, neither Justin Martyr, Perpetua, Bruno nor Rev. King were exalted in their own time. The fruits of their sacrifice took generations to fully blossom. The full realization of their greatness occurred posthumously.
Some readers are now thinking that there is an important distinction to be made between those who intentionally end their lives by their own hands and those who pursue their values knowing that their punishment will be certain death by their persecutor. Yet such a distinction must not be made at the expense of acknowledging the commonality between the two. Both acts place commitment to a fundamental value over self-preservation, and neither can be accused of violating the rights of other persons. Each is an act of radical autonomy. The difference, thus, is of kind but not of species.
Matt Nelson Defended Aaron Bushnell’s Sanity
Evidence from Matt Nelson’s social media account makes it clear that he had thought about recent and historical examples of self-sacrifice. Just a month after Bushnell's self-immolation, Nelson criticized a social media user’s characterization of Bushnell as mentally ill and pointed to the precedent of self-sacrifice in Buddhist culture.
In an exchange on Blue Sky, Nelson wrote, “calling a person you've never [met] who's [sic] job was literally to understand the thing they acted over mentally ill and uninformed is real cool edgelord stuff.” When the other user responded that Bushnell’s self-immolation was evidence of his lack of understanding of the complexity of political affairs, Nelson replied, “tell that to Thích Quảng Đức.” The other user replied, “literally who.”
As Nelson clearly knew, Duc was a Vietnamese monk who protested the repression experienced by Buddhists by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government by self-immolating in a busy intersection of Saigon on June 11, 1963. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, explained the self-immolations, which he said were so often misunderstood in the Western world, in his first correspondence with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. In the June 1, 1965 letter, “In Search of the Enemy of Man,” Hanh wrote:
“The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire non-existence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future…. Like the Buddha in one of his former lives—as told in a story of Jataka—who gave himself to a hungry lion which was about to devour her own cubs, the monk believes he is practicing the doctrine of highest compassion by sacrificing himself in order to call the attention of, and to seek help from, the people of the world.”
Hanh refers to an important story in the Buddhist tradition in which the Buddha sacrifices himself to preserve others. In one such rendering, “The Bodhisattva and the Hungry Tigress,” originating in the Golden Light Sutra, the Buddha tells of three princes who were walking through a nature park when they discover a hungry and exhausted tigress surrounded by five newly born cubs. The princes realize she and her 7-day-old cubs will die without immediate nourishment. “She is quite exhausted, overcome by hunger and thirst, scarcely alive and very weak,” said Mahadeva. “In this state she cannot possibly catch any prey. And who would sacrifice himself to preserve her life?”
His brother, Mahapranada replied with acknowledgment not only of the tigress’ dilemma but also of the moral failings of those lacking the courage for self-sacrifice. “It is difficult for people like us, who are so fond of our lives and bodies, and have so little intelligence,” he said. “It is not at all difficult, however, for others, who are true men, intent on benefiting their fellow-creatures, and who long to sacrifice themselves. Holy men are born of piety and compassion. Whatever the body is they may get, in heaven or on earth, a hundred times will they undo them, joyful in their hearts, so that the lives of others may be saved.”
After watching the poor creature in helpless frustration, the third brother, Mahasattva decided to take action to preserve the creatures’ lives. He asked his brothers for some solitude, then went to the tigress’ lair. “From deep compassion I now give away my body, so hard to quit, unshaken in my mind.” Mahasattva threw himself before the tigress only to discover she lacked the strength to seize him. “As a merciful man he had taken no sword with him,” explained the Buddha. “He therefore cut his throat with a sharp piece of bamboo, and fell down near the tigress. She noticed the Bodhisattva’s body all covered with blood, and in no time ate up all the flesh and blood, leaving only the bones.” At the end of the story the Buddha revealed “It was I…who at that time and on that occasion was that prince Mahasattva.”
Mahasattva was moved to compassionately sacrifice himself to save six lives. Similarly, Nelson sacrificed his life in the hopes of helping to save some of the tens of thousands of lives presently imperiled by starvation, shelling, disease, and rampant denial of human rights. Though the efficacy of his sacrifice is much less direct and more difficult to determine than Mahasattva’s, it’s clear that Nelson was deeply committed to the values of justice, truth and perhaps moral wholeness—integrity.2 Owen Flood told the Cape Code Times that he was shocked to learn of the manner of his longtime friend Matt Nelson’s actions and death, but not the moral conviction implied by his action. “I never saw Matt as a big political person,” explained Flood. “He was nonviolent. So him doing something this extreme is surprising. But him having a strong feeling about genocide happening somewhere else on the Earth that we as a country are complacent to, is not surprising at all.”
Extinguishing Injustice
My wish is that no one will ever again be inspired to self-immolate to be heard or move the world to stop the inexplicable torment and denigration of human beings. But Bushnell’s and now Nelson’s actions demand more from us than such hopeful well-wishes. Their acts challenge those of us who value justice, truth, and integrity to examine our presumptions around who is “healthy” and who is “sick.” As I previously wrote,
“… whatever we think of his cause, we can no more declare Bushnell’s self-immolation an instance of suicide than we can declare a stranger’s decision to jump in front of a hail of bullets to save a child as an instance of suicide. Bushnell’s actions were motivated by a fundamental regard for human life that has and remains at the heart of humanity and therefore human flourishing. That he would be declared mentally ‘sick’ for prioritizing the lives of thousands over his own tells us little about Bushnell and quite a lot about the pathological state of our social conscience.”
Neither Bushnell nor Nelson called for others to follow them into the fire, to emulate their life-ending protest. Their aim was not to ignite a wildfire of death. They sought to thaw and enliven our cold and enervated conscience; to stir our hearts into ethical action. Bushnell and Nelson’s shocking torchlights of self-sacrifice force open our eyes to consider our deepest values and purpose. Their deaths stimulate difficult questions including what it means for mortal beings such as ourselves to live lives of personal integrity.
None of us need to walk into the flames to honor Bushnell and Nelson’s sacrifice. Their message was not an exaltation or endorsement of death, but a plea for the living to live; a cry out for us to find our voices, nurture our compassion, replace apathy with intentionality, and resolve ourselves to meet this moment with an authentic love of life. If your heart has led you to read this essay, the author respectfully asks that you spurn the flames of self-immolation and live to courageously carry forward and exemplify Bushnell and Nelson’s moral demand that the dignity of Palestinian people be honored. Let us join together in solidarity to take steps each and everyday to put out the fires of injustice and extinguish the desperate conditions that leads some to give their lives to the fire.
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Bruno is said to have responded to the verdict against him by telling his judges, “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it.”
This does not mean that either was a faultless exemplification of those values. None of us are. That we may learn of objectionable behaviors or actions committed by either person would not be surprising. The point is not to treat Nelson or Bushnell as gods among humans or perfect models of humanity. Rather, the objective is to contemplate the wider meaning or significance of their acts.
Thank you so much for this deeply insightful exposition of the true motives and spiritually/mentally/emotionally healthy state of Matt Nelson and Aaron Bushnell as their final blazing moments on Earth cried out for justice in Palestine. I just finished a painting of Bushnell’s very intentional self-sacrifice. It followed a painting of Shaban Al Dalou, the 19-year-old Palestinian who was burned alive with a IV in his arm after an Israeli strike on the grounds of the hospital where he was recovering from injuries sustained in a strike 10 days earlier. Both were painful in the extreme to paint, and brought a host of thoughts and feelings to the surfaced. I hope to post them with essays at least a quarter as revelatory as what you’ve written before long and now I’m determined to include links to what you’ve written about Aaron and Matt. It’s a sad and horrible time when thoughtful young men of conscience are driven to such extremes to condemn the our society’s acceptance and enabling of genocide. Thank you for making sure the mainstream narratives have a heavy counterweight of truth and exceptional active compassion available for people to balance their perspectives and activate their own consciences.
That's great, Jeremy. Authentic dialogue and heartfelt expression are valuable in themselves and vital to solving so many problems. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to read your poem.