“Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
Voltaire (1765)
This is sadly part 2 of this topic, the first is here and was inspired by the politically motivated suicide of an Air Force member:
I have always been about reality, and so I will warn you if you are sensitive:
DO NOT WATCH THIS FIRST VIDEO AS IT IS GRAPHIC…
You Have Been Warned
As a history buff of the Vietnam War, I am familiar with self-immolation
While this is said to be suicide… it is quite literally murder – as much as I think euthanasia of people are. The recent self-immolations by the Air Force serviceman and the guy yesterday were suicides… and if someone doused them with gasoline, led a trail away from them and lit the trail – that person would be facing criminal charges. Plain and simple. Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức is doused… let me repeat that… is doused with gasoline by “team monks” during a protest demonstration in Saigon, on June 11, 1963
THE ATLANTIC has an article titled “Stop Glorifying Self-Immolation“ Here are some excerpts, and, it primarily is written with the Air Force kid setting himself on fire:
In 1963, the monk Thich Quang Duc soaked himself [no, he did not – RPT] in gasoline and lit himself on fire to protest the government of the Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Within a few years, dozens more had killed themselves the same way. A Quaker named Norman Morrison stood outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office, handed off his 1-year-old daughter to a stranger, and cremated himself. Back in Vietnam, a nun named Nhat Chi Mai wondered to a friend whether the tactic had lost its power through overuse. “Fasting and even self-immolation no longer wake people up,” she said. “We have to be imaginative!” She suggested they take part in a mass public disembowelment. Her friend said she’d think about it. In 1967, Nhat knelt before statues of the Virgin Mary and Quan Am, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and stuck with Plan A. She was 33.
This past weekend, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force enlisted man livestreamed his self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He said he could no longer abide being “complicit” in “genocide,” and the last comprehensible words he uttered before collapsing were “Free Palestine!” Among the effects of his suicide was to disturb the many people scrolling through social media who (like me) inadvertently saw him dancing and chanting while engulfed in flames, and to inspire many supporters of the Palestinian cause to celebrate his act. The theologian and presidential candidate Cornel West praised his “extraordinary courage and commitment.” “Rest in power,” Jill Stein, the former Green Party presidential candidate, posted on X, with an image of the young man ablaze.
I won’t speculate on the dead man’s mental health. He grew up in a cult, described himself as an anarchist, and generally eschewed what Buddhists might call “the middle way,” a life of mindful moderation, in favor of extreme spiritual and political practice. In addition to being an immoderate act, self-immolation is a violent one, indeed one of the most violent, and if you dislike violence, then you should abhor it no matter your view on the war in Gaza. Self-immolators choose that method over hunger strikes, civil disobedience, marches, and a long menu of other morally exemplary tactics.
It is also a tactic that succeeds and fails depending on the situation, and whether the moment is ripe for horrific violence or (as Nhat speculated) needs violence even more ghastly than can be achieved with gasoline. Virtually no one before Quang Duc had burned himself in protest of anything. The tactic is contagious. Another man had set himself on fire in December outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. Already the D.C. self-immolator is being turned into a hero, and that risks compounding this tragedy for no good reason.
There is a Buddhist tradition of suicide that values the shedding of one’s body as an end in itself. About 1,500 years ago, a Buddhist monk named Daodu declared that his body was “like a poisonous plant,” and burned himself alive to get rid of it. But for nearly all the self-burnings in the modern era, the goal was more worldly: to call attention to alleged injustice and stress one’s devotion to ending it. In a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., the monk Thich Nhat Hanh said that burning oneself will “prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance,” and demonstrate “determination and sincerity.”
The most comprehensive survey of the practice is by the Oxford sociologist Michael Biggs. He notes that some self-immolators inspired others to rededicate themselves to the immolator’s cause, and some—such as Morrison and Quang Duc—really did spur political change. (Diem’s government fell months after Quang Duc’s death.) But “most acts of self-immolation fail to generate any collective response,” Biggs writes.
[….]
I wonder if I am the only one left who would be more moved and persuaded by an absence of fanaticism.
[….]
I have serious doubts about the value of discussing anything with someone who brings a jerry can and a Zippo to the conversation. The Palestinian cause is already associated with death cultism: Hamas arrives at the conversations pre-drenched. Certain factions of the Israeli right seem excessively open to conflagration too. The tendency to celebrate and encourage this behavior, or even to be moved by it, strikes me as deeply sick. I am moved only to check the inspection certificate on my office’s fire extinguisher.
And RED STATE shows the hero worship of these potential mass killers. In my previous dealing 2-months ago, I noted this – adapted anew:
- The one positive that I can pull out of these two self-immolators, Aaron Bushnell & Max Azzarello, is, that at least they hurt themselves. It’s tragic. I wish someone could have been able to talk them out of it. But, hurting themselves versus hurting fellow service members or protestors to make a statement… I’m going with the the former. Much of the distorted view within the Left that radicalizes it is a narcissistic victim mentality, and this often leads to violence. So thinking through this, this morning, I would add that had the propensity to harm others as part of his statement based in lies and his egoism.
Again, Voltaire:
- “Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
How did the media try and spin this? That he was a right winger… but MOONBATERY noted the following:
…He left a manifesto, which reveals an unsurprising political orientation.
Azzarello had a paranoid interest in conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, believed that “capitalism is unsustainable,” and fretted about fascism and climate change. He had worked for Democrat congresscritters Tom Suozzi and Ami Bera, as well as for the self-described “social justice organization” Liberty Hill Foundation. His LinkedIn photo was a picture of him standing next to Bill Clinton. He described himself as “a huge proponent of left unity” and an “anarchocommunist” — i.e., a radical moonbat of the type you might expect to do something really crazy in a public park.
Nonetheless, the media will spin his viewpoint as nonpartisan even pro-Trump if they think they can get away with it….
And the BEST post so far I have come across on the crazy guy can be found over at POST MILLENNIAL. They post readable pictures of the pamphlets the guy was touting when he burned himself. Here is one of the “political” grabs from Maxwell Azzarello’s REDDIT posts:
NOT THE BEE notes the media’s attempt to say this guy was a righty: “The media is out there right now hinting that the man who set himself on fire outside Trump’s trial in NYC is a Trump supporter himself.”
They go on to list similar points that the above sites do from his manifesto, like these:
I’ve archived Max’s Substack manifesto here in case it gets memory holed. It is clearly an insight into how people are stressed and hopeless these days, so I wouldn’t recommend reading through the whole thing unless you are able to handle the madness.
I’ll simply highlight a few things here.
- He says “we are victims of a totalitarian con” before outlining a Ponzi scheme involving tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley Bank, and cryptocurrency that will “take down half the stock market.”
- He believes the elites set up a “secret kleptocracy” and that the Republican v. Democrat divide is entirely fake, presenting us with opposites like George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton or Trump and Hillary to keep us distracted while they gobbled up all the resources and money.
- Their reasoning, he argues (and this is the important part) is “capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it.” He says they wanted to “gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia.”
- He then implies that Walt Disney, The Beatles, George Orwell, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, and the 1960s film “Easy Rider” were all part of the propaganda machine meant to hide this “secret kleptocracy.” This is an actual quote of his:
When we realize that the secret fascists long planned to use new technology like computers and smart phones to pump us full of misinformation, we realize that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was ‘predicting’ a future that was already planned out.
So yeah, this guy was deranged.
I’m not writing this to entertain the man’s manifesto. Some of his points may sound valid to you because most insane people start with a few valid points, like elites being greedy, and get more fantastical from there.
Let’s not get sidetracked by that. The point here is to give you an idea of who he was and to dispel the idea that this man was anything close to a conservative or a Trump supporter before the CNN headlines drop….
One last thought, what rolled thru my mind when I saw him pictured with Newt Gingrich… leading some to speculate he was a Republican.
Max is wearing an “Eat the Rich” T-Shirt. I thought it was Ironic because he BBQed himself. After I thought that I thought the pain from this death into a second death — which is eternal seperation from God [more torment than mere flames] — must be unimaginable. And I praise God I do not have to imagine it.
And on that note I exit stage right.
