Getting past the 2010s

Palestine, Bidenomics, and the ebbing of unrest.

Photo by 警察庁 (National Police Agency), CC BY 4.0

If you’re an anime fan, or if you just grew up in the 1980s, you might have seen the classic Japanese animated movie Akira. Although the movie’s main plot is about psychic children, the backdrop is a futuristic Tokyo in chaos, with protesters clashing brutally with cops in the street.

Given how utterly peaceful Japan is today, it’s easy to write off Akira’s urban unrest as a science-fictional flight of fancy. But at the time, it was quite realistic. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, large-scale leftist protests were pretty common in Japan. Some of the largest protests were against the construction of Narita Airport. The Japanese government built the airport by forcing inhabitants of an agricultural village called Sanrizuka to relocate. Japanese leftists made resistance to this development their cause célèbre. As unrest began to fade in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leftists increasingly focused on Sanrizuka. Finally, in 1985, leftists from all over Japan gathered near the Narita construction site, battling the police in a brutal multi-day struggle that left (if I recall correctly) 11 people dead. You can watch a video of the riot here, if you want.

What’s kind of remarkable is how quickly the country seemed to move on from this clash — and the entire period of unrest that led up to it. By the time the movie Akira came out just a few years later, Japanese culture had shifted strongly toward peaceful consumerism, effectively becoming the place that tourists know and love today.

Anyway, so yes, I watched the video of the guy burning himself to death for Palestine in Washington D.C. It’s not actually the first such incident — back in December, someone immolated themself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. But Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. Air Force serviceman who burned himself up in D.C., took a video, and that video understandably went viral. Bushnell immediately became a hero to leftists all over the world, who praised his action effusively and made a bunch of art in his honor.

A lot of people dismissed Bushnell as simply a crazy person, and chided the leftists for encouraging people with mental illness to commit suicide. But honestly, I don’t think this is the right take. Self-immolation is actually a fairly common form of political protest, especially among Tibetan protesters against Chinese rule, and by farmers in developing countries whose land is seized by the government. Mental illness is certainly much more common among people who choose this form of protest, but the political nature of the act, rather than a simple desire to die, is typically central. (Note that the same leftists who are lionizing Bushnell and using his sacrifice as proof of the righteousness of the Palestinian cause tend to ridicule the Free Tibet movement. But I digress.)

I’m not arguing that Bushnell was a normal, healthy individual. He grew up in a fringe religious sect known for its abusive practices (and for its tendency to send its members into the military). But his Reddit posts were lucidly written, and they were all pretty standard leftist extremist stuff — much of which puts the lie to the idea that he was a humanitarian. He argued that the October 7th massacre of concert-goers in Israel was justified, because the victims were “colonizers” and therefore couldn’t be classified as civilians. He denounced U.S. support for Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. was trying to conquer Ukraine instead of defending it. He claimed that wiping out the population of Israel wouldn’t be genocide, because it would kill only 40% of the world’s Jews instead of 100%, and because Israel’s population are “colonizers”. And so on.

This was not a good man, fighting for a good cause. But that doesn’t make him insane, either. He was a passionate man, fighting passionately for an extremist cause. We should no longer be surprised when such people are willing to die for their beliefs — suicide bombers, or participants in human wave attacks in wars, are proof enough of that. Throughout history, human beings have willingly died for many different causes — some good, some ambiguous, and some downright evil. I’m just glad that Aaron Bushnell chose not to take anyone else with him when he decided to die for the mishmash of online leftist propaganda that had taken over his worldview.