What Aaron Bushnell was going through, judge, was what a lot of american service members and veterans go through. This realization that they may have joined the american military thinking that they were going to be wearing the white hat, but what they come to realize is that they are wearing a black hat. And Aaron Bushnell just felt that he could no longer continue to wear that black hat. And for him, the option of self immolation was the way that he thought best to express his complete resistance to the idea of being complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

Is there more of an urge for members of the military, active duty members of the military, to express disenchantment with the direction and the use of the military by political leadership when the military is 100% volunteer, as it is now, as opposed to when it is largely filled with draftees, as was the case in Vietnam? Well, it’s interesting if you look at what’s called the GI resistance to the Vietnam War, which was one of the very key, if not the most important aspect of the overall resistance in the US to the Vietnam War.

If you look at that GI resistance, a lot of it was led by those who have volunteered for the war. So what happens is that those who go into the military thinking they’re doing the right thing, those who are stepping forward and say, yes, I want to go forward, I want to protect my country. I want to defend our freedoms and liberties. I want to keep our country safe.

Well, it’s to them the great shock then the moral injury of realizing that they are being betrayed, that they are not protecting their country or they are not protecting our freedoms and liberties. Their actions are not keeping Americans safe, but rather often the opposite. That their actions are counterproductive and wrong and that they are not serving the interests of the United States, but they’re serving the political, the economic and the financial interests of the american empire, and very often doing things that harm and bring great suffering on to others.

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