It demonstrates that the controlled media have now been handed their talking points and are trying to "spin away" the implications of the self-immolation by an active-duty US Air Force airman who declared that he would "no longer be complicit in genocide."
The mainstream media studiously ignores the obvious question: "What did his duties involve, to make him feel so deeply complicity in the genocide?"
Instead, the Washington Post has now published a piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, a consistent cheerleader for the US Empire and for neoliberalism and hyper-capitalism, which shows us what they have come up with so far: we shouldn't focus on this act of self-immolation because we are in the midst of a mental health crisis and too many young people are taking their own lives.
He scolds the world that Aaron Bushnell is wrong about there being an ongoing genocide, and says we must not "imbue his suicide with a grandeur it does not deserve."
Ironically but not surprisingly, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote an article for National Review in 2011 in which he definitely "imbued with grandeur" the act of self-immolation by a 26-year-old man in Tunisia which launched the so-called "Arab Spring." He even quoted approvingly another writer who said that the slap by the police which led Mohamed Bouazizi to light himself on fire in protest might come to be known as the "Slap Heard Round the World," a clear evocation of the "Shot Heard Round the World" which started the American Revolution against the British Empire (clearly "imbuing his suicide" with some "grandeur").
Shockingly but also not surprisingly, the New York Post has now published an article in which three journalists quote a long-time friend of Aaron Bushnell who says that Bushnell confided that he has seen evidence of US forces in the tunnels in Gaza, involved in the killing of Palestinians ("participating in the killings" is the exact quotation). The friend says Aaron Bushnell confided this information to him less than 24 hours before his act of self-immolation, and the friend also says he heard fear in Aaron Bushnell's voice when he talked about it, in a way that he had never heard before.
It is not "un-American" to have serious questions about this entire incident, serious questions which the controlled media are not addressing (but which the controlled media are in fact obscuring and obfuscating and dragging in red herrings about the "noxious" views of Aaron Bushnell, and the danger of supposedly celebrating a suicide at a moment when suicide is on the rise and mental health is an increasing problem).
It is also not un-American to perceive that the treatment of this particular incident indicates very strongly that the major American media is being controlled – in direct violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Of course, the controlled media's treatment of the September 11 operation of 2001 also leads to the same conclusion, as does the controlled media's treatment of the Iran-Contra affair, the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, to name other prominent examples of ongoing control of the media and subversion of freedom of the press and the First Amendment.
Looking at the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell in protest of an ongoing genocide is not incompatible with concern over the rise of suicide and mental health issues in the United States and "the west." The cynical use of this particular tactic of spinning the story from Ramesh Ponnuru and the controlled media is obscene and objectionable and should be denounced, along with the denunciation and condemnation of the actions by the government of the United States to enable the criminal ethnic cleansing and murder of men, women and children in Palestine.
