Re: [Salon] Will Aaron Bushnell’s Death Trigger Anarchism Witch Hunt?

[Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com>]

(More on “associative sympathy,” as causality in the form of reciprocal attacks, when populations come under attack. As the Palestinians have been since way before 1948. In answer to responses to my email from Sunday on Aaron Bushnell, and Tom Cotton.) 

Headline: 

Gaza war may stoke ‘generational’ terrorism threat, top intel official says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/11/cia-israel-gaza-ukraine-ai/

Quote: "The top U.S. intelligence official on Monday warned that the war in Gaza could embolden terrorist groups, which are aligned in their opposition to the United States for its support of Israel.

“The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told an annual hearing on global security threats.

. . . 

"Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a stalwart backer of Israel, prodded Burns and Haines to refute critics’ allegations that Israel is “exterminating the Palestinian people” with its military campaign."

More on Cotton’s militaristic fanaticism for you The American Conservative Straussians in this gushing profile of Cotton for those who celebrate US Conservatives like Trump and DeSantis for fueling Israeli genocide, even more than Biden:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tom-cotton-further-positions-himself-as-trumps-heir/

"Cotton is an old antagonist of Iran realists, spearheading the effort to tell the Iranians in 2015 that Barack Obama’s nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Tehran would be null and void under a Republican president; every Republican, even realist Rand Paul, signed on.” (TP-expressing what TAC “realism,” really is, since 2015.)

And this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tom-cotton-has-been-waiting-years-for-this/

Quote: "Double Harvard (undergrad and law), protégé of the influential West Coast Straussians at the Claremont Institute, a dabble in blogging for the not-so-underground Power Line (TP-Claremont connected) and a lucrative victory lap at McKinsey.

. . . 

"When, more than two decades later, I completed the same fellowship in Southern California as the now-senator, Charles J. Kessler—eminence grise of the Claremonsters—referred to the young man in a hurry like a son."

With that for “context,” indicative of how the Republicans will amplify their Islamophobia with accusations against Muslims again, similar to “they hate us for our freedom;” having had the responsibility of studying very closely the “causality” of terrorism by Muslims (a hat-tip to Graham Fuller for his writings on “Political Islam”) as a Guantanamo Defense Attorney, I believe the attached files, from a book: Political Phenomenology, are a refutation for what we are hearing from the CIA/FBI, and other “Counter-Terror” propaganda platforms. To especially include Conservative platforms, as they’ve already deemed as “Woke,” those few Americans actually capable of having empathy for US/Israeli victims. 

Two people responded to my earlier email, with one pointing out how that 2015 WaPo article never mentioned the 2014 Israeli War on Gaza, which was even more brutal than previous assaults on Palestinians by Israel. What follows below addresses that. Another person who read it, with extensive military/diplomatic service, pointed out: 

"This is my take from what you sent:

“I can’t believe these people even come here to this country!” one woman yelled. “Why do they come here?”

“Because they want to kill us,” a man answered.

"It's my take because these questions just have to be being asked by Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, as well as a host of others over the past 30 years -- about the United States of America!"

So, if anyone has read this far, this is an additional addendum to my previous email on “associative sympathy,” on top of this follow-up article I sent two days ago, which at least two people read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/angry-protesters-in-chattanooga-whens-the-government-going-to-do-something/2015/07/19/ef1004b0-2e45-11e5-8353-1215475949f4_story.html "Angry protesters in Chattanooga: When’s the government going to do something?” 

Which I believe is relevant to today, as it shows a past case of “associative sympathy” leading to retaliatory violence, “reciprocity,” with this additional background information: 

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/17/us/tennessee-shooter-mohammad-youssuf-abdulazeez/index.html.

The article is thoroughly inadequate as is the case in most such “news” magazines, but “clues” include this: 

"Jordanian sources, however, denied that he was a Jordanian citizen, but rather a Palestinian who carried a Jordanian travel document. The sources said he was born Mohammad Youssuf Saeed Hajj Ali on September 5, 1990, but that his father changed his name that year to Abdulazeez.”

From the WaPo article above is this quote: "There are more than 100 FBI agents on the ground in Chattanooga, primarily from the FBI Knoxville Field Office, trying to piece together Abdulazeez’s path to radicalization and violence. “That’s going to take time,” one official said. “We may never know, but we are working toward that.”

That is standard FBI practice over the last three decades of our perpetual War; always claiming publicly that they “don’t know the motive,” for such attacks as in Orlando, California, etc. When they knew full-well, as was revealed by Wikileaks I believe, that it was US foreign policy which served as provocations for “counter-attacks.” 

In the case of Abdulazeez, his family were in fact Palestinian refugees living in Iraq before the first Gulf War when they were expelled for Palestinians taking Kuwait's side in Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The family got to the US where Abdulazeez became a “model” refugee, in achieving success. Then he went to visit his Palestinian family living in Jordan as Palestinian refugees, in 2014. In time for one of Israel’s earlier wars on Gaza, "Operation Protective Edge," described here: 

https://www.unrwa.org/2014-gaza-conflict.

And this particularly important article to understand the full dimensions of Israel’s “installment plan” genocidal wars against Palestinians: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/6/israels-psychological-operation-in-gaza.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/07/17/authorities-scrutinize-chattanooga-shooters-visit-to-jordan.html

"There are more than 100 FBI agents on the ground in Chattanooga, primarily from the FBI Knoxville Field Office, trying to piece together Abdulazeez’s path to radicalization and violence. “That’s going to take time,” one official said. “We may never know, but we are working toward that.”

As it turns out, they probably did, but wouldn’t admit that. So they lied!

I’ve shared these here, before, and I’m sure no one even read the opening paragraphs. But if the USG and its citizens were serious about ending political violence, and had enough open-mindedness to at least desire an explanation for it, these are what I found to actually put into words, “why,” political violence as reciprocity for what we and Israel are doing to non-Israelis in the Mideast. To include US complicity in Israeli genocidal war. For which, war generates “reciprocal acts,” as Clausewitz understood as a “proto-phenomenologist," as he was described by Peter Paret (see “Theory” below). Which show the connection between the “Theorist of War,” and Edmund Husserl’s “Science of Consciousness.” Which is now used against their own populations by Israel and the US in the form of “Cognitive Warfare,” in the form of what is called in Israel: Mass Consciousness Activities. These explain the underlying science of what is used against us for shaping public opinion, as “Phenomenology,” the “Science of Consciousness” as Husserl called it, has been “militarized.” 

Attachment: Delhom-NormativeForceofSufferedViolence.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

  

Attachment: A Political Grammar of Feelings.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Attachment: BeingConcerned_FINAL.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

  

Attachment: Theory.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

On Mar 10, 2024, at 6:22 PM, Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com> wrote:

Pardon me for saying this but all that comes to mind on reading this to say in regard to Tom Cotton and his like-minded “Conservatives,” is “Goddamn that SOB,” reverting to language I might have used back in my construction working days. 

Reverting back to the present, though at the risk of seeming to flatter myself, my research into the “causality” of war and terrorism, took me into a study of David Hume, Carl von Clausewitz, Edmund Husserl, and his student, who eventually was martyred by the Germans in an extermination camp, Edith Stein (who had become a Catholic Nun, as a Jewish convert), led me to the following, which I believe explains Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation, on seeing the Israeli genocide of Palestinians taking place in front of our very eyes. And self-sacrifice of such people as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and so many other valiant, courageous, and “sympathetic,” to the US military’s victims, Whistleblowers, from a paper I wrote in 2018 on “Phenomenology”: 

Associative Sympathy

Scottish philosopher David Hume explained how individuals would feel so intensely about victims that they would respond with hatred to their killing, as happened in Chattanooga. In “A Treatise of Human Nature,” as explained by Hume scholar Prof. Charlotte R. Brown, Hume explains why we care about the pain and suffering of others. When we encounter others in distress whom we associate with ourselves in some manner, he observed, we feel concern for their plight. But why do their sorrows and afflictions matter to us? Hume explained our compassionate responses to those in distress in terms of the principles of “sympathy.” Hume’s use of the word “sympathy,” is in how “empathy” is used today. 

Hume’s idea was that the “moral sentiments,” in the terminology of the 18^th Century, spring from sympathy. But to Hume, sympathy was a mechanism of the mind. It is the capacity of the human mind “to receive the passions, sentiments, and even beliefs of others.” Prof. Brown explains that sympathy is not itself a passion so it shouldn’t be confused with feelings such as compassion, pity, or empathy. Instead, it is a mechanism by which the feelings of others are imparted to us. Sympathy is the explanation for how we “literally enter into the feelings of others, feeling what they are feeling.” 

Hume explains, however, that sympathy works in terms of the more fundamental principle of the mind, the associative principle. This is that certain ideas go together, “resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and causation.” We sympathize more strongly and easily with those with whom we are related by causation and “who are spatially or temporarily contiguous to us - friends, family, neighbors, and fellow citizens. 

When one is related to someone in all three ways, they are able to conceive of that person’s passion “in the strongest and most lively manner.” Sympathy enables humans to enter into the feelings of anyone to a degree, “our capacity to react sympathetically to others varies with the variations in the associative relations.” 

Furthermore, sympathy allows humans to have sentiments even to strangers. For example, when we see a bully beating up a vulnerable victim, even though both are strangers, we respond sympathetically to the victim’s pain. Causal reasoning focuses our attention on the bully, since he is the cause of the victim’s pain, whom we sympathize with, and we may end up hating the bully. Finally, associational sympathy isn’t predictive in how people will react. Prof. Brown notes that sympathy isn’t a motive. It may enter into an explanation of why someone performs a certain action but it doesn’t explain how they will react to painful feelings, with everyone regulating sympathy differently. In the example above, one person may be moved to help the victim, and another to just walk away. 

Edith Stein on Empathy

            Edith Stein addressed the issue of Hume’s “sympathy,” but as it would be called today, as “empathy.” Her phenomenological study is particularly valuable in understanding terrorism and war and the causality of each, which are in fact, generally identical as each are the use of violence toward a political objective. Stein wrote in her forward to On the Problem of Empathy that she recognized the different forms of empathy as being “mingled together” so that they were indistinguishable from each other. Therefore, in seeking the “epistemological, purely descriptive, and genetic-psychological aspects of this identified problem,” was that the forms of empathy which she had listed were indistinguishable from each other. Consequently, it seemed to her, that she “should extract the basic problem so that all the others would become intelligible from its viewpoint.” She recognized this “basic problem to be the question of empathy as the perceiving of foreign objects and their experience.” She noted that she had had a look at Professor Husserl’s Part II of his “Ideen,” dealing in part with the same question so refrained from using new suggestions she had received. Part II will be briefly addressed in this paper.[1] Addressing only what I consider the most relevant of Stein’s study to the theme of this paper, causation and motivation of war by reason of empathy and collective consciousness, I won’t delve into every aspect of her book.  

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/07/aaron-bushnell-fbi-anarchism-extremist/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

Will Aaron Bushnell’s Death Trigger Anarchism Witch Hunt?

Sen. Tom Cotton demands the Pentagon root out leftist extremism.

Ken Klippenstein 

March 7 2024, 12:52 p.m. 

Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington last month has provoked nationwide soul-searching about the war in Gaza. For the U.S. government though, the airman’s death excites a different kind of search: for so-called extremists, particularly left-wing ones. 

Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a terrorist group [Hamas],” Cotton goes on to ask about the Defense Department’s internal efforts to address extremism and whether Bushnell was ever identified as exhibiting extremist views or behaviors.

Cotton’s agitation to find Hamas supporters in uniform twists Bushnell’s political act, which Bushnell said was in support of the Palestinian people. But it also follows a longstanding urging by other members of Congress like Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee and former president pro tempore of the Senate — for the military to pursue some kind of similar treatment for leftists.

While studies show that support for extremism is similar or even lower among veterans than the general population, extremism in the active-duty military has become an obsession of the Washington brass since January 6. Soon after taking office, new secretary of defense Austin, a retired Army general, directed the military to conduct an all-hands “stand down” to address extremism in the ranks, commissioning a number of panels and studies to evaluate white nationalism and neo-Nazi support among service members.

Outside of the Defense Department, the FBI is responsible for domestic counterterrorism. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began last October, it has been focused on any foreign blowback on the United States.

“In a year when the [foreign] terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans inside the United States to a whole ‘nother level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told cadets at West Point on Monday. “We cannot — and do not — discount the possibility that Hamas or another foreign terrorist organization may exploit the current conflict to conduct attacks here, on our own soil,” Wray told Congress right after the Gaza war began.

Will Bushnell’s death, and congressional pressure, open the door to build some speculative link between domestic supporters of Palestine and the bureau’s foreign-oriented anti-Hamas work?

Though Bushnell’s suicide was intended to demonstrate his anguish over the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he also embraced anarchism, or at least a present-day articulation of anarchism that is a general rejection of established authority. Bushnell’s posts on Reddit and other social media platforms before his death reflected this embrace of anarchism, and he chose the anarchist symbol as his profile picture for the Twitch account he used to livestream his self-immolation. His Facebook page also followed and liked pages for several anarchist groups. The anarchist collective CrimethInc. also said in a blog post that Bushnell had emailed the group shortly before his death.

Bushnell was also a community activist in San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed. The Democratic Socialists of America San Antonio chapter issued a statement expressing solidarity with Bushnell and mentioning his work with them on homelessness. “He was an anarchist,” a San Antonio DSA member who interacted with Bushnell told The Intercept, asking that their name not be used. “He had a good nose for recognizing coercive / unhealthy organizing structures and practices; and was very intentional about his relationships with other people.”

Anarchism and the FBI

Since 2019, the FBI has used five “threat categories” to describe domestic terrorism: Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism (AGAAVE), Animal Rights or Environmental Violent Extremism, Abortion-Related Violent Extremism, and “All Other Domestic Terrorism Threats,” which is defined as “furtherance of political and/or social agendas which are not otherwise exclusively defined under one of the other threat categories.”

The AGAAVE threat, the FBI says, “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists.” FBI data reveals that 31 percent of its investigations relate to AGAAVEs and 60 percent of all investigations include cases categorized as AGAAVE and “civil unrest.” Most of that focus since January 6 has been on groups that participated in the protests at the Capitol and supporters of Donald Trump.

Behind the scenes though, according to congressional testimony reported here for the first time, the FBI maintains a program specifically for combating anarchists, called the Anarchist Extremism Program. In Senate testimony, the FBI says that it had increased its targeting of anarchist “violent extremists” across the country by using both human and technical sources to spy on them. Since the nationwide protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the bureau has tasked field offices to tap confidential informants to develop better intelligence about anarchists. In 2021, the FBI more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload; and Wray told Congress that arrests of what the bureau calls “anarchist violent extremists” were more numerous in 2020-2021 (the months around January 6) than in the three previous years combined.

An internal FBI threat advisory obtained by The Intercept defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as individuals “who consider capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,” and “oppose economic globalization; political, economic, and social hierarchies based on class, religion, race, gender, or private ownership of capital; and external forms of authority represented by centralized government, the military, and law enforcement.”

By the FBI’s definition, little of this applies to Bushnell’s own articulation of his political views, despite the anarchist label. But the airman’s protest fulfills the push by many Republicans and conservatives to get the FBI to equally focus on leftists. In a 2021 hearing, Grassley pushed for more investigations of those on the left, alluding to the bureau’s anarchist extremism program. 

“Former Attorney General Barr stated that the FBI has robust programs for white supremacy and militia extremism, but a significantly weaker anarchist extremism program,” Grassley said to Wray. “How do you plan to make your left-wing anarchist extremism program as robust as your white supremacy and malicious extremism program?”

At a press briefing last Thursday that discussed Bushnell’s ties to anarchism, the Pentagon appeared to hint that his death might be considered an act of extremism.

“A review of Aaron Bushnell’s social media account indicates that he has some pretty strong anarchist views,” a reporter asked. “Under the Pentagon’s definition of extremists, would he fall under that?” 

“I do think it’s fair to say that suicide by self immolation is an extreme act,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder replied, promising a “full investigation.”