Legitimate Protest and the Construction of "Reason" w/ Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu (02/29/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu about attempts to dismiss Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation as mental illness, and why settler colonialism relies so heavily on drawing lines between madness and “reason.”
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Welcome to the Death Panel. We couldn't do any of the work that we do without the support of our patrons. So patrons, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making this project possible. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. As a thank you, becoming a patron gets you access to our second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 0:01
There is this level of like mythology surrounding these types of actions. And I think people want to always draw a direct line back to, okay, well, we can explain this by mental illness, because if it was really what he said, then why isn't everyone doing it, right? Like, if we can't say that there's something wrong with him, then we have to say what is wrong with us?
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:50
Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, as always, we deeply appreciate your support. This is an entirely independent project and we couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. We do two shows a week -- the public episode on Thursday like this one, and a second weekly bonus episode that comes out every Monday as a special thank you to our patrons. So if you'd like to support the show, get access to those bonus episodes, and the entire back catalogue of bonus episodes: patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. So I'm really honored to be joined today by our guest, Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu. Stefanie is a disability justice organizer, an educator, a peer supporter, writer and conflict intervention facilitator. They're the founding director of Project LETS and their work focuses on building non-carceral, peer led mental health care, independent of the state, providing political education, developing new knowledge and language around mental distress, reframing misconceptions about Madness, and organizing against and intervening in systems that harm marginalized and oppressed disabled and Mad individuals. I have immense respect for Stefanie's work, and I'm so glad to finally have them on the show. Stefanie, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so nice to have you here today.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 2:21
Thank you so much, Beatrice. Really great to be in conversation with you, and deep love and respect for your work as well.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:28
I'm really glad that you can join me today. I know that long-time listeners will have heard me shout out your work for years now. And I really appreciate you coming on in particular today because today we're going to talk through Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation this past Sunday outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC and more so than that, actually really the kind of resulting discourse that has become so entangled in the ways that we think and talk about Madness, protest, suicide, psychiatric pathology, so-called self harm, mental distress, reason, crisis support, etc., and how this is all also weaponized by the settler colonial apparatus to erase via the kind of classic twin pathways of suppression and pathologization, to minimize, delegitimize and look away from acts of protests like this, or for example, the other recent self-immolations, like the unknown woman in Atlanta, who is still in critical condition and unidentified to the public, who self-immolated on December 1st outside of the Israeli consulate to protest Palestinian genocide, Wynn Bruce in 2022, David Buckel in 2018, regarding climate, which of course, these are just four recent US examples. And this is a very ancient form of protest with a long history going back centuries, and also a particular point of cultural relevancy in the US related to the Vietnam War. So we're going to wade through some of these entanglements today, but really, what we're going to talk about is why this kind of pushes us to look closely at something that liberals, who are still really bought into the dead-end colonial charade, would really much rather no one look at too closely. And in many ways, today, our focus, again, is not so much on this as a form of protest, but on the discourses that have ensued, both what underlines the debates that have popped up, like the, was Bushnell mentally ill or not back and forth, or the quote, you know, this is impossible or dangerous to discuss in public canard. So we're gonna be addressing that today as well as what roles these discourses are playing and how this connects to the broader pathologization of resistance and the criminalization of mental illness and so on. So, ultimately, while this is a heavy topic that touches on, of course, death, protest, the weaponization of stigma by the state and media, as well as the weaponization of bodies against the state. It's all heavy, of course, but I think it's very important also to sit with this, to talk through the ways that many of these ideas that we're going to touch on today are also core to Mad liberation, and to try and find our way through it all. And I specifically really wanted you to come on, Stefanie, because I think a lot of the work that you've been directly engaged in for years now, in terms of reframing and pushing back on dominant conceptualizations of so-called self harm, suicidality, Madness, carceral sanism are not just helpful towards making sense of all this, but also towards making something of it as well. So before we dive into all of that, I think it's probably best to just start by contextualizing your work a bit for people who might not be familiar.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 5:40
Thank you so much, Beatrice, for laying that out. So much coming up for me, because it's such a deep web that we are collectively swimming in. And thinking for me, a lot about how I've come into some of this work, I was psychiatrized from a very young age, meaning really that this kind of narrative of psychiatry, this blanket of psychiatry was put on me as something that was meant to bring comfort or healing or as you just said, right, making something of this, right? I think psychiatry is and has always been a colonial tool of sensemaking that is a belief system. Psychiatry is a belief system. And I think when it has clung itself to clinical medicine, we have lost a bit of that collective knowledge and history, that actually psychiatry and this medicalized language that is imposed upon us is only one way of making sense of these experiences. So for myself, I really had the experience of being pathologized very young, and having this agency, and this ability to make my own narrative of myself and my bodymind taken away, and had life saving and sustaining interventions through being rooted in and connected to communities of and lineages of psychiatric survivors, so meaning people who identify ourselves as having literally survived the institution of psychiatry, or the harm, or the torture, or the experience of what happened to us inside of the system. Also, within communities and lineages of Mad liberation, as you mentioned, within disability justice, and really, though there are important nuances, and I'll say differences, and at times, tensions and disagreements between all of these various communities, for me, to get to the central core of agency and self-determination over the bodymind, over how we define our experiences, over what we find to be healing, over how we use our bodies as a form of communication or resistance. And for me, that was a big breaking out of the kind of chains of psychiatry into my own self-determined understandings of how I move through this world. And I also want to say that, for myself, identifying as a Mad person, or thinking about Madness, Mad liberation, that is really situated in a particular historical lineage and political lineage of people who were called Mad in a harmful and derogatory way, and having the capacity to reclaim that and locate the source of our distress externally. Some of us talk about, yes, we are Mad. Mad as in angry, Mad as in rageful, Mad as in we have gone crazy, because this world is on fire, and we feel it, and we see it. And so nothing that I offer about my experience, or these lineages, is to dismiss the reality that the clinical mental health system has also been a way of survival for so many under these systems that we navigate. For many of us, they're the only stories we've been told. And the lineages that I sit inside of are not to say that we can't have both or take tools from both, but that we honor the roots of psychiatry as a Euro-colonial system of oppression and harm that was not meant to treat or heal. But also, more importantly, is not something that is stable, and actually is very, very fluid and flexible, and has consistently tagged along with the status quo. And the status quo of so-called America is not one that necessarily has the greatest history, right? So that for me is a bit of my situation and context here. I think as well, I want to name that one of my first awakenings in this kind of area was around actually going to therapy, like begging for help, and being told that it couldn't be so bad because I was still working and "functioning," and going to school, and getting "good grades." And so this message being like you can suffer, but as long as you produce and as long as your physical being is still playing a specific role, then we can look past that. And your internal experience of suffering does not outweigh your "functioning" in the world. And that for me was a real pathway into a lot of what I think we will likely get into.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:14
I'm really appreciate the way you laid that all out, Stef. Long-time listeners of the show will know that this is like a really particularly important point to me about making sure to, when we're, in particular, talking about psychiatry, right, it can be really easy to see these discussions weaponized and sort of flattened of all of their important detail, right, like the kind of classic framework that sometimes you'll hear is that from a left perspective, everyone says that mental illness is imaginary and we're gonna blame it on capitalism. And you know, it kind of gets tied into this very like reductive argument either over like the best terminology, the right terminology, the right framework, right. But ultimately, what is much more interesting than talking through those things, and what we're very interested in on this show, is sort of what in terms of psychiatric pathology are we actually talking about, right? Are we talking about a sort of regime of diagnosis, or are we talking about the way that these things also function within the state, within the world, politically, medically, right? This is much more broad than sort of a simple declaration about the ontology of something. And ultimately, part of why I'm really excited to have you on today is, in particular, the work that you've done through Project LETS is really focused around political education. And I think that's key to almost what we're touching on today, because in some ways, you could say like, okay, right now, we sort of have this attempt in the media to suppress this act of protest, right. And part of that is happening through direct statements that are happening in the media, actions by the media, actions by politicians, people in positions of government, etc. But it's also happening on behalf of everyday people, and by everyday people in conversation, just online, etc., right. And part of what this big debate sort of has resulted in is almost a really, really complex entanglement with all of these ideas that we touch on when we're coming from this position of looking at psychiatry and empire in particular. And key to that is sort of understanding in some ways, like as you're saying, again, the really kind of important detail here, right. And so before we go further, I think we should just touch on also some of the specific words that we use that are also -- they're shared context between us, but they're not necessarily terms that everyone is familiar with. So you mentioned this sort of reclamation of madness as a framework, and that's something that we use often. And every time I mention it on the show, I have to make sure to explain it, because there are always people who are like, wait, what, what are you talking about, right? And long-time listeners have heard me explain this so many times now. So I was wondering, do you want to offer a sort of brief madness 101 for people? Because I think in sort of talking through psychiatric abolition, and in particular, the way that right now we're seeing this incredible increase in demands for loosening restrictions on involuntary commitment, we're seeing a intense pathologization of political action and political speech, right. And this is not specifically related to Bushnell's self-immolation. This is just something that's pre-existing. We've talked about it a lot on this show, in terms of involuntary commitment, AOT, laws that are basically sort of compelling treatment, and also in terms of laws that are changing the ways that, for example, police or EMS or social workers are interacting with folks who are unhoused, who are on the street, anything from Eric Adams' framework of sort of, let's identify on site who's mentally ill or you know, sort of shifting these ideas of danger to yourself or others as a kind of framework, to things happening in California, where you see the definition of gravely disabled being sort of shifted and expanded, you have Proposition 1 on the table there. So this is also part of this like much bigger sort of morass, that also is something that both of our work touches on. So you know, I think it would be helpful for us to also just make sure we're not leaving people behind by -- you know, the stakes can be so high for being misunderstood when you're doing this work. So it's always worth making sure that we've established some common ground. So like when we say Madness, in your words, sort of what do you feel like is the best way to explain that to someone who really doesn't have a lot of background on this.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 14:48
Thank you for this. And this is I think one of the biggest sticking points around trying to move towards a new or slightly different paradigm where we have these moments where we're reclaiming language, we're shifting language, and it doesn't land for everyone. Language is often, I think, dismissed as something that's maybe less important than the material side of things, but language creates and shapes our reality as well. And I think especially for people who have been psychiatrized, or given diagnoses, particularly those of us who've been given them against our will, right, allowing us to choose the word, even if it shifts over time, and I think one way to look at Mad is to look at what it is not referring to. And I think it's important to understand that when we take the word, mental illness, we are taking a word that is situated within this clinical, medical framing, that whether we agree with it or not, is rooting a "illness" inside of our bodyminds, that is oftentimes being referenced or referred to in biological terms and roots. That's the lineage. I'm not saying that I agree or disagree. That's that lineage. And most importantly, I think, for me, this language of Madness also is used not just as a way to say, hey, this thing is happening inside of my body mind, but it signifies a certain political identity, and an alignment with folks who are fighting against the web of carceral psychiatric institutions. For me, when I hear somebody say the word Mad, it signals this political lineage or this context around -- you know, it gives me information, right, about how somebody views their experience. Is this a person who maybe has a lens and an understanding of recognizing that within the context of clinical medicine, everything about Madness is coming from a deficit based lens, right? And we're talking about a system of medicine or health care that actually has the power to redefine people's realities, and teach us what thoughts or what emotions are right or correct, or which ones need to be erased or diminished or treated away. And there is a lot of power and history that many, many people and institutions have tried to erase and hide. And there is something to be said as well about the way the psychiatric survivor and Mad liberation movements have become like chopped up and broken. And when you look back at that, a piece of it is because our people get disappeared, they die young, we take our own lives. There's a whole range of reasons why. And that kind of willingness to look beyond just the what is living inside of us and situated in that political, historical context feels like such a sticking point. And I have a quote from Liat Ben-Moshe I wanted to share, who I know you've had on the show. This quote, "It sucks to have bodily and mental manifestations of these things we call mental illness. And sometimes the world tries to annihilate you. But Madness is site of lineage. It connects us to movements and histories of both confinement and resistance." So that is the historical part. And then, one other piece I'll just touch on is that Madness, I think, allows many of us to lean into this expansive way of recognizing that there are multiple ways of being and that there is language that comes along with madness, right. So something that might be called psychosis in the clinical mental health system, there is other language, like altered states or extreme states. So Madness itself is more than just a term but also holds and is a gateway to a paradigm of a lot of other language that Mad folks, psychiatric survivors have created and self defined to give us more embodied justice over the way we narrate our experiences.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:03
So beautifully put. I have very little I would ever want to add to that, but I so absolutely appreciate how you laid it out. And I think one thing I just want to add on to the end there, specifically for our purposes today, is also in terms of this historical lineage, an important third historical example to bring in is the very ancient lineage of madness and how it actually connects back to ideas about reason, mental clarity, and things like the Enlightenment. This is a word that started being used in the 14th century to describe a mental state that was irrational or producing headstrong behavior, right. So you have in the 14th century, this political association that is actually concurrent with shifts in the state as well and shifts in how the state sort of proceed -- how European states specifically perceived themselves in relation to the rest of the world, right, and what was reason, and where reason and enlightened reason was located, right, and who had access to that and who didn't. And so part of why I bring that up is because what we're really sort of talking about today is both the kind of weaponization of "mental illness" to undermine the effect or to modify the public's perception of Bushnell's mental state, or the mental state of anyone who engages in forms of protests that result in harm or death. And so when we're also talking about what's going on in the kind of discourse aftermath that's churning around, in which there's a lot of debate over Bushnell's mental state, and whether or not this is related or not to mental illness, and really what we're kind of trying to point to here, as you're saying, Stefanie, is that when we talk about this in terms of Madness, and the discourses around Madness, and these ideas that when we're saying Madness we're trying to tap into, right, which is this idea that there is an ability to designate between good, sound, reasoned people and people who are irrational. And what that sort of dividing line is, and has often been, has been oriented around politics and resistance for many, many centuries now. You have people being pathologized, again, in the 14th century for headstrong behavior. You have people being locked up in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia for their entire lives in the 1800s, for novel reading, politics and immoral life. These are like literally the designations and the descriptions of the reasons why these people were institutionalized for their whole lives. So we're talking about also a certification that has flexed over time, that has changed over time. The pathology has evolved, the language has shifted, as you said, Stefanie. And when we talk about Madness, we're talking about how despite all of these shifts and changes, right, this ability to designate who is being unreasonable, who is being unreasonably headstrong, who is a threat in the very embodiment of their protest, this has always been part of what the power of this designation has attempted to be able to divide between, right. And that's also part of what's going on here, when you see people rising to cite mental illness, right, saying, you know, the problem here is that this is a form of protest that is driven by a mental state in which someone lacks reason, and therefore this protest act is not legitimate, right. And that sort of translation is really what we're talking about when we talk about stigma of mental illness, and of psychiatric pathology, and of biopsychiatry in general. And so ultimately, what we're really sort of looking at today is also what is this ability to sort, what is this power of sorting, and the language that is imbued with it, that's both formal and medicalized within psychiatry and the institutions of psychiatric treatment and medical treatment, but is also informal, and something that is highly social and colloquial as well. What does this actually serve as a function socially and politically? And ultimately, what we see, even looking back to the 14th century, right, is that this ability to designate someone as lacking reason is part of the kind of core lifeblood of colonialism, from being able to designate resistance to colonial expansion of European states, right, as lacking reason, as the person having a differing view from the idea that the state does deserve to take this land, the monarchy does deserve to expand and occupy territories, right. So this is part of the very architecture of colonialism, of racial capitalism. And it's also the power of the state is really imbued in this idea of being able to designate, based on a kind of normative assessment of mental state, right, whether or not someone deserves, you know, to be locked up or not, and also whether or not someone's actions are "legitimate" or illegitimate.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 24:35
Like you can go ahead and keep talking, Beatrice, I'm here for it. All of that. Yeah. And just picking up from what you were just saying, even that, the level of who's competent, who isn't, thinking who's dangerous and who isn't. And all of these things, right, and the way that it connects as well to colonial histories as well as histories that have been weaponized particularly against Black and indigenous people, and thinking about levels of reason, usually coming along with danger and conceptions of safety. And these ideas of both ownership and what we see in public and what we don't see, and what we are willing to endure, but not have be known in a really public sphere. And these kind of competing histories of exactly what you're naming, of at any point in time, these things can become something that either justifies or takes away, or humanizes or dehumanizes. Because there also is a level that I think is interesting with Aaron Bushnell, because with white people, bringing mental illness in is typically in a mainstream media way used as a, oh, well, here's why they weren't necessarily fully responsible for their actions. And you see that like a bit here as well, just kind of in a different -- in a different way, in a different lens. Whereas the introduction of disability or mental illness for people of the global majority, for negatively racialized people is often the a-ha, it's the, we told you so, the justification of the demonization. Talila Lewis talks a lot about this, and incarceration and ableism go hand in hand. And TL talks about this as patho-criminalization, right, these massively intersecting ways of how we come to certain determinations about behavior and being. Thinking as well about this idea of, in the way it was laid out, thinking around the protest psychosis, Jonathan Metzl, right, in the 1960s, we see this, the justifications around like delusional anti-whiteness, right? And in Metzl's book, talking about this kind of like indoctrination from Malcolm X that was contributing to these delusional, rageful anti-white ideologies that were, essentially as Metzl argues, threatening the social order of white America, right. So thinking about the endless amount of examples around how resistance to a "social order of white America," as Jonathan Metzl said, and as so many folks say, in community, who are at the brunt of navigating all of these intersecting, dominant ideologies and systems of oppression know as well, that with all of the moving pieces of what's happening in so-called America right now, it is actually easier to -- "easier" to lock someone in a psychiatric institution than it is to go through the criminal legal system. There's a whole range of due process protections that just poof, vanish, don't exist. And I often refer to these psychiatric facilities and systems as black holes. Once people go in, if you don't know where someone went, or you weren't with them at the time, or they didn't -- they weren't able to communicate to you where they're going, you may not be able to find them again. And that's not an exaggeration. So we're seeing the ways in which the pathways towards being able to identify somebody as "mentally ill" are expanding and ever growing. And this is just yet one arm of that that has been utilized as a part of the colonial assault throughout history. One other point, just thinking about Renee Linklater's work in Decolonizing Trauma Work where she talks about on Turtle Island, indigenous folks who were incarcerated in the Hiawatha Insane Asylum, again, simply under the grounds of refusing to send their children to boarding school, refusing to cut their hair. And having that level of, exactly as you mentioned, this kind of who is sane under insane conditions, and what is extreme under extreme circumstances? And so yeah, a lot to -- a lot to sit with.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:51
Absolutely. And I really appreciated the way that you brought that in as well, because I think one of the things that's really important to touch on is also this debate that's happening, right, about mental state. This feeds into this much broader dynamic, and that's really at the core of what we're really trying to say today is that it was not surprising and absolutely telling that sort of as word got around about this, that the discussion quickly turned to mental state, because the role of psychiatric pathology politically, historically, policy wise, as you're saying, legally, regarding due process, right, is that this is a kind of magic trick in some ways that can be leveraged in order to weaponize "self harm," you know, what you might call revolutionary suicide, right? Like something as simple as a hunger strike even can be used to essentially trigger a legal -- an actual legal chain of events that strip someone of a ton of these so-called "rights," also, that I think a lot of people assume are there to protect them, right, if something goes wrong. And I think this is why it's a really important tool in the liberal arsenal, right. And it's because it kind of triggers this automatic distancing. And especially when you have the kind of open and visible example of, right, like a white military member, who's a cis man doing this, you know, one thing that we've seen emphasized is obviously using Aaron Bushnell's politics as an anarchist to distance him from the white able-bodied majority norm, that's sort of the pretend "citizen" at the heart of the American imaginary, right? But also, this is -- this is sort of how you're publicly disqualifying someone from the body politic, right, this is a public act of distancing, and looking away, and suppression, all at once. And part of what I hope we can sort of get to for people today is that when these debates arise, right, oftentimes, you'll see people go digging through someone's life, and pull a random detail off of social media or whatever remnants are available on the internet and say, a-ha, here, look, proof, this person is not mentally ill, right. And even in doing that, right, we are seeing so many people who are trying to work against this implicit delegitimization of this form of protest, right, and the attempts to suppress this and to suppress movements ranging from Palestinian solidarity to Stop Cop City to anti-police organizing that's going on, right. And in doing this kind of assertion, right, of mental fitness, of reason, of the "good subject," right, and the good mind, there's also this flip side of the coin, right, which is there's an implicit devaluation. And so part of why this is important to talk about, right, is that this kind of weaponization of pathology, right, is not always as formal as people think about it, right? It doesn't only exist in these specific legal medical pathways, it's also highly informal, and it can play out interpersonally. And this goes back to the point you made about language actually being really important in a material, political way, not just in a way of terminology, so to speak, or you know, etc. And so, I wonder if we could sort of talk about, for example, like, why is this sort of sticking as an image, right, relative to some of the other self-immolations that I mentioned, that have either been memory-holed, in the case of the climate ones - 2018, 2022, or the situation in Atlanta, where, you know, we still don't know this person's name. And part of sort of why that's happening is privacy rules and related to that, but it also didn't get the same coverage or attention. And people have been attributing that to like the live stream that Bushnell did, and what he said in the live stream, which was, "I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal." And I think that that last line, which really indicates also that this is a direct address, not necessarily to people in power, but to other people who are engaged or not in political struggle right now, and I think that partially this kind of direct address, and the fact that it's really made clear sort of who he's talking to, is terrifying to the state and to the status quo. But I think that there's also something at play in terms of the kind of like able-bodied norm, the sort of imaginary of the citizen, right, of the responsible, sane citizen, of the imaginary of the military at play. And I think that there's sort of something here in terms of why the intent to suppress this one in particular has been so rampant, and why this sort of discussion of mental state in particular has been something that has been a sort of consistent focus in the discourse after.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 34:29
You know, I think that there are a lot of intersecting pieces to what's happening in this moment. And the first one that you're naming is this directness, right, that I think is one of the powers of the great American lie, the great American delusion is that most people, or I won't say most, but I'll say a lot of people are willing to tolerate varying degrees of cognitive dissonance, right? And it is a moment of clarity. And connecting that as well with what you said earlier, I think something that's come up for me in this moment is thinking about -- comparing this moment of recognition and again, clarity, and speaking just very, very plainly, in comparison to what many people are -- well, I mean, what we're all witnessing, from the Israeli occupation, and seeing, if we're trying to be really nuanced about it, a moment where somebody who wears the uniform is breaking the third wall, right? And is like, I see it, I see this thing. And, you know, there's levels of this as well, where he is a white man, it was publicly recorded. And I think that there are many people who have given their bodies to liberation and for liberation, who -- including right now in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, who will never be known in the way that he will be known, or is known now, because of all of these intersecting pieces that we're attempting to like pull apart and name, and all the ones that we can't do justice to. So I can't say that I exactly know why. But I can say that, as a person watching it, there was a level of calmness, of acceptance in at least what I perceived. And I think that there -- I think you said this a bit earlier, right, that we often -- people -- or you said this in the way of, right, like people will go digging around and look for something like on social media, like for that a-ha moment, like a way to like write the narrative for someone, right? Like, I would say that it is a gift to receive so much clarity from someone around why they chose to engage in a certain act of protest. And we can -- you know, there are people who are talking about this as "glamorizing suicide." So, I think the word can be used, but it's also important to say that he was very clear that this was a protest. So deferring to that language is very important. But usually, right, there is this level of like mythology surrounding these types of actions, that we don't know. And I think people want to always draw a direct line back to okay, well, we can explain this by mental illness, because if it was really what he said, then why isn't everyone doing it, right? Like, if we can't say that there's something wrong with him, then we have to say what is wrong with us, right? We have to -- like, there is this level of like if we're looking in this binary thinking of like, if what he said is true, then what is happening to all of the people who are able to look on and are not feeling -- are not feeling that. And I think there's a lot of different types of suicidality, if we're looking at -- you know, because I want to speak a little bit just to the folks who are like, oh, the glamorizing of suicide, right? That there are different ways of placing that narrative. There are people who are very clear, that they kill themselves because they are suffering extreme poverty. There are people who kill themselves because they're in chronic pain, because they can't afford their health care. There are people who are navigating spiritual emergencies or spiritual crises, people have suffered at the hands of colonial violence, people who other people would label that as suicide, and someone else calls it something different. And so that level of, he gave it to us clearly and I'm gonna -- I'm going to honor that, right? That's where it starts and stops for me, because there is this constant desire to take away the agency and the choices that people make. And I think there's also another level of this that we have not really gotten into of like, what if he was mentally ill, right? Like what did he like did, right, have all these "diagnoses," or identify that way? Like, does that make his choice to protest in this way less legitimate or less real? Or would people in more radical communities take away from that and question that choice? And those are really important things to consider, that it's not like, oh, like, he's not mentally ill, so this thing was okay, because you can also like be mentally ill and use your body to protest or do things that other people say that you can't because you're incompetent, right? That's the core of what we're kind of trying to like sift through.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:35
Hell yeah, absolutely. And I so, so appreciate the precise way that you brought that in, right, because this is exactly the issue. I think back to some of the work that I've done on the Socialist Patients' Collective, for example, on SPK. And this is a group that's interesting to look at from the perspective of looking at psychiatric liberation because it was happening in this very specific research environment, the kind of home, the hotbed of biopsychiatry itself, which is Heidelberg University, where you have figures like Dr. Kraepelin and Alzheimer coming up with these dramatic, revolutionary shifts in psychopathology, right, that have completely influenced and changed all of psychiatric medicine. And this is a moment of psychiatry going from something that was in a crisis of legitimacy to step into its current position in medicalized hegemony. This is the birth of neurology, right? Like this is a very important context. And what they specifically did is they wanted control over some of the research that was going on on themselves, and they demanded that. And it's very interesting to sort of see how this happens, this resistance happens within a university. Part of the fight is over funding to be used on their own autonomous, peer led work and things like that. And it does work, and then it's taken away by the university and the state, they're pathologized, criminalized, locked up in jail using a law intended to be able to take Nazis off of the street during de-Nazification in order to sort of avoid due process and hold someone without charges on suspicion of essentially being part of a "terrorist" group. So you have also these connections to the pathologization of Palestinian resistance to British colonial rule, and to the creation of the State of Israel that are all tied up in these laws as well. And the thing that's so interesting is that when you see some of these doctors from within the university, who are part of this fight to repress and criminalize SPK, when you look at their writing, I'm thinking of Horst Richter, in particular, you get these statements from physicians that are fascinating, right, where they're like, you know what, this is ridiculous, patients cannot be part of a revolution, they cannot be political, right? Like this is malpractice, right, for doctors even -- you know, the one doctor involved even enabling this and doing this with his medical students, right? This is, this is literally bad for their health, right? This is not conducive to their recovery, in that moment, is so telling, right? And sort of points to even what is going on in terms of why this even became a debate, right? And what is at stake in having the debate and what is being reinforced in just the mere having of the debate, right? We're looking back at this moment of really kind of, as you're saying, Stefanie, like autonomy is at stake, right. And it reveals actually how our conceptualization of autonomy is based on this distancing from a "position of mental illness," right? It's in a kind of negative declaration of competency, not in saying, I am competent, and therefore a worthy human being or whatever. But it's in saying, you know, I'm not sick, right. And this is a really sort of important part of what's going on here as well is that this is also not necessarily about what anyone's reasoning is, right? It's about the fact that the debate is happening at all. And really, what is the sort of legitimate/illegitimate, sane/insane, rational/un-rational, pro or anti-Empire, right, what does this logic of zero sum binaries actually bring us towards in terms of understanding the society that we're in? Why, for example, despite protests and change and frustration over like the conditions of repression and criminalization does nothing ever change in the US, right? And sort of it breaks up this mythology, right, that there is this kind of body of national interest and that everyone has equal membership in the body politic, and then that government is proportionally representing the views of the people, right? And this is why this is a debate that's much easier to have, right? Is this person mentally ill or not? Like, are they a legitimate person or not? Then looking at what's actually underneath that, which is, is this state who is financing, supporting, enabling, protecting the right of one state to genocide in the name of its colonial goals, like is this state legitimate or not, is the conversation that folks who engage in any type of protests like this are trying to point to, right. And ultimately, the decision is less important in some ways than what this triggers in terms of the response from Empire, right, which is we see this immediate sort of self protective pathologization of the individual, the debate over the pathology, right. And then what that tells us is not just something about how we perceive personhood, but how Empire actually functions, justifies itself, and parasitically uses us to sustain its reproduction.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 45:07
Oof. Uh-huh, yes. I am sitting with the last thing you just said here, of the ways that Empire justifies itself. Because there's an argument to be made around the fact that we're all, in one way or another, being driven Mad. And I think that we -- if we're in the so-called US, right, living in a "country" that's actively gaslighting us every day, you know, what happens to a person when they live in these perpetual, ongoing conditions where what they know to be true, like deeply in their core, is denied, and rejected, and dismissed, and ignored, and pathologized repeatedly, by individuals, by communities, by systems. Like where do we go, except in half? What choice are we left with, except to split? Like what better psychological defense mechanism than to go Mad, like to not have to navigate and negotiate this world anymore? So we can also view Madness as an act of radical resistance, right, as an absolute unwillingness to adopt to the lie. And that is something that is -- you know, I don't think there's any greater threat to the social order than people who are not just willing or able to see those through lines, but actually have the capacity or the willingness to act on that. And knowing that, for me, I think, some of our greatest healers, revolutionaries, liberatory workers, have been people who have refused to live in that lie, and whatever way that that comes out, through their bodyminds. And that is a very, very dangerous thing, and one of the reasons why resistance falls into the arms of the carceral state in this way. It's one of the reasons why we're seeing poets being targeted by the Israeli occupation, because the hope that comes out of possibility, out of language, out of retelling a story in a way that cuts to the core and lets us see the truth. In a couple of lines, you can present an argument that gets to the heart of the rot of the Israeli state. And so thinking about -- about who becomes a target, and what that level of danger looks like. And I think that the US Empire is acutely aware of the message that Aaron Bushnell was communicating, and what it signaled for him to be wearing the uniform, where he was, the resolve and again, calmness that I perceived. I think all of that is frightening, because it didn't look like it was -- and you know, again, this is my perception, from what I witnessed, it didn't look like it was a difficult -- it was difficult. He communicated, from my perception, that what would have been more difficult was to continue moving in the way that he was, and trying to figure out how to align himself with the absolute understanding of what he communicated, that the Palestinians are enduring things far more extreme every single day. And if you accept that reality, then you accept that what -- the act of protest that you're about to engage in, as he said himself, is not so extreme at all. And you know, that argument that he laid out in those very few moments, I think, is triggering such a moment of frenzy of like, how do we clean this up? Because it was just very direct in that way. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:52
Absolutely. Well, I mean, it shows, I think the importance also of pathology towards sort of casting all of these modes of suppression, questions of legitimacy, on resistance in general. And part of it sort of hinges on the idea that, in some way, shape or form, that these attestations are not genuine, because they're associated with a "altered state." And I mean, this is something that's leveraged against Mad people all the time in terms of, you know, there's even whole pathologies, to explain this and whole aspects of diagnostic regimes that recognize the refusal of, for example, the psychiatrist's interpretation of the patient's "disease," you know, like that the refusal of that interpretation and that non-consensual naming is in and of itself, proof of the pathology, right? And this is -- this is a huge part of sort of how, again, we construct these modes of being able to theoretically parse through the population and determine whose protest, whose speech is "legitimate". And just to sort of point to how absolutely illegitimate that process of sorting is and how arbitrary it is, and all of the sort of things that it's actually tied up in, beyond the truth that it pretends to be tied up in, which is some sort of like empirical, final word on behavior, personality and humanness, right, which is -- you know, it can sound, it can sort of sound the alarm for something as simple as, for example, the sort of question coming up at all, for someone in a debate, right, can clue you in to how someone thinks about Madness, but also how someone thinks about disability and what someone perceives as qualifying or disqualifying someone as a legitimate human being, or as having legitimate speech. And so, you know, it's part of a much bigger piece of the puzzle than even just this one aspect. And in the same way, more than just relating to this one specific act of protest or type of with regard to self-immolation, right, we've talked about the concept of self-harm a little bit and touched on it, which is like a word in and of itself that is incredibly sort of problematic. And also, you know, beyond protest that involves "self-harm," right, if this is also part of a sort of process of pathologizing all resistance, all protests relating to Palestine, as again, sort of being subject to the same regime of stigma that's translated through the kind of popular understanding of what even a debate around psychopathology indicates to people.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 51:46
Yeah, so much of -- so much of what I think about in this realm of -- and I'll say, I use -- I tend to use language of self injury, the harm, level of harm, right, being something that has been a point of so much contention around what that means and looks like, according to who, standing in whose shoes, and like having injury maybe more as that kind of anchor to signaling that there's something happening to the body that could be injurious. And thinking about going back to what I brought up in the beginning, of this level of like going to therapy and basically being told, like, oh, it's okay if you're miserable as long as you like keep going to school, right? And I think that's -- tying that as well, with again, this level of cognitive dissonance that we are living inside of, that there are so many forms of self injury that are more socially acceptable than others. We could point to alcohol, tobacco use, burnout culture, like pushing yourself to the ultimate limits of -- thinking about the dynamics of our pace of work, etc., etc. There are ways in which what we call mania, or like recreational use of stimulants is like directly and non-directly praised when it serves capitalism, or -- and then we have the more graphic, visible, or violent forms -- you know, "violent" forms of self injury, thinking more of like a person like banging their head into a wall, or hunger strikes, or people who utilize tools against their own bodies. These are things that tend to trigger fear and discomfort in other people, who then have a really strong desire to control or eliminate those behaviors. So for me, it's really important to name - it's not usually about what somebody is doing, it's about the fact that they're doing it in such a way that other people are forced to bear witness to it, right, and what that looks like, you know, not always, but there is this kind of level of how that shows up. And I was thinking about this as well in the context of MAID, right, arguments around MAID, and how all of a sudden, somebody who was suicidal in one context and who could be locked up for that, on the other hand, is now being offered, you know, do you want to pursue MAID? Do you want the state to end your life? And that's another very nuanced argument, but the kind of bottom lining of it around that -- that at any moment, right, we can decide that something is unacceptable and needs to be forcibly treated. And if you kind of hold these tensions with each other, we can understand that we're not actually invested in that person's care or well-being, we're invested in the profit underlying it, and the threat to the economic stability of whatever system people are inside of. So, you're talking about hunger strikes, you know, hunger strikes in prisons, in psychiatric institutions, where people will refuse to eat, sleep, participate in programs, going to classes. It is a moment in which a person -- and I participated in a hunger strike when I was incarcerated in a psychiatric facility, and thinking about this moment of like, no, no, no, like, A) you will witness this and B) it is such a red flag of we are at the most severe point, yes, we are doing the thing that literally is what our bodies just naturally ask for and require, going against those very, very basic instincts of keeping ourselves alive, like holding your breath, right. And that should signal something really important. And also, it does have us contending with this question of agency. And if you are, again, in a position where you're thinking about or coming at all of this from a lens of like, constantly assessing if somebody is competent or incompetent. And if you decide they're incompetent, you're ready to like, take them out and take over, as you said, this like total level of autonomy, -- or authority, excuse me -- this total level of authority that comes if you're diagnosed in a certain way or determined to be incompetent in a certain way. Well, that would be really important to look at. There are other parts where I think people talk about that they're concerned about the people who are engaging in these acts of protests. But I think that they are really concerned about the disruption, right, to the social order, and what it looks like, and what it -- what it means to not meet the demands of those people who are willing to engage in such a "extreme" act, and what it says, what it signals. So, for me, looking at anything that we could call self injury, as a form of communication, like what is this communicating? What is this -- what is the message that's trying to be sent? There has never been, in my personal life or work, I've never met or worked with somebody who is experiencing a crisis or engaging in self injury or anything, where I'm like, I don't understand that, right? If I don't understand it in the moment, it takes a little bit of digging, or there's some context that I don't have, but the ability for anyone to believe that they could single-handedly possess the power to declare someone sane or insane, competent or incompetent, is personally beyond me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 57:19
So well said. And I mean, I think, you know, there's a kind of easy tell also when you see people claim that this is not just like extreme, but like performative, for example, right? That there's a similar function going on of there just being a sort of desire to look away, to not have that addressed. And part of it is that it's really kind of asking you to look into -- like behind the curtain of Empire, so to speak, and in a way that's really uncomfortable and pushes people, I think, to sort of question what violence begets their own day-to-day comfort, and sort of what they don't see, right? And part of what I'd love for us to touch on for a second, if you are up for it and feel like it's appropriate, is that recently you were working with students at Brown, who were engaged in a hunger strike, right, and this is something that is, again, like, physically taxing, and should always demand our full support. And that's not always what folks encounter when they engage in this, right. And part of what I'd love for us to get into for a second is sort of like how part of what is at issue and sort of what the real centrality of even the desire to pathologize movements and political protest, for example, kind of gets to the core, again, of this fundamental issue of disrupting normality, not just in terms of like the status quo, but challenging the dominant liberal perception of normal, "good protest" behavior, the kind of good protestor/bad protestor binary, that's also something that we encounter in this space.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 58:58
Yeah, it's such an interesting, interesting question, right? What's the correct way to disrupt the things that are swallowing you whole? You know, I think one thing I'm thinking about is in addition to the pathologization of the behaviors that disrupt the state, and this is one that does as well, but maybe less directly in the way we think about it, that the clinical mental health system is rooted in this, right, the individualist response and belief system, so that the only or very likely, very usually, the only behaviors or actions that are considered in the realm of "normal," are ones that tend to prioritize and benefit the self, or a very small nuclear group of people over the collective. And there are ways in which that directly comes into play when you are looking at something like a hunger strike, where you might have folks who are -- why would you do this to yourself, right? Like talking people out of that, because they're hyperfocusing on the impact that is located literally just inside of the person that is like right in front of you, right. And I think there are a lot of people who come from life worlds that are not rooted in that way. And so it is much easier for a person to engage in an act like a hunger strike, for example, because the thinking and the embodiment is already more collective. It just makes sense. And maybe that is also a reason why the actions of Aaron Bushnell are so jarring to people, because he was very, very clear, again, that it was this level of like feeling outside of the self, right, he was engaging in this thing that very obviously did not benefit his individual being in that moment, while he is on fire, right? And holding what that means and what that looks like. And that is such a threat to every order that would say, you know what, even if this thing is hurting me and harming me, I do it because I see bigger than myself. And if we are really rooted in that, then that is the greatest threat to capitalism, to white supremacy, to fascism. That level of collectivity, that is the root of the root of what we want to iron and erase out of people, almost like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for like you once cared about people, right? Like there is this level of we need that, in order for the Empire to thrive, we need people to not feel anything. You can't possibly feel in your body and engage in this way, right. And I think that's another reason why like a hunger strike, for example, can be really powerful or really disturbing, because it forces you to look at people and be like, I know that you are starving for this reason, right? And there's this quote that I've been turning to a lot that I want to bring in and that feels really resonant, from bell hooks, in All About Love, where she writes, "No wonder that we are collectively unable to confront the significance of grief. Just as the dying are often carted off so that the process of dying will be witnessed by only a select few, grieving individuals are encouraged to let themselves go only in private, in appropriate settings away from the rest of us. Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in a culture that offers a quick fix for any pain. Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs of their anguished spirits." And I felt this way when I was at Brown, doing -- I was doing anti-carceral mental health support for and with the protesters. And watching a student standing in front of a group of people screaming, and the pain and the rage, and then like watching other people just like walking by, because they just bought a sandwich and they're just going to like their next place, and like not even seemingly fazed. That dichotomy is I think another purpose of -- you know, and if people want to call a hunger strike a performance, then I can agree with it in the way that like we are all -- we're all performing, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:20
Yeah, re: Goffman.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 1:03:22
Yeah, right, come on. [Beatrice and Stefanie laughing] Exactly. Like, you know, what is a performance if not standing up, using your bodymind in a way to communicate a message? And I think that we are at a time where people are being called, their spirits, their ancestors, their people are calling all of us to use every capacity that we have to tell the truth. And if that means that for some of us, it is sitting down and using our bodies and not eating, then let's see what kind of disruption stems from that. What does it trigger in people? What does it teach us about each other, or what is possible? Because in that moment of this protest, and I've been seeing this tweet going around, like, oh, if people had Twitter during the Irish hunger strikes, they'd be saying that they were glamorizing eating disorders. And I was like, yes, like I actually -- you know, we did navigate that. And it was this moment of like genuinely wanting to ask this question and have this level of like, okay, what is -- what is the aspect of what's triggering here? Because is it that -- it's like we're seeing it, that we know that's happening now in front of us? Because is it -- should it not also be triggering that there's 2 million people starving, right, just because we can't see it, or it's not in front of us, right? And this way, I think, again, that if we are rooted in the intention of what these actions mean, we would never even be having conversations around glamorizing suicide or eating disorders, because we are talking about a particular communication. And if we miss that message, then the whole thing is just up in flames. So it's very important that we look for and honor the intentions and the root of what is happening and situate it. And it's not to say that we can't feel, or we shouldn't be triggered by these things. I think there is a lot to say on that. But there is a looking and a feeling that needs to happen for so many of us to actually sit with the weight of what is happening in our names, especially if we are part of or living in the Imperial core.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:25
Absolutely. One of the things that I think often comes up as a question when I'll speak to people on this, particularly even just the very simple like binary of good protestor/bad protester, right? Like we're talking very basic here. One of the real big push backs I always encounter is like, well, okay, if good protestor/bad protestor kind of takes us away from the message and engages in all these sort of carceral logics and has all these sort of effects, and gets us into the realm of psychopathology, right, like why are there not these sort of alternative ways of understanding it? Like, why does it seem de facto though that the sort of humanity is stripped regardless, right? And it's a -- I think it's a very hollow challenge, but it's one that I encounter all the time. And so I wanted to sort of take a second to really specifically push back on it. And part of what I think is also at play here, right, is this kind of, as you're saying, there's a very important distancing, and that this is fundamentally about what shakes the core of Imperial foundations and what doesn't, and sort of what effects are produced politically from each of those things. And part of what I want to bring in here is a 2003 essay by the anthropologist Ghassan Hage, called "Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm": Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia. And so in this essay, he talks about what he calls the condemnation imperative, and the kind of significant mode of censorship that that actually operates as. And that's one of the things that I think we're also up against here and hoping to kind of like name today for people and maybe offer language to a vibe that we've all encountered, right, and haven't necessarily been able to stop and think about or talk about in public. And that's for a reason. Sometimes that's because there's this kind of weaponization of discourses around even mentioning suicide, that mention and discussion of this, right, is glorification, it reproduces harm, social contagion, right? There's all these ways of formal and informal censorship. And one of those ways is this kind of mode of censorship that shuts down sort of sociological explanations for these things, right, that point us to the political, that point us away from behavioral pathology and from the individual. And one thing he says in this essay is, you know, there's clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings. And so, part of it is that there's a mode, right, of this condemnation imperative, of the total condemnation, and this is partially just sort of like a mode of communication, right, that's the standard, that's the norm. But beyond the kind of pros and cons of the political risk of humanizing suicide bombers, for example, or even trying to put yourself in the position where you could understand where someone's coming from, if they're making that decision, enough to receive their message, right, as you're sort of pointing to here, he talks about the kind of reactions that he received in the university, in lectures, just trying to -- you know, amongst his colleagues, just trying to talk about these kinds of sociological contexts, the anthropological context of suicide bombings and why these decisions are made and sort of what the broader message is, right. And the responses that he received largely were folks saying, I wasn't very comfortable during some parts of your lecture. "You've made it as if suicide bombers are ordinary human beings." And so this is a point he's kind of stuck on. And in this essay, he talks through a number of these ideas, and includes this really important quote, which is why I'm setting this all up, that touches on and I think so succinctly addresses the American Imperial hypocrisy that we're trying to touch on today. And so I just wanted to sort of read that and bring that in. Hage writes, “While on fieldwork, (working on the unrelated issue of transnational migration) in a Shi'a village in South Lebanon, a village studded with photos of young men who died fighting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, I heard the same argument--expressed in stronger terms--from one of my informants, an educated man and a member of Hizb'allah”:
Ali: The Americans pretend not to understand the suicide bombers and consider them evil. But I'm sure they do. As usual, they are hypocrites. What is so strange about saying: "I am not going to let you rob me of all my humanity and all my will?" What is so strange about saying: "I'd rather kill you on my own terms and kill myself with you rather than be led to my death like a sheep on your own terms?" I know that the Americans fully understand this because this is exactly what they were celebrating about the guy who downed the Philadelphia flight on September 11, the one where the hijackers failed to hit their target. Isn't that exactly what he must have said when he decided to kill himself and everyone else by bringing the plane down? Didn't he say to those hijacking him, "I'd rather kill you on my own terms and kill myself with you rather than be led to my death like a sheep on your own terms?" They made a hero out of him. The only hero of September 11. They are hypocrites, the Americans. They know as much as we do that as a human being we all have the capacity to rush enthusiastically to our death if it means dying as a dignified being."
And he writes that,
"Despite its convenient "forgetting" of the more unsavory aspects of suicide bombing that were not a part of the "suicide crashing" of the Philadelphia plane, this interpretation can be seen as driven by a desire to establish a "common humanity." This view stands in opposition to the condemning attitude that wants to deny such a common humanity. Emanating from a kind of warring disposition toward the suicide bombers, those who can only condemn the suicide bombers end up sharing with them, at a very general level, the same warring logic. After all, the negation of a common humanity, in its more dramatic form as a vision of an abstract dehumanized other (where children are not perceived in their children-ness, mothers [not] in their motherliness) is of course inherent to the practice of the [Palestinian] suicide bomber. Rather than losing it ourselves as we rush into condemnation, those of us driven by the ethics of social explanation will always want to ask, "What kind of social conditions must avail and what kind of history must a people have internalized to make them lose this capacity of seeing the other in his or her humanness?" This is not an easy question to ask in the West today, because the West itself is rapidly losing whatever capacity it had to see the other in his or her humanness."
So I know this is heavy. And I know this is a lot, in some ways, but I do think it's a really important anecdote that Hage has in this paper of his from 2003, again, Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm is what it's called. And, you know, ultimately, I think this speaks to, again, what are the stories that we're telling ourselves? What is the narrative of Empire that is imposed on us and sort of, is it on us to accept this? And it's absolutely not. And this is partially what I hope folks can take away from this, right, is that what we're talking about here is ultimately not just about freedom, autonomy, agency, pathology, right? Like we're talking about really sort of what is at the core, what are the core values that we are up against and participate in every day, right? And when we stop and look at the liberal state that we live in, and, you know, the other liberal states that are also funding this and even beyond the direct relationship to the genocide in Palestine, when we talk about the broader relationship of racial capitalism and extraction from the Global South, right, into conceptualizing the sort of nice calm, "normal" life in America or Canada or the UK or Australia where Hage's work is located, we're talking about an extreme distancing, right, and a refusal to understand martyrdom also. And I think one thing I want to just name is what Bushnell was trying to draw attention to, which is that upwards of 2 million people are under deliberately death-making conditions, right? That every aspect of our lives and our survival as people who live in the Imperial core contributes to that. And I think the thing that Rachel Corrie said, who was murdered in Rafah by the IOF in the early 2000s, they ran her over with a bulldozer, right? She was an American, in Palestine. And so many folks right now are pinned down in Rafah, in southern Gaza. What we're really sort of talking about here, right, is that it doesn't matter whether it's sane or insane, right, to resist this with your every being. What matters is that that is what is before us right now. And there are aspects of the liberal state that will refuse to sort of recognize the problem. And it might not be through the "traditional channels," right, that we're going to achieve anything but it's like ultimately, we're in a position right now where I think all Aaron really wanted to do was to really most importantly, not speak to Biden, right, but speak to everybody right now, engaged or not in resistance, right, to call people to do whatever they have in their capacity, right, to support Palestinian liberation and self determination and to stop what's going on.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 1:15:13
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:14
Yeah. I just wanted to bring it in, because I think what Hage is pointing to, what Ali sort of names here, right, in heroicism, in narrative building, right, part of what ultimately is going on is that Madness as a label is used to indicate that you can look away and ignore that story that that person is trying to tell.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 1:15:37
Yeah. Oh, I appreciate that. That has me thinking so much about the dignity of risk. And I think about that, in this context, almost in a way of like the dignity of violence, right? Like, where, exactly as Hage is talking about, this duel, that dissonance of, you know, it's only okay when we do it. And I think that -- I think right now is a moment where many people are seeing, you know, like the Wizard of Oz taking off the colonial projection, like seeing that, well, it's only okay if we do it. Well, no, like, we're seeing that now, right? And there is a larger collective unwillingness to accept that and to say, well, what makes your resistance and your appreciation of violence, how does that just disappear when other people are utilizing that tool? You know, so we don't have to like dig or look so hard to see that every day. We're embedded and surrounded by a nation that actually does know very, very well, and clearly, that violence is accepted. I mean, how many times have we heard the argument of Israel and self-defense and etc., etc., and like that we are very able to tolerate violence being used as a tool, just only if it's directed at who we want it to be directed at. And if we're unwilling to sit with that, and unwilling to break down the ways in which certain people move into territory of being labeled a terrorist and other people are given medals, right? Thinking about the military industrial complex, and our criminal legal system, it's like, you know, I can go to jail if I kill someone, but if I kill someone for the US government, then I won't go to jail, I'll get a medal. And just wanting to bring in as well, this idea of suicide as not something that one person like does. I learned that coming from Vikki Reynolds, in her essay, Hate Kills: A social justice response to “suicide,” where she says, suicide is not something that happens to one person. It's not something that one person does. Nobody simply kills themselves. Events occur in context. And because we live in a society that has not delivered on the promises of social justice, which we are well qualified and able to deliver, we have to structure into our analysis of a person's death the context of social injustice in which they lived. And I think that's exactly what Hage is asking us to do. And like one of our, yeah, greatest tasks at hand.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:18:12
So, so important. And I think that's a really good place to end on. Unless there's any final thoughts you wanted to share? Stefanie, I so appreciate this. This, this conversation has been really wonderful. And it has been refreshing after, you know, the last couple of days of sort of discussion after what happened this weekend. And I just really, really appreciate everything that we've gotten into today.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 1:18:38
Thank you, Beatrice. It's been such a gift to share space with you in this way. I think one thing that's sitting with me to share is something that Kay Darling said during a panel discussion that we had with Project LETS around anti-carceral approaches to suicide. They were talking about how there's often this misconception that suicidal people are feeling like, oh, you know, I'm not good enough, or I don't know how much I'm loved, or I don't know how much I'm worth. And Kay was like, no, for me, I know exactly what I'm worth. And it's almost this turning on the head of like, actually, like, I'm too good for this, for this world, right? And knowing that, you know, we are actually worth more than what we are tolerating, and flipping that on its head to realize that the dysfunction or the dysregulation that so many of us may be feeling, for me, feels really in sync and in route with the dysfunction and dysregulation of the Earth in this moment. And if we're feeling that, that maybe that is kind of like a call and response with what is -- what is really needed to be felt and seen in this moment. So, yeah, much gratitude, Beatrice, I could talk to you forever.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:55
Forever.
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu 1:19:56
So, yes, and solidarity.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:59
Oh, thank you so much, Stefanie. And also if folks want to follow your work, Stefanie is on Twitter and Instagram, @stefkaufman. Also, if you have not checked out Project LETS, highly recommend it. We'll link to all of those in the episode description. And of course in the transcript, we'll have links to all the things that we were quoting and everything like that, in line as well. And patrons, as always, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. You'll get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. Everyone else, we'll catch you later next week. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
[ Outro music ]