Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that what they were attracted to wasn’t Bushnell’s courage but his vulnerability. A Veterans Affairs suicide prevention psychologist found in a 2017 study that guilt “had direct effects on” suicide ideation in military veterans. A 2021 study found that “[w]hen examined concurrently, guilt—but not shame—remained significantly associated with suicidal ideation, after accounting for effects of depressive symptoms and past suicide attempt.” According to an Ohio State Medical Center researcher, “literature has consistently implicated guilt in suicidality.” Those studies focused on the U.S. and UK. In similar research in Australia, “guilt was significantly associated with PTSD severity, anger, alcohol use, attempted suicide and being a contemporary veteran.”
I mention all of those simply to show that guilt, the category of emotion into which complicity falls, is nearly a universal marker of the chances of attempting suicide among military and veterans. It is emotional cyanide. The activists disrupting everyday life with cries of “genocide!” are feeding the population a steady dose of rat poison.
Redemption politics have always been a mainstay of extreme political movements—the Soviet gulags themselves were seen as purifying by their sociopathic wardens. And that concept is clearly driving the campaign of human sacrifice that has claimed real victims and whose ringleaders seem to be taking only encouragement from that fact.
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