U. S. concentration camps- June 11, 2019, at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, TX, Station
Dear Citizens of Israel,
We did it for you during World War II. Now it’s your turn to help us.
The U.S. government-sponsored concentration camps on our southern border are racist, immoral and unconscionable. Over 50,000 refugees are being held indefinitely in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions—including infants and children, separated from their parents.
Trump continues to ignore criticism and refuses to take any
action that would demonstrate even a shred of humanity toward those imprisoned.
White supremacists cheer for an autocratic leader who keeps pushing to see how
much he can get away with.
Does this seem familiar?
Israel, as one of the United States’ strongest allies, is in
a position to influence and intervene. This madness must stop. The unthinkable
cannot happen again. We need your help.
Liberate the camps! We did it for you; now you do it for us.
In 2007, I traveled to the eastern part of Sri Lanka, during the civil war. I wanted to understand the views of children and adults about recruitment to groups that engage in terrorist tactics, including attacks in which the attacker plans to die. The Tamil Tigers were skilled and well-organized killers. So were the government forces. Outside the country, the war was widely understood to be based on ethnic orreligious differences–a convenient fiction. It was a war, like all wars, about power and resources. We citizens of the US were partially responsible for the war. Our government was supplying the Sri Lanka government with weapons. The children whose families and friends were dying knew that. Americans need to know it too.
I reported the research I did in Sri Lanka in the book Creating Young Martyrs: Conditions that make Dying in a Terrorist Attack Seem Like a Good Idea. I continue to hope that my work, together with the work of scholars, activists, journalists, filmmakers, and others, will help Americans better understand the complexity, and the immorality, of war and encourage them to be skeptical about the simplistic messages delivered by our government about war. I hope it will also help Americans understand that it is not soldiers who are responsible for war; it is all citizens who stand by, failing to exercise judgment, failing to take responsibility for the acts of our government.
In 2010, I returned to Sri Lanka, where I learned about the aftermath of the war and the fragile peace. The children without parents, and parents without children. The dead, the sick, the maimed, the traumatized. People were freer to talk with me about the personal losses of family members and friends, and the impact on children and adults who had experienced bombings, no matter from which side. The Sri Lankan government at that time claimed the war had no psychosocial consequences. That was untrue.
Whatever one thinks about ancient wars, contemporary wars are immoral. Those who suffer most in all contemporary wars are civilians, many of whom want only to have a means to support themselves and their families and a peaceful place to live. They are generally no one’s enemy, just people, often literally caught in the middle—just people until they become unintentionally involved, when, for example, their child is kidnaped and disappeared, or forced to fight.
With a military that is powerfully marketed, and never witness to war in our home communities, most Americans find it easy to leave decision-making to those who assert there cannot be peace without war, even nuclear war. We have acted on that belief for too many generations, with disastrous results for many civilians in war zones—and for many ordinary people right here in the US. Can we the people do better? Can we decide to use our political power to influence decisions regarding the actions of our military? Can we become determined to foster nonviolent resistance, to negotiate, and to find a path to resolution of differences without war? Can we become motivated to let ordinary noncombatant civilians like ourselves live?
It seems time for Americans to recognize our personal responsibility for the weapons our country sells, and the wars we engage in, as well as the wars we support. This is our watch, we must take responsibility.
Alice LoCicero, daughter Emily, and golden retriever at Women’s March in San Francisco, 2019.
Dr, Alice LoCicero is a board certified clinical psychologist, with a practice in Oakland California. She is also a scholar, and activist, working for peace, nonviolence, and climate justice, and against militarism, individualism, corporatism, and unchecked capitalism. She is past president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, and of the Society for Terrorism Research. Currently a part of a research collective called Re-Envisioning Psychology, whose headquarters is in Berkeley, CA, Dr. LoCicero has studied youth who are recruited to groups using terrorism, the costs of counter-terrorist policies—including the involvement of the American Psychological Association in covering up torture of detainees—and the seduction of psychologists into roles that lead them to unintentionally enforcing colonialism and surveillance. Dr. LoCicero is a 2018 winner of the Anthony J. Marsella Prize for Peace and Social Justice, given by Psychologists for Social Responsibility. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/paradigm-shift
