Dear Dr. Weisel:
Thank you for all of the courageous, brilliant, extraordinary work you have done as a humanitarian in your lifetime, and for your seminal writing on the holocaust. Thank you for your lifelong service to our world. We have been blessed to recieve your life work.
Here is my question:
What is your opinion of the strong connection between endemic child abuse in American families, including emotional neglect, sexual abuse, and physical violence, and the problems of systemic and isolated abuse that surface when the US puts itself in military actions in other countries, such as Iraq?
Numerous studies in the last 30 years reveal that one in three girls and one in seven boys are sexually abused before the age of 18 in the US, with over 90% of their perpetrators being well-known to the child. Thus, incest and other forms of violence against children, however stigmatized and “secret” are, in fact, tragically normative in US culture.
Thus, when systemic abuses, such as those in Abu Graihb, occur, abuses with a strong,often horrifying, sexual content, many of us who work with families and children here in the US are not that surprised.
Can you comment, please, on your opinion about this connection? Many who work with children and families see the epidemic of family violence as very much a social justice/human rights issue with the same kinds of horrific consequences we have seen at other times in modern history. For example, my question can be placed in the context of the work of Psychologist Alice Miller, as well as other theorists in many other disciplines, who make the connection between the cultural norms of violence and intense harshness in traditional German parenting, and the horrific development of Nazism, the scourge of the modern era. While Hitler’s movement came to power through propaganda, legal manipulations and terrorizinf violence against some of his own citizens, it is also true that there was some reason that so many in Erope were swept up so willingly into perptrating the horrors that followed. What primed the millions to so readily buy in? To act out? Tragically, we see that this phenomenon has in no way been readicated from our world. Whole societies continue to be blown apart and savaged by the evolution, in their midst, of genocide.
I offer you, for whatever it is worth, my deepest agony for the ways in which you, those you love, and the Jewish people of Europe, “the apple of God’s eye,” were injured and subjected to genocide. No words can adequately convey my sorrow and outrage about this.
What is your insight about, and opinion of, these ideas?
Thank you, and God Bless you in every way; I will be honored to attend your tribute day and evening.
Sincerely,
Kalia Mussetter
Northern California
