The U.S. government has the world’s most expensive military waging wars around the world. It also now has a military aimed at the United States itself. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has a budget larger than any military in the world except 12. It has military weaponry and vehicles. It has military training from the U.S. and Israeli militaries. It has veterans of foreign U.S. wars in its ranks. The man who murdered Renée Good had learned to kill people in Iraq, for which he was almost certainly thanked many times and had his work referred to as a “service.”

There have long been many ways in which, as Dr. King said, the bombs dropped abroad explode in U.S. cities. Mass shooters are often veterans — and many of the others are pretending to be. The equipment, training, and culture of war has been spread to local police, civilians, and popular entertainment. But Trump has taken a couple of practices used abroad for many decades and brought them home in new ways. One was the coup. The U.S. has a nasty habit of overthrowing governments; Trump openly tried that in Washington in 2021. The other is the occupation. Men and women who occupied places like Iraq are now occupying places like Minneapolis.

The U.S. government hasn’t flipped from killing people far away for the benefit of U.S. residents to killing U.S. residents. All those people it was killing far away were not killed to somehow benefit us, and we should never have allowed it; it was this same evil on a larger scale. The number of victims in foreign wars dwarfs those thus far killed in ICE’s war on the United States, while the speed and size and strength of the public outrage over ICE dwarfs what we usually see over foreign wars. This inverted relationship is no doubt the result of people protesting more readily what is nearer to them. There are videos of people in Minneapolis saying that they have become activists for the first time ever because masked thugs are murdering anyone they like in their city and they could be next. Surely there must be a way to get many more people active prior to that point.

Of course, killing anyone they like is a habit acquired abroad. It is also what I mean by calling this a war. The casualties thus far are low. But they are, as in other wars, very one-sided. They are, as in other wars, accomplished with automatic weapons. They are, as in other wars, not disguised or justified in the ways that local police usually handle their killings. In ICE’s war, one is killed for being the enemy, and the enemy is easily recognized; the enemy is anybody who isn’t ICE.

The lies are also part of the standard package, they just fail more quickly when the videos are more numerous and more quickly available. This presents us with an opportunity that no one would have ever wished for, but which we need to take advantage of. If enough people can see war for what it is, this close at hand, and shut it down, perhaps some of them can carry that lesson over to all the other wars. If we can block funding for ICE, in theory we can also block funding for wars around the world. 

Peace groups have the darndest time staying focused on the hard work of abolishing war. Most peace centers are eventually renamed Peace and Justice centers, and then quickly abandon anything related to peace in order to take up numerous other good causes deemed more respectable. That’s not a concern here and now. The peace movement in the United States and around the world needs to oppose all military occupations regardless of how distant the government is that imposes one. Parts of the United States are, in fact, farther from Washington, D.C., than Venezuela is.

War is war. It is never justified. We must never fail to oppose it and work to replace it with something more worthy of the wonderful people we are all capable of being.