Devastating Civilians at Home: The Plight of Crimean Tatars and Californians of Asian Decent during World War II
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In many wars the states engaged in hostility aboard will turn their attentions to the enemy at home, targeting individuals who disguise themselves as patriots while supporting foreign powers. Chapter 3 “Devastating civilians at home: The plight of Crimean Tatars and Californians of Asian descent during World War II” by Karina V. Korostelina highlights the inhumane treatment of civilians living in their homeland. She provides a comparative analysis of two cases: the deportation of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet government after the re-conquest of Ukraine from the German Wehrmacht and the internment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry by the US government in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In both cases the targeted ethnic groups were accused of collaborating with the enemy: the Crimean Tatars allegedly fighting alongside the German forces and in the United States the Japanese Americans accused of preparing the homeland for a possible invasion by the Imperial Japanese Army. Korostelina documents how in both cases intense propaganda campaigns against their two ethnic minorities by government authorities exploited fears and long-standing hatreds among certain elements of the population. Such campaign had the effect of expanding category of the enemy at home, providing a platform of virulent ethnic hatreds that exploit long-standing bigotries. Such a framing enlivens normative commitments associated with purity and protection at home and danger and sacrifice abroad.
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.
Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.
Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.
This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.
