Talk to focus on civilian victims of war bombings

By Fritz Klug

News Editor
From the firebombs of Dresden, to the fallout in Hiroshima, to the napalm clouds in Vietnam, and the unmanned drone bombing in Pakistan, civilians have been the victims — and often the targets — of military bombings.

The development and acceptance of this “particular war crime” will be the topic of Ronald Kramer’s lecture tonight, at 5 p.m. in room 2033 of Brown Hall.

A professor of sociology and the director of the criminal justice program at Western Michigan University, Kramer will discuss how the bombing of civilians evolved during World War II and became accepted and normalized within the American military, even though it breaks international laws that forbid the bombing of civilians. The laws date back from the Geneva and Hague conventions.

“Those international laws still exist,” Kramer said. “Often they have been ignored or not enforced.”
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Kramer said that 10 percent of the casualties in World War One were civilians. That increased to 50 percent in World War Two. In modern wars, Kramer said close to 90 percent of the casualties are civilians.

World War II was the tipping point, Kramer added, when both technology and the use of air power increased.

Kramer will also talk about how the morality of World War II as the “good war” justifies the use of bombing civilians as necessary, such as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lewis Pyenson, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate College, said that civilians have been affected by war since antiquity. When an area was conquered, its people would either be killed or sold into slavery. In the 20th century, civilians began to be the objects of bombardments as a way to break moral.

This tactic has not been successful in modern warfare, Pyenson said.

“It didn’t work in Germany during the firebombs or in London during the blitz, and it’s not working today in Israel or Gaza,” he said.

Kramer’s talk is part of and is sponsored by the Graduate College in association with the Departments of English, History, Political Science and Sociology. His lecture, “Bombing Civilians: The Normalization of War Crime,” is based on a chapter Kramer wrote for a forthcoming book, “State Crime in the Global Age.”