this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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Collective punishment is a war crime and fucked up, no matter who does it. It is especially awful when the punishment basically amounts to genocide.
Require proof of wrongdoing before applying punishment to individuals.
Otherwise you could also argue that it was fine to intern all US-Japanese because the Japanese living in Japan (which were the majority of Japanese people) were waging an aggressive war on the US, therefore that makes it OK to punish all Japanese. It's the same argument.
I am not well read on these events, but i do have some thoughts.
What if the material conditions don't allow for that? What if there is no time for such a thing? What if it is absolutely crucial that this area does not fall into enemy hands or the entirety of your country gets eradicated?
Were any of the alternatives, if they exist at all, actually viable?
Imma go into this with the knowledge that i could be completely wrong, but this just sounds like empty moralism. Also, it is not clear to me that any of this was a "punishment" at all and actually rather a defusing of traitors that they knew existed because this group had already shown it, but don't know who exactly it is. Instead of just killing everyone that they thought tipped too far into the potential enemy side, they just sent everyone somewhere where they couldn't harm anyone.
Not sure if my thought process is missing something though
You raise some good points, thank you. Honestly I don't have the mental resources to think about it now deeply, but boiling down the choice to "forced relocations and winning the war against nazis vs. no forced relocations but losing the war to nazis" I would choose the forced relocations too, even if out of harm minimization. However I can't decide if this is a false dichotomy or not. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
It's not even this that is the problem. We look at it in the retrospect and we still don't really know. However at the height of biggest war ever things do look very different. It's not even dichotomy, if you look at the time, even the most unjustified relocation, that is the Koreans, does not look that unnecessary considering that it was 1937, year before Japan really invaded USSR. And while Koreans were a nation opressed by Japan, collaboration there was also high (and during WW2 over 7 million Koreans were mobilised by Japan, though most of them were used as forced labour and not soldiers).
Also the definition of relocation as genocide is made up specifically to bash USSR since it equals expulsions with coordinated relocation, including the post war relocations which (again in retrospect) definitely saved eastern Europe from becoming Yugoslavia 2.0 just worse in 90's.
Bruh there was like 40000 troops in the Idel-ural Tatar SS unit alone, while i don't think i can recall i single case of sabotage or attack made by US-Japanese in US.
You confuse Idel-Ural (which had absolutely incredible levels of desertion to partisans) and Crimean Tatar units. Those are two different things.
Yes, it was not obvious at first they mean specifically Crimean Tatars, which afaik did not had SS units, but had something around 35000 people in armed collaboration units (including 15000 partisan hunters) out of 218000 population which is still close to every man able to hold a gun.
Volga Tatars also didn't have SS units, by the way. And it is fascinating, how different were Crimean Tatars' and Volga Tatars' relationships with Russia and USSR, despite being initially literally the same people. Really shows the power of material conditions.