Resisting the Bombing of Civilians: Challenges from a Public Criminology of State Crime

BOTH THE INTENTIONAL AND THE DISPROPORTIONATE AND INDISCRIMINATE bombardment of civilian populations by military aircraft are war crimes (McCormack and Durham, 2009), a specific form of state criminality (Chambliss, 1989; Friedrichs, 1998; Rothe, 2009; Rothe and Mullins, 2010; Chambliss, Michalowski, and Kramer, 2010). This article will argue that a public criminology of state crime can make an important contribution to the effort to resist the bombing of civilians and protect noncombatants from harm. Bombing civilians is a moral and a legal crime because it is behavior by state officials, acting on behalf of the state, that violates the "long-standing and widespread" moral principle and international legal norm of "noncombatant immunity" (Conway-Lanz, 2006: 2). Slim (2008:1) refers to this precept as "the civilian ethic in war." This important normative principle is found in just war theory, where "noncombatants have a kind of sacred immunity" (Fiala, 2008: 7), as well as in the legal rules of international humanitarian law, the laws of war (Maogoto, 2004; Byers, 2005). These particular substantive laws, which date back to the Hague and Geneva conventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Slye and Van Schaack, 2009), cover the deliberate targeting of civilians (area, terror, or morale bombing) and the use of disproportionate and indiscriminate military force found in some forms of "precision" bombing (Messerschmidt, 1992; McCormack and Durham, 2009). Violations of these legal rules by state officials constitute war crimes and can be subjected to criminological analysis (Kramer and Michalowski, 2005; Rothe, 2009; Kramer and Kauzlarich, 2010). Kramer, Michalowski, and Chambliss (2010) have recently made a case "for" a public criminology of state crime. A public criminology would bring criminology into "a conversation with publics, understood as people who are themselves involved in a conversation" (Burawoy, 2007: 28). This article will analyze certain challenges that such a public criminology can mount to the bombing of civilians; it may contribute to the public discourse about how to resist this form of state crime. A public criminology of state crime can: (1) challenge the denial and normalization of the aerial bombardment of civilians, (2) challenge the political impunity and legal immunity of the state officials who commit these war crimes, and (3) challenge empire, one of the primary structural contexts within which state criminality occurs. Before these challenges can be analyzed, however, it will be helpful to sketch a theoretical narrative of how the area bombing of civilian populations evolved during World War II and became normalized, that is, accepted and approved within American political culture. The Normalization of the State Crime of Bombing Civilians The terror bombing of the ancient Basque (Euskadi) town of Guernica (Gernika) by the fascist allies of Franco's nationalist rebels during the Spanish Civil War provoked an angry outcry. As Englehardt (2008a: 2) observes, "the self-evident barbarism of the event--the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population--caused international horror. It was news across the planet." Patterson (2007: 38) points out that it is "almost impossible to overestimate the outrage it caused in 1937." The global outcry stemmed as much from what the attack presaged, as from the actual damage inflicted. As Kurlansky (1999: 200) notes, "the world was horrified--outraged at the ruthless massacre of unarmed civilians but also terrified at its first glimpse of the warfare of the future." Within a decade, in the context of the massive violence of the global human catastrophe that was World War II, the illegal bombing of civilian populations became commonplace and morally acceptable to many of the same political leaders and publics who, in the interwar years, dreaded the rise of air warfare, had attempted to specifically outlaw it, and condemned the horror of Guernica. …