Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.3 million Palestinians constitutes a profound reversal of post-1945 U.S. norms, which condemned such mass relocations of indigenous populations. It is the sort of thing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin used to do, and Trump has to decide if he wants his legacy to be that of an American Stalin.
During his first term, President Trump’s own diplomatic representative to the 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Chargé d’Affaires Harry Kamian, denounced Stalin for having forcibly transferred 230,000 indigenous Tatars from Crimea in 1944-47 to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Kamian said, “seventy-five years ago, over 230,000 Crimean Tatars suffered a terrible fate, when, on May 18, 1944, the Soviet government ordered their mass deportation from their Crimean homeland to Soviet Central Asia. Thousands of families were forcibly separated. Nearly half of those deported between 1944 and 1947 perished. This was part of a larger program of deportations within the Soviet Union.”
Kamian’s concerns were not merely historical. He condemned Vladimir Putin, as well, saying “Today, the Crimean Tatars, now citizens of an independent Ukraine, again find themselves the victims of the Kremlin’s repression and brutality. Since invading and occupying Crimea in 2014, the Russian government has carried out a campaign of violence, including killings, forced disappearances, and torture against Crimean Tatars and others who oppose the occupation.”
The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, to which the United States is a signatory, is pretty plain on the matter: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Of course in the 19th century the US had been guilty of horrible such crimes against Native Americans. But after WW II a chastened Greatest Generation attempted to craft new and better norms for the post-war world, norms that we are now betraying most foully.
In short, that language was intended to forestall the tactics used by Nazis and other powers during WW II from being implemented again in the future by members of the United Nations. But I guess avoiding acting like Nazis or Stalinists is no longer an American value nowadays.
So, the question is, whether Kamian’s complaints were merely another cynical US use of international law, where convenient, to slam Moscow, or whether Washington actually minds people being uprooted en masse from their homeland. Because 2.3 million Palestinians are ten times as many people as the 230,000 Tatars whom Stalin displaced thousands of miles from home.
Stalin’s population transfers were deemed crimes by Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who revealed them to the the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. He also charged that Stalin had built up a “cult of personality,” deeply distorting Socialist ideals. Appalled at the revelation of these and other crimes, half of the remaining 100,000 members of the US Communist Party left the party.
Let me repeat: American Communists of the mid-1950s showed more revulsion at a cult of personality and at crimes against humanity than most members of today’s Republican Party, vanishingly few of whom have objected to Trump’s Stalinesque plans for massive population transfers. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called the move “common sense.” Rep. Nancy Mace, (R-SC) said that the U.S. should “turn Gaza into Mar-A-Lago.” Indeed, the few demurrals on the Republican side were not to the idea of ethnically cleansing a people but to using US troops to do so. Apparently they think it would be all right if somebody else carried it out.
“Cult of Personality,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
Campana Aurélie at France’s premier political science institution, Sciences Po , lists many more ethnic cleansing campaigns by Stalin.
She notes, “1937, September-October: The first large-scale operation of massive deportation occurred in the Soviet Far East. About 175,000 Koreans living along the Chinese and Korean borders were relocated by force to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They were charged with espionage, spying for the Japanese. After a brutal expulsion, the Koreans experienced severe living conditions. Moscow did not inform the local Uzbek and Kazakh authorities about the arrival of a large population of “administrative settlers.” Nothing was prepared to accommodate or provide them with basic supplies such as food, clothes and shoes. Although there was no reliable data regarding the Korean death toll, testimonies and NKVD documents indicate that many of them died from disease, starvation and lack of housing. By 1945, they joined the long list of “special settlers,” among other punished peoples.”
The list grew over the next 15 years, including 250,000 Poles, 1.2 million Russians of German heritage, and many others. When I visited Uzbekistan for a conference in the mid-1990s, I spent an evening speaking with a German Russian in Tashkent, since the rest of the people at my table didn’t know English and my Uzbek was weak. And one of our conference participants, whose paper we published, was a Crimean Tatar. People pointed out Koreans to me. Those people displaced by Stalin were still there in Central Asia all those decades later. It was creepy.
I grew up in an America full of revulsion for Stalinism, and even the few Communists I ever met were critics of it. Now, we have a new American Stalinism, as dismissive of individual and collective rights and liberties as Uncle Joe had been. I feel it as a profound and ominous betrayal that every American is not up in arms at the very idea that we would behave this way.
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