Consortium News: 06-11-2024,
We are tired of carnage and death. We want a permanent end to war.
Ismael Al-Sheikhly, Iraq, “Watermelon Sellers,” 1958.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
In 1919, Winston Churchill wrote, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Churchill, grappling at the time with the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq as Britain’s secretary of state for war and air, argued that such use of gas “would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.”
Gas warfare had first been employed by France in August 1914 (during World War I) using tear gas, followed by Germany with the use of chlorine in April 1915 and phosgene (which enters the lungs and causes suffocation) in December 1915.
In 1918, the man who developed the use of chlorine and phosgene as weapons, Dr. Fritz Haber (1868–1934), won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
It is a sad fact that Haber also developed the hydrocyanide insecticides Zyklon A and Zyklon B, the latter of which was used to kill 6 million Jews in the Holocaust — including some of his family members.
In 1925, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the “use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases,