"I am strongly in favor of using poisioned gas against uncivilised tribes."

[Capn Amerika]

"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisioned gas against uncivilised tribes." -Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill commenting on a Kurdish uprising in British controlled Iraq.

[Guaranteed]

1. Ugh. nt

[Imagevision]

2. You should have hooked up with saddam...

[originalpckelly]

3. Who knew conservatives and Saddam shared similar values?

[Capn Amerika]

9. Go figure.

The CIA put him in power. He was their boy. Until he wasn't their boy.

[sammythecat]

4. This shocks me.

I always thought he was supposed to be a "good guy". Now I guess I'll just have to think of him as an asshole that found himself at the right place and time.

Gotta be an asshole to make a statement like that.

[originalpckelly]

6. Well, he was a conservative after all...

what'd you expect?

[rebel with a cause]

10. He was half English

and half American. What'd you expect?

Just being smart alecky, don't stone me. :silly:

[LostinVA]

24. No, he also treated the Afrikaners horribly during the Boer War

Concentration camps, scorched earth policies, etc.

[NNN0LHI]

5. Lawrence of Arabia felt the same way

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2719939.stm

<snip>Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who was to lead the bomber offensive against Germany 20 years later, did not conceal the fact that he aimed at civilian targets.

Harris said in 1924 that he had taught Iraqis "that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or wounded".

Some other British leaders were equally blood-thirsty. After the revolt of 1920, TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - wrote to the London Observer to say: "It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions."

[rebel with a cause]

11. The only defense I can think of for this is

ignorance. Perhaps they did not realize the horror of poison gas. Its hard to think they did not know the effects of it, since they were in the military. But I do remember when some people in the fifties thought you just went to sleep from it and died. I remember Mustard gas was what most people were the most afraid of, if I remember this correctly.

[sammythecat]

12. What disturbs me the most

about this quote is the implication that, had they been more "civilized", he might not have considered using gas. Clearly a hardcore racist sentiment.

[rebel with a cause]

21. Disturbing indeed.

I have been watching old movies (silent movies, and those from the 30s & 40s) lately and their interruption of dark skinned people is mind blowing. I grew up watching this type of movies on tv, but in my then ignorance, paid little attention to these images. Now I think about African American/Latino children growing up the same time as I did seeing these images on screen representing them. I know the problems my own children (they are Latino) had with images portrayed in the 80s, and those were light years ahead of those from 40 years earlier. I honestly thank that all us white people should be thankful there was not an all out revolution, and we were not punished for this type of harmful stereotyping. The ideas that people held about those that were different from them was horrible, but then some people still hold similar ideas even today. JMHO

[sammythecat]

23. I'm not up on the details yet,

but I just read a post by Trumad about the attack in Somalia where A-130 gunships laid waste to a village?, island?, where suspected terrorists were lurking. "..dead bodies and animals everywhere.", was one description of the aftermath. Many innocents were most certainly killed and maimed, but it really doesn't matter all that much. It's them. They're brown, they dress funny and they talk funny. They're not like us. This kind of collateral damage is acceptable.

Organized crime has always been a problem here. Wouldn't it be a good idea to send a few of these gunships to Las Vegas? There's probably lots of Mafia hanging out there. Yeah, there'd be some collateral damage, but I bet we'd get a bunch of the bad guys. I wonder why we don't do that.

[EFerrari]

7. Capn, have you read about the Bologna of Tolerance?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3069707

/a->o

[Capn Amerika]

8. Yeah, fuck tolerance!

Excuse me, I have to go beat my wife for burning dinner.

[Bluerthanblue]

13. Why does America refuse to destroy OUR poison gas, and

refuse to submit to 'inspections' or provide evidence that we have stopped producing, experimenting with, and stockpiling the crap?

Why do we Needsuch 'weaponry' if we TRULY embrace the belief that it is inhuman to use it- and that no one should possess or use such a terrible thing????

We need a long hard look in the mirror- imo

[The2ndWheel]

14. America wouldn't exist without that way of thought

Everything we have today, we owe to expansion, colonization, conquest, and death. If every empire before us hadn't done it, we wouldn't be here. We didn't just defeat the British Empire, we learned something from them too.

[Capn Amerika]

28. The driving power behind imperialism is greed.

That will always be with us.

[Freddie Stubbs]

15. Prior to the end of World War I, the use of chemical warfare was an considered an acceptable

aspect of war.

[Bluerthanblue]

17. that was the first and last time it was to have been used- the

gruesomeness of its effects horrified the world. My father used to tell us stories about his early childhood, during which his Uncle (a WWI Vet) lived his last days being cared for by my Grandparents. Uncle Merritt had been gassed in WWI and contrary to what most people think, didn't die immediately, it was rather a slow suffocating death- the gas having destroyed much of the lungs ability to function- eventually progressing to death.- no 'antidote'- no 'cure'.

Supposedly most "civilized" nations agreed NOT to ever use these weapons again.

But we continue to stockpile them. And experiment with them.

Why?

[PVnRT]

18. We're spending millions to destroy them, actually

I know, I work at a site sliminating a VX stockpile. We've been destroying this and other chemical weapons since the mid-1990's.

[Bluerthanblue]

19. can you offer some insight for me as to

why we are continuing to produce them?

And why we refuse to allow independant inspections of OUR gas WMD's while demanding others submit?

I'm very suspect of this government, having been woefully ignorant of much of our 'actions'- that have brought us to the place we are today.

thanks-

[PVnRT]

22. Uh...

We have people from the UN on site, 24 hours a day, doing random inspections of everything we do here; they're at the other sites as well. As to where you're getting this idea that we're producing them, I have no idea what you're talking about.

In fact, we even allow Chinese inspectors here - despite the fact that they are not required to disclose details about their chemical weapons program, nor do they have to allow inspectors, nor do they have to destroy anything. Kind of a sweet deal they have there.

[Bluerthanblue]

25. well, from

here-
I get the strong idea that 'we' are indeed still 'producing' chemical and biological weapons-
If we can't even know what the expenditures for the Pentagon and its secret programs are, how can we seriously believe that we aren't doing this???

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,821306,00.html

And from what I have read our 'compliance' with inspectors is not as transparent as one might think-
It may be very 'transparent' on your end- the end that is actually involved with the destruction of stockpiles, but what about the entire program???-

Right after the installation of bush into the White House in 2001 I did a lot of monitoring of the various treaties and global agreements that the US either removed itself from, or refused to comply with. There was far more info online then than there appears to be now- but our willingness to open ourselves up to the kind of scrutiny we went on to demand of others, was pretty poor.

Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) - The United States limited its compliance with the declaration and inspection regime of the CWC. It narrowed the facilities open to inspection, prohibited removal of samples, and conferred on the president the right to refuse inspections for national security reasons. The CWC does not permit these limitations, and already contains thorough safeguards for the protection of confidential information. The limitations may prevent accurate results, and other states are applying them to inspections of their facilities. The United States recently led changes in management of the body charged with implementing the CWC, expressing a desire to strengthen CWC operations.

from a fact sheet based on the report, Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties 2002

Perhaps this administration has done a complete 180, and is completely compliant- but my admittedly jaded perspective doesn't hold out much trust in 'our' integrety.

I hope I'm wrong.

[Capn Amerika]

31. Production, right here.

http://www.atcc.org/

I know we are talking about "chemical" weapons, but these are WMDs just the same. The Anthrax we gave Saddam Hussein was manufactured by American Type Culture Collection. We gave it to him up until 1989. Funny how the Press NEVER mentions that fact. ATCC is in Rockville, Maryland and Manasass, Virginia, it's probably where the Anthrax for the 2001 Anthrax attacks came from.

[genie_weenie]

16. Yeah, Churchill sucked.

His whole legend was a propaganda effort post world war 2 in which This Land, This Realm, This... England was the prime opponent and defeater of Hitler. Joe Stalin was no longer our friend at that point and it wouldn't do to admit the Soviets had done most of the heavy lifting in beating the 3rd Reich.

The really interesting thing about the British control of Iraq was when the Assyrian Christians mounted an expedition to wipe out the invading Arabs. They stormed through Habaniyah on their way to Fallujah to wipe the Fallujans out when the Brits intervened and threatened them with aerial attacks using poision gas.

Of course, nobody gives a crap about the Assyrians (unless you live around Chicago and happen to know some) and the genocide which they were subjected to during World War One by the Turks and the 1930s by the Iraqi Monarchy mainly using Kurdish troops.

[Ursus Rex]

20. You mean Armenians?

I thought the Assyrians went out with Hammurabi, etc., but I dated a woman of Armenian descent (yes, while I lived in Chicago), and her father's family was directly affected by the Turkish, uh, "programs."

Please - no offense, just adding my .02 and seeing if there maybe *was* another group ...

[genie_weenie]

26. Nope. The Assyrian Genocide.

Many people know of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks, but the Assyrians also suffered at the hands of the Turks during the same time frame.

With the number of peoples who have moved through the mesopotamian Region names become confused (Elamites, Meades, Amorites, Kassites, Chaldeans, Sumerians, Acheamedans, and on and on and on). As far as I know you can not trace back an exact lineage to the Assyrians of 2800 years ago to the modern Assyrians.

Hammuradi was Babylonian from 1000 years before the Assyrians.

[Vidar]

27. I highly doubt Churchill would have made that statement later in life.

[genie_weenie]

29. Churchill was fascist. He was just simply

a Roosevelt type of Fascist. And while he wouldn't make a statement like that later in life he was content to send a bunch of Canadians to their death and capture with the horribly imagined Dieppe Landing. Which of course were an homage to his great Gallipoli Landing in the First War.

[Vidar]

30. More of a Victorian imperialist than a fascist You definitely have

a point about Dieppe though.