Margaret Thatcher dies at 87

[Hillary]

Annoying side-note: Nitram & I are arriving in England the day of the funeral. It's going to be fun dealing with this at 8am, with three heavy bags, heading from Heathrow to our hotel via the Tube.

So it's going to be you blocking up my commuter tube with your suitcases Pro-tip, the front of the tube is usually less busy on that line. Give me a wave when I get on at Northfields.

[Aaron MkII]

Yeah it is and I fail to see why it should not apply here.

Me neither - and I can't say I was a fan. Some of the invitees raise an eyebrow for me, Jeremy Clarkson especially.

Isn't he a big Thatcher fan?

[Hillary]

Yeah it is and I fail to see why it should not apply here.

Me neither - and I can't say I was a fan. Some of the invitees raise an eyebrow for me, Jeremy Clarkson especially.

Isn't he a big Thatcher fan?

Oh yes, but he's not exactly what you'd call a dignitary - not normally the sort of person that you'd see at a royal occasion (which is effectively what this is).

[Stark]

But he's super rich and popular with the proles; it's genius casting.

Sorry I meant compassionate.

[Aaron MkII]

Actually I think its brillant. What better way is there to highlight Thatcher and her policies then having a rich, white half wit attend.

Edit: Especially if that half wits persona is nothing but flashy cars, and shameless conservatism. Hell the guy even gets away with shitting on gays.

[Hillary]

Actually I think its brillant. What better way is there to highlight Thatcher and her policies then having a rich, white half wit attend.

Edit: Especially if that half wits persona is nothing but flashy cars, and shameless conservatism. Hell the guy even gets away with shitting on gays.

She really was the People's Princess PM

You're probably right - what is also rather appropriate is that it will wind up the anti-Thatch brigade even more - she would have approved.

[Aaron MkII]

Win/win for everyone.

Well, she was a great Prime Minister, that's for sure. She halted and reversed the terminal decline we were in.

Great Prime Minister's are not personal friends with dictators.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Well, she was a great Prime Minister, that's for sure. She halted and reversed the terminal decline we were in.

Of course she did. I mean, look at the Falklands. Two Argentinian hillbillies dead, and bam! Hegemony restored. She won one of Britain's most pissant wars, that's gotta count for something.

Great Prime Minister's are not personal friends with dictators.

They don't gas Kurds either, but that didn't prevent the Brits from adoring Saddam Churchill.

[Thanas]

Fun Fact: Churchill's plan for dealing with the kurds has a lot of eery chords of pre-Wannsee Hitler.

[spaceviking]

Fun Fact: Churchill's plan for dealing with the kurds has a lot of eery chords of pre-Wannsee Hitler.

What exactly were his plans for the Kurds?

[NoXion]

Kill them with poison gas?

[Simon_Jester]

What, all of them?

[Zaune]

Just the ones who ran away too quickly to be shot and hid too well to be wiped out with artillery, I think.

[spaceviking]

A quick googling says Winston Churchill feared the Iraq state would oppress the Kurdish minority (British Air Scheme), which is a odd concern for someone who would call for their genocide.

[Captain Seafort]

That's because most people who go on about Churchill being keen on gassing Iraqis haven't done enough research to know he was talking about tear gas. Or that he raised the excellent point that complaining about making their eyes water but not about ripping them up with bullets and shrapnel is daft.

[NoXion]

That's because most people who go on about Churchill being keen on gassing Iraqis haven't done enough research to know he was talking about tear gas. Or that he raised the excellent point that complaining about making their eyes water but not about ripping them up with bullets and shrapnel is daft.

Not just tear gas, it would seem:

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.

- from Companion Volume 4, Part 1 of the official biography, WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by Martin Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1976) [bold and italics added by yours truly for emphasis] - my source for the quote, in case anybody has a better one.

If Churchill had been talking about using purely "crowd control" gases rather than "murderdeathkillfuckerising" gases, then surely he would have omitted the word "only" from the last quoted sentence?

[Captain Seafort]

If Churchill had been talking about using purely "crowd control" gases rather than "murderdeathkillfuckerising" gases, then surely he would have omitted the word "only" from the last quoted sentence?

Look at the date. For anyone to talk of gas in 1919 would immediately cause everyone to think of the use of mustard, chlorine, etc, during the war. Churchill's use of "only" was to counter what would have been a common misconception that those were the only types available, and the phrasing of the rest of the quote demonstrates that he was thinking solely in terms of tear gas and similar.

[Stark]

Fun Fact: Churchill's plan for dealing with the kurds has a lot of eery chords of pre-Wannsee Hitler.

Alert: 19th century Englishman racist. Look at his deft resolution to the Iranian crisis!

[Flagg]

I don't know what's more pathetic, Churchill wanting to gas the Kurds or the people trying to defend their imaginary friend.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Hey, Seafort.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.

This thing was written by Churchill, and is a very Shakespearean use of wit to express his opinion. Which means, it is about as clear as the sun. The only mitigating factor here is that he says they needn't use phosgene, but only because they have less lethal gases on hand.

[Simon_Jester]

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHU407A.html

Full text of the memo in question:

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.

I have two images of what Churchill wanted to do with chemical weapons here, based on his personal background and what he's saying.

1) Tear gas. If that's what he's thinking of, he's probably loving the idea of being able to scatter a tribal force from the air with gas, without killing many of them and before any large deployment of ground troops has to be risked: war 'on the cheap,' with the same sort of push-button aspect that makes today's leaders enamored of drone strikes. He was pretty much indifferent to reports that such gases might blind or kill more vulnerable people. Coming out of World War One, the Boer War, and colonial wars in the Sudan and Afghanistan, this does not surprise me.

2) More lethal chemical weapons (chlorine and up); in this case he's predicting that tribal forces (which he'd faced in battle in the 1890s) would scatter very quickly, after only brief exposure. Hell, I would too. Based on WWI experience, I suspect he would (correctly) expect that if people immediately fled the area of exposure, most of them would be only moderately effected- no serious permanent injury. The main thing that makes WWI-era chemical weapons a killer is if you try to stand and fight in an area saturated with them, or if they sink down into trenches and bunkers where you're sheltering to avoid more normal weapons like bullets and artillery.

Does this make him a murderous racist imperialist? Yes.

Still, the context is relevant; Churchill's standard of comparison for what happens when native forces try to oppose the British army was the Battle of Omdurman, and compared to the purely conventional slaughter at Omdurman, gas attacks look a bit less intense by comparison. Churchill took for granted that one way or another, any armed opposition to British dominance would get slaughtered; this was him proposing to do it with World War I weapons instead of 19th century weapons.

Does this make him a murderous racist imperialist? Still yes.

For other interesting Churchill reading, I suggest his speech to Parliament in the wake of the Amritsar massacre, here:

http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/churchill/am-text.htm

[You will have to scroll down a bit; the page contains the tail end of a speech by someone else, who was defending the actions of General Dyer]

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Meh. I always thought the British elite never shook off their delusions of grandeur about Britain being a Great Power...

[Thanas]

Ah yes, the defend Churchill brigade. I highly doubt that anybody who thought concentration camps a fundamentally sound policy would have any qualms about gassing other people.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think he did have qualms about gassing people, I want to describe exactly what he probably pictured happening based on his military experiences:

He, from the memo and from the real strategies he endorsed of aerial bombing and strafing, probably expected gas to be dropped on tribal military forces in the open. Some of them would be blistered, burned, blinded, or killed by gas exposure. Others would scatter for their lives, as usually happened during a gas attack among troops who have no protection against dying horribly from the poison.

The exact proportion would depend on the gas used and the amount. The amount would be "not very much," at least by standards of the Western Front, but then it wouldn't have to be, since it would be aimed at a smaller force. Using something like tear gas (the 'lachrymatories' referenced) would cause a lot more blistering and a lot less blinding and killing. Using something like phosgene would cause a lot more killing. Churchill might (insufficient evidence) have favored more phosgene or less tear gas, or vice versa.

I suspect he expected this to scatter said tribal military force very quickly and easily, and demoralize them just as quickly and easily. Certainly that's in keeping with the history of forces that suddenly get hit with weapons far beyond their technology, which they don't know how to counter.

Did he also expect gas to be dropped on their villages? I do not know; the memo does not say. He certainly seemed happy enough to bomb and strafe those tribal villages with machine guns, a la Guernica. He had himself participated in, and written newspaper accounts of, expeditions on foot into the mountains of Afghanistan which went into tribal villages and blew up the houses in a village by hand. And, as I recall, defended this, believing it to be the only practical way to deter such cultures from raiding and violence and resistance to British authority. Naturally, Churchill was all for maintaining British authority over colonial peoples by force.

He was complicated- the speech after Amritsar should prove that- but the realities remain. We can safely say Churchill thought of gas as an acceptable weapon to use, a legitimate alternative to, say, high explosives. By modern standards, or for that matter of his WWII contemporaries, that made him much more pro-chemical warfare than normal. And he kept this attitude when it came to oppressing colonial peoples.

There. If that is a defense of Churchill, I don't know what isn't.

[Korto]

Then you'll like this, Thanas. Ex Australian PM John Howard is going to the funeral, and I just heard a snippet of his doorstop, where he said...
"She was the best Prime Minister since Churchill."