Anne Applebaum reminds us that Syria remains a gruesome battleground. Although the international community is apparently able to keep some check on Assad's chemical weapons, the dictator is not wanting for tools of massacre.
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But in our obsession with what is terrifyingly new, it seems we have forgotten that there are much older ways to kill large numbers of people. Certainly there is one weapon of mass destruction so ancient and low-tech that it doesn't even involve gunpowder, let alone the lethal tools we so dismissively refer to as conventional weapons. This method is called "starvation."
In medieval Europe, starvation was the de facto consequence of a siege. An army would surround a castle or a walled town, prevent food from entering—and then wait. The inhabitants would grow weak. They would lose their hair and their teeth. They would then surrender, or die in large numbers.
In the 20th century, dictators used starvation not just as a battle tactic but also to murder people who did not fit into their vision of an ideal society. Before resorting to more "industrial" methods, Hitler used starvation to kill Jews: Nazi soldiers shut them in ghettos, closed the doors, and shot children who tried to smuggle food in through the sewers. Stalin used starvation to kill Ukrainian peasants: Soviet soldiers confiscated their grain, forcibly removed food from their larders, and blocked roads so nothing could reach them. As in the Middle Ages, the Jews of the Łódź ghetto and the peasants of Kharkiv district grew weak, lost their hair and teeth, and then died. Millions of people were thus murdered, without a whiff of sarin gas or a particle of plutonium.
Nowadays, "death by forced starvation" sounds like something from an old newsreel. But it is not. Right now, in the 21st century, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is once again making use of it. While the international community is haggling over his chemical weapons, the stuff of modern nightmares, he is following the example of his medieval and his 20th-century predecessors and deliberately starving thousands of people to death.
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Anne Applebaum at Slate.com>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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