Remember it’s fine when the US and its allies do it but it’s “terrorism” when non-white people are fighting back.
For the [Fascist] military the great value of chemical weapons was as a means of destroying Ethiopians—soldiers and civilians—en masse from a safe distance without having to confront the enemy directly, but only from aeroplanes.
That this policy was public knowledge in Italy is illustrated by the fact that in early October a group of Bologna university students, having swallowed the propaganda put out by Mussolini regarding Ethiopians, exhorted him to conduct ‘a war to the limits’, against the ‘inhuman, vile … bestial Abyssinian people’, and insisted that in the process the Italians should deploy chemical weapons to ensure that they themselves would not be put in harm’s way.
In a telling admission of Italian martial spirit that probably infuriated the Duce, who always proclaimed multiple deaths on the battlefield as positive expressions of Italian valour, they wrote, ‘We are Italians, and we want to keep our sacrifice to a minimum—especially when it is a question of fighting animals like the Abyssinians.’ The students knew that chemical weapons were expensive but regarded them as the most effective method of dispensing death from a safe distance, in order to preserve the lives of young Italians ‘who will be needed as the productive forces of tomorrow’s empire’.
Dismissing international treaties as applying ‘only to weak states’, they went on to reassure the Duce that, in any case, ‘How can anyone check if Italy does or does not use gas?’32
By January 1936 the application of poisonous chemicals had been further refined by the Regia Aeronautica to provide for high‐volume discharge during low‐flying aerial spraying of Ethiopian civilians and their crops, animals and water sources, bringing the number of Ethiopian deaths during the invasion to an estimated total of more than a quarter of a million. […] Poison gas, administered from the air, was used extensively and, after the Occupation began, became the principal weapon used against the resistance.
(Emphasis added. Source.)
when even “human rights” (regime change) organizations funded by the US government feel compelled to admit this, not even liberals should be able to deny it, yet somehow many still do
