“That he wanted to gas ‘uncivilised tribes’ as a war crime.”
He advocated for tear gas (lachrymatory gas) to save lives vs high explosives.
“It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gases... lachrymatory gas... would leave no serious permanent effect.”
— Winston Churchill
This quote is truncated to deliberately invert its meaning. Critics use it to portray him as a monster, but the full text reveals a humanitarian intent to reduce lethality.
He wrote: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas... 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.”
Churchill argued that using tear gas to disperse rebels was morally superior to the alternative: bombing them with high explosives. He was advocating for the use of non-lethal riot control agents, exactly as used by modern police forces, to prevent slaughter. His intent was the preservation of human life—“Why lacerate a man with shrapnel when a watery eye will suffice to clear the field?” — to call this a “war crime” is a deliberate distortion.