Okay before I say anything else I should preface by saying that this is me researching for a socialist science-fantasy fictional world that I am creating, for writing stories. I know that “in Minecraft” and similar sayings are popular on Lemmygrad with topics like these but this is genuinely hypothetical and born from my desire to accurately represent Marxist values in my fictional writing. But also because I really do want to learn Marxist-Leninist philosophy and writing fiction is a way that I explore and try to apply theory that I have read.
Basically, in my plot which revolved around characters who are chemists, the revolution was helped greatly by the development of a hard to detect neurotoxin that would slowly kill the victim by shutting down their brains over a period of several weeks, symptoms included insomnia, memory loss, catatonia and coma before death. Not exactly a quick no-bullshit execution by firing squad but in-universe it’s not intended to make them suffer and it’s believed to at least be painless, but it was basically a covert assassination method that would not be detectable until it was too late. In my story it was only ever used for targeted assassinations of individual leaders in the fascist aristocracy and military. Obviously if they just released it into the general population it would be unambiguously immoral since it would cause tons of what the West likes to call “collateral damage.”
I don’t know of many famous sci-fi socialist/leftist stories so don’t really have a place to draw inspiration for that specific type of fiction, and none that actually depict a revolution, which is why I thought to post here (apologies if this post is not appropriate for this community). Would this be contradictory to a socialist revolution in Marxism-Leninism? Would it be something acceptable as the terrible realities of war/revolution or would it be totally immoral from a socialist point of view? I don’t need it to be totally moral, as I do want to explore the implications and basically what can happen in desperation fighting for a cause you believe right and facing imminent defeat, but as a socialist writer writing about a socialist world I really don’t want to depict something most socialists would consider completely unacceptable.
My choice to envision it as affecting the brain also plays into my motifs relating to sapience/intelligence and the mind in this story but that’s not really relevant to this post.
What do you think comrades?
Chemical weapons tend to be incredibly indiscriminate, you can’t really choose whether or not they hit civilians. That’s why they are considered war crimes. They can also damage the environment for decades or centuries after they have been used.
What you’re thinking of sounds more like poison than chemical weapons though, if it is something used to assassinate single targets or small groups at a time.
Wait, but is the consesus about chemical weapon those that are used in massove scale? Because if you use poison to kill someone, I believe you are using it as a weapon, or am I mistaken? Is that a different category?
It could honestly be semantics I suppose. I don’t know if there is a clear definition.
I believe it all depends on context. For example, the KGB got Stephan Bandera in Germany using cyanide gas. So there’s an historic precedent on what you are thinking about. Every weapon has a different use due to the circumstances, that is why so many of them exist. In order to make a weapon viable in any given situation first it has to be effective and then it has to be the best option. A simple gun can be effective, but may not be the best option against a plane.
No, chemical weapons are indiscriminate, can linger for extremely long times (some bio and chemical weapons can last decades until they’re disturbed again), unexploded ordnance will lead to waiting deathtraps. This will leave areas uninhabitable.
Also in war, there is a reason why even tear gas is banned. Using chemical weapons will cause the other side to escalate. You use pepper munitions? They use use tear gas. You use phosgene in retaliation? They use chlorine back. You deploy mustard to one up them? They use cyanide back. You then use Sarin? They attack with VX.
Chemical weapons, bio weapons, and nuclear are off the table for these reasons.
Except that nothing is off the table for fascists. They will use any weapon they can against you. I don’t understand this naive notion that if we are just polite and don’t use forbidden weapons the enemy won’t do so either. To give a contemporary example: Russia was not using cluster weapons, now Ukraine with the full backing of the West has decided to go ahead and use them anyway. There have also been reports from the battlefield that Ukraine has been using chemical weapons; they have also blown chemical plants when retreating to create hazard zones. Top Kiev officials have said repeatedly that if they could they would use nuclear weapons too and they constantly bemoan the fact that they had to give up “their” nuclear weapons when they got independence. Their commentators on TV endorse plans like detonating a nuclear power plant to stop the Russians from advancing, and they brag about and celebrate war crimes against POWs. Fascists and imperialists (remember the US’ use of biological weapons in Korea and chemical weapons in Vietnam?) have no limits or moral restraints, you will not get the same kind of courtesy in return from them just because you decide to act morally and restrained.
This is not to say that we should be doing this kind of shit ourselves, but that this argument about escalation is not really a good justification. The one about collateral damage is a much better one. To win the support of the population after the conflict it is wise to refrain from doing things that can harm them. It is still possible that the enemy will engineer false flag events and blame their attacks on the population on you, but many people will see through that.
Chemical weapons cannot be used on key members of a fascist leadership. Key members of a fascist leadership could get caught up in the blast zone of a chemical weapon, but that blast zone will harm thousands of people, and some chemical weapons will make the area toxic for multiple generations.
