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Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today Paperback – November 7, 2017

by Anna Feigenbaum (Author)

4.7 20 ratings

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The story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets

More than a hundred years ago, French troops fired the first tear gas grenades at the German enemy. Designed to force people out from cover, tear gas causes tearing and gagging, burning the eyes and skin. Its use has ended in miscarriages, permanent injuries, and death. While all but a few countries have agreed that it is illegal to manufacture, stockpile, or use chemical weapons of war, tear gas continues to proliferate in civilian settings. Today, it is a best-selling form of “less lethal” police force. From Ferguson to the Occupied Territories of Palestine, images of protesters assaulted with “made in the USA” tear gas canisters have been seen around the world. The United States is the largest manufacturer, and Brazil and South Korea are rapidly growing markets, while Britain has found an international audience for its riot control expertise.

An engrossing century-spanning global narrative, Tear Gas is the first history of this poorly understood weapon. Anna Feigenbaum travels from military labs and chemical weapons expos to union assemblies and protest camps, drawing on declassified reports and eyewitness testimonies to show how policing with poison came to be.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A vivid history of the time and also—as good radical accounts should be—a source of encouragement to those fighting all too similar battles today.”
—Hilary Rose

“It is this violence that comes through most clearly in Tear Gas—the psychological factors, the sheer unfairness and dismissiveness that accompany the use of chemicals against demonstrators and ordinary citizens, all come through brilliantly. Tear gas not only affects protesters and bystanders indiscriminately; it relegates the status of a dissenting citizen to that of a mere irritant.”
—Yiannis Baboulias, Times Literary Supplement

“There is something epic about Anna Feigenbaum’s Tear Gas, its scope and intensity, the way that chemistry—the orienting science of the industrial revolution—provides the material to manage that revolution’s epic collapse … There is crucial knowledge to be found here.”
—Joshua Clover, author of Riot.Strike.Riot

“A passionately argued history of the development and gradual spread of tear gas around the world … a clarion call for reassessment of the widespread availability and misuse of tear gas.”
—Patrick Wicklen, Researcher on Arms Control and Human Rights at Amnesty International

“Fascinating, deeply researched and lucid … We have become so accustomed to the use of tear gas during protests that it comes as a shock when we realize, in reading this book, how little we know about the longer-term effects of what is in some ways a chemical weapon.”
—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows

“Read Feigenbaum’s book. It’s timely, well-written, and very important.”
—Evaggelos Vallianatos, Independent Science News

“Feigenbaum integrates science and history with a compelling discussion of tear gas’s history and its present role in the civilian arena.”
—Choice

About the Author

Anna Feigenbaum is a writer, researcher and educator working on communication and social change. She is co-author of the book Protest Camps, and her work has appeared in Vice, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, the Guardian, Salon, Financial Times, Open Democracy, New Internationalist, and Waging Nonviolence. She is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of media and Communications at Bournemouth University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso (November 7, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 178478026X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1784780265
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.61 x 8.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,112,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #237 in Biological & Chemical Warfare History (Books)
- #1,867 in Law Enforcement (Books)
- #2,114 in Conventional Weapons & Warfare History (Books)

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Malvin

Accurate, astute and on-point

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2018

“Tear Gas” by Anna Feigenbaum offers an unique history of tear gas and the struggle for democracy in our time. Dr. Feigenbaum is a lecturer, author and activist whose important work includes RiotID, a civic media project that aims to empower tear gas victims. Readers who may be interested in thinking through issues of militarism, policing and plutocracy will value this outstanding book.

I found Dr. Feigenbaum’s history to be highly accurate, astute and on-point. Dr. Feigenbaum begins by sharing how chemical warfare in World War I was repackaged by profit-seeking entrepreneurs for peacetime use - meaning that tear gas played a crucial role in the rise of the military/industrial complex. The author presents original research that provides a window into the thinking within Anglo-American imperial circles about the merits of deploying tear gas to quell dissent in India, Palestine and elsewhere. We learn that the powerful hoped that tear gas could ridicule demonstrators, shift the narrative to the benevolence of non-violent imperial power, and avoid critical discussions of the exploitative colonialist relationship.

Dr. Feigenbaum explains how tear gas became a policing tool. Corporations funded junk science to paper over the dangers of tear gas, leading the way to its marketing to law enforcement agencies. The author discusses some of the most infamous incidents of domestic tear gas attacks, from Governor Ronald Reagan’s helicopter assault on student demonstrators at Berkeley to the Occupy Movement, the Ferguson protests, and so on. Ultimately, we come to understand that tear gas, by depriving citizens of their right to assembly, is indispensable to maintaining the privileges of the One Percent.

Dr. Feigenbaum talks about resistance. We are introduced to some of the many concerned citizens and activists who are working to challenge the industry, often using social media to bring the harm and injustice of tear gas to light. Dr. Feigenbaum expertly frames the issue of tear gas around our collective human and democratic rights; thus inspiring us to work for a better future.

I highly recommend this excellent book to everyone.

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David Swanson

The case for banning tear gas

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2018

Tear gas is among the least of the problems facing those who care about the murder and destruction of war. But it is a major element in the militarization of local policing. In fact, it is widely deemed illegal in war, but legal in non-war (although what written law actually creates that loophole is unclear).

Like blowing people up with missiles from drones, shooting people for being Palestinian, holding people in cages for decades without charge or trial on a stolen corner of Cuba, or zapping people with tasers for being African American, the legality of firing tear gas or mace or pepper spray at people — regardless of whether it harms or kills them, as it often does — is believed by many to hang on whether or not the action was part of a war.

The distinction is a bizarre one in a number of ways. First, no current wars are themselves legal. So drone murders don’t get to be legal if they’re declared to be part of a war.

Second, state militaries openly wage war against governments, non-governmental groups, amorphous categories of people, and even against tactics or emotions (terrorism, terror). When a government wages war against distant people, such as the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, etc., it is theoretically forbidden to use tear gas (even while using napalm, white phosphorous, and far more deadly weapons that are not chemicals). But when the same government wages war against people it claims belong to it (sending National Guard troops to both foreign wars and New Orleans, Ferguson, Baltimore, etc., and not just Guard but also police troops armed and trained by both the U.S. and Israeli militaries) it is supposedly allowed to use weapons that are too evil to use abroad.

Third, the U.S. government is nonetheless permitted to — or at least it routinely does — market and sell and produce and deliver those weapons for use by the world’s most brutal governments against the people whom they claim belong to them.

Fourth, when the U.S. military occupies other people’s land for decades as in Afghanistan, the world shows little concern (and an International Criminal Court “investigation” goes nowhere) when the global police kill with acceptable weapons, but tear gas remains an unacceptable weapon not for use in war. However, the occupation gradually loses the name of war, and the troops now seem to have so much tear gas at their disposal that they use it on themselves.

I’ve long opposed using the term “war” for things other than war. I don’t want a war on cancer for a great many reasons, including the need for a focus on prevention, the need to lose warlike habits of thought, and the need to maintain the word war for reference to, you know, war — for moral, practical, and legal reasons. The bans on war in international law, already generally ignored, would only be further weakened by expanding what counts as a war. So, I don’t want to equate Ferguson with Iraq. And I don’t want to render more difficult the necessary abolition of war by preventing people from recognizing what war is. Yet I am up against wars that never end, and domestic policing that shares weaponry, training, and mission with wars.

So, here’s what I propose.

The illegality of war under the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact be recognized.
The legal standards on practices too evil for war be understood to apply universally to all human endeavors. In fact, nothing in the Chemical Weapons Convention or other treaties says otherwise.
Those standards be steadily expanded to encompass more evil.

By dropping the “war time” vs. “peace time” distinction, in this way, we could lose the notion that by somehow being part one and part the other a death camp like Guantanamo escapes the legal restrictions of both. By making everywhere “peace time” rather than “war time,” and treating war as merely the greatest of all crimes, we would not be granting governments special wartime powers, but rather stripping them of those for good.

Currently only certain types of chemical weapons are deemed good-only-in-non-war. Some chemical weapons are already considered too evil to ever be used. In fact, certain types of chemical weapons are deemed so evil that the most implausible and unproven allegations of their use or even their very possession by the wrong party are deemed justification for massively murderous and destructive largely-non-chemical warfare. In part this is an issue of ordinary colonial double-standards, as other nations can go right on possessing the same weapons. But in part it is a distinction between good and bad chemical weapons. While some chemical weapons are in fact more dangerous than others, more people are killed by tear gas than were killed in a supposed Russian chemical attack in England that the British Prime Minister characterized earlier this year as “an unlawful use of force against the United Kingdom.” The legalistic distinction between good and bad chemical weapons should end.

We were sold a drone war on Yemen as preferable to a non-drone war, which of course it predictably led to. Tear gas is often sold to us as preferable to shooting demonstrators with bullets. The better choice for Yemen would have been no war at all. The better choice for protesters is firing nothing at them, but rather sitting down and reading the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and then sitting down with them to hear their grievances. Tear gas police riots, or “riot control” which is often to riots as “counter-terrorism” is to terrorism, generally involve lots of other weaponry as well.

War Resisters League provides information on tear gas on a website. And I recommend the new book I’ve just read: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum. As Feigenbaum notes, the use of tear gas has increased dramatically, jumping up in 2011 when it was used heavily in Bahrain, Egypt, the United States, and elsewhere. People have been killed, lost limbs, lost eyes, suffered brain damage, taken third-degree burns, developed respiratory problems, and had miscarriages. Tear gas canisters have fractured skulls. Tear gas has started fires. Crops and non-human animals and birds have been poisoned. Then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly dismisses pepper spray as “a food product, essentially,” and a British report from 1970 still widely used to justify the use of tear gas recommends that it be considered not a weapon at all, but a drug. Feigenbaum’s book is a history of weapons development and use, and of corrupt “scientific” marketing.

Super-patriotic Americans will be delighted to know that the United States and England have led the way. Since World War I, Brits and Americans have marketed chemical weapons as a means to reduce suffering in wars and to end wars more swiftly — not to mention a “harmless” means of controlling crowds (by inflicting unbearable harmless suffering). They’ve developed distinctions without a difference. They’ve fudged test results. They’ve hidden test results. And they’ve engaged in human experimentation, with major testing of chemical weapons on unsuspecting victims being done at Edgewood Arsenal in the United States and Porton Down in England for decades beginning just after Germans were convicted and hanged for similar acts.

General Amos Fries, head of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, was motivated to market chemical weapons to police as a means of preserving the existence of his agency after World War I. Not only was the war over, but chemical weapons had a very bad reputation — based on, you know, reality. The reputation was so bad, that it took the UK another generation (and the aid of racism in applying them first to colonies) to fully come around to accepting the use of chemical weapons by police. Fries marketed chemical weapons as excellent for both “mobs” and “savages.”

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” quoth Winston Churchill, as eloquent and ahead-of-his-time as always (and yet, as always, I fail to feel the love everybody else seems to always respond with).

A major militarization of police, in Feigenbaum’s account, came about with the adoption of tear gas by U.S. police departments in the 1920s and 1930s. While we might imagine that guidelines were in place from the start rendering the way that tear gas has so often been used (as an aggressive weapon against trapped crowds and in enclosed spaces, etc.) unethical, Feigenbaum corrects this misunderstanding. Tear gas was designed and promoted as a tool for use against unarmed civilians at close range and in enclosed spaces. Its increased effectiveness in such cases were selling points. This may be worth bearing in mind as the U.S. Army is now training soldiers to kill underground.

The first big test in the glorious history of the use of tear gas as “crowd control” came when the U.S. military attacked World War I veterans and their families in the Bonus Army in Washington, D.C., killing adults and infants, and giving tear gas a new name: the Hoover ration. Far from a point of shame, this murderous attack on veterans “using chemical weapons on their own people” (to echo the oft-used justification for later U.S. “humanitarian” wars) also became a marketing point. The Lake Erie Chemical company used photos of the attack on the Bonus Army in its sales catalogues.

The United States pushed tear gas on the world and sold it to British colonies until the British felt compelled to become their own producers. Turning points in its acceptance for Britain came in India and Palestine. The Amritsar massacre in India created the desire for a gun-like weapon less deadly and more acceptable than the gun, a way, as Feigenbaum writes, to “change how governments looked without any need to change the way things actually were.” The dying British Empire picked up the baton and spread tear gas far and wide. Tear gas was part of Israel from before Israel’s official creation.

We still today think of tear gas in terms of how it has been marketed, despite what our own lying eyes have shown us. During the Civil Rights and Peace movements of the 1960s, as so many times since, tear gas has not principally been used to disperse dangerous crowds. It has been used to facilitate attacks with other weapons on intentionally trapped and nonviolent crowds. It has been fired into people’s houses and churches and meeting halls to chase them out into danger, just as it was used to force people out of caves in Vietnam. It has been used as visual cover for assaults with other weapons. It has been used to create an accepted image of a dangerous crowd, regardless of what the people choking on it are doing or were doing before the tear gassing. Tear gas motivates the wearing of masks, which alters the image and the behavior of protesters. It’s been used by SWAT teams in countless cases where knocking on a door would have worked better. It’s been used as punishment of protesters and prisoners. It’s been used as sport by over-eager police/soldiers.

Activists have resisted, have stopped a shipment from Korea to Bahrain, have stopped a hotel in Oakland, California, from hosting a weapons bazaar. But tear gas use is on the rise around the world. Feigenbaum proposes honest scientific studies. I’m not against that. She proposes clarification of the legal status of tear gas. I’m not against that — see above. She proposes, rather desperately, that if this weapon is to be deemed a drug, then the same restrictions on conflicts of interest should apply as apply to drugs. I’m not against that. But Feigenbaum’s book actually makes a simpler and stronger case: ban tear gas entirely.

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Dan L

A very informative read.

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2018

Like a lot of people, my knowledge of tear gas came from the evening TV news. And like most, I assumed that tear gas and its effects were temporary and harmless. From reading this book, I learned that tear gas is basically chemical warfare and that the long term effects of being gassed have serious health implications. Very enlightening.

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Angelo Fiorini

Não é bem assim...

Reviewed in Brazil on June 25, 2018

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A autora critica o uso de gás lacrimogêneo mas não propõe nenhuma solução como alternativa para o uso desta solução não letal.
O texto é muito acadêmico e nada prático. Parece mais uma tese universitária.

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Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today Paperback – November 7, 2017

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