As I write this, BBC reports that UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is “urgently” investigating reports of a chemical weapons attack in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The US Department of Defense finds the reports “deeply concerning.”

Usually when the western governments start quacking about “chemical attacks,” it means they’re planning to take action of some kind — airstrikes in Syria, sanctions on Russia, what have you — and are looking for an excuse.

This doesn’t look like an exception to that rule: Further down in the story, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar identifies the likely weapon as “phosphorous ammunition.”

That would most likely be white phosphorous, an element not classed as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It’s used as a component in smoke, illumination, incendiary, and tracer rounds for everything from small arms to large artillery, as well as in grenades, by most major militaries on Earth.

In theory, it’s illegal to use white phosphorous to attack “personnel,” but acceptable to use it on “equipment.”

That’s a pretty big loophole. As an 81mm mortarman in the US Marine Corps, I often trained on what we called “shake and bake” missions, involving a mix of white phosphorous and high explosive rounds. The justification? We would be firing at the enemy’s “equipment.” That would include their uniforms, canteens, etc. If they chose to stay with that “equipment,” well, that was their problem.

If the weapon in question is indeed white phosphorous, calling the incident a “chemical” attack is neither legally accurate nor novel. It’s nasty stuff — it burns incredibly hot and water won’t put it out — but it’s been in wide use since World War One. Including, probably, by both sides in the Ukrainian conflict.

In truth, chemical weapons aren’t especially useful on the modern battlefield. Soldiers of all nations carry, and are trained to use, protective gear. Such weapons have some utility in short-term “territory denial” — making the enemy not want to enter a given space for fear of exposure. They’re not a game-changer, though. And, with one exception, most regimes won’t use them precisely because the effects aren’t worth the negative reactions.

That exception is CS, commonly known as “tear gas.”

Unlike white phosphorous, “tear gas” IS banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can’t legally be used on the battlefields of international conflicts.

But most regimes, including the US government, freely use it on “their own people” (another phrase often used in pre-escalation propaganda) to break up protests, flush out suspects in standoffs with police, etc.

CS, which is highly flammable, was the agent used in the US government’s fiery 1993 massacre of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, near Waco, Texas.

The US also retains stockpiles of deadlier agents, which it agreed by treaty in 1997 to destroy by 2007. What’s the holdup?

Given the American government’s own retention of several actual chemical weapons and frequent, even casual, use of another,  calling a supposed white phosphorous attack in a war zone “deeply concerning” comes off as, at best, insincere and opportunistic.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On April 6,  hundreds of protesters convened outside the Walt Disney Company’s headquarters in Burbank, California. Their message: Boycott Disney.

Disney’s having a moment at the center of the latest culture war dust-up, with the allied forces of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base and the old “religious right” arrayed against an equally motley crew of something they call the “radical woke left.”

Under pressure from the latter, Disney spoke out against Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, a bit of fentanyl-laced red marketing meat tested on the former’s support base there, and now spreading to other states.

Disney’s General Entertainment Content president, Karey Burke, followed that up with a stated intention to boost the presence and centrality of  queer characters in Disney productions: “We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories and yet we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.”

Right-wing response: Avengers! Assemble!

It seems that the American right has already forgotten, and is about to re-learn, a lesson it’s only recently given to what passes for an American “left”: It’s easier to implement and sustain a “buycott” than a “boycott.”

When Chick-fil-A came under attack for donating money to anti-LGBTQIA causes, its revenues didn’t fall. In fact, they soared to new records as Chick-fil-A became religious conservatives’ fast food chain of preference.

The Chick-fil-A boycott/buycott scenario had clearly drawn lines. You avoided it because you supported e.g. same-sex marriage, or you patronized it to “own the libs.”

With Disney, the lines aren’t nearly as clear. Disney is easy to buycott, hard to boycott.  Why? Because Disney owns and makes a LOT of stuff, not all of which is obviously Disney-branded. Let us count the ways:

Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Pixar. Marvel Studios. Lucasfilm. 20th Century Studios and 20th Century Animation. Searchlight Pictures. The ABC television network. The Disney Channel. Freeform. FX. National Geographic.  A&E. ESPN. Hulu. Then there are its theme parks, hotels, and cruise line.

If you consume entertainment content, you almost certainly consume Disney content whether you notice you’re doing so or not.

Buycotting  Disney is as easy as continuing to do what you’re probably already doing.

Boycotting Disney? Well, that’s significant and probably unpleasant work. How many sportsball fans even notice that Disney owns ESPN? How many of them are going to give up watching their favorite teams’ games over it? Probably not many.

The proposed Disney boycott is essentially Old Yeller, except that few will likely notice or mourn when it’s put down. And frankly, I’d be happy to see all of these “culture war” battles end that way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Genocide.” That’s the announced verdict of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as images of hundreds of civilian dead — some with their hands bound, apparently executed — emerged from the city of Bucha following a withdrawal of Russian troops.

“You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” says US president Joe Biden. “Well, the truth of the matter — we saw it happen in Bucha — he is a war criminal.”

What actually happened in Bucha is uncertain  and may remain so forever. The Ukrainians claim that Russian soldiers murdered the civilians. The Russians seem to alternately claim the entire scene was staged, or else that the victims were suspected Russian sympathizers/collaborators killed by fellow Ukrainians.  Probably mass murder, but who did it?

Unfortunately, absent total defeat a la Germany and Japan in World War Two — an unlikely outcome for either side in Ukraine  — such crimes will almost certainly go unpunished.  Neither the actual perpetrators (whoever they are), nor their commander in chief (whoever he is), will suffer significant consequences for their actions.

Biden’s call for Vladimir Putin to face trial –presumably in the International Criminal Court — is a combination of political grandstanding and gross hypocrisy. His own government refuses to recognize that court and threatens to sanction its judges and prosecutors if they investigate US war crimes.

But he does have a point.

“To initiate a war of aggression,” reads the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal, convened to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals at the end of World War Two,  “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

By that standard, Vladimir Putin is a war criminal for his order to invade Ukraine. The Bucha massacre, if perpetrated by Russian troops, is just a subsidiary crime.

So is Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s predecessor, who oversaw Ukraine’s war of aggression against two seceded republics in the Donbas region along the Ukraine-Russia border.

Zelenskyy himself, as well as Biden, are guilty of continuing wars of aggression initiated by their predecessors — Zelenskyy in the Donbas; Biden in, among other places, Syria.

Harry Truman never faced trial for two of the largest terror attacks in history (the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). George W. Bush and Barack Obama will probably never pay for their war crimes. Ditto Putin and Zelenskyy.

Occasionally, if the heat’s really on, the world’s political class will toss a few small fry under the bus. Absent total state collapse, the ringleaders usually skate.

Which is a very good reason to support total — and universal — state collapse. War itself is the crime, and the state is the perpetrator.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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