Nowadays, “death by forced starvation” sounds like something from an old newsreel. But it is not. Right now, in the 21st century, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is once again making use of it. While the international community is haggling over his chemical weapons, the stuff of modern nightmares, he is following the example of his medieval and his 20th-century predecessors and deliberately starving thousands of people to death.

Because he says he doesn’t want to feed armed rebels, trucks filled with food aid now sit outside the besieged city of Homs, where an unknown number of civilians have had no supplies for many weeks. The effects are the same as they were in the Łódź ghetto. A Dutch priest who has remained inside the city has described people literally going mad from hunger: “Infants are suffering the most. Nursing mothers can’t feed their babies as they are too weak from hunger. We search everywhere for milk, and when we find it we mix it with water.”