Author: neilg63

We spent the first few days in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, speaking to government leaders.... Then we went to Svay Rieng where, after meeting with the provincial governor, we were taken to the border at Bave - this is the border with South Vietnam. It was interesting to see that in Bave there was a deliberate attempt on the part of the South Vietnamese puppet border guards to create an incident with the Cambodian officers accompanying us. At one stage, when a Cambodian photographer tried to photograph the border, the South Vietnamese puppet officers came to our side of the border with pistols cocked and threatened military action unless the film was handed back to them. Fortunately an incident was prevented only by the tact displayed by the Cambodian officers on the Cambodian side of the border.

We were told that there was a Special Forces camp just across the border and that the Americans flew in with helicopters, strafed Cambodian villages, and then took away villagers for interrogation. In the village of Soc Noc I spoke to a villager named Muy Tith, twenty-nine years old, who had been captured by the United States Special Forces. He told me that he was tortured and beaten by the South Vietnamese Special Forces and also by the Americans, who then asked him whether there were any Viet Cong in his village. As the man could not speak any Vietnamese, he kept saying, ‘No, no, no!Â' until finally, after tying him up for two hours and beating him consistently, they released him and let him go back to his village. We were also told that others had not been so lucky, and while we were in the village of Soc Noc there were {133} twelve villagers who had not been returned: no one knew what had happened to them...

After we had seen the villages which had been bombed by the United States, after we had seen the destruction which had been caused by these attacks, and after we had met the victims of these attacks, we went back to Phnom Penh. After two days of talks with officials there, we went on the so-called Sihanouk and Ho Chi Minh Trails, which were long journeys. It was absolutely clear to us from the trails we visited that it would have been impossible for any large force, whether it belonged to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam or whether, as the United States claimed, it belonged to North Vietnamese divisions, to use those trails. It was impossible for any heavy trucks to go on those trails, and further on the river could not be bridged. We saw the area where the United States said that there was an airport which landed North Vietnamese and NLF battalions when they were coming back or going to the South. It was very clear to us that this was in a clearing, but the rough nature of the ground and the fact that there had been bushes growing on it for over the last two years, would have made it impossible for any plane to land. We also saw near the site of the so-called airport a lot of diamond mining going on, and they had large bamboo sticks sticking up into the sky, which the United States claimed were antennae for an underground radio station.

In any event, there was no doubt in our minds that neither the Sihanouk nor the Ho Chi Minh Trails could be used by the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces, and that the United States was merely using this as an excuse to bomb and strafe Cambodian border villages. This becomes increasingly significant when one learns that at the recent conference in Guam, it was suggested to President Johnson by Westmoreland and other military leaders that two Cambodian provinces be occupied and the war extended to Cambodia to stop the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops. In Cambodia we found (and any other investigation teams that go to Cambodia will find the same) that there was no evidence whatsoever that there had been infiltration by the North Vietnamese forces.

Continuing our journey into the southern districts of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, we visited Ninh Binh province {134} and spoke to the Roman Catholics there and saw for ourselves the churches which had been bombed. The churches were mainly isolated, with a couple of mud huts next to them.

But the most traumatic experience was in the province of Thanh Hoa. It was 29 January 1967.... We were told that at 2.30 P.M. that afternoon we would be taken to the hospital in Thanh Hoa to meet and interview some of the victims of the air raids. But the same day, while we were having lunch, we heard the planes roaring overhead and making their way towards the town. Then we heard the bombing and the thuds which have become a feature of life in North Vietnam today. We were told that the trip was off. A major said that they were bombing Thanh Hoa.

At 4.00 P.M. we visited the hospital, the first place on our itinerary. This was the hospital where we should have been at 2.30. At 3.00 P.M. it had been bombed and some of the patients killed. While they were being removed from the hospital and taken to the first-aid station, there was another attack and the first-aid station had been completely destroyed. Incendiary bombs had been used and some houses were still burning. When we visited Thanh Hoa, it was on fire. There were embers and flames everywhere. We saw a large crater caused by an American rocket. Anti-personnel weapons had been used.

Mrs Nguyen Thi Dinh had rushed out of her house just in time to save herself, but she saw her house and its contents burned to the ground. When I spoke to her, she was weeping silently. She said, ‘Do you think I will ever forgive them for what they are doing to us? Never! Never! They must be made to pay for their crimes.Â'

Two hundred homes had been damaged or destroyed, and 125 families were homeless.

A hospital with Red Cross markings and a first-aid station had been singled out and destroyed. If the shelters provided by the authorities had not been so effective, the casualties would no doubt have been higher. Half of Thanh Hoa had been evacuated in advance as well, and this too was fortunate. I looked around for anything which could conceivably have been a military target in the town itself. There was no sign of any military object.

The part of the province which had been bombed almost without respite was Dinh Gia district, at its southern extremity. The {135} bombing was so heavy that no one had been taken there before for fear of casualties. We travelled there during the night, crossed a few bridges, and reached Dinh Gia safely. The next day was the most depressing day I spent in Vietnam. I saw bombed schools and hospitals. They had been direct hits. There could be no doubt whatsoever that this was deliberate. In the village of Hai Nan, a coastal village not far from the 7th Fleet, almost every house had been destroyed. The attack which had destroyed the village had taken place four days earlier. The destruction was obviously fresh.

I spoke to Nguyen Thi Tuyen, a twelve-year-old girl who had lost a leg. She told me her story in the following words:

I had just returned from school and was about to have a bath when the aircraft came from the direction of the sea. They dived down and dropped lots of bombs. I grabbed my younger brother and rushed to the shelter, but it was too late. A bomb fragment hit my brother in the stomach and killed him. Another fragment cut my leg off, as you can see for yourself. Our house was burned down. My uncle could not put the flames out in time. Now I live with some relatives. Will you please tell me why they are bombing us? ...

This was the story in almost every village I visited. These were no military targets, and the United States could not but be aware of this fact. The schools in the district had been dispersed to avoid casualties. Some of them were in shelters. Hospitals had been dispersed. Hospitals which had been bombed previously were now under the ground. At this stage I think it is fair to point out that the Vietnamese doctors are the most impressive group of people I have met anywhere. They are dedicated, and they have seen more suffering than anyone else, but it has not affected their morale in the least. {136}/

On 15 October 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations. The demonstrators heard pleas for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and for a serious commitment to negotiations, in response to the negotiation offers from North Vietnam and UN efforts to settle the war. To be more precise, this is what they heard if they heard anything at all. On the Boston Common, for example, they heard not a word from the speakers, who were drowned out by hecklers and counter-demonstrators.

On the Senate floor, Senator Mansfield denounced the ‘sense of utter irresponsibilityÂ' shown by the demonstrators, while Everett Dirksen said the demonstrations were ‘enough to make any person loyal to his country weepÂ'. Richard Nixon wrote, in a letter to the New York Times, that ‘... victory for the Viet Cong... would mean ultimately the destruction of freedom of speech for all men for all time not only in Asia, but in the United States as wellÂ' - nothing less.

In a sense, Senator Mansfield was right in speaking of the sense of utter irresponsibility shown by demonstrators. They should have been demanding not an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and negotiations, but a complete and immediate withdrawal of all American troops and matériel - an end to any forceful interference in the internal affairs of Vietnam or any other nation. They should have been demanding not merely that the US adhere to international law and its own treaty obligations - thus removing itself forthwith from Vietnam; but they should also have exercised their right and duty to resist the violence of the state, which was as vicious in practice as it was illegal in principle.

In October 1967 there were, once again, mass demonstrations {29} against the war, this time in Washington and at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, still larger, though less militant, demonstrations had taken place in New York. The Tet offensive, shortly after, revealed that American military strategy was ‘foolish to the point of insanityÂ'.1 It also revealed to the public that government propaganda was either an illusion or a fraud. Moreover, an international monetary crisis threatened, attributable in part to Vietnam.

In retrospect, it seems possible that the war could have been ended if popular pressure had been maintained. But many radicals felt that the war was over, that it had become, in any case, a ‘liberal issueÂ', and they turned to other concerns. Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

These demands, however, had always been beside the point. As to negotiations, there is, in fact, very little to negotiate. As long as an American army of occupation remains in Vietnam, the war will continue. Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place. Those who had been calling for ‘negotiations nowÂ' were deluding themselves and others, just as those who now call for a cease-fire that will leave an American expeditionary force in Vietnam are not facing reality.

As to the bombing of North Vietnam, this had always been a side-show, in large measure a propaganda cover for the American invasion of the South. The US government could not admit that it was invading South Vietnam to protect from its own population a government that we had installed. Therefore it was rescuing the South Vietnamese from ‘aggressionÂ'. But then surely it must strike at the ‘source of aggressionÂ'. Hence the bombing of North Vietnam. This, at least, seems the most rational explanation for the bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965, at a time when no North Vietnamese troops were in the South, so far as was known, and there was a bare trickle of supplies.

To be sure, those who are ‘in the knowÂ' have different explanations {30} for the bombing of North Vietnam. Consider, for example, the explanation offered by Sir Robert Thompson, the British counter-insurgency expert who has been for many years a close adviser of the American army in South Vietnam - a man who is, incidentally, much admired by American social scientists who like to consider themselves ‘tough minded, hard-nosed realistsÂ', no doubt because of his utter contempt for democracy and his relatively pure colonialist attitudes. In the Guardian of 19 May 1969, his views are explained as follows:

He also condemns the bombing of the North. The US Air Force in 1965 was having great budgetary problems, because the army was the only one that had a war on its hands and was thus getting all the money. ‘So the Air Force had to get in, and you had the bombing of North Vietnam ... the budgetary problems of the Air Force were then solved.Â'

In his No Exit From Vietnam (1969), he explains more graphically the attractiveness of air power:

One can so easily imagine the commander of the Strategic Air Command striding up and down his operations room wondering how he could get in on the act. With all that power available and an enormous investment doing nothing, it is not surprising that reasons and means had to be found for their engagement. The war was therefore waged in a manner which enabled this massive air armada to be used round the clock. ... In this way the war could be fought as an American war without the previous frustrations of cooperating with the Vietnamese.

Or consider the explanation for the bombing of the North offered by Adam Yarmolinsky, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, 1965-6, previously Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. According to his analysis, the strategic bombing of North Vietnam ‘produced no military advantages except for its putative favourable impact on morale in the south. But [this step] was taken, at least in part, because it was one of the things that the US military forces were best prepared to do.Â'2

So North Vietnam was flattened and impelled to send troops to {31} the South, as it did a few months after the bombing began, if the Department of Defense can be believed.

Since the bombing of North Vietnam ‘produced no military advantagesÂ' and was extremely costly, it could be stopped with little difficulty and little effect on the American war in South Vietnam. And so it was, in two steps: on 1 April 1968, when the regular bombing was restricted to the southern part of North Vietnam, and on 1 November, when it was halted. At the same time, the total American bombing, now restricted to Laos and South Vietnam, was increased in April and increased again in November. By March 1969 the total level of bombardment had reached 130,000 tons a month - nearly two Hiroshimas a week in South Vietnam and Laos, defenceless countries. And Melvin LairdÂ's projection for the next twelve to eighteen months was the same.3 The redistribution (and intensification) of bombing and the largely empty negotiations stilled domestic protest for a time and permitted the war to go on as before.

We can now look back over the failure of the ‘peace movementÂ' to sustain and intensify its protest over the past four years. By now, defoliation has been carried out over an area the size of Massachusetts, with what effect no one has any real idea. The bombardment of Vietnam far exceeds the bombardment of Korea or anything in the Second World War. The number of Vietnamese killed or driven from their homes cannot be seriously estimated.

It is important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war. Rather it is of the very essence of American strategy. The theory behind it has been explained with great clarity and explicitness, for example by Professor Samuel Huntington, Chairman of the Government Department at Harvard and at the time (1968) Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group, ultimately responsible to the State Department. Writing in Foreign Affairs, he explains that the Viet Cong is ‘a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency {32} so long as the constituency continues to existÂ'. The conclusion is obvious, and he does not shrink from it. ‘We can ensure that the constituency ceases to exist by “direct application of mechanical and conventional power”... on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to cityÂ', where the Viet Cong constituency - the rural population - can, it is hoped, be controlled in refugee camps and suburban slums around Saigon.

Technically, the process is known as ‘urbanizationÂ' or ‘modernizationÂ'. It is described, with the proper contempt, by Daniel Ellsberg, a Department of Defense consultant on pacification in South Vietnam, who concludes, from his extensive on-the-spot observations, that ‘we have, of course, demolished the society of VietnamÂ', that ‘the bombing of the South has gone on long enough to disrupt the society of South Vietnam enormously and probably permanentlyÂ'; he speaks of the ‘people who have been driven to Saigon by what Huntington regards as our “modernizing instruments” in Vietnam, bombs and artilleryÂ'.4 Reporters have long been aware of the nature of these tactics, aware that ‘by now the sheer weight of years of firepower, massive sweeps, and grand forced population shifts have reduced the population base of the ..... .Â'5 so that conceivably, by brute force, we may still hope to ‘winÂ'.

One thing is clear: so long as an organized social life can be maintained in South Vietnam, the NLF will be a powerful, probably dominant, force. This is the dilemma which has always plagued American policy, and which has made it impossible for us to permit even the most rudimentary democratic institutions in South Vietnam. For these reasons we have been forced to the solution outlined by Professor Huntington: to crush the peopleÂ's war, we must eliminate the people.

A second thing is tolerably clear: there has been no modification in this policy. Once again, as two years ago, there is mounting popular protest against the war. Once again, a tactical {33} adjustment is being devised that will permit Washington to pursue its dual goal, to pacify the people of South Vietnam while pacifying the American people also. The first of these tasks has not been accomplished too well. The second, to our shame, has been managed quite successfully, for the most part. Now, we hear that the burden of fighting the war is to be shifted away from the American infantry to the B52s and fighter-bombers and a mercenary force of Vietnamese. Only a token force, of between 200,000 and 300,000 men, backed by the Pacific Naval and Air command, will be retained, indefinitely, to ensure that the Vietnamese have the right of self-determination.

At a recent press conference, Averell Harriman explained that the North Vietnamese cannot believe that we really intend to abandon the huge military bases we have constructed in Vietnam, such as the one at Cam Ranh Bay (Village Voice, 27 November 1969). Knowledgeable American observers have found it equally difficult to believe this. For example, as long ago as 27 August 1965, James Reston wrote in the New York Times:

US bases and supply areas are being constructed on a scale far larger than is necessary to care for the present level of American forces in fact, the US base at Cam Ranh ... is being developed into another Okinawa, not merely for the purposes of this war, but as a major power complex from which American officials hope a wider alliance of Asian nations, with the help of the US, will eventually be able to contain the expansion of China.

The phrase #145;contain the expansion of ChinaÂ' must be understood as code for the unpronounceable expression: ‘repress movements for national independence and social reconstruction in Southeast AsiaÂ'.

Premier Eisaku Sato, in a speech described by American officials as part of a joint Japanese-American policy statement, announced that we are entering a ‘new Pacific ageÂ' in which ‘a new order will be created by Japan and the United StatesÂ' (New York Times, 22 November 1969). His words, one must assume, were chosen advisedly. To perpetuate this new order we will need military bases such as that at Cam Ranh Bay, which can play the role of the Canal Zone in the western hemisphere. There we can base our own forces and train those of our loyal dependencies. {34}

We will no doubt soon proceed to construct an ‘inter-AsianÂ' army that can protect helpless governments from their own populations, much as the Brazilians were called in to legitimize our Dominican intervention. Where popular rebellion is in progress, these forces can gain valuable experience. Thus a senior American officer at Camp Bearcat in South Vietnam, where Thai units are based, explains that ‘they are infusing their army with experience they could never get in their own homeland.... They are coordinating their own piece of real estateÂ'. And a Thai colonel adds: ‘If my country ever has the same subversion, IÂ'll have to fight there. I want to practice hereÂ' (New York Times, 3 December 1969). Surely Reston was right in 1965 in speculating about our long-range plans for the South Vietnamese bases, from which our ‘token forceÂ' of a quarter of a million men will operate in the 1970s.6

Who can complain about a quarter of a million men, a force that can be compared, let us say, with the Japanese army of 160,000 which invaded North China in 1937, in an act of aggression that scandalized the civilized world and set the stage for the Pacific phase of the Second World War? In fact, counterinsurgency experts like Sir Robert Thompson have long argued that the American forces were far too large to be effective, and have advocated a ‘low-cost, long-haul strategyÂ' of a sort which will now very likely be adopted by the Nixon administration, if, once again, the American people will trust their leaders and settle into passivity.

As American combat troops are withdrawn, their place, it is {35} hoped, will be taken by a more effective force of Vietnamese - just as Czechoslovakia is controlled, it is reported, by fewer than 100,000 Russian troops. Meanwhile, the war will no doubt be escalated technologically. It will become more ‘capital intensiveÂ'.7 Some of the prospects were revealed in a speech by Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, reported in the Christian Science Monitor (25-7 October 1969) under the heading: ‘Technologically the Vietnam war has been a great success.Â' General Westmoreland ‘sees machines carrying more and more of the burdenÂ'. He says:

I see an army built into and around an integrated area control system that exploits the advanced technology of communications, sensors, fire direction, and the required automatic data processing - a system that is sensitive to the dynamics of the ever-changing battlefield - a system that materially assists the tactical commander in making sound and timely decisions.

Further details are presented by Leonard Sullivan, Deputy Director of Research and Development for South-east Asian Matters: 8

These developments open up some very exciting horizons as to what we can do five or ten years from now. When one realizes that we can detect anything that perspires, moves, carries metal, makes a noise, or is hotter or colder than its surroundings, one begins to see the potential. This is the beginning of instrumentation of the entire battlefield. Eventually, we will be able to tell when anybody shoots, what he is shooting at, and where he was shooting from. You begin to get a ‘Year 2000Â' vision of an electronic map with little lights that flash for different kinds of activity. This is what we require for this ‘porousÂ' war, where the friendly and the enemy are all mixed together.

Note the time scale that is projected for Vietnam. News reports reveal some of the early stages of these exciting developments. The New York Times, 22 November 1969, reports a plan to use remote-controlled unmanned aircraft as supply transports for {36} combat areas. On 1 October 1969 the New York Times explains that:

The landscape of Vietnam and the border regions are studded with electronic sensors that beep information into the banks of computers. Radar, cameras, infrared detectors and a growing array of more exotic devices contribute to the mass of information. Not long ago reconnaissance planes began carrying television cameras.

The data go into the Combined Intelligence Center near Tansonnhut Air Base: ‘Day and night in its antiseptic interior a family of blinking, whirring computers devours, digests and spews out a Gargantuan diet of information about the enemyÂ', the better to serve the ‘conglomerate of allied civil and military organizations that work together to destroy the VietcongÂ's underground governmentÂ' - freely admitted to have been the most authentic popular social structure in South Vietnam prior to the American effort to demolish the society of Vietnam. One can understand the gloating of Douglas Pike: ‘The tactics that delivered victory in the Viet Minh war, however impressive once, had been relegated by science to the military history textbook.Â'9

What this means is, to put it simply, that we intend to turn the land of Vietnam into an automated murder machine. The techniques of which Westmoreland, Sullivan and Pike are so proud are, of course, designed for use against a special kind of enemy: one who is too weak to retaliate, whose land can be occupied. These ‘Year 2000Â' devices, which Westmoreland describes as a quantum jump in warfare, are fit only for colonial wars. There is surely an element of lunacy in this technocratic nightmare. And if {37} we are still at all capable of honesty, we will, with little difficulty, identify its antecedents.

Our science may yet succeed in bringing to reality the fears of Bernard Fall - no alarmist, and fundamentally in favour of the war during its early years - who wrote in one of his last essays that ‘Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity ... is threatened with extinction ... the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this sizeÂ'. The South Vietnamese Minister of Information wrote in 1968 that ordinary Vietnamese would continue ‘to be horrified and embittered at the way the Americans fight their war.... Our peasants will remember their cratered rice fields and defoliated forests, devastated by an alien air force that seems at war with the very land of VietnamÂ'.10

American reporters have told us the same thing so often that it is almost superfluous to quote. Tom Buckley - to mention only the most recent - describes the delta and the central lowlands:

... bomb craters beyond counting, the dead gray and black fields, forests that have been defoliated and scorched by napalm, land that has been ploughed flat to destroy Vietcong hiding places. And everywhere can be seen the piles of ashes forming the outlines of huts and houses, to show where hamlets once stood.11

The truth about defoliants is only beginning to emerge, with the discovery that one of the two primary agents used is ‘potentially dangerous, but needing further studyÂ' while the other causes cancer and birth defects, and probably mental retardation. Both will continue to be used in Vietnam against enemy ‘training and regroupment centresÂ' - i.e. anywhere we please, throughout the countryside.12 {38}

Of course it may be argued that the American government did not know, in 1961, that these agents were so dangerous. That is true. It was merely an experiment. Virtually nothing was known about what the effects might be. Perhaps there would be no ill effects, or perhaps - at the other extreme - Vietnam would become unfit for human life, or a race of mutants and mental retardates would be created. How could we know, without trying? In such ways ‘the tactics that delivered victory in the Viet Minh war, however impressive once, had been relegated by science to the military history textbookÂ'.

To see what may lie ahead, IÂ'd like to turn away from Vietnam to a less familiar case. It has been claimed that Vietnam is the second most heavily bombarded country in history. The most intensively bombarded, so it seems, is Laos. According to Le Monde, ‘North Vietnam was more heavily bombed than Korea; Laos is now being bombed even more than North Vietnam. And this battering has been going on for over five years. ... The US Air Force carries out more than 12,500 raids a month.Â'13 On the same day, 1 October 1969, the New York Times announced its discovery that in Laos, ‘the rebel economy and social fabricÂ' are now the main target of the American bombardment, which is claimed to be a success:

Refugees from the Plaine des Jarres area say that during recent months most open spaces have been evacuated. Both civilians and soldiers have retreated into the forests or hills and frequently spend most of the daylight hours in caves or tunnels. Refugees said they could only plough their fields at night because they were unsafe {39} during the day. ‘So long as the US bombing continues at its new level,Â' a European diplomat said here this week, ‘so-called Communist territory is little but a shooting range....Â' The bombing, by creating refugees, deprives the Communists of their chief source of food and transport. The population of the Pathet Lao zone has been declining for several years and the Pathet Lao find it increasingly difficult to fight a ‘peopleÂ's warÂ' with fewer and fewer people.

The worldÂ's most advanced society has found the answer to peopleÂ's war: eliminate the people.

It is, incidentally, remarkable that the New York Times can so blandly announce that the rebel economy and social fabric are the main target of the American bombardment. It is remarkable that this claim, which, if correct, sets American policy at the moral level of Nazi Germany, can be merely noted in a casual comment, with - so far as I know - no public reaction of horror and indignation.

Still, it is good that the American press has discovered that the rebel economy and social fabric are the target of the American bombardment of Laos. Perhaps we will be spared the pretence that our targets are steel and concrete, or that the bombing is ‘the most restrained in modern warfareÂ' (as McGeorge Bundy so elegantly put it at the time when virtually every structure in North Vietnam, outside of the centres of Hanoi and Haiphong, was being demolished).

The discovery has been mysteriously delayed. For example, in July 1968, the south-east Asia expert of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published detailed reports of his visits to the liberated areas of Laos: ‘a world without noise, for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves living hidden in the mountains ... it is dangerous to lean out at any time of the night or dayÂ' because of the ceaseless bombardment which leads to ‘the scientific destruction of the areas held by the enemyÂ'. ‘The Americans are trying to “break” the Laotian Left, both psychologically and if possible, physically.Â' The nature of their relentless attack ‘can only be explained if the target is the central administration of the Neo Lao HaksatÂ' - the political organization that won handily in 1958 in the only unrigged election in Laos. This electoral victory inspired the {40} American effort at subversion that led to the Laotian crisis in the early sixties, which still persists.

Decornoy describes ‘the motionless ruins and deserted housesÂ' of the central town of Sam-Neua district:

The first real raid against the population centre itself was launched on 19 February 1965. Very serious attacks were made on it quite recently on 17 and 19 March 1968.... The two ends of the town were razed to the ground. The old ruins of 1965 have disappeared, those of March 1968 were still ‘smokingÂ' when we visited them. Branches of trees lay all along the length of the river, houses were totally burned out (phosphorus had been used). At the other end of Sam-Neua, the sight was even more painful. Everywhere enormous craters, the church and many houses were demolished. In order to reach the people who might be living there, the Americans dropped their all-too-famous fragmentation bombs. Here lay a ‘mother bombÂ' disembowelled, by the side of the road. All round, over a dozen metres, the earth was covered with ‘daughter bombsÂ', little machines that the Vietnamese know well, unexploded and hiding hundreds of steel splinters. ... One of the officials of Sam-Neua district told us that between February 1965 and March 1968, 65 villages had been destroyed. A number impossible to verify in a short report, but it is a fact that between Sam-Neua and a place about 30 kilometres away where we stayed, no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb craters.

Decornoy reports that ‘American raids on “liberated Laos” began in May 1964, therefore well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964) and the policy of escalation to North Vietnam (spring 1965). For this reason, Laos has, in some ways, served as a testing ground or experimental siteÂ'. He describes the amazing persistence of the Laotians in maintaining and advancing the social revolution in the face of this attack, their ‘virulent nationalismÂ' and refusal to follow foreign models, the schools and factories in caves, the prosperity of the rare villages that have still, for unknown reasons, escaped destruction. Finally he quotes an American diplomat in Vientiane who says: ‘To make progress in this country, it is necessary to level everything. The inhabitants must go back to zero, lose their traditional culture, for it blocks everything.Â' And Decornoy comments: ‘The Americans accuse the North Vietnamese of intervening militarily in the country, but {41} it is they who talk of reducing Laos to zero, while the Pathet Lao exalts the national culture and national independence.Â'

No doubt Laos is still serving as a testing ground or experimental site for the next stage of the Vietnam war, for our new long-haul, low-cost policy. If the American people will only trust their leaders, perhaps there is still a chance to crush the peopleÂ's war in South Vietnam by methods that will be as well concealed as have been those of the Laotian war.

The secret can be kept. Americans know virtually nothing about the bombing of South Vietnam. To my knowledge, there has been only one pro-Western correspondent who has spent time in the liberated zones of South Vietnam, Katsuichi Honda - and I am sure that his reports in Asahi in the fall of 1967 are known to very few Americans.14 He describes, for example, the incessant attacks on undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong river and by helicopter gunships ‘firing away at random at farmhouses

They seemed to fire whimsically and in passing even though they were not being shot at from the ground nor could they identify the people as NLF. They did it impulsively for fun, using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood. They are hunting Asians.... This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong Delta were full of wounded.

He is speaking, notice, of the Mekong Delta, where few North Vietnamese soldiers were identified until several months after the Tet offensive, where, according to American intelligence, there were 800 North Vietnamese troops before last summer;15 and {42} which contained some forty per cent of the population of South Vietnam prior to the American assault.

Occasionally such material finds its way to the American press. Consider again the Mekong Delta. ‘In March [1969] alone, the United States 9th Infantry Division reported that it killed 3,504 Viet Cong troops and sympathizers in the northern delta [and] senior officers confidently forecast that they will continue to kill at least 100 a day well into the summer.Â' The ‘conflagration ... is tearing the social fabric apartÂ'. In ‘free-fire zones, the Americans could bring to bear at any time the enormous firepower available from helicopter gunships, bombers and artillery ... fighter bombers and artillery pound the enemy positions into the grey porridge that the green delta land becomes when pulverized by high explosivesÂ'.16

Apparently the performance of the 9th Division was not entirely satisfactory, however: ‘... . in the Mekong Delta, US military advisers at My Tho told a UPI correspondent, Robert Kaylor, that the governmentÂ's pacification programme was still being hampered by the effects of indiscriminate killing of civilians by US 9th Infantry Division troops recently withdrawn from the area. “You canÂ't exactly expect people who have had parts of their family blown away by the 9th to be wholeheartedly on our side,” said the US source, a member of a pacification team.Â'17

In the Monitor, 14 October 1969, there is a front page story reviewing such efforts. It explains that ‘the proportion of the country “pacified” has risen with the flow of peasants to resettlement and refugee areasÂ', although the Viet Cong ‘currently are intensifying their campaign to drive peasants back to their home areas where [they] have a better chance of controlling themÂ'. The picture is clear. We, in our magnanimity, are using our modernizing instruments, bombs and artillery, to lead the suffering peasants to the promised land of resettlement and refugee {43} areas. while the ferocious Viet Cong - mere ‘village thugsÂ', as the MIT political scientist, Ithiel Pool, explains in the journal of the Gandhi Peace Foundation - cruelly drive them back to their homes. The Monitor article also notes that ‘despite years of thought and effort, officials here are still not agreed on how best to pacify a troubled land. In those years, pacification has advanced from being a theoretical ideal - though inconvenient - to the more important but second-class status of being “the other war”Â' - and a proper theoretical exercise for American scientists and scholars.

The New York Times, 24 September 1969, presents an example of how pacification proceeds. North-west of Saigon, 700 soldiers encircled a village, killing twenty-two and arresting fifty-three. It was the fourth such operation in this village in fifteen months. As for the villagers: ‘The Viet Cong are everywhere, they say, and will be back when the Americans leave.Â' An American junior officer, looking at the deserted central market, had this to say:

They say this village is 80 per cent VC supporters. By the time we finish this it will be 95 per cent.Â' Such reports are hardly more newsworthy than a small item of 27 September which notes ‘that United States Army helicopter gunships mistakenly attacked a group of Vietnamese civilians 25 miles west of Tamky Tuesday, killing 14 civilians. ... United States helicopter gunships killed 7 unarmed civilians and wounded 17 others in a similar incident 16 September in the Mekong delta.Â' It is not easy to avoid such accidents as we try to ensure that the Viet Cong constituency ceases to exist.

In Look magazine, 18 November 1969, Foreign Editor Robert Moskin describes his visit to a refugee camp, which ‘tells part of the story of VietnamÂ's hopelessnessÂ'. Its 3,125 refugees (240 men) were transferred to this ‘desolate sand-dune campÂ' in a military sweep last summer from an island that was regarded as a VC stronghold: ‘The rest of the men are still hiding with the VC in the tall grass.Â' This is in Quang Nam province, where even the American officials in charge admit that the battle was lost ‘to Viet Cong forces recruited for the most part from within the provinceÂ'.18 With an honesty that others would do well to emulate, {44} Moskin states that in Vietnam ‘AmericaÂ's historic westward-driving wave has crestedÂ'.

With justice, ‘a staff major [of the American 1st Division in Chulai] said: “We are at war with the 10-year-old children. It may not be humanitarian, but thatÂ's what itÂ's like.” Â'19

And now there is Song My ‘PinkvilleÂ'. More than two decades of indoctrination and counter-revolutionary interventions have created the possibility of a name like ‘PinkvilleÂ' - and the acts that may be done in a place so named. Orville and Jonathan Schell have pointed out20 what any literate person should realize, that this was no isolated atrocity, but the logical consequence of a virtual war of extermination directed against helpless peasants: ‘enemiesÂ', ‘redsÂ', ‘dinksÂ'. But there are, perhaps, still deeper roots. Some time ago, I read with a slight shock the statement by Eqbal Ahmad that ‘America has institutionalized even its genocideÂ', referring to the fact that the extermination of the Indians ‘has become the object of public entertainment and childrenÂ's gamesÂ'.21 Shortly after, I was thumbing through my daughterÂ's fourth-grade social science reader.22 The protagonist, Robert, is told the story of the extermination of the Pequot tribe by Captain John Mason:

His little army attacked in the morning before it was light and took the Pequots by surprise. The soldiers broke down the stockade with their axes, rushed inside, and set fire to the wigwams. They killed nearly all the braves, squaws, and children, and burned their corn and other food. There were no Pequots left to make more trouble. When the other Indian tribes saw what good fighters the white men were, they kept the peace for many years. I wish I were a man and had been there,Â' thought Robert.

Nowhere does Robert express, or hear, second thoughts about the matter. The text omits some other pertinent remarks: for example, by Cotton Mather, who said that ‘it was supposed that no less than six hundred Pequot souls were brought down to hell {45} that day.Â'23 Is it an exaggeration to suggest that our history of extermination and racism is reaching its climax in Vietnam today? It is not a question that Americans can easily put aside.

The revelation of the Song My atrocity to a wide public appears to have been a by-product of the November mobilization. As Richard L. Strout wrote in the Monitor:

American press self-censorship thwarted Mr RidenhourÂ's disclosures for a year. ‘No one wanted to go into it,Â' his agent said of telegrams sent to Life, Look, and Newsweek magazines outlining allegations.
Except for the recent antiwar march in Washington the event might not have been publicized. In connexion with the march a news offshoot (Dispatch News Service) of the left-wing Institute of Policy Studies of this city aggressively told and marketed the story to approximately 30 US and Canadian newspapers.24

Apart from this, it probably would have disappeared from history, along with who knows what else.

The first investigation by the Pentagon ‘reported that the carnage was due to artillery fire. Civilian casualties by artillery fire among hostile villages are so common that this explanation ended the inquiryÂ'.25 But the murdered Vietnamese were not the victims of artillery fire. Since the soldiers looked into the faces of their victims, the inquiry must continue, despite the difficulties. Henry Kamm reported in the New York Times that:

The task of the investigators is complicated by the fact that last January, most of the inhabitants of the peninsula were forcibly evacuated by American and South Vietnamese troops in the course of a drive to clear the area of Viet Cong. More than 12,000 persons were removed from Batangan Peninsula by helicopters and taken to a processing camp near this provincial capital. Heavy American bombing and artillery and naval shelling had destroyed many of the houses and forced them to live in caves and bunkers for many months before the evacuation. ... An elaborate interrogation and screening procedure, in which American intelligence agents were said to have taken an {46} important part, yielded only a hundred or so active Viet Cong suspects. Most of the people were sent to a newly established refugee camp. ... Despite the extensive movement of the population and the military operation, the Viet Cong remain active in the area.26

On 22 November, Kamm adds the further information that ‘the number of refugees “generated” - the term for the people forcibly dislocated in this process - exceeded intelligence estimates fourfoldÂ'. ‘The 12,000, instead of being scattered in many hamlets where it would be difficult to keep out the Viet Cong, are now concentrated in six guarded, camp-like settlements.Â'

It is perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a still greater national scandal - if we assume that to be possible - if they alone are subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail - merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.

Recently, a study of American public opinion about Vietnam concluded with this speculation: ‘... . little reaction to the war is based on humanitarian or moral considerations. Americans are not now rejecting “war”, they merely wish to see this current conflict ended. To achieve this goal, most Americans would pursue a more militant policy and ignore resultant atrocities.Â'27 We may soon discover whether this speculation is correct. Of {47} course, there is sure to be a segment of American society that will not ‘ignore resultant atrocitiesÂ' - namely, the irresponsible, loudmouth vocal minority, or those who are described so nicely by Colonel Joseph Bellas, commanding officer of a hospital in Vietnam where soldiers boycotted Thanksgiving dinner in protest against the war: ‘TheyÂ're young, theyÂ're idealistic and donÂ't like manÂ's inhumanity to man. As they get older they will become wiser and more tolerant.Â'28 If a majority of the American people will, indeed, ignore resultant atrocities and support NixonÂ's policy of pursuing a war without discernible end, then this segment of American society may be subjected to domestic repression of a sort that is not without precedent in American history; we seem to be seeing the early signs today with the savage repression of the Panthers, the conspiracy trial in Chicago, and other incidents.

The fact that repression may be attempted does not imply that it must succeed. Surely the possibility exists, today, to create a broad-based movement of opposition to war and repression that might stave off such an attack. It is now even imaginable, as a few years ago it was not, that a significant American left may emerge that will be a voice in national affairs, and even, perhaps, a potential force for radical social change. There has been a remarkable shift in popular attitudes over the past months, an openness to radical political thinking of a sort that I do not recall for many years. To let these opportunities pass is to condemn many others to the fate of Vietnam.

Is there an ‘honourableÂ' way out of Vietnam - meaning by that a way that might be tolerable to the present state of American opinion? The question is important, for if the answer is negative, it may well be that the threat of extinction that Fall recognized will in fact be realized. It is important to stress this possibility, in view of the present mood in certain ‘movementÂ' circles where it is a criterion of oneÂ's radicalism to believe that America has been defeated and that the Vietnamese will win. On the contrary, a serious person will follow GramsciÂ's maxim: pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will. There is not much doubt that the United States has the power to deny victory, or even continued existence, to the people of Vietnam. No one knows whether the {48} present strategy of capital-intensive war can reduce the level of organized social life in Vietnam to the point where an American-imposed solution may, in its terms, be successful.

There surely is an ‘honourableÂ' way of ending the war. The PRG and DRV delegations in Paris have proposed such a way, repeatedly. It is a measure of the GovernmentÂ's contempt for the American people that Nixon was willing to publish Ho Chi MinhÂ's conciliatory letter, with the statement that it signified - in NixonÂ's phrase - ‘the other sideÂ's absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join in seeking peaceÂ'. It seems that the intermediary in the Ho-Nixon exchange was Jean Sainteny. He was interviewed by Joseph Kraft, who writes:

I saw Sainteny at the end of September, just after his return from the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. He had had a long talk with Premier Pham Van Dong. He was persuaded that the other side was prepared to accept a settlement that would include an independent and non-Communist South Vietnam set in a neutralist Southeast Asia. The obstacle to agreement in his view was that Hanoi did not have any faith in Mr NixonÂ's claim that he wanted an agreement. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese thought the United States was still trying to impose on Saigon, by military means, a pro-American government hostile to Hanoi. M. Sainteny felt - and his feelings were made known to the President - that the United States could dispel HanoiÂ's doubts in two ways. One would be a formal statement that the United States recognized the principle of total withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam at some unstipulated date. The other would be by broadening the present regime in Saigon to include some political figures who were not die-hard anti-Communists.29

Corroboratory evidence appears in an article by Philippe Devillers in LÂ'Actualité, 24 October 1969, and Averell Harriman has publicly stated that KraftÂ's report is consistent with his understanding of the situation.30 Subsequent statements by Xuan Thuy and Mme Binh in Paris provide further confirmation of the possibilities for a reasonable settlement.

Since 1960, the NLF has demanded that a neutralized South Vietnam be governed by a coalition in which they would have a {49} fair representation. It is this demand that we have consistently opposed - not surprisingly, in view of the judgement of the American mission at the time, and since, on the political power of the NLF relative to that of the succession of puppets we have installed. When the full-scale American invasion began, Bernard Fall cited a remark to George Chaffard of Le Monde by a ‘high-ranking spokesman of the FrontÂ': ‘We have not fought all these years simply to end up by installing one set of dictators in place of the old.Â' Fall added: ‘One does not fight for eight long years, under the crushing weight of American armour, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases, for the sheer joy of handing over what one fights for to some bureaucrat in Hanoi, merely on the say-so of a faraway party apparatus.Â'31 Despite the intensive American effort since 1965 to destroy social life in Vietnam, there is no reason to believe that the situation is fundamentally different today.

NixonÂ's speech of 3 November 1969 must be understood as a rejection of these possibilities for an ‘honourableÂ' settlement, one that should be acceptable to a large, I should think overwhelming, segment of the American public. Nixon denied the existence of the PRG-DRV initiatives, and made it clear that we have no intention of withdrawing our expeditionary force or broadening the Saigon regime. The present Saigon regime, which exists solely by the force of American arms, is not an acceptable partner in a coalition with the PRG and would no doubt collapse were a realistic effort to resolve the conflict seriously contemplated.

Under these conditions, it is important to take note of recent political developments in Saigon. President Thieu has apparently abandoned any effort to construct a significant political base. Elizabeth Pond reports from Saigon that his new party ‘should be very similar to the Can Lao Party [virtually, a branch of DiemÂ's secret police], as it is being directed by old Diemists, several of whom were Can Lao membersÂ'. Thieu has been able to find no political base apart from the generals and the northern {50} Catholics - essentially a reconstruction of the Diem regime.32 One of the Hoa Hao factions recently left ThieuÂ's party in protest ‘against the intensification of military control of the government in recent months - and the PresidentÂ's continuing refusal to deal seriously even with the member groups of his own allianceÂ'. Its leader asserted that the PresidentÂ's coalition ‘cannot do anything good for the countryÂ'.33 A report on the non-Communist opposition in South Vietnam quotes Pham Ba Cam, a Hoa Hao leader: ‘ItÂ's not very healthy to be in the opposition in Vietnam. If you want to learn about the status of the non-Communist opposition, go to Con Son [offshore prison island]. ThatÂ's where youÂ'll find the largest gathering.Â'34 As Pond reports, ‘President ThieuÂ's decision to organize an Army/Catholic party - at this time and in this manner - sets the course for increasing isolation of the Saigon regimeÂ'. It is a decision ‘to maintain the narrow interests and power of the existing military oligarchy as long as possibleÂ'.

This narrowing of the base of the Saigon regime reflects the political realities of South Vietnam. It also reflects a rational political judgement on the part of General Thieu:

As Vietnamese sources analyse President ThieuÂ's thinking, he is calculating that the US cannot afford to lose the war and is therefore stuck here almost no matter what Saigon does. The US might dare, it is reasoned, to abandon the Thieu regime within a year or so, but it would never dare to destroy the South Vietnamese Army. If President Thieu links his destiny inextricably to that of the Army, then, he may figure that the US cannot depose him.35

Thus the current political developments confirm, once again, {51} the failure of the American military to create a workable Quisling regime in the manner of the Russians in Czechoslovakia or the Germans in much of occupied Europe. The consequences of this situation are summarized adequately by Jacques Decornoy:

‘Under these conditions, a military solution may be a task for several decades, supposing, that is, that there still remain Vietnamese to fight and Americans to accept a conflict without end and without hope.Â'36

Twenty years ago the PeopleÂ's Republic of China was founded. Just a few months earlier, Dean Acheson had formed a committee to reassess American policy in Asia, now that China was ‘lostÂ'. The committee was to operate under this instruction: ‘You will please take it as your assumption that it is a fundamental decision of American policy that the United States does not intend to permit further extension of Communist domination on the continent of Asia or in the south-east Asia area... Â'37 Acheson made his thoughts more precise, shortly afterwards, when writing on the Soviet threat: ‘It is not only the threat of direct military attack which must be considered, but also that of conquest by default, by pressure, by persuasion, by subversion, by “neutralism”Â'38

In May 1950, Acheson announced that economic aid and military equipment would be sent to the French in Indochina ‘in order to assist them in restoring stabilityÂ'. Not long after, the State Department explained our support for French imperialism in Indochina in these terms: ‘. . . the fall of Indochina ... would be taken by many as a sign that the force of communism is irresistible and would lead to an attitude of defeatism.... Communist forces there must be decisively conquered down to the last pocket of resistanceÂ' - in the name of French imperialism39. The ‘much-needed rice, rubber, and tinÂ' were also cited as a justification for our support for the French in their ill-fated effort to reconquer their former colony. Upon their failure, we took over management of the enterprise directly. {52}

In 1955 the Communist threat was defined, very perceptively, in an extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association, The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, a study that involved a representative segment of the tiny élite that largely determines foreign policy, whoever is technically in office. The primary threat of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers ‘in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the WestÂ'. Communism, in short, reduces the ‘willingness and abilityÂ' of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of the Philippines - to take a classic Asian example - where:

Their economy has for nearly half a century been deliberately geared into that of the United States to an extent which caused Mr McNutt, in testifying as High Commissioner, to say that ‘our businessmen and our statesmen in past years allowed the Philippines to become a complete economic dependency of the United States to a greater degree than any single State of the Union is economically dependent on the rest of the United States.Â'40

Since then, there has been little substantive change in what UN Ambassador Salvador Lopez called the classic colonial economy of the Philippines. To be sure, we have bequeathed them the blessings of democracy. As Tillman Durdin accurately describes this legacy of half a century of colonial domination: ‘Filipinos view elections as a confirmation of the power of the wealthy business and landed interests who back both parties but usually pick the winners before Election Day and quietly give them the most support. In this case they picked President Marcos.Â'41 And in gratitude, the Filipinos have helped us in our war in Vietnam, in the manner explained in a recent report of the Symington subcommittee. William Selover summarized this report in a recent Monitor:

The hearings showed, for example, that the US taxpayer has been {53} paying for the Philippine troop commitment in Vietnam. It has also shown that, without this payment, the Philippines would not have sent a single man to help the US in Vietnam. ... Administration officials admitted paying the Philippines some $40 million to send the troops to Vietnam.42

Still more revealing is the stated purpose of the US military commitment to the Philippines. Selover reports Lieutenant-General Robert H. WarrenÂ's admission that the commitment was designed partly ‘to maintain internal security and stability and, thereby, make our own activities over there more secureÂ'. Senator Symington put it succinctly, with General WarrenÂ's reluctant assent: ‘In other words we are paying the Philippine Government to protect us from the Philippine people who do not agree with the policies of the government or do not like Americans.Â' Pentagon officials admitted in the hearings that ‘the only real threat that the Philippines faces . .. [is] . . . internal subversionÂ'. The threat is related, perhaps, to the fact that, for most of the population, living standards have not materially changed since the Spanish occupation.

It is this ‘Communist threatÂ' that we have been combating in Vietnam, where, as has frequently been noted, Vietnamese communism threatens the new order that we have been trying to construct in Asia with Japan as junior partner, linked to Asia by essentially colonial relationships. As President Eisenhower expressed it:

One of JapanÂ's greatest opportunities for increased trade lies in a free and developing Southeast Asia. . . . The great need in one country is for raw materials, in the other country for manufactured goods. The two regions complement each other markedly. By strengthening of Vietnam and helping ensure the safety of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, we gradually develop the great trade potential between this region ... and highly industrialized Japan to the benefit of {54} both. In this way freedom in the Western Pacific will be greatly strengthened.43

It remains to be seen how long Japan will be able to fend off economic intervention of a sort that is increasingly turning Western Europe into a dependency of American-based multi-national corporations, those ‘US enterprises abroad [which] in the aggregate comprise the third largest country ... in the world - with a gross product greater than that of any country except the United States and the Soviet Union’. 44

It is not likely that the population of the empire - the ‘integrated world economyÂ' dominated by American capital, to use the technical euphemism - will remain quiescent, willing indefinitely to complement the industrial economies of the West. Seventy-five years ago, shortly before the American invasion of the Philippines in a war that was, apart from scale, rather like our present war in Vietnam, the Philippine nationalist José Rizal castigated his countrymen because they were ‘like a slave who asked only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may rattle less and not ulcerate the skinÂ'. Those days are past. Those whom Marx called ‘the slaves and drudges of the [bourgeois] orderÂ' are no longer satisfied with a bandage to wrap their chains, and their discontent will lead to turmoil and violent repression, so long as we consent.

What can we do to affect the events that are to come? First, we must not make the mistake of placing trust in the government. The large upsurge of anti-war sentiment can be an effective device {55} for changing national policy if it is sustained in continuing mass actions across the country. Otherwise the administration can ride out the storm and continue as before to systematically demolish the society of South Vietnam and Laos. It is difficult week after week, month after month to sustain a high level of protest against the war. As American society becomes more polarized and the true, familiar Nixon emerges in the person of Mitchell or Agnew, as the threat of repression becomes more real, it will be hard to maintain the kinds of resistance and protest that the Vietnam catastrophe demands. As the reports of massacres and automated murder become routine, the impulse to respond by violence may become more difficult to stifle, despite the realization that this can only have the effect of bringing the mass of the population to ‘ignore resultant atrocitiesÂ'. Continued mass actions, patient explanation, principled resistance can be boring, depressing. But those who programme the B52 attacks and the ‘pacificationÂ' exercise are not bored, and as long as they continue in their work, so must we.

This essay appeared in the 1 January 1970 issue of the New York Review of Books. Reprinted by kind permission. {56}

Notes

1. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke as quoted by Townsend Hoopes, see New York Times, 28 September 1969.Back
2. No More Vietnams?, R. Pfeffer (ed.) (Harper & Row, 1968).Back
3. For detailed analysis based largely on Defense Department sources, see Gabriel Kolko, London Bulletin, August 1969.Back
4. No More Vietnams? For further discussion, see my article in the New York Review, 2 January 1969 and my At War with Asia (Pantheon, 1970), Chapter 1, Section 3.Back
5. Elizabeth Pond, Christian Science Monitor, 8 November 1969.Back
6. On 10 December 1969, after this article was written, Reston returned to the question of Cam Ranh Bay, stating that it was now ‘an air and naval base which is the best in AsiaÂ', and that it has been a ‘fundamental question throughout the Paris negotiationsÂ' whether the US is willing to abandon it ‘and many other modern military basesÂ'. He raises the question whether the US would withdraw all troops or only all ‘combat forcesÂ', a plan which ‘could leave a couple of hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam to maintain and fly the planes and helicopter gunships and continue to train and supply and help direct the VietnameseÂ'.
7. There is no indication of any serious intention to withdraw all forces or to abandon the bases. As Joseph Kraft has reported (see p. 49) the American refusal to commit itself to the principle of complete withdrawal is one of the factors blocking progress in Paris. Back
8. In the apt phrase of E. Herman and R. Duboff, ‘How to coo like a dove while fighting to winÂ', pamphlet of Philadelphia SANE, 20 S. Street, Philadelphia, Penna. 19107.Back
9. Congressional Record, 8 August 1969. Cited in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, October 1969 (1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Mass. - an important journal for those concerned with Asian affairs).Back
10. War, Peace, and the Viet Cong (MIT, 1969). He estimates that in 1963 ‘perhaps half the population of South Vietnam at least tacitly supported the NLFÂ'. The same estimate was given by the US Mission in 1962. Elsewhere, he has explained that in late 1964 it was impossible to consider an apparently genuine offer of a coalition government, because there was no force that could compete politically with the Viet Cong, with the possible exception of the Buddhists, who were not long after suppressed as a political force by Marshal KyÂ's American-backed storm troopers. The same difficulty has been noted, repeatedly, by spokesmen for the American and Saigon governments and reporters. For some examples, see Herman and Duboff, op. cit., or my American Power and the New Mandarins (Chatto & Windus, 1969), Chapter 3.Back
11. New York Times, 11 June 1968.Back
12. New York Times Magazine, 23 November 1969.Back
13. See Washington Post, 31 October 1969; Los Angeles Times, 31 October 1969; New York Post, 4 November 1969; Science, 7 November 1969. A Vietnamese student in the United States, Ngo Vinh Long, has summarized much of what is known, including his personal experience from 1959 to 1963 when he visited ‘virtually every hamlet and village in the countryÂ' as a military map maker, in Thoi-Bao Ga, November 1969, 76a Pleasant Street, Cambridge, Mass., a monthly publication of Vietnamese students in the United States. He describes how defoliation has been used since 1961 to drive peasants into government-controlled camps, and from his own experience and published records in Vietnam, he records some of the effects: starvation, death, hideously deformed babies. He quotes the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council who claims that by 1967 about half the arable land had been seriously affected. For American estimates, see the report of the Daddario subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 8 August 1969. They estimate the total area sprayed through 1968 as 6,600 square miles (extrapolating through 1969 the figure would reach about 8,600 square miles, about sixty per cent of this respraying - over ten per cent of it crop destruction).Back
14. Weekly selection, 1 October 1969.Back
15. They have appeared in English, and can be obtained from the Committee for the English publication of ‘Vietnam - a voice from the villagesÂ', do Mrs Reiko Ishida, 2-13-7, Nishikata, Bunyo-ku, Tokyo.Back
16. ‘Before this summer, the enemy in the delta consisted mostly of indigenous Vietcong units and guerrillas, many of whom worked during the day in the rice fields and fought at night. The only North Vietnamese were troops and officers who led some of the guerrilla units. They numbered about 800 as against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong soldiers and support troops.Â' New York Times, 15 September 1969. On 16 September, The Times reports that ‘for the first time in the war, a regular North Vietnamese army unit, the 18B Regiment, had attacked in the deltaÂ'.Back
17. New York Times, Peter Arnett, 15 April 1969. Arnett claims that only ninety per cent of the enemy forces of 40,000 are recruited locally, giving a far higher estimate of North Vietnamese than the intelligence reports cited above, or others: e.g., Christian Science Monitor, 16 September 1969, which reports that in the early fall of 1969 ‘North Vietnamese troops in the delta doubled in number, to between 2,000 and 3,000 men.Â'Back
18. Boston Globe, 1 December 1969.Back
19. William Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam (Praeger, 1967).Back
20. Henry Kamm, New York Times, 1 December 1969.Back
21. New York Times, 26 November 1969.Back
22. In No More Vietnams? On the widely noted analogy between Vietnam and the Indian wars see my American Power and the New Mandarins, Chapter 3, note 42.Back
23. Harold B. Clifford, Exploring New England (Follett, 1961).Back
24. See Howard Zinn, ‘Violence and social changeÂ', Boston University Graduate Journal, Fall 1968. When disease decimated the Indians, Mather said: ‘The woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for a better growth.Â'Back
25. On 24 November 1969. Attention Mr Agnew.Back
26. ibid., 29 November 1969.Back
27. Henry Kamm, New York Times, 15 November 1969.Back
28. J. Robinson and S. G. Jacobson, in Vietnam: Issues and Alternatives (Shenkman, 1968), a symposium of the Peace Research Society (International). This organization, following a script by Orwell, is concerned with a special kind of peace research: the question of ‘how pacification can be achieved in turbulent village societiesÂ', along lines that we have been pioneering in Vietnam, for example. The editor explains that the United States is one ‘participant in the game of world dominationÂ'. It might be asked why scholars should assist the Government in this game. The answer is that the foreign policy of the US has been characterized ‘by good-intentioned leaders and policy makersÂ', so the problem, presumably, does not arise. But even the Peace Research Society (International) is not monolithic. It would be unfair to assume that the conclusion of the cited study is mere wishful thinking. It has to be taken seriously.Back
29. Reuters, Boston Globe, 27 November 1969.Back
30. Boston Globe, 10 November 1969.Back
31. In a panel at Johns Hopkins University, 14 November 1969Back
32. New Society, 22 April 1965, reprinted in Fall and Raskin, Vietnam Reader. Those who speak so glibly of ‘bloodbathsÂ' might note his report that from 1957 through April 1965, ‘over 160,000 South Vietnamese [overwhelmingly Viet Cong] have thus far been killed in this warÂ'. Note the date.Back
33. Monitor, 6, 8, 14 November 1969. Miss Pond has been one of the few correspondents, over the years, to give any serious attention to Vietnamese political and social life. In the past, her analyses have proven quite accurate. For additional corroboratory information, see D. Gareth Porter, ‘The Diemist restorationÂ', Commonweal, 11 July 1969.Back
34. John Woodruff, Baltimore Sun, 25 October 1969.Back
35. Terence Smith, New York Times, dateline 24 October 1969. The scale and character of forceful repression of dissent in South Vietnam have been amply reported. See, for example, Herman and Duboff, op. cit., and references therein.Back
36. Pond, 6 November 1969.Back
37. Le Monde diplomatique, November.Back
38. Memorandum from Acheson to Philip Jessup, cited by Gabriel Kolko, Roots of American Foreign Policy (Beacon Press, 1969), p. 95 (see note 10, p. 82 below).Back
39. Cited by Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945-1966 (Wiley, 1968), p.102.Back
40. ibid., p.116.Back
41. Rupert Emerson, in J.C. Vincent (ed.), AmericaÂ's Future in the Pacific, 1947.Back
42. Commenting on the recent elections, New York Times, 16 November 1969. For some discussion of Philippine politics, see Onofre Corpuz, The Philippines (Prentice-Hall, 1966).Back
43. 28 November 1969: ‘From the hearings it is learned that the US paid South Korea and Thailand as well to send their troops to Vietnam in a show of solidarity.Â' This was somewhat more expensive. According to The Times, 1 December, the bribe to Thailand amounted to a billion dollars.Back
44. 4 April 1959, quoted in Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 1969). On early American post-war policy in this area, see John Dower, ‘Occupied Japan and the American LakeÂ', in AmericaÂ's Asia, M. Seldon and E. Friedman (eds.), (Pantheon, 1970). He presents material in support of the analysis of ‘critical Japanese commentatorsÂ' that ‘Japan was to be developed not only as a military base against China and the Soviet Union, but also as an industrial base supporting the counter-revolutionary cause in Southeast Asia Â', a policy that was opposed not only by Russia but also by virtually all the members of the Far Eastern Commission. See also his essay on the US-Japan military relationship in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, October 1969 (see note 8 above). For still earlier background, see Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War (Random House, 1968).Back
45. Leo Model, Foreign Affair, July 1967, quoted in Magdoff, op. cit.Back

As mainstream politicians justify acts of mass murder in the name of bogus democracy and US control of the world's oil supplies, Joan McAlpine ("Be wary when fascists try to hide behind racist poison" Herald 29/04/04) asks us to focus our attention on a relatively small group of isolationist anti-immigration rightwingers.

We already have clear laws forbidding harassment, assault or incitement to racial hatred. The true liberal tradition has always distinguished gratuitous offence and intimidation from reasoned arguments and radical thinking.

Why should we need to go one step further to curtail intellectual freedom? By raising false alarms about the alleged BNP threat, when the real danger to millions of dark and light-hued people around the world comes from the rightwing cabal behind George W Bush's presidency and the growing concentration of wealth and power in a handful of transnational corporations, Joan McAlpine would like us to set a precedent we may live to regret.

Indeed she correctly observes our government has already gagged an Islamic fundamentalist cleric, which begs the question: Where do we draw the line? Who defines unacceptable Neo-Nazism or Islamic fundamentalism? Who decides which orthodox historical accounts may be challenged? Who decides which arguments constitute hate speech? A commission set up by the state or the corporate media? If they could ban the BNP, would they seriously stop there? Would 9/11 sceptics be incarcerated? These are very serious questions as the new rulers of Baghdad close down newspapers and radio stations and even rebuke the Qatar government over the graphic nature of Aljazeera's coverage of the Iraqi war of resistance.

As Noam Chomsky said "It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers". Nearly six decades after the end of WW2, it comes as no surprise that today's authoritarians pose as anti-fascists. The German National Socialist Party did not rise rapidly in the early 1930s because they were afforded free speech, but because big business, including many foreign multinationals, bankrolled them. Today the same ruling elite supports Bush, Blair and Sharon.

Published in the Herald 29/04/2004

After a brief introduction recalling the origins, the composition, the competence and the procedures of the Tribunal, the report contains two parts:

1. The rules of law which apply.
2. The crimes charged.

Part 1: The rules of law which apply

Crimes against the peace and wars of aggression

1. Definition: Crimes against the peace are thus defined by article 6 of the Nuremberg statutes: "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international
   treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing".
2. The illegality of recourse to war in international relations has been stated in numerous texts, of which the most important is the Paris Pact of 27 August 1928 (the Briand-Kellogg Pact), bearing the signature of the President of the United States of America. This is the text which was invoked at the greatest length by the Nuremberg judgements condemning the wars of aggression charged to Germany.
3. Other international texts condemning recourse to war and bearing the signature of the United States of America will also be cited.
4. Recourse to war is also unlawful according to the terms of article 2, paragraphs 3 and 4, of the United Nations Charter.
5. But recourse to war is not only an unlawful act; it is also a criminal act. The discussion which arose at Nuremberg on this {68} point no longer presents any more than a theoretical character, the Nuremberg verdict and the United Nations resolution of 11 December 1946 having hallowed, in positive international law, the criminal character of recourse to war.
6. Independently of the violation of the fundamental international rule condemning recourse to war in international relations, a war can furthermore constitute a more precise violation of the specific obligations resulting from such and such a treaty. it is in this sense that the Nuremberg judgement enumerated twenty-six agreements violated by Germany.
7. It should be emphasized that since Nuremberg the notion of war of aggression has undergone a certain evolution. The United Nations Charter mentions in two different paragraphs the necessity to have recourse to peaceful means in order to resolve international disputes on the one hand, and the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of a State on the other. For its part, the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 14 December 1960 proclaimed the necessity to permit all peoples "to peacefully and freely exercise their rights to complete independence and integrity of their national territory". Therefore it seems that a difference must henceforth be made between a war waged in order to resolve an international dispute, and a war waged in order to attack the national existence of a state. In the latter case, one is certainly confronted with an international crime of greater seriousness, and one can even wonder if it is not a question of a crime of aggression ofa particular nature, distinct from the crimes of aggression previously described.

War crimes

1. War crimes are thus defined by the Nuremberg statutes: violations of the laws and customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave
   labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing
   hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military
   necessity.Â’
2. The fundamental text concerning the rights and practices of {69} war is constituted by the fourth Convention of The Hague of 18
   October 1907, and the ruling which is annexed to it. Article 25 of said ruling hallowed the fundamental principle of positive international law according to
   which ‘belligerents do not have an unlimited right concerning the choice of means of doing harm to the enemy’. Other articles decree the principal
   prohibitions.
3. Concerning the treatment of prisoners of war, of the wounded and the sick, and the protection of civilians in time of war, the
   basic texts in force are the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which went into effect on 21 October 1950.
4. As for gases and analogous substances, the basic text is the Geneva Protocol of 1925. This protocol was not ratified by the United States, but it is commonly admitted that its provisions express a
   customary law of universal applicability.
5. The entirety of the rules, recognized by the United States of America as binding, is contained in an
   official manual ("Department of the Army field manual") entitled The Law of Land Warfare, published by the United States Department of Defense
   in 1956 (reference number: FM 27-10). There is a companion volume of the treaties and Conventions which the American army is required to respect. We shall
   frequently have occasion, in the course of the Tribunal's discussions, to refer to these two documents, which can in no way be contested by the United
   States government.

Crimes against humanity

1. They are thus defined by the Nuremberg statutes: "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connexion with any crimes within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated".
2. Discussion of crimes against humanity committed outside of a state of war and those which could be committed in the course of war - discussion which was taken up before the Nuremberg Tribunal - is of no interest to the debates which will take place before our Tribunal. {70}
3. Crimes against humanity are characterized especially by the extent of the affected populations, and by the motives for these crimes.
4. In certain cases, the same facts can simultaneously constitute a crime against humanity and a war crime.

Genocide

1. Genocide, as it is denounced by the International Convention of 9 December 1948, consists of the destruction or the persecution of human groups conceived of as national, ethnic,
   racial or religious entities.
2. The crime can be committed by the following acts: murder of members of the group, serious attack on the physical or
   mental integrity of members of the group, intentional submission of the group to conditions of existence which, by their very nature, will lead to its partial
   or total physical destruction, measures designed to prevent births within the group, and finally, forced transference of children from the group to another
   group.

Part 2. The crimes charged

General comment

The enunciation of the principal crimes condemned under inter national penal law, and with which the United States of America is charged, as this enunciation will be briefly made in this introductory report, can only constitute, at this stage of the debates, a statement of grievances, for which there is not yet any supporting evidence.

Each category of crimes will be dealt with in detailed reports, which will be accompanied, in each case, by supporting evidence.At the end of the discussions, and before the deliberation, a statement will be made, which
will sum up all the facts established in the course of the hearings.{71}

Crimes against the peace and wars of aggression

1. When the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954, a legal settlement governing Vietnam was created. This legal settlement was accepted by all the interested parties, and by the
   general body of these nations.
2. By using armed force to modify this legal settlement, the United States has replaced a state of peace with an
   armed conflict. Therefore, it bears the responsibility for the transition from the state of peace to the state of war, and it has consequently committed what
   is considered in international law to be a war of aggression, a crime against the peace.
3. The nature of the Geneva Accords of July 1954 will be briefly recalled, that is, an agreement on the cessation of hostilities signed by the commander-in-chief of the People's Army of Vietnam and by the
   commander-in-chief of the forces of the French Union, followed by two declarations, the final declaration made by the various participants, and a declaration
   made by the United States representative.
4. A brief summary will be made of the main provisions of the Geneva Accords, in particular those relating to the independence, the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Vietnam, and also those stressing the temporary nature of the demarcation line, and the impossibility of its being interpreted as constituting a political and territorial boundary.
   There will also be reference to certain essential provisions of the Geneva Accords, namely the prohibition of any persecution arising from activities which took place during the preceding war, the prohibition on introducing
   new troops, military personnel, weapons and munitions, as well as the installation of military bases.
   Finally, mention will be made of the elections scheduled for July 1956, and the obligation to begin preparing them by undertaking contacts in July 1955.
5. The foregoing provisions will be compared with the behaviour of the United States of America, and it will be pointed out that, beginning even before 1954, a certain number of actions already testified to the intention of the United States to seize Vietnam. In this connexion will be recalled the conditions under {72} which the United States set up the Diem government in Saigon a few weeks before the Geneva Accords.
   This confrontation will enable us to realize the progressive character of the American aggression, and of the successive violations of the Geneva Accords (persecution of former members of the resistance, refusal to hold the elections scheduled for 1956, introduction on a large scale of weapons and personnel, introduction of paid men).
6. In the face of this aggression, the struggle of the people of South Vietnam until 1959 assumed the character of a national struggle against foreign intrusion, by taking the form only of a political struggle.
   It is only from 1959 on, and in face of the development of American aggression, that the struggle in the South took the form of an armed conflict, which was led, from 1960 on, by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.
7. Finally, we will deal with the conditions in which American aggression against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam took place, and also with the so-called politics of escalation, underlining the concomitant threat to peace in south-east Asia and throughout the world.
8. We will stress the weakness of the arguments invoked by the United States in order to justify its activities, particularly as they are presented in the "juridical memorandum on the legality of United States participation in the defence of Vietnam" dated 4 March 1966, presented before the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate.
9. The conclusion will be that the United States seems to have committed a crime against the peace, that is to say, it has waged a war of aggression in violation of both general and particular treaties, with the additional factor that, in this case, recourse to force is directed against the territorial integrity and political independence of a state - Vietnam - whose integrity and independence are recognized by the Geneva Accords.
10. It is not only a question of a war of aggression which, like every war that sets out to settle an international dispute by force, is unlawful and criminal, but also a war of aggression conducted against the right to live of the Vietnamese people.
11. The Nuremberg judgement rightly declared that a war of {73} aggression is the supreme international crime, since it contains within it all the other crimes. It is this crime that has been committed by the United States in Vietnam, but we Will see that it has been accompanied by numerous other crimes.

War crimes properly so called

1. In this introductory report, we do not set out to recall in detail all the war crimes imputed to the American armed forces
   in the execution of its military operations.
2. Massive, systematic and intentional bombing of the civilian population and of civilian objectives
   (hospitals, schools, churches, pagodas, etc ...). All information will be brought before the Tribunal dealing with the extraordinary extent of these bombings -
   which are regularly preceded by reconnaissance flights - and also with the quantity, nature and diversity of the devices employed. Among the witnesses who will
   give evidence on this question will be, in first place, the members of the investigating commissions who went to North Vietnam on behalf of the
   Tribunal.
3. Policy of destruction, persecution and massacre in South Vietnam, in contempt of international rules on the treatment of civilian
   populations in occupied territories.
4. Murders. tortures or harmful treatment inflicted upon prisoners of war in contempt of the provisions of the
   International Conventions of Geneva of 1949.(e) Besides the use of certain weapons or devices in unlawful conditions allowing the commission of the
   above-mentioned crimes, the use of new weapons of a patently "anti-personnel" nature, directed against civilian populations. In this regard, very
   special attention will be given to the so-called fragmentation bombs, which the Tribunal will be asked to declare to be prohibited weapons.
5. Massive deportation of populations, and concentration in special camps created for this purpose. A detailed study of these camps (sometimes called "strategic hamlets") will be made, and they will be compared to the concentration camps organized by Germany during the last World War, and which
   were the object of the judgement at Nuremberg.
6. A detailed study of the gases and toxic products employed {74} by the United States army will be
   made, including not only a scientific analysis of these products, but also the particular conditions under which they are used.

Crimes against humanity

1. As we have recalled, crimes against humanity are distinguished, in fact, from war crimes only by their scope and by the intention to
   exterminate which inspires them.
2. We believe that we can demonstrate to the Tribunal that the crimes we have just listed have had far-reaching
   consequences for the populations affected, and that they have been perpetrated with the obvious objective of exterminating one part of the population of
   Vietnam in order to force the other part into surrendering.

Genocide

The International Convention on genocide esteems that this crime is committed when a group of human beings. considered to be a national, ethnic or religious entity, is massacred or persecuted.

If all the crimes we have just listed (crimes against the peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity) are taken as a whole, one can say that, if one gives the most restricted interpretation to
the text on genocide, one is nevertheless dealing with such a crime.

This crime, which is the culmination of the war of aggression, and which includes all crimes perpetrated in conducting the war, constitutes an attempt to exterminate an entire nation.

Conclusion

The war being waged by the United
States in Vietnam, both in principle and in the way it is being executed, is criminal according to Positive International Law.

It has culminated in the crime of genocide, which has already been, and is still being, committed.

To have some idea of the contempt with which United States {75} representatives treat the question of the legality of their intervention in Vietnam, one has only to quote an interview given by Mr Henry Cabot Lodge, at that time United States Ambassador in Saigon. In the course of this interview, he replied as follows:

Question: Questions have recently been raised on the legal aspect of what we are doing in Vietnam. In what way are we justified by International Law?

Answer: As far as I'm concerned, the legal aspect of this affair is of no significance. ....1

Note

1. US News and World Report, 15 February 1965.

We constitute ourselves a Tribunal which, even if it has not the power to impose sanctions, will have to answer, amongst others, the following questions:

1. Has the United States Government (and the Governments of Australia, New Zealand and South Korea) committed acts of aggression according to international law? {59}
2. Has the American army made use of or experimented with new weapons or weapons forbidden by the laws of war?
3. Has there been bombardment of targets of a purely civilian character, for example hospitals, schools, sanatoria, dams, etc., and on what scale has this occurred?
4. Have Vietnamese prisoners been subjected to inhuman treatment forbidden by the laws of war and, in particular, to torture or mutilation? Have there been unjustified reprisals against the civilian population, in particular, execution of hostages?
5. Have forced labour camps been created, has there been deportation of the population or other acts tending to the extermination of the population and which can be characterized juridically as acts of genocide?

This Tribunal will examine all the evidence that may be placed before it by any source or party. The evidence may be oral, or in the form of documents. No evidence relevant to our purposes will be refused attention. No witness competent to testify about the events with which our inquiry is concerned will be denied a hearing. The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam have assured us of their willingness to cooperate, to provide the necessary information, and to help us in checking the accuracy and reliability of the information. The Cambodian Head of State, Prince Sihanouk, has similarly offered to help by the production of evidence. We trust that they will honour this pledge and we shall gratefully accept their help, without prejudice to our own views or attitudes. We renew, as a Tribunal, the appeal which Bertrand Russell has addressed in his name to the Government of the United States. We invite the Government of the United States to present evidence or cause it to be presented, and to instruct its officials or representatives to appear and state their case. Our purpose is to establish, without fear or favour, the full truth about this war. We sincerely hope that our efforts will contribute to the world's justice, to the re-establishment of peace and the liberation of oppressed peoples.

International War Crimes Tribunal1

NOTE

1. A list of the members of the Tribunal can be found on p. 369. {60}{61}{62}
   
   Back to Table of Contents

"We are not judges. We are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind bear witness to these terrible crimes and to unite humanity on the side of justice in Vietnam."

With these words, Bertrand Russell opened the second session of the International War Crimes Tribunal, in November 1967. The American people were given no opportunity, at that time, to bear witness to the terrible crimes recorded in the proceedings of the Tribunal. As Russell writes in the introduction to the first edition, '... it is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know - or care - about circumstances in the colonies'. The evidence brought before the Tribunal was suppressed by the self-censorship of the mass media, and its proceedings, when they appeared in print, were barely reviewed.

Russell wrote that 'it is in the United States that this book can have its most profound effect'. He expressed his faith in the essential decency of the American people, his faith that the ordinary man is not a gangster by nature, and will react in a civilized way when he is given the facts. We have yet to show that this faith is justified. Russell hoped to 'arouse consciousness in order to create mass resistance ... in the smug streets of Europe and the complacent cities of North America'. By now, there are few who can honestly claim to be unaware of the character of the American war in Vietnam. There are few, for example, who can now claim ignorance of the 'new Oradours and Lidices' described, in testimony to the Tribunal, by a West German physician who spent six years in Vietnam (see p.306). But consciousness has yet to create mass resistance. The streets of Europe and the cities of North America remain smug and complacent - with the {9} significant and honourable exception of the student youth. The record of the Tribunal stands as an eloquent and dramatic appeal to renounce the crime of silence. The crime was compounded by the silence that greeted its detailed documentation and careful studies. However, although no honest effort was made to deal with the factual record made public in the proceedings of the Tribunal, its work did receive some oblique response. The Pentagon was forced to admit that it was, indeed, using anti-personnel weapons in its attack against North Vietnam (though it could not resist the final lie that the targets were radar stations and anti-aircraft batteries). The hypocritical claim that the American bombing policy was one of magnificent restraint, that its targets were 'steel and concrete', was finally exploded beyond repair. A State Department functionary who had become an object of general contempt for his unending deceit regarding Vietnam demeaned himself still further by informing journalists that he had no intention of 'playing games with a 94-year-old Briton', referring tto one of the truly great men of the twentieth century. Those who were prepared to go beyond the mass media for information could learn something about the work of the Tribunal from such journals as Liberation, as could readers of the foreign press, in particular, Le Monde. The Tribunal Proceedings, along with the documentary study, In the Name of America, which appeared in the same year, and the honest and courageous work of many fine war correspondents, helped to crumble the defences erected by the government, with the partial collusion of the media, to keep the reality of the war from popular consciousness.

Though not reported honestly, the Tribunal was sharply criticized. Many of the criticisms are answered, effectively I believe, in Part 1 of this book. There are two criticisms that retain a certain validity, however. The participants, the 'jurors' and the witnesses, were undoubtedly biased. They made no attempt, in fact, to conceal this bias, this profound hatred of murder and wanton destruction carried out by a brutal foreign invader with unmatched technological resources.

A second and less frivolous criticism that might be raised is that the indictment is, in a sense, superfluous and redundant. This is a matter that deserves more serious attention.

The Pentagon will gladly supply, on request, such information {10} as the quantity of ordnance expended in Indochina. From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about four and a half million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times the tonnage of bombing in the entire Pacific theatre in the Second World War, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 'over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, North and South ... about 500 pounds of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam'.1 The total of 'ordnance expended' is more than doubled when ground and naval attack are taken into account. With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realize that the war is an overwhelming atrocity.

A few weeks before the Tribunal began its second session, forty-nine volunteers of International Voluntary Services wrote a letter to President Johnson describing the war as 'an overwhelming atrocity'. Four of the staff leaders resigned. These volunteers had worked for many years in Vietnam. They were among the few Americans who had some human contact with the people of Vietnam. Their activities, and even the letter of protest, indicate their belief - surprisingly uncritical - in the legitimacy of the American effort in Vietnam.2 In this letter they refer to 'the free strike zones, the refugees, the spraying of herbicide on crops, the napalm . .. the deserted villages, the sterile valleys, the forests with the huge swaths cut out, and the long-abandoned rice checks'. They speak of the refugees 'forcibly resettled, landless, in isolated desolate places which are turned into colonies of mendicants'; of 'the Saigon slums, secure but ridden with disease and the compulsion towards crime'; of 'refugees generated not by Viet Cong terrorism, but by a policy, an American policy' - a process described by cynical American scholars as 'urbanization' or 'modernization'.

So effective is urbanization in Vietnam that Saigon is now estimated to have a population density more than twice that of {11} Tokyo. Experts in pacification ('peace researchers', to use the preferred term) assure us that 'the only sense in which [we have demolished the society of Vietnam] is the sense in which every modernizing country abandons reactionary traditionalism'.3 The methods of 'urbanization' are described, for example, by Orville and Jonathan Schell:

We both spent several weeks in Quang Ngai some six months before the [Song My] incident. We flew daily with the FACS (Forward Air Control). What we saw was a province utterly destroyed. In August 1967, during Operation Benton, the 'pacification' camps became so full that Army units were ordered not to 'generate' any more refugees. The Army complied. But search-and-destroy operations continued.

Only now peasants were not warned before an airstrike was called in on their villages because there was no room for them in the swamped pacification camps. The usual warning by helicopter loudspeaker or air-dropped leaflets were stopped. Every civilian on the ground was assumed to be enemy by the pilots by nature of living in Quang Ngai, which was largely a free-fire zone.

Pilots, servicemen not unlike Calley and Mitchell, continued to carry out their orders. Village after village was destroyed from the air as a matter of de facto policy. Airstrikes on civilians became a matter of routine. It was under these circumstances of official acquiescence to the destruction of the countryside and its people that the massacre of Song My occurred.

Such atrocities were and are the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people.4

Elsewhere, Orville Schell quotes a Newsweek correspondent returning from Quang Ngai: 'Having had experience in Europe during World War II, he said what he had seen was 'much worse than what the Nazis had done to Europe'.' Schell adds: 'Had he written about it in these terms? No.'5 Vietnamese-speaking field workers of the American Friends Service Committee describe more recent stages of modernization, as seen from the ground: {12}

In one such removal, during Operation Bold Mariner in January 1969, 12,000 peasants from the Batangan Peninsula were taken to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over whose guarded gate floated a banner saying, 'We thank you for liberating us from communist terror.' These people had been given an hour to get out before the USS New Jersey began to shell their homes. After eight weeks of imprisonment they were ferried back to what was left of their villages, given a few sheets of corrugated metal and told to fend for themselves. When asked what they would live on until new crops could be raised, the Vietnamese camp commander said, 'Maybe they can fish.'6

Reports by Western observers are limited to areas more or less under American control. The most intensive attacks are therefore unreported in the West. We do, however, have Vietnamese reports, which will, perhaps, be given somewhat greater credence than heretofore now that the incident at Song My, which they described with accuracy at the time, has finally been made public. To select one such report virtually at random:

In Trang Bang on the evening of October 24 [1969], three flights of B52s made three sorties, killing 47 people, wounding many others (mostly children, and old folks), completely levelling 450 houses and devastating 650 hectares of fields. On the night of October 25, B52s flew nine attacks in Quang Tri and Quang Nam provinces, dumping more than 1,000 tons of bombs, killing 300 people, wounding 236 others, setting afire 564 houses and damaging hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards. In Pleiku, a fertile region, many flights of B52s came in on the morning of October 17 and released 700 tons of bombs which wrought havoc in hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards ...

In the area of Nui Ba and the villages of Ninh Thanh, Hiep Ninh Thanh, Hiep Ninh of the Tay Ninh Cao Dai persuasion, the US puppets resorted to toxic chemicals to destroy the crops and kill civilians. American hovercraft dumped tens of thousands of CS cans while helicopters dropped hundreds of thousands of toxic bombs on the villages. Moreover, enemy guns and mortars fired more than 5,000 gas shells affecting over 1,000 people, with 13 children under 13 killed (Ninh Thanh and Hiep Ninh villages) and more than 100 hectares of crops completely destroyed.7

{13} And on and on, without end.

The facts are, of course, familiar in a general way to the highest authorities in the United States. The Under Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes, wrote a memorandum in March 1968 in which he pointed out that:

...ARVN and US forces in the towns and cities are now responding to mortar fire from nearby villages by the liberal use of artillery and air strikes. This response is causing widespread destruction and heavy civilian casualties - among people who were considered only a few weeks ago to be secure elements of the GVN constituency. ... The present mode and tempo of operations in SVN is already destroying cities, villages and crops, and is creating civilian casualties at an increasing rate.8

He describes the savage American reaction to the conquest of many cities by the NLF in the Tet offensive in January 1968 - for example, in Saigon, where in an effort to dislodge the 1,000 soldiers who had taken the city, 'artillery and air strikes were repeatedly used against densely populated areas of the city, causing heavy civilian casualties'; or in Hue, where the American reoccupation left 'a devastated and prostrate city'. 'Eighty per cent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and in the smashed ruins lay 2,000 dead civilians.9 ... Three quarters of the city's {14} people were rendered homeless and looting was widespread, members of the ARVN being the worst offenders'. Elsewhere, the story was much the same:

Everywhere, the US-ARVN forces mounted counterattacks of great severity. In the delta region below Saigon, half of the city of Mytho, with a population of 70,000, was destroyed by artillery and air strikes in an effort to eject a strong VC force. In Ben Tre on 7 February, at least 1,000 civilians were killed and 1,500 wounded in an effort to dislodge 2,500 VC.

According to Hoopes, the combat photographer David Douglas Duncan, whose war experience covers the Second World War, Korea, Algeria and the French war in Vietnam, 'was appalled by the US-ARVN method of freeing Hue'. He quotes him as saying:

The Americans pounded the Citadel and surrounding city almost to dust with air strikes, napalm runs, artillery and naval gunfire, and the direct cannon fire from tanks and recoilless rifles a total effort to root out and kill every enemy soldier. The mind reels at the carnage, cost, and ruthlessness of it all.

Hoopes also reports that a 'sizable part' of the PAVN force of 1,000 escaped. Compare the figures on casualties, cited above.

These events occurred too late to be considered by the Tribunal. I need not elaborate on what has been revealed since. Some indications are given in my book, After Pinkville. For far more, see the book by Edward Herman, cited in footnote 1 on p. 11.

I have mentioned all of this in connexion with the question, raised earlier, as to whether it is necessary, today, to publicize the detailed reports of the Tribunal. Is it not true that by now the monstrous character of the war has penetrated the American consciousness so fully that further documentation is superfluous? Unfortunately, the answer must be negative. To see why, consider again the case of Townsend Hoopes, who is now a leading 'dove'. {15}

A reviewer of his book in the New York Times describes it as the most persuasive presentation of the case for American withdrawal from Vietnam. It is instructive to compare his position with that of the 'hawks' on the one hand, and that of the Tribunal, on the other. Such a comparison shows how narrow is the gap between the 'hawks' and the 'doves', and how far removed the dove-hawk position still remains from the consciousness that Russell hoped would be aroused by the factual record and historical and legal argument of the Tribunal. I want to stress that Hoopes's is one of the most humane and enlightened voices to be heard within the mainstream of American opinion today, surely among those who have had any significant role in the formation and implementation of policy. For this reason, his views are important and deserve careful consideration.

America's early strategy, as Hoopes describes it, was to kill as many VC as possible with artillery and air strikes:

As late as the fall of 1966... a certain aura of optimism surrounded this strategy. Some were ready to believe that, in its unprecedented mobility and massive firepower, American forces had discovered the military answer to endless Asian manpower and Oriental indifference to death. For a few weeks there hung in the expectant Washington air the exhilarating possibility that the most modern, mobile, professional American field force in the nation's history was going to lay to rest the time-honoured superstition, the gnawing unease of military planners, that a major land war against Asian hordes is by definition a disastrous plunge into quicksand for any Western army.

But this glorious hope was dashed. The endless manpower of Vietnam, the Asian hordes with their Oriental indifference to death, confounded our strategy. And our bombing of North Vietnam also availed us little, given the nature of the enemy. As Hoopes explains, quoting a senior US Army officer: 'Caucasians cannot really imagine what ant labour can do.' In short, our strategy was rational, but it presupposed civilized Western values:

We believe the enemy can be forced to be 'reasonable', i.e. to compromise or even capitulate, because we assume he wants to avoid pain, death, and material destruction. We assume that if these are inflicted on him with increasing severity, then at some point in the process he will want to stop the suffering. Ours is a plausible strategy - for those who are rich, who love life and fear pain. But happiness, wealth, and {16} power are expectations that constitute a dimension far beyond the experience, and probably beyond the emotional comprehension, of the Asian poor.

Hoopes does not tell us how he knows that the Asian poor do not love life or fear pain, or that happiness is probably beyond their emotional comprehension.10 But he does go on to explain how 'ideologues in Asia' make use of these characteristics of the Asian hordes. Their strategy is to convert 'Asia's capacity for endurance in suffering into an instrument for exploiting a basic vulnerability of the Christian West'. They do this by inviting the West 'to carry its strategic logic to the final conclusion, which is genocide'. The Asians thus 'defy us by a readiness to struggle, suffer, and die on a scale that seems to us beyond the bounds of humanity.... At that point we hesitate, for, remembering Hitler and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we realize anew that genocide is a terrible burden to bear.'

Thus by their willingness to die, the Asian hordes, who do not love life, who fear no pain and cannot conceive of happiness, exploit our basic weakness, our Christian values which make us reluctant to bear the burden of genocide, the final conclusion of our strategic logic. Is it really possible that one can read these passages without being stunned by the crudity and callousness?

Let us continue. Seeing that our strategy, though plausible, has failed, the Air Force Staff worked out several alternative strategies, which they presented to the new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, in March 1968. The Air Staff preferred the following:

an intensified bombing campaign in the North, including attacks on the dock area of Haiphong, on railroad equipment within the Chinese Buffer Zone, and on the dike system that controlled irrigation for NVN agriculture.

But Hoopes and Air Force Secretary Harold Brown demurred. Why? They felt 'there was little assurance such a campaign could either force NVN to the conference table, or even significantly reduce its war effort'; furthermore, 'it was a course embodying {17} excessive risks of confrontation with Russia'. If they had any other objections to intensified bombing of the dike system of NVN, Hoopes does not inform us of them.11 Hoopes himself preferred, rather, the following tactics:

a campaign designed to substitute tactical airpower for a large portion of the search-and-destroy operations currently conducted by ground forces, thus permitting the ground troops to concentrate on a perimeter defence of the heavily populated areas ... the analysis seemed to show that tactical air-power could provide a potent 'left jab' to keep the enemy in the South off balance while the US-ARVN ground forces adopted a modified enclaves strategy, featuring enough aggressive reconnaissance to identify and break up developing attacks, but designed primarily to protect the people of Vietnam and, by population control measures, to force exposure of the VC political cadres.12

In a letter of 12 February 1968 to Clark Clifford, Hoopes explains his preferences in similar terms. We should, he urges, stop the militarily insignificant bombing of North Vietnam and undertake a less ambitious ground strategy in the South, trying merely to control (the technical term is 'protect') the populated areas. This policy:

would give us a better chance to develop a definable geographical {18} area of South Vietnamese political and economic stability; and by reducing the intensity of the war tempo, it could materially improve the prospect of our staying the course for an added number of grinding years without rending our own society... .

Compare these recommendations with the tactics now being followed by the Nixon administration. Secretary of the Army Resor, testifying before the House Appropriations Committee,13 refused to predict how long the war would last, but he sees time as 'running on our side':

Therefore, if we can just buy some time in the US by these periodic progressive withdrawals and the American people can just shore up their patience and determination, I think we can bring this to a successful conclusion.

To this remark General Westmoreland added: 'I have never made the prediction that this would be other than a long war.'

Thus the present Secretary of the Army agrees with the Hoopes letter of February 1968, that we may be able to stay the course for 'an added number of grinding years' if the American people will consent, if this policy will not rend our own society. And with this judgement, finally, Mr Hoopes disagrees:

Vietnam is not of course the only source of division in America today, but it is the most pervasive issue of our discord, the catalytic agent that stimulates and magnifies all other divisive issues. In particular, there can be no real truce between the generations - no end to the bitterness and alienation of even the large majority of our youth that is neither revolutionary nor irresponsible - until Vietnam is terminated.

This is the primary reason why, he urges, we must withdraw from Vietnam.

So the hawks and the doves divide: can the American people stay the course until victory, or will the polarization and discord in American society make this effort inadvisable, not in our national interest?

I do not want to suggest that the spectrum from Hoopes to Resor exhausts the contemporary debate over Vietnam, but there is little doubt that it represents the range of views and {19} assumptions expressed within the mainstream of 'responsible' American opinion. With this observation, we can return to the Tribunal. Its assumptions, of course, fall entirely outside of this spectrum. It is unfortunate, but undeniable, that the central issue in the American debate over Vietnam, in respectable circles, has been the question: can we win at an acceptable cost? The doves and the hawks disagree. Hawks become doves as their assessment of the probabilities and costs shifts, and if the American conquest were to prove successful, they would, no doubt, resume their former militancy. The Tribunal is concerned with very different questions. It does not ask whether the US can win at an acceptable cost, but rather whether it should win, whether it should be involved at all in the internal affairs of the Vietnamese, whether it has any right to try to settle or even influence these internal matters by force. Until this becomes the unique and overriding issue, within the United States, the debate over Vietnam will not even have begun.

Inevitably, despite disclaimers, the Russell Tribunal will evoke memories of Nuremberg and Tokyo. With the revelation of the Song My atrocities, the issues raised in the War Crimes trials have become, at last, a matter of public concern. We can hardly suppress the memory of our initiative at Nuremberg and Tokyo, or the explicit insistence of the US prosecutor, Robert Jackson, that the principles of Nuremberg are to be regarded as universal in their applicability. After the trials, he wrote:

If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.14

It might be argued that the verdict of Nuremberg and Tokyo was merely the judgement of victors, who sought vengeance and retribution rather than justice. I think there is merit in this accusation, but - right or wrong - it does not affect the broader question of the legitimacy of the principles that were recognized in the Charter of the War Crimes Tribunals. Legal niceties aside, the citizen is justified in taking these principles as his guide. {20}

A classic liberal doctrine holds that: 'Generally speaking, it is the drawn sword of the nation which checks the physical power of its rulers.'15 It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as 'a crime under international law' in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg. This is, in essence, the challenge posed to us by the Russell Tribunal.

Richard A. Falk has written about this matter in an important recent article.16 He points out that 'Song My stands out as a landmark atrocity in the history of warfare, and its occurrence is a moral challenge to the entire American society'. Nevertheless, it would 'be misleading to isolate the awful happenings at Song My from the overall conduct of the war'. Among the war policies that might, he argues, be found illegal, are these: '(1) the Phoenix Programme; (2) aerial and naval bombardment of undefended villages; (3) destruction of crops and forests; (4) 'search-and-destroy' missions; (5) 'harassment and interdiction' fire; (6) forcible removal of civilian population; (7) reliance on a variety of weapons prohibited by treaty.' That these policies have been followed, on a massive scale, is not in question. Falk argues that: 'if found to be 'illegal', such policies should be discontinued forthwith and those responsible for the policy and its execution should be prosecuted as war criminals by appropriate tribunals'. He also notes how broad was the conception of criminal responsibility developed, under American initiative, in the War Crimes Trials. In Falk's paraphrase, the majority judgement of the Tokyo Tribunal held as follows:

A leader must take affirmative acts to prevent war crimes or dissociate himself from the government. If he fails to do one or the other, then by the very act of remaining in a government or a state guilty of war crimes, he becomes a war criminal.

And Falk emphasizes the obligation of resistance for the citizen, if {21} the evidence is strong that the state is engaged in criminal acts.

It is correct, but irrelevant, to stress the vast differences in the political processes of America and the fascist states. It is correct, but hardly relevant, to point out that the United States has stopped short of carrying 'its strategic logic to the final conclusion, which is genocide' (Hoopes). Thus one cannot compare American policy to that of Nazi Germany, as of 1942. It would be more difficult to argue that American policy is not comparable to that of fascist Japan, or of Germany prior to the 'final solution'. There may be those who are prepared to tolerate any policy less ghastly than crematoria and death camps and to reserve their horror for the particular forms of criminal insanity perfected by the Nazi technicians. Others will not lightly disregard comparisons which, though harsh, may well be accurate.

Nazi Germany was sui generis, of that there is no doubt. But we should have the courage and honesty to face the question whether the principles applied to Nazi Germany and fascist Japan do not, as well, apply to the American war in Vietnam. Recall the objectives of 'denazification', as formulated by those who were responsible for this policy. General Lucius D. Clay, in 1950, described the primary objective as follows: 'to safeguard the new German democracy from Nazi influence and to make it possible for anti-Nazi, non-Nazi and outspoken democratic individuals to enter public life and replace the Nazi elements which had dominated all life in Germany from 1933 to 1945'.17 He reports that:

This was, perhaps, the most extensive legal procedure the world had ever witnessed. In the US Zone alone more than 13 million persons had been involved, of whom over three and two-thirds million were found chargeable, and of these some 800,000 persons were made subject to penalty for their party affiliations or actions. All this was, of course, apart from the punishment of war criminals many of whom were high-ranking Nazis.

Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery saw the objective of the allied forces in Germany as 'to change the heart, and the way of life, of the German people'. Denazification involved a cultural and ideological change, to proceed side-by-side with economic reconstruction.18 {22} We can certainly ask whether three and two-thirds million Germans in the US Zone were more guilty of complicity in war crimes than any Americans. And we can ask whether a cultural and ideological change in the United States, at the very least, is not imperative if many others, who fear neither pain nor death, are not to be spared the fate of Vietnam.

Some of these questions arise in a revealing exchange between Townsend Hoopes and two young journalists who published an interview with him in the Village Voice (see note 14 above). Hoopes insisted that:

War crimes tribunals would be the worst thing that could happen in this country. That would amount to McCarthyism. You're proposing a system of legal guilt for top elected officials. The traditional way to deal with these top officials is to throw the rascals out.

In an article in which he comments on 'the curious piece of reporting' of Coburn and Cowan, Hoopes explains further that 'a democratic and an entirely elective form of retribution' has already been visited upon Lyndon Johnson, and that his 'closest collaborators' may also be excluded from high office.19 Hoopes does not say whether this form of 'retribution' would also have been more appropriate in the case of the Japanese and German war criminals should the West, then, merely have guaranteed a democratic election in which they might have been deprived of office? He does, however, reject the suggestion that civilian officials be held accountable for such incidents as the Song My massacre, or for the bombing of North Vietnam, or for such policies as those enumerated by Falk, cited above. In fact, Coburn and Cowan report that 'in the friendliest possible terms, he accused our 'generation' of wanting to impose a totalitarian system of morality' which would lead to 'universal anarchy'. Coburn and Cowan, in turn, ask:

If Tojo can be sentenced to be executed by an American war crimes tribunal for leading Japan into a 'war of aggression', should the only punishment for an American President be that he is voted out of office while his Secretary of Defense serves a secure term as President of the World Bank?

This seems a not unreasonable question, certainly not unreasonable for those who take seriously the statement of Justice Jackson, quoted earlier. Nor do Coburn and Cowan appear unreasonable when they add that: 'The 'anarchists' who frighten us most are those who wield the big bombs, control the courts, and assume for themselves the power to declare all their enemies outlaws.'

Hoopes strongly disagrees. It is these strange conclusions that make the Coburn-Cowan article such 'a curious piece of reporting'. To him it is 'crystal clear ... that such views could not conceivably be held or expressed by anyone who was a young man during the Second World War or who was engaged in the mortal struggles of its aftermath - in Greece, in Germany, in Berlin, in Korea'. Only 'sensitive, clever children' could be moved to such harsh judgements, 'unshaped by historical perspective and untempered by any first-hand experience with the unruly forces at work in this near-cyclonic century'. Those who designed our Vietnam policy were 'struggling in good conscience to uphold the Constitution and to serve the broad national interest according to their lights'; they were, 'almost uniformly, those considered when they took office to be among the ablest, the best, the most humane and liberal men that could be found for public trust', and 'no one doubted their honest, high-minded pursuit of the best interests of their country, and indeed of the whole non-Communist world, as they perceived these interests'. To be sure, they were deluded by the 'tensions of the Cold War years'. The tragedy of Vietnam, as he sees it, is that these good men were unable to perceive that the triumph of the national revolution in Vietnam would be 'neither a triumph for Moscow and Peking nor a disaster for the United States'. Furthermore, their policies received wide public support. 'Set against these facts, the easy designation of individuals as deliberate or imputed 'war criminals' is shockingly glib, even if one allows for the inexperience of the young.' Similarly, it would be 'absurd' even to ask whether a war crimes tribunal, even in principle, should try Nixon and Kissinger as 'war criminals' (even though they continue to 'buy some time in the US' so that the war can be brought 'to a successful conclusion', in the words of the present Secretary of the Army).

One should, I believe, agree with Townsend Hoopes that 'what the country needs is not retribution, but therapy in the form of {24} deeper understanding of our problems and of each other'. No one, to my knowledge, has urged that those responsible for the massacre of the people of Vietnam, their forced evacuation from their homes,20 and the destruction of their country, be jailed or executed, or even that 'denazification' procedures of the sort instituted against thirteen million Germans in the US Zone be applied to the American population. Let us, by all means, try rather to achieve a deeper understanding of our problems. Among these problems is the fact that one of the most liberal and enlightened commentators on contemporary affairs can assure us that Asian hordes care nothing of death, fear no pain and cannot conceive of happiness, while as for us - it is our Christian values that impel us to stop short of a final solution. Among our problems is the fact that the same spokesman can summon up the kind of 'historical perspective' that sees our intervention in Greece, in the 1940s, as a 'mortal struggle' (against whom?); or the fact that those who were, quite possibly, the most humane and liberal men that could be found for public trust could set out to annihilate the Vietnamese in the belief (whether honest or feigned - it hardly matters) that they were combating a communist monolith that included 'Moscow and Peking' (in 1965!). One of our problems is the doctrine developed by Mr Hoopes, in accordance with which - to take his words literally - no policy carried out by the best American leaders with wide public support could be criminal, could in principle demand any response other than 'to throw the rascals out'.

In fact, is it not a trifle naive (or even 'glib') of Mr Hoopes to suggest that we throw the rascals out? Did we vote the rascals in? Richard Barnet, in a recent study, writes:

Most of the men who have set the framework of America's national-security policy, as I found when I studied the background of the top 400 decision-makers, have come from executive suites and law offices {25} within shouting distance of one another in fifteen city blocks in New York, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, and Boston. It is not surprising that they emerge from homogeneous backgrounds and virtually identical careers with a standard way of looking at the world. They may argue with one another about means but not about ends.21

No one who considers carefully the role of the executive in civil-military decisions in the post-war world, or the role of the private economic empires in determining national policy (either in their own protected domain, or within the parliamentary system itself), or the kinds of choices presented by the two competing candidate-producing organizations can so easily speak of 'throwing the rascals out'. It would require social revolution, leading to a redistribution of power throughout the industrial as well as the political system, for a significant change to take place in the top decision-making positions in American society. For this reason alone, one must fully accept the judgement that 'what the country needs is not retribution, but therapy in the form of deeper understanding of our problems' - and appropriate action to remedy these problems, which, given our enormous power, are problems of life and death for a good part of the world.

These problems should be on the agenda for any thinking person. More immediate, however, is the problem of bringing about a withdrawal of American force from Vietnam. There is no indication that any such policy is envisioned, at present. Rather, it is clear that the US government is hoping to stay the course until victory is achieved, adjusting tactics, where necessary, to buy some time at home. For this reason, the Proceedings of the Tribunal is a document of first importance; the spirit and convictions that underlie it must, as Russell hoped, become a part of the consciousness of all Americans.

Richard Falk concludes the article I quoted earlier, writing:

Given the perils and horrors of the contemporary world, it is time that individuals everywhere called their government to account for indulging or ignoring the daily evidences of barbarism... the obsolete pretensions of sovereign prerogative and military necessity had better be challenged soon if life on earth is to survive.

The Tribunal takes one step - small, perhaps, but significant. The Tribunal, or another like it, should turn to Czechoslovakia, to Greece, to a dozen other countries that are suffering in the grip of the imperialist powers or the local forces that they support and maintain. Still more important, the work initiated by the Tribunal should be carried further by groups of citizens who take upon themselves the duty of discovering and making public the daily evidences of barbarism, and the still more severe duty of challenging the powers - state or private - that are responsible for violence and oppression, looking forward to the day when an international movement for freedom and social justice will end their rule. {27}{28}

Notes

1. Edward S. Herman, 'Atrocities' in Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Pilgrim Press, 1970). In a careful analysis, he estimates South Vietnamese civilian casualties at over a million dead, over two million wounded, and he notes that two years ago the total number of refugees 'generated' mainly by the American scorched earth policy was estimated at almost four million by the Kennedy Committee of the 90th Congress.Back
2. The letter appears as an Appendix in Don Luce and John Sommer, Vietnam: the Unheard Voices (Cornell University Press, 1969).Back
3. Ithiel Pool, New York Review of Books, 13 February 1969, letters.Back
4. New York Times, letter, 26 November 1969. The war in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces is described in unforgettable detail by Jonathan Schell, The Military Half (Vintage Books, 1968).Back
5. 'Pop me some dinks', New Republic, 3 January 1970.Back
6. Vietnam: 1969, AFSC White Paper, 5 May 1969, 160 N. 15th Street, Philadelphia, Penna. 19102.Back
7. South Viet Nam: The Struggle, publication of the NLF Information Commission, No.48, 15 November 1969.Back
8. Limits of Intervention (McKay, 1969).Back
9. The NLF claims that 2,000 victims of the American bombardment were buried in mass graves (see Wilfred Burchett, Guardian, 6 December 1969). This is consistent with Hoopes's account. Hoopes states that, after ten days of fighting, 300 local officials and prominent citizens were found in a mass grave. This corresponds roughly with the estimate of Police Chief Doan Cong Lap, who estimated the total number executed as 200; he also gives the figure of 3,776 civilian casualties in the battle of Hue (Stewart Harris, The Times, 27 March 1968). Apart from Harris, I know of only one journalist who has given a detailed eye-witness report from Hue at the time, namely Marc Riboud. US authorities were unable to show him the mass graves reported by the US mission. Riboud reports 4,000 civilians killed during the reconquest of the 'assassinated city' of Hue (Le Monde, 13 April 1968). AFSC staff people in Hue were unable to confirm the reports of mass graves, though they reported many civilians shot and killed during the reconquest of the city (see the report by John Sullivan of AFSC, 9 May 1968). For attempts to evaluate government propaganda on mass killings in Hue, see D. Gareth Porter and Len E. Ackland, 'Vietnam: the bloodbath argument', Christian Century, 5 November 1969; Vietnam International, December 1969 (6 Endsleigh Street, London, W.C.1); Tran Van Dinh, 'Fear of a bloodbath', New Republic, 6 December 1969. The only other accounts I have seen merely convey information given out by American government sources.Back
10. This is not quite accurate. He does provide a brief philosophical discussion of Buddhist beliefs, which tend 'to create a positive impetus towards honourable death'.Back
11. As Gabriel Kolko notes, in testimony to the Tribunal, the barbarism of Seyss-Inquart in opening the dikes in Holland was considered one of the most monstrous crimes of the Second World War, and was prominent among the charges that led to his death sentence at Nuremberg. Note also Kolko's discussion of the bombing of dikes in the Korean war, and the testimony given regarding American bombing of dikes in North Vietnam. Eye-witness reports of the bombing of dikes in the Red River Delta have appeared in the American press. See Christian Science Monitor, 8 September 1967, quoted in my American Power and the New Mandarins (Chatto & Windus, 1969), p.15.Back
12. As we know from other sources, the VC political cadres thus 'exposed' were to be eliminated by 'Operation Phoenix', which, in the year 1968, is claimed to have killed 18,393 persons. See Senator Charles E. Goodell, New Republic, 22 November 1969 (cited in Herman, op. cit.), and also Judith Coburn and Geoffrey Cowan, 'Training for terror: a deliberate policy?', Village Voice, 11 December 1969. On 'population control measures', see William Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam (Praeger, 1967). For earlier precedents during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 195-203.Back
13. 8 October 1969, released 2 December. Quoted in I. F. Stone's Weekly, 15 December 1969.Back
14. Quoted in an article to which I return in a moment: Judith Coburn and Geoffrey Cowan, 'The war criminals hedge their bets', Village Voice, 4 December 1969.Back
15. Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 1792 (Cambridge University Press, 1969), J. W. Burrow (ed.).Back
16. 'The circle of responsibility', The Nation, 26 January 1970. Falk is Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton University.Back
17. The Present State of Denazification, reprinted in Constantine Fitzgibbon, Denazification (Norton, 1969).Back
18. Fitzgibbon, op. cit.Back
19. 'The Nuremberg Suggestion', Washington Monthly, January 1970. Noam Chomsky.Back
20. Coburn and Cowan report the views of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who says in a statement to Congress on the refugee situation that the figures may be misleading, since the war-torn Vietnamese are used to disruption and 'have been moving around for centuries'. Since this is true, to a far greater extent, of the American population, there would presumably be even less reason to protest, if they were driven from their homes by a foreign invader.Back
21. The Economy of Death (Atheneum, 1969). See also the detailed analysis by Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy(Beacon Press, 1969), Chapter 1.Back

Allow me to express my appreciation to you for your willingness to participate in this Tribunal. It has been convened so that we may investigate and assess the character of the United States' war in Vietnam.

The Tribunal has no clear historical precedent. The Nuremberg Tribunal, although concerned with designated war crimes, was possible because the victorious allied Powers compelled the vanquished to present their leaders for trial. Inevitably, the Nuremberg trials, supported as they were by state power, contained a strong element of realpolitik. Despite these inhibiting factors, which call in question certain of the Nuremberg procedures, the Nuremberg Tribunal expressed the sense of outrage, which was virtually universal, at the crimes committed by the Nazis in Europe. Somehow, it was widely felt, there had to be criteria against which such actions could be judged, and according to which Nazi crimes could be condemned. Many felt it was morally necessary to record the full horror. It was hoped that a legal method could be devised, capable of coming to terms with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. These ill-defined but deeply felt sentiments surrounded the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Our own task is more difficult, but the same responsibility obtains. We do not represent any state power, nor can we compel the policy-makers responsible for crimes against the people of Vietnam to stand accused before us. We lack force majeure. The procedures of a trial are impossible to implement.

I believe that these apparent limitations are, in fact, virtues. We are free to conduct a solemn and historic investigation, uncompelled {57} by reasons of state or other such obligations. Why is this war being fought in Vietnam? In whose interest is it being waged? We have, I am certain, an obligation to study these questions and to pronounce on them, after thorough investigation, for in doing so we can assist mankind in understanding why a small agrarian people have endured for more than twelve years the assault of the largest industrial power on earth, possessing the most developed and cruel military capacity.

I have prepared a paper, which I hope you will wish to read during your deliberations. It sets out a considerable number of reports from Western newspapers and such sources, giving an indication of the record of the United States in Vietnam. These reports should make it clear that we enter our inquiry with considerable prima facie evidence of crimes reported not by the victims but by media favourable to the policies responsible. I believe that we are justified in concluding that it is necessary to convene a solemn Tribunal, composed of men eminent not through their power, but through their intellectual and moral contribution to what we optimistically call ‘human civilizationÂ'.

Our Tribunal was formed, on the initiative of Lord Bertrand Russell, to decide whether the accusations of ‘war crimesÂ' levelled against the government of the United States as well as against those of South Korea, New Zealand and Australia, during the conflict in Vietnam, are justified.

During this inaugural session, the origin, function, aims and limits of the Tribunal must be clarified: the Tribunal means to explain itself, without sidetracking, on the question of what has been called its ‘legitimacyÂ'.

In 1945, something absolutely new in history appeared at Nuremberg with the first international Tribunal formed to pass judgement on crimes committed by a belligerent power. Until then there had been a few international agreements, for instance the Briand-Kellogg pact, which were aimed at limiting the jus ad bellum; but as no other body had been created to implement them, the relations between the powers continued to operate under the law of the jungle. It could not be otherwise: the nations which had built their wealth upon the conquest of great colonial empires would not have tolerated being judged upon their actions in Africa or Asia.

From 1939, the Hitlerian furies had endangered the world to such an extent that the horrified Allies decided, since they were to be the victors, to judge and condemn the wars of aggression and conquest, the maltreatment of prisoners and the tortures, as well as the racist practices known as ‘genocideÂ', unaware that they were condemning themselves, in this way, for their own actions in the colonies.

For this reason, that is to say because they were recognizing the Nazi crimes, and because, in the more universal sense, they were opening the way to a real jurisdiction for the denunciation and {63} condemnation of war crimes wherever committed, and whoever the culprits, the Tribunal of Nuremberg is still the manifestation of a change of capital importance: the substitution of jus ad bellum by jus contra bellum.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen whenever a new force is created by historical exigencies, this Tribunal was not free from serious faults. It has been said that it was a diktat of the victors to the vanquished and, which comes to the same thing, that it was not really being international: one group of nations was judging another. Would it have been more worthwhile to have taken the judges from neutral countries? I cannot say. What is certain, however, is that, although the decisions were perfectly just by ethical standards, they did not convince all Germans. The legitimacy of the magistrates and their sentences is contested to this day. Also, it has been declared that, if the fortunes of war had been otherwise, a tribunal of the Axis could have condemned the Allies for the bombing of Dresden or for that of Hiroshima.

Such a body would not have been difficult to set up. It would have sufficed that the body created for the judgement of the Nazis had continued after its original task, or that the United Nations, considering all the consequences of what had just been achieved, would, by a vote of the General Assembly, have consolidated it into a permanent tribunal, empowered to investigate and to judge all accusations of war crimes, even if the accused should be one of the countries that had been responsible for the sentencing at Nuremberg. In this way, the implicit universality of the original intention would have been clearly defined. However, we know what did happen: hardly had the last guilty German been sentenced than the Tribunal vanished and no one ever heard of it again.

Are we therefore so pure? Have there been no war crimes since 1945? Have we never had further resort to violence or to aggression? Have there been no more ‘genocidesÂ'? Has no large country ever tried to break by force the sovereignty of a smaller one? Has there never been reason for denouncing more Oradours or Auschwitzes?

You know the truth: in the last twenty years, the great historical act has been the struggle of the underdeveloped nations for their freedom. The colonial empires have crumbled, and in {64} their place independent nations have grown or have reclaimed ancient and traditional independence which had been eliminated by colonialism. All this has happened in suffering, sweat and blood. A tribunal such as that of Nuremberg has become a permanent necessity. I have already said that, before the Nazi trials, war was lawless. The Nuremberg Tribunal, an ambiguous reality, was created from the highest legal principles no doubt but, at the same time, it created a precedent, the embryo of a tradition. Nobody can go back, stop what has already existed, nor, when a small and poor country is the object of aggression, prevent one from thinking back to those trials and saying to oneself: it is this very same thing that was condemned then. In this way, the hasty and incomplete measures taken and then abandoned by the Allies in 1945 have created a real gap in international affairs. We sadly lack an organization which has been created and affirmed in its permanency and universality and which has irreversibly defined its rights and duties. It is a gap which must be filled and yet which no one will fill.

There are, in fact, two sources of power for such a body. The first is the state and its institutions. However, in this period of violence most governments, if they took such an initiative, would fear that it might one day be used against them and that they would find themselves in the dock with the accused.

And then, for many, the United States is a powerful ally: who would dare ask for the resurrection of a tribunal whose first action would be to demand an inquiry on the Vietnam conflict? The other source is the people, in a revolutionary period, when institutions are changing. But, although the struggle is implacable, how could the masses, divided by frontiers, unite and impose on the various governments an institution which would be a true Court of the People?

The Russell Tribunal was born of this doubly contradictory conclusion: the judgement of Nuremberg had necessitated the existence of an institution to inquire into war crimes and, if necessary, to sit in judgement; today neither governments nor the masses are capable of forming one. We are perfectly aware that we have not been given a mandate by anyone; but we took the initiative to meet, and we also know that nobody could have given us a mandate. It is true that our Tribunal is not an institution. But, {65} it is not a substitute for any institution already in existence: it is, on the contrary, formed out of a void and for a real need. We were not recruited or invested with real powers by governments: but, as we have just seen, the investiture at Nuremberg was not enough to give the jurists unquestioned legality. . . . The Russell Tribunal believes, on the contrary, that its legality comes from both its absolute powerlessness and its universality.

We are powerless: that is the guarantee of our independence. There is nothing to help us except for the participation of the supporting committees which are, like ourselves, meetings of private individuals. As we do not represent any government or party, we cannot receive orders. We will examine the facts ‘in our souls and our consciencesÂ', as we say, or, if one prefers, in the full liberty of our spirits. None of us can state, today, how the discussions will turn out and whether we answer yes or no to the accusations, or whether we will come to a conclusion at all, perhaps deciding that the evidence, though real, is insufficiently proven. What is certain, in any case, is that our weakness, even if we are convinced by the proof brought before us, would not enable us to condemn. What can even the lightest sentence mean if we do not have the means to put it into effect? We will therefore limit ourselves, should this arise, to declaring that this or that act does in fact fall under the jurisdiction of Nuremberg, and that it is therefore a war crime and that, if the law were applied, it would be appropriate for this or that sentence to be carried out. In this case, if possible, we will name the guilty. Thus, the Russell Tribunal will have no other function in this inquiry and its conclusions, but to make everybody understand the necessity for international jurisdiction - which it has neither the means nor the ambition to replace and the essence of which would be to resuscitate the jus contra bellum, stillborn at Nuremberg, and to substitute legal, ethical laws for the law of the jungle.

From the very fact that we are simple citizens, we have been able, in coopting ourselves from all over the world, to give our Tribunal a more universal structure than that which prevailed at Nuremberg. I do not only mean that a larger number of countries is represented; from this point of view there are still many gaps. But, most of all, whilst in 1945 the Germans were represented only in the dock, or sometimes as witnesses, here {66} several members of the jury are from the USA. This means that they come from the country whose very policy is our subject and that they have, therefore, their own ways of understanding it. Whatever may be their conclusions, the intimate relation with their own country and its institutions and traditions will necessarily be reflected in this TribunalÂ's conclusions.

Whatever may be our wishes for impartiality and universality, we are very conscious that this does not legitimize our undertaking. What we would really like is that our legitimation would be in retrospect, or a posteriori. In fact we do not work for ourselves nor for our own edification, and we do not presume to impose our conclusions like a thunderbolt. In truth, we would wish, with press collaboration, to maintain constant contact between ourselves and the masses all over the world who are painfully watching the tragedy in Vietnam. We hope that they will be learning while we learn, that they will watch and understand, and come to their own conclusions. These conclusions, whatever they may be, we would wish to be reached individually and independently of those we come to ourselves. This session is a communal undertaking for which the final term should be, as a philosopher said, ‘une verité devenueÂ'. If the masses agree with our judgement, it will become truth, and we, at the very moment when we step back so that they will become the guardians and powerful supporters of that truth, will then know that we have been legitimized. When the people show their agreement they will also show a greater need: that a real ‘War Crimes TribunalÂ' be created on a permanent basis, that these crimes may be denounced and not sanctioned anywhere and at any time.

These last remarks reply to a critical comment made, without ill-feeling, in a Paris newspaper: ‘What a strange Tribunal: jurymen but no judge!Â' It is true, we are only jurymen, we have no power to condemn, nor to acquit anyone. Therefore, we are not prosecutors. There will not even be a real accusation. Maître Matarasso, President of the Legal Commission, will read you a statement of the charges registered. The jurists, at the end of the session, will have to pronounce on these statements: are they justified or not? But judges exist everywhere. It is for the peoples of the world and, in particular, the American people that we are working. {67}