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Title: Foreword
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: 1971
Language: en
Topics: anti-war
Source: Retrieved on 30th October 2020 from https://chomsky.info/1971____/
Notes: In Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, 1971

Noam Chomsky

Foreword

‘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 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

to 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 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 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:

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]

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 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’.

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 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 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 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… [my italics].

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 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.

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 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] 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 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 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.

[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 90^(th) Congress.

[2] The letter appears as an Appendix in Don Luce and John Sommer,

Vietnam: the Unheard Voices (Cornell University Press, 1969).

[3] Ithiel Pool, New York Review of Books, 13 February 1969, letters.

[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).

[5] ‘Pop me some dinks’, New Republic, 3 January 1970.

[6] Vietnam: 1969, AFSC White Paper, 5 May 1969, 160 N. 15^(th) Street,

Philadelphia, Penna. 19102.

[7] South Viet Nam: The Struggle, publication of the NLF Information

Commission, No.48, 15 November 1969.

[8] Limits of Intervention (McKay, 1969).

[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.

[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’.

[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.

[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.

[13] 8 October 1969, released 2 December. Quoted in I. F. Stone’s

Weekly, 15 December 1969.

[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.

[15] Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 1792 (Cambridge

University Press, 1969), J. W. Burrow (ed.).

[16] ‘The circle of responsibility’, The Nation, 26 January 1970. Falk

is Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton

University.

[17] The Present State of Denazification, reprinted in Constantine

Fitzgibbon, Denazification (Norton, 1969).

[18] Fitzgibbon, op. cit.

[19] ‘The Nuremberg Suggestion’, Washington Monthly, January 1970. Noam

Chomsky.

[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.

[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.