U.S. AGGRESSION IN VIETNAM A "PURE CRIME OF CONQUEST"
(The following message from Bertrand Russell was read at the first meeting of the second session of the International War Crimes Tribunal, which opened November 20 in Copenhagen.
{At the first session, which concluded May 10 in Stockholm, the United States government was found guilty of the crimes of aggression, widespread, deliberate and systematic bombing of civilian targets in Vietnam, and violating the neutrali and territorial integrity of Cambodia.
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As we meet in quiet comfort, the people of Vietnam are made to suffer new and greater crimes. Hour by hour, and day by day, the horror intensifies, inflicting wanton pain and torment on a nation which has known no peace.
We are calm and unhurried. We have carried on our work these many months in the tranquility of our laboratories and reading rooms. We have studied the war through the means which are customary to us as scholars. The written word, pictorial evidence, the material remains of incinerated villages -- all these are transported to us for examination at our convenience. We form our judgment as we would judge right and wrong in a war of antiquity. The anguish of the Vietnamese people is as remote from our lives as that of a people who are removed from us by centuries.
We have not shared their suffering. Our judgment does not vindicate them, but vindicates ourselves. The idle man has no right of judgment over those who support the concept of morality and justice by their active struggles against cruelty and injustice. Our words are a small charity, causing us to endure no hardships. Ours is a meagre role in history. Can we consider ourselves actors when the drama of our epoch is a life and death struggle between the peasants of Vietnam and the mechanised slaughter perpetrated from Washington?
The course of history is being shaped in Vietnam. We shall not alter it much by our words. It is the people of Vietnam who refuse to submit to United States hegemony, who are altering history. They are proving the might of men inspired by ideals. They face the richest armies and the most modern instruments of extermination.
America spends seventy million dollars per day to enact mass murder, but the impoverished nation of Vietnam cannot be deterred. The power of this example will be felt in every continent where the poor have been cowed before the military prowess of their oppressors. The power of their example extends even to the affluent nations of the West, where their heroism has stirred politically inert people to massive protest against the new barbarism of the Pentagon.
What we may say counts for little beside their deeds. By examining and exposing American war crimes in Vietnam we do no more than ask to be counted on the side of those who are struggling in a just cause. By fulfilling the minimal obligations which we recognise, we seek merely to avoid moral impotence.
We have already presented conclusive evidence of the aggressive character of the United States intervention in Vietnan. As we proceed we must recognise how profoundly the concept of aggression covers all of America's crimes in Vietnan.
We are not examining a border dispute between Great Powers to determine which is the aggressor, in the sense of the first party to transgress the frontiers of another. In such a case, I should be reluctant to say that the incident of aggression would constitute the totality of all war crimes in the ensuing battles.
I do not agree with the rigorous
adherence to formal definitions which prevented our placing the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the same moral plane as the crimes of the Axis in World War II. Japan's aggression does not exonerate the United States for using the atomic bomb against civilian centres.
But I believe firmly that America's aggression in Vietnam is a pure crime of conquest, delineating precisely between aggressor and victim. I cannot remember any war within my own lifetime in which the term "naked aggression" so profoundly explained the full meaning of the bloodshed.
In Vietnam there is a race of men who, in modern times have never been free and who have never known peace. This explains why the war knows no middle course between national salvation and genocide. Men who have known only war, injustice and suffering can make no compromise, for they possess nothing to concede.
They may lose their lives, but these were already taken from them. Their culture may be brought to ruin, but it was already perverted and abased by the power of alien forces. Their wealth may be wasted, but it was already stolen. A century of western oppression forms the prelude to a quarter century of violent strife.
The struggle aims not to restore the past, but to create the future. The epic struggle of Vietnam continues so long as one man survives, embodying these hopes, demanding to create a new life, free of impoverishment and fear, with dignity and courage. Every man of this race, who has not been bought by the United States, carries this hope. Each threatens America; for each must be exterminated if America's will is to prevail. .
We meet in the coming days to consider the extent to which America is already guilty of genocide, in the most exact juridical sense of the tern.
America's intent is plain; the logic is unmistakable. Our task is to hear the evidence, document the atrocities, and declare the extent to which this -- the most heinous of crimes -- has been committed.
Vietnam has much in common with other struggles for justice. Although it is not the task of our Tribunal to consider these other struggles, we cannot forget them. They are the raisons d'étre of new tribunals and future enquiries.
By our modest effort, we wish to affirm the duty of those who have sought only to contribute to civilisation to stand with the men and women who struggle to uphold its values. Let us remind the complacent that the crimes against the American Negro will also receive the most exhaustive examination. Let this warn the arrogant spokesmen of the American Century that the crimes against the people of Latin America will also be exposed.
We are not the judges; we are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind to bear witness to these terrible crimes and to unite humanity on the side of justice in Vietnam.