Lord Russell's War Crimes "Trial"

...It offers the premium of total victory for stubbornness and unreasonableness in negotiation...

...Since the choice is between one kind of dictatorship and another, according to Russell's political logic, we may as well stay alive...

...Having pronounced the verdict of Guilty!, he is now, like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan, arranging for the trial...

...If it does not, then since the United States cannot be active everywhere, prudence may dictate greater caution in the future concerning when and where to engage the enemies of freedom and national independence...

...The Vietcong is mentioned only where Russell denies that it is Communist controlled...

...The despots must consent to be bound by it as well as the free states...

...Russell's attitude and sympathies were clearly expressed in the text of two telegrams...

...In a letter in the New York Tunes of October 6, he defends his Tribunal as a grand jury considering prima facie evidence in order to bring an indictment...

...He denied that there were such missiles in Cuba and dismissed the photographs as fakes...

...Far from being blindly anti-Communist and going to war for ideological reasons, as Russell urged, the United States has even aided some Communist regimes to preserve their independence at tremendous costs to the American taxpayer...

...But they prove that when great men err they err greatly...

...When a sufficient state of terror has been produced by these means, the victim is informed there is a way out...

...The only charge absent from its litany of crimes is that of germ warfare, the standard Communist canard during the Korean War that was laid to rest at the cessation of hostilities...

...they are unaware that they, too, are being exploited by the war criminals and industrial overlords: " 66 million Americans live at the poverty level...

...This objection to "trying" people declared guilty in advance has been raised by many critics of the Tribunal, and it apparently has stung Russell and his associates...

...None but ideological fanatics would dispute this...

...Note that to begin with Russell proclaimed in the most unmeasured terms the guilt of President Johnson, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Rusk, and other American leaders-and then he proposed to sit in judgment on them...

...At that time he was unjustly denied an opportunity to teach at the City College because of his views on sex and marriage-views that are widely held today...

...He declared: "I am for controlled nuclear disarmament but, if the Communists cannot be induced to agree to it, then I am for unilateral disarmament even if it means the horrors of Communist domination.' In effect, to avoid the risks of war Russell was willing to settle for peace at any price...

...The real reasons for Russell's conversion say more for his motives than his judgment...

...In an essay on "NonIntervention" (Fraser's Magazine, 1859), which reads as if it were written only yesterday, Mill wrote: "To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue...

...So resentful is Russell of the criticism of his procedure that he suggests that those who make these criticisms are also responsible for the crimes against the people of Vietnam...

...Does he come into court with morally clean hands...

...At first Russell thought that the Soviet Union would accept such controls, since they were in everyone's interest...

...It charges the United States with behaving like the Nazis in Eastern Europe and the Japanese in Southeast Asia "on a scale which is larger and with an efficiency which is more terrible and complete...

...One does not have to approve of American foreign policy in Vietnam or elsewhere to be appalled by the virulence and hatred of Russell's caricature of America's culture and economy...

...Still, a case can be made for an objective investigation of the conduct of the Vietnamese war, as of any war...

...It may have been imprudent originally to become involved in South Vietnam...

...In view of Russell's declaration that the Tribunal is to provide "the most exhaustive portrayal of what has happened to the people of Vietnam," perhaps a more important omission is the lack of any reference to the tens of thousands of Vietnamese men, women and children murdered and mutilated by Vietcong terrorists...

...The "American capitalists and their political and military servants,' apparently more humane than Russell, refused to employ their monopoly of atomic power to destroy the Russian people in order to get rid of Communism...

...It is absurd, however, to say that all wars are equally inhumane...

...If this were true, North Vietnamese centers of population would long since have been destroyed...

...The horrors of Communist domination" will not last forever...

...He ignores the fact that most principled and consistent opponents of Communist aggression are not the American capitalists-many of whom wish to do business with the Communist countries, including Communist China-but the organized American labor movement...

...The analogue to the Dewey Commission would be a commission of inquiry to examine the evidence to be introduced (or not introduced) before the Russell Tribunal...

...But this can hardly explain the tone and substance of his criticisms of American domestic policies and conditions in recent years...

...But whether what was right was also prudent, whether anything which is imprudent on a large scale is also right, are questions not so readily answered...

...Russell's fury against the United States has reached such a pitch that despite his claims to have returned to his earlier pacifism, he has recently appealed to Premier Kosygin of the Soviet Union to send the Soviet Air Force to combat the American planes in Vietnam-thus inviting the very global war he professes to fear...

...But Russell urged preventive war to destroy Communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere...

...When the Soviet Union acquired the full panoply of nuclear weapons, Russell became convinced that their proliferation would in all likelihood lead to a world war which would destroy the whole of civilization, perhaps all human life...

...Bertrand Russell's place in the history of modern philosophy is as incontestable as the place of Richard Wagner in the history of music...

...Communism must be wiped out, and world government must be established...

...The second was to Khrushchev, who had dispatched the missiles and whose adventurism was subsequently criticized by his own comrades: MAY I HUMBLY APPEAL FOR YOUR FURTHER HELP IN LOWERING THE TEMPERATURE DESPITE THE WORSENING SITUATION YOUR CONTINUED FORBEARANCE IS OUR GREAT HOPE WITH MY HIGH REGARDS AND SINCERE THANKS...

...This is exactly the way English superpatriots spoke of Russell when he questioned the stories about German atrocities in Belgium in World War I. The charge against the American "war criminals" is indiscriminate warfare against the Vietnamese people...

...How trustworthy and reliable are his reports...

...Sometimes the death and suffering are unnecessary and therefore doubly evil...

...THINKING ALOUD Lord Russell and the War Crimes "Trial" By Sidney Hook A few months ago Bertrand Russell, the nonagenarian but still vigorous English philosopher, issued a call for an International Tribunal of Justice to put on trial "the war-criminals-Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Lodge, and their fellow criminals.' Next month, on November 13, a preliminary meeting of the group is scheduled to be held in London...

...Johnson in Vietnam, like Truman in Korea, whatever the wisdom of their decisions, intervened to repel actual aggressions-to counteract actions that unleashed war...

...Instead of resisting Communist aggression by war, which may destroy everyone, it is wiser to yield...

...Some day when conditions permit, an investigation into the way the war has been conducted in Vietnam, into its crimes as distinct from its accidents, may be perfectly in order...

...I convey my great wish that the day may not be far off when a united and liberated Vietnam will celebrate its victory in a free Saigon...

...if he will denounce a sufficient number of his friends, he may obtain absolution.' These and other fantastic statements, unmatched even by the worst drivel about America broadcast by Radio Moscow or Peking, brought forth an indignant refutation by Norman Thomas, the veteran Socialist leader, and a more consistent opponent of war than Russell...

...Italics mine-S.H...

...If this point gets across the sacrifices will not have been in vain, since they will have prevented further sacrifices...

...All wars spell death and suffering, which are always evil even when necessary in defense of a good cause...

...A war in which non-combatants are destroyed by the planting or hurling of bombs, or deliberately subjected to bombing from the air, is worse than one in which the non-combatant population is spared and only military forces and installations attacked...

...WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER ULTIMATUM MEANS WAR I DO NOT SPEAK FOR POWER BUT PLEAD FOR CIVILIZED MAN END THIS MADNESS...

...Instead, he praised Khrushchev for his forbearance...

...But this does not establish the validity of the American policy...

...But in any event, Bertrand Russell has no moral standing in the court...

...In such a war, he wrote, "I have no doubt that America would win in the end, but unless Western Europe can be preserved from invasion, it will be lost to civilization for centuries [since the Communists would seize Western Europe and we would have to bomb it too...

...Bertrand Russell is no more a Communist today than he was during the many years he denounced its terror...

...It is thinking of this sort which explains why Russell has declared that West Berlin and West Germany are not worth defending, that India was more at fault than China after China invaded, that the intervention of North Vietnam into South Vietnam is not aggression...

...For this would abandon the South Vietnamese to enslavement and decimation by the vengeful Vietcong and thus encourage further Communist aggression...

...One reason for believing that he is responsible for what he has written is that he has recorded large portions of it for Radio Hanoi for transmission to American service men in South Vietnam...

...He also mentions the Dewey Commission, which fairly examined the evidence of Stalin's purge trials in the 1930s...

...An "exhaustive portrayal of what happened to the people of Vietnam"-if honest and objective-could be instructive to all the peoples of the world...

...Anybody who goes so far as to support equal rights for colored people, or to say a good word for the UN is liable to a visit by officers of the FBI and threatened, if not with prosecution, at least with blacklisting and consequent inability to earn a living...

...Obviously, Russell is not sufficiently free from violent bias against either side in the Vietnam war to assess fairly the respective guilt of the combatants...

...This policy has had greater support from Main Street than Wall Street...

...The poor carry the burden of taxation and the fighting of colonial and aggressive wars...

...The chief errors in United States policy may be traced not so much to the fear of native Communists coming to power by legitimate political means as to mistaken appraisal of the involvement of foreign Communist regimes as in the Dominican Republic, and their efforts to impose their will on neighboring peoples by invasion or subversion...

...Far from recognizing the great, if incomplete, strides made toward the elimination of poverty and racial discrimination, Russell writes of the United States as if its minorities lived under a perpetual reign of terror organized against them by the Federal government, and as if the American working class was still suffering the throes of hunger and unemployment...

...Perhaps the strongest defense of the official position of the United States was actually made a long time ago by John Stuart Mill, the godfather of Bertrand Russell...

...Written in 1948, this was published in the Saturday Review of October 16, 1954...

...He and his selected associates have set themselves up to play the roles of judge, juror, and accuser all at once...

...He concluded his message with these words: "I extend my warm regards and full solidarity for President Ho Chi Minn and for the people of Vietnam...

...He denounced the American heads of state as "worse than Hitler" and as the crisis deepened, wrote: "You are going to die because rich Americans dislike the government Cubans prefer...

...Even in 1938 when he was pleading that the best defense of England and Denmark against Hitler was "their very defenselessness," and that in the event of a Nazi invasion and takeover "the consequences both to ourselves and the world would be infinitely less terrible than the consequences of war," he did not speak up for the Nazis or defend their actions or pretend that they represented the forces of peace and liberation...

...To condone one and condemn the other is like starting a forest fire and becoming hysterical over the danger of a campfire...

...For although he was very critical of the United States at the time, asserting with typical exaggeration that the United States had become a police state under McCarthy, he was even more critical of Communism...

...When President Kennedy announced the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, positioned to fire at the United States, Russell taxed the President with lying...

...Nor is there reference to Ho Chi Minh's bloody purges, whose excesses have been admitted by Hanoi and which caused almost a million refugees to flee South...

...He anticipated that the Kremlin would refuse to yield to any ultimatum to internationalize atomic energy and coldly, if not cheerfully, accepted the consequences of inevitable atomic war...

...While it would not abolish war, it might powerfully affect the way it was fought...

...for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect...

...No one can reasonably question that South Vietnam values its independence, and that it is right for the United States to endorse its claim...

...Indeed, there is a good deal of evidence to show that he has become almost pathologically anti-American, not against individual Americans, but against the American nation-its leaders and policies, and its people to the extent that they support these leaders and policies...

...One might interpret Russell's blatant anti-Americanism, his shrill denunciation of its foreign policy, and his uncharacteristic servility to Khrushchev as a kind of subconscious compensation for his earlier espousal of a nuclear preventive war against Communism...

...I believe that Adlai Stevenson spoke for the reflective conscience of America when he said, on the very day of his death: "My hope in Vietnam is that resistance there may establish that fact that changes in Asia are not to be precipitated by outside force...

...The Negro struggle in Harlem and Watts-the resistance of American students" are encouraging signs...

...Apparently Russell's high regard for Khrushchev was unaffected not only by Khrushchev's role in the Cuban missile crisis but by the butchery of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, carried out on Khrushchev's express orders...

...How well does Bertrand Russell pass these tests...

...He has justified indiscriminate warfare against a whole people...

...Neither the antiSemitism of the latter nor the anti-Americanism of the former can alter that fact...

...Russell had by that time swung from a political posture in favor of preventive atomic war to one of nuclear disarmament...

...It is merely "a broad alliance, like the popular fronts of Europe"-presumably something like the movement headed by Leon Blum in France...

...A war in which prisoners and wounded are murdered after being tortured is worse than a war fought under the Geneva conventions...

...How much confidence can any fair person, informed of the past, have in "the bona fides and authenticity" of any tribunal he organizes...

...Later he was rudely and arbitrarily dismissed from his post at the Barnes Foundation which had been procured for him by John Dewey...

...About the time the FBI arrested and jailed John Kasper, the white racist rabble rouser, for encouraging violation of a Federal court order, Russell wrote of conditions in America: "Members of the FBI join even mildly liberal organizations as spies and report any unguarded word...

...Russell holds out hope, however, that the rule of these "greedy and brutal men" will be overthrown just as soon as Americans understand the connection between the crimes perpetrated in Vietnam and the poverty of the American masses...

...He was an eloquent defender of a preventive atomic war against the Soviet Union when the Kremlin refused to accept the American and UN offer to internationalize the sources of atomic energy...

...He has earlier charged that American soldiers in Vietnam were using their bayonets to rip open the bellies of pregnant women-a charge last laid, not against the Nazis in Eastern Europe, but against the German soldiers in Belgium during World War I. The historical irony is that Russell came into public limelight by deriding these and other atrocity stories about the Germans...

...The first was to Kennedy: YOUR ACTION DESPERATE THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT...

...Further, he seems unfamiliar with the fact that the grand jury which indicts is not the same jury which sits in judgment at the trial to resolve the issue of the truth of the indictment...

...Elsewhere, the document reads as if someone were trying to imitate Russell's style...

...He writes: "I suggest that those who raise procedural points in objecting to the International War Crimes Tribunal would be better occupied in assessing their own responsibility for the horrendous acts against the people of Vietnam" This sounds more like Andrei Vishinsky than like the author of Justice in War Time...

...He ignores the progress the Negro, the Puerto Rican and other minorities have made with the help of all three branches of the American government...

...He was aware that the West, particularly the United States, had officially declared its willingness to accept general and complete disarmament provided it was universal and multilateral, subject to strict international control in order to prevent totalitarian countries, unhampered by a free press or a free public opinion, from launching atomic Pearl Harbors...

...Though it may be a mistake to give freedom [or independence-S.H.] to a people who do not value the boon, it cannot but be right to insist that if they do value it, they shall not be hindered from the pursuit of it by foreign coercion...

...Today, however, Russell has willingly accepted the role of spokesman for the Communist cause in Vietnam...

...Do not yield to ferocious and insane murderers...

...The cities of America are covered with slums...

...This shocking treatment left him with a justified resentment which still burned fiercely when I last met him in the Fall of 1953...

...Because of its extremism, some observers have doubted that Russell himself is author of the statement, despite the use of the first person pronouns in it...

...This is the point of the conflict in Vietnam...

...In his latest characterization of the United States, Russell speaks of the American welfare state as if it were an economic-military dictatorship ruling over a brainwashed and poverty stricken population...

...As a founder of the Ban-the-Bomb movement, one expected at the very least that he would condemn Khrushchev for smuggling nuclear weapons into Cuba, thus precipitating the crisis...

...Perhaps the most emphatic expression of Russell's hostility to the United States-not without its humorous aspects-occurred at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...

...He must not have previously condoned the type of "crimes" to be investigated...

...Even Russell was once prepared to sacrifice half a billion lives if necessary to prevent the triumph of Communism...

...He began to refer to the West and especially the United States as the "so-called" free societies-which he did not do when, less free than they are now, they were struggling against Fascism-and to play down the evils of Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam...

...None the less, there can be little doubt that it expresses his sentiments...

...Last June 11 he sent two separate messages to the Vietcong and to Hanoi informing them that he was organizing a War Crimes Tribunal to bring Johnson, McNamara, and Rusk to justice...

...The American leaders have done "all this to protect the interests of American capitalism" and further "their own economic interests...

...Intervention to enforce non-intervention is always right, always moral, if not always prudent...

...The logic of Russell's new position, the emphasis on peace at any price, compelled him to downgrade the importance of the values and institutions of freedom in the open societies of the West...

...He ignores the fact that the standard of living of the American working class, despite pockets of poverty, is not only the highest in the world but is currently the highest in American history...

...His "Open Letter to Bertrand Russell" (NL, January 7, 1957) refuting these falsehoods left Russell unmoved...

...He must not be so precommitted to an antecedent conclusion that he weighs the evidence unfairly...

...There are some who contend that Russell's transformation from a fanatical anti-Communist-prepared to destroy Communism almost at any cost including nuclear war-into a fanatical anti anti-Communist and anti-American, is a consequence of the humiliations he suffered in the United States in 1940-42...

...By announcing that only the alleged crimes of the American government will be judged and not those of the Vietcong and the Hanoi regime, the Russell Tribunal is more likely to function like the Moscow Tribunal than like the Dewey Commission...

...Unless they do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to this miserable issue, that the wrong side may help the wrong side but the right may not help the right...

...I am assuming, and I think it is true, that Russell is still in possession of his remarkable faculties-that he is not a pitiable old man blindly signing statements drawn up in his name by those upon whom he has become physically and mentally dependent...

...But his desperate fear of war has made him the willing ally of the Communist cause...

...Mill then states what is required of a foreign policy, grounded in an intelligent morality, in situations like that of South Vietnam: "The doctrine of non-intervention, to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments...

...What is curious about this document, issued in the name of one of the most distinguished minds of our century, is the simplism of its thought and the virulence of its language, matching the crudest Communist propaganda leaflets...

...When Khrushchev finally admitted the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Russell was not embarrassed in the least...

...It explains why he refuses to speak of the deliberate murder of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese by Vietcong terrorists in connection with what he purports to be a "most exhaustive portrayal of what has happened to the people of Vietnam," and why he plays up as deliberate American atrocities the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursions of North Vietnam and its partisans...

...If the United States is a dictatorship of the capitalists and their military henchmen under a formal veneer of rhetoric about democracy, the talk about freedom is hollow and hypocritical...

...Morally, Russell's position is further weakened by the fact that he urged a preventive war on purely ideological grounds...

...Bertrand Russell may be wrong in his unmeasured indictment of the position of the United States...

...The War Crimes Tribunal, by providing "the most exhaustive portrayal of what has happened to the people of Vietnam," will contribute to this end...

...Clearly, atom bombs are a much greater menace to civilian populations than pin-point bombing with conventional weapons...

...The foolishness of such a position is apparent, since it can only harden Communist intransigence...

...But it does not explain the shift of ground...

...But whoever conducts such an investigation must not be a party to the conflict or violently prejudiced against either side...

...But Russell has already drawn up the indictment...

...These, apparently, are not regarded as crimes against humanity...

...That Commission, which I helped organize, was first of all an inquiry into "evidence" already introduced in the Moscow trials...

...What explains his transition from a staunch opponent of Communism-we were premature anti-Communists in many battles together!-to a role more appropriate to Lord Haw-Haw than to Lord Russell...

...Freedom and independence are still precious values in the Western world...

...The people ruled by these capitalists are kept ignorant of the facts by a lying press...

...Kublai Khan, after all, followed Gengis Khan...

...The explanation of these horrible crimes against humanity, according to Russell, is simple...

...Instead, they offered Communist countries Marshall Plan aid and sought to reach an accommodation on the principle that the political status-quo should not be altered by outside foreign forces...

...This was the point of the Korean War...

...When he shifted from the advocacy of appeasement of Fascism in the '30s to resistance, he never spoke of Nazi Germany in comparable terms...

...Some sentences, such as the assertion that American capitalists "send American soldiers to Vietnam as company cops," are written in an American idiom untypical of Russell...

...But when it became clear that the Communists would not permit effective inspection on their territory, Russell's views underwent a profound change...

...How "objective" is this searcher for objective truth...

...One final question remains...

...What moral justification, if any, can be offered for American intervention in South Vietnam...

...Promptly and enthusiastically endorsed by Radio Hanoi and the Communist press throughout the world, the indictment published by Russell accuses the American government and its leaders of deliberate and systematic resort to the use of "concentration camps, torture, massacre, poison gas and chemical warfare" against the Vietnamese people...

...But it seems even more imprudent to withdraw from South Vietnam without negotiating a peace...

...He has broadcast the substance of it on the Hanoi and Vietcong radios...

...It gave Trotsky a hearing denied him by the Moscow courts that convicted him without indicting him...

...It expects those who enjoy the reality of freedom and independence, however limited, to surrender them out of fear of a problematic world disaster...