Ralph Schoenman "He who witnesses a crime in silence, commits it", wrote Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary leader in the struggle against Spain. "We," said Eichmann, "only provided the lorries". These two men, both in ‘their lives and in their words, man the barricades of a moral divide. It does not matter whose is the authority or the State power concerned. The authors of particular injustice or the identity of those hypnotised and helpless before horror do not affect the issue: there are not two sides in this matter. There is only one. There is no neutrality or "non-alignment" between Marti and Eichmann, there are only those who move from passivity, in the face of horror, to resistance, and those who shrink from resistance, no matter what camouflage they contrive to disguise this from themselves and from the world. Which struggle, then, historically, can equal that of the Vietnamese peasantry in our time, and which oppressor has enjoyed such power in relation to his victim ss that cultivated and boasted of by the rulers of the United States? Vietnam is a poor country. A peasant there can expect to live for less than thirty years. They have known death very intimately. They have known war for three generations. They know their powerful enemies as only those who must live within the reach of peovle Pathologically determined to do reat injury know their enemies. They are aware that the absentee landlords who have served the Jananese, the French and now the American may be inconstant in their choice of foreign master, but never, under any circumstances, alter their rapacious extortion of rent, usury and endless labour from the mass of people, who groan under the weight of their rule. This is the Vietnam that people who live in the belly of that beast which is Western capitalism know, at best, in an abstract way. Who, in our midst, understand intimately what gives the strength to illiterate and emaciated peasants in Vietnam to hold out against that military colossus, which is United States imrerialism today? These Vietnamese peasants receive half the calories (1,700) consumed on the average in Western turope end North America. There is not one large industry in Vietnam, such as can be found in any of the dreary merchant towns of the canitalist West. But truly everyone in the West is aware of this. Who can say that he is unaware that Vietnam is a poor country, desverately voor? Who can say that he is unfamiliar with the torture and mutilation of Vietnamese captured by the United States forces and the Saigon Government, for the pictures devicting these incredible scenes have filled our newspapers, our television screens and our newsreels? Who, now, does not know that a small peovle, without an air force, has endured bombing for nearly two years, with tonnages in excess of those used during the Second World War and the Korean War, for the United States Government boasts of its kill ratio and the rerformance of its air force frequently and loudly. Three million pounds of hombs daily fall in North Vietnan, according to Robert MuNamara. The weapons include napalm, which burns unremittingly, causing the victims to turn into a bubbling mass. Napalm's purpose is not only to inflict agonising death on the victims, but to cause terror in the observers, who find it impossible to extinguish the torch-lit Vietnamese neasants. Neither dirt nor water will
stop napalm. Chemicals and gas have been used, with the full approval of the United States Derartment of Defence, since 1961 and 1962, resrectively. Gas, said Robert McNamara, is a basic weapon of the U.S. forces in Vietnam. The United States army has issued a field manual, which states:
"The United States is not a party to any treaty in force
that prohibits or restricts the usein warfare of toxic
or non-toxic gases, of smoke or incendiary materials,
or of bacteriological warfare." Washington officials stated:
"Arsenic and cyanide comnounds are being used in the
southern part of Vietnam, but not yet in the North." IT have been to North Vietnam, and travelled in five provinces. I have seen personally the victims of lazy dog fragmentation bombs - those cylinders containing slivers of razor-sharp steel, causing 211 in their nath to be sliced, as a machete slices cane. I have seen the victims of chemicnl agents and nerve gases, which cause convulsions, paralysis, blindness and perforation of the lungs. I have snoken at length to people who endured the forced labour camns of the South which, according to Time magazine and the London Observer, held eight million peasants - fifty-nine rer cent. of the rural population. It is imvortant to note that more Vietnamese died between 1954 and 1959 than since 1960, the date when the National Liberation Front began armed struggle in the South. This is an incredible fact, for despite the vast and unrelenting bombardment of the North and the horror perpetrated by American forces in the South, more died during the so-called "years of peace’, at the hands of imerica's punpets in Suigon and their American advisors, than during full-scale armed conflict. What, then, do we do? The people of Vietnam are conducting alone a national struggle for survival, breathtaking in its daring and daily heroism. What can we do which can really help them in their struggle? whet ought we to be doing, in order to strurgle with trem in a manner worthy of their sacrifice and on a par with their human commitment? I pose this question seriously and coneretely. The United States controls sixty per cent. of the world's resources, while containing only six rer cent. of the world's ponulation. The Unitated States maintains over 3,600 military bases to protect this empire against the revolution sweening the victims of American canitalism. That capitalism transmuted now into an imperialist system is prepared to use any means to crush those who rise up on behalf of decency and the vost elementary necessities of life. I believe the most telling and serious help to be provided the people of Vietnam is to onen as many fronts:against American imneriglism as possible, Wherever conditions favour struggle, struggle should be undertalen, and assisted by those who are in a position to do so. Whether in Peru or Tuailand; whether in Southern Africa or in Western “urove, struggle against American imperialism is the most.conerete and sericus form of solidarity possible.
The Vietnamese are carrying the whole burden for the ceuse cf ovpressed peoples in the world. A real revolutionary international would waste no time in ovening up new fronts. The true resistance in the spirit of Marti would lose no time in blowing up the »ripnelines in Iraq or the locks of the Panama Canal, or whatever strategic installation of American imnerialism afforded itself as a target to those conscious of their duty to the Vietnamese and to the victims of oppression everywhere. In Western Europe and in North America, the working class is being asked to finance the military anmaratus and the corrorate means of exploitation and oppression in the theatre of revolutionary struggle today - Asia, Africa and Latin America. We, then, who conceive our resvonsibility without mistiness or rationalisation, must enter consciously into ~olitical and revolutionary struggle in the West. Wherever workers are exnloited or made to experlence hardship, it is our task to pose the relation between their suffering and the ovpression waged by Western capitalism in Vietnam. This is the true setting for the international War Crimes Tribunal which has been proposed by Bertrand Russell an‘ which is under full and urgent preparation. This Tribunal commands no State power and cannot compel the accused to give evidence or to submit to the findings of its members. This, however, is not a disadvantage, for if this international war Crimes Tribunal is to play the historical role available to it, it will serve in a true sense as a revolutionary Tribunal of justice, voicing the powerless but morally strong feelines and convictions of those who know what oppression is in the world. I believe that this War Crimes Tribunal can set new standards, denarting from the tired precedents of Nuremberg and other attemrts at legal pvrecents which, in reality, conform to th. real-politik of the State powers providing them. The war in Vietnam - that incredible war of aggression - has historical and sociological roots which must be dug out, examined and put on display. The Tribunal's authority will derive from the eminence of their procedures and the thoroughness with which they prepare and present the full evidence of what the United States has done to the people of Viet~ nam, All mass organisations who claim they are in solidarity with the people of Vietnam, who profess to value the absence of war and a peace worthy of the name, will be tested by their resnonse to this Tribunal. I believe that the truth about Vietnam, when assessed by a body of eminent and qualified peonle and exhaustively set out, will afford all engaged in serious struggle with basic tools for the tas before us. The Vietnamese revolution is a cry from the depths. It arreals to us to see in it our own future, and it warns us of our own fate if we fail.
Ralvch Schoenman
4 October, 1966.
ADDRES oakvON from a soecial correspondent indre “reton, the foremost exoonent of surrealism, has Gied in Paris at the ace of seventy. Creatly influenced by Pienund Freud in 1921, he vecame a protecanist of psychoanalysis and the implications of its discoveries to the world of art. in 1°58, when socialist art was »einge Cistorted by the bureaucratic insistence on idealisction of the prescnt, %rcton was in i:exico with Trotsks: and Diez;o Rivera, with whom he collaborated in the issuing of a menifesto devoted to the independence of art within a socialist societ;, cnc the relationship of art to social reality.
snrouchout his life Andre “reton never ceased to use his name né@ influence on vehalf of the victins of political persecution, ond his last public act was to join in denouncing: the court nartial of the Peruvian peasant leader, Huo Clanco.