Bertrand
Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal - Contents
Jacket Blurb from ‘Prevent the Crime of Silence’
In 1967 the
International War Crimes Tribunal held sessions in
Stockholm and Roskilde, in Denmark, to hear evidence on the conduct of
the war in Vietnam. Invitations to the American government had been
ignored.
To
many
people it seemed a ludicrous situation: a tribunal
without any power investigating a conflict in which its own sympathies
were very clear.
But there was a precedent: the Nuremberg War Trials
had also assumed the right of judgement. And it had been a US Supreme
Court judge who had said at Nuremberg:
‘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 invoke against us.’
The
Tribunal merely
took America at its word. The evidence it heard was
from historians, scientists, journalists, American soldiers and
Vietnamese civilians. Its findings were of political connivance at
unjust war, of wholesale attacks on civilians, hospitals and schools,
of torture of political prisoners, of calculated disruption of the
landscape and social structure of Vietnam.
Since
1967,
Bertrand Russell has died and the world has heard
of
‘Pinkville’.
This book is intended
to assist
Russell's initial request of the Tribunal ‘to prevent the
crime of silence.’
Note: Copyright in this text is held by the Bertrand Russell Peace
Foundation, who can be contacted at Bertrand Russell House, Gamble
Street, Nottingham, NG7 4ET, England. Telephone UK 0602-784504. Fax UK
0602-420433.
'Prevent the Crime of Silence' is reproduced here, with their
permission, in full without omissions or insertions of new material.
Original page numbers as they appeared in the book are noted here in
{brackets}; these were at the foot of the page, thus text recorded e.g.
between {75} and {76} was on page 76. Some half dozen spellings and
inconsistencies corrected. Footnotes moved to section ends with full
software links.
Lengths of sections indicated by number of pages; the longest entry, by
Gabriel Kolko, is about 100K; most are shorter than 20K. The text
represents something like 20% of the full transcribed set of documents,
which are held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada in the Bertrand
Russell archives McMaster's Internet site includes a discussion group
on Russell - Rae West.
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Bertrand
Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal - Contents
Bertrand
Russell Tribunal - 9/11Review