No subject

police took me into custody. The name of the interrogating officer was Kafka
- a touch, one would think, that would suit the theater of the absurd that
so tempts Mr. Oglesby.
 
For several days I was a "flying Dutchman," unable to land in any European
country, placed finally on a flight back to New York sandwiched between two
U.S. federal agents.
 
All of this received ongoing notice in the media, particularly in Sweden and
Denmark. I was not permitted to enter Denmark and did not attend the Danish
session of the Tribunal nor engage in dialogue with any of its members.
 
Mr. Oglesby is not fazed. Describing further his "adventures" in Copenhagen,
he writes:
 
"Also sitting on the tribunal was the Polish historian Isaac Deutscher,
author of major biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin..."
 
Unfortunately, my close friend, Isaac, died of a heart attack in Rome the
previous August 18th and, like me, was absent from the tribunal session in
Roskilde.
 
The second session of the Tribunal alone examined the sixth question, on
which evidence was presented during that meeting, namely: "Whether the
combination of the crimes imputed to the government of the United States met
the general qualification of genocide."
 
This issue was discussed in Copenhagen, but without me.
What then of the actual opinions of Jean-Paul Sartre on the subject of
genocide and on the judgment appropriate to the Tribunal?
 
Did he espouse the views ascribed to him by Mr. Oglesby?
 
Fortunately, although Sartre is no longer with us, his views on the subject
are memorialized in his presentation On Genocide, published in Against The
Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes
Tribunal - Stockholm and Copenhagen (Ohare Books, 1968), pages 612 to 626
and expanded upon by tribunal member Lelio Basso in his Summation on
Genocide, pages 626-643. They are entirely consonant with those of Russell
and myself.
 
Sartre's On Genocide states, "The Americans want to show others that
guerrilla war does not pay: they want to show all the oppressed and the
exploited nations that might be tempted to shake off the American yoke by
launching a peoples' war, at first against their own pseudo-governments, the
compradors and the army, then against the U.S. Special Forces and finally
against the G.I.s. ... To Che Guevara, who said 'We need several Vietnams,'
the American government answers 'They will all be crushed the way we are
crushing the first.'"
 
He continues, "They do offer an alternative: Declare you are beaten or we
will bomb you back into the stone age. The fact remains that the second term
of this alternative is genocide. They have said: "genocide, yes, but
conditional genocide." Is this juridically valid? Is it even conceivable?
 
".... An act of genocide, especially if it is carried out over a period of
several years, is no less genocide for being blackmail. ... And this is all
the more true when, as is the case here, a good part of the group has been
annihilated to force the rest to give in."
 
Sartre is clear, specific and passionate:
 
"In the South, the choice is the following: villages burned, the populace
subjected to massive bombing, livestock shot, vegetation destroyed by
defoliants, crops ruined by toxic aerosols and everywhere indiscriminate
shooting, murder, rape and looting. This is genocide in the strictest sense:
massive extermination. ... What are the Vietnamese people to do to escape
this horrible death? Join the armed forces of Saigon or be enclosed in
strategic or "New Life" hamlets, two names for the same concentration
camps."
 
Jean-Paul Sartre continues:
 
"As the armed forces of the United States entrench themselves firmly in
Vietnam, as they intensify the bombing and the massacres, as they try to
bring Laos under their control, as they plan the invasion of Cambodia, there
is less and less doubt that the government of the United States, despite its
hypocritical denials, has chosen genocide."
 
Despite the claims by Ms. Brightman, pace Mr. Oglesby, that Sartre rejected
the evidence of genocide marshaled at the International Tribunal, his actual
words demonstrate where their half-truths lie.
 
Jean- Paul Sartre was unambiguous.
 
"The genocidal intent is implicit in the facts. It is necessarily
pre-meditated. ... The anti-guerrilla genocide that our times have produced
requires organization, military bases, a structure of accomplices and budget
appropriations. Therefore, its authors must meditate and plan out their
act."
 
He continues as follows:
 
"When a peasant falls in his rice paddy, mowed down by a machine gun, every
one of us is hit. The Vietnamese fight for all men and the American forces
against all. Neither figuratively nor abstractly. And not only because
genocide would be a crime universally condemned by international law, but
because little by little the whole human race is being subjected to this
genocidal blackmail piled on top of atomic blackmail, that is, to absolute
total war.
 
"This crime, carried out every day before the eyes of the world, renders all
who do not denounce it accomplices of those who commit it, so that we are
degraded today for our future enslavement."
 
Here is how Sartre concludes his exposition "On Genocide":
 
"In this sense, imperialist genocide can only become more complete. The
group that the United States wants to intimidate and terrorize by way of the
Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety."
 
Mr. Oglesby and Ms. Brightman have imputed to Sartre an embrace of the
rationale of U.S. rulers for their genocidal war. In the process, they
reinvent me as a catspaw in furthering this farrago.
 
Late in 1968, well after the conclusion of the Tribunal sessions, the
Stalinist regime of Brezhnev invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the students
and steel workers who fought to reclaim the socialist ideal during the
Prague Spring.
 
I flew to Rome to meet Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Hotel
Nazionale. We prepared a petition together to summon people to a defense of
socialism with democratic control and content.
 
Together, with Bertrand Russell, Antonin Liehm, C.L.R James and prominent
others, we prepared an international conference of socialists and
anti-imperialists to defend the Czech worker and student resistance.
 
That conference also took place in Stockholm - in early Spring 1969.
 
It is not the evil that is new; nor is it the crisis that has changed.
Today, forty-one years later, Ms. Brightman and Mr. Oglesby, reprise their
political role in these matters. In making truth a casualty to their
predilections and petty ambition, they evince, now as then, the dishonest
lengths to which they are prepared to go and, in the process, the limits of
liberalism.
 
Ralph Schoenman
Vallejo, California, January 21, 2008