Open Letter to An American Liberal

thunder from the british left as a noted critic condemns the u.S. presence in Vietnam and castigates those passive dissenters among us who have learned to live with horror

Dear Friend:

In the last six months of 1967, 25 children under the age of 14 were executed by the American Army in South Vietnam for giving aid and comfort to the Viet Cong. During the same period, the number of child prostitutes in Saigon increased by 7000, and the bombs dropped by U.S. planes on North Vietnam had a combined explosive power twice as great as that of all the aerial bombardments in World War Two.

Every one of the statements in that paragraph is false. But were you quite sure, as you read them, that they weren't true? Didn't you, in fact, assume that they were accurate? And, if so, did you feel anything more than the customary twinge of weary nausea with which one reacts to the daily barrage of evil news out of Vietnam? The human capacity to be shocked is not unlimited, and the lies I have cooked up differ only in degree from the truths you already know about the strange and ferocious war in which your Government is presently engaged. But suppose you believed my inventions and were genuinely outraged: How would you have protested, and what could your protest hope to achieve? Above all, what is it like to live in a country where such statements might conceivably be true?

I ask you because I honestly don't know. I've just returned from my first trip to America in three years. Shortly before I left England, I learned from a Gallup Poll that one out of every four American adults favored the use of atomic weapons to win the war in Vietnam. An appalling statistic, but it didn't greatly surprise me: We Europeans are nowadays as grimly accustomed to bad news about America as you are to bad news about Vietnam. I wonder if you realize exactly what European liberals feel about this war of yours. Do you remember a hypervirile Manhattan intellectual we knew who used to go down to Stillman's gym every so often and climb into the ring for a few rounds with some junior aspirant, generally a Negro, a Cuban or a Filipino? Big deal, you said; he's working off his aggressions on "inferior races." That's how we regard your war. To us, Vietnam is Washington's grisly equivalent of Stillman's gym.

Before 1967 I'd paid about 20 visits to the States, all of them as a friend--critical on occasion, alarmed by McCarthy's rise and relieved by his fall, but always affectionate and ultimately trusting. Last year, for the first time, I came warily, as a suspicious stranger. Just after I arrived, I bought a handful of comics at the airport for the six-year-old son of a liberal buddy of mine. Riffling through them, I came across a copy of Tod Holton--Super Green Beret and decided to violate my anticensorship principles by withholding it from the boy. In case you don't know about Tod, he's a schoolboy in Valleyville, U.S.A., to whom "an ancient Far Eastern monk" has entrusted a supernatural Green Beret. Whenever American interests are threatened overseas, "the magic headgear glows." Tod puts the thing on, salutes the flag and instantly vanishes, only to reappear--transformed into an ironfisted superman--wherever the natives are restless. His job is to succor the needy while (continued on page 100)Open Letter(continued from page 83) merrily zapping the Cong. Typical sample of dialog:

South Vietnamese child: Please, sir, some food! Our rice bowls have been empty these three days now!

Tod: Sorry, I didn't have time to stop off at the supermarket! But you can have these chocolate bars!

South Vietnamese child: Many humble thanks, sir!

Having solved the starvation problem, Tod goes on to beat hell out of the Cong--a parcel of bald-pated fiends with Fu Manchu beards--and departs as miraculously as he came. Crowds of pro-American peasants (the assembled Uncle Toms of Vietnam) speed him on his way with wholeheartedly servile cries of gratitude, worthy of Stepin Fetchit on Lincoln's birthday. The strip concludes: "So spreads the fame of the mighty Super Green Beret as he battles on the side of the oppressed and downtrodden all over the world!" The same magazine also features a daredevil trio called the Flying Musketeers, who zoom out to China in their supersonic jet-copter and triumphantly bomb an atomic-missile factory. ("Your country's yours again!" they tell the local chieftain. "You are free once more!") After carrying out this classic pre-emptive strike, they jet back to Washington, where they are hailed by the Pentagon with cheers and congratulations.

So I didn't give that black-and-white, might-is-right, end-justifies-the-means-type propaganda sheet to six-year-old Pete; but I talked about ends and means to his father, and to several other good writers whom I used to count as political sympathizers. I found them drinking on a fairly monumental scale. Every night before dinner they would get somberly sloshed, and the provocation would always be the same: Vietnam, and what to do about it. Should they go on marches, or burn their draft cards in Independence Square, or emigrate to a Mediterranean island, or make one last, desperate attempt to get an unequivocal statement out of Bobby Kennedy? By the time the sun rose over Vineyard Haven, they would usually have decided that they were politically impotent. (But at least they have something to be impotent about--a dominant climate of opinion against which to revolt. We in Britain are far more abjectly powerless; we rebel in a vacuum. Even if we persuaded Harold Wilson to protest against the bombing of North Vietnam, it would mean nothing, since he would undoubtedly let L. B. J. know in advance that he was only doing it to placate the left wing of the Labor party.)

Although I saw quite a few of our friends during my three-week stay, I didn't call you; for reasons that I'll try to explain, I felt hesitant and slightly embarrassed. Do you recall the last time we met? It was in London, late in the summer of 1964. Johnson was running for the Presidency on a platform that explicitly pledged him to cool the war; he promised he wouldn't let American boys "do the job that Asian boys should do." To my lasting amazement, you believed him, and you became quite ruffled when I cynically predicted that his first act, after election, would be to escalate. We both agreed, however, that American involvement in Vietnam was militarily a mess and morally a catastrophe. It wasn't until 1965 that your position began to change. You still deplored the war, but I saw that it was taking on, in your mind, a curiously autonomous identity, almost as if it were an inoperable disease, following its predestined course in accordance with its own nature--horribly but blamelessly, like an earthquake or hurricane.

Fate, and not human agency, seemed to be in charge of events; and once you accept this view of history, the next logical step is to absolve human beings from all moral responsibility. Which brings us very close to those interesting theories about war guilt that certain West German pundits have lately been peddling. As one of them has said: "Behind the technical machinery of war, the individual can no longer be cornered. The causal nexus of action and responsibility has been broken.... The concepts of guilt and innocence sound like rules of behavior from the nursery--authors should be ashamed to go on churning them out." The same apologist sums up his case in a wonderfully bland sentence. By the end of World War Two, he says, "the means of extermination available had finally outgrown the power of human decision." (My italics.) In other words, the buck ends nowhere. Auschwitz and Hiroshima were nobody's fault--just regrettable by-products of an omnipotent abstraction called "the historical process."

"A plague on both their houses," you said in one of your letters, referring to the American Army and the Viet Cong. And a plague--in the sense of a disaster caused by no human volition and raging beyond human control--was precisely what, in your eyes, the war had become.

You were naturally dismayed when the black news came through on February 7, 1965, that U.S. planes had started to bomb North Vietnam, and you wrote me a sturdy letter of dissent. But it contained a worrying passage in which you suggested that L. B. J. and his advisors were somehow "prisoners of events." There it was again, the old historical process, whereby executioners are mysteriously transmuted into prisoners, and criminals into victims. And although you thought the bombing unjustified, you seemed to regard it as just another downhill step, instead of a seven-league stride toward the point of no return. When noncombatants began to die under your bombs, the people of North Vietnam saw the face of the West as their government had always depicted it. A truth we often forget became self evident to them: that the aerial bombardment of civilians is a practice in which the Communist countries have never indulged.

It was during 1965 that your attitude finally became clear. Somewhere, in everything you wrote or said about the war, there would be an escape clause, acquitting you of the charge of taking sides. Of course America was wrong to devastate the South and blast the North; but at the same time (you would point out), the Viet Cong had killed a lot of civilians, and were thus equally guilty. As I read these hedging letters of yours, a few lines by Thomas Hardy flitted across my mind:

There seemed a strangeness in the air,Vermilion light on the land's lean face;I heard a voice from I knew not where:--"The Great Adjustment is taking place."

And a safe, respectable adjustment it was. You had taken your stand at last, resolutely facing both ways with the same Olympian frown. You didn't love Big Brother, but nobody was going to accuse you of loving Big Brother's enemies.

Now, it would obviously be lunatic to say that either side in Vietnam had a monopoly of right or wrong. But isn't it just as irresponsible to throw up your hands and declare that there's nothing to choose between them? In my primitive, pragmatic way, I begin by counting the victims. General Westmoreland stated in April 1967 that during the past nine years, 53,000 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed "or kidnaped" by the Viet Cong--i.e., slightly less than 6000 a year. (He neglected to specify how many of these were kidnaped.) But according to an exhaustive associated Press report issued in October 1966, American artillery and aircraft are killing almost as many Southern noncombatants as that every month--quite apart from civilian casualties in raids on the North.

The murder of innocent people is always atrocious; even so, Jean-Paul Sartre was not being entirely cold-blooded when he said:

I refuse to place in the same category the actions of an organization of poor peasants, hunted, obliged to maintain an iron discipline in (continued on page 135)Open Letter(continued from page 100) their ranks, and those of an immense army backed up by a highly industrialized country of 200,000,000 inhabitants. And then, it is not the Vietnamese who have invaded America or rained down a deluge of fire upon a foreign people. In the Algerian war, I always refused to place on an equal footing the terrorism ... which was the only weapon available to the Algerians, and the actions and exactions of a rich army of half a million men, occupying the whole country. The same is true in Vietnam.

I'm quoting from an interview given by Sartre shortly before the first session of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, of which he was the executive president. No doubt you've heard of this extraordinary body, set up by Russell to determine whether the activities of the U. S. in Vietnam could be classified as criminal under the laws by which the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg in 1945. No government or party sponsored the Tribunal; it was paid for by private subscriptions. (Ironically, a great deal of the money came out of the $200,000 that an American publisher gave Russell for the rights to his autobiography.) Its prototype was Nuremberg, where several precedents in international law were firmly established. To initiate or wage aggressive war, to violate the customs of war as laid down in the Hague and Geneva conventions, to commit inhuman acts on civilians--all these were defined as crimes, and the guilty Nazis were duly punished. Inherent in the trials was the doctrine that nobody--not even a head of state--could escape accountability for his deeds. To plead that you were acting under orders was no longer a valid defense. Nuremberg was no mere kangaroo court: In 1946, its legality and its judgments were affirmed by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief American counsel at the trials, spoke for his country when he said: "We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." All that Sartre and Russell did was to take him at his word.

Their Tribunal stated the case for the prosecution. Although they invited evidence from the other side, I think they felt that the defense had already had a pretty thorough airing in the mass media of the West. Naively, they hoped that the Western press would report the Tribunal's hearings. Apart from the odd, dismissive paragraph, I saw almost nothing. (The eastern-European papers were just as curt, though for different reasons. The Tribunal's image of gallant little North Vietnam, not only surviving but even winning against all the odds, was not wildly endearing to the Russians; they want Hanoi to come to the conference table, since they are well aware that Chinese communism grows stronger whenever an Asian is killed by a Western bullet.) None of the 15 men and women on the Tribunal needed much convincing that U. S. intervention in Vietnam was immoral: Their purpose was to find out whether it could be shown to be illegal: Sartre made this distinction quite clearly in the interview I've mentioned above: "There is no question of judging whether American policy in Vietnam is evil--of which most of us on the Tribunal have not the slightest doubt--but of seeing whether it falls within the compass of international law on war crimes."

If an anti-Fascist organization is both shunned by the Soviet bloc and knocked by the West, it can't be all bad. In spite of its admitted bias, I couldn't help respecting the Tribunal's aims. Without international law we perish, and no other body seemed to be concerning itself with applying the rule of law to the bloody carnival of Vietnam. And even if the jury is packed, it's still possible for an outsider to weigh the value of factual evidence. Hence I decided to watch the Tribunal in action; and I'd like to lay on you my impressions, to date, of its brief, beleaguered and fugitive existence.

November 1966: first press conference, held in London. Apart from European and American journalists, I notice a high proportion of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans in the audience, which also includes Dick Gregory. The Tribunal obviously has a powerful appeal to the Third World--i.e., to those nations and individuals who decline to be leaned on by Moscow or Washington. Sartre is unable to attend, but Bertrand Russell puts in an appearance to read a prepared statement. He moves with a terrible fragility, like an ancient wading bird, and the piping, rasping precision of his voice turns the conference into a Cambridge University tutorial, circa 1900. "I have lived through the Dreyfus case"--in seven words, he whisks us back through as many decades. He accuses the U. S. of mounting "a war of annihilation," expresses "admiration and passion" for the people of Vietnam, and departs. (Age and ill health prevented the sage from traveling to Stockholm for the Tribunal's first session. Dean Rusk, who had been invited to nominate a spokesman for the American Government, told a group of journalists that he had no intention of "playing games with a 94-year-old Briton." Sartre promptly issued a crisp rebuff. "Mr. Rusk," he said, "might have replied: 'I do not recognize the legitimacy of the Tribunal, and I will not send anyone to represent the American Government's point of view.' Or else: 'I recognize it as legitimate, and we are so certain that we are right that I will at once send a spokesman to Stockholm.' Or he might have answered: 'I do not recognize the legitimacy of these judges, but we possess such strong arguments and overwhelming evidence that I am not afraid to set before them the reasons for our policies.' But he said none of these things. Instead, he chose an ignominious way out. He sought to ridicule a great old man.")

Months pass. Postponement follows postponement. Harold Wilson won't have the Tribunal in London; with freezing courtesy, De Gaulle slams the door on it in Paris. For a while it looks as if Algeria may be the place, but this plan is unaccountably frustrated, and it's in Stockholm, for a chilly week in May 1967, that the tribunes, witnesses, newsmen and private observers finally forgather. The venue is the Folkets Hus (People's House), a Swedish-modern conference hall with a theater in the basement, where the neatly timed current attraction is the off-Broadway protest play Viet Rock.

The Tribunal members--grave faces clustered around green-baize tables-- comprise a German dramatist (Peter Weiss, author of Marat/Sade), a British historian (Isaac Deutscher, biographer of Stalin and Trotsky), a French novelist (Simone de Beauvoir, disciple and companion of Sartre) and, of course, Sartre himself, a busy, bespectacled gnome, exuding intellectual energy. There are also eminent jurists from France, Italy, Japan, Pakistan and Turkey, and two Americans--a pacifist and a minor playwright. The scowling chairman, who looks like a heavyweight bouncer, is the Yugoslav historian Vladimir Dedijer--a highly sympathetic figure, I later discover, who championed the cause of Milovan Djilas when the latter was imprisoned for criticizing Tito. In Stockholm (Dedijer announces) the Tribunal will confine itself to two questions: Is the U. S. guilty of aggression in Vietnam, and to what extent have civilian targets been attacked? Other charges--concerning chemical weapons, inhuman treatment of prisoners, and genocide--will be held over until subsequent sessions.

So the quiet recital of evidence begins, a litany of pain inflicted with nobly paternal motives (after all, the Vietnamese must be protected from themselves), a story--growing monotonous with iteration--of homes and schools, churches and hospitals destroyed for the greater good of those who lived, learned, worshiped and were healed in them. Only thus, it seems, can the people of Vietnam be taught the wisdom of the American way of life. Better this than the heresy of neutralism or the living death of communism. There's no room for a middle course now. The bombs fall on the just and the unjust--first a wave of high explosive, then a wave of napalm, then a wave of fragmentation bombs (the procedure never varies)--until the survivors come to their senses, realizing at last that they must either welcome the sincere white bombardiers or be branded enemies of freedom. Those who are not for the U. S. are against liberty, and must not marvel if they are hunted and destroyed.

A French lady journalist tells how she accompanied a North Vietnamese peasant to his home after a raid. Tea had been prepared and was hot on the table, but his wife and four children were dead. What end did these deaths serve? The Frenchwoman, who was tortured by the Germans in World War Two, claims to recognize the tactics. To make a member of the Resistance confess, the Gestapo would torture his next of kin; similarly, to make the Viet Cong capitulate, the Americans bomb their compatriots in the North. A Pakistani witness quotes from a conversation he had with a military official in Hanoi.

Question: If the U.S. stops bombing North Vietnam, will you take reciprocal steps of de-escalation? Answer: Certainly --we'll stop shooting down American bombers.

The catalog of homicide goes relentlessly on. Of people ravaged by napalm ("His ears just melted," says a witness who was present during a raid); of Northern villages carefully obliterated, despite being far removed from military targets. Film clips and photographs amply support the charges, together with tape recordings made by local citizens. As slide after slide of civilian corpses is projected onto the screen, we acquire a sort of immunity to horror. "Autres corps des victimes....Autres corps des victimes," repeats a Cambodian delegate, showing us pictures of Cambodian peasants who died when American bombers violated their territory. (Ostensibly by accident, but actually, he insists, to chastise Cambodia for its policy of neutralism.) In time it becomes difficult to distinguish a dead body from its background. It looks like something crumpled, spilled, rolled up, discarded--an unwieldy piece of garbage, melting into surroundings of domestic debris. This is the human form as Francis Bacon sees it in his paintings, caught writhing in some private turmoil, as if anticipating its own ultimate putrescence.

A special ghastliness ought to attach to dead lepers. In 1957 the North Vietnamese built a model leper colony to accommodate 4000 patients. They chose a secluded spot for it. Even in our enlightened age, tradition insists that lepers should be kept in isolated areas. American planes demolished the colony in 39 raids, and fired on the inmates as they were being evacuated to caves in the nearby hills. One hundred thirty-nine people were killed. Films and photos establish the loneliness of the site and the extent of the havoc; but I can't pretend that a slaughtered leper looks more moving than any other corpse. This is what French weapons expert Professor Jean-Pierre Vigier is later to define as "psychosocial bombing"--its essential target being civilian morale. The dead act as object lessons to the living. Why, indeed, should Rusk bother to play games with an aged Briton? Here, on the big board, is a far more fascinating game, and one for which he can invent his own rules.

By no means all the evidence goes unchallenged by the members of the Tribunal: These are combative intellectuals, in whom the impulse to argue is almost a reflex. Thus, when a witness describes the bombardment of dikes in the North, a massive Pakistani lawyer sternly demands how much of his account is based on personal experience and how much on official sources. Mostly the latter, the witness admits; and his testimony is brusquely disallowed. Again, a Japanese investigator produces a map taken from a captured American pilot on which (he maintains) hospitals chosen for attack are marked in red. Sartre will have none of this. Perhaps, he suggests, they were marked in red as targets to be avoided? The Japanese equivocates; Sartre persists in his skepticism; and the evidence is quashed.

Is this technically a war of American aggression? Three dapper professors--Chesneaux of the Sorbonne, Douglas of Cornell and Kolko of the University of Pennsylvania--present their findings, which differ only in length and relative felicity of phrasing. All reject the conventional thesis, advanced by establishment liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, that this is a war into which America just happened to blunder. Summary of Chesneaux: American intervention in Vietnam started long before the Geneva Conference of 1954--Truman said in the previous year that the U. S. was paying half the cost of what was then a French colonial war. Those who believe that this was ever a civil war are kidding themselves: It was (and remains) a struggle between Vietnamese nationalism and foreign-backed puppet governments. "It is the U. S. that has committed subversion in Vietnam, not the N. L. F. [National Liberation Front]." Summary of Douglas: For at least 17 years, the U. S. has been financially and militarily committed to preventing the country from going neutral. American policy, according to this nostra culpa recital, combines "a glib rhetoric with a barbarous reality." (But Douglas could hardly have guessed how far the barbarity would go, or how glib the rhetoric would get. Since he addressed the Tribunal, it's become common form for U. S. commanders to advocate punitive invasions of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The closed world in which they think and plan is now a complete moral madhouse. They are moving the air war to the frontiers of China--perhaps in the hope of provoking Chinese retaliation. If this takes place, on however small a scale, they will be able, like Tod Holton's cronies, to bomb China's nuclear stations with a clear conscience.)

Gabriel Kolko, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, comes up with the fullest and most clinching indictment of the Great American Aberration. From the beginning, he says, Vietnam has been a testing ground of America's ability to suppress wars of revolutionary nationalism. And the beginning was in 1950, when the success of communism in China first convinced the U. S. that self-determination in southeast Asia was something to be discouraged. Hence America's refusal to endorse the 1954 Geneva agreements, which guaranteed free elections in Vietnam. Between 1955 and 1959, the Diem regime executed more than 16,000 of its political opponents and received more than 70 percent of its budget from the U. S. A new resistance movement erupted among the peasants in 1959, and the N. L. F. was formed at the end of the following year. Soon afterward, the U. S. military build-up began. Excerpt from Kolko's peroration:

First as a passive senior partner, and then as the primary party, the United States made Vietnam an international arena for the Cold War; and the war should never be considered as a civil conflict, or even secondarily as a by-product of one--for in that form it would hardly have lasted very long against a national and radical movement that the vast majority of the Vietnamese people always sustained.

Should the U. S. therefore pull out? On this question I fancy you'd go along with Schlesinger, who opposes the war but says (in his book on Vietnam) that America has "moral obligations to those South Vietnamese who, under our encouragement and with the expectation of our support, have said and done things which will assure their imprisonment or death if the Viet Cong should take over South Vietnam by force." This is the American liberal's stock case against American withdrawal. But it wouldn't be insuperably difficult, given U. S. good will and careful surveillance by the International Control Commission set up at Geneva, to make sure that free elections, not force, determined the composition of the government; and the I. C. C. could also supervise a general amnesty. Even if the worst happened, and reprisals occurred, could they really be more abominable than what the U. S. is already doing to Vietnam?

As the days pass, and the witnesses come and go, I detect a certain duality in the Tribunal's aims. It is trying to prove that America's military effort is at once effective (i.e., commits atrocities) and ineffective (i.e., cannot win the war). "The accused, your Honor, is not only a multiple ax slayer but harmless." But this is a forensic quibble. What dominates one's mind is wonder at the versatile violence of American war making. Napalm, for example--what a triumph of scientifically administered pain! One of the witnesses offers in evidence a fragment of a napalm bomb that has already exploded. He chips a tiny splinter into an ashtray and applies a match. It burns fiercely for ten minutes. The brain recoils, and the flesh cringes, from the thought of contact with this exquisitely researched product of Western know-how. (Not to mention such other marvels of expertise as the seven "chemical agents"--three of them potentially lethal gases--that the U. S. has now authorized for use in Vietnam. These, together with data relating to bacteriological weapons, will be discussed at the Tribunal's next series of sessions.)

On the fourth morning, the human evidence is shown. Cameramen converge, arc lamps flood the stage and we avidly peer, feeling like ghouls, at a pretty girl in blue, a serene small boy and two impassive men in dark, ill-fitting business suits. These are the first Vietnamese victims of American bombing ever to be seen outside their native country. (From this point onward, I wish you had been there: Hearsay is a great cushion against guilt.) The men come from the South. Thai Binh Dan, aged 18, is a peasant who was napalmed on May 21, 1966, suffering permanent injuries to his face, arms, hands and legs. Hoang Tan Hun is a 45-year-old rice grower, maimed by a phosphorus bomb earlier in the same month. His left ear has gone, he can't move his head and his left arm is glued to his body.

The girl and the boy are North Vietnamese. Ngo Thi Nga, who is 23, teaches school in a village of 500 homes. On the night of October 22, 1966, she and 15 of her pupils were asleep in the classroom when the American bombs fell. She felt a stabbing pain in the back of her neck, but took as many children to the shelters as she could before fainting. When she came to, she was in hospital. "My head hurt, I couldn't sleep, I vomited everything. Two of the children were dead. The diagnosis said I had a steel pellet lodged in my skull." It is still there. Her sight is getting weaker, and she has crippling headaches. A French doctor testifies that the damage to her brain is incurable. There was no military target--no factory, no power plant, no railroad, no highway, not even a bridge--within 20 kilometers of her village, and no troops had ever been stationed there.

Do Van Ngoc is a moonfaced lad with a voice as shrill and sunny as Shirley Temple's in her prepolitical days. He is nine years old. In the mornings he goes to school and in the afternoons looks after his father's cattle. The afternoon of June 5, 1966, is the one we are concerned with. "I saw three planes coming in from the sea. One of them dropped two bombs. There were big flames, the cattle were on fire, and I jumped into the waterd of the rice fields because my body was burning. Later I called out to some people passing by and they took me to hospital. I stayed there three months. Then my parents brought me home and I got fat again and went back to school." He is politely asked if he is willing to show his wounds. The cameras move in closer, the audience rises. He strips off his jacket, shirt and pants, and is suddenly naked, in a blaze of light. Above the waist he's unmarked; but his belly, thighs and groin are burned to a deepbrown crisp, corrugated like the crackling on a roast of pork. (A Stockholm physician confirms that the scars could have been caused only by napalm.) Shock inscribes the image on my retina.

Mention Vietnam today, and that is what I see. If you dismiss it as a mere propaganda display, I can only agree with you, and pity you. It was propaganda; but it was propagating a symbolic and demonstrable truth. Tabloid simplifications are not always lies. I know we are taught to mistrust them; but the moment our skepticism becomes total, we play into the hands of authority, which rejoices whenever a potential rebel is seduced into apathy.

I suppose I am urging you to lose your cool. Can you face the prospect of living without it? About 30 years ago, another great military power intervened to impose a puppet government on another embattled country. You would surely have lined up against the Germans in Spain: Isn't there reason enough to take sides against the Americans in Vietnam? You'll probably argue that to do so would be an empty gesture, but I say the hell with such self-abasement. I know it pleases you to think yourself powerless, but numbers are extremely potent, and your allies are more numerous than you imagine.

So what to do? For one thing, how about setting up a War Crimes Tribunal in the U. S., with a panel of American jurists sitting in judgment on their own political leaders? Arraign your own country in accordance with the international laws it helped to formulate. If the Tribunal produced concrete evidence that the U. S. had acted in breach of these laws, it would not only attract enormous publicity but also open the way for a test case that might be taken before a Federal court--e.g., that of a man who refused the draft because he did not wish to aid and abet his country in committing war crimes. You may remind me of the case of Captain Howard Levy, the Brooklyn dermatologist who got a prison sentence for declining, on conscientious grounds, to give instruction to Green Beret medicos bound for Vietnam; but that sentence was passed by a military court, not a civil one, and Dr. Levy lacked the corroborating weight of witnesses and evidence that a Tribunal could provide.

My idea is to put the basic structure of American democracy to the test: Take the Executive branch to court and challenge the Judiciary to condemn it. And if you think I am being fanciful, let me boost your morale with a quote from Professor Louis Sohn of the Harvard Law School. "Certainly," the professor says, "a U. S. court could find its own Government in violation of international law--and do something about it." If the Judiciary evades its duty, one thing at least will have been made bitterly clear: that the separation of law from politics, on which your Constitution prides itself, is a discredited myth. Your legal system will have confessed its subservience to the political arm.

If, like me, you belong to the 39-plus generation, you and your coevals could be indispensably helpful in the organizing (which must be speedy and well financed) of a juridically sound and politically respectable Tribunal. But what about the young? I'm convinced that most of them would be either radical enough to support the Tribunal or unprejudiced enough not to ignore it. If its findings cut no ice in the official courts, they might decide to opt out of the system, having been shown that it self-evidently did not work. As far as the political establishment is concerned, they would surely be right. But opting out need not mean giving up. Two courses of definite action would still be left to them. They could line up with the Third World I've mentioned and defined above by helping to form--inside America but outside the major parties--a political Third Force of tough-mindedly leftish character. (A solid and obdurate Popular Front would spell nightmares for L.B. J.) Alternatively, they could join the hippies. It's an easier choice, of course, but not to be underrated. Ten years ago I used to attack the Beats for being nonpolitical; I told them to stay in the boat and rock it. Since then, the boat has grown steadily more unrockable. Nowadays, it's a hell-bent war canoe that neither of the major parties can steer away from the rapids. Dropping out of the present setup can be an act of affirmation, more positive than staying in. "You and I, dear brothers, all of us who smoke a little pot and dig a little peace, we are high among the radicals and subversives L. B. J. would like to get rid of." (I'm quoting from a "love release" put out by a Digger community.) "Anything that criticizes the establishment and its asinine war-and-power game is political, subversive.... All the heads and hippies, all the black-power people, all the wild and futile Reds with their outmoded economic fantasies and incredibly lovely and naïve idealism, you and I, dear brothers--they're out to get us!"

And did you hear about the Digger who went to Michigan last summer and made a speech so challenging that it stunned the New Left into silence and self-reappraisal? The occasion was a conference held by the Students for a Democratic Society. The Digger said, in part:

Marxism's a groove, but Russia's a drag, right? Look at us, we're out of it, drop out of it with us. We're going to make this country be what we want. It can be beautiful. We can all be beautiful.... Johnson doesn't want you to be beautiful. Resist! You can't reform this country. If the New Left took over, it would all be the same, man, because you're not free. You got to drop out, baby. Free yourselves, and then free the country. We're doing it. You can do it. We're your brothers. Are you with us?

In other words, defeat the military-industrial machine by noncooperation and passive resistance. Regard the Government as an occupying power, just as Gandhi regarded the British in India. Make bridges, all the time, between the Diggers and the New Left. If American youth would only learn from the patience of the Vietnamese, it could change the face of America within a decade.

No matter what choice it makes, you will be able to help--with advice, with prestige, with propaganda. And that will help all of us, including your friends in Europe. Don't think we like disliking America.

Yours at the barricades,Kenneth Tynan