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.’