On Wednesday February 24, 1965, James Baldwin paid a public visit to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell at his house in London and exchanged
thoughts with Russell on racial relations in the United States. It was less than three days after Malcolm X was shot to death at a public rally in Harlem.
Baldwin was in London to launch a novel. When he was asked by the press to comment on Malcolm X’s assassination, he told them while there might be just one man that committed the crime, “the entire Western white su-premacy forged the bullet” (No Name 115). Having expressed on several oc-casions that antiblack racism was as pervasive in Europe as in the United States, Baldwin chose to frame the assassination not as an isolated incident in New York but rather as a brutal result of the fear of black political upris-ings ingrained in the modern Western psyche.5 His host, Bertrand Russell, was then devoting himself to opposing the global expansion of U.S. military power, for which he made persistent efforts to meet and correspond with Vietnamese artists, activists, scholars, and journalists who had witnessed the catastrophic U.S. military maneuvers on the ground. Although the con-versation between Baldwin and Russell was not fully disclosed to the public, it could be said that they concurred in fighting the racial logic of America’s power. In the next year, when Russell founded a “people’s tribunal” against the U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Baldwin was listed as one of the founding members, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Their idea was to set up an unprecedented independent international court of justice without the backing or intervention of any single nation-state.
James Baldwin published “The International War Crimes Tribunal” in the radical African American journal Freedomways in fall 1967 to publicize his support for Bertrand Russell. In a statement that bears clear imprints of Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, Baldwin declares his moral support for the cause and even proposes that the trial be held in Harlem. To this transnational antiwar movement, Baldwin provides an elucidation of the internal racial division of the United States under the facade of a unified nation:
I speak as an American Negro. I challenge anyone alive to tell me why any black American should go into those jungles to kill people who are not white and who have never done them any harm. . . . I challenge anyone alive to convince me that a people who have not achieved anything resembling freedom are empowered, with bombs, to free another people whom they do not know at all. I challenge any American, and especially Mr. Lyndon Johnson and Mr. Hubert Humphrey and Mr. Dean Rusk and Mr. Robert McNamara, to tell me, and the black population of the United States, how, if they can-not liberate their brothers—repeat: brothers—and have can-not even learned to live with them, they intend to liberate Southeast Asia. I challenge them to tell me by what right, and in whose interest, they presume to police the world, and I furthermore want to know if they
would like their sisters, or their daughters to marry any one of the people they are struggling so mightily to save. And this is not a rhe-torical question. . . . I want an answer: If I am to die, I have the right to know why. (246–247; emphasis in original)
Echoing King’s same-year statement on “the interrelatedness of racism and militarism and the need to attack both problems rather than leaving one”
(“Dr. King”), Baldwin condemns the U.S. government for its use of the low-est racial caste of the country to prey on an exploited Asian colony. The question Baldwin asks is simple: How could those who have denied the hu-manity of their kin at home risk their lives to save a people whom they do not know? The answer is clear: The self-appointed crusaders are probably not being sincere, and they are probably not risking their own lives for such task.
Countering the American propaganda of the Vietnam War as a noble cru-sade, Baldwin recast the scenario into one of an imperial nation dispossess-ing its disposable subjects to destroy a presumably weak enemy.
After questioning America’s unfulfilled promise of liberating black men and women, he draws on the provocative comparison of black America, Na-tive America, and Vietnam: “Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors car-ried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can’t but fight a racist war—this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first ‘Vietcong’ victim. We were bombed first”
(248). Baldwin situates the American idea of liberation as an expansive cata-logue of violence. In a time when the state propaganda framed Vietnamese peasants as potential communist spies or suicide bombers, Baldwin remind-ed readers that, for centuries, black Americans and Native Americans had been similarly smeared and unjustifiably mistreated as enemies to the na-tion. By comparing Native Americans and black Americans to “the first
‘Vietcong’ victim,” Baldwin shows the American idea of war for freedom is not a new invention in the mid-twentieth century, and it must be viewed with discretion, especially its danger of generating lies and terror, within and beyond the U.S. border.
In addition, Baldwin emphasizes in the statement that the American de-cision of “liberating the Vietnamese” is meant to revoke the political dede-cision the Vietnamese made for themselves—in this case, of building a communist society. He denounces the U.S. war in Vietnam as a war in contradiction to the principle of self-determination:
The American War in Vietnam raises several questions. One is whether or not small nations, in this age of superstates and super-powers, will be allowed to work out their own destinies and live as
they feel they should. For only the people of a county have the right, or the spiritual power, to determine that country’s way of life. An-other question this war raises is just how what we call the underde-veloped countries became underdeunderde-veloped in the first place. Why, for example, is Africa underdeveloped, and why do the resources of, say, Sierra Leone belong to Europe? Why, in short, does much of the world eat too little and so little of the world eat too much? (247–248) While Malcolm X in his “Ballot or Bullet” speech criticizes the United States
“minding somebody else’s business way over in South Vietnam,” Baldwin elaborates that argument to remind his readers of how U.S. hegemony, through the global Cold War, deprived “small nations” of their right to self-determination and therefore perpetuated colonialist exploitation in Africa and Asia. Baldwin’s political turn, or radical turn, at this point can be seen as an effort to continue Malcolm X’s vision of building a transnational coali-tion of black America and the third world.
Vietnam was being devastatingly bombed as members of the Russell Tri-bunal used various platforms to protest against the escalating warfare. Since its establishment, the campaign received mixed press coverage in Europe but was largely blocked out of public attention in the United States due to gov-ernmental intervention. Despite its intended imitation of the Nuremberg Tribunals, in the end it was carried out more as an event to attract broader attention than as a legal experiment that truly sought to try the heads of the United States as “war criminals.” Sartre presided over the Stockholm session in April 1967 and announced in the verdict that the United States was launching a “genocide” against the Vietnamese. Both the Tokyo session in August and the Denmark session in November publicized an unprecedented amount of evidence of violence, committed individually and institutionally, by the U.S. military in Vietnam. While the verdicts reached predictable con-clusions, the “trial” sessions released a large amount of unheard, horrendous evidence of wartime cruelty from Vietnamese and American testifiers. In the United States, the Johnson administration was angered by the tribunal’s attempt to shame the U.S. military and ordered mainstream U.S. media, including the New York Times and New York Magazine, to minimize their coverage of the tribunal and spawn problematic images of Russell and his aides as deceived communist sympathizers.6