The recent disclosures of American atrocities by the Fleet Street press should not be a surprise to any of us. The press has concentrated its attention on one particular atrocity at My Lai—"Pink[ville]" [illegible]. And the press has tried (with the exception of the Sunday Times, 23 November) to make believe that it was only the excesses of a handful of soldiers, rather than being the normal method of suppression that occurs. The second reason why the press has concentrated on this massacre is one of pure sensationalism.
In fact the total duplicity of the capitalist press can be shown clearly when one looks back to 1967, when in Stockholm the War Crimes Tribunal, initiated by Bertrand Russell, presented to the world a mass of evidence of daily atrocities far greater than anything that happened at My Lai. At the Stockholm and Copenhagen sessions of the War Crimes Tribunal, witnesses, including doctors from all over the world, reported on the results of napalm bombing, "lazy dog" shells which exploded into thousands of tiny razors on the civilian population of Northern Vietnam; pictures of babies burned to charcoal by napalm, pregnant mothers with "lazy dog" razors or "guava" pellets [illegible] their bodies. Also undeniable evidence of systematic bombing of schools, churches, pagodas, sanitoria and even leprosy colonies. And from the south came evidence of the use of toxic chemicals and herbicides [illegible] rice plantations: the use of gas as a weapon of war, and the systematic razing of villages and confinement of their population to "pacification camps", a crude euphemism for concentration camps.
During the holding of the tribunals, the international capitalist press didn't even make so much as a squeak of protest against the atrocious revelations. Instead, papers like The Times merely reported that the jury was "biassed" or else attacked the "senile" Bertrand Russell. And now the fact that the truth begins to worm its way into the open can be seen by all of us who supported and worked in the War Crimes Tribunal, including the Vietnamese people, as a historic vindication of its work.
J. Clough
P.S. A report in the [illegible], 28 November that the U.S. government is considering holding its own "War crimes commission", presents an extraordinarily ironic situation: comparable, one may say, to [illegible] taking his hired gunman to court and charging him with murder! The real criminals are not the U.S. Army sergeants or Private Medina, who will be on trial, but Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and their accomplices are Wilson, Brown and Stewart.
THE GOVERNMENT AND APARTHEID
The Springboks' rugby tour has provided the left and the liberals with an apparently real target upon which to vent their anger against the racism of apartheid in South Africa. And while all of us will support and applaud [every] demonstration against the Springboks it is worthwhile taking a look at the Labour Government's role. Wilson and his supporters, including THE GUARDIAN have been by no means displeased by the receptions that these representatives of apartheid have received.
In the Government's case this is not because of its solidarity with the victims of apartheid, but because by having his ministers make whispered criticisms of South Africa, Wilson can try to cover up his role of complicity with the Vorster regime.
So deep is this complicity that the British representative voted along with the USA, Portugal and South Africa to oppose a resolution in the United Nations calling for sanctions against the Vorster regime. Whilst we have no confidence in the UN to do anything positive, this symbolic act speaks far louder than Howell's condemnation of race in sport.
Opponents of apartheid should use the great interest in the demonstrations to explain that the fight against apartheid is a class question and that the main enemy in this [illegible] big business, backed by the Wilson government, which pours millions of pounds into South Africa each year to reap the benefits of low labour costs. We should also explain why we must support armed action by the African people against [illegible].
Manchester reader