Genocide and Its Jurors
24th September 2026
On a November afternoon in 1967, at a hall in Roskilde, Denmark, a panel of the most celebrated left-wing intellectuals in the world delivered a unanimous verdict at the second session of its “International War Crimes Tribunal”: the United States government was perpetrating a genocide against the people of Vietnam. The event was organised by Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre had spent months building the legal case. The tribunal’s investigators had made five fact-finding trips to Vietnam, where they collected testimony and documents, and assembled reports on everything from the origins of American intervention to the use of fragmentation bombs and the destruction of civilian areas.
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The tribunal was funded by the North Vietnamese government. Russell had personally requested this from Ho Chi Minh. Political activist Staughton Lynd—chairman of the 1965 “March on Washington” and a staunch opponent of the war—rejected Russell’s invitation to join the tribunal, once it was made clear to him that Russell and the rest of the tribunal would not be investigating Viet Cong atrocities. The violence of the oppressed, he was told, could not be judged by the same standard as the violence of the oppressor. As Lynd recalled in an essay published that year in an issue of Liberation:
In conversation with the emissary who proffered the invitation, I urged that the alleged war crimes of any party to the conflict should come before the Tribunal. After all, I argued, a “crime” is an action that is wrong no matter who does it. … I asked, “What if it were shown that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam tortures unarmed prisoners?” The answer, as I understood it, was, “Anything is justified that drives the imperialist aggressor into the sea.” I declined the invitation to be a member of the Tribunal.
If it weren’t for double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.