Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide

The following is an excerpt from Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide. It was written by Sartre in December 1967, in his capacity as President of the International War Crimes Tribunal created by Bertrand Russell. Sartre was charged by the Tribunal with setting out the grounds for its verdict that the United States government had committed genocide in Vietnam.

The word 'genocide' has not been in existence for very long: it was coined by the jurist Lemkin between the two world wars. The thing is as old as mankind and so far no society has existed whose structure has prevented it from committing this crime. In any case, genocide is a product of history and it bears the mark of the society from which it comes. The example which we are to consider is the work of the greatest capitalist power in the present-day world: it is as such that we must try and examine it - in other words, in so far as it expresses both the economic infrastructure of this power, its political aims and the contradictions of the present set of circumstances.

In particular we must try to understand the intentions, in respect to genocide, of the American government in its war against Vietnam. Because Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide on the basis of intent. The Convention made tacit reference to events that were fresh in everyone's memories: Hitler had openly proclaimed his deliberate intention of exterminating the Jews. He used genocide as a political means and did not disguise the fact. The Jew had to be put to death wherever he came from not because he had been caught preparing to fight, or because he was taking part in resistance movements, but simply because he was Jewish. Now the American government has naturally been careful not to say anything so explicit. It even claimed that it was rushing to the support of its allies, the South Vietnamese, attacked by the Communists of the North. After studying the facts, can we objectively discover such an unspoken aim? Can we say, after this investigation, that the American armed forces are killing the Vietnamese for the simple reason that they are Vietnamese? This can be established only after a short historical discussion: the structures of war change with the infrastructures of society. Between 1860 and the present day, military thinking and objectives have undergone profound changes, and the outcome of this metamorphosis is, in fact, the 'cautionary' war the United States is fighting in Vietnam. 1856 — convention to protect the goods of neutral countries; 1864 — attempt at Geneva to protect the wounded; 1899, 1907 — two conferences at The Hague to try to regulate fighting generally. It was no coincidence that jurists and governments should have been increasing the attempts to 'humanize war' on the eve of the most frightful massacres mankind has ever known. In his work On Military Conventions, V. Dedijer has shown clearly that capitalist societies were also simultaneously engaged in the process of giving birth to the monster of total war - which expresses their true nature. This is because:

1. Rivalry between industrialized nations, who fight over the new markets, engenders the permanent hostility which is expressed in the theory and practice of what is known as 'bourgeois nationalism'.

2. The development of industry, which is at the root of these antagonisms, supplies the means of resolving them to the benefit of one of the competitors, by producing devices that kill on an ever more massive scale. The result of this development is that it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the front and the rest of the country, between combatants and civilian population.

3. All the more so since new military objectives are now appearing near the towns - i.e. the factories which, even when they are not actually working for the army, are nonetheless to some degree the storehouses of the country's economic potential. The destruction of this potential is precisely the aim of conflict and the means of winning it.

4. For this reason, everyone is mobilized: the peasant fights on the front, the worker supports him behind the lines, the peasant women take their men's places in the fields. In the total struggle mounted by one nation against another, the worker tends to become a combatant because, in the final analysis, it is the power that is strongest economically that has the most chance of winning.

5. Lastly the democratic development of the bourgeois countries tends to involve the masses in political life. They do not control the decisions of those in power, and yet little by little they become self-aware. When a war breaks out, they no longer feel remote from it. Reformulated, often distorted by propaganda, it becomes a focus of moral effort for the whole community: in each belligerent nation everyone, or almost everyone, after a certain amount of manipulation, becomes the enemy of all the members of the other - which is the last step in the evolution of total war.

6. These same societies in full technological growth continue to broaden the field of competition by multiplying means of communication. The famous 'One World' of the Americans already existed by the end of the 19th century, when American wheat finally brought about the ruin of the English farmer. Total war is no longer the war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total for another reason: because it may well involve the whole world.

So that war between (bourgeois) nations - of which the 1914 war was the first example but which had been threatening Europe since 1900 - was not the invention of a single man or a single government, but the simple need for total effort which became obligatory, from the begin­ning of the century onward, for those who wished to continue politics by other means. In other words, the choice was clear: no war or that war. It was that war that our fathers fought. And the governments - who saw it coming without having the intelligence or the courage to avoid it - tried in vain to humanize it.

Yet during the first world conflict, the intention of genocide appeared only sporadically. It was primarily a question - as in previous centuries - of shattering the military power of a country, even if the underlying aim was to ruin its economy. But, if it was true to say that one could no longer distinguish clearly between civilians and soldiers, it was rarely - for this very reason - that the population was overtly aimed at, with the exception of a few terror raids. In any case the belligerents - at any rate those who were actively conducting the war - were industrial powers, which implied a certain balance at the outset: each possessed a force for the dissuasion of possible exterminations - i.e. the power to apply the law of retaliation; this explains why, even in the midst of the massacre, a sort of prudence still reigned.

However, after 1830 and during the whole of the last century, there were many examples of genocide outside Europe. Some of these were the expression of authoritarian political structures and the others - those relevant for the understanding of the sources of United States imperialism and the nature of the war in Vietnam - had their origin in the internal structures of the capitalist democracies. To export goods and capital, the great powers - England and France in particular - built themselves colonial empires. The name given by the French to their 'conquests' - possessions d'outre mer (overseas possessions) - indicates clearly that they had managed to obtain them only by wars of aggression. The aggressor seeks out the adversary on his own ground, in Africa, in Asia, in the under-developed countries; and, far from waging a 'total war', which would presuppose a certain reciprocity at the outset, he takes advantage of his absolute superiority in arms to commit only an expeditionary corps to the conflict. This gains an easy victory over the regular armies - if there are any - but as this uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population, and since the latter is always a mine of rebels or soldiers, the colonial troops hold sway by terror, that is to say, by constantly renewed massacres. These massacres are genocidal in character: they involve destroying 'a part of the group' (ethnic, national, religious) to terrorize the rest and to destructure the native society. When in the last century the French, after wreaking havoc in Algeria, imposed on its tribal society - where each community owned the land jointly - the practice of the Code Civile, which introduced the legal norms of bourgeois ownership and enforced the dividing up of inheritances, they systematically destroyed the economic infrastruc­ture of the country and the land soon passed from the peasant clans into the hands of traders from the parent country. In point of fact coloni­zation is not a matter of mere conquest - like the annexation in 1870 by Germany of Alsace-Lorraine; it is, of necessity, cultural genocide. Colonization cannot take place without the systematic elimination of the distinctive features of the native society, combined with the refusal to allow its members integration with the parent country, or to benefit from its advantages. Colonialism is, in fact, a system: the colony sells raw materials and foodstuffs at preferential rates to the colonizing power which, in return, sells the colony industrial goods at the price current on the world market. This curious system of exchange can be established only if work is imposed on a colonial sub-proletariat for starvation wages. The inevitable consequence is that the colonized peoples lose their national individuality, their culture and their customs, sometimes even their language, and live, in abject poverty, like shadows, ceaselessly reminded of their 'sub-humanity'.

However, their value as almost free manpower protects them to some degree against genocide. Just before the Nuremberg trials the French, to set an example, massacred seventy thousand Algerians at Setif. This was such a matter of course at the time that no one took it into their heads to judge the French government as they were to judge the Nazis. But this 'deliberate destruction of a part of the national group' could not be extended without damaging the colonialists' own interests. By exterminating their sub-proletariat, they would have ruined themselves. It was because they could not liquidate the Algerian population and, equally, because they could not integrate it, that the French lost the Algerian war.

— An edited excerpt from Between Existentialism and Marxism by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by John Matthews.

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Between Existentialism and Marxism

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Translated by John Matthews

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the incep...

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