Word: schoenman
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...Schoenman's voice softens--perhaps accidentally, perhaps intentionally--when he discusses his undergraduate days at Princeton. A scholarship student from Brooklyn, he was then "already involved in the Black Struggle.... I was a socialist, but with a syndicalist or anarchist orientation." He "polemicized a bit" against the club system. "It was a training ground for the Southern aristocracy...stabbing one's friends in the back. I thought they were all so lifeless, so...bland, and so one dimensional...
After receiving an honors BA from Princeton in 1958, he went to the London School of Economics to study political philosophy. While participating in anti-nuclear campaigns, he met Lord Russell. Schoenman feels it is "very flattering, but a bit fatuous," to be considered the eminence grise behind the 95-year-old philosopher. "What's it done with--telepathy?" he asks sarcastically...
...SCHOENMAN'S eyes blink as he praises Russell. "There have been various changes in his thought, but also a thread of consistency--his opposition to arbitrary authority and his defense of the oppressed." He denies that Russell is senile, and lists "this Renaissance man's" current projects: the second and third volumes of his autobiography, an "updating" of the New Testament (based on current events), a book of epigrams, and adaptations of his short stories for the stage...
Critics of the "war crimes tribunal" receive short shift from Schoenman. "We never represented it as a trial," he says, and compares the procedure to a "grand jury" for examining evidence without the "adversary process." He admits that the judges--including Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Vladmir Dedijer--were already convinced that the U.S. had committed war crimes in Vietnam. "We're all conditioned...the question is how the evidence is dealt with," he says flatly. The tribunal felt that the Viet Cong had not committed war crimes. "Their resistance is a heroic chapter...
...present, Schoenman is working to spread the findings of the tribunal (neatly packed in a paperback book). He will return to England as soon as he can retrieve his United States passport which was confiscated by the Federal government after he took a trip to North Vietnam...