Posted on 08/24/2005 9:07:04 AM PDT by Interesting Times
Jane Fonda is a beautiful and talented actress. But for many Vietnam veterans, she is remembered more as a despicable traitor whose betrayal undermined the sacrifices of millions of American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen – and in the process contributed significantly to a Communist victory in Indochina that led to the slaughter of millions of innocent human beings and the consignment of tens of millions of others to a Communist gulag that continues to rank among the “worst of the worst”[1] among the world’s human rights abusers.
My Life So Far is Fonda’s attempt to justify the first six decades of her existence. She tells us far more than most would care to know about her difficult childhood, her battles with eating disorders to maintain her trim figure, and her various problems with a series of failed marriages. There are few acknowledged regrets,[2] considerably more efforts to rationalize and spin behavior by leaving out essential facts, and an underlying theme that almost seems calculated to be setting the stage for an insanity defense. (There is, after all, no statute of limitations barring a treason prosecution even after passage of a third of a century.)
One of her regrets is the publication of “the photograph.” The infamous photograph—which is hardly the worst of her transgressions while visiting Hanoi—showed a gleeful Fonda sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun and apparently pretending to shoot down American pilots. But in her autobiography, Fonda dismisses it as a consequence of being “used” and deceived by her otherwise wonderful Communist hosts. She had told them, she asserts, that she did not wish to visit any military installations; and the only reason she happened to be wearing a North Vietnamese military helmet at the time was that it was “required” by her hosts.[3]
After decades of taking serious grief even from some of her fellow war critics, Fonda decides to give her readers her “best, honest recollection of what took place.” It seems a North Vietnamese soldier sang her a wonderful song that made her so happy she was giddily applauding his effort when, she writes: “Someone (I don’t remember who) leads me toward the gun, and I sit down, still laughing, still applauding. It all has nothing to do with where I am sitting. I hardly even think about where I am sitting.”[4]
It is only later, she explains that the implications of what she has done hit her. “Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes! I plead with him [the translator], “You have to be sure those photographs are not published. I am assured it will be taken care of.”[5]
She now acknowledges that “[i]t is possible that the Vietnamese had it all planned” and that she was “used.”[6] Interestingly, the still doesn’t seem to understand that other portions of her trip might have been “planned” by Hanoi to “use” her. But in this instance it is very difficult to accept Fonda’s explanation anyway, as her other behavior in Hanoi is far more consistent with the idea that she knowingly and willingly sat in the gun chair and pretended to shoot down the hated American “war criminals” who she tells us were intentionally targeting schools, hospitals, and dikes in an effort to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. And she would have had to have been high on drugs to allow some unknown individual to force her into the seat of an anti-aircraft gun and then gleefully pretend to shoot down American planes as a pack of international photographers snapped her smiling face (all the while apparently oblivious to what was happening)—that explanation really fails to pass the “straight-face” test. Furthermore, Fonda’s hatred for U.S. pilots and POWs was obvious at the time, and she even admits that her 1973 denunciation of returning American POWs as “liars” for saying they were tortured (which she now admits did occur) was provoked in no small part by her anger over the warm reception they received from the American people.[7]
Fonda characterizes her permitting herself to be photographed pretending to shoot down American pilots as a “two-minute lapse of sanity.”[8] And the volume is peppered with little comments suggesting that poor little Jane Fonda really couldn’t control her own actions, and that she was pretty much programmed through her life to do whatever was necessary to please the current man in her life. Roger Vadim told people she really wasn’t very bright, and she acknowledges that she has “always been numerically challenged” and her poor little mind simply “goes blank” when it comes to understanding details like “bomb tonnage.”[9] (I recall hearing her on I believe it was the Tonight Show in the early 1970s talking about B-52 bombers being launched from aircraft carriers in the Tonkin Gulf. Even the modern Nimitz-class carriers only have a total length of about 1,100 feet, or less than one-tenth of the runway length used by the enormous B-52 Stratofortresses.)
Consider her response to being asked whether she enjoyed “being with women” while married to Vadim. (He would often bring prostitutes home to share their bed, and Fonda admits that she was sometimes the procurer.) “I don’t know [if I enjoyed it]. I thought I did at the time because I’m so good at becoming whatever my man wants me to be. I can convince myself of practically anything in the name of pleasing.”[10] Ergo, she really should not be held responsible for her treasonous behavior, as she became enamored with what she calls “small-c communism”[11] while married to Vadim and then married an American leftist radical from the “Red Family Collective” in Berkeley.[12]
In fairness to the “insanity” defense, Fonda appears to have learned little at Vassar about critical scientific inquiry. When strangers told her that America supported the French colonial cause in 1946 and that American pilots were intentionally targeting “hospitals” and “schools” and using “invisible” bombs to target the dikes of North Vietnam, she carefully recorded these new “truths” so they could be regurgitated to eager college audiences and legislators back in America without the slightest apparent skepticism.
To her credit, Fonda is willing to acknowledge that she should have “listened more” and “talked less” during her years as a Vietnam protester: “Watching some taped interviews years later,” she writes, “I wanted to shout, ‘Will someone please tell her to shut up?’” (And some think Vietnam veterans never agree with Jane Fonda.)
There are few textual references to serious source materials (she asserts that husband Tom Hayden sometimes quoted the Pentagon Papers,[13] but most of the “facts” she attributes to that source are in reality readily refuted by a careful reading of the documents therein[14]), and given the unsupportable factual errors that permeate the volume that oversight is understandable. It may be useful to address a few of the specific myths that remain widely accepted by Americans who do not follow these issues closely, but first a “big picture” view of the origins of the war may be useful.
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Article continues at vvlf.org...
A government that does not have the legal means and/or the political will to prosecute someone like Jane Fonda for open acts of treason had no business engaging in that military campaign in the first place.
That's not counting the thousands of us who came back to a very hostile 'welcome'. Even the VA clinicians will admit that the high percentage of chronic PTSD among us Nam Vets is due to how we were treated on coming back to the world. In fact, some will go so far as to say that the trauma of returning was worse than the war trauma itself.
Nothing quite like coming close to death, and seeing others die, only to find yourself an outcast on coming home.
The Fonda/Kerry crowd won't even get near that. That is the more disturbing part of their legacy. They have a lot to answer for.
There's little question that the U.S. could legally have prosecuted Jane Fonda for treason -- see Dr. Hank Holzer's "Aid and Comfort" for a detailed layout of that legal case.
And America had the political will to engage in the military campaign when it began, and also for years thereafter, until it was eventually eroded by leftist opposition and the lack of tangible success.
If you're going to argue that the U.S. shouldn't engage in any military action that the people might later disapprove, that pretty well eliminates everything...
If I am a U.S. soldier doing a combat tour in Vietnam and I come home to find that some dip-sh!t who "gave aid and comfort to the enemy" was not prosecuted by the government that sent me over there in the first place, you can be sure that I'd be extremely p!ssed off -- more so at the f#ckers in my government than at the traitor herself.
At least in the American Revolution the colonials who waged the war had no illusions about their fellow country men. Tories who supported the British during the war were routinely burned out of their homes and chased to Canada or back to Britain.
No argument there.
I suspect the reluctance of the Nixon Administration to prosecute Fonda, Hayden, et al had something to do with the ability of the Left to put 500,000 people on the streets in Washington.
I suspect the Nixon administration was reluctant to prosecute these people because they knew they couldn't possibly keep a straight face in court when a defense attorney asked them to explain what meaning the word "enemy" has in Federal treason statutes in the context of a military campaign that was undertaken without meeting even the most basic formal requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
You'll recall that U.S. spies were convicted of treason during the Cold War, despite the absence of a formal declaration of war against the Soviets...
Deconstructing Hanoi Jane Fonda is a fine enterprise and long overdue.
I may be wrong about this, but I believe these spies are generally not formally charged with treason (probably for the reason I stated). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for example, were convicted of espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason. And Jonathan Pollard is rotting away in a Federal prison right now following his convictions on espionage charges, not treason.
Ping.
Good point. Of course, leftist groups such as the VVAW openly publicized classified U.S. ship and aircraft movements during the Vietnam War without being charged with espionage.
Yeah, poor Jane, she always did what she was told. I'm wonder if she would change her mind yet again after what she's saying now. One never knows.
If Fonda had simply said years ago that she'd been a damn fool and that she was sorry to her soul for what she'd done, if she'd spent time, a very long time...without publicity, visiting V.A. hospitals, if she'd put her money where her mouth is...ah, but she's not smart enough, nor does she love this country enough. She's a traitor, end of story.
Good article......did you hear what the American Legion said today?
"For many of us, the visions of Jane Fonda glibly spouting anti-American messages with the North Vietnamese and protestors denouncing our own forces four decades ago is forever etched in our memories," he stated. "We must never let that happen again."
"Good article......did you hear what the American Legion said today?"
***
Here's a news article about it.
American Legion Declares War on Protestors -- Media Next?
By E&P Staff
Published: August 24, 2005 4:20 PM ET
NEW YORK The American Legion, which has 2.7 million members, has declared war on antiwar protestors, and the media could be next. Speaking at its national convention in Honolulu, the group's national commander called for an end to all “public protests” and “media events” against the war, constitutional protections be damned.
"The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples," Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group's national convention in Honolulu.
The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to "ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism."
Cadmus added: "It would be tragic if the freedoms our veterans fought so valiantly to protect would be used against their successors today as they battle terrorists bent on our destruction.”
Without mentioning any current protestor, such as Cindy Sheehan, by name, Cadmus recalled: "For many of us, the visions of Jane Fonda glibly spouting anti-American messages with the North Vietnamese and protestors denouncing our own forces four decades ago is forever etched in our memories. We must never let that happen again….
"We had hoped that the lessons learned from the Vietnam War would be clear to our fellow citizens. Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm's way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies. "
Resolution 3, which was passed unanimously by 4,000 delegates to the annual event, states: "The American Legion fully supports the president of the United States, the United States Congress and the men, women and leadership of our armed forces as they are engaged in the global war on terrorism and the troops who are engaged in protecting our values and way of life."
Cadmus explained, "No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it, but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies." This might suggest to some, however, that American freedoms are worth dying for, but not exercising.
"Let's not repeat the mistakes of our past," Cadmus advised. "I urge all Americans to rally around our armed forces and remember our fellow Americans who were viciously murdered on Sept. 11, 2001."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001020671
I still swear that on the video series VIETNAM:A TELEVISION HISTORY, they have Hanoi Jane posing aiming, ot just sitting at the cannon, but aiming the cannon with her smile
I have to find all my old video tapes, I scanned what I had, couldn't find it.
Good stuff. Thanks.
I haven't seen that. Most people don't realize that in the "classic" shots of Jane on the anti-aircraft gun, she's right in the middle of singing an antiwar song, which is why her mouth looks strange...
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