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...
Deconstructing Hanoi Jane ping...
Projectile vomit forthcoming.
I dunno about the "talented" part. Even when I was a young fella, knew nothing about Fonda's radicalism, and found her physically attractive, I never-the-less was consistently irritated by her screen presence. I vividly remember, the first time I watched Barefoot in the Park, repeatedly wishing that Robert Redford would stuff a sock in her yapp, or just deck her.
Okay, everybody, try to claw your way past the first sentence...
Thanks for the ping!
I don't wish Ms Fonda any ill will,bu I hope she dies a slow and painful death and burns in Hell.
25th Inf Div '67-'69
"If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist." -- Jane Fonda speaking at University of Michigan, November 21, 1970.
"I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism." -- Jane Fonda speaking at Duke University
Her acting rep is based mostly on Klute.
How tough is it for a slut to pretend to be a slut?
BTTT!!!!!!
Heehee.
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.
Jane Fonda: rates right up there with Hillary.
About three million people died in Indochina following communist take-overs there. This mass slaughter was held at bay only by US soldiers and US assistance to local military forces.
Those three million died because America withdrew, and anyone, everyone, who had a hand in causing that withdrawal must share in the guilt. The people Fonda most admired and still admires in this world have the blood of millions on their hands, and she does too. She will never recognize what she did because how could she live with it if she did?
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
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