Hanoi Jane speaks again

Jane Fonda is once again on the media stump, promoting her own agenda, and her own book. In one way, you’d think she learned something. The Press reports that she’d apologized for Vietnam. However, if you listen, she apologizes very specifically for getting in the enemies anti-aircraft gun, and getting used by them in a media campaign, and that it offended some Americans. On a few different talk shows/interviews, she defends everything else she did, and says the U.S. government lied about what was going on, and the same old misinformed (exaggerated) rhetoric. She even said getting in the anti-aircraft gun (thus supporting the enemy) wasn’t wrong, just allowing the negative PR it lead to was what was bad. This to me means that she didn’t really learn or grow, like I’d originally hoped/thought, and is the same stupid, deluded and immature person she was 30 years ago.

In case anyone forgets. Jane Fonda went to North Vietnamese camps for American prisoners, and they trotted out the best cared for ones. Jane used them as an example as how humane the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) was, and as proof that there was no abuse going on. Only the U.S. lies in her deluded world views, not the enemies of America/Freedom. The problem was that she only saw the ones who’d signed confessions and were beaten into submission; after that, they’d been treated better. Still, the POW’s slipped her notes saying, “we’re being Tortured, please tell the world”; and she turned those notes over to the North Vietnamese, which lead to more torture/beatings. She supported a lie to the world in the name of her agenda and to help the enemies of freedom, while hypocritically accusing the U.S. of doing the same. You are left with a choice; believe Jane Fonda’s view of the way prisoners were treated, or the John McCain’s and all the others who told of horrible tortures under the North Vietnamese. Jane never apologized for any of that.

On the same trip, Jane Fonda sang war songs with the enemies, and broadcast appeals on the radio to the American Soldiers to desert their posts and their duty (commit crimes against the United States). She supported the communist position in the world (for multiple years), saying how good they were, and how evil and wrong we were. By definition she ‘gave aid and comfort to the enemy during a time of war’, which according to our Constitution is the definition of treason. She told our people they were wrong and demotivated them by telling them they were losing, and bolstered the enemies by telling them they were right and winning. Of course she never apologized for high crimes against our nation, in fact, she defended it, and said she was not wrong for her trip, or what she said on Radio Hanoi (or after).

Jane and friends were saying how the poor communists were just trying to help the people, and there would be no mass murder or war when we pulled out; that was all an evil lie propagated by the evil CIA. We were in the wrong for trying to stop the communists from enslaving the whole region. When we pulled out, over 4 million people were slaughtered by the side she supported, millions more were made refugees and driven from their homes. She blames that on the U.S. for provoking the conflict; ignoring that it was her friends that were doing the slaughter, and there was absolutely no reason for the purges and wars.

That issue frustrates me the most. Some well meaning by myopic people claim there is no bias in the media or in Hollywood. Well we’ve seen dozens of movies promoting the liberal anti-war view. How the Americans cut off ears, or went mad over there, and so on. The most extreme examples turned into the norm, ignoring what the war was really like to most that were there. Just to name a few: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July, A Bright Shining Lie, The Deer Hunter, Good Morning, Vietnam, Heaven and Earth, Some Kind of Hero. All of them choose to tell the same side of the story. Name one, just one, that showed how the well meaning peace-movement in the U.S. were sponsored by the Chinese/Russian communists, and how their actions undermined the moral and objectives in the U.S., and lead directly to the killing fields. Or how about one that shows the view of how deluded teenagers (of many ages), fought against the U.S. interests, and built this whole myth of the crazed and evil american soldier, and how that lead to returning soldiers being spit on or called baby-killer. Did Jane and clan apologize for any of their action in supporting that?

Look, I’m not arguing that the war wasn’t mismanaged. (Thanks to a couple Democratic Presidents and Democratically controlled Congress who micromanaged the war for at least some of that). For what it is worth, I completely respect what Muhammad Ali did. He stood up to the government, and owned up to the consequences. I don’t disagree with conscientious objectors, or people that protested but didn’t cross the lines into crimes. However, those that let themselves be blinded by their own one-sided delusions deserve to be held responsible for their actions as well.

The bigger point is that we got mired in a lose-lose situation. We had a choice; to try to save millions of people from totalitarians brutes, but we had to support corrupt brutes that were nearly as bad. Or to ignore the genocidal purges we knew were coming, like the Red purges in China under Mao and Russia under Lenin and Stalin. And indeed did come. I would never argue that the regimes in the South were great. But you’ve have to be completely biased and/or clueless to think the North was better. Jane did. Many claimed peace was better than war. War cost roughly 60,000 Americans over decades and a million Vietnamese that would have never been lost if the Chinese and North Vietnamese were willing to tolerate a corrupt democracy that they could have replaced without revolution and war, but chose not to. (Some responsibility of course would belong to Fonda’s allies, but not one in the media ever adds 1+1 in that case — they blame the U.S. for those deaths). Peace on the other hand cost another 4-5 million deaths over the next decade in the region. Was that really better? The clueless still don’t connect the dots, and get that the North Vietnamese and Communists that they’d supported were brutal, and far worse than the South. They blame us for our allies, while ignoring the actions of their own. What is the definition of hypocrisy again?

So finally, 30 some years later, Jane Fonda (the poster child of the peace movement) has apologized for letting the enemy take pictures of her manning the anti-aircraft battery, and makes excuses for everything else she did, or the consequences of the friends she chose, and the costs to America and our troops? In balance, that doesn’t seem like much of an apology or that she even begins to get the consequences of what she did. She said, ‘that two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me for the rest of my life’. No Jane, that 30 year lapse in sanity is what should haunt you, not just for the rest of your life but be an asterisk next to your name for all future generations as well, just like Henry Ford and Charles Linberg deserve to carry their support of the National Socialists and anti-semitism next to theirs, just like Helen Keller should carry her fanatical support of socialism, and other people’s mistakes should stain them as much as their successes. We are the sum of our actions. If we learn from our mistakes and ask for forgiveness, we should be forgiven. If we refuse to, or make half-hearted excuses to dodge blame then we should be used as examples of the blind ignorance and hubris that represents. I have some hope for Jane, but then she opens her mouth and reminds us that some old dogs refuse to learn new tricks.