An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged

[thedrifter]

An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged <br />
By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer <br />
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 10, 2005 <br />
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For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually...

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Propaganda <br />
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Propaganda was an integral part of the psychological warfare strategy of the North Vietnamese Communists. They used it to rally their own citizens. They used it to undermine...

[thedrifter]

That Fonda’s propaganda efforts played an important role in prolonging the war and increasing the death toll is attested to by North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin. In a postwar interview with The Wall Street Journal reproduced at length in “Aid and Comfort, ” the Colonel, a dedicated Communist cadre for most of his life, confidant of Ho Chi Minh and the architect of the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” along which the North Vietnamese conducted their aggression against the South, and also one of the first officers of their army to enter Saigon on the day it fell, had this to say:



Wall Street Journal: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi’s victory?



Bui Tin: It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear [China] was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda . . . gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.

(Emphasis ours)



The identical point was made by North Vietnamese Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This was the man most responsible for the Communists’ military strategy in their war with the United States.



Stop the killing? End the war? Jane Fonda’s treason unquestionably prolonged both. What she “ended” were the lives of many Americans, and many more Vietnamese for whom she claimed to have such sympathy.



Most chilling of all, perhaps, is that the consequences of Fonda’s actions did not begin and end with Vietnam. In facilitating a Communist victory in Vietnam, Jane Fonda, self-described woman of conscience, contributed to the genocidal bloodbath that would soon follow in Cambodia.



POWS: “Healthy and Repentant”



In writing Aid and Comfort, and now this rebuttal to the Vietnam section of Fonda’s autobiography, we have often attempted—without success—to rank her treasonous acts from bad to worse; everything she did in Hanoi, and immediately thereafter, was reprehensible.



But among the worst lies she told while in North Vietnam concerned her deliberate exploitation of American prisoners of war and the aid she gave to those who tortured them by providing them a cover of denial for their crimes.



It is no surprise that in her autobiography (which doesn’t contain a single index reference to “prisoner of war” or “POW”), Fonda devotes little more than one page to her widely publicized meeting with seven American POWs and her claims that they were not tortured. And, worse, that they were sorry for serving their country.



Here is the essence of what Fonda has written in her autobiography, tracking what she said in a Radio Hanoi broadcast:



· “The POWs appear to be healthy and fit.”



· “All of them have called publicly for an end to the war and signed a powerful antiwar letter . . . . “



· “A few of them tell me they, too, are against the war and want Nixon to be defeated in the upcoming elections. They express their fear that if he is reelected, the war will go on and on . . . and that bombs might land on their prison.”



· “I am asked to convey their hopes that their families will vote for George McGovern.”



· “I ask them if they feel they have been brainwashed or tortured, and they laugh.”


Evidently she didn’t ask John McCain or any of the many many American POWS who were tortured in contravention of the Geneva codes. Or, she did ask them and fearing more torture if they told her the truth and possibly death, they lied to her. In fact, this meeting and her anti-American propaganda following it was so palpably a charade that even Fonda, after noting the presence of at least one guard, "realize[d] that the men could have been lying to protect themselves, but I certainly see no signs in any of the seven that they have been tortured, at least not recently." (Emphasis ours).

Here is what really happened that day in Hanoi, as related in Aid and Comfort [our footnotes appear in brackets]:

"At least three POWs were unwillingly made to meet with Fonda. One prisoner didn’t even know where he was being taken:



I was informed . . . to get ready to leave. We were put on a bus,

blindfolded and driven away. Others were loaded on the bus

at another stop and the bus left again. We were unloaded, lined

up and had the blindfolds removed. We were then taken into a

room and seated. The next thing that occurred was the

appearance of Hanoi Jane and she began to speak. [Email in possession of authors]



Fonda . . . was doing a script, at one point she got lost in what she was saying, went back and used exactly the same words again for about two sentences to get back on track. I never got a chance (nor did I want to) say anything, it was a listen and be on display thing . . . anything else would have brought on problems. [“Problems” was a euphemism. Lack of cooperation at this show interview would have resulted in more torture. The source of the former POW’s quotation is an email in possession of authors] [Emphasis in original]


What was Fonda’s "script"—conveniently omitted in her nearly 600-page autobiography? While pointing at a chart,

. . . Jane Fonda’s theme was that we [the United States] were

committing genocide on the Vietnamese people. She also

asserted that we were bombing the dikes which was against

the rules of war. [Email (from one of the POWs) in possession

of authors]

Fonda was quick to lie about her meeting with the POWs, even as she continued to parrot the North Vietnamese propaganda lines being fed to her:

This is Jane Fonda speaking from Hanoi. Yesterday evening . . . I had the opportunity of meeting seven U.S. pilots. Some of them were shot down as long ago as 1968 and some of them had been shot down very recently. They are all in good health. We had a very long talk, a very open and casual talk. We exchanged ideas freely. They asked me to bring back to the American people their sense of disgust of the war and their shame for what they have been asked to do.

They told me that the pilots believe they are bombing military targets.

They told me that the pilots are told that they are bombing to free their buddies down below, but, of course, we all know that every bomb that falls on North Vietnam endangers the lives of the American prisoners.

They asked me: What can you do? They asked me to bring messages back to their loved ones and friends, telling them to please be as actively involved in the peace movement as possible, to renew their efforts to end the war.

One of the men who has been in the service for many, many years has

written a book about Vietnamese history, and I thought that this was very moving, that during the time he’s been here, and the time that he has had to reflect on what he has been through and what he has done to this country, he has—his thought has turned to this country, its history of struggle and the people that live here.

They all assured me that they have been well cared for. They—they

listen to the radio. They receive letters. They are in good health. They asked about news from home.

I think we all shared during the time I spent with them a sense of—of deep sadness that a situation like this has to exist, and I certainly felt from them a very sincere desire to explain to the American people that this was is a terrible crime and that it must be stopped, and that Richard Nixon is doing nothing except escalating it while preaching peace, endangering their lives while saying he cares about the prisoners.

And I think that one of the things that touched me the most was that one of the pilots said to me that he was reading a book called The Draft, a book written by the American Friends Service Committee [Quakers], and that in reading this book, he had understood a lot about what had happened to him as a human being in his 16 years of military service. He said that during those 16 years, he had stopped relating to civilian life, he had forgotten that there was anything else besides the military and he said in realizing what had happened to him, he was very afraid that this was happening to many other people.

I was very encouraged by my meeting with the pilots [because] I feel that the studying and the reading that they have been doing during their time here has taught them a great deal in putting the pieces of their lives back together again in a better way, hopefully, and I am sure that when—when they go home, they will go home better citizens than when they left. [Hearing Report, 7670]

continued

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Back in the United States, Fonda telephoned the wife of one of the POWs: <br />
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She called me after that meeting to let me know was fine. I said I just didn’t see how he could be fine held in prison,...

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One good performance deserves another. The AAA gunners ask Fonda to reciprocate with a song of her own. Somehow Fonda has managed to anticipate this request before leaving the United States. She has memorized in Vietnamese a song written by South Vietnamese and antiwar activists -- i.e., supporters of the Communist propaganda offensive. "Everyone laughs and claps, including me," she writes.

The performance is over. "Someone, I don’t remember who, leads me toward the gun, and I sit down, still applauding. It all has nothing to do with where I am sitting. I hardly even think about where I am sitting." Give us a break.

These three sentences are the only explanation in some 600 pages of Fonda’s autobiography of why she provided the North Vietnamese Communists with a propaganda picture worth, not the proverbial thousand words, but rather thousands of American and Vietnamese lives.

As Fonda walks away, we are asked to believe that the implications of her conduct suddenly dawned on her. She writes, "Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down America planes." [Emphasis Fonda’s] Not really, Jane. It looks just like you thought that shooting down American planes was a fantastic idea, which is evident from everything else you did and said in Vietnam and in respect to the war before and after.

She claims, preposterously, in her autobiography that she pleaded with her translator to make sure her hosts saw to it that the potentially embarrassing photographs were not published. If this is true, how come she didn’t protest the pictures when they were published? How come it took her twenty years to "apologize" for embarrassing herself (which was the extent of her apology)? This self-serving assertion is of course belied by the fact that she went to the gun emplacement installation in the first place and allowed herself to be photographed – for what purpose? Home entertainment?

Thirty-three years later comes this grudging (and embarrassing and not credible) admission: "It is possible that the Vietnamese had it all planned." [Emphasis ours] But, she continues, "can I really blame them?" And besides, Fonda adds as an afterthought: "the gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead." In what reality is this woman living?

Regrets

In recent months, while promoting her autobiography across the United States, Fonda has purported to apologize for some of her conduct in North Vietnam. But her words have always been equivocal and ambiguous—a technique she established many years ago and honed to a fine art ever since.

As we wrote in Aid and Comfort, What makes Fonda’s regret ring so hollow and self-serving are her revealing words in a 1989 interview, in which she stated categorically: "I did not, have not, and will not say that going to North Vietnam was a mistake . . . . I have apologized only for some of the things that I did there, but I am proud that I went." Proud that she went to give aid and comfort to a ruthless totalitarian enemy that launched an aggressive war that killed more than 2 million people and saddled South Vietnam with a Communist police state that has lasted for more than thirty years.

Jane Fonda is 68 years old. When she started writing her autobiography, she had an opportunity to take genuine stock of her life and set the record straight once and for all. Here was a chance to prove that she really was sorry for what she had done. That she understood the meaning of the words "apology" and "making amends" and how her actions really did have serious consequences. That regrets, if sincere, require action, not just lip service.

Not only did Fonda lack the integrity and strength of character to seize the opportunity, but she was contemptuous at the mere suggestion that she had much to apologize for. How can one take seriously anything this woman says about an apology when, on page one of the North Vietnam section of her autobiography, she writes: "My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun sight"?

Conclusion

Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda In North Vietnam was a time-consuming book to write. It required thoroughly researched facts, complex legal and constitutional analysis, hundreds of supporting and elaborating footnotes, and an appendix setting forth every one of Fonda’s broadcasts. We have often been asked why, given other writing projects and more pressing interests, we chose to do it.

Our answer is threefold.

First, Fonda was the most prominent American citizen to give the North Vietnamese invaluable antiwar, anti-United States, pro-Communist propaganda, which cost many American lives. She is a symbol of the willingness of members of the American left to oppose their country in war and give aid and comfort to the enemy camp – even when that enemy is a ruthless totalitarian aggressor. Because she got away with it, it was all the more important that we set the historical record straight by proving that she was indictable and convictable for treason.

Second, we felt strongly that a moral reckoning for Fonda’s conduct in Hanoi was long overdue, one that we hope will follow her to her grave—as it should.

Third, we believed then—we continue to believe—that what we think of as "Fonda-ism" must be fought whenever it appears. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language defines "ism" as "a doctrine, theory, system, etc." By "Fonda-ism," we mean the belief that American citizens can with impunity interfere with their country’s foreign policy by making common cause with enemies bent on its destruction.

By herself, Jane Fonda is unimportant—confused, defensive, narcissistic, empty—a woman who admits in her autobiography that "Maybe I simply become whatever the man I am with wants me to be: ‘sex kitten’ [Roger Vadim], ‘controversial activist’ [Tom Hayden], ‘ladylike wife on the arm of corporate mogul’ [Ted Turner]."

But Fonda-ism is important because Americans who give aid and comfort to our enemies – Communists then, jihadists now -- put at risk, not only our cherished institutions, but—in today’s world—our very existence.

Henry Mark Holzer (www.henrymarkholzer.com) is Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School. Erika Holzer (www.erikaholzer.com) is a lawyer turned novelist.

Ellie

[OLE SARG]

I wouldn't even use pages of traitor fonda's new book to wipe my ass with after a nice dump!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

**** on fonda and all she stands for (Ha). The Vietnam Ho!!!!!!

SEMPER FI,
OLE SARG

[hrscowboy]

You said it all OLE SARG this broad should be deported from our United States, let he dumb arse go back to Vietnam and see if she can make them feel sorry for her...