She's still 'Hanoi Jane' | The San Diego Union-Tribune
At her request, she made at least 10 broadcasts on Radio Hanoi that included calling American pilots war criminals and urging them to stop bombing North Vietnam. In a propaganda gesture heavily publicized by Hanoi, she also met with a group of coerced American prisoners of war to demonstrate, as the North Vietnamese intended, that the POWs were receiving "humane" treatment.
In fact, as we know now, nearly all American POWs in North Vietnam were brutally tortured until 1969, when Hanoi's policy changed to more selective mistreatment. One American POW was strung up from a ceiling by his broken arm until he agreed to listen to Fonda's assertions that the prisoners were being well treated.
When the POWs returned from North Vietnam in 1973 and told of their torture, Jane Fonda declared, "the POWs are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American prisoners." For good measure, she also suggested that their recollections of torture were products of "racism" toward the Vietnamese.
Does Fonda regret her propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi or her role in trying to persuade the world that tortured, brutalized American POWs were receiving humane treatment? Not a bit. Is she apologizing? No.
Here's what she told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes":
"I don't think there was anything wrong with it. It's not something that I will apologize for ... we'd been saying to Richard Nixon, 'stop this'... it needed what looks now to be unbelievably controversial things. That's what I felt was needed."
During World War II, two equally deluded American women, dubbed by U.S. servicemen Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, made propaganda broadcasts from the capitals of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Both were prosecuted for treason after the war, convicted and sent to federal prison. Fonda escaped that fate partly, one assumes, because of the ultimate unpopularity of the Vietnam War and partly because a prosecution for treason would require that a formally declared state of war had existed between the United States and North Vietnam. The majority of anti-
war protesters simply believed that American participation in the war was wrong. Their objective was American withdrawal from Vietnam. But a hard-core, hard-left minority in the anti-war coalition favored a communist victory by the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.
However witlessly, Jane Fonda lent herself to that latter goal, a communist triumph in Vietnam.
When the Soviet-armed North Vietnamese army overran South Vietnam in 1975, Fonda's then-husband, the left-wing radical Tom Hayden, expressed his relief and approval. When the North Vietnamese, quite predictably, imposed their totalitarian system on South Vietnam – complete with concentration camps that imprisoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese and the extinguishing of all civil and political liberties – Jane Fonda said she couldn't object because the evidence of oppression was unproven.
When, by United Nations estimate, a quarter of a million South Vietnamese boat people perished at sea escaping their supposed liberators in the 1970s and 1980s, Jane Fonda was silent. When 2 million Cambodians were murdered or died of privation at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge (originally Hanoi's allies), Jane Fonda had nothing to say. When the people of reunified Vietnam were denied basic human rights and continue to suffer today under Hanoi's one-party dictatorship, Jane Fonda apparently was too busy with her personal life to comment.
That's a lot to answer for, Hanoi Jane. Caldwell, a Vietnam veteran, is editor of the Insight
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
