Jane, You Ignorant Slut!

On Friday evening, January 16, 2015, the Weinberg Center for The Arts in Frederick, MD played host to an American traitor and seditionist.  The Center billed her speaking engagement as an opportunity to address a variety of issues including motivation, health and wellness, business, women’s issues, achievement and perseverance.  There was zero mention of her radical activism, calls for revolution, her support of the Black Panthers or that little thing in Hanoi.

For four decades the actress woman slut known as “Hanoi Jane” has been met with protesters for her propagandist machinations in support of one of the worst regimes in human history.

It all began in 1972 when Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam to show her solidarity with the Viet Cong and to collect evidence at the behest of radical activist Tom Hayden that the United States was deliberately bombing river dikes in Nam Dinh.  Upon seeing the aftermath, she asked the VC if she could go on Radio Hanoi to plead with American bomber pilots to stop the bombing.  She broadcast 19 propaganda interviews.  She made a hero out of Vietnamese hijacker Nguyen Thai Binh who was killed trying to seize a plane from Saigon going to Hanoi.

Broadcast on August 9, 1972:  "This is Jane Fonda speaking from Hanoi. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, I'm extremely concerned these days about the betrayal of everything that my country stands for—about the betrayal of our flag, about the betrayal of the very precepts upon which our country was founded: equality for all people, liberty, and freedom." 

"Richard Nixon, history will one day report you as the new Hitler…It is no wonder that you are so cynically manipulating the American public into believing that you are striving for peace, when you are in fact committing the most heinous crimes against the innocent civilians of Vietnam."

Her utterances and movements are a testament to the skilled indoctrination of the Viet Cong and the Communists who were supporting them. To the extent there may be any sympathy at all for Fonda among Americans, it's probably because they’ve never known what she actually said in Hanoi and what was attributed to her.

Excerpted from Mark Holzer’s book Aid and Comfort:  Jane Fonda in North Vietnam:

“Fonda's own words make plain beyond any reasonable doubt the intent and import of her statements. They contained lies about the United States, its leaders, their motives and their acts.  They maligned the President of the United States.  They spouted the Communist propaganda line in every respect.  They sought to undermine the moral and military effort of our soldiers in the field and our prisoners in jungle camps and North Vietnamese prisons.  And her words even encouraged mutiny and desertion.”

Emboldened by her willingness to be a propaganda tool for Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas, she was taken to visit an air defense installation on the outskirts of Hanoi.  While donning a VC helmet, she hopped onto the seat of an anti-aircraft battery holding a gun. 

The picture quickly circled the globe and by the time she arrived back home proudly wearing a coolie hat and black Vietnamese pajamas, she was heckled and cursed with cries of “Hanoi Jane” and rightly accused of being a traitor.

“What is a traitor? What is a patriot? I cried every day when I was in Vietnam. I cried for the Vietnamese and I cried for the Americans, too,” Fonda said.

Even before her treachery in Hanoi, she had been romantically involved with actor Donald Sutherland, her co-star in the film Klute.  Together they took a political vaudeville show called FTA—slang for Fuck The Army—across the country outside military bases and along the Pacific Rim at bases from Guam to the Philippines.  The troupe was under surveillance by both the CIA and FBI.  Fonda’s FBI dossier extended to 22,000 pages.

Eventually, Fonda split from Sutherland, saying she was moving into a “different phase” of her life and she couldn’t share it with just one man. She had always been hedonistic and soon there were rumors of affairs with various activists.  Some time before 1971, Fonda confessed during a feminist consciousness-raising session, “My biggest regret is I never got to fuck Che Guevara.”  Yep, that was her biggest regret.

Now, of course, Fonda would have you believe that she is consumed with guilt about her repugnance for America’s soldiers and her “mistake” at being photographed on that anti-aircraft battery.  She “claims” she wasn’t against them when she visited Vietnam.  Oh no, she wasn’t giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  Not little ‘ol me. “Whenever possible I try to sit down with vets and talk with them, because I understand and it makes me sad.  It hurts me and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers.”

Fonda has endeavored, unsuccessfully, to rehabilitate her reputation as a traitor.  By describing herself as a “lightning rod” Fonda demurs, “This famous person goes and does something that looks like I’m against the troops, which wasn’t true, but it looked that way, and I’m a convenient target.”

To this day she maintains, "I don't regret going to North Vietnam. I'm glad I went. I'm glad I did everything I did.”