Jane Fonda aka Hanoi Jane - Was She A Traitor?

Was Hanoi Jane a Traitor?  You Decide for Yourself

 

 

Link to the transcript of HJ's radio broadcast from Hanoi for the North Vietnamese

 

I have my opinion of course but I existed at the time.

 

I'm just posting parts of the transcript  go to the link above to read the whole disgusting thing.

 

Lee Murray

Jane Fonda laughing with an NVA gun crew

Jane Fonda sitting on a seat of an anti-aircraft gun

 

the transcript of Jane Fonda's radio address which she had broadcast in North Vietnam.  This transcription, dated August 22, 1972 was made from her Hotel Especen broadcast in Hanoi at 7:11 p.m.  

The following  was submitted in the U.S. Congress House Committee on Internal Security, Travel to Hostile Areas. [HR16742, 19-25 September 1972, page 761]

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[Broadcast] This is Jane Fonda. During my two week visit in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, I've had the opportunity to visit a great many places and speak to a large number of people from all walks of life- workers, peasants, students, artists and dancers, historians, journalists, film actresses, soldiers, militia girls, members of the women's union, writers.
I visited the (Dam Xuac) agricultural coop, where the silk worms are also raised and thread is made. I visited a textile factory, a kindergarten in Hanoi. The beautiful Temple of Literature was where I saw traditional dances and heard songs of resistance. I also saw unforgettable ballet about the guerrillas training bees in the south to attack enemy soldiers. The bees were danced by women, and they did their job well.
In the shadow of the Temple of Literature I saw Vietnamese actors and actresses perform the second act of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, and this was very moving to me- the fact that artists here are translating and performing American plays while US imperialists are bombing their country.
I cherish the memory of the ........

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda being interviewed after their return from North Vietnam.  Jane Fonda tells the world press that the American Prisoners of War were being well treated and not tortured.

Link to the article

 Background of Jane Fonda's Anti-War Activities
While American Soldiers were fighting and dying in the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda, the daughter of Henry Fonda, was using her money and influence at colleges and universities to gather support to advocate communism and encourage rebellion and anarchy against the United States Government.  

On November 21, 1970 she told a University of Michigan audience of some two thousand students, "If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist." At Duke University in North Carolina she repeated what she had said in Michigan, adding "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism. " Washington Times July 7, 2000

Jane Fonda began her participation in anti-war activities around 1967, allegedly after meeting with Communists while in France and with American citizens who were revolutionaries.   Her activities included active participation in demonstrations, rallies, radio broadcasts and plays.  

Jane Fonda also helped in the organization of a production group called the F.T.A. (F*** The Army).  This group helped to set up coffee houses near military bases where they would perform anti-war derogatory-type sketches for the visiting soldiers.  The coffee-house sketches were intended to counterpoint the U.S.O. shows, such as Bob Hope and other U.S.O. sponsored performers whose performances increased  morale and gave positive support to American soldiers.   Some of the F.T.A. coffee house employees would mingle with the soldiers to help them to "relax and unwind", while encouraging the soldiers to desert.   Some soldiers alleged that they were promised jobs and money by the F.T.A.  if they deserted.......  

 

Jane Fonda looking admiringly at an NVA gun crew

 

From another article:  Link to the second article

 

 In an effort to explain why she made her broadcasts over Radio Hanoi, Fonda writes in her autobiography that she had mainly wanted to educate U.S. pilots about the great harm their bombing campaigns were inflicting on innocent people. But in fact, most of what Fonda said was of a highly political nature. Many of the statements had been scripted for her by the North Vietnamese. Among her statements were the following (as catalogued by Henry Mark Holzer):

• "I want to publicly accuse Nixon here of being a new-type Hitler whose crimes are being unveiled."
• "The Vietnamese people will win."
• "Nixon is continuing to risk your [American pilots'] lives and the lives of the American prisoners of war . . . in a last desperate gamble to keep his office come November.  How does it feel to be used as pawns?  You may be shot down, you may perhaps even be killed, but for what, and for whom?"
• "[President Nixon] defiles our flag and all that it stands for in the eyes of the entire world."
• "Knowing who was doing the lying, should you then allow these same people and some liars to define for you who your enemy is?"
• "The only way to end the war is for the United States to withdraw all its troops, all its airplanes, its bombs, its generals, its CIA advisors and to stop the support of the . . .  regime in Saigon . . . ."
• "There is only one way to stop Richard Nixon from committing mass genocide in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and that is for a mass protest . . . to expose his crimes . . . ."
• "In 1969-1970 the desertions in the American army tripled. The desertions of the U.S. soldiers almost equaled the desertions from the ARVN army . . . ."
• "Perhaps the soldiers . . . who have suffered the most . . . [are] the black soldiers, the brown soldiers, and the red and Asian soldiers."
• "Should we be fighting on the side of the people who are, who are murdering innocent people, should we be trying to defend a government in Saigon which is putting in jail tens of thousands of people into the tiger cages, beating them, torturing them . . . . And I don't think . . . that we should be risking our lives or fighting to defend that kind of government."
• "We . . . have a common enemy—U. S. imperialism."
• "We thank you [the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese] for your brave and heroic fight."
• "Nixon's aggression against Vietnam is a racist aggression [and] the American war in Vietnam is a racist war, a white man's war."
• "I heard horrifying stories about the treatment of women in the U.S. military. So many women said to me that one of the first things that happens to them when they enter the service is that they are taken to see the company psychiatrist and they are given a little lecture which is made very clear to them that they are there to service the men."
• "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 [the POWs] 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 [the POWs'] hopes that their families will vote for George McGovern."
• "I ask them [POWs] if they feel they have been brainwashed or tortured, and they laugh."
• "We read with interest about the growing numbers of you [South Vietnam Army troops] who are understanding the truth and joining with your fellow countrymen to fight for freedom and independence and democracy [i.e., with the Communists]. . . . We think that this is an example of the fact that the democratic, peace-loving, patriotic Vietnamese people want to embrace all Vietnamese people in forgiveness, open their arms to all people who are willing to fight against the foreign intruder....

In a 2011 biography of Jane Fonda, author Patricia Bosworth revealed a lifelong lament by the actress: “My biggest regret” Bosworth quotes Fonda as having said during a “feminist consciousness-raising session,” “is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.” ....

From another article:  Link to Article

Hanoi Jane on North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun: A few hundred yards from the location of this photograph, American POWs were being subjected to all manner of torture at the "Hanoi Hilton." You can read about one of those POWs, Col. Roger Ingvalson, whose aircraft was shot down by an NVA-AAG similar to the gun Hanoi Jane is straddling

Fonda called returning POWs "hypocrites and liars," adding, "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed. ... Pilots were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic. I believe that's a lie."

More to the point, in a 1995 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a communist contemporary of Giap and Ho Chi Minh, who was serving as an NVA colonel assigned to the general staff at the time Saigon fell, had this to say about the Leftmedia and Soviet puppets like "Hanoi" Jane Fonda and John Kerry: "[They were] essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."
Bui stated further, "Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."

From another article

In 1999, Jane Fonda was to be honored as one of ABC's "100 Women of the Century." Unfortunately, many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country but men who served and sacrificed during Vietnam.

There are several 'Urban legend' accounts of Hanoi Jane's treason and treachery. The most popular is attributed to F-4E pilot, Jerry Driscoll. This alleged incident is proveably false, even by Driscoll himself. For the truth in Jane Fonda's crimes and disgusting behavior, read the book titled:   Aid and Comfort,   written by Henry and Erika Holzer.

 

However, the following account is true....
"I was a civilian economic development advisor in Vietnam, and was captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held for over 5 years. I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a "black box" in Hanoi. My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border.

At one time, I was weighing approximately 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.) We were Jane Fonda's 'war criminals.'
When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs received different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane and lenient." Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a large amount of steel placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane till my arms dipped. I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She did not answer me." (this is part of the article it just won't convert to red letters)
To add insult to injury, when American POWs finally began to return home (some of them having been held captive for up to nine years) and describe the tortures they had endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Jane Fonda quickly told the country that they should "not hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars." Fonda said the idea that the POWs she had met in Vietnam had been tortured was "laughable," claiming: "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." The POWs who said they had been tortured were "exaggerating, probably for their own self-interest," she asserted. She told audiences that "Never in the history of the United States have POWs come home looking like football players. These football players are no more heroes than Custer was. They're military careerists and professional killers" who are "trying to make themselves look self-righteous, but they are war criminals according to law."

Were Jane Fonda's actions treason, or were they the exercise of a private citizen's right to freedom of speech? At the time, the legal aspects of this question were moot: President Nixon was engaged in trying to wind down American involvement in Vietnam and had to face another election in a few months, so politically he had far more to lose than to gain by making a martyr out of a prominent anti-war activist. (No requirement in either the Constitution or federal law states that the U.S. must be engaged in a declared war -- or any war at all -- before charges of treason can be brought against an individual.)

On the one hand, Jane Fonda provided no tangible military assistance to the North Vietnamese: she divulged no military secrets, she gave them no money or material, and she did not interfere with the operations of the American forces. Her actions, offensive as they were to many, were primarily of propaganda value only. On the other hand, Iva Ikuko Toguri (also known as "Tokyo Rose") was convicted of treason for making propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Japanese during World War II (although she claimed her betrayal was forced and was eventually pardoned many years later by President Gerald Ford), and Fonda's efforts could fall under the definition of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." It is also undeniable that some American soldiers came to harm as a direct result of Fonda's actions, an outcome she should reasonably have anticipated.

 

The above is taken from several articles, and may be considered somewhat one sided I suppose, but of course as I said above I have my own opinion. Fonda admits to being a communist and radical. My suggestion is take this as a starting point, and do your own research.

 

Lee Murray