Date: April 13th, 2013 2:57 PM
Author: Hyperventilating Aqua Shitlib
In July-August 1972 Fonda made her infamous trip to North Vietnam. By this time, over 50,000 Americans had been killed in the war. While there, she posed for pictures on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes, and she volunteered to do a radio broadcast from Hanoi. She made approximately eight radio addresses, during which she told American pilots in the area:
“Use of these bombs or condoning the use of these bombs makes one a war criminal … Examine the reasons given to justify the murder you are being paid to commit … I don’t know what your officers tell you … but [your] weapons are illegal and that’s not just rhetoric … The men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed.”
Fonda also quoted Ho Chi Minh during some of these broadcasts. She referred to President Richard Nixon as a “new-type Hitler,” and advised South Vietnamese soldiers to desert: “You are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism.”
These radio addresses were aired repeatedly by the North Vietnamese Communists, for whom propaganda was a key tool of psychological warfare; they used the broacasts not only to hearten their own citizens, but also to undermine the American public’s will to go forward with the war, and to crush the morale of U.S. and allied forces.
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 addition to the foregoing statements, Fonda also said:
that the Vietnamese people were peasants—leading a peaceful, bucolic life before the Americans came to destroy Vietnam.
that the Vietnamese were seeking only “freedom and independence” — which the United States wanted to prevent them from having.
that the million infantry troops which the United States put into Vietnam, and the Vietnamization program, had failed.
that Patrick Henry’s slogan “liberty or death” was not very different from Ho Chi Minh’s “Nothing is more valuable than independence and freedom.”
that President Nixon had violated the 1954 Geneva Accords.
that the United States must get out of South Vietnam and “cease its support for the . . . Thieu regime.”
that American troops were fighting for ESSO, Shell and Coca-Cola.
that the soldiers of the South Vietnamese army were “being sent to fight a war that is not in [their] interests but is in the interests of the small handful of people who have gotten rich and hope to get richer off this war and the turning of [their] country into a neocolony of the United States.”
that American soldiers in Vietnam had discovered “that their officers were incompetent, usually drunk . . . .”
that she had recently talked to “a great many of these guys [black American soldiers] and they all expressed their recognition of the fact that this is a white man’s war, a white businessman’s war, that they don’t feel it’s their place to kill other people of color when at home they themselves are oppressed and prevented from determining their own lives.”
Such statements could have had only one purpose: to provide aid and comfort to America’s Communist enemy. Fonda’s propaganda efforts played a major role in prolonging the war and increasing the death toll. As North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin explained in a postwar interview with The Wall Street Journal, the American antiwar movement “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.”
… When Fonda returned to the U.S., she told college students, “I bring greetings from our Vietnamese brothers and sisters,” and she lamented the war damage that she had seen in North Vietnam — inflicted, she said, by U.S. forces. She also sported a necklace given to her by the North Vietnamese Communists, made from the melted parts of a U.S. aircraft they had shot down.
Whenever stories about POWs getting tortured emerged, Fonda called them lies. When the POWs began coming home in 1973 and their accounts of torture began to gain credence, Fonda called the returning soldiers “liars, hypocrites, and pawns.” “Tortured men do not march smartly off planes, salute the flag, and kiss their wives,” she said. “They are liars. I also want to say that these men are not heroes.”
… Fonda and Hayden also returned to Hanoi and went on to the “liberated zones” of South Vietnam (areas the Communists had conquered) to shoot the documentary Introduction to the Enemy, a propaganda piece depicting the North Vietnamese as peaceful patriots who, despite years of war and bloodshed, did not hate Americans and planned to create an ideal new society based on justice and equality.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2227709&forum_id=2#22990661)