TRADER RICK'S LAST OUTPOST: HANOI JANE

Most Americans probably know that Hollywood Actress Jan Fonda was an anti-war activist during the Viet Nam war and that Veterans everywhere despise her, but not for that. Some younger Americans, if they had a private school education, may even know that she was photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun emplacement, pretending to shoot down American aviators.

But do they really know the depth of her depravity? Probably not. She "apologized" half-assedly a few years ago, but no one took her seriously--she had a book to sell.

Now she is at it again, pushing for America's defeat, in "Peace" rallies.

I am going to post a series of anti-Jane articles, in an effort to explain why Veterans place Jane Fonda targets in urinals in Legion Posts. Here's the first ( It's long, but worth the read):

Fonda's Selective Silence
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 1, 2007

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“Silence is no longer an option.”

That was Jane Fonda’s explanation for coming out of her supposed protest retirement and joining the anti-war radicals who converged on the nation’s capital last weekend.

Fonda’s conscience had apparently been tormenting her about the U.S. trying to save Iraq from radical Islam -- and so she could stay quiet no longer. In her speech to the anti-war crowd, Fonda championed American defeat in Iraq and compared the war to Vietnam, condemning what she called America’s “blindness to realities on the ground.”

Fonda, of course, exhibited tremendous perception of “realities on the ground” three and a half decades ago, in July 1972, when she traveled to Hanoi with Tom Hayden and other fellow travelers to offer her hand in solidarity to the North Vietnamese. [1] That’s the infamous trip during which she posed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down U.S. planes and announced to the world that American POWs were living in the lap of luxury -- when it was clear that they were being barbarically tortured by their captors. [2]

As authors Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer have documented in ‘Aid and Comfort:’ Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, if the American law of treason would have been applied to Fonda regarding her conduct during that totalitarian odyssey, she should have been indicted for -- and convicted of -- treason. [3]

One would think that Fonda’s interest in the phenomenon of silence would include a curiosity into her own personal failure to have spoken one word about the nightmare that she and other anti-war activists helped fertilize in Indochina after the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam in 1975. Indeed, the anti-war movement had facilitated the communist victory and paved the road for the bloodbath in Indochina that followed. David Horowitz, who helped organize the first campus demonstration against the war at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, reflects on this phenomenon:

Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them. The Vietcong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most of the casualties in the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the fact Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to win it. This is what happened. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, is on the hands of the anti-war activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the Communists. [4]

And when the anti-war activists handed victory to the North Vietnamese, they helped unleash a horror throughout Southeast Asia. After Saigon fell in 1975, the summary executions of tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese followed. There were to be two million refugees and more than a million people thrown into the new communist gulags and “re-education camps.” Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China Sea in their attempt to escape what the likes of Fonda, Hayden, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy and Noam Chomsky had helped create.

The anti-war movement in America also facilitated the communist takeovers of Laos and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia led to a killing field in which some three million Cambodians were exterminated. In just a few years after the communist takeovers in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the communists killed more Indochinese citizens than had died on both sides in the whole Vietnam War. And the Left could take full credit for this new era of death. The intellectual leaders of the Khmer Rouge, after all, had all been radicalized in France’s universities -- they called themselves Angka Loeu -- “the Higher Organization.” [5]

Jane Fonda’s current interest in breaking some kind of supposed “silence” obviously doesn’t entail a desire to offer an apology for her complicity in the tragedy of Indo-China. Nor does it entail a longing to offer any kind of mea culpa for the atrocious lies and insults that she verbalized in regards to the American POWs -- who she said were being treated well by their captors.

The American POWs received a treatment from the North Vietnamese that, as the Holzers have noted, words like “inhumane" and "barbaric" are inadequate to describe. [5] The “Cuban Program” that Fidel Castro ran at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as the “Zoo," serves as a window of insight into what the POWs endured. The main purpose of the “program” was to decipher how much agony could be inflicted on a human being. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban sadist nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer heading the project, perpetrated his own personal reign of terror.

The horrifying ordeal of Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot, reflected the tragic reality of the Nazi-like experiment. Fidel tortured Cobeil in slow agonizing stages, solely for the sake of torture, beating him without remission and, aside from myriad other vicious techniques, mercilessly whipping him with a fan belt without pause on all of his body. [7]

Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of former fellow POW Colonel Jack Bomar:

The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . .He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . .

Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . .His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs. [8]

Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidel’s torture. Fidel’s beating of another American POW, Jim Kasler, also tragically epitomized the torture of Americans at the “Zoo”:

He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his ‘buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds.’ During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . .the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it. [9]

When will silence no longer be “an option” for Jane Fonda in terms of the invisibility into which she pushed the fates of American POWs such as Jim Kasler and Lt. Colonel Earl Cobeil? When will she break her silence and apologize for denying the torture of the POWs and for calling them, among other insults, “liars”? [10]

Fonda’s silence will obviously not be broken because it is a selective and conscious silence. It is a silence that represents what Fonda and her ilk nurtured in their hearts during the Vietnam War and the totalitarian and monstrous enemy for whom they cheered. Dreaming of their earthly socialist redemption, these activists understood only too well that the utopia of their leftist fantasies could be built only on the ashes of liberty’s defeat. The blood of the Indochinese people and of American soldiers and POWs was the necessary price that had to be paid -- in order to wipe the slate clean and build on it the disinfected and fresh paradise envisioned by the political faith.

And so, like the new generation of anti-war activists, Fonda lusts, once again, for her nation’s defeat in another dire conflict with a pernicious totalitarian enemy. Like her comrades, she understands that an American withdrawal from Iraq will embolden and empower Islamist terrorists everywhere and, therefore, will increase the chances that America will suffer more punishment, attack and destruction. In turn, the bloodbath that is central to the leftist utopian vision will be replayed all over again. To be sure, a premature American withdrawal from Iraq would engender the fall of the elected Iraqi government and lead to an Islamist mass slaughter of Iraqis -- as well as of the citizens of neighbouring countries.

The killing fields of Indochina now threaten to enter the Iraqi theater -- albeit under the guise of an ideological mutation. We know what forces are yearning to help the perpetrators engender that nightmare into earthly incarnation. The question remains if we have the will and resolve to stop them.

Notes:

[1] For the best account of Jane Fonda’s pilgrimage to North Vietnam and the immense damage it inflicted, see Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, ‘Aid and Comfort:’ Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2002).

[2] For documentation of the torture and brutalization of American POWs in North Vietnam, see chapter three in Holzer and Holzer, ‘Aid and Comfort:’ Jane Fonda in North Vietnam and Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, Honor Bound. American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973 (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1999).

[3] Holzer and Holzer, ‘Aid and Comfort:’ Jane Fonda in North Vietnam.

[4] David Horowitz, "An Open Letter to the `Anti-War’ Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring The War Home," Frontpagemag.com, September 27, 2001.

[5] For an authoritative account of the bloodbath that followed in South Vietnam and Laos after their fall to communism, see Jean-Louis Margolin, “Vietnam and Laos: The Impasse of War Communism,” in The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, pp. 565-576. For a comprehensive discussion of Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia, see Jean-Louis Margolin, “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes,” in The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, pp. 576-635.