Jane Fonda, traitor

In an article in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Vietnam vet Robert Caldwell has nothing good to say about Jane Fonda. He recalls her North Vienamese adventure and closes with this:

The anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was, in fact, two parallel movements. 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.

I don't think Caldwell's going to buy her book.