I have read a lot about Jane Fonda over the years. She was, and is a remarkably talented actress. If one judged her for that alone, she would be universally revered. However, she has asserted her right to speak out on issues she thinks are of vital importance. I am sure only the most extreme of partisans would fault her for most of what she has said and done. I was disappointed when Ms. Fonda chose to go to Vietnam, during he war. I have carefully listened to her explanations of her opposition to the policies that got us involved in the war, and they are sound. I admire her desire to end the unnecessary suffering of the innocent civilians, which is the ugliest by-product of war. However, there are no innocents in the political and military leaders who conducted that war, including the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Choosing to criticize one and canonize the other is like saying you like your husbands mistress better than your best friends husbands mistress. The integrity of your position is forever tainted. Ms. Fonda has been accused of many things she did not do. The following is a quote from Snopes of an Ex-POW leader: Mike McGrath, President of NAM-POWs, has also stepped forward to disclaim the Internet-circulated rumors about Jane Fonda and American POWs: Please excuse the generic response, but I have been swamped with so many e-mails on the subject of the Jane Fonda article (Carrigan, Driscoll, strips of paper, torture and deaths of POWs, etc.) that I have to resort to this pre-scripted rebuttal. The truth is that most of this never happened. This is a hoax story placed on the internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. Please assist by not propagating the story. Fonda did enough bad things to assure her a correct place in the garbage dumps of history. We dont want to be party to false stories, which could be used as an excuse that her real actions didnt really happen either. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular internet story is a hoax and they wish to disassociate their names from the false story. I accept that Ms. Fonda now regrets some of what she did. She has called it a mistake. Certainly, she was young, the domain of mistake makers. We all did stupid things at that age. It is hard to dislike someone for decades, no matter the size of their transgression. However, (and I have confirmed this with exhaustive research) she called American POWs, hypocrites and liars. These were over 700-people being held under the worst of conditions by people who would have preferred to kill them. They had no opportunity to rebut or defend themselves against this slur. Unnecessarily insulting them, is something that is impossible to rationalize. That will always be a sore spot with me. Have a good life, Jane. At the very least, your actions provide an extreme example of how our words can come back to haunt us.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:09:10 +0000
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