Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Jane Fonda as Traitor (sic)

 

On FB someone posted the old “Jane Fonda is a traitor” crap and I asked how much of a traitor she could have been given the NVN wasn’t enough of an enemy for Congress to declare war upon.  This brought a not-entirely-unexpected reaction from someone whose brother never came home.  I pointed out that people like Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara knew (McNamara said so in his autobiography) VN was a lost cause from day-one but they still sent American soldiers to fight and die in order not to be seen as “soft on Communism”.

At the time, I was a supporter of Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative”, who thought it was a good idea to defoliate all of VN to deny the Viet Cong greencover.  The defoliant was called “Agent Orange”.  I, with Barry, supported raining ecological armageddon down upon all of Southeast Asia in order to “win” (whatever that means).

So, here we are, 42 years and 58,000 dead American soldiers later, and VietNam is one of our trading partners.  Does anyone think the situation would be different had we not sent all those young men over there with their M-16s?  Can anyone actually say those 58,000 deaths served some purpose?  True, they did get John McStain into Congress, but I’m not sure that should be seen as ‘a good thing’.

What we need to learn from places like VietNam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others, is that soldiers are little more than blocks of wood.  They will be thrown into the sacrificial fire whenever and wherever our elite masters in Washington deem it expedient.  There is no honor in being firewood, and we need to stop playing the game that says ‘s/he’s a hero because s/he got paid out of the Pentagon budget’.  There is no honor in ‘just following orders’.  After WW-II we hung generals and privates for doing just that.  There is no honor in dropping a Hellfire missile from a drone onto a wedding party just because someone in Washington thinks there might be a bad guy or two among the ushers.  That sort of behavior eventually makes people crazy – crazy enough to fly airplanes into office buildings.  If you don’t think that’s true, imagine how we’d feel if Italy were doing it to us.

It’s time – it’s well past time – we demand answers to difficult questions before we send our children abroad with orders to kill.  We need to ask – and get believable answers to – questions like

  • What do we hope to accomplish?
  • How will we know when we’re done?
  • What repercussions should we expect?
  • Is it lawful?
  • Is it moral?
  • Is it just?
  • Is it practical?
  • How much is this going to cost?

We don’t ask any of these questions now.  We charge in “to free the oppressed people of West Wheresoever”, we free them, and almost always we make the situation worse than it was before we butted in to other nations’ business.  And, we empty the Treasury to do it.  Where does all that money go?  To Lockheed-Martin, to Halliburton, to Kellogg-Brown&Root, to thousands of charter members of the military-industrial complex.  Where does all that money come from?

Why, my dear, it comes from you.  It’s the price you pay for the privilege of having your sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, and acquaintances buried at Arlington with full military honors (sic).

 

2 comments:

  1. You once supported Barry Goldwater? Hard to believe. At any rate, I STILL support him and always will --- and not the One-World Socialist would-be dictator LBJ! Also, I happen to be something of an expert on Goldwater, and he never flatly came out for defoliating the Vietnamese forests -- he said that was an option that the military should look into. He knew that the Army had a moral obligation to our troops to try everything to minimize our casualties, and denying the NVA and VC Commie enemies jungle sanctuary was one such option. Better some damn trees die than more American soldiers. You should also remember that, unlike LBJ and Bobby Mac, Goldwater was very reluctant to go into a ground war in Vietnam (and I can quote the passages in his books and speeches to prove it). He, like MacArthur and Eisenhower, realized the dangers of getting bogged down in jungle warfare. I would strongly recommend you read "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, MacNamara, the JSC and the Lies that Lead to Vietnam" -- and ask yourself if a President Goldwater could EVER have "backslid" us into war as they did, with a friendly liberal Congress and news media. Heck, no! Goldwater could never have almost secretly got us into Vietnam as LBJ did -- the press and Congress wouldn't have allowed him such secrecy.

    As for your Hanoi Jane comments, you can obfuscate all you want on the immorality of the war in general, but the fact of the matter is that Jane Fonda DID make the trip to the capital of an enemy country (and a despicable Commie one at that) and DID allow herself to be used for propaganda purposes by our enemy. Only the technicality of the lack of a formal declaration of war kept Jane Fonda's trip to our enemy North Vietnam from being actionable as treason. What she did was "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". Period. Live with it. Just because the Vietnam War never had a formal "declaration of war", but was another stupid "police action" hardly excuses her treason. You might also read some memoirs of our POWs being held at the time, and see just how her trip adversely affected THEIR treatment!

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    1. For some reason, I never saw this when it was first posted, but I do notice that you artfully declined to answer the most salient question: "...how much of a traitor she could have been given that NVN wasn't enough of an enemy for Congress to declare war upon".

      Until you can answer that question, you have no business --- NO business --- labeling anyone "traitor" since you have already demonstrated an aversion to following the Constitution yourself.

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