Atheist Meditations

I got that mass email going around that slams Jane Fonda for her traitorous actions during the Vietnam War. This one was allegedly written by Barbara Walters and had that story about how Ms. Walters was visiting American POW's and then betrayed their attempts to communicate with her.

I'm going to hit Wikipedia on the topic next, but this was my reply to the letter, and since I took ten minutes typing, I thought I'd just ctrl-X my blog post today.

I suppose I should have included the original email, but I'm just not inclined to copy that one more time.



Hey X,

I'm sorry, but I'm uncertain about the truthiness of this email.

I've heard this story before, and I havn't looked into it personally. My father brought it up in a conversation about politics - the last one we ever had - and he was just shaking with fucking anger at the behavior of that 'bitch.' It's a powerful story, and it fits a model that we see a lot, that makes me suspicious.

I see Vietnam as a war in which the U.S. tried to support a puppet government in Asia for the purpose of strategic positioning against China, as well as expanding 'markets' for our international companies. Vietnamese chased out the French and their nasty colonial government, and that's a bad example in the third world - the masters of commerce in the world don't want the worthless poor in some ho dunk little jungle thinking that they can repeat the American Revolution and start owning their own land and resources. The U.S. Military has admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was the WMD of the Vietnam war, was fabricated in order to get us into that war.

The notion in the Vietnam war was to 'bomb that country back into the stone age.' We killed over 800,000 Vietnamese in that war. We used really nasty weapons, like napalm, and tactics, like hunter-killer squads who moved like ghosts in the jungle and assasinated anybody who was 'suspected' of being part of the communist movement.

Ms. Fonda was caught up in the Revolution Movement. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and countless others were writing songs that defined a new way of thinking. The Civil Rights movement was demanding a situation where all people are treated equally regardless of skin color, and a whole generation was determined to try something different than war.

As one famous Native American soldier declared - 'I realized that in Vietnam I was doing to those people what had been done to my own people.'

I was not alive during the Vietnam Era, but it was a fucking crazy time. According to the Pentagon Papers, famously leaked by the New York Times, the masters of the U.S. policy were concerned that they were losing control domestically. They were discussing deploying U.S. troops in the U.S. to stop the hippies. It was a crazy time.

A great deal of America thought that the war was the perfect example of a colonial policy that should be the exact opposite of how an America founded on Revolution and a Bill of Rights should be acting. Over a half a million soldiers - according to the Pentagon themselves - went AWOL rather than fight in that war.

You can't be a world super-power when nobody wants to fight for your goals.

So they had to stop that movement. Someone like Ms Fonda - like the Dixie Chicks today - was a popular figure so she became a valuable target to crush. This story may be real - but it's a fucking great smear campaign.

Nasty shit happening to POW's sucks ass. It happens in every war, and when times are desperate the shit gets really bad. Look at some of the atrocities that happened in POW camps on both sides during the Civil War - and that was against people who had the same skin color as the captors. Dehumanizing captors who look different is always easier.

Finally, I suspect this email because of the way it looks. I've seen a bunch of this sort of mass email - especially pro- GOP, pro- evagelikal stuff. This just has the look and feel of one of them. The type of html and formatting. The use of a title that grabs some serious attention. The by-line was given to Barbara Walters. Ms. Walters is busy telling housewives all over Amercia which new male actors are hot on 'The View.' She wants her public image to be friendly and safe. She's never been a firebrand, and I doubt she'd touch an issue like this with a ten foot pole.

For a propagandist, her's is a name that has a lot of cred with a lot of folk. Once you get to the juicy details of torture, you are going to forget that she supposedly wrote that email.

Hey I don't fucking know. I thought Monster-in-Law sucked. Just my thoughts.

Catch ya later,