FTA: Jane Fonda’s Anti-War Movie that Still Resonates Today
The re-release of this 1972 Vietnam war documentary is headlined by Hanoi Jane herself.
What sharpened Fonda’s anti-war crusade back then was that it had kernels of truth to it few on either side of the debate could deny. Blacks railed against the war, in part because their country didn’t always stand up for them to begin with. They were right — at least about the unfair treatment part of their argument. And it’s hard to defend aggressive measures like dropping chemical weapons on Vietnamese societies as we did with Agent Orange.
The war was also an optional conflict, much like the current Iraq War. That kind of battleground is always open for debate, as well it should be. But it’s hard not to doubt the sincerity of some of those marching, singing, and shouting throughout FTA.
Fonda and her Hollywood peers stayed on the sidelines years later when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and, years later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The film’s extras include a modern-day chat with Hanoi Jane herself. She talks about how the tour was meant to be the antidote to Bob Hope’s efforts to entertain the troops, only he inadvertently did much more than that, she claims. “Bob Hope was a cheerleader for the war,” she says.
In recent years, Fonda has expressed some regret for her war protests, in particular that iconic picture of her on the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery. But here, talking up an old project, her only regret is that she didn’t deconstruct her Barbarella image to those brave soldiers expecting to see a tarted up version of herself on stage. Fonda also bemoans how she adhered too closely to her old PC roots. “Except for the times Dick Gregory would join us, we were all white,” she says of the original FTA tours, adding in her defense, “I was going through my humorless pedantic PC phase.”
The anti-war movement, no matter the conflict, always has a seducing element to it. Who wants war in the first place? It’s easy to sidle up to Fonda — striking without movie star makeup — when she speaks of the dismembered bodies and displaced lives wrought by the Vietnam War, or any armed conflict for that matter. But some wars need to be fought. At times a country, a leader, a group, cannot be swayed by talking or other diplomatic pressures. It should be avoided at all costs, but to drape oneself completely in the pacifist banner is to deny reality.
FTA epitomized the era’s anti-war template, and at times the film rises to the level of the best protest battle cries. Just don’t bother asking the antiwar protesters of that era, or today’s, about what the Communists were really up to. They’ll likely change the subject back to imperialism or the evils of capitalism. Maybe both.
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Christian Toto is a freelance writer and film critic for The Washington Times. His work has appeared in People magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Scripps Howard News Service. He also contributes movie radio commentary to three stations as well as the nationally syndicated Dennis Miller Show and runs the blog What Would Toto Watch?
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29 Comments
1. GDT:In 1983 I saw the funniest thing I have ever seen in the helicopter pilot’s restroom at Ft. Knox KY. They were three inch circles laminated to the back of the urinals. Each circle had a picture of the lovely Ms. Fonda. They were indentified as “Hanoi Jane Urinal Targets”. These had the dual benefit of helping keep the bathroom clean and helping one to feel better about the world at large.
I have, unsuccessfully looked for “Hanoi Jane Urinal Targets” since. There are a great many restrooms that would benefit from the addition. While I have not found this useful article anywhere else I do often imagine them – which is almost as good.
Mar 8, 2009 - 3:59 am 2. JackT:Thanks Jane for your work to get us the hell out of a war Kennedy would never have allowed.
Mar 8, 2009 - 6:59 am 3. Oscar the Grump:JackT
Mar 8, 2009 - 7:14 am 4. MarkD:Learn your history. Kennedy had already committed troops and weapons to South Vietnam before Johnson formalized the war. Officially the troops were “advisors” but they had full combat roles.
I won’t spend a nickel to watch anything that traitor is in. No sale, ever. Treason is unforgiveable.
Mar 8, 2009 - 7:23 am 5. B.D.:THe release of this film belies the odd notion made in the 1980’s that the left was “Not against the warrior, only against the war.” Clearly with a re-relase those responsible for the film and its re-release are against the troops who fought that war as best as they were allowed.
Do we need to vicitimize them all over again?
Mar 8, 2009 - 8:51 am 6. Outlaw13:Just like MarkD, I refuse to watch or spend a dime on anything that might benefit a traitor. When she visited North Vietnam during the war she gave aid and comfort to our enemies and even worse caused a great deal of harm to befall POWs who were tortured to appear on camera with her or to make propaganda statements against the war.
She can try and rationalize this all she likes but her actions crossed a line, and I for one refuse to reward that behavior.
Mar 8, 2009 - 9:05 am 7. LawhawkSF:Apparently, JackT is a victim of lefty revisionist history. John and Bobby Kennedy were both ardent anticommunists. As President, John Kennedy learned some lessons from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He just didn’t learn all the lessons. He learned to be wary of anything the CIA told him. He learned that communist dictatorships were not the easy pushovers he had been told they were. But he didn’t learn that if you go into a war, you must have strong justification for it, and once committed, go in to win–full bore. The idea of Kennedy planning to get out of Viet Nam is pure fabrication. We can never know what he would have done had he lived, but at the time of his death, he had no intention of withdrawing the “advisors.”
Bobby did eventually turn against the war, as did a large number of us. A great many of us hated the war, but loved our country. We didn’t join the anti-military spit-fests. We didn’t call our soldiers “baby killers.” We didn’t join the radical America-hating groups. My uncle was a Marine Corps colonel who had gotten his field commission twenty years earlier at Iwo Jima–and in private, he said the war was a mistake. Many of us sincerely wished to see Jane Fonda disappear in a puff of smoke from a well-aimed missile during one of her commie-hugging propaganda tours.
Mar 8, 2009 - 9:32 am 8. Joe Bison:The year the film came out there were what like
25,000 US troops left in Vietnam and these
were being withdrawn. This was not much above
the US levels when Kennedy was assassinated
and way down from the Johnson era of 500,000.
The US air war was kicking commie ass and the
ARVN were holding their own so the stooges and
useful idiots made a film. There were not a
hell of a lot of Blacks in Vietnam in 1972 either.
The ARVN collapsed when the Democrats cut
funding in 1975. Meanwhile the communists
retained full funding and more from the USSR.
This film was made to aid a failing communist
Mar 8, 2009 - 9:37 am 9. pst314:cause in their war effort and peace talks period.
All you have to do is actually listen to what Fonda and Sutherland said to realize that this wasn’t about peace, this was about aiding communist terrorists and thugs. And they have never stopped loving those thugs, the more murderous the better.
Mar 8, 2009 - 10:41 am 10. Peter Stone:JackT
Do you also thank Hanoi Jane for the Millions of So. East Asians that were slaughtered by the Communists after the USA left So So East Asia with our tail between our legs?
Mar 8, 2009 - 10:48 am 11. thefrog:If Jane Fonda’s teeth were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on her gums.
Mar 8, 2009 - 11:16 am 12. Jack K:Yes you have to hand it to Jane Fonda: nothing is as helpful to soldiers fighting in the mud like seeing a pampered moron from their own country consorting with the enemy. At least the Dixie Chicks had enough sense to dump on our president in an allied country. So Jane has some regrets now does she? Typical: she says “oops, I have regrets” and the matter is over as far as she is concerned. No better than people that chummed it up with Goebbels and Ribbentrop as far as I can see. Like Mark D I will not spend or allow anyone in my family to spend a nickel on her product.
Mar 8, 2009 - 2:36 pm 13. Raoul Deming:Try eBay or Google it. I bought some years ago, it was pretty easy to find.
Mar 8, 2009 - 3:11 pm 14. Bilgeman:Mr. Toto:
“And it’s hard to defend aggressive measures like dropping chemical weapons on Vietnamese societies as we did with Agent Orange.”
Whose rot are you repeating here?
Agent Orange was not a chemical weapon, and it wasn’t dropped on Vietnamese societies.
It was a chemical defoliant, meant to strip the jungle canopy and thereby deny cover and concealment to the enemy.
As such, it’s use was a defensive, not an aggresive, initiative.
Try to get your facts straight, will ya?
And no, I have utterly no desire to contribute royalty income to Fonda or Sutherland or the rest of those low-life hippie scumbags.
If Janey needs some cash, then she can shag her wrinkled ass down to court and see if the judge will wring some more loot out of Ted Turner’s piggy-bank.
Mar 8, 2009 - 5:13 pm 15. K:And it’s hard to defend aggressive measures like dropping chemical weapons on Vietnamese societies as we did with Agent Orange.
Agent Orange is not a “chemical weapon” unless your definition of “weapon” includes things like field glasses or radar that makes it easier to see an enemy. It is a defoliant similar to the commercially available “Roundup” week killer.
There was a large payout to US vets based on the supposed ill health effects of the dixon exposure in Agent Orange, but those effects are now considered controversial or non existent at the levels most personel were exposed.
http://www.amazon.com/Dioxin-Agent-Orange-Michael-Gough/dp/0306422476
Mar 8, 2009 - 5:27 pm 16. fred:No one talks about the contacts that Jane Fonda and Michael Hayden had with KGB proxy cutouts in Europe during the war. Any good piece of agitprop is going to have “hooks” and I’m sure, as this author allows, there are hooks in the movie. The best lies have a patina of truth about them. But you will never get any of these Communist swine to admit what North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union were doing in Southeast Asia. The anti-war people made Ho Chi Minh into a kind of democratic hero rebelling against foreign imperialists. Ho was a Communist since well before WWII, and had indeed spent years inside the Soviet Union being trained by the foreign directorate of the KGB.
People like “JackT” would be challenged to understand that we were defending a nation against Communist aggression. The enormous resources the Soviet Union poured into Hanoi for that war effort helped to eventually collapse their economy and military. We eventually recovered from the effects of that war. They never did.
Mar 8, 2009 - 5:38 pm 17. John Moore:This Vietnam Vet encourages you to Steal the DVD (hey, didn’t Abbie Hoffman say something like that?)
No F way will I ever contribute a nickel that might make it’s way to Hanoi Jane’s pocket.
Mar 8, 2009 - 6:21 pm 18. fred:Agent Orange was a defoliant that was used in jungle and bush areas, not in populated areas. It was not a chemical weapon used against the Vietnamese people. You can construe it as a “weapon” used against the enemy to deny him the cover of the jungle, so we could blast his ass to kingdom come.
Mar 8, 2009 - 6:44 pm 19. WestGuard:#1 GDT:
“They were indentified as “Hanoi Jane Urinal Targets”.”
————————————
Too funny! There’s probably a market for this kind of thing nowadays. I would like to see some others toilet decorations as well: “Moorer, O’Donnell, Code Pink” et al.
Mar 8, 2009 - 7:26 pm 20. JFM:Maybe “Osama, Chavez, Amadinejad” toilet paper too!
Jane Fonda contributed to making the Vietnamese and Cambodian genocides possible. Jane Fonda n=knew all too well this would happen as many atrocities had made well clear what would follow a communist victory. Jane Fonda is a criminal against humankind.L It is not too late to hang her just like it was done for Saddam and the Nazi criminals. She is from the same stock.
Mar 9, 2009 - 3:18 am 21. Dan Maloney:If anyone is in the New York City area, and wishes to express their ‘affection’ for Hanoi Jane Fonda, please join us on Saturdays from 12:30pm to 2:00pm at West 49th St. between Broadway and 8th Avenue where we are running an ongoing protest outside the theater where Hanoi Jane is appearing in a play.
Here is a link to pictures and video:
http://nygoe.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/aar-hanoi-jane-in-nyc/
Dan Maloney
Mar 9, 2009 - 3:31 am 22. COL.SEBASTIAN MORAN:NY State Coordinator
Gathering of Eagles
BILGEMAN
Mar 9, 2009 - 9:43 am 23. Bilgeman:#14
I was in Viet Nam 1n ‘67 & ‘68 (in time to enjoy the Tet festivities). Agent Orange was, indeed, used as a defoliant only. It was never used as an offensive chemical weapon. Hanoi Jane should have been lodged at a U.s. equivalent of the Hanoi Hilton – damned if she shouldn’t still be there ! Treason is both unforgivable and unpardonable.
S. M.
#22 Col. Moran:
“I was in Viet Nam 1n ‘67 & ‘68 (in time to enjoy the Tet festivities). Agent Orange was, indeed, used as a defoliant only.”
Heck, I recall watching a CBS Reports about the 1st Infantry Division who had a young captain or colonel,(don’t recall which), named Alexander Haig who made his bones with a squadron of Rome Plows and a few cold six-packs for the engineers who could clear the most forest.
This woulda been about your time…7 years later Haig was NATO commander and in the orbit of Nixon’s Oval Office.
Not a bad career track, huh?
I wonder how his ‘dozer operators made out?
Mar 9, 2009 - 5:32 pm 24. john from cinncinatti:she was in the movie Klute, and as far as i know she has never gotten out of character. this capitalist endeavor of selling movies is kind of like selling Che shirts.
Mar 10, 2009 - 5:21 pm 25. dale:I was also in country in time to enjoy tet. Col you are correct she should have taken the place of some of our pow’s. I honor my brothers and sisters who were there. Jane you pos someone should piss on you not only your urinal cake
Mar 11, 2009 - 6:10 am 26. Chris:Jane Fonda proves herself to be her boldest and most courages in FTA. I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, my favorite Jane has always been the F%%$ the establishment Jane of the early seventies. Fight the power Fonda!
Mar 20, 2009 - 10:48 pm 27. Malcolm Z:“FTA epitomized the era’s anti-war template, and at times the film rises to the level of the best protest battle cries. Just don’t bother asking the antiwar protesters of that era, or today’s, about what the Communists were really up to. They’ll likely change the subject back to imperialism or the evils of capitalism. Maybe both.”
Ah, finally! The “Reverend” Sun Myung Moon won’t fire you now, Toto. (Wasn’t that the dog in The Wizard of Oz?)
And don’t ask the protestors what the VIETNAMESE were really up to:
1. Overthrowing 100 years of Western colonialism / imperialism / oppression / racism / etc.
2. Fighting and defeating the most fascistic nation on earth, now the 21st century successor to Nazi Germany.
3. Sacrificing 3 million of their people who gave their lives to support their “Communist” government.
Sieg Heil, Washington Times.
Mar 30, 2009 - 9:35 am 28. zayne:Hey GDT Just google it i found them in less then a min.
Apr 9, 2009 - 7:09 am 29. Spurwing Plover:She is still a traitor and i,ll never watch any of her movies again
Jul 10, 2009 - 11:41 pm