IT WAS on April 30, 1975, that the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon surrendered to the invading forces of North Vietnam. That collapse ended the long Vietnam War, uniting both halves of Vietnam under a single communist dictatorship ruled from Hanoi — a dictatorship that remains to this day one of the world's most repressive. The fall of Saigon sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives in flimsy boats; many drowned at sea, or were captured or killed by pirates. To this day, April 30 is commemorated sorrowfully throughout the Vietnamese diaspora as Tháng Tư Đen, or "Black April."
When the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last month singled out April 30 as an annual day of recognition, however, it was not to ensure that the historical trauma of Vietnamese Americans would receive solemn and reverent attention. It was to honor Jane Fonda.
"Starting today," declared supervisors board chair Lindsey Horvath at a public ceremony, "we proudly proclaim April 30th each year as 'Jane Fonda Day' in Los Angeles County, in recognition of her incredible contributions to entertainment, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and social justice."
Could any proclamation have been more tone-deaf?! Of all the people to single out for honor on "Black April," none was more certain to provoke outrage in Vietnamese American circles than Fonda, who has been widely reviled as "Hanoi Jane" since 1972, when she traveled to Southeast Asia to make broadcasts for Radio Hanoi and promote the North Vietnamese war effort.
 Jane Fonda traveled to Hanoi to provide propaganda support for North Vietnam. She posed on an anti-aircraft gun with North Vietnamese troops on July 1, 1972. |
"She may be a very strong activist for climate change, but besides that, we also view her as being a person who was very cruel to the rights of the South Vietnamese people during the antiwar protests," Phat Bui, head of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times.
In a letter to the board of supervisors, state Senator Janet Nguyen condemned the designation of a day with such profound emotional and historical resonance as "alarming and profoundly disrespectful to over half a million Vietnamese-Americans in California." Another letter, signed by state Assembly member Tri Ta and 17 other legislators, lamented that the Los Angeles supervisors "would choose this particular day to celebrate Jane Fonda," calling it "an affront to the service and sacrifice of American and South Vietnamese soldiers who gave everything in the cause of freedom."
It has been more than half a century since Fonda's notorious propaganda tour. The actress is 86 years old. Two generations have grown to adulthood since the Vietnam War ended. To many, no doubt, Fonda's environmental activism and other causes matter far more than whatever she may have done during the 1970s. Besides, she eventually repudiated the most infamous image that came out of her visit to North Vietnam — the one in which she posed on an enemy anti-aircraft gun, grinning and clapping as she watched a helmeted soldier maneuver the weapon. By 1972, millions of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam. After all this time, isn't there something churlish about continuing to regard Fonda with such loathing?
No.
The 1970s aren't ancient history, least of all to those whose lives were shattered by the communist conquest of Vietnam and Cambodia. Fonda has enjoyed a life of great wealth, fame, prestige, and comfort, but her celebrity does not wash away her conscious decision to provide aid and comfort to an enemy that was actively engaged in killing young American servicemen. The contrition she belatedly expressed was only for the picture with the North Vietnamese gun, which she called "the most horrible thing I could possibly have done." Other than that, however, she has always maintained that she does not regret traveling to Hanoi, and sees nothing wrong with having leveraged her celebrity for the benefit of a regime with which the United States was at war.
Fonda went to North Vietnam in order to demoralize American GIs. In her broadcasts for Radio Hanoi, she denounced "US imperialism," praised the valor of North Vietnamese, and urged US troops to disobey orders.
"I'm speaking particularly to the US servicemen," she said in one broadcast. "I don't know what your officers tell you . . . but [your] weapons are illegal and . . . the men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law. In the past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed."
Even that wasn't the worst of it. American prisoners of war reported being tortured for refusing to attend a meeting with Fonda. Michael Benge, a civilian POW, was forced to kneel on a concrete floor, arms extended, with a heavy metal bar across his hands; every time his arms sagged from the weight, he was whipped with a bamboo cane. Navy Capt. David Hoffman, whose arm had been broken when his plane went down, said that his captors broke the arm a second time and twisted it until "excruciating pain ripped through my body" when he balked at being taken to pose with Fonda. Later, when the POWs came home and told what they had undergone in Hanoi's cells, Fonda called them "hypocrites and liars."
Fonda was not some naïve kid in 1972. She was a 34-year-old adult, who willingly chose to abet the totalitarians engaged in killing, imprisoning, and torturing her fellow Americans. Even after the war ended and it became clear what the communist victory meant — countless Vietnamese civilians killed, vast refugee waves, savage "reeducation" camps — Fonda could not bring herself to condemn the brutal violations of human rights being committed by the government she had supported. Other antiwar activists did. For example, Joan Baez publicly denounced the "cruelty, violence, and oppression" being inflicted by Hanoi — only to be attacked by Fonda, who accused her of making common cause with people "who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death."
This is the woman that Los Angeles County voted to honor each year on April 30? No wonder Vietnamese Americans were outraged. Stunned by the backlash, the board of supervisors now says it will henceforth shift Jane Fonda Day to April 8. I have a better suggestion: Scrap the whole thing. Fonda has been showered with acclaim for decades. Another honor is the last thing this dishonorable woman needs.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Young, passionate — and wrong
The anti-Israel, pro-intifada encampments on college campuses are history now. What did they accomplish? Plainly, all those weeks of protests, chants, demands, trespassing, intimidation, and vandalism did nothing to "free Palestine." Nor do they appear to have materially weakened the American public's broad support for Israel in its war against Hamas, which remains at a commanding 80 percent, according to the most recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
What the menacing and toxic protests did accomplish was to make unmistakably clear that antisemitism is now rampant on the far left in America and has embedded itself in elite academia. Leading campuses have become caldrons of anti-Jewish bigotry, expressed primarily — though by no means exclusively — as hatred of the Jewish state.
The hostility isn't new, but denial is now impossible. A moment that seemed emblematic of the new reality was when a rabbi at Columbia advised the university's Jewish students to "return home as soon as possible" because it was no longer safe for them to be on campus. The Anti-Defamation League, which for many years focused chiefly on the threat of right-wing antisemitism, now reports that left-wing anti-Jewish animus has exploded. In a survey of conditions at 85 schools, the ADL found that the threat to Jewish students was most acute at 13 in particular: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, Princeton, University of Virginia, Tufts, Michigan State University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, SUNY Purchase, SUNY Rockland, and Swarthmore.
With antisemitism in higher-ed becoming unavoidable, American Jews are reacting in different ways. Some are choosing to apply to different colleges than they would have pursued formerly. Some are taking universities to court, alleging that they are failing to protect Jewish students in violation of federal law. Some wealthy alumni are closing their checkbooks; Columbia alumnus Robert Kraft said last month that, given the "virulent hate" manifesting itself at his alma mater, he is suspending his financial support.
I doubt whether any of this will make a difference. The antisemitism at these institutions is neither a new nor a passing phenomenon. It results from deep shifts in social attitudes and will not be easily redirected. The Ivy League and its ilk did not become focal points of anti-Zionist and antisemitic hostility suddenly. The transformation has been underway for years and reflects the intellectual conquest of the academy by woke illiberality, critical race theory, identity politics, postcolonial studies, and "social justice" indoctrination.
 The pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University |
These ideological currents are by now deeply grooved into the soil of higher education, and they converge in a deep pool of antipathy toward the Jewish state. All this helps explain why so many universities erupted more or less simultaneously in anti-Israel protests this spring, many launched using "tool kits" supplied by outside organizations. Antisemitism has become fashionable. And this particular fashion offers the added pleasure of feeling enwrapped, not just in keffiyehs, but in moral enlightenment and righteousness. Few sensations are more emotionally satisfying for young agitators and activists than the conviction — whether true or not — that they are standing for the oppressed, the colonized, and the weak. Better still, as Eve Garrard shrewdly observed in Fathom,
focusing on Jews for singular criticism can also be presented as subversive and transgressive, flouting the conventions of polite discourse, and thus conferring on the hostile critic the accolade of being untrammelled by convention, excitingly edgy, possibly even outrageous. All in all, that's an awful lot of moral bang for your antisemitic buck.
Young activists do not, of course, have any particular claim to ethical clarity or virtue, though typically they are sure their youth gives them a unique grasp on goodness and truth that eludes their elders. ("Don't trust anyone over 30" was a catchphrase during the campus protests of the 1960s). In a post on X last month, a Bernie Sanders supporter and member of the Democratic Socialists of America proclaimed: "A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue." As of Monday, an astonishing 9 million people had viewed that tweet and 59,000 users had liked or shared it.
But it isn't true. It isn't close to true.
As Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute noted, it was bizarre to see such a claim go viral "at a time when masked student mobs are assaulting their peers, spewing antisemitic vitriol, and chanting paeans to genocide."
Again and again over the past century, student movements have backed hideous causes and embraced barbaric objectives. Hess recorded some of them:
There was the student movement that helped establish Fidel Castro's oppressive regime in Cuba. . . . Students served as a vanguard for Castro's regime as it wantonly arrested, tortured, reeducated, and murdered those deemed suspect.
There was the Marxist-shaded Iranian student movement that helped bring Ayatollah Khomeini to power, occupied and seized hostages at the US embassy in Tehran, and fueled the rise of religious fanaticism. Ironically, for the students, one of the first actions Khomeini took was to "Islamize" universities as part of a Cultural Revolution, which involved purging Marxist and secular books and professors.
There were Mao Zedong's Red Guards, the student-led paramilitary that loomed so large in China's Cultural Revolution, who helped to round up, attack, imprison, and murder millions of "counter-revolutionaries." Impassioned students helped liquidate Mao's rivals while demanding lockstep obeisance from petty officials, educators, scientists, and educated professionals — all conveniently dismissed as members of the "ruling class."
Writing at Reason, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin amplified Hess's tally.
He noted that before Hitler's Nazi Party came to power, it was supported "by a large and active student movement — the National Socialist German Student League" formed in 1926. Later, in the 1960s, many white students at schools like the University of Alabama fervently opposed desegregation and some mobilized to stop it.
I would add that the America First Committee, notorious for its isolationism, antisemitism, and pro-fascist sympathies, was founded by a Yale University student, R. Douglas Stuart Jr., and rapidly expanded to encompass many thousands of students on scores of college campuses. In Britain, too, many university students were passionately opposed to confronting Nazi Germany. The Oxford Union in 1933 — in what Winston Churchill called an "abject, squalid, shameless, and nauseating" incident — voted overwhelmingly to support a motion that "This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country."
Students in any era are no more likely to be on the right side of history or morality than any other groups. The young often overflow with passion, but passion is no substitute for wisdom, decency, or justice. The ugly demonstrations of recent months were only the latest manifestation of that ineluctable fact of life.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Ray Shamie's last campaign," May 24, 1999:
In a sense, it was his realism that led Shamie into politics in the first place. He believed that most voters were like him — that if given accurate information, they would choose the right leaders. It saddened him to discover the truth — that most ballots are not cast on the basis of ideas and analysis, but for irrational reasons: emotion, party loyalty, ethnic affiliation. He still talks about the woman who approached his wife in a supermarket during the 1982 campaign. "I really like what your husband says, I like what he stands for," the woman told her. "But I have to vote for Ted Kennedy. He came to my daughter's graduation."
Americans unhappy with politics-as-usual often lament: "Why don't more decent people go into politics?" Soon it will be time to bid farewell to one decent man who did.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Last Line
"Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again.
As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers I call God's blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children." — Sullivan Ballou, Final Letter to His Wife (July 14, 1861)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read more? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.