Reply #119: The Problem With That, Mr. Tragedy [View All]

[The Magistrate]

Is that a person has to be aware something is going on to be a willing accomplice to it. Further, to be described as aiding and enabling, a person has to have made some material contribution to the thing. It does not seem to me, and did not seem to me at the time, that Fonda managed either thing.

The doctrinaire leftist view of the war at that time was every bit as much a propaganda construct as the doctrinaire rightist view. Both touched on reality only by accident. Each side claimed only the other engaged in atrocious behavior, and denied resolutely the committal of any atrocity by the side it opposed. There is no doubt in my mind Fonda was as certain there was no torture by the North Vietnamese as a modern "ditto-head" is convinced there is no torture at Guantanamo. In both cases, inconvenient evidence is simply ignored, or minimized through a variety of mental strategies. The fall-back position on the left was that atrocities by the Vietnamese Communists were justified and excuseable because of the atrocities committed by U.S. forces, just as the fall-back position of the right was that atrocities by U.S. and R.V.N. forces were justified and excuseable because of the atrocities committed by the Communists. The willful ignorance and moral blindness of both sides of the debate in those days was palpable.

Fonda's actions made no more difference to what happened in North Vietnam than a teaspoon emptied into it would make to the level of the ocean. The treatment of prisoners there was settled policy of the government long before she arrived, and remained what it was before after her departure. The fact is that both sides engaged routinely in atrocious behavior as a matter of policy, and it is a fact beyond that that atrocity is and always will be the method employed by both sides of any guerrilla conflict. Decision to support one side or the other of such a struggle cannot be made on the basis of the behavior of either side, since both will inevitably be sufficiently reprehensible to shock the humane conscience: it can be made only on the basis of the goals of the sides, and the possibilty those goals can be achieved. A moral position can only be based on the refusal to support atrocity commited by anyone, and unwillingness to see the mutual exercise in horror continue any longer, which will of necessity require that the side who's political leadership one can affect must be convinced to halt its participation.

Fonda was foolish and misguided in what she did in those days: in that, she is legion, for that same foolishness and misguidedness were endemic. She has always rated rather low in my regard for it, as did those in demonstrations against the war I participated in who carried North Vietnamese flags and chanted praise of Ho Chi Minh. It has never seemed to me that it was demonstrations and the opposition of the left in particular that brought about the retirement of the U.S. from that misbegotten conflict, but rather the spreading realization among the people that the thing was a futile quagmire to which they were unwilling to commit their children any longer, and the condition of near-mutiny that became endemic in the conscript ranks of the fighting forces on the ground there. The public, and a sufficient number of the soldiery, made in the end the moral choice that they would no longer participate in the wretched business, and would rather see it ended regardless of consequences to national policy in the question.