The American actress has demonstrated her political commitment throughout her life.
Jane Fonda was arrested by the Washington police for demanding, along with other protesters from the Fire Drill Fridays movement, measures against climate change. It happened even a day before the Grace and Frankie actress celebrated her 82nd birthday, on December 21, 2019. On that day, she was once again accused of "clustering, obstructing, and harassing."
While "inconvenience" is an open legal type that is unlikely to succeed in court, the truth is that it is a term that accurately defines the attitude of Jane Fonda for many of the presidential administrations of the United States, including that of Donald Trump, whom he has criticized for projecting a series of oil pipelines that run through land that belonged to Native Americans.
Fonda's political involvement dates back to the 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration. She first got involved with groups that worked in favor of civil rights and, later, in the protests against the Vietnam War, a French colonial conflict taken over by the United States, whose citizens did not quite understand why their troops were in the Asian country This lack of understanding ended up turning into discontent and indignation when, at the end of the sixties, events such as the Tet Offensive caused significant casualties in the American army.
Far from listening to its citizens and reconsidering the situation, Richard Nixon's presidency made the country even more involved in the conflict and, consequently, the protests increased in intensity. In this way, in 1970, Jane Fonda together with the activist Fred Gardner and the actor Donald Sutherland organized in the United States a tour similar to the one the army mounted at the front with musicians and comedians of the stature of Bob Hope. However, while Hope's goal was to boost the morale of the troops, Jane and her companions' was to inform soldiers who were going to Vietnam and their families of their rights and to explain to them the hell they were going to find. in the Asian country.
However, the most media action of her anti-war campaign would come two years later, when Jane Fonda decided to travel to Vietnam. For two weeks she toured different places, denounced the actions of her country's army, showed her support for the North Vietnamese government, and denied accusations of torture of American prisoners in Vietnamese jails. Despite the seriousness of her assertions about the US government's attitude in Vietnam, Fonda's militancy continued to be perceived as a Hollywood star whim that even earned her the nickname Hanoi Jane. At least that was the case until some photographs of her were published that raised blisters among a large part of American society and caused Hollywood to include her on a blacklist.
It all happened on the last day of her stay in Hanoi in July 1972. Fonda went to visit some Vietnamese soldiers, they talked, sang songs, and such a relaxed atmosphere was generated that the meeting moved to a nearby artillery post. There, the actress sat on one of the cannons while she continued laughing and chatting, a moment that was immortalized by the press. When the photograph was published in the United States, Ella Fonda was described as a traitor to her homeland and as disrespecting American soldiers, especially those who fell in the war and her families.
“I didn't even think about where she was sitting. Suddenly, the cameras flashed her. It may have been prepared by the Vietnamese but I will never know. If they used me, I allowed it. The photo exists regardless of what she was doing or thinking. I have apologized numerous times for the pain I may have caused soldiers and their families as a result of that photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm ”, the artist would declare that, except for that photo, she has never regretted her militancy in Vietnam.
Despite all the time that has elapsed, his apologies have not been fully accepted and today there are many Americans for whom the memory of that photograph still causes discomfort. So much so, that Republican sectors used Jane Fonda to wear down the image of Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 elections. To do this, his adversaries did not hesitate to filter a photograph in which the politician shared a platform with the actress in a protest against the Vietnam War in the 70s. It was useless to prove that the image was a crude trick made with Photoshop. The anger that the star still arouses among a certain American population is a fertile field for fake news.
However, while many of the young people who led protests during the sixties abandoned their militancy when they reached maturity, Fonda has continued her activism, attentive to the concerns of society at each historical moment. After civil rights, Native Americans, Vietnam, Iraq or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the protagonist of Barbarella and The China Syndrome has been openly feminist, has participated in campaigns against gender violence, has criticized patriarchy, and has launched the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health, to prevent unwanted pregnancy in adolescence.
Now she has touched the turn to climate change and the defense of the environment. Some issues which the artist had already spoken about in the past, but with which she has become more actively involved in recent times due to the awareness work carried out by Greta Thunberg. A fight Fonda faces fearlessly, thanks to the strength of her experience and her age. As she told The Washington Post after her arrest: “You don't see it, but I have armor that protects me. I am 82 years old. There's nothing they can do to me." A resounding message announces to the US authorities that next Friday they have an appointment with "Hanoi Jane".
