Monday, March 17, 2008

Tom Hayden Laments the Ungrateful Vietnamese

Tom Hayden, who along with former wife, Hanoi Jane Fonda, gave moral support to the despots who enslaved the people of Vietnam, has recently visited the country again:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.


Can you believe those ungrateful bastards? You would think those Vietnamese would have some social conscience and forget about themselves and their families, in order to toil selflessly for the good of the proletariat. But noooooooo.....

During his trip, a leading Vietnamese novelist told him, "Some Americans may sympathize with communism, but I lived under it and couldn't stand it." The novelist has a son making millions travelling for a high-tech corporation.

Perhaps the Vietnamese noticed that Hayden declined to join them in their workers' paradise, and instead lived in California while Jane made millions from acting in movies and selling exercise videos. Or perhaps the Vietnamese were too busy trying to escape the paradise by going out to sea in tiny overcrowded boats.

"Far be it from me," says Hayden. "to question the desire of the Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else."

Hat tip to Kate at SDA.

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