Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1970. július-december (24. évfolyam, 27-49. szám)

1970-07-23 / 28. szám

Thursday, July 23, 1970.

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THEY SHOOT SOLDIERS, DON’T THEY?

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ — HUNGARIAN WORD

(Continued from page 1)

all about and I didn’t understand why they were getting it more than any other black group—Ron Karenga’s group (US) which is much more blatantly racist, for example. Why the Panthers?

So I began to contact Panthers and I began to meet Panthers and talk to them and discovered that they are not in fact racist and that this is one of the reasons they are getting so much harassment. The idea that a militant group will unite all oppressed peoples scares the establishment to death. They are organized, they’re disciplined. Their rhetoric is violent, their actions are not violent; they are armed in self-defense.

I think that it is important for people not just to listen to their rhetoric, but watch their actions too. In fact, they are feeding hot breakfasts to kids of all races in the ghettos, they are setting up free medical clinics, and so forth.

SPACE CITY: How did you get interested in the GS movement?

FONDA: One of my dreams has always been

to drive across the country. At various stages of my life it took on different forms so where at one point it was to dig nature and at another time it was to dig other things, I decided two months ago that it would be a political trip. When I first decided to do it, it was just to find out what was happening between the two coasts that I knew very well. I hadn’t been anywhere between those for a long time and I had really lost contact with the country and I wanted to find out what was going on.

At a party in Hollywood, I was talking about this trip and how I was planning to go to Indian reservations and so forth. Fred Gardner was there, who was one of the original organizers of the GI movement and has recently written a book which is about the Presidio mutiny—called Unlawful Concert, I think.

And he said why don’t you go to some GI coffee houses and at the time I didn’t even know what a GI coffee house was. So he briefly explained the movement to me and I said I wanted to find out more, what would I be doing and what kind of role could I fulfill and all of that. And so I sort of took a crash course on the GI movement.

Every night I had meetings with different people, young lawyers involved with military law, some of the organizers of the movement. And I started going to coffee houses—in Monterrey, in Washington and other places. And the more I work with GIs, the more I find out what kind of oppression they suffer within the military, the more I learned about what military indoctrination does to the heads of lower class boys who have no education, not just while they are in the military, but since there is no debriefing when they come back from the war as trained killers with a tolerance for violence and a tolerance having their constitutional rights taken away from them, the more I realize how important it is to get these guys political — so that when they come out fighting, they come out not puppets, they come out not able to be manipulated by the government, by their bosses, by their friends and their parents.

So what I’ve been doing over the last two months is visiting Indian reservations, army bases, GI coffee houses and Panther headquarters all across the country. And the more I see, the more 1 learn, the more I realize that I don’t have any solution. I don’t know what the end result is. And that’s another reason why for a long time I didn’t really lay myself on the line in any way because I thought in order to do so you had to know what you were seeking for specifically—an “ism” of some kind.

All I know is that despite the fact that I am one of the people who benefit from a capitalist society, I find that any system which exploits other people cannot and should no exist. It’s very difficult to make people realize that. I have a lot of friends who are liberal who are working for peace senators, who feel that if you take the bad guys out and put the good guys in office, it’s going to change something. I think if you had a whole lot of saints in office in Washington it still wouldn’t

JANE FONDA

Photo: Ted Reich

make any difference because the system is corrupt from the bottom up and this is something that we have to make people aware of.

That it’s not just poor white people and black people and brown people and red people that are oppressed, we are all being exploited and we are all being oppressed. It’s easier to see it in terms of minorities than it is for those of us who are white middle-class people. We must realize that we are getting it just as bad as everybody else.

I am only beginning to realize now the importance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in terms of this kind of struggle. Just in terms of numbers for one thing. Any time you get people to move, you always do it around their oppression. Getting women political has to be done around showing them the ways in which they are being oppressed. As Evelyn (Sell) said tonight, it’s not just a matter of some crazy movement off on one side that is trying to get out of the kitchen. In order to be valid, in order for it to really succeed, it is locked in with every single area of the struggle which will eventually change the entire society. And it is only when the entire society is changed that there will be a true equality between men and women, between sexes, between classes and between races.

SPACE CITY: Will you tell us about some of the specific things you have been doing in terms of the GI movement, especially. The places you went. I think you were kicked off a couple of bases, weren't you?

FONDA: I went onto Fort Lewis in Washington to invite guys to come to the Shelter House. I was arrested, I was given expulsion papers which said that I had broken a law and as a result I was banned from several military installations...

Besides Fort Lewis, I was also in Colorado Springs at Fort Carson... Of course, the place was completely cleaned up because they knew I was coming. And all of the guys in the stockade pointed out to me that this isn’t the way it usually is. I was taken in maximum security which is really hair-raising. It’s all black, you can’t see anything. And all the prisoners were black. And they were all in there for political reasons, some for AWOL, some of them because they were political organizers. Some of them had done nothing more than refuse to do KP and were in for like two months.

They thought that they had gotten all the heavy

people out before we came, but they had forgotten one black guy who had been beaten so badly and kicked in the ribs so badly the night before that he could hardly move or speak. He should have been in a hospital and he was just left there lying on his bed.

SPACE CITY: How do you think you've best been able to help political prisoners in the Army?

FONDA: What I say to GIs and what I try to do in terms of working outside of the coffee houses, is to raise money for their legal defense, which is really the way civilians can help most. They are really risking their lives by bucking the system and by becoming political in any way. There is an incredible shortage of young lawyers who know anything about military law to defend them. In most of the places I’ve been, there are maybe one or two lawyers who have to come a great distance to defend these guys and they’re totally swamped with work. We need training of military lawyers, we need volunteers, we need military law' libraries. All of these kinds of things.

Along with Dr. Spock and many other people I have been trying to raise money in various cities for this. Trying to get the GIs to learn about their rights, their legal rights. We always tell them that whatever they do they should do it in as legal a way as possible so that they’re not going to get sent to prison. I try to do as much as I can to talk to civilian people about the movement and how important it is and how they need civilian support.

SPACE CITY: Up until the last two weeks your involvement has primarily been with GIs and Indians. I remember seeing a picture of you in the paper at New Mexico State and someone was tying an armband on you or something. What do you think about what happened at Kent State? What are your feelings about what's been going on the last week or so in the country?

FONDA: I had just arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when Nixon gave his Cambodia speech and I had heard some things about the University of New Mexico, that there was nothing happening and nothing had been planned, so I asked them if I could speak. I’d never spoken at a university before. It was done on very short notice and I did not expect there to be very many people.

But because of the speech and because it happened the evening of the day the four were killed at Kent State, there was an enormous turnout. And it ended up being a meeting in which they hammered out five demands that they were going to make and we went to the dean and so on and so forth and the university is now closed down and there have been some bad incidents.

I think, as someone said at the rally yesterday in Washington, that Nixon might as well have pulled the triggers himself as far as Kent State is concerned. Just as it makes it easier to slaughter Vietnamese civilians by thinking of them not as human beings but as gooks and slopes, so it is that much easier to kill students when the chiefs of state and heads of state brand them as buffoons and bums.

One thing that upsets me is that it takes four W'hite students to be killed for the nation to rise

up. The black school in Texas where there were a lot of black students killed and wounded by National Guard and nothing happened. And the three black students who were killed two years ago in South Carolina in a peaceful demonstration, killed by State troopers and nothing happened.

I think that Nixon is bringing the war onto the campuses. He’s calling all his conferences about why are students reacting this way and what has to be done. As usual there is outside agitation and it’s communst-infiltrated, blah, bhah, blah, blah. He’s just an idiot if he doesn’t realize why these things are happening. It’s just so obvious. The fault is his. His and the system’s.

But it’s happening all the time. This kind of thing gets the nation going, but people mustn’t forget that there are black people slain all the time, everyday, framed up, slaughtered, gunned down with military weapons that the police don’t have any right to carry anyway. I don’t think we have to wait to get worked up about things like that, they are happening all around us. We just have to be more aware of them.