Well, QVC drops a segment with Jane Fonda because a couple of callers

complained about her trip over 40 years ago to Hanoi...


NEW YORK (AP) -- Jane Fonda says she's been banished from QVC amid concerns about her political past. The network says it was a routine programming change.

Fonda was set to appear on the home-shopping channel on Saturday to promote her new book on aging, "Prime Time." But the day before, she learned her segment had been cancelled.

In a statement posted on her website, Fonda says QVC told her of receiving "a lot of calls" from viewers criticizing her opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if she was allowed to appear.

http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=659076&affid=100055

This pissed me off. So I sent an EMail to QVC...

A few right wing fanatics call your show and suddenly Jane Fonda, one of the greatest American Actresses of the last half century, is off your network?

You think her presence on your network demeans your brand.

Whether you know it or nor there are many real Americans out here who believe in the freedom of expression. You are doing yourself a disservice because your demographic is getting old and soon will be out of the consumer stream. The next generation that comes along will have no use for your political capitulation.


If you care to join me....

https://quality-s.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/main.html.file.%7Ccs%7Ccs_email,html/left.html.file.%7Ccs%7Ccs_nav,html/

How do you feel about people who protest Glen Beck's "freedom of expression?"

Don't misunderstand, I believe you did the right thing in making your voice heard as well.

I fear only of ideologues.

I was quite upset to see that you decided to cancel the show that Jane Fonda was to appear upon. I happen to think that she is a first-rate American and actress.I do believe in our First Amendment rights. Don't you? Why are you allowing the political right wing to dictate who may or may not be allowed on your show?

Recommended.

I'm a long time QVCer. I emailed. :)

There's some goober I've seen driving around town here with a bumper sticker saying "I'll forgive Jane Fonda when the Jews forgive Hitler"... Uh, dude, I come from a family that had people die in the camps, and they're not even CLOSE to the same fucking thing. Idiot.

But somehow, I doubt it. Greatly.

Starting with the fact that the majority of the Vietnamese people supported unification and Ho Chi Minh, and would have voted for such had the elections they had been promised been allowed to go forward by the French (and, by extension, the Eisenhower Administration)

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/55election.htm

There is simply NO WAY to compare Vietnam to Nazi Germany, or the Vietnam war- which was overwhelmingly viewed by the majority of participants as a war for national liberation and against colonial occupation- to WWII. It's not just a weak comparison, it's a totally bogus one. Nor was Ho Chi Minh anything like Pol Pot in Cambodia. Whatever the excesses of the Hanoi regime, it's simply not a valid point to make.

Even if somehow you could make a parallel between the North Vietnam Government and the Nazis, Jane Fonda STILL wouldn't be equivalent to "Hitler". At best, she was made out to be mildly supportive of the regime. She wasn't responsible for it. It might make sense to say "I'll forgive Jane Fonda when the Jews forgive Charles Lindbergh", that sort of thing.

But you're right, the dude clearly isn't Vietnamese.

If one of your family was MIA?

All she is guilty of is loving our boys too much and doing whatever she thought she could to get them home. She was the very furtherest thing from a traitor than one could be.. Now if you want to talk treason maybbe we should bring up Republican actions...

Because the Vietnam War was a mistake, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. We were on the wrong side. Period.

Old people. How many people under 50 even know who Jane Fonda is?

I think their biggest base is 30s through 40s.

:shrug:

it's very popular.

their opinion on anything counts for nothing because of course they never spend a dime of their money. :sarcasm: Just dismiss them, geesh I thought only Wall Street and corporate America felt that way. :-(

I AM old at 62. That gives me the right to talk about old people.

Jane Fonda. Not all "old" people are Right Wingers or tea baggers, you know! In fact, I am probably rather to your left, because I am to the left of most people in this country.(BTW, 50 isn't really consdiered "old" any more.)

Dayem! And we all, 100+ million of us, buy from QVC. :eyes: Btw, you sell your own generation short. I know lots of smart youngins and I would bet most of them would know exactly who Jane Fonda is in that she's an actress, author, activist and the daughter of Hollywood royalty.

Time for these old hags to get current on their Fascist info...

Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Yemen
Syria
Libya

...of one that began and ended 150 and 146 years ago.

Why would Vietnam be any different?

Seems like quite the double standard, as usual.

"Let me get this straight: You pulled Jane Fonda off your show because of something that happened 40 years ago? Because she joined her voice with those protesting a war that so many people were against that they actually had to call the war OFF? She was protesting the unconscionable slaughter of innocent people, and you find this controversial? I crewed a tank in the Gulf in 1991, and even though I wasn't doing that particular job to "protect our freedoms", as so many people like to say, my original purpose in donning the uniform of the United States Army was to protect the freedom of speech, among many others that we enjoy here in the U.S. Give Ms. Fonda a break. And stop cowering before right-wing bullies."

I think you are a great American, Aristus...

:-)

Jane Fonda can sell her book.

For doing the tomahawk chant! :)

:rofl:

:)

I asked for a response, and they did follow up.

Behold:

Dear Ms XXX,

Thank you for emailing QVC.

Since customer satisfaction is our top priority here at QVC, we always
appreciate any suggestions or comments from our customers. I have
forwarded your suggestion to the appropriate department.

It has been a pleasure assisting you. We look forward to serving you again
in the future!

Thank you for shopping with us.

Regards,

XXX

How about that? I was genuinely surprised...

And no, I did not buy anything.

that said it was okay to send me a reply...

I really did not expect to hear from them.

And your message was way more eloquent too.

Jane Fonda went to Vietnam in August 1972, a critical time in the war. The North Vietnamese were about to throw in the towel when Jane Fonda, still in her 20's, encouraged them to fight on. They did.

Nixon knew he was whipped. Turning to an aide, he said, I have enough trouble beating George McGovern. Don't tell me I have to fight Jane Fonda as well!



Fonda Cost Democrats the '72 Election, Too

even though we won that battle, the perception was out there back in 1969 that we had lost.

LBJ called it quits when he knew there was no way to win the Vietnam war. He should have just shut down the war, but instead he just resigned. Thus Nixon knew from his first day in office that the war was unwinnable, but instead of shutting it down, he escalated it! To this day, people don't assign enough blame to Nixon for his role in the Vietnam War.

It's wrong to count the cost of the war by just the number of U.S. dead, but just for the record there were nearly as many U.S. fatalities on Nixon's watch as on LBJ's. The difference is that at least part of the time, Lyndon Johnson thought the war was winnable. Nixon never believed that.

Fonda went to North Vietnam as a protest against the bombing of the North as a way of prodding the North Vietnamese negotiators to make concessions. Violence against civilians in order to compel a change in government policy is now called terrorism.



Terrorist Nixon Used B-52 Bombers
to Extract Negotiation Concessions

don't know whether to laugh or to cry at the likes of the above, especially since your post subsequent to that was spot on. no offense, but are you schizo, or something?

those two posts are just about completely contradictory, don't you think

cheerio......

I mean, really. As if there were no other dynamics at work, like the whole thing wasn't a bloody chessboard played by people who never got their hands dirty and whose names are rarely associated with the slaughter.

born December 21, 1937.

But I'm going to be the voice of dissent. Jane Fonda had every right to her opinion. She was well w/in her rights to oppose the war and to demonstrate against it. But for her to actually go to North Viet Nam and meet w/ our enemies and to encourage them to continue the fight is treasonous.


So that's my freedom to express my opinion. I will never watch any film she is in I will never purchase any product she makes profit from, period.

The war was over but the bombing continued because Nixon wanted to extract concessions from the North Vietnamese negotiators. It was a monstrous thing to do, a part of American history for which we should be deeply ashamed. However, not all of us agreed with Nixon.

Terrorism is cowardice. Nixon was a terrorist, and we saw later on what a cowardly piece of shit he really was. Jane Fonda stood up to him, and more power to her for having done so. I'm glad she hasn't really suffered for it, because it took guts.

thank you for allowing me mine.

One of the segments is all about the TET Offensive.

The military guys and the historians agree that even though we actually beat back the VC attacks, we lost the war because the American people saw how brutal the fighting really was.

Up to that point, the majority of people were for the war, after the TET offensive, the public opinion changed over night.

Nixon and Kissinger prolonged that war to squeeze out concessions from Mao and Brezhnev.

At least that was my take and how it was explained to me in several classes in college.

It really doesn't make any difference whether the Viet Cong "won" the Tet offensive or not. The fact that they mounted such a wide-ranging and successful attack showed America that the VC were going to keep fighting until there were none of them left. They were ferocious fighters - a fact that American commanders were well aware of since the early days of the war.

In the intervening years since the war was over, American commanders have never admitted the truth of what happened, that we were simply out-soldiered by the enemy. Instead there's a fanciful story that American GI's somehow lost heart because the American public turned against the war. But that's crapola. We lost the war the old fashioned way - we got beaten where it matters - in the field.

Not having the moral character to admit defeat honestly and squarely has led to our military defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, also where it matters - in the field. These little brown people aren't as weak as Americans like to think they are. They are resourceful and courageous, and they don't give up.

the American Troops and their dwindling Southern allies.

They co-ordinated over 100 attacks all over South Vietnam.

how do you figure we ( CLARIFICATION "we" reffers th ethe U.S. Army I did not fight in Viet Nam) were "out soldiered"

We failed -utterly failed- to read and understand the history of the region. We were sold a 'grand cold war battle against communism' when really we were picking up the pieces of the French Colonial Occupation. Why the fuck we handed Vietnam back to the French after we saved their asses (at least, the ones who weren't collaborating with the Nazis in the Vichy government) at the end of WWII- right after WWII US Intelligence Asset Ho Chi Minh declared an independent Vietnam quoting liberally from Thomas Jefferson & The Declaration of Independence - is one of the great What The Fuck? questions of history.

Oh, and letting the just-defeated Japanese administer Vietnam until the French could get back there? Another stellar fucking touch. I understand that Truman, et al. were busy in the immediate wake of WWII, but there's no way to look at that situation and not see the makings of a clusterfuck with clear white, colonial, Eurocentric overtones.

All this retroactive dick-swinging about who 'won' in Vietnam misses the point, entirely. It wasn't a fucking football game. We never should have been there, and that's the reason we didn't "win".

The Vietnam war was not about major engagements. Westmoreland kept asking for more troops because he thought it could be won like a conventional war. Johnson capped troop strength at 500,000, and Nixon let it drift up to 550,000, but even if we'd had a million soldiers there at one time, it was not a conventional war.

People can argue that we won the battles of Hué or Ia Drang Valley or Bien Hoa - territories we captured and kept - and say that we won the major engagements. But those battles didn't define the war. Body count became the defining metric, but "winning" the body count war was also meaningless when U.S. commanders ran up the score by killing every male Vietnamese in range. The fixation on body count led directly to atrocities like My Lai.

When neither territory nor body count were reliable indices of winning or losing, the Americans tried different ideas to measure success such as control over "strategic hamlets." But that didn't work either. Nothing worked. Whatever we threw at the Viet Cong, failed. They were far more resourceful that we thought they could possibly be. They simply beat us where it counted - in the field. In more standard terminology, they outsoldiered us. But you'll never get an American historian to admit it.

The U.S. should have never gone to Viet Nam (I believe we agree on this)

Given that our stated mission in Viet Nam was to halt Communist aggression and Viet Nam is now a single Communist country the U.S. lost the war or at least failed to accomplish our mission (I believe we agree on this).

What we disagree on is the idea that we (the U.S. Army) were "out soldiered". One does not "out soldier" another army by getting one's ass kicked every time one chooses to stand and fight.

One "out soldiers" an other Army by defeating them militarily

People always try to see past military conflicts in a favorable light, especially conflicts that end painfully. Saying that the Viet Cong refused to "stand and fight" sounds like a way of claiming that we defeated them. They took everything we threw at them and they still beat us.

You're welcome to your view of the Vietnam war. Who's going to stop you?

That's the problem with the Americans in Vietnam. They were looking for a WW2-style victory. Killing more of the bad guys and holding the ground must surely equal victory, right?

But they failed to understand the basics of long term guerilla warfare. The Vietnamese never sought to soundly defeat the US and their puppets in the field. All they strove to do was outlast them. By being able to still mount combat operations in spite of all the glorious American "victories" made them the real victors. That was their strategy and it worked like a charm.

The heavy handed way in which the Americans achieved their battlefield sucesses in VN was actually a victory for the VC/NVA because it kept creating new recruits for them while diminishing the legitimacy of the Americans/SVN.

- but I'll be the exception. You are 100% correct. It was treasonous for her to go to the enemy when we had young men and women in harms way. Not only did her actions potentially extend the war, she demoralized our military and the American people.

My husband was in the military during that time and no Jane Fonda film is allowed in our home. The rare times she shows up on TV, the channel is immediately changed.

What will it take for you to oppose American military policy anywhere in the world where we have troops stationed? From your statements it sound like you'll support anything and everything so long as our troops are in harm's way.

Suppose for example that we're bombing cities, full of innocent civilians. Would that motivate you to question American military policy?

What if we were dropping cluster bombs that 3 and 4-year olds will come upon and have their arms and legs blown off - would you raise an objection to that? How about the use of white phosphorus?

I shot Willy P during Desert Storm and I sleep like a baby

It doesn't surprise me that you don't regret your military service.

BTW WP rounds are used and marker rounds or to burn off foliage that offers concealment to the enemy.

They are not used just for the fun of frying people

What happened was she became a target for the warmongers.

She was right. We had no right to wage war in Vietnam. Period.

In that sense that's how Afghanistan and Iraq are like Vietnam. That and the quagmire effect.

http://www.facebook.com/QVC

click on 'most recent' posts to get in on the discussion

sell their wares and all they are known for is their big asses....

but not Jane Fonda...

come on qvc...don't bow to that stupid pressure.

Only used to shoot down Americans...

Imagine how many hearts and minds were won the day this happened:



Now 46 years old, Kim Phuc Phan Thai (Kim Phuc to most) spoke recently at a conference of burn survivors and burn care specialists in New York City on the physical and psychological struggle that she went through over the ensuing decades.

"Sixty-five percent of my body got burned," she said in an interview with HealthDay. The third-degree burns left her face untouched but sheared off every layer of skin on her back and left arm, leaving a legacy of permanent scars and recurring pain.

"I should be dead," Phuc said. "I got burned so deep I had to do skin grafts -- mostly from under my leg -- from the 35 percent of my skin that was OK. And from the beginning to the end, including physical therapy, I was in the burn unit in Saigon for about 14 months. And I had 17 operations. But I was spared," she added.

There are entirely too many ripoff, er, shopping channels on tv anyway, so why should anyone care even a little bit about this one?
And as far as your email, nice thoughts, but Fonda as one of the great actresses of the last half century? I guess we all have our opinions.

is on the bottom line, not politics. If it was just a FEW calls, they overreacted, but if it was a concerted Koch Brothers-backed type of effort, they probably did what most publicly held companies would have done. :shrug: They were going to have her on to make money, if they felt that might be impacted plus affect future sales, I'm not sure they had a choice.

Still pisses me off, though.

I wrote them and said they've lost my business because of it, although again, I think it was just a business decision. I'd like QVC (and others) to know RW whacks aren't the only ones who will boycott a company. And again, they're better organized than we are. :)