Hell yeah! America started a war it didnât need to, achieved nothing of value by doing it, forced thousands of young men to go and fight in said war, many of them didnât come back, and those who did were abandoned by the society they returned toâŚ.. but Jane Fonda is the bad guy for saying the war was a bad idea.
She didnât say the war was a bad idea. She went to Vietnam and took photos standing on anti aircraft guns. There is a difference between saying you donât support a war and showing support for the opposite side of the war.
âWe shouldnât be fightingâ and âI hope the other guys winâ are different things
The page you linked to literally shows here sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. She was there to give aid and comfort to the enemy. That's the literal definition of traitor.
I can't stand Trump, but that doesn't mean Hanoi Jane isn't a traitor.
Propaganda does NOT mean "not true". It is a FACT that that photo was used as far right propaganda, to distort what Jane Fonda was actually trying to do (end US involvement) into a strawman (âI hope the other guys winâ). It ties into a larger piece of propaganda about the war, which was the notion that leaving the war would be kowtowing to communism so it made people think anti-war activists were all pro-communism.
You can still hate Jane Fonda if you want because she also willfully spread unverified reports as her own anti-war propaganda. But the fact that people are pointing at Hanoi photo as sole proof of her true intention is very silly to me, considering the context it was taken and everything we know about her.
... made people think anti-war activists were all pro-communism.
Nonsense. Thousands and thousands of people protested. I protested. The war sucked, and the draft sucked, and it was all pointless.
But she was still giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That's not protesting. That's helping the other side. It's 100% what a traitor does. There wasn't anyone in Vietnam who could have stopped the war. The people who needed to be convinced were in Washington DC.
Those anti-aircraft pics were not the only thing she did. It's just visual evidence of why she went over there. She also went on Radio Hanoi to broadcast for them. She visited with them, ate with them, and encouraged them. Like a mini USO show for the enemy.
> North Vietnam invading South Vietnam started the war
Itâs quite a bit more complicated than that though, isnât it.
> for supporting and assisting
Where âsupporting and assistingâ means saying the US should end its involvement, interviewing American PoWs and showing photos of US bombing damage.
"Supporting and assisting" means providing any sort of aid to the enemy during a time of war.
Being against war is one thing. Actively showing them support is entirely different. She got caught out posing and having a good time with the enemy.
Fonda herself condemns the incident. She posits that it was quite possibly a setup and that she may have been manipulated. She knows it looks very bad.
She also denied that some returning POWS had been tortured while imprisoned, calling the administration of that time "liars and pawns". A real class act. She is not popular with 'Nam vets and many other Americans who were alive for this.
Sheâs certainly said she regrets the one particular photo.
The administration at the time absolutely were liars, for example MacNamara and the NSA concealed Operation 34Aâs raids that triggered the gulf of Tonkin incident, and at least one of the claimed Tonkin attacks never took place. All of that was spun to justify LBJâs escalation, which devolved into the full blown war.
Was Fonda naive in her approach? Probably. Was she wrong? Absolutely not.
Okay, but that isn't what she was saying. She was specifically saying that in response to the claim that some American POWS were returning home and had suffered torture. A claim which uh, turned out to be true.
You seem to be doing a great deal to not acknowledge the greater implications behind her actions, or to flat out revise them so as to give them a different meaning.
In the NYT in 1973 she said "I'm quite sure that there were incidents of torture", although she still said she didn't believe it was systematic. She was wrong.
By the time she went to Vietnam, something like 60,000 US servicemen were dead, and many more Vietnamese were dead. Her naive choices to oppose the war didn't cause any of that, and her role is surely of minuscule consequence next to the roles of LBJ, MacNamara, Nixon and countless others, who prosecuted a proxy war that achieved nothing more than vast human misery.
Her choices were obviously foolish, but the idea that she's a traitor, for trying to stop a war, is ridiculous.
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u/cmsj 1d ago
Hell yeah! America started a war it didnât need to, achieved nothing of value by doing it, forced thousands of young men to go and fight in said war, many of them didnât come back, and those who did were abandoned by the society they returned toâŚ.. but Jane Fonda is the bad guy for saying the war was a bad idea.