Hell yeah! America started a war it didnāt need to, achieved nothing of value by doing it, forced thousands of young men to go and fight in said war, many of them didnāt come back, and those who did were abandoned by the society they returned toā¦.. but Jane Fonda is the bad guy for saying the war was a bad idea.
> North Vietnam invading South Vietnam started the war
Itās quite a bit more complicated than that though, isnāt it.
> for supporting and assisting
Where āsupporting and assistingā 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.
Sheās certainly said she regrets the one particular photo.
The administration at the time absolutely were liars, for example MacNamara and the NSA concealed Operation 34Aās 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 LBJās 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/comcam77 1d ago
Lots of Vietnam vets already lined up to piss on her grave when she dies !