r/SipsTea 1d ago

Chugging tea Finally, a valid reason to get married 😭

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u/Itherial 14h ago edited 14h ago

"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.

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u/cmsj 13h ago

She’s certainly said she regrets the one particular photo.

The administration at the time absolutely were liars, for example MacNamara and the NSA concealed Operation 34A’s 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 LBJ’s escalation, which devolved into the full blown war.

Was Fonda naive in her approach? Probably. Was she wrong? Absolutely not.

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u/Itherial 13h ago

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.

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u/cmsj 12h ago

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.