The Making of a Scapegoat - Redux

When things go badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who cannot accept defeat or being wrong, will look around for someone to blame. This book is about an earlier and continuing effort to blame the American pullout from Vietnam on Jane Fonda and those who opposed the war rather than a policy that was flawed, wrong, folly.

clipped from janefonda.com New Book “Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal” Lembcke shows how Fonda’s demonization played an important part in a powerful right-wing campaign to attribute American defeat in Vietnam to left-wing scapegoats and to reconstitute U.S. power as well as the ideal of aggressive masculinity.” —Christian G. Appy Lembcke shows that the expression “Hanoi Jane” did not reach the eyes and ears of most Americans until five or six years after the end of the war in Vietnam. By then, anxieties about America’s declining global status and deteriorating economy were fueling a populist reaction that pointed to the loss of the war as the taproot of those problems. Blaming the antiwar movement for undermining the military’s resolve, many found in the imaginary Hanoi Jane the personification of their stab-in-the- back theories.