The London Review of Books has an article about how the American right constructed a mythology around Jane Fonda in order to delegitimize opposition to the Vietnam war.
the Nixon administration and its supporters engaged in a systematic campaign of misinformation to make Fonda and anti-war veterans into hate-figures. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. While the article doesn’t draw an explicit parallel with what’s happening today, it’s lurking just beneath the surface.
The current efforts of various right wing propagandists to tar the anti-war left as traitors smack of Nixon’s smear campaign in the 1970’s.
Then, as now, there was a widespread perception on left and right that the war was a disaster. Nonetheless, Nixon succeeded in using it as a wedge issue to split voters from the Democratic party, and to generate a set of pernicious myths that last to this day (not only Hanoi Jane’s treachery, but bogus stories about anti-war protesters spitting on veterans.
From Crooked Timber :
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