Tom Brosz said:

"In Joan Baez's favor, I would like to point out that she was one of the very, very few people on the Left willing to acknowledge the hell that was going on in Vietnam after we left that nation. She spoke out for Boat People and others, a consistent rather than a politically-motivated human rights advocate."

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Joan Baez's only "crime" against the liberal agenda was speaking out for the boat people. For that offense, all of her earlier opposition to the Vietnam War was forgotten and she was labelled "Phoney Joany".

Concerning boat people: Years ago I was on a ferry boat going from the Greek island of Corfu to what was then called Yugoslavia. During that trip, I met a Yugoslav ship's engineer who worked in the engine room of a super tanker. This ship's engineer told me about his supertanker going through the South China Sea shortly after the conclusion of the Vietnam War. This engineer witnessed thousands of rafts and little boats out to the horizon that were packed with refugees. There were so many of these little rafts and boats that the supertanker could not dodge them, resulting in many of them being capsized by the ship's wake. The captain of the supertanker was an honorable man. He stopped the ship and took on board as many refugees as he could. After the deck of the supertanker as literally packed with people, the captain restarted the ship and left behind the fast majority of the refugees. The ship then went to Hong Kong where the refugees were dropped off. The thousands of people left behind probably died slowly from exposure on the open ocean.

Gary