The Federalist: On 2 November, groups of Vietnamese men, women, and children will gather for memorial services across the world to honor the death of a man largely forgotten in American historical memory. Once this man was a household name, frequently featured on the front pages of our nation’s newspapers and spoken from the mouths of reporters on the nightly news.
That man is Ngo Dinh Diem, president of the Republic of Vietnam (better known as South Vietnam) from 1955 to 1963, his rule and life cruelly ended in a military coup tacitly supported by the U.S. government. A recent book on Diem’s life, “The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam,” by military historian Geoffrey Shaw clarifies why Americans would do well to mourn the tragic loss of a man many deemed to be Vietnam’s best chance of defeating communism.
According to the Burns-Novick and Karnow narrative, Diem, a member of a well-respected, well-connected aristocratic Vietnamese Catholic family, served in various French colonial government positions prior to Vietnam’s independence in the 1950s. Vietnam’s division between north and south at the 17th parallel at the Geneva Conference in 1954 enabled Diem to assert his authority over South Vietnam with the support of the French and Americans.
A referendum held in the south in 1955 — one many viewed as illegitimate due to fraud — sealed Diem’s role as president of the country. With the approval of the United States, Diem shortly thereafter rejected the Geneva stipulation that the north and south were to hold nationwide, conciliatory elections in 1956 to determine the government of a unified Vietnam, allegedly because he knew he would lose to the more popular Ho Chi Minh, who ruled the communist north.
As the years progressed, Diem and his notorious brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were plagued by turmoil within his administration, failing government programs across the countryside, and rising popular support for the communist insurgency. The brothers in turn pursued ever-more repressive measures to preserve their authority. Secret police forces led by Nhu imprisoned, tortured, and murdered enemies of the regime, while government policies enriched the country’s Catholic minority to the detriment of the majority-Buddhist nation. Read more here
More left wing dem incompetence.
Time to crush the left, they are the enemy.
Did you mean left wing incompetence, or left wing incontinence? Hard to tell them apart!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5050715/Port-Authority-Police-officer-struck-vehicle.html
I doubt if anyone could have kept Vietnam from reuniting under Ho Chi Minh, commie or no commie. Vietnamese nationalism was too strong to stop after WW2. The biggest mistakes the U.S. made was supporting the French in their effort to retake French Indochina after the war, and then buying into the whole “domino theory” and trying to do what the French couldn’t.
Well, that and listening to Presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 when he said, “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Do tell, Lyndon. Do tell.
Sounds very similar to what’s going on in the (Russian? Chinese?) province, where the local government, with the tacit approval of the central government, is harassing and purging the muzzies.
History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
Is there a perspective problem with that photo or is the guy really really really short?
We Killed Yoda ?
From a US perspective, Diem was about the worst leader for South Vietnam you could have imagined. Except for all those who came after, that is. Ain’t hindsight wonderful?
VV, I wonder if had the US got off the French horse early enough, the “Ho no commie” scenario might have had a shot? We’ll never know I guess.