Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first acts of Minh & Co. were to declare martial law, with an 8 p.m. curfew and censorship of press messages abroad. Dispatches discussing the fate of Diem and Nhu were carefully cut, forcing correspondents-at least for a while-to use precisely the same ruse they had employed against Diem's martial law period last summer: smuggling their files out to the cable offices in Hong Kong and Bangkok via cooperative airline passengers...
...Weapon. Minh's junta also suspended the constitution, dissolved the National Assembly. Yet, declared Minh's men, they were well aware of the fact that the best weapon to fight Communism is democracy and liberty. But at the same time they were aware of the fact-which Diem also knew-that total freedom in time of war is impossible. So the junta added somewhat nervously that it had no intention of establishing a "disorderly democratic regime...
...seized power in other nations, was looking for was a form of democracy within the discipline of war. Few doubted his intentions, but few forgot the paths of other soldier-leaders after the first pure bliss of revolution. "For a moment, imagine that another government replaced this one," Diem once ruminated in one of his endless soliloquies. "It could not help but result in civil war and dreadful dictatorship...
...stage. A national hero, who had fought long and courageously against great odds, had finally been brought down by fate-fate in this case being a combination of his avowed enemies, his former friends and, undoubtedly, his own flawed nature. When he took office nine years ago, Ngo Dinh Diem told his people, "Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die!" In whatever manner and for whatever reason Diem died, it was not because he retreated...
...with a Gun. At the beginning, few thought Diem would last nine months, much less nine years. The Geneva partition of 1954 condemned Viet Nam to be divided into a Communist state in the north and a state of almost total anarchy in the south. The capital city of Saigon was run by bandits. Control of the countryside was split among the private armies of two religous sects and almost anyone else...