Word: diem
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opinion she makes the Diem government seemingly and literally weak and indecisive. An impulsive, violent and radical person should not have the authority to shape the destiny of a country over which she has no legal powers...
Indeed an inaccurate allegation has been made which may impugn my motives. The truth is that the Ngo Dinh Diem government did not expropriate any property of mine by application of its land reform of 1956. By that time most of the land I had in excess of the allowed 247 acres had been abandoned by me and even by the peasants because of insecurity in that area of the province of Rach-Gia during the long Indo-Chinese war of 1946-54. This can be checked at the Department of Land Reform in Saigon and will give an idea...
Sacking the pagoda's main altar, the raiders carted away the charred heart of Buddhist Martyr Thich Quang Due, who last June was the first of five Buddhists to burn himself to death in pro test against the Diem government's anti-Buddhist drive. But the Buddhists managed to spirit out of the building the receptacle holding Quang Due's ashes. "The ashes are holy," said one monk. "We would give 15 lives to defend them." Two other monks escaped over the back wall of Xa Loi (pronounced sah loy) into the grounds of the adjoining...
...Diem government, the crackdown obviously seemed necessary to protect the regime-and enforce the law of the land-against Buddhist defiance. But it was brutal, nonetheless, and it aroused a strong new wave of sympathy for the Buddhists. It also put U.S. policy in South Viet Nam, which involves the lives and safety of 14,000 U.S. troops, into an agonizing dilemma. While often unhappy with Diem, the U.S. has proceeded on the assumption that it was safer to stick with him than risk the chaos that might surround a switch to a new, unknown and unpredictable regime...
Boola, Boola. Until last week, prodded by the U.S., Diem had displayed an apparent willingness to conciliate the Buddhists. Feeling betrayed by Diem's crackdown, one ranking U.S. embassy officer said: "All the time they've been preaching conciliation to us, they've evidently been planning just the opposite." The Buddhist crisis had begun as a religious one, but gradually turned into a major political conflict. The Buddhists are far from passive martyrs. Their religious and social demands-a fairly modest package demanding full equality with the country's Roman Catholics-had never sounded crucial, especially...