Word: diem
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...they believe, will bring the good liberals back to power, and put an end once and for all to the Nixonian onslaught of fascism. At the same time, American withdrawal from Indochina will end once and for all the wave of liberal and radical protest that made Nixon, like Diem before him, believe repressive methods necessary. So much for the profit Democrats hope to make off of this national 'tragedy.' When the Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War profited to consolidate the rule of the Northern middle-class, when the Democrats profited from the Depression to enact...
...failure of democracy in Vietnam not on the conditions that made their definition of democracy inadequate, but on the one factor in the situation that they could readily change--the South Vietnamese government. Because it was loyal to the ideal of political democracy, therefore, the Kennedy Administration overthrew General Diem. And because a merely political democracy was impossible in Vietnam, General Diem's successors inevitably ruled even less democratically than...
...that the Buddhist peasants could hope to overthrow the largely Catholic middle class. Just as the French middle-class Marx wrote about found that the democracy it believed in endangered its rule and so accepted the dictatorship of Napoleon III, Vietnamese liberals found themselves accepting the dictatorship of General Diem, and refusing to hold a national election, as they had promised...
...Eisenhower Administration encouraged Diem to cancel the '56 election, in the belief that a democratic election would bring communists to power throughout Vietnam, and so end democracy there once and for all. It was a curious preview of later Administration reasoning: cancelling elections to protect democracy smacks of destroying villages in order to save them. But the confusion was inevitable, given that the preservation of political democracy and the suppression of economic democracy was a basic aim of American foreign policy. Political democracy without economic democracy was impossible in Vietnam. The communist peasants out-numbered the liberal middle-class...
...just as had the previously democratic middle-and upper-classes of those countries. Franco's Spain and the Afrikaaners' South Africa, after all, are bulwarks of The Free World. But most Americans do not really like to defend these countries, much as Vietnamese liberals were not really happy with Diem. American supporters of a right-wing dictatorship, therefore, do not emphasize its dictatorial character--most of them dislike dictatorships themselves. They are willing to accept a dictatorship only because they believe it is the only alternative to radical change, and only because their commitment is shaky enough so that they...