Word: minh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Buddhism was one of the first institutions affected when pro-Western governments in Cambodia, Laos and South Viet Nam were replaced five years ago by Communist regimes. In Viet Nam, bonzes managed to keep the pagodas open by strategically placing busts of Ho Chi Minh opposite altars crowded with Buddha images. In the mountainous kingdom of Laos, the new Communist rulers were less tolerant. Monks in Luang Prabang were lucky to escape with re-education in "seminar camps." Many others who had become wealthy by selling protective amulets to hill-tribe animists had their magic severely tested by Pathet...
Neither Ho Chi Minh nor the CIA was able to find a way of using Buddhism as a rallying point. The only time Indochina's Buddhists were roused to unified action was in the early 1960s, when harassment by Viet Nam's Catholic minority provoked a series of public demonstrations that helped topple Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem...
Indochina's current Communist regimes seek their own middle way to deal with their Buddhist populations. In South Viet Nam, people are free to worship, but those who meditate with the 15 monks (out of 30) who remain at the Vinh Nghiem pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City are reminded by the bust of Uncle Ho and numerous red banners that the religion is tolerated only as an appendage of the state. In Laos, over the past five years, one-fourth of the peasant population of 3 million have swum or rafted across the Mekong River to Thailand...
...Hanoi vowed to crush accounts for 60% of the South's economic activity. Out of necessity, the regime has tacitly accepted the fondness that the entrepreneurial Saigonese have for profits-and even the still treasured U.S. dollar. Following a visit to what is now officially called Ho Chi Minh City, TIME Correspondent David DeVoss filed this report...
...civil rights is outstanding, his foreign policy tragic. Viet Nam defied a political solution as he understood the term. "I think he wrongly thought that the same assumptions prevailed there that prevailed here," says Moyers. "He'd say, 'My God, I've offered Ho Chi Minh $100 million to build a Mekong Valley. If that'd been George Meany he'd have snapped...