Posted on 11/03/2017 9:00:28 AM PDT by Perseverando
Then there were the millions of South and North Vietnamese injured and killed during the war, followed by the "re-education" camp phase after the war ended.
I don't even want to think about the hundred of billions of dollars wasted on a needless neocon global war for someone else's democracy that never happened.
“Diem, the Ideal Vietnamese Leader “
My wife would not agree.
We have a long history of getting rid of foreign leaders who were successfully accomplishing the thing we wanted them to accomplish.
Diem
Shah of Iran
Ghadaffi
plenty of others.
The dude was corrupt as hell. Then he was a Catholic and determined to keep Buddhists in their place. Its retarded to think he could have changed the outcome of the war.
“We have a long history of getting rid of foreign leaders who were successfully accomplishing the thing we wanted them to accomplish.
Diem”
LOL!
“The dude was corrupt as hell. Then he was a Catholic and determined to keep Buddhists in their place. Its retarded to think he could have changed the outcome of the war.”
AMEN! And remember Buddhists were about 75% of the population.
I remember those days and how Madam Nhu was considered to be the equivalent of a “Dragon Lady”.
When they were overthrown, the joke was..”No Nhus is good news.”
Agree. It is generally regarded that assassinating him was a ham-handed mistake at best and a disaster at worst, but I don’t think it would have changed history either way, although my opinion is that ultimately he would have probably been more helpful than not.
Yes. No one said anything at the time. It was all Camelot, Camelot, Camelot, and JFK was perfect. Sure, he may have made a few little mistakes in the Bay of Pigs, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or, etc., etc., but he was still picture perfect!
I first learned about the assassination when I read the complete report on Tricky Dick’s Watergate scandal in the NY Times. There was a whole section of the paper, maybe 20 pages, that included every word. Buried in the middle was a short statement about how JFK sent the CIA to assassinate the Catholic President of South Vietnam, because the Buddhists were mad at him and a monk had committed suicide.
JFK was the first openly Catholic President, and he had a terrible time explaining that he wasn’t about to do whatever the Pope told him to. He leaned over backward to show that he wasn’t a Catholic. And he just HAD to murder his faithful ally in Vietnam because he didn’t want to be known as a CATHOLIC! Never mind that behind the scenes he was one of the worst Catholics ever, with at least two or three adulterous affairs every day.
So, he murdered our ally, who was brilliantly fighting the war with our minor help. With him gone, we either had to give up the whole area to the Communists, or we had to send in numberless troops to die in the jungles.
Every war JFK fought was just dreadful, and required the sacrifice of unprecedented numbers of drafted troops.
Interesting, November 2, 1963 Diem, 20 days later, Kennedy.
Wasn’t it Diem and his brother as well?
Bobby & JFK had that blood on their hands
” who was brilliantly fighting the war with our minor help.”
ROTFLMAO!
Wrong.
Wrong by a country mile.
Buddhists have never been more than about a 15% minority in VietNam, even combining the North and South.
The vast majority of VietNanese, primarily of the Kinh (Viet) ethnic group practice a folk religion that is based on ancestral and nature worship.
Buddhists simply appeared to be prominent in that they were used as shills both by the Communists and the foreign (including American) press.
“My wife would not agree.”
Interested readers would like to know why.
Diem's government won the war against the communists in the 1950’s. The Kennedy administration made the deal with the Communists in Laos the enabled the communists to build the Ho Chi Minh trail and infiltrate large numbers of North Vietnamese troops.
The Kennedy administration undermined the
Diem government. They then recruited corrupt military officials to murder ?Diem and his family.
Shortly after Diem was killed there was no stability as coup after coup took over south Viet Nam. LBJ then sent over 500.000 US troops into South Vietnam and had no strategy to win.
Diem was less corrupt than the governments that replaced him. Diem was less corrupt than LBJ.
If Diem had been supported there would have not have been the need for the large American military presence. South Vietnam woul not have turned communist.
“Interested readers would like to know why.”
She was a Buddhist in a country that was over 75% Buddhist but she and many others had to hide their religion.
Her classmates ‘disappeared’.
Her neighbors ‘disappeared’.
He was a cruel dictator.
The Kennedy-Johnson team knocked off a man they did not like and by doing so and agreeing to a coup, they insured that Ho Chi Min could easily sell, to Vietnamese north and south, the idea that every government in the south after that was just an American puppet. Nice going.
Not a good way to ‘prevent’ a war.
Ping to an interesting article.
The President and a third of the people were Catholic, because it had been a French colony, until the French left.
The Buddhists wanted their freedom, and at first considered the Catholics as their primary enemies, to be revolted against. After some years, they learned better, especially after watching Pol Pot kill millions of Buddhists for no particular reason, except that he felt like it. Most of the South Vietnam Buddhists came to understand that Communists were their worst enemies, not French Catholics. But the stupid liberals in the press here in America thought it was an evil war, and that it would be better to turn the whole of Southeast Asia over to the Communists. Meanwhile, instead of being advisers to the Vietnamese, our troops became the primary fighters, and endless lives were lost in the process. There would have been at least hundreds of thousands fewer Americans killed there if JFK hadn’t murdered our ally, and the Buddhists would have come around and realized that Catholics were less deadly to them than maniac Communists.
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