>People who had it coming
>Diem
>Has autistic spasm over Buddhist flags
>Decides to have them torn down despite the obvious backlash from a majority Buddhist country.
>Protests ensue
>Kills, arrests, and even shut down almost all educational institutions
>Some soldiers start joining the protests
>Oh shit nigga, might be a good time to end this dispute
>Doesn't end dispute
>Coup launched and killed along with his brother in a blaze of gunfire.
>ywn enjoy BBQ with Madame Nhu
youtube.com
Don't forget
>Army is starting to seriously consider a coup
>Buddhists are protesting in every city and setting themselves on fire in front of a global television audience
>you know what would be a great idea
>we get the Army and the Buddhists fighting each other
>have the ARVN special forces, loyal to your brother, dress up as regular Army guys and raid and demolish multiple Buddhist temples across the country, killing hundreds
>protests increase in severity to where Diem is forced to declare martial law, which makes the future coup way easier
>when the US finds out what actually happened, they're so irritated that they tell the Army to go ahead and get this shit over with
And yet despite all that Diem was still far superior to his corrupt and incompetent successors
>mfw I could have stopped it
>mfw all those Buddhist cunts crying about MUH OPPRESSION get sent to "re-education camps" after glorious reunification
>Diem was acceptable because he wasn't just as bad as his successors
whataboutism.jpg
so apparently this book claims the man did nothing wrong and was the victim of an anti catholic conspiracy
anyone who knows anything about it?
Then what's the point of this thread? Even one of the coup plotters admitted that there really wasn't a viable candidate to replace Diem with
I haven't read that one, but Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken has a similar revisionist line (except Diem was the victim of starry-eyed liberal American journalists, not ant-catholics)
The tl;dr being that Henry Cabot Lodge repeatedly undermined Diem by insisting on reforms (thus making him look like an American puppet), and that the Diem regime was making significant progress against the Viet Cong right up until his assassination - at which point post-coup intertia allowed the VC to get their shit together while the generals blundered and squabbled over how to run South Vietnam
Let's be real, the US needed to use Diem as an excuse to pull out of Vietnam and focus on Laos and Cambodia where there was a reasonable chance of winning the war.
Even if Diem was the best leader, he still wasn't good enough to beat Ho Chi Minh.
The US "needed" Diem because they had to have a fall guy to blame everything on (instead of their own repeated fuckups), like ~90% of the American take on why they lost the Vietnam War
>"Welp, South Vietnam was a lost cause anyway, the only mistake we made was intervening USA USA USA"
If South Vietnam didn't suck, Ap Bac would never have happened and there never would have been any call to Americanize the war.
Saying there was none better doesn't mean he could was a good president. Was there anything stopping him from running a less catholic hard-line policy?
And Ap Bac was a defeat because Colonel Vann fucked up repeatedly, but rather than accept even partial blame simply blamed it entirely on the South Vietnamese, and indirectly on Diem's regime - which Sheen and Halberstam (due to their burning loathing of the Diem regime) ate up without the slightest critical appraisal of Vann's actions
>DUDE CHARGE ACROSS WET RICE PADDIES YOU COWARDLY GOOKS LMAO
>Oh shit, that's a dumb idea - welp, uh, it was them dumb gooks that wanted to do it, I had nothing to do with it!
>Was there anything stopping him from running a less catholic hard-line policy
Under Diem's regime Buddhism in Vietnam had flourished, in part due to funding the creation/renovation of thousands of Buddhist temples, and that Diem had multiple Buddhists in his cabinet. Diem enforced the law against religious flags precisely because the display of Vatican flags earlier had been inappropriate - not because "fuck those heretics"
>have such incompetent officer corps that you lose fights when you have a 4-1 advantage
>this isn't a sign of a bad government
His entire graft network was catholic
>it's ok when we do it but not when you do it as you've always done
Hmm
Hmmm...it's almost as if assaulting an entrenched position in difficult terrain might be more difficult than an advantage in numbers would make it seem
>wtf? we can't fly our religion's flags in public?!? this is literally like the Inquisition all over again!
>we've been doing this for hundreds of years but some cathocuck is stopping us from a benign freedom of expression wtf?
wasted trips
>A
>FUCKING
>FLAG
>run a Catholic theo-oligarchy
>in a majority Buddhist country
The only thing I can think of that's even half that stupid is the Afghan government cracking down on Islam in the late 70s because muh opiate of the masses.
t. Bootlicker
See That's literally the only thing used to prove Diem's "anti-Buddhist" policies
>wtf? he banned the display of ALL religious flags after recognising how provocatively sectarian the display of Vatican flags was?!?
It's still funny that most of the Buddhist protestors probably ended up in North Vietnamese re-education camps anyway lmao
tandfonline.com
>Buddhists immolate themselves in protest against Diem's oppression
>Rest of the world: WTF? We have to stop this!
>Buddhists immolate themselves in protest against communist oppression
>Rest of the world: Ehhh, they probably had it coming