Thich Quang Duc - June 11, 1963

[John]

On June 10, a spokesperson for Buddhists in Saigon privately alerted press contacts that "something important"  was going to happen the next morning.

On the morning of June 11, 1963 Thich Quang Duc freely and willingly gave his life for his cause.

Amazingly - even after creation - Thich Quang Duc's heart still did not burn.

Many people said that they saw Buddha's face in the sky that night, and the Buddha was weeping.
The Sacrifice Of Thích Qu?ng ??c: Sit With Me

[John]

- A variety of artists/many have honored Duc's sacrifice.
- The body was re-cremated, but the heart remained intact and did not burn.The intact heart relic is regarded as a symbol of compassion.
- President Kennedy said, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."

[John]

https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1518&bih=714&q=tich+quang+duk&oq=tich+quang+duk&gs_l=img.3...2742.11677.0.12199.14.14.0.0.0.0.193.1949.0j14.14.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..1.13.1772.Uq59r_ZIJ_A#

google images

[WithoutAPaddle]

A couple of years ago, I saw a clip of Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam. making this callous remark about Thich Quang Duc:

What have the Buddhist leaders done comparatively...the only thing they have done, they have barbecued one of their monks whom they have intoxicated, whom they have abused the confidence, and even that barbecuing was done not even with self-sufficient means because they used imported gasoline.

Fortunately for her, there were no TV stations in Vietnam at the time.  Stepping back from this bold incident, to this day, no one, and I mean no one, can possibly have any idea how complex the whole tortured history of the region we presently call Vietnam was.  Around the time of the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I started writing a response for a newspaper comment string on one aspect of it, and in doing so I found I had to elaborate on parts of my first draft so that others would understand it, which then forced me to expand it to magazine length, but then, to defend the integrity of some of my claims, I found myself writing paragraphs that were too exhaustive and detailed for magazine length writing while discovering gaps in my own knowledge that sent me on searches for information that were sometimes productive and sometimes not, so I gave up for now and will probably revive the project a few months before the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.

I will pass along a few items that will at least intrigue those who are unfamiliar with them.  In 1946, after the Japanese had left the part of Indochina that is now called Vietnam, the French colonialists returned and resumed looting it of most of its agricultural production. There was a relatively poor crop yield in 1946 but the French took "their share" anyway, leading to the starvation death of tens of thousands of Vietnamese in a region that had still managed to generate an agricultural surplus.  Ho Chi Minh had no trouble recruiting followers because it made sense to most Vietnamese to have an indigenous, nationalistic dictatorship rather than a Colonial dictatorship. Those people working in the rice paddies didn't even know what Communism and Capitalism were.

By 1953, France had increased its troop level to 190,000 and would eventually incur some 72.000 to 75,000 combat deaths, not to thwart the spread of Communism, which had a legal and robust political presence in France, but to keep stealing the Vietnamese agricultural production.  To put that military commitment in perspective, since France has one fourth the population of the United States, and since the United States lost "only" 58,000-something solders in the Vietnam, the proportionate cost in loss of lives paid by the French draft age population was five times as great as that of the United States.

By 1954, France had run out of young men to sacrifice for its commerce.  An agreement was reached by the warring parties, and the Geneva Peace Accords called for a temporary partition of three regions of Indochina: Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, to eventually become one sovereign nation, Vietnam, and in the transition phase, it was to be temporarily partitioned, with there ultimately being one national election.   But unfortunately for some involved parties, the United States had not run out of money to support non-reunification. 

The CIA advised Dwight Eisenhower that if a national election were held, Ho Chi Minh would win in a landslide.  That is not a crackpot version of history.  It comes from Dwight Eisenhower himself, in The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313:

...I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai...

The United States thus continued to do everything it could to thwart reunification.  The CIA determined that in order to have a chance of having an interim government established in South Vietnam that would oppose reunification, it was essential for a Catholic to be elected to rule it.  Even though only about 10% of the people in the South Vietnam partitioned region were Catholic, the CIA believed that if it could get the Catholic population up to 20% they could successfully rig the election, so they started a campaign called Operation: Passage to Freedom to encourage northern Catholics to move south.  That included giving each a one time payment that exceeded one year of per capita GDP and free moving transportation and promises of land and jobs that did not exist.  It also included a campaign of disinformation to scare them that included spreading stories of persecution and torture of Catholics that were not exaggerations but total fabrications, and the CIA even printed up counterfeit "inventory lists" that they claimed were government issued to require the citizens to list their possessions so that the Communist government could more efficiently take them.  The remarkable exploits of Major General Edward Geary Lansdale in that disinformation campaign have been diligently detailed by biographer Seth Jacobs in: Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam, 1950–1963. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-4447-8.

900,000 people, nearly all Catholics, were moved from the north to the south during that interregnum, and the plan worked fabulously.  In 1955, Diem "got" 98% of the vote in the interim election... but he ran stronger in Saigon, where he got 132% of the vote.  As Joseph Stalin has said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing.  Those who count the votes decide everything".

Diem then had to try to rule a country in which about 80% of the population was Buddhist and didn't want him, and which was assailed by the North Vietnamese military as well.   Diem clung to power for the next eight years largely by doing whatever he had to do to cling to power.  Eventually, his support by the United States waned.  I am not as knowledgeable about that aspect of the history of South Vietnam as I am about other aspects, so I can't write as comprehensively about it as I can about other aspects, but I would suspect that the United States had concluded to it satisfaction that if Diem was assassinated, the structure he had in place would result in the continuation of the non-unification policy it wanted.  I have read that the two guys who were planning on assassinating Diem actually ran their plan by someone at a low level in the US government and never head back from him, so that was good enough to be taken as a "go" even though they never explicitly got US approval.  I also have read that the assassination was set back by a day because one of them had overslept, due to an alarm clock failure.  That, I can't confirm, but it is one more story that I hope to eventually check out.

I just read an unconfirmed statement attributed to Ho Chi Minh, rhetorically asking, "How could the United States be so stupid as to allow" Diem to be assassinated, because he said that there was no way that the United States could get another government to pursue its anti-reunification policies.  Actually, we were stupider than that.  The only way we could then get a South Vietnamese government to pursue those policies was to not only pay for it, which we were doing all along, but to augment it with half a million United States troops.

I will next endeavor to learn what I can about South Vietnamese policies towards Buddhists after the assassination of Diem.   It surely was much better...  I hope.  Of course, they continued to get drafted and shot at, because the country was at war, but more likely, on a more equal basis.

[John]

Thank you very much for that info.

What would you say about a hunch that the CIA was involved with the June 11 event; at least to the extent of making absolutely certain it got VERY  wide coverage?

[John]

I made this t-shirt for the 50th anniversary:

[WithoutAPaddle]

What would you say about a hunch that the CIA was involved with the June 11 event; at least to the extent of making absolutely certain it got VERY  wide coverage?

Your question reminded me of a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon where the fire fighters were hampered by a severely leaky hose, and announcer William Conrad said something like, "... it seemed that Boris Badenov must have had a hand in it", and Natasha asked, "Boris dahlink, which hand did you have in it?" and Boris replied, "The one with the ice pick in it."

Update: Someone reported it at TV.com this way:

Rocky: Hokey smoke, the hose is full of holes.
Bullwinkle: What could've happened?
Rocky: I'll bet that Mr.Badley had a hand in this.
Boris: (from a distance) And guess which hand, Natasha.
Natasha: The one with the ice pick in it, dahlink.
Boris: You guessed, you clever little dickens, you.

[WithoutAPaddle]

"If they (The United States) want to assassinate me, it's easy. After that, just blame it on the Viet Cong or a coup d'etat plot." 

- Nguyen Van Thieu, Diem's successor, cited in Wikipedia, but only referenced to a Vietnamese language source, and with a broken link.

[KBCraig]

Another tidbit: Ho repeatedly begged Truman to support independence. He didn't trust the Soviets, and downright feared the Chinese.

The U.S. could prop up a shattered two-war ally with little left other than some rubber plantations in Indochina, or support independence for a people unknown to the world at large; Truman and the U.S. chose the French, and the rest is tragedy.

[Tom Sawyer]

Another tidbit: Ho repeatedly begged Truman to support independence. He didn't trust the Soviets, and downright feared the Chinese.

The U.S. could prop up a shattered two-war ally with little left other than some rubber plantations in Indochina, or support independence for a people unknown to the world at large; Truman and the U.S. chose the French, and the rest is tragedy.

Come on European Imperialism was the way things were done. White people from half a world away, is of course more just than brown people running their own destiny.

A friend referred to Vietnam as WWII continued.

[WithoutAPaddle]

Yearbook photo:



Members of the O.S.S. Deer Team with Viet Minh leaders, including Ho Chi Minh,
(standing third from left) during training in 1945. Henry Prunier is fourth from right.

This photo accompanied Henry Prunier's New York Times obituary.  Prunier was enlisted by the United States to teach General Giap of the Vietnamese how to throw grenades.  I'm sure that in future decades, the New York Times will get to run pictures of Al Qaeda terrorists we taught how to fire rifles at the Soviets.

From the Obituary:

In 1995, Mr. Prunier returned to Hanoi for a reunion with some of the surviving Viet Minh he had helped. Recognizing him, General Giap picked up an orange and displayed the grenade-lobbing technique Mr. Prunier had taught him.

"Yes, yes, yes!" the general exclaimed.

Obituary here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/asia/henry-a-prunier-army-operative-who-helped-trained-vietnamese-troops-dies-at-91.html