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For Wed., Nov. 8, 2017
~All Gave Some~Some Gave
All~God Bless America
ROUND UP OF ROYALS CONTINUES
The saviors of the Democrat Party
(Three of a kind that beats a full house…)
Charlie Hebdo Gets Fresh Death Threats Over Islam Cartoon
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo said Monday it was pressing charges after receiving fresh death threats over a cartoon of the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan who faces rape allegations.
The provocative magazine, which suffered a deadly jihadist attack in 2015 after publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, depicted Ramadan with a huge erection in its edition last Wednesday, saying: "I am the sixth pillar of Islam."
The Swiss academic, an Oxford professor and conservative Islamic intellectual in France, has been accused of rape by two women after the Harvey Weinstein scandal unleashed a wave of sexual abuse accusations worldwide.
Ramadan, 55, has furiously denied the accusations as a "campaign of lies launched by my adversaries."
"Rape," reads the caption on Charlie Hebdo's cover. "The defense of Tariq Ramadan."
Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau, the magazine's editor, said the threats and hate mail had "never really stopped" after the January 2015 jihadist attack in which 12 people were gunned down at its offices.
"Sometimes there are peaks when we receive explicit death threats on social media -- this has been the case once again," he told Europe 1 radio.
"It's always difficult to know if these are serious threats or not, but as a principle, we take them seriously and press charges."
The shooting at Charlie Hebdo was claimed by Al-Qaeda, with the jihadists notably seeking to punish the staunchly atheist magazine for printing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, forbidden in Islam.
The attack was the first in a wave of jihadist attacks in France over the past two years that have left more than 240 people dead.
Charlie Hebdo has continued to court controversy since the attack, notably with cartoons after the Barcelona attack and others that made light of an Italian earthquake that killed nearly 300 people.
The five pillars of Islam are the five basic practices obligatory for believers: faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
A minority of Sunni scholars considers jihad -- or holy struggle, which can have different meanings -- to be the sixth pillar of Islam.
Texas AG: Response to Church Shooting Should Be More Armed Law-Abiding Citizens, Not More Gun Control
by AWR HAWKINS
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) indicated during an interview with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade that the response to the Texas church shooting should be more armed law-abiding citizens rather than more gun control.
Paxton pointed out that there were numerous laws already on the books, including “laws against murder,” and the attacker violated those laws without hesitation. He observed, “So adding some other gun law, I don’t think would in any way change this guy’s behavior.”
He added:
It’s not clear to me that [the attacker] wasn’t already prevented from having a gun, given his history in the military. What ultimately may have saved some lives is … people that were outside the church that actually had guns that may have slowed this guy down and actually pursued him. So I would rather arm law-abiding citizens and make sure that they can prevent this from happening as opposed to trying to pass laws that would prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns.
TX AG: I would rather arm law-abiding citizens... as opposed to trying to pass laws that would prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns
On November 5, Breitbart News reported that a witness to the Sutherland Springs church shooting recounted that his neighbor grabbed a rifle, “took cover behind a car,” and shot at the attacker, thereby ending the attack.
KENS5 quoted the witness, Kevin Jordan, describing his neighbor’s actions:
Our neighbor, who’s a very good guy, a very big Christian, he’s the nicest person on the planet [and] will do anything for anyone around here. We’ve known him for years; he’s childhood friends with my dad. He came with his [gun], and he took cover behind a car, and he shot the guy. I’m not sure if it was inside the church and the guy was coming out, but if it wasn’t for him, the [attacker] would not have stopped.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
‘They’re Going to Try to Hide the Football’: Steve Bannon Calls Out GOP Establishment’s Push for Amnesty
by JOHN BINDER
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
The Republican establishment will “try to hide the football” in their latest effort to pass amnesty for nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded by an Obama-created federal program, says Breitbart News executive chairman and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
In a speech to the members of The Remembrance Project, an organization made up of the families of American victims who have been murdered at the hands of illegal aliens, Bannon exposed the latest efforts by GOP Senators and Congressmen to sell amnesty for illegal aliens to the American people while making false promises in exchange.
“This is a struggle, this is every day,” Bannon said of pushing back against an amnesty for illegal aliens. “The first struggle, as we often have, is the Republican establishment. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. By the way, there are no more games. There’s no more slipping this stuff in the middle of the night. By the way … I must have missed … I must have missed where they said they were going to slip in building a wall into an appropriations bill. Where’s our wall? Where’s that wall?”
“You’re going to have a fight in the next 30 days, okay. In the next 40 days, next two months okay,” Bannon said. “You’re going to have it in the House and you’re going to have it in the Senate. And they’re going to try to hide the football and they’re going to try to tell you that they’ve got enhanced border security and they’ve got 10 times more ICE agents and they’re going to have a … [an amnesty] is never going to happen again. Right, that this is never going to happen again. They’re lying. And here’s the important thing, you know they’re lying. You’re on to their game now.”
For the last few months, GOP establishment politicians have attempted to sell an amnesty for illegal alien recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which would set them on track to gain U.S. citizenship.
As Breitbart News reported, if Republicans and Democrats signed off on an amnesty plan for DACA illegal aliens, it could trigger a chain migration to the U.S. where 9.9 million to 19 million foreign nationals enter the country over the next several decades.
Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 DACA recipients saw their protected status revoked for being involved in gang activity or suspected/convicted of a felony. Due to a loophole in the DACA program, more than 39,000 illegal aliens have been able to obtain Green Cards and more than 1,000 naturalized.
Former DNC Chair Drops Another Bombshell:
Washington Examiner by: Daniel Chaitin
By Tim Pierce via Wikimedia Commons
In yet another bombshell from Donna Brazile's upcoming book, the former interim head of the Democratic National Committee describes the paranoia she went through surrounding the Russia-linked hacks of Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign.
In the memoir, which will have the title, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House," Brazile talks about the mysterious murder of DNC data staffer Seth Rich, which some conspiracy theorists say is because he leaked internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks, and wrote about how she felt her own life was in danger.
Brazile says she shut the blinds to her office window so snipers could not see her, according the Washington Post. She also installed surveillance cameras in her home and fretted over whether the Russians had bugged her DNC executive suite with listening devices.
Brazile took over as head of the DNC after Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz bowed out after emails published by WikiLeaks showed she and other officials worked to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Chilling motive uncovered in Texas church massacre
The gunman who opened fire in a small Texas church, killing 26 people during worship services, sent threatening text messages to his mother-in-law before the attack and had been confronted about domestic violence at least twice in the last five years, authorities said Monday.
The deadliest mass shooting in state history claimed multiple members of some families, with the dead ranging from 18 months to 77 years old, and tore gaping holes in a town with a population of just 400 people.
The massacre appeared to stem from a domestic situation and was not religiously motivated, Texas Department of Public Safety Regional Director Freeman Martin said.
Based on evidence at the scene, investigators believe Devin Patrick Kelley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by armed bystanders and crashed his car.
The 26-year-old shooter also used his cellphone to tell his father that he had been shot and did not think he would survive, authorities said.
The investigation showed that Kelley had displayed a pattern of violence spanning years.
In 2014, sheriff’s deputies went to his home to investigate a domestic violence complaint involving him and his then-girlfriend. People in the house said there was no problem, and no arrests were made. Kelley married the girlfriend two months later.
That same year, Kelley was discharged from the Air Force for assaulting his wife and child and had served 12 months’ confinement after a 2012 court-martial.
He had also been charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in 2014 in Colorado and had been the focus of a protective order issued in that state in 2015.
The gunman’s family relationships at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs were uncertain. The sheriff said the shooter’s former in-laws sometimes attended services at the church but were not there on Sunday. Martin said the text messages were sent to the gunman’s mother-in-law, who attended the church. It was unclear if they were referring to the same people.
Investigators were looking at social media posts Kelley made in the days before the attack, including one that appeared to show an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon.
Kelley, who had a license to serve as an unarmed private security guard, did not have a license to carry a concealed handgun. Martin said.
Three guns were recovered. A Ruger AR-556 rifle was found at the church, and two handguns were recovered from the suspect’s vehicle, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The church has posted videos of its Sunday services on a YouTube channel, and authorities say they are reviewing video footage recorded inside the church.
About 20 other people were wounded, 10 of whom were still hospitalized Monday in critical condition.
The deadliest mass shooting in state history claimed multiple members of some families, with the dead ranging from 18 months to 77 years old, and tore gaping holes in a town with a population of just 400 people.
The massacre appeared to stem from a domestic situation and was not religiously motivated, Texas Department of Public Safety Regional Director Freeman Martin said.
Based on evidence at the scene, investigators believe Devin Patrick Kelley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by armed bystanders and crashed his car.
The 26-year-old shooter also used his cellphone to tell his father that he had been shot and did not think he would survive, authorities said.
The investigation showed that Kelley had displayed a pattern of violence spanning years.
In 2014, sheriff’s deputies went to his home to investigate a domestic violence complaint involving him and his then-girlfriend. People in the house said there was no problem, and no arrests were made. Kelley married the girlfriend two months later.
That same year, Kelley was discharged from the Air Force for assaulting his wife and child and had served 12 months’ confinement after a 2012 court-martial.
He had also been charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in 2014 in Colorado and had been the focus of a protective order issued in that state in 2015.
The gunman’s family relationships at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs were uncertain. The sheriff said the shooter’s former in-laws sometimes attended services at the church but were not there on Sunday. Martin said the text messages were sent to the gunman’s mother-in-law, who attended the church. It was unclear if they were referring to the same people.
Investigators were looking at social media posts Kelley made in the days before the attack, including one that appeared to show an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon.
Kelley, who had a license to serve as an unarmed private security guard, did not have a license to carry a concealed handgun. Martin said.
Three guns were recovered. A Ruger AR-556 rifle was found at the church, and two handguns were recovered from the suspect’s vehicle, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The church has posted videos of its Sunday services on a YouTube channel, and authorities say they are reviewing video footage recorded inside the church.
About 20 other people were wounded, 10 of whom were still hospitalized Monday in critical condition.
“Hillary Clinton is a murderer” top Democrat confesses!?
Did Hillary Clinton order the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich?
Ever since Rich was gunned on July 10, 2016 rumors have swirled that he was a victim of the Clinton family’s unscrupulous lust for power.
One person has recently come forward to add weight to the rumors — and it has blindsided the Democratic Party.
Former chair of the Democratic National Committe Donna Brazile.
Brazile is a very powerful and well connected person. Even so, she says she was scared after the unexplained murder of Rich last year.
So scared, in fact, that she hid inside and refused to open her blinds in case snipers were coming for her.
That’s according to Matt Drudge, owner of the conservative news website The Drudge Report, who read Brazile’s startling confession in an advanced copy of her forthcoming tell-all book.
Brazile writes she was haunted by murder of DNC Seth Rich, and feared for her own life, shutting the blinds so snipers could not see her 
2:21 PM - Nov 4, 2017
The circumstances surrounding Rich’s 2016 murder, officially ruled a robbery gone bad,
Indeed, Rich’s death was so bizarre, rumors began almost immediately that his murder was to protect a Clinton conspiracy. Critics point to strange details that seem to indicate the shooting wasn’t a robbery — for example, none of Rich’s personal belongings were stolen.
Rather than a botched robbery, critics say Rich’s murder was ordered as political revenge.
Some conservatives, including Fox News’ Sean Hannity, have openly speculated that Rich was murdered because he was the source leaking Clinton’s emails to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The rumors heated up in May when a private investigator for the Rich family said he’d discovered evidence that was being covered up.
“My investigation shows someone within the D.C. government, Democratic National Committee, or Clinton team is blocking the murder investigation from going forward,” former homicide detective Rod Wheeler told Fox News in May.
It’s an accusation the Rich family and the Clinton campaign have both venomously denied.
In fact, Fox News was forced to retract the story days later when Wheeler’s credibility was called into question.
However, the former chair of the DNC being so haunted by the murder she feared for her own life?
Does that sound like a simple botched robbery on the streets of Washington, D.C.?
While not proof enough to send Hillary and her team away to jail, Brazile’s startling confession will certainly add fuel to the rumor mill.
Brazile: Haunted by Seth Rich Murder, Closed Blinds So Snipers Couldn’t See Her
BY KIM SMITH
Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile is making some huge waves with her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.”
Perhaps one of the most intriguing revelations to come from the memoir was the fact that Brazile found herself fearing for her life after Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was fatally shot in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood in the early morning hours of July 2016.
Conservative and founder of the aggregate news website, The Drudge Report, Matt Drudge tweeted about Brazile’s fear to his 545,000 followers, raising speculation about what Brazile knows about Rich’s death.
“Brazile writes she was haunted by murder of DNC Seth Rich, and feared for her own life, shutting the blinds so snipers could not see her,” tweeted Drudge on Saturday afternoon.
That information, allegedly from Brazile’s book, paints a bleak picture of the toxic atmosphere of the DNC.
In an article covering Brazile’s desire to replace Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with Sen. Joe Biden as the party’s nominee after Clinton’s fainting spell in September, Washington Post writer Phillip Rucker also wrote that Brazile’s book indicated that she was haunted by Rich’s still-unsolved murder.
Brazil “feared for her own life, shutting the blinds to her office window so snipers could not see her and installing surveillance cameras at her home,” Rucker wrote.
The question, of course, is why Brazile would feel as though she was a target.
If you’ll recall, it was reported in May last year that Brazile tried to put an end to investigations into Rich’s death. She allegedly called the police and the Rich family, demanding to know why a private investigator was “snooping” into the staffer’s death.
So, at one point, it would seem that Brazile was trying to stop the Rich investigation.
Why?
We don’t know the answer to that question.
However, knowing what we know about the mysterious deaths surrounding the Clintons, a fear of being knocked off is not irrational at all.
Last year, WND covered some 33 mysterious deaths linked to former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dating all the way back to the 1970s.
There’s little doubt Brazile is aware of this list.
Please like and share this story on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about how Donna Brazile was haunted by the data of Seth Rich and thought she might become a target.
100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead
The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.
By
David Satter
Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.
The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.
Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.
The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.
But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.
In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”
This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”
Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.
The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.
To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.
If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.
The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”
That these sentiments were neither accidental nor ephemeral was made clear in 2008, when the Russian Parliament, the Duma, for the first time adopted a resolution regarding the 1932-33 famine that had killed millions. The famine was caused by draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the Duma acknowledged the tragedy, it added that “the industrial giants of the Soviet Union,” the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dam, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.
While the Soviet Union redefined human nature, it also spread intellectual chaos. The term “political correctness” has its origin in the assumption that socialism, a system of collective ownership, was virtuous in itself, without need to evaluate its operations in light of transcendent moral criteria.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.
Many in the West were deeply indifferent. They used Russia to settle their own quarrels. Their reasoning, as the historian Robert Conquest wrote, was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.
Today the Soviet Union and the international communist system that once ruled a third of the world’s territory are things of the past. But the need to keep higher moral values preeminent is as important now as it was in the early 19th century when they first began to be seriously challenged.
In 1909, the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “our educated youth cannot admit the independent significance of scholarship, philosophy, enlightenment and universities. To this day, they subordinate them to the interests of politics, parties, movements and circles.”
If there is one lesson the communist century should have taught, it is that the independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is the conviction on which all of civilization depends.
Mr. Satter is the author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale).
This Man Could Have Kept Vietnam From Communists, But The Kennedy Administration Okayed His Assassination
Geoffrey Shaw’s account is a page-turning, sorrowful account of how the United States betrayed a man of remarkable character and political genius.
By Casey ChalkOn 2 November, groups of Vietnamese men, women, and children will gather for memorial services across the world to honor the death of a man largely forgotten in American historical memory. Once this man was a household name, frequently featured on the front pages of our nation’s newspapers and spoken from the mouths of reporters on the nightly news.
That man is Ngo Dinh Diem, president of the Republic of Vietnam (better known as South Vietnam) from 1955 to 1963, his rule and life cruelly ended in a military coup tacitly supported by the U.S. government. A recent book on Diem’s life, “The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam,” by military historian Geoffrey Shaw clarifies why Americans would do well to mourn the tragic loss of a man many deemed to be Vietnam’s best chance of defeating communism.
Diem was rarity in history as a devout Catholic head of state in Asia. He has not been served well by the most popular American appraisals of the Vietnam War era. Less than two months ago, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s popular PBS series on the Vietnam War devoted much of its second episode to Diem’s rise and fall. Burns’ portrayal appears to borrow heavily from an earlier PBS documentary on the Vietnam War produced by foreign correspondent Stanley Karnow that aired in 1983. Both tell essentially the same story.
An Overplayed Trope: Diem the Antipathetic Ally
According to the Burns-Novick and Karnow narrative, Diem, a member of a well-respected, well-connected aristocratic Vietnamese Catholic family, served in various French colonial government positions prior to Vietnam’s independence in the 1950s. Vietnam’s division between north and south at the 17th parallel at the Geneva Conference in 1954 enabled Diem to assert his authority over South Vietnam with the support of the French and Americans.
A referendum held in the south in 1955 — one many viewed as illegitimate due to fraud — sealed Diem’s role as president of the country. With the approval of the United States, Diem shortly thereafter rejected the Geneva stipulation that the north and south were to hold nationwide, conciliatory elections in 1956 to determine the government of a unified Vietnam, allegedly because he knew he would lose to the more popular Ho Chi Minh, who ruled the communist north.
As the years progressed, Diem and his notorious brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were plagued by turmoil within his administration, failing government programs across the countryside, and rising popular support for the communist insurgency. The brothers in turn pursued ever-more repressive measures to preserve their authority. Secret police forces led by Nhu imprisoned, tortured, and murdered enemies of the regime, while government policies enriched the country’s Catholic minority to the detriment of the majority-Buddhist nation.
Eventually, the Vietnamese could take no more. Protests erupted across the country, resulting in some of the most iconic moments of the Vietnam War era. Photos of the public self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức ultimately scored American photographer Malcolm Browne a Pulitzer Prize, and seemed to encapsulate the degree of resentment among the Vietnamese populace towards Diem and his brother.
The two, fearing the loss of their authority, pushed even harder on the Buddhist protesters, while Washington, which by this point was pouring significant financial and military resources into the country, grew increasingly impatient with the seemingly intransigent and incompetent Diem regime.
Members of the John F. Kennedy administration, finding Diem an intractable force increasingly hostile to U.S. interests, gave the green-light to leaders in the south Vietnamese military to remove Diem from power. A coup initiated on 1 November, 1963 drove the brothers into hiding. By the next day, their hideout in a Catholic Church discovered, they were both dead, murdered in the back of a military truck.
Although many of the details above are true, Shaw’s work shows that the overall theme — Diem the troublesome, dictatorial politician — is far from accurate.
Diem, the Ideal Vietnamese Leader
Shaw’s biography of Diem paints a far different picture of “America’s Mandarin.” For starters, Diem was a deeply religious man, whose Catholic faith was central to every decision in his life. Often attracted to the religious life, Diem had to be constantly pushed to embrace his natural skills as an administrator and politician.
Diem had a reputation both as an ascetic scholar and a capable bureaucratic, one who seemed to perfectly fit the role of the ideal Vietnamese Confucian leader. Indeed, as Shaw shows, Ho Chi Minh admired Diem’s austerity, and likely sought to emulate it. Even at the height of his power, Diem lived meagerly, and was known to constantly give money away to any in need. He was known to rise early every day to attend Mass, and worked brutal 16-hour days.
Nor was he a distant, removed politician unfamiliar with the people he governed. According to many first-hand accounts, Diem seemed most alive when tramping through the Vietnamese countryside meeting with peasants, hearing their stories, and seeking to improve their lives. Nor is “Diem the anti-Buddhist” a fair caricature. Diem’s government poured large sums of money into supporting the preservation or revival of Buddhist buildings and organizations.
The Buddhist protesters who so famously undermined Diem’s regime in the months leading up to his ouster were in fact a minority within the south, incited by Buddhist extremist leaders very likely supported by the communists. Rather than a reflection of the teetering authority of the government, the Buddhist crisis was more likely a propaganda effort to obstruct what so many contemporary accounts and historical documents suggest: Diem and his brother were incrementally winning on both the political and military fronts.
A Biased Media, an Ambivalent Government
So how have we come to have such a skewed perception of Diem and his reign as president of South Vietnam? According to Shaw, two sources share the majority of the blame: an American press heavily biased against Diem, and a circle of senior government officials — led by Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman — hell-bent on replacing him.
Correspondents from such publications as The New York Times and Washington Post, contrary to their portrayal by Burns and Novick’s television series, were often junior reporters in search of the next sexy story to burnish their credentials. Many spent most of their time in Saigon and other major cities, inevitably drawn into the circles of rumor and intrigue that represented only a segment of Vietnamese society. This created a skewed perception of Vietnamese popular opinion, which was particularly troublesome given that Diem’s efforts were focused largely on protecting and improving the lot of poor South Vietnamese farmers, who made up a majority of the population.
Throughout the Kennedy administration, the press corps published article after article condemning just about everything Diem did, while urging his removal. The media’s presentation of events on the ground were far more negative than those military assessments offered, or those of U.S. Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who supported Diem’s regime. The media’s hatchet job was so over-the-top that U.S. officials on a number of occasions complained directly to the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post.
Harriman, a classic example of a condescending WASP bureaucrat, was widely known to despise Diem for resisting U.S. policy.
The Buddhist uprising of 1963 should be interpreted within this context, with Buddhist demonstrators (often protesting in English!) seeking to gain the attention of American journalists eager for the next breaking story.
As for Kennedy’s administration, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman led a cadre of officials within the government vehemently opposed to Diem’s regime. Much of this stemmed from Harriman’s distaste for Diem’s attempts to maintain autonomy over his government, the latter often spurning U.S. directives he viewed as misguided, if not a threat to the survival of his country.
Probably the most famous example is Harriman’s support for the neutrality of neighboring Laos, a policy that allowed the communists to take over large parts of the Laotian countryside and use it to transfer fighters and materiel to communist insurgents (the notorious Vietcong) in the south. The route through Laos became known, jokingly, as the “Averell Harriman Memorial Highway.” Diem was adamant in calling this out for what it was: a direct attack on his nation’s security and viability. Harriman, a classic example of a condescending WASP bureaucrat, was widely known to despise Diem for resisting U.S. policy.
Shaw’s research shows it was Harriman who instigated and led growing support within the Kennedy administration for Diem’s removal, consistently setting the tone of cabinet discussions as explicitly anti-Diem. As would be expected, he sought to sideline those individuals — like Nolting — who offered a different, more sympathetic take. Harriman also relied heavily on the biased reporting of the American media, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Marguerite Higgins observing:
And thus is history recast. All those Vietnamese-speaking Americans circling the countryside for the purpose of testing Vietnamese opinion; all those American officers gauging the morale of the troops… all those dispatches from Ambassador Nolting — an army of data — collectors in reasonable agreement had been downgraded in favor of press dispatches stating opposite conclusions. It was the first time that I began to comprehend, in depth and in some sorrow, what was meant by the power of the press.
Harriman’s argument — that Diem’s persecution of Buddhists had “made it impossible for the United States to back him” — eventually won in the White House, despite a congressional fact-finding mission in late October 1963 (the month before the assassination) that concluded Washington should stick with Diem. The White House ignored the report, and a wealth of other information, and communicated to Vietnamese military coup plotters they would not oppose Diem’s removal.
The men who supported the coup surely must have known what would happen to Diem and his brother. When the two were discovered inside the Church of Saint Francis Xavier in Cholon on 2 November, soldiers acting on coup leaders’ orders secured them inside a personnel carrier, where their executioner “cut out their gallbladders while they were still alive, and then shot them.”
This was the ignominious end to an American ally, a man whom observers — Americans, French, British, Australian, and even North Vietnamese — believed (or in the case of the communists, feared) was Saigon’s best chance to preserve an independent South Vietnam. In an ironic twist of fate, the man at the helm of the administration responsible for Diem’s demise was himself assassinated three weeks later in Dallas, Texas. The rest, unfortunately, is in the words of Nolting, a “most unsavory story” of missed opportunities and lost lives.
Setting the Record Straight
Ngo Dinh Diem came to power in South Vietnam through the help of the United States. Burns-Novick’s film and Karnow suggest even this was a farce, given Diem’s ultimate rejection of the planned 1956 nationwide elections, though Shaw’s careful research proves this a problematic thesis, as well. Although the communists quite expectedly called “foul” when Diem demurred on elections, Ho Chi Minh’s government had already been in direct violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords by building up their military forces and supporting communist insurgent networks in the south.
Much of the data remains unreleased by a communist Vietnamese government eager to preserve a certain narrative regarding Diem’s rule.
Meanwhile, in the north, the communists were busy suppressing revolts, murdering thousands of people during their unpopular and poorly contrived land reform efforts. Moreover, as Shaw argues, their flagrant violation of the Laotian neutrality agreement years later proves the communists would never have allowed a free and fair nationwide election anyway. Diem simply saw the sham for what it was.
Shaw’s account of the rise and fall of this ideal Confucian, Catholic Vietnamese leader is a page-turning, if terribly sorrowful account of how the United States betrayed a man of remarkable character and political genius. It is steeped in primary and secondary sources, and many years in the making. Perceived weaknesses of the book — such as its possible under-reliance on Vietnamese, rather than Western sources — should be tempered by the acknowledgement that much of that data remains unreleased by a communist Vietnamese government eager to preserve a certain narrative regarding Diem’s rule.
For those interested in understanding a different perspective on the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam than that peddled by the fiercely anti-Diem Burns-Novick and Karnow documentaries, “The Lost Mandate of Heaven” is a much-needed antidote. Shaw not only sets the record straight on a man who deserves our esteem rather than our enmity, he provides a valuable lesson on carefully vetting the sources we should rely on to rightly judge men’s character, motives, and ability. As Diem’s story proves, our judgments may determine the fates of nations.
This article has been updated to reflect the co-directorship of the Burns-Novick documentary.
Casey Chalk is a graduate student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College.
G’ day…Ciao…Helen and Moe Lauzier
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