Reddit reviews Our Vietnam Nightmare

I've seen this mistake in American version of history too many time, it needs to be corrected.

 

The burning of the Buddhist monk during the Viet Nam war had nothing to do with religious persecution despite what the popularized version being told in Western history books and media. It was an isolated event exploited by both North Viet Nam and used by the U.S to gain their support to get deeply involved in the war.

 

The accusation that South Viet persecutes buddhists is completely made up by a minority of political Buddhists (led by Thich Tri Quang) that had ties to the communist regime. After the burning of Thich Quang Duc (famously depicted in video and images), the U.N sent a commission to study of religious persecution of the South Viet Nam government and found no justification for this accusation. This is talked about in Higgins' book, Our Vietnam Nightmare, p.62-63. Further more, the President Diem is portrayed as a religious bigot because he happened to be a Catholic, but this is also completely a made up accusation. Diem has deep respect for culture and a also learned man. He understood the implication of his Catholicism could be used against him so at the beginning of his presidency, he had staffed his cabinet equally of people from different religious faiths.

As for Thich Quang Duc, he was part of a small and extreme sect of Buddhism that practice suicide pact ritual. There were incidents of self-immolation from these Buddhist monks across China and North Vietnam after the war. But these incidents were never reported after the war because the Americans had already left. Duc's immolation was used as a political pawn by Quang and was eaten up by American media at the time. The rest is history.

 

More of this is well documented in two different books:

The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam by Geoffrey Shaw https://amzn.com/1586179357

Our Vietnam Nightmare by Marguerite Higgins https://amzn.com/0060118903

 

I've uploaded a chapter from Geoffrey Shaw's book particularly related to the Bhuddist crisis here for reference: http://imgur.com/a/bfVsm