User:VnTruth

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Contents

[edit] Background

Ngô Đình Diệm was born in Huế, the original capital of the Nguyễn Dynasty of Vietnam. His Ngô family was Roman Catholic dating back to the seventeenth Century.[1] He was one of the highest ranking officials of the Nguyễn Dynasty under Emperor Bảo Đại before World War II but resigned once it became clear that the French would not honor their commitment to delegate real power to Vietnamese officials.[2] He was nationalistic, devoutly Catholic, anti-Communist, and practiced the social philosophy of personalism. [3]

In 1945, he was imprisoned and exiled to China following conflicts with anti-French Communist forces that were gaining power in Vietnam. After his release, he refused to join in the brief post-war government of Hồ Chí Minh, the Communist leader, and went into exile in the United States.

[edit] Rise to Power

In 1954, Diệm returned to be appointed Prime Minister of South Vietnam, by former Emperor and then Chief of State Bảo Đại, on the condition that he be given total control over all civilian and military matters.[4] By this time, the French had been defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and were ready to withdraw from Indochina. Many Americans and Europeans held out little hope for the future of South Vietnam under Diệm's leadership, with one American official describing his government to Time magazine as being held together by "Scotch tape, bits of string and putty."[5]

On October 23, 1955, Diệm held a referendum asking the people to choose whether he or Bảo Đại, who was still in France, would be chief of state.[6] One historian claims that on the day of the referendum, Diệm's agents guarded the polls, and that the votes for Diệm in areas such as Saigon exceeded the number of registered voters. This historian also interviewed an individual in Hue who claimed that after he and his family voted for Bảo Đại, they were assaulted by Diệm's agents.[7] In contrast, another historian cites the United States Ambassador to Vietnam as reporting that he found no evidence of fraud or intimidation on the day of the voting; however, this historian acknowledges that in the weeks preceding the referendum, Diệm's policeman and soldiers stifled pro-Bảo propaganda, while Diệm's political supporters saturated the country with pro-Diệm propagaganda.[8] Over 98 percent of the voters voted for Diệm.[9] Historians generally agree that "[t]he election, like others to follow, was a test of authority rather than an exercise in democracy."[10] Put another way, the vote totals "did not indicate that the entire South Vietnamese people admired Diệm[,]" but instead "demonstrated the people's lack of interest in democratic procedures and their willingness to follow the dictates of the government, as expressed in its propaganda campaign...." [11]

(Ex-Emperor) Chief of State Bảo Đại abdicated, and appealed to the country to unite under a democratic government. On October 26, 1955, Diệm became President of the Republic of Vietnam.

[edit] Rule

Diệm established an authoritarian regime, because he did not believe his backward country was ready for a Western-style democracy. He established a nepotistic regime, because of the lack of loyal, qualified leaders available in South Vietnam at the time. His most trusted official was his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, his chief advisor and head of secret services. Another brother, Ngô Đình Cẩn, was given administrative control of the northern portion of South Vietnam. A third brother, Ngô Đình Luyện, served in France as a liaison with Western diplomats. Diem's older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was archbishop of Hue and a leader in the country's Catholic community. The wife of Diem's brother Nhu, born Tran Le Xuan and known to the West as Madame Nhu, received much publicity in the West because of her flamboyant, and sometimes abrasive, public remarks; however, she actually exerted only marginal influence over the workings of the government.[12]

Acting with assistance from American advisors, Diem slowly built South Vietnam's civic infrastructure, army and provincial forces.[13] In 1954, he successfully resettled one million refugees, who had fled the Communist regime in North Vietnam, into underpopulated, fertile areas.[14] In 1955, he neutralized and defeated a number of formidable opponents: the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects, each of which had standing armies; the Binh Xuyen, an armed street gang that controlled the largest gambling establishment in the Far East, the largest brothel in the world, an opium factory and a network of opium dens; and two senior South Vietnamese generals. These victories were all the more noteworthy because Diem's opponents had the support of the French, who still had 150,000 troops in the country.[15] During the remainder of the 1950s, he greatly increased South Vietnam's agricultural production.[16]

In 1957, Diem allowed Madame Nhu to introduce the Family Law, which forbade polygamy, concubinage and adultery, allowed women to work in any profession they chose and to retain their property after marriage, and made Presidential approval a prerequisite to divorce. This law, a radical departure from the patriarchal and polygamous practices of the past, would earn Madame Nhu the lasting enmity of many upper-class Vietnamese.[17]

After the defeat of the French, Communist North Vietnam had left forces in the south that may have numbered in the tens of thousands. These fighters were directed to bury their weapons and to infiltrate and disrupt government organizations.[18] In 1955 and 1956, Diem rooted out and substantially weakened large portions of this network.[19] In 1957, under orders from Hanoi, these Communist cadres initiated a campaign of assassinations and raids; however, by 1958, the South Vietnamese forces, supported by a small number of American advisors, had eliminated 90 percent of the cadres' membership.[20] During this period, Diem received much praise from the American media, being dubbed, for example, by Life magazine as the "tough miracle man of South Vietnam."[21]

In January 1959, under pressure from the southern cadres, the Central Committee of the Communist Party in North Vietnam issued a secret resolution authorizing the initiation of an armed struggle in the South. During the remainder of the year, the North Vietnamese moved men and equipment into South Vietnam through Laos, over what would come to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.[22] The new insurgency began in January 1960, and the Communists made gains through 1961.[23]

During this period, on 12 December 1960, also on instructions from Hanoi, Communists operating in the South established the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam or NLF which expressly sought to overthrow Diem's regime. While there were non-Communist members of the NLF, Communist cadres held all the important leadership positions, and, thus, controlled the organization. Nonetheless, the NLF was able to portray itself to many in the West as a primarily nationalist, rather than Communist, movement.[24]

Diem's government began to beat back the insurgency in the spring of 1962. From that time until the ouster of Diem in November 1963, South Vietnamese forces inflicted a series of stinging defeats on the Communists, and regained virtually all of the areas previously lost to the insurgency.[25] The South Vietnamese successes were due to an increase in American assistance and to Diem's continuing improvement of the military and administrative parts of his government. [26] Particularly successful was the Strategic Hamlet Program, implemented by Diem's brother Nhu, which substantially increased security in the countryside.[27] This program, the cornerstone of Diem's counterinsurgency effort, called for the consolidation of 14,000 villages of South Vietnam into 11,000 secure hamlets, each with its own houses, schools, wells, and watchtowers. The hamlets served to isolate the insurgents from the villages, their source of recruiting soldiers, supplies and information.

[edit] Ties with the United States

During a visit to the United States in May 1957, Diem and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forged a relationship between the United States and South Vietnam. The United States provided South Vietnam military advice and equipment, while recognizing that South Vietnam was an independent country with independent policies.

[edit] Coup and Assassination

Diem understood his country and his Communist adversaries, but never appears to have understood the power of the media to mold American public opinion. Beginning in mid-1962, Diem and his principal American advisors incurred the enmity of the Saigon-based American press corps, particularly David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, by not providing the correspondents what they believed to be sufficient access to information.[28] The correspondents, most of whom were young and inexperienced, increasingly turned to sources hostile to Diem for information, a development that was to have significant repercussions in the Buddhist crisis that arose the following year.

That crisis surfaced in May 1963, when Diem's decision to enforce a law prohibiting the display of religious flags on religious holidays triggered protests by Buddhist monks in Hue. A confrontation with police on May 8 resulted in the deaths of nine civilians, and a larger protest followed. After the province chief offered to compensate the families of those killed, the crisis appeared to have run its course. However, the Buddhist leaders made new demands that Diem refused to meet--such as the enactment of a law prohibiting the arrests of Buddhists--and the protests continued. Rather than immediately dispersing the monks, Diem attempted to develop a dialogue with their leaders.[29]

Many of the protestors actually sought to bring down the Diem regime.[30] After the protests began, Communist agents infiltrated the protests at the low and middle echelons. In addition, the principal organizer of the protests, a Buddhist monk named Tri Quang, was deeply hostile to the regime and may have been a Communist agent.[31]

Diem's failure promptly to disperse the protestors allowed them time to gain the sympathy of the Saigon-based American press corps, which, as noted earlier, was already hostile to his regime. These correspondents turned to Buddhist leaders, and to two other Vietnamese sources--Pham Ngoc Thou, a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army, and Pham Xuan An, a stringer for Reuter's news service--who were later found to be Communist agents.[32]

Given such sources, the American correspondents, the press misrepresented the protests "as evidence that the Diem government lacked public support and deserved to be overthrown."[33] The reporters contended that Buddhists constituted 70 to 80 percent of South Vietnam's population, whereas Buddhists actually constituted no more than 27 percent of the population, and practicing Buddhists only half of that percentage. The press also reported that the Buddhist deaths in Hue were the result of a government policy of persecuting Buddhists; in fact, Diem had done much to help the Buddhists permitting construction of numerous Buddhist pagodas, sometimes with government funds, and appointing more Buddhists in his cabinet than any other religious denomination. The reporters also reported that Diem's army officers were dissatisfied with his leadership when no significant dissatisfaction existed.[34]

After Diem reached an accord with many of the Buddhist leaders, Tri Quang staged a visual event that not only undermined the agreement but also profoundly impacted American public opinion. Buddhist activists apprised the media that a significant event would take place on June 11, 1963, at Xa Loi pagoda. On that day a 73-year-old Buddhist monk named Quang Duc, allowed himself to be drenched with gasoline, and then struck a match and set himself on fire. Buddhist activists presented Vietnamese police from coming to the burning monk’s assistance. His companions used loudspeakers to broadcast that this act of self-immolation was in protest to Diem’s refusal to accede to Buddhist demands. Photographs of the burning monk circulated internationally. Many Americans viewed the event as proof of Diem’s religious persecution; a group of ministers took out full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post protesting the alleged religious persecution. More significantly, as a result of this event and the ongoing press coverage, Roger Hilsman, head of the State Department's Far Eastern Bureau, and Averell Harriman, a senior diplomat, became convinced that Diem needed to meet all the Buddhists' demands. [35]

At the beginning of August 1963, in a CBS interview, Madame Nhu exacerbated the situation by declaring that the only thing "the so-called Buddhist leaders" had accomplished was to "barbecue a bonze" and that they had had "to use imported gasoline" to effectuate even this meager end.[36] Four more monks burned themselves to death in August.[37]

Eventually, Diem and granted his generals’ request to remove the monks from their pagodas in Saigon and Hue and to disperse them to the areas from which they had come. The South Vietnamese and police took such action on August 21, 1963, and though some violence ensued, the Buddhists ceased to be a problem for the remainder of Diem’s tenure.[38]

However, the Saigon-based correspondents further damaged Diem's standing in American eyes by misrepresented the government's behavior during the crackdown. Halberstam wrote that South Vietnamese police clubbed, bayoneted and fired on fleeing monks, killing 30 people in Hue alone; an investigation conducted two months later would reveal that no Buddhists had died in the crackdown. Halberstam and other journalists charged that Diem’s brother Nhu, had directed the attacks without the knowledge of the Army; in fact it had been the generals who had asked Diem for permission to disperse the monks. Finally, Halberstam claimed that Diem’s suppression of the Buddhists had robbed his government of popular support, when in fact most of the populace was indifferent to the Buddhist crisis.[39]

On August 24, 1963, in the wake of these news reports, Hilsman and Harriman prepared a cable directing the newly installed Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., to ask Diem to (1) dismiss Nhu and (2) grant the Buddhists' demands. If Diem refused, Lodge was to advise senior South Vietnamese generals that the Americans no longer supported Diem but would be willing to support an alternative leader. President John F. Kennedy approved the cable by phone from his vacation home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, apparently without paying close attention to the details. After receiving the cable, Lodge obtained authorization from the State Department to tell the generals that they could depose Nhu and decide for themselves whether to retain Diem--a much stronger message than that contained in the original cable. Lodge conveyed this message on August 25.[40]

Prior to receiving Lodge’s message, the chief of the South Vietnamese general staff and most of the generals supported Diem. However, upon receiving the message, they believed that they had to oust Diem and Nhu to retain American aid.[41] Accordingly, they advised Lodge that they would move ahead with to the coup. Nevertheless, at the end of August, they determined that they lacked the forces to overthrow Diem and canceled their plans. [42]

In mid-September, Lodge told Diem that America might suspend aid to South Vietnam if Diem did not remove Nhu. Diem, mindful of Nhu’s importance to the strategic hamlet program and of the consequences of looking like an American puppet, refused. Thereafter, Lodge was determined to remove Diem. In reaching this position, Lodge was influenced to a great degree by the Saigon-based American press, which had become his primary source of information.[43]

By this time, President Kennedy, who had received a Central Intelligence Agency report highlighting the bias in Halberstam’s reporting, had second thoughts about ousting Diem. Torn between anti-Diem and pro-Diem factions in his administration and concerned with public opinion polls showing only 28 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval of his Vietnam policy, Kennedy took a middle course. On October 5, 1963, he directed Lodge not to encourage any further attempts to replace Diem, but to cut aid to South Vietnam as a means of compelling Diem to enact Western-style reforms.[44]

By cutting aid, President Kennedy unwittingly undermined Diem’s position with his generals even further. On October 9, 1963, a group of generals led by General Duong Van Minh—-who resented Diem’s consignment of him to minor duties—-asked Lodge if the Americans would oppose a coup. Lodge, in violation of White House orders, answered that the Americans would not oppose such action and would support a successor government.[45]

President Kennedy subsequently learned of Lodge’s insubordination, and on October 30, 1963, directed him to call off the coup. Lodge did not comply, and Kennedy ultimately left support of the coup to Lodge’s discretion.[46] In so acting, Kennedy appears to have feared the domestic political consequences of a public confrontation with Lodge, who was a potential Republican presidential candidate.[47]

Accordingly, the generals moved forward. On November 1, 1963, after assuring that pro-Diem generals would be cut off from Saigon, the rebel forces attacked various military and police headquarters and the presidential palace. Diem and Nhu fled through an underground tunnel to a church from which Diem called Lodge. Lodge offered the brothers asylum, but refused to provide them transportation to a protected location, and even prohibited his senior aide from picking them up. Lacking transportation to safety, Diem called one of the rebel generals, and negotiated an agreement under which he and his brother would give themselves up in return for safe passage to the airport.[48] After surrendering themselves, the brothers were shot, by order of General Minh, in the back of an armored personnel carrier that was taking them to Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters.[49] Diem was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetary next to the house of Ambassador Lodge.[50]

The United States publicly expressed shock and disappointment that Diệm had been killed. According to General Maxwell Taylor, when President Kennedy learned of Diem's death, he "leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face...." [51] Kennedy was assassinated just twenty days later.

[edit] Repercussions of Diệm's Assassination

After the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm, the Americans continued to influence the government of South Vietnam. However, Diem's murder left South Vietnam without a viable leader, and numerous coups and purges took place during the first several years after his death. As a result, South Vietnam's military position deteriorated substantially.[52] The assassination also bolstered the North Vietnamese attempts to characterize the South Vietnamese as supporters of colonization.

One historian, making extensive use of newly available primary sources, calls the United States' role in the overthrow and assassination of Diem as "by far the worst mistake of the Vietnam War."[53] The reaction of the most knowledgeable of Diem's contemporaries supports this conclusion: Upon learning of Diem's ouster and death, Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said, "I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid."."[54]

References


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search I have made substantial edits to the Diem article based on histories by Dr. Mark Moyar and Stanley Karnow. I have provided citations supporting every assertion. You have twice replaced my pages with the original, largely unsourced article.

Your only substantive remark has been that Catholics were not the majority in South Vietnam. I agree, and never said they were. I simply stated, based on Dr. Moyar's extensive research, that Buddhists did not make up a majority either.

We can keep replacing each other's articles (at least until adults intervene), or we can try to work this out. If you are interested in the latter course, please contact me on my talk page.

VnTruth

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Yoohooboo"

[edit] Rewrite of Buddhist Issue

Diem's treatment of Buddhists is a matter of controversy.[55] Under the generally held view, Diệm, as a member of the Catholic Vietnamese minority, pursued pro-Catholic policies that antagonized many Buddhists. During the months May - August, 1963, activists, led by a Buddhist monk named Tri Quang, staged mass protests and even engaged in self-immolations. State police under direction of Diem's brother Nhu were accused of assaulting these protestors. The United States, noting widespread Buddhist anger at Diem's religious biases, requested him to redress their grievances, but Diem unwisely refused to do so.[56] As Diệm became more obdurate, the U.S. dissociated themselves from his anti-Buddhist policies.[57] Some have claimed Buddhists constiuted the majority of South Vietnam's population.[citation needed] The foregoing protests set off a chain of events that eventually led to Diệm's overthrow and death, as discussed infra.

Revisionist historians assert that Diệm did not discriminate against Buddhists, pointing out that eight of his 18 cabinet members, including his vice-president and foreign minister, were Buddhist (compared with five Catholics), and that 26 of his province chiefs were Buddhists or Confucians, compared with only 12 province chiefs who were Catholic. Moreover, the revisionists say, more than one quarter of South Vietnam's Buddhist pagodas in were built during Diệm's rule, some with government funds. The revisionists also cite Central Intelligence Agency reports showing that Buddhists numbered no more than four million, approximately 27% of South Vietnam's population, and that practicing Buddhists made up only half that number.[58]

Other historians assert that Diệm did not discriminate against Buddhists.[59] These historians point out that eight of his 18 cabinet members, including his vice-president and foreign minister, were Buddhist (compared with five Catholics), and that 26 of his province chiefs were Buddhists or Confucians, compared with only 12 who were Catholic.[60] Moreover, Diệm removed the French prohibition on the construction of Buddhist pagodas, and by 1963, more than one quarter of South Vietnam's pagodas had been built during Diệm's rule, some with government funds; the government also provided appreciable amounts of money for Buddhist schools and ceremonies.[61] The revisionists also cite Central Intelligence Agency reports showing that Buddhists numbered no more than four million, approximately 27% of South Vietnam's population, and that practicing Buddhists made up only half that number.[62]

It is generally agreed that the trouble between Diệm and the Buddhists began in Hue on May 8, 1963, when a Buddhist protest of an ordinance prohibiting the flying of religious flags on religious holidays, led by an activist monk named Tri Quang, resulted in government soldiers firing into the crowd and killing nine civilians.[63] According to the revisionists: Diệm directed his province chiefs to apply the ordinance against all religions, Catholics as well as Buddhists, the province chief tried to disperse the crowd by peaceful means and the soldiers may have fired on the crowd in response to a bomb set off by an agitator during the confrontation. Although the province chief expressed sorrow for the killings and offered to compensate the victims' families, Tri Quang and his followers organized new demonstrations and made additional demands--including punishment of all officials involved in the May 8 incident, removal of all restrictions on the displays of religious flags and even a prohibition on arrests of Buddhists--which if granted, would have seriously undermined Diệm's government. As recent Vietnamese Communist histories acknowledge, Communist agents aggressively infiltrated the lower middle echelons of the protests after May 8, and substantial evidence indicates that Tri Quang himself was such an agent. Finally, Diệm's own generals asked him for permission to disperse the Buddhists and send them back to their provinces, and did so on August 21 without any resulting deaths. No further mass Buddhist protests occurred during the remainder of his rule.[64]

According to the revisionist view, the perception that Diệm persecuted Buddhists arose from gross distortions by young, inexperienced American correspondents based in Saigon, particularly David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International. These corespondents resented Diệm and his principal American advisors because they did not provide the correspondents the access to information to which the reporters believed they were entitled. They obtained most of their information from activist Buddhists hostile to Diệm and from two non-Buddhist Vietnamese--Pham Ngoc Thou, a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army, and Pham Xuan An, a stringer for Reuter's news service--who were later found to be Communist agents.[65] President John F. Kennedy asked the New York Times to reassign Halberstam after receiving a CIA report highlighting this reporter's lack of objectivity.[66]

[edit] Response to Blnguyen

I take your point on the footnotes. The approach you are using is a good one that saves everyone needless work. However, if you cite three sources after a sentence, you should make them into one footnote, rather than three, as you do with your footnotes 8-10.

Now to the hard part. I take it from your edit summary, that your most recent reason for deleting my edits is your belief that they violate Wikipedia's rule against publicizing fringe opinions. Whether we go to mediation/arbitration would appear to turn on your willingness to accept that the views I'm setting forth are not fringe views. If you can't accept that, then we should let the powers that be at Wikipedia decide.

In my view, none of my edits represent "fringe" views in the sense Wikipedia uses that word. My principal source, Triumph Forsaken, was published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press, and has received praise from such respected persons as Senator (and Vietnam War hero) James Webb and historian Max Boot, both of whom, as you can see, are written up in Wikipedia. The author, Dr. Mark Moyar, graduated summa cum laude at Harvard and earned his Ph.D at Cambridge University in England. He has already written a well-received history of one aspect of the Vietnam War, the Phoenix program. In addition I also cited other historians who also support the assertions I made in the text that you removed. Once the page is unlocked, I intend to add one more source that supports my text regarding the Buddhists, Marguerite Higgins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, written up in Wikipedia. In fact, my assertions are better supported than yours.

For that matter, the claim that Buddhists constituted 70%-90% of South Vietnam's population does not appear to constiute the majority view. Your citations consist of: Dr. Moyar, who actually says that such claims were made in 1963, but were false; an internet article that says only--in passing and without citation--that Buddhists constituted a majority of the population; and a book by Marvin Gettleman that is 40 years old and so obscure that it lacks a Wikipedia identifying number. As far as I can tell, the more recent historians do not claim that Buddhists constituted the majority. For example, Stanley Karnow and Neil Sheehan,widely read and anti-Diem to the core, do not make this claim.

I also note that you deleted text and a footnote that I had written under the "Repercussions" heading which seems to me to clearly represent the majority view. There is no question that the military situation deteriorated after Diem fell. Even Karnow, whom I cited in the footnote you deleted, acknowledges it.

Anyway, I rest my case. And ask you once again: Will you stop deleting my changes? If not, I think I'm going to have to appeal to a third party to sort this out. Then we can let the chips fall where they may.

By the way, sorry I mispelled your user name in one of my earlier messages. The four consonants in a row threw me. --VnTruth 18:18, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] {Ngo Dinh Diem}

Initiated by --VnTruth 16:29, 15 April 2007 (UTC)at--VnTruth 16:29, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Involved parties

  • Template:Blnguyen[1]
  • Template:Sarvagnya[2]


I have left messages regarding my arbitration request on both parties' talk pages.[3].[4]
Confirmation that other steps in dispute resolution have been tried
I have discussed the matter extensively with Blnguyen and suggested mediation, all to no avail.[5]

[edit] Statement by ----VnTruth 16:29, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

This dispute involves disagreements regarding the portion of the article, titled "Government treatment of Buddhiss," regarding Diem's treatment of South Vietnamese Buddhists. The article contains language, much of which has been added by Blnguyen, stating that Diem discriminated in favor of Catholics against Buddhists, who constituted the vast majority of South Vietnam's population. I have added an additional paragraph reiterating the views of several historians that Diem treated Buddhists well, and that Buddhists constituted no more than a large majority of the population. Blnguyen has regularly deleted my edits,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] to the point that the page was recently locked by another user.[13] Sarvagnya has recently delted my edits as well.[14]

They contend that my edits violate Wikipedia's rule against publicizing fringe opinions.[15](edit summary). In fact, if you review my most recent edit to the article (under "history"), you will see that I have provided more citations in support of my edits than Blnguyen has in support of his.[16] Moreover, one of my sources, Triumph Forsaken, was published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press, and has received praise from such respected persons as Senator (and Vietnam War hero) James Webb and historian Max Boot, both of whom, as you can see, are written up in Wikipedia. The author, Dr. Mark Moyar, graduated summa cum laude at Harvard and earned his Ph.D at Cambridge University in England. He has already written a well-received history of one aspect of the Vietnam War, the Phoenix program. Another source, Our Vietnam Nightmare, was written by Marguerite Higgins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist also written up in Wikipedia.

Blnguyen's claim that Buddhists constituted 70%-90% of South Vietnam's population was particularly weak. His citations consisted of: Dr. Moyar, who actually says that such claims were made in 1963, but were false; an internet article that says only--in passing and without citation--that Buddhists constituted a majority of the population; and a book by Marvin Gettleman that is 40 years old and so obscure that it lacks a Wikipedia identifying number.[17] The more recent historians do not even claim that Buddhists constituted a majority of the population, much less 70%-90%. For example, Stanley Karnow and Neil Sheehan,widely read and anti-Diem to the core, do not make this claim.

Nonetheless, I am not asking for deletion of Blnguyen's portion (except for his inaccurate citation of Dr. Moyar), but just that all parties be prohibited from deleting my edits.

[edit] Statement by {party 2}

[edit] Clerk notes

(This area is used for notes by non-recused clerks.)

[edit] Arbitrators' opinion on hearing this matter (0/0/0/0)

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[edit] Sample 3-Revert Report

[edit] User:Emokid200618 reported by User:Gdo01 (Result:)

Three-revert rule violation on Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs). Emokid200618 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log):


Comments

This user has been blocked multiple times before with incrementing values. The last block was 72 hours. The user has also stated here that the user does not care about violating 3RR. Recommend a longer block or an indefinite one. Gdo01 21:23, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Please provide diffs for reverts, not oldids. Heimstern Läufer 21:32, 12 April 2007 (UTC)