Word: buddhists
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Moynahan, who took up Yoga only a year ago, and who is "Of course not!" a Zen Buddhist, explained the exercises with a faint Boston accent. One pose, with the left arm stretched forward and the right hand holding the right foot behind the back, Moynahan described as "the Buster Keaton position...
Shops reopened, repairmen restrung power lines blown down by battle, and saffron-robed Buddhist monks emerged from jail or hiding (among them: top Buddhist Thich Tri Quang, who had sought asylum ten weeks ago in the U.S. embassy). At Xa Loi Pagoda, principal scene of last August's government crackdown, thousands prayed. From Poulo Condore prison island and other jails, 150 political prisoners were freed, telling bitter tales of torture...
...August. Serious talk about an uprising had first started in August, after Diem raided the Buddhist pagodas. Lieut. General Tran Van Don, then acting chief of the Joint General Staff, got word that a coup seemed imminent, and felt (as he now explains it) that the moment was not right. He feared that whoever was planning the affair might not be able to control things, that the Communist Viet Cong might move in on it and take over Saigon. So Don supported Diem's imposition of martial law, and the August coup never surfaced...
...Minh's "Military Revolutionary Committee" decided it would look better to have a civilian at least nominally at the head of the government, but they did not want another President. Named Premier was Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Diem's figurehead vice president since 1956, the highest-ranking Buddhist in Catholic Diem's regime. Like Minh, Tho is a southerner in a nation where regional loyalties are strong, and has been a close friend of Minh since the two shared the French prison cell...
...rightly or wrongly, that it could no longer win that war with Diem, was not so much that his regime was repressive, but that it had lost its ability to command the nation. By the unhappy standards of the mid-20th century world, Diem's treatment of the Buddhists may not have been spectacularly cruel, but it was thoughtlessly clumsy. The mandarin in the palace somehow seemed to have lost touch with reality-a reality that included the Buddhist self-immolations, perhaps the grisliest of history's propaganda gestures...