Word: buddhists
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Boola, Boola. Until last week, prodded by the U.S., Diem had displayed an apparent willingness to conciliate the Buddhists. Feeling betrayed by Diem's crackdown, one ranking U.S. embassy officer said: "All the time they've been preaching conciliation to us, they've evidently been planning just the opposite." The Buddhist crisis had begun as a religious one, but gradually turned into a major political conflict. The Buddhists are far from passive martyrs. Their religious and social demands-a fairly modest package demanding full equality with the country's Roman Catholics-had never sounded crucial, especially...
...duplicating machines ground out hundreds of thousands of messages, and the sound of typewriters and telephones blended with the boom of temple gongs. Appeals for aid were broadcast to President Kennedy, Pope Paul VI, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant. At a grisly, well-organized press conference in Saigon, Buddhist leaders introduced a tiny, withered Buddhist nun as a candidate for self-immolation in protest against the Diem government. When one Buddhist spokesman who had studied at Yale wanted to pass out the latest communiqués from the pagoda, he would stroll up to a Yale-educated U.S. newsman...
...early phases of the quarrel, Diem probably could and should have conciliated the Buddhists. But he vacillated. His brother and sister-in-law, Ngo Dinh Nhu and Mme. Nhu, insisted that unless the Buddhists were crushed, there would be a coup threatening the very existence of the family's rule. Mme. Nhu's fiery philippics lent impetus to the Buddhist movement just as it appeared to be flagging. By last week, after three Buddhist suicides spurred new protest demonstrations throughout the country, it was clearly too late for conciliation. Even if Diem had wanted it, the Buddhist leaders...
Rope Trick. The crackdown in Saigon was duplicated all over South Viet Nam, and more than 1,000 people were imprisoned. In the Buddhist stronghold of Hué, the approach of government troops was signaled by the beating of temple drums and the clashing of cymbals calling for help. Beating pots and pans to rouse their neighbors, the angry populace poured from homes and raced to defend the city's temples. At Tu Dam Pagoda, monks tried to burn the coffin of a priest who had burned himself alive in the Buddhist suicide protest wave. But government soldiers, firing...
...behind the government's move had been Brother Nhu, head of the 10,000-strong special forces and secret police. For weeks there had been hints that he might try a coup of his own-supposedly to forestall the anti-Diem coup that he kept predicting unless the Buddhists were put down. Any change in government policy, he had warned, would be "anti-Buddhist, anti-American, anti-weakness...