Countdown to Diem Day, 11/2 – The Mandate of Heaven

Neither the State Department in Washington nor the Press Corp hanging out at a ritzy Saigon hotel, could understand the character of Vietnamese culture, and therefore of Diem. They had no clue why Diem was to considered by his people to have the Mandate of Heaven as a legitimate ruler.

Diem had actually been captured by the communists when he was a rising regional administrator. He was brought before Ho Chi Minh and offered a position within the Viet Minh administration. Diem refused vehemently, because the communists had just murdered his brother. But Ho Chi Minh let Diem go; he admired Diem's integrity and moral courage.

The qualities that made Diem revered to his people made him repugnant to the Americans who felt that they, not the legitimately elected leader of the Vietnamese people, possessed a mandate to refashion the country of Vietnam. Ugly Americanism to the core. The following quotes are from The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam, by Geoffrey Shaw.

“During his studies, Diem became increasingly aware that Catholicism and Confucianism had many similarities, including a shared understanding of ethics. As a result, Diem would think and move in a way that was almost incomprehensible to the secular-minded and politically expedient Americans with whom he would later collaborate. A modern western or American policy perspective asserts that individual rights and the freedom to pursue personal happiness are paramount, almost to the exclusion of every other consideration. Diem, however, believed that the individual needed to submit his will and talents to the greater good of the family, the community, and the nation. In his political philosophy, the individual did not have a right to political activity that threatened the downfall of a legitimate government. Diem’s Catholic faith and Confucian principles were so robustly integrated as to make his political philosophy all but impermeable to contrary argument."

“Catholicism and Confucianism both stress that the well-being of the family is the most important social responsibility of a people and their rulers. Diem never lost sight of this responsibility, even as the modern world threatened to destroy traditional Vietnamese culture. This seems to be the area where Diem's soul burned with a righteous fire: he lamented that the faith and the family life of his countrymen had diminished under French rule. When he became president, Buddhism, for example, was in such decline that it seemed like a discard from a bygone era. This loss grieved Diem, and during his presidency he appropriated government funds for the restoration of Buddhist places of worship. In effect, Diem was a true conservative: he wanted to conserve the traditional Vietnamese way of life. First and foremost, he wanted to restore the family to its Confucian status as the legal personality and the responsible entity within the village community…. As it would turn out, Diem's sturdy emphasis on religious familial, and social duties placed a spiritual, moral, and intellectual gulf between him and the many of his American advisors, the latter finding this an extremely difficult chasm to cross…

“Diem’s firm Catholic faith was? buttressed by another significant character trait that had a profound appeal to the Confucianist soul of Vietnamese society: asceticism. He led a disciplined life, and this was something the Vietnamese people revered because they believed that the quality of a man was determined by his ability to withstand hardship. Diem's scholarly, monk-like personality made him far more attractive to the Vietnamese people as a leader than, for example, a Western styled, big-toothed, glad-handing, baby-kissing politician. Yet it was this very model that many American advisors tried to push on Diem.

“There is another reason Diem found favor with the Vietnamese people. As the Vietnamese writer Tran Van Dinh explained, according to Confucian ethics and Taoist concepts of harmony and universal order, those who seek wealth to the near exclusion of all else and attain it are held in low regard. Their motives are suspect, and consequently, so is their morality. even the name for them is derogatory: troc phu, which translates as “filthy rich”. As was expected of a mandarin, Diem and his family had nothing to do with chasing money, and this also may have had some bearing on why, later in his career, Diem did not take a liking to W. Averell Harriman, celebrated scion of American high society who became one of President Kennedy's most influential foreign policy advisors. Opposite the troc phu is the thanh ban, or the learned “immaculate poor”; thus the impecunious scholar had social appeal in Confucian Vietnamese Society. Ho Chi Minh did his level best to appear as thanh ban, to the average Vietnamese, because he knew he would be judged by them according to the Vietnamese Confucian ideas of a good leader. Ho, however, was a bit disingenuous about his image, whereas Diem was the genuine article by birth and training.

“In nearly every meaningful way, traditional Vietnamese Society had values that were diametrically opposed to those of modern secular Western societies, particularly the United states. The Vietnamese social order, from top to bottom, looks something like this: at the top where the si, or scholars, men of letters like Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu; second down the scale could be found the nong, or peasant farmers; the next lower echelon was occupied by the cong, or workers; considerably farther down in esteem were the thuong, or the businessman and merchants; and finally, last in the Confucian Vietnamese order were the binh, or soldiers, who like modern day sanitation workers were seen as doing a necessary but dirty job. The low standing of soldiers in Vietnamese Society explains why the Washington backed coup against Diem was doomed to failure, because it replaced a si with a group of binh... Political legitimacy, in the form of the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, could never rest upon a military regime.”