This is not the first time spineless SBTN’s Cuong Nguyen (Vietnamese name: Nguyễn Tự Cường) bent over and submitted to the will of a few. A little more than a year ago, when controversy arose over music of the late antiwar musician Trịnh Công Sơn (see here), Nguyen went on air, insulted the musician, and repudiated any affiliation with the concert – which his station early had promoted heavily.

This SBTN, by the way, is the same SBTN whose reduced-rate ads given to OC supervisor candidate Hoa Van Tran resulted in a complaint to the state Attorney General as a possible illegal campaign contribution. See here.

This most recent controversy involves the legacy of South Vietnam’s first president, who was brought down following a wave of popular protests led by Buddhist monks, something like the one in the photo to the right.

The station had broadcast an interview with an author who claimed the protesting monks were communists. A group of Buddhists clamored for a retraction, and Nguyen went on air to repudiate the interview, slash out at the interviewer, and cancel the program on the spot.

In recent years and especially in the U.S., the late President Ngo Dinh Diem has enjoyed a comeback of sort, where people pretty much forgave his dictatorial ways, his cronyism, and his favoritism of Catholicism. Instead, they remember him as a corruption-free individual (just him, not necessarily his underlings) who was fervently anti-communist.

Riding that wave of newly arisen support for President Diem, an author published a book attacking the Buddhist leaders who had brought down the man’s presidency.

Liên Thành is a former commander of the police force in Huế, the city in central Vietnam that was home to most Buddhist activists. Entitled “Biến Động Miền Trung” (Turmoil in Central Vietnam), the book has been extensively quoted and excerpted electronically, posted on various web sites (such as this one) and sent around the various right-wing listservs.

Essentially a long diatribe, the book’s main claim is that the Buddhist forces that brought down Diem and continued to oppose various policies of the Saigon government were, well, communist.

Always happy to see more accusations of commies, former South Vietnamese military initially came out in droves to support the book. The publisher is the association of former South Vietnamese Rangers. Many came to the book signing all dressed up and wearing a red beret, the symbol of the Rangers, proving how seriously they took the author and his accusations. The photo to the left is taken from a Viet Bao story, here.

On a special Tet broadcast on the same SBTN, Lien Thanh was invited to speak about the atrocities committed by communists during the Tet Offensive in Hue. After all, he’s now the expert on communists in the city. (Click on photo below to go to video on Blogspot.)

That was when Lien Thanh was the darling of conspiracy theorists who love the fact that he’d unearthed a whole organization of commies.

A few months into the lovefest, however, people began having second thought. The same (supposedly commie) Buddhist forces that once opposed President Diem are now opposing the communist government’s attempts to take over Buddhist temples and teachings in the country.

If those same Buddhists were communists then, what does it make them and their disciples now? All of a sudden, Lien Thanh’s red-baiting doesn’t seem as attractive as it used to be.

Into this quandary stepped Du Tử Lê. One of the most creative and frequently cited poets of the late 20th century, Du Tử Lê has had many of his poems set to music to become very popular songs (Khúc Thụy Du – Anh Bằng, Khi Cuộc Tình Đã Chết – Phạm Đình Chương, etc.)

Du Tử Lê has his own show on SBTN, so he invited Lien Thanh to participate. By then, however, he’s no longer the anti-communist knight in shining armor. He has become (gasp!) a controversial figure.

So Du Tử Lê had his interviews with Lien Thanh and broadcast them in several installations. All hell broke loose. The two camps, pro-Lien Thanh and anti-Lien Thanh, began loudly proclaiming the other one communist.

On Halloween Day, SBTN rolled over and played dead. Half of its midday news broadcast consists of a meeting between a group of Buddhists and its CEO Cuong Nguyen.

Interestingly, SBTN devoted much of its coverage to the delegation heaping abuse, not on Lien Thanh, but on the interviewer Du Tử Lê.

The clip cuts away just as one member of the delegation started talking about Lien Thanh. Even SBTN’s reporter Thanh Toan, who has been spending most of last year enjoying the good life in communist Vietnam, in his voice-over also craps on Du Tử Lê.

Probably afraid that a group of pro-Diem people would show up next, SBTN steered clear of any criticism of Lien Thanh’s claims.

And then, bending backward, the CEO admitted that his approach to any controversy is actually to go along with whatever the people sitting in front of him say – whom he calls “the community.” He agreed with the group, threw the old poet under the bus, and announced that he would cancel the show even if nobody has asked for it.

Forty-five years ago, on November 1, 1963, a group of South Vietnamese generals and colonels staged a coup and captured President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother the Special Advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu. The two were killed in the armored car that was bringing them to the coup leaders. Later a low-ranking officer was sentenced to death for the unauthorized killing, in a court martial that became viewed as a cover-up.

Another brother of Diem and Nhu, who had ruled half the country as his own fiefdom, was tried and executed. Another brother was an ambassador and never returned to the country. The family’s oldest brother, Catholic Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, went on exile and eventually died in a Vietnamese monastery in Missouri.

The coup was long in coming. Diem had come under intense internal opposition and international pressure to reform and allow more democracy and religious freedom. It was in opposition in President Diem that Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc famously self-immolated.

Until the end of the war, November 1 was celebrated as the National Day of the Republic of Vietnam.

A stamp series commemorating the National Day shows it as “Revolution Day” and compares the event to the breaking of chains.

A large segment of the prominent figures in the Viet community in the U.S. came from the opposition camp.

Most prominent in OC is, of course, the leadership of Nguoi Viet Daily News. The shareholders of Nguoi Viet all met each other through protests against President Diem.

The late publisher Yen Do was put on trial (and expelled from Saigon’s most prominent high school) for leading a protest against the Diem government, demanding universal education.

Senior Editor Do Quy Toan (a.k.a. Ngo Nhân Dung) became famous as a poet with the poem “Fire” – how the fire lit by Thich Quang Duc would rouse up the Vietnamese people.

Another Board member, at the time a new pharmacy grad, provided a sick bay where student-protestors injured by riot police could get medical care.

It is fair to say that if it weren’t for all the anti-Diem protests, there wouldn’t be any Nguoi Viet Daily News.

Poet Tran Da Tu is a co-owner of Viet Bao, the other prominent Viet newspaper. His first job in the U.S. was also at Nguoi Viet, and he spent most of the Diem years either getting arrested for saying something the Diem regime was unhappy about, or barely getting out of jail and hiding from the secret police.

Another poet, Vien Linh, runs the most successful monthly magazine out of a little corner of a Westminster print shop — he too spent a lot of time hiding from Diem’s secret police.

As the war ended and Vietnamese refugees came to American shore, however, the perception of President Diem began to change.

Diem loyalists believe, and propagate the the notion that President Diem was the only true democrat, the only true reformer, and the only true anti-communist of all the South Vietnamese leadership.

And that view came to dominate — as in: most posted on the internet, most published on newspapers and magazines, most stated on TV and radio, etc. — political discourse in the Viet community in the U.S.

It is never clear what percentage of the community adheres to this revisionist point of view. The community’s divided opinion of President Diem can be seen in one Bolsavikland media giant: Writer Nhat Tien, whose family holds a sizable share of Little Saigon Radio, was a prominent speaker at the July 1963 funeral of Nhat Linh, an event that galvanized popular opposition to the president. But the company’s president Vu Quang Ninh, on the other hand, is an ardent supporter of the late president and promoter of all things Diem-related.

It is also not clear how this revisionist view came to be so dominant in the public square. Some would claim that the Vietnamese-American Catholics forced this view. Diem was a devout Catholic often accused of favoring the country’s Catholic 10% minority over the Buddhist 90% majority in his personnel decisions.

The Bolsavik, however, tends to believe in a different explanation that has been put forward, and that is the influence of the former South Vietnamese paratroopers.

These rangers, together adding up to one brigade in the South Vietnamese armed forces, stayed loyal to President Diem throughout the war. Their first commander had led a failed coup against Diem, but all subsequent commanders of the paratroopers are Diem loyalists.

The paratroopers were the first to form well-organized and vocal groups in the U.S. – the “Red Beret Family” – named after the headgear in their uniform. (In Vietnamese: Gia Dinh Mu Do.) The point of view of the paratroopers often becomes some sort of “official” “patriotic” political views of the Vietnamese.

For years, they commemorated the former National Day of the Republic of vietnam not as a day of celebration but rather a day of remembrance of President Diem. A number of Catholic groups also joined in the ceremonies.

In 2007, Diem loyalists upped the ante and held their ceremony honoring President Diem at the Vietnamese-American War Memorial in Westminster. It created rumblings of opposition from people who thought one faction in the community shouldn’t push their agenda at the memorial. One Buddhist temple even went so far as to threaten to hold an exhibition of President Diem’s “crimes” against Buddhism.

This year, they did it again, but opposition was mute.

And the announcement of the ceremony was only snuck in on the day of the event itself.