The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

Something else happened in 1956. Or rather, it didn’t happen. The division between North and South Vietnam was supposed to be resolved by an election that would unite the country under a single government. But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote.7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.