Madame Nhu, First Lady of Vietnam, RIP

Editor: She was the brave and sharp witted First Lady of Vietnam. She was a devoted Catholic who deserves our prayers. We'll try to write a better obituary here for her than what she'll get from the Marxist New York Times. So it almost goes without saying that she has been unjustly maligned by the media for more than fifty years. She is almost universally referred to by enlightened and culturally sensitive leftists as "Dragon Lady", although she was herself a woman of high birth, being of the Imperial Family of Vietnam, and great intelligence. Her life has been bitter and tragic as she has lived in exile for most of it, owing to her country being stolen by Bolshevik thieves and the incompetent bungling of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Her brother-in-law was the most Catholic, courageous and interesting President of the Republic of Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm. Like many other Catholic leaders, he was assassinated, leaving the Communists reportedly shocked that the Americans could be so stupid.

She has little love or sympathy for the United States, which is understandable considering the way she was treated by our local Marxists in the press corp. As an interesting aside, it was her comments about Buddhist monks incinerating themselves, and her witty remark that indicted the Monks of hypocrisy, which they used to portray her ever after as "The Dragon Lady". Indeed, the way her sharp remarks were portrayed in the American press, she sounded vain, stupid and quite frankly, redolent of certain stereotypes held by the protestant mind-set in the United States about Asians. Her treatment by these journalistic Quislings reminds us of another brilliant Catholic Lady who suffered a like treatment from similar journalistic types almost two centuries earlier in 1789.



H/t: Tom

A nice profile of her by Mad Monarchist.

"The Dragon Lady" as she came to be called, was also a passionate anti-communist and was determined that women should play a leading role in defending their country from Communist infiltration. She formed a corps of women warriors and there is a famous photograph of her at their training ground, firing a .38 pistol for the first time. That event sums up a great deal of her character. Having never used a firearm before she was startled by the noise of the first shot. Laughing it off, she vowed that she would not flinch again and fired the remaining five rounds as though she were an expert. She also fostered a renewal of commemorations for the Trung Sisters, the heroic co-Queens of early Viet Nam who fought against Chinese occupation.