No Nice Thing to Say: Kissinger Dead

It's a good thing I'm wrapping up my NaNo project because now I have time to go back to blogging just as this news alert broke tonight:

Henry Kissinger is (finally) dead.

The NPR report from Tom Gjelten is mostly hagiography - in that he describes Kissinger's public persona as a foreign policy giant - and it's not until halfway through the article that Kissinger's hard-line - bordering on war crimes - policies regarding Cambodia and Latin America are even mentioned.

This was what I wrote back in May when he turned 100:

There's a reason why whenever a beloved celebrity like Tina Turner passes away, the immediate social media reaction is "Why the fuck is Kissinger still alive?"

Kissinger still lives because he converted political connections into personal power, and because the United States refuses to hand him over for war crimes or any other crimes against humanity he clearly caused across his career (and the bloody legacy he left in his wake).

Kissinger defends himself to this day by arguing the global struggle against Communism required a "realpolitik" response: That is, to be as brutal and undermining as the Stalin-backed insurgencies had been in the 1950s across Eastern Europe and then the Third World. In this, Kissinger describes himself as a Machiavellian, in that "the ends justified the means" in ensuring American economic and political influence on the world stage.

If Kissinger truly is a Machiavellian, he overlooked one of the key teachings: In Machiavelli's question "whether it is better to be Loved or Feared," Machiavelli answered his own question by pointing out "It is more important to avoid being Hated" because in that moment you lose the Respect a Prince - or any leader - needs to keep himself in power.

In Kissinger's wake were dozens of nations broken, bloodied, left to suffer under dictatorial regimes backed by American muscle. The citizenry of those nations did not, will not forget that the United States - selling ourselves as a beacon of liberty and justice - became hypocritical monsters turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who begged for liberty and justice for their own.

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers Guns & Money shows less mercy:

One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt...

When Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee in 1968, Kissinger immediately made a close connection with him. In fact, they had a lovely thing to bond over: committing treason in defense of Nixon’s presidential ambitions. After Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection, he hoped to end the Vietnam War. Nixon feared doing this would undermine his chances to win that fall, especially after LBJ announced the moratorium on bombing Hanoi. Luckily for Nixon, Kissinger agreed. Kissinger was serving Johnson as his advisor on the Vietnam peace talks. He let Nixon know that a peace treaty was imminent. This allowed Nixon to use his own connections in the Thieu government in Saigon to tell them he would recommit the U.S. to the war and thus they should refuse to agree to peace. This worked. Thieu boycotted the peace talks and nothing happened. Saving millions of Vietnamese lives and tens thousands of American lives had little meaning compared to the noble goal of getting Nixon elected to the presidency. Nixon repaid him by naming him National Security Advisor. Between 1968 and Kissinger’s “peace at hand” statements shortly before the 1972 elections, 20,000 American soldiers died. Thanks Hank and Dick...

But let’s not overstate the positives of Kissinger. The man was an absolute monster. Kissinger was the architect of Nixon’s policy of bombing Cambodia and the 1970 invasion that led to the biggest protests against the war and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State University. The bombings of Cambodia killed up to 150,000 people between 1969 and 1973 and destabilized that already struggling nation, helping to usher in the Khmer Rouge, while also not doing anything at all to win the war in Vietnam that we should not have been fighting in to begin with. Kissinger told his assistant Al Haig that Nixon “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” And Kissinger and Haig made sure that happened. Kissinger then went on to be supportive of the Khmer Rouge! He saw Pol Pot as a counterweight against the real enemy: North Vietnam. He asked Thailand’s foreign minister to tell the Khmer Rouge, “we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” Luckily, the Vietnamese themselves finally put an end to the genocide in Cambodia, with no thanks to Henry Kissinger or the United States...

Kissinger committed massive crimes against humanity, even if you only consider his actions in Chile. First, Kissinger neither knew anything about Latin America nor cared. He thought the region utterly irrelevant. He once rejected the offer of a childhood friend who became an official at the Inter-American Development Bank to provide information about the region by responding, “If I need any information on Latin America, I’ll look it up in the Almanac.” He later stated, “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”

In this worldview, Latin America only existed to serve U.S. interests. Salvador Allende’s socialist and democratic government was outraged Nixon and Kissinger. That Allende was elected democratically despite massive CIA interference in 1970 to defeat him only outraged them more. So they sought to undermine him at every opportunity...

When General Augusto Pinochet rose to prominence and eventually overthrew Allende in a violent coup, Kissinger was behind him every step of the way. The CIA and Kissinger knew of the coup head of time and had ongoing relationships with people such as Pinochet, not to mention had previously supported an attempt for a coup in 1970. The horrifying aftermath, with torture and killing abounding, hardly quieted Kissinger’s ardor for Pinochet. By 1976, Kissinger was Ford’s Secretary of State. When Pinochet ordered the assassination of dissenter and former U.S. ambassador Orlando Letelier on U.S. soil, blowing up his car in Washington, Kissinger was totally fine with it...

He took a similar role in Argentina as he did in Chile, supporting the 1976 coup that overthrew the elected government of Isabel Perón by a right-wing military regime that then disappeared its opponents through such lovely methods as throwing them into the ocean from airplanes. Kissinger was completely fine with all of this. He told them about murdering leftists, “the quicker you succeed, the better.” His primary admonition to the Argentine junta was to warn them that Congress might consider sanctions if they continued with these things and so advised them maybe to stop such obvious tactics...

On top of all of this, there is Pakistan. Kissinger completely supported the military junta in Karachi using extreme genocidal force to force East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to stay in that nation. In 1971, the Pakistani military invaded its restive eastern province. The death toll was shocking. The CIA estimate is 200,000. The Bangladeshi government estimates the deaths at 5 million. The number is almost certainly closer to the Bangladeshi estimate. Ten million refugees fled into India. Kissinger and Nixon basically agreed to stand aside. They issued a couple of broad admonitions not to fire on civilians, but threatened no pulling of aid and used no leverage at all to ensure that Pakistan did not massacre people. Even after the massacres were known, Kissinger and Nixon threatened no sanctions, no loss of aid, no consequences at all...

All of these war crimes made Kissinger persona non grata, right? Of course not! Very little speaks more to the festering wound that is “respectable” Beltway culture than the bipartisan adoration to the monster that is Kissinger in his retirement. For decades, he appeared on Charlie Rose whenever he wanted. Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Kissinger during her campaign was utterly grotesque. In 1977, Kissinger was given an endowed chair at Columbia University, despite significant students protests against making the monster a home there. He taught at Georgetown for several years in the late 70s and early 80s as well. He served on the board of directors for a raftload of companies, all of whom use his endless connections to promote their business interests...

Kissinger’s late life continued to be a deep dive into supporting the scummiest leaders of the world. That included Vladimir Putin. Kissinger found the need to intervene in Putin’s imperialist war in Ukraine in 2022 to support the idea that the West should bully Zelensky into giving up a bunch of territory to the Russians. He used his typical language of realpolitik to do so and as usual, it demonstrated a complete indifference to justice and death in favor of playing up to one of the most violent leaders in the world...

That Kissinger remained feted and "respectable" among the Beltway Media speaks to the indifference - if not outright sadism - of those in the journalism profession who traded away any integrity and morals for "access" to the powerful, even when those "powerful" were utter monsters.

For everything Kissinger approved of, the juntas and dictators he supported eventually fell, their sins exposed, the damage done. For all his obsessions with defeating or containing Communism as a global threat during the Cold War, in the end it wasn't Kissinger's policies it was Soviet Russia's internal rot and Communist China's turn towards authoritarian capitalism. Millions of people died and suffered for nothing. And Kissinger openly supported the authoritarian powers - especially Putin - that rose to fill the void of the Post-Cold War world.

There is nothing nice to say about Henry Kissinger. His "successes" at foreign policy were failures of human dignity and common goddamn decency. If there is any hope for America and the world after all this, it's that every policy idea Kissinger ever promoted should be dumped into the scrap pile of history and every acolyte who still obeys his twisted agenda barred from any civil role at all.

Goddamn Kissinger forever.