Henry Kissinger Leaves World In Need Of New Rhetorical Question When Someone Decent Dies Young

For now, 'How is it fair that Kissinger made it to 100?' still works.

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Former US secretary of State, national security advisor, and Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Henry Kissinger — that last was the reason Tom Lehrer gave for retiring, reasoning that “political satire became obsolete” — died yesterday at his home in Connecticut at the age of 100. If you’d like a sober balanced obituary, here’s a gift link to the Washington Post’s; for a more honest assessment, though, you’ll want to read Spencer Ackerman’s scathing assessment at Rolling Stone, for which Ackerman says he had the headline prepared well in advance: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.” The story is tagged with the entirely justified heading “Good Riddance.”

Ackerman notes that in the official record, the worst mass murderer ever executed in American history was TimothyMcVeigh, the white supremacist whose bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, 19 of them children. However, says Ackerman,

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. 

Then some blue-check idiot on Twitter replaced “Kissinger” in the above paragraph with “Fauci” and upped the number of dead to 20 million because that’s the state of the country in 2023.

Kissinger was a devotee of what got called realpolitik, in which pursuit of narrow US policy goals without consideration of human rights was allegedly more “realistic” than giving any consideration to the impact of the desired policy on those who found themselves getting stomped on. It was a sham, of course, pretending that getting what the US wanted was necessarily based in pure facts, without any sentimental worries about who might suffer — or how that suffering might lead to massive blowback against those supposedly cold, “realistic” calculations.

In the language of my people — science fiction nerds — it was a preference for the worldview of “The Cold Equations,” but with a pretense that international relations were simply a matter of applying power and physics to messy human lives and international relations. Not that Kissinger necessarily knew that story, but for Christ’s sake the world might be a better place if he’d given more thought to the implications of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” instead. Crushing people can have consequences, no matter how you may justify it or insist that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” as a more recent formulation of the realpolitik fantasy puts it.

Here’s how the WaPo obit puts it, with a detached bloodlessness of which Kissinger might approve:

What he viewed as pragmatic, many writers and analysts regarded as unprincipled maneuvering, unguided by respect for human rights or even human life. […]

Critics held Dr. Kissinger responsible for the 1969 “secret bombing” of neutral Cambodia and for the American ground invasion of that country the following year, which expanded the conflict in Southeast Asia and led to a takeover of the country by the murderous Khmer Rouge.

They said his policy of promoting the shah of Iran as the anchor of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf encouraged the shah to raise oil prices and fed the megalomania that led to the Iranian revolution. They accused him of conniving at the 1974 coup that overthrew the government of Cyprus, and of supporting Pakistan’s brutal campaign to quash a secessionist rebellion in what is now Bangladesh because Pakistan was his secret conduit to the Chinese.

And they said Dr. Kissinger was at least indirectly responsible for the CIA-inspired coup that overthrew the legally elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile — as well as the earlier murder of Gen. René Schneider, commander in chief of Chile’s armed forces, who staunchly opposed a coup.

We’re with Spencer Ackerman, who says the quiet part far more explicitly: for all of Kissinger’s reputation as a tough-minded “realist,” he actually made things worse, particularly in how he fed information from the Paris Peace Talks to Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. Nixon, campaigning on a secret plan to end the war, dissuaded South Vietnamese negotiators from agreeing to basically the same terms they would accept years later, needlessly prolonging the war until 1973. Says Ackerman:

Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.

But hey, Kissinger won himself positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations where he could play around with the fates of entire nations and be respected ever after by the powerful, so that seems a fair price.

And now he’s dead, the bastard, and we barely even mentioned his role in the coup against Allende in Chile. A taste: Before Allende was elected, the great realist said, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” I’m pretty sure supporters of Trump’s 2021 coup attempt said more or less the same thing.

Nor did we get into the weirdness of how a man who escaped the Nazis in his youth came to be the top flunky and lickspittle for a vicious antisemite who blamed “those dirty rotten Jews from New York” for reporting on the My Lai massacre and making godly American soldiers look like bloodthirsty maniacs. Ackerman again:

Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.” 

Go read the whole Ackerman piece, which is infuriatingly detailed, and if you feel sad today, feel sad that there’s probably no Hell in which Kissinger, Nixon, Pinochet, the Shah, and the whole crowd of criminals will suffer forever as they deserve, the end.

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Neat New Proof Nixon Sabotaged Foreign Policy Like A Common Reagan, Trump!

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[Washington Post (gift link) / Rolling Stone / “The Cold Equations” / “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (audio on YouTube)]

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