I'm surprised at the extreme brevity of this obituary; were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100 and didn't have anything prepared? I would have expected at least an brief summary of his career, highlights, major points of controversy, etc. e.g. like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/29/henry-kissin... (and undoubtedly many others).
Also, this ruins my "Jimmy Carter v. Henry Kissinger in 2024"-joke.
Seeing as he was 100, I doubt they were taken by surprise. These things are usually canned and updated once in a while for people of interest, especially past a certain age (or at least that's my understanding).
Four years? The Venture Brothers had a "Dr Killinger" character with his 'Magic Murder Bag' about 15-ish years ago. Kissinger's crimes have been known about for a loooong time... but the establishment didn't seem to care.
EDIT: Apologies if you meant "forty" years. That'd be about right for mainstream.
I was referring to a specific image template and heavily hedged with "at least", but you're right - anti-kissinget sentiment had been around for decades.
The BBC tend to keep separate breaking news (which they usually keep short, or run a live feed) and more long term articles about the state of the world, obituaries, etc.
Your grandfather's obituary was written by his kin, right? But the beeb doesn't have to treat him like a relative. Seems like any controversies about them are very relevant to an article about their death.
If you talk about the good things he did one group of people will get very mad, and if you talk about the bad things he did another group of people will get very mad. Much easier to just say nothing.
Do yourself a favor and listen to at least one of the six part series that Behind The Bastards podcast[0] did on Kissinger. It will give you a background, with sources, on the "controversial" statesman that you'll read eulogies about over the next few days.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
Tl;dr version: Kissinger was an almost superhuman ass-kisser. He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
And he used that power to stay in the halls of power whoever was in charge.
The only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
The crowd here might find it preposterous but Kissinger dated models and movie stars. One that I remember was the actress Jill St. John who was a Bond girl in the movie Diamonds are forever. The two dated for a couple of years. Miss St. John also dated Michael Caine, Sean Connery, David Frost and Tom Selleck.
Interestingly, the Behind the Bastards episodes on him point out that his relationships with women may have been one of the only non-bastard things about him. He was seen as “safe” compared to other men of the time!
>He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?
“ He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?”
Hahahahaha nope, he literally was just a leech on society that got into high enough positions that his vapid bullshitting didn’t just fool his bosses into paying him a good wage but directly contributed to the deaths of countless innocent humans… for absolutely zero good reason from any perspective other than kissingers. Seriously this isn’t serial killer level stuff, this is war criminal mass murderer levels off violence and he never ever faced any real consequences for it.
I am not religious but Kissinger makes me want to believe in hell just so I can fall asleep with the comforting thought that Kissinger is burning in hell forever. He deserves nothing less, rest in piss, Kissinger.
Diplomacy and "ass-kissing to stay in the halls of power forever" seem like they can have some nonempty intersection, but still are different concepts.
Diplomacy would further the needs of a state or at least a faction of people. Ass-kissing for personal gain seems like a different thing that may even hinder more genuine diplomatic efforts.
Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. They just wasted tons of lives for nothing. Same as with the recent Afghanistan campaign.
At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.
Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.
Japan's "amazing recovery" wasn't hampered by a legacy of UXB (unexploded bombs) that still kill and cripple children to this day.
America had total control of Japan following their surrender, and the time/power/resources to rebuild Japan as they saw fit (which was to become an eastern bulwark of capitalist freedom, against China and Russia).
Bombing Cambodia had the much more cynical purpose of convincing Ho Chi Min that Nixon was an unrestrained madman whose demands in peace talks had to be surrendered to, to avoid further mindless devastation for all involved. Yes, it was more complicated in the details, but pretty damn clear in the larger picture.
It depends on your evaluation of his outcomes, but the scholarly opinion of him is that the legacy of his that endures is the death toll, while the geopolitical outcomes were bad for the U.S. (losing Vietname/Cambodia/Laos), temporary advantages (Pinochet in Chile), or opinionated side-taking that has not been good for the U.S. or the world (Israel/Palestinians).
He was very effective at remaining in a position of power and influence. I don't think you'll find many who believe he was as consequentially good for America.
This piques my curiosity. Does anyone have the mechanical specifics of how this worked, as in actual conversations when Kissinger was in his element that demonstrated this quality in action?
Teens today who have never experienced Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field normally don't believe my shorthand description of the RDF like the above encapsulated description of "superhuman ass-kisser". Fortunately, I can show them the historical records, giving them not just the video of his meticulously-rehearsed MacWorld presentations, but the context of the enormous stakes he was playing with, to change their minds. And to teach them that what seems extraordinary can be accomplished with extraordinary effort, if one is willing to relentlessly study and practice.
So whenever I hear about extraordinary abilities, I'm always curious to see how they worked up close, mechanically, in dissect-able action.
If you listen to Nixon’s tapes, there are many instances where Nixon makes outrageously antisemitic comments, and Kissinger (who was Jewish himself), ever the brown-noser, agrees and responds with an even more outlandish one.
The podcast also covers some more humoring of extreme antisemitism when he was negotiating in the middle east. It's not just that he tolerated it, he validated and played along with very clever quips about being a Jew.
Not saying I agree with the charge but this also doesn’t refute it. I mean, for one thing the US believes the state department and military of the US is above international war crimes courts. (Thats the actual official position).
Not just "above"; US law explicitly gives the President the power to invade The Hague if they get their hands on American officials or military personnel.
> The Act gives the President power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
So what? Many countries do not recognize the ICC, not just the US. We don’t want a Global World Order; that’s a European fantasy Europe can keep. We don’t share all the same values or laws and never will.
Doesn't the Hague only do war crimes? It's not much of a Global World Order if they only process heinous stuff. Is this a slippery slope argument? Or do you disagree with how the Hague does things?
American money has "NEW WORLD ORDER" written in Latin on it. I'm sure that's where people might get the idea that America does want a Global World Order.
This position is not unique to the US and stems from the potential for politically motivated prosecutions and the need to protect military personnel. Other countries (India, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, etc) are also cautious about subjecting their citizens to the jurisdiction of international courts.
If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
> If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
Except the optics and power that his party holds (politics), which is what keeps many congress critters in positions of power. The power that the US wields (economically and militarily) kept the other countries at bay.
People pretending, that the reasons are unclear, are being disingenuous.
"International war crimes courts" do not prosecute treason.
And it isn't about the personnel being "above" anything. It's simply that the ICC is not a court and does not respect due process, so we do not subject American citizens to it (and indeed it would be an interesting Constitutional question as to whether that's even truly possible).
From a more pragmatic perspective, as long as Russia and China don't recognize the ICC's authority, it would be a major global strategic blunder to impose checks and balances only on the United States.
Were some of the comments up-thread edited or something? I don’t see any mention of treason in this specific chain until this post (but it is weird because hammock’s post, at this same level, also mentions treason).
Of course there are other threads that bring up the possibility of treason. But I don’t see why there’s a need to explain the (obvious, right?) fact that the ICC wouldn’t prosecute treason.
> “If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?”
Which, I guess I just meant, prosecuted by whom? He was the US government at the highest levels and there is no international body with jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem like nobody being able to press charges means a man is innocent.
The crazy thing about this is that the folks calling Kissinger out for war crimes and the folks like you pointing out the good things he enabled both have a valid point.
I'm not saying his legacy is positive or negative overall, but folks need to look at both sides of it. He's a great example of someone who had a major hand in a lot of major decisions and has a very very mixed legacy because of it.
Things are much blurrier than we make them out to be these days. Anyone who has a major impact often has significant positive and negative impacts. Kissinger was not a one sided character.
And with that said, I can't believe I just defended Henry Kissinger, but it's still worth saying...
People are complicated. I'd be more tempted to see the good, if he had ever shown remorse or admitted to mistakes.
The Nobel prize is based on explosives. Most scientists 100 years ago were eugenicists. It's difficult to judge people's beliefs and decisions outside of their era. That doesn't mean that you can't build a moral or ethical system outside of it, but they're all based on assumptions of what is good.
It's not like there weren't people calling out Kissinger contemporaneously, or even Lincoln (for his handling of the Dakota). It's more weird when people obliviously deny recent history or create hagiography upon their death.
I don't think your examples are very convincing. To the extent that Nobel enabled bad things with explosives, the prizes were there to compensate and not celebrate them. And even though the word is very taboo today, eugenics are not inherently evil. They don't compete with Kissinger.
> The crazy thing about this is that the folks calling Kissinger out for war crimes and the folks like you pointing out the good things he enabled both have a valid point.
The biggest problem is that what a lot of people know about Kissinger is "folk knowledge" they picked up from other people, and this gets passed down as a game of telephone until it's common knowledge, but no one has bothered to check if it's accurate or not. It doesn't help when there are articles like the Rolling Stones one that's been posted, which seem more interested in cherry-picking facts to fit the narrative then in actually looking at what happened with open eyes.
A few years ago, I thought to myself that since people talk about Kissinger so much, I should go and look at what he actually did. I was surprised to see that he didn't seem to be the driving force behind bad policy decisions in the Nixon White House. He was certainly involved as National Security Advisor, but most of the time it looked like Nixon would have made the same decisions without him. Yet for some reason, Kissinger is usually blamed much more than Nixon.
For instance, at least according to the State Department Historian[1] it was General Creighton Abrams that first suggested bombing enemy bases in Cambodia. Nixon agreed, and involved Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor. But the bombing is usually presented as Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. General Abrams isn't mentioned in the Rolling Stones article at all. Compare the Google results for "Creighton Abrams Cambodia" with "Henry Kissinger Cambodia" to see how slanted things are.
That's not even getting into the fact that blaming the Khmer Rouge on the bombing campaign is an extreme stretch. But that's how people approach the folk knowledge - they get told something is true, believe it to be true, then stitch together whatever facts they can find to support the narrative they've already set their mind on.
Part of this is that Nixon resigned in disgrace and Kissinger kept being an active part of American politics, so his influence was seen as something to fight against. Not that he was somehow more culpable than Nixon, but he was certainly more relevant than Nixon.
I mean, the Paris peace accords happened after the Nixon campaign convinced the south Vietnamese to walk out of earlier talks and crash the Johnson campaign. So it seems weird to praise those people for getting almost the same result after killing lots of anmerican and lots more Vietnamese, not to mention the noncombatants in laos and Cambodia Kissinger directed the bombing of. And after all that it was barely a different deal.
I'm not disputing his complicated legacy, but it seems strange and unjust to me that if he had committed some straight-forward crime, like murdering his wife, we probably wouldn't be talking about his complicated legacy. He would be a politician whose career ended in disgrace.
But we somehow feel compelled to weigh war crimes that lead to the death and suffering of millions against other positive accomplishments as if one justifies the other. We're basically conceding to Kissinger yet again by evaluating his legacy in terms of realpolitik.
> If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?
Kissinger himself said many times that relations between states aren't based on morality, so people who act in the name of states can't be bound by international laws. It's an idea that is the basis of the realist philosophy. A lot of people in the the foreign policy establishment share that view.
The USA for example supports the International criminal court, but not for its citizens, so Kissinger can never be prosecuted like Milošević. Those who say the ICC is just an instrument of power are not entirely wrong.
Especially since there is evidence the Nixon campaign prolonged the war by sabotaging Johnson’s peace talks, going directly to the south Vietnamese and promising them a better deal if they would make sure Johnson didn’t get to end the war.
Reading through the descriptions of the episodes of this podcast it seems a lot like they start with a conclusion and then confirmation bias themselves (and everyone else who already agrees with them). Maybe not the most objective source.
It’s co-hosted by the guys from The Dollop, who I’ve listened to quite a lot. They’re funny and entertaining, but they’re comedians not historians. Their whole schtick is just reading some book and incredulously saying “holy shit” about whatever it says, without any critical analysis.
Edit: and there’s nothing wrong with that! Just recognize when something is entertainment vs. trying to be objective.
Which makes it such a shame that people throw them around like they are an authoritative source of anything. It’s literally just some guy who read a book and has a microphone. It’s as good as whatever book they read.
Podcasts, in general, are not made to cater to bonafide genius intellectuals.
Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere, but to expect an entire series of episodes to average out to anything close to that is too high of an expectation.
That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
Podcasts, like live news, radio talk shows, and other scheduled throughput based media, have to fill time with content. If there's nothing intelligent to say, they say stuff anyways.
Nah.
Podcasts are one of the few mediums that don’t have set lengths. The one here goes to 6 parts because of the volume of material. And often I’ve heard podcasts do multiple episodes in one. There’s no time they’re trying to achieve as there’s no standard.
That's mostly true, except for the big ones that have signed deals, but even then a lot of filler sentences, filler talk, etc., happens regularly in the podcast episodes I've heard.
The huge advantage of podcasts over most other forms of media is that they don't have to cut things down into tiny bite sized pieces. Many podcasts will get down into the nitty gritty details of things that the news never will. I think it's much closer to long form journalism than television news. Although, obviously, podcasts can take any form and some are geared toward that latter rather than former. But the ones I am most drawn to are those where actual experts pour over the data in great detail.
This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.
You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.
Be that as it may -- and I haven't listened to the podcast -- but there's very compelling evidence of his responsibility, or at least complicity for war crimes throughout southeast Asia during the Nixon administration amounting to civilian deaths numbering in the tens of thousands, conservatively.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
The podcast, no. But if a comment is going to offer a link with the conceit of “consume this to fully understand who this person was” it would be good if the source were not something with the explicitly stated thesis of “hey, this guy’s a bastard”. I mean, you don’t even need to listen to it to know what the conclusion is going to be.
Indeed, which is to say, it is possible the rational view here is the man who facilitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge by testing an entire country as collateral damage is, well, a bastard.
Maybe. Maybe the alternatives available at the time were believed to result in something 10x worse than the Khmer Rouge. Would he still be a bastard then? Or someone who had to make a hard choice among terrible options?
I don't know, for the record. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't sound like a reasoned consideration of the evidence taking into account the historical context. It sounds like someone who thought "I bet Henry Kissinger was a bastard", then found a book that says "Henry Kissinger was a bastard!" and then made a podcast saying "See? I knew it!"
He supported and enabled dictatorships in Latin America. Do tell us how that was defensible. This is very much part of public record, thanks to diplomatic cables declassified in 2016.
His point of view was that communism had to be stopped everywhere and that's what he went with. Clearly he knew that it meant aligning with bad folks in some cases. Hence why he's known as the "real politik" guy. You can disagree with his conclusions but it's not like it's helpful to assume that this man had zero moral compass and was pure evil. He might have been wrong (I'm not saying he was or wasn't), many of us are in our attempts at doing what seems necessary for the greater good.
> You can disagree with his conclusions but it's not like it's helpful to assume that this man had zero moral compass and was pure evil.
That analysis approach is useful for historian to understand human behaviors but should not be the bar one uses to evaluate a legacy. Hitler believed that the raising of the Third Reich was absolutely necessary for German survival. We can acknowledge that in understanding how a person becomes pure evil while also observing that, yes, he was pure evil.
Nobody is the villain of the story they've told themselves. We have the privilege and perspective to evaluate whether that story was awful and should never be repeated.
I don't know anything about the podcast beyond the name, but I could see a podcast called "Beyond the Bastards" not having a forgone conclusion about their subject, but being more about why someone is believed to be awful and then going "beyond" to see if that were fair. I'm going to give the podcast a chance.
Funny! But your question did get me thinking. I don't know anything about this podcast nor much about Kissenger, but a podcast dedicated to bad people could be objective, I think, if they were to pick their subjects based on objective criteria.
Their criteria is definitely “was this person/organization a bastard?” That said, the host does a lot of research and does attempt to provide as full a picture as possible about his subjects. There is some editorializing, and also there’s a healthy amount of “this is the best information that I could find”. A number of times I’ve heard him say things like “we don’t have a direct source for Thing X, so take this with a grain of salt”.
Well worth a listen imo, I ended up binging every episode over the course of a year or two.
I listened to it once based on some redditor's enthusiastic recommendation, and it was as bad (i.e. blatantly unapologetically biased) as you might expect.
Does it have to be objective? Also, perhaps the glowing eulogies are the biased ones--objective means a fact-based honest look at his terrible legacy, not erasing it.
I mean, it’s not science, it’s politics. The podcast isn’t trying to present an argument, but rather convey facts to an already trusting audience. This feels off the mark
Asking half rethorically, how would these descriptions be different if they were fully objective and the guy was a really horrible person ?
In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
It's harsh to fault them for having an opinion on the subject they dug to the end, and a conclusion already made at the time they start recording the series.
>In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
This is false. Age of Napoleon is quite good at presenting the factual history of its topic and then weighing dual interpretations of events. He highlights that something is his opinion when he gives it. The result is a wildly engaging podcast.
Hell, he's an avowed Marxist, which is a belief system I find repugnant. However, other than one or two clearly labeled bonus interview episodes, his views are AFAICT, totally absent from his presentation of history. He strives very hard to not tell you what to think.
It is disheartening that you believe information must be presented with an agenda.
I never heard of the Age of Napoleon podcast, seems to be a series by a Texas resident revisiting Napoleon's history after getting fascinated by the subject.
There's a ton of distance between the author and the subject, it's about something they deeply enjoy and decided to dedicate more than a hundred episode to, and I'm not sure how much being Marxists matters here, when Marx started becoming famous after Napoleon died.
That's a lot different from discussing a politician of your own country who's still alive and untried at the time you do your podcast series.
You might listen to the podcasts. They are good and they are well researched. Listen: I met Kissinger a few times and spent a few decades of my life working with foriegn policy wonks. He was a monster beyond compare.
And I'll just add this in. When I was 24 I got a job at the New York Times working on the tech team that would launch nytimes.com. The "web editor" was one Bernard Gwertzman. Look him up. He was the foreign desk editor of the paper of record for decades. He made his name reporting on the Vietnam war. Would you like to know who his best friend was in 1996 when I met him? Henry Kissinger. He had lunch with him every wednesday at the Harvard Club. Having read Manufacturing Consent more than once I was flabbergasted. If Chomsky had known this... Anyway, he and I were the first ones to show up for a meeting one time and I asked him how he and Henry K had met. He leaned over and said (with a literal wink) "while I was reporting on Vietnam, but don't tell anyone!"... said the man who among many other things 1. reported that we were not bombing Cambodia, 2. Supported Pinochet and 3. didn't report on the East Timor genocide. All policies that were 100% Kissinger.
I do not know about Israel, but I can read both Russian and Ukrainian. And there is a pretty objective test: read a Russian president’s statement - see how it is reported, read a Ukrainian president’s statement - see how it is reported.
Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:
1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.
This was reported as a belligerent statement.
2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.
This was not reported at all.
Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?
'attempted objectivity' is better. It would include:
- narrator reveals his convictions at the start
- focuses on things that physically happened
- weigh dual/multiple interpretations and views of said events from relevant factions, attempting the greatest charity with the one(s) opposed to the initially revealed convictions.
I've listened to the podcast, but one Kissinger op I don't think was mentioned there that always stuck out to me was Operation Popeye. It was a real life attempt to extend the monsoon through cloud seeding so the Ho Chi Minh trail would get washed out and unusable. I think it might be the origin of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory. (Not quite as evil as randomly picking out grid squares and bombing them of course.)
Also check out The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens. I think it was made into a documentary later. The man was worthy of the title of war criminal, but of course we don't prosecute our own and we certainly don't recommend to the ICC (we're the good guys, you see).
It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
Not only would we not recommend our war criminals to the ICC, we have on the books the authorization to be able to invade the Hague in case any US person was being held or tried. Hague Invasion Act / ASPA is wild.
The rest of the west is allied with the US because they’re the least evil guys, not because they’re the good guys.
I’m Dutch and knowing that the US has a constant threat of extreme violence against us written into their law scares the crap out of me. We’re supposed to be happy jolly NATO allies but srsly that shit is not cool.
All countries of comparable power are murderous autocracies. By that metric. At least I cannot think of any that isn't, feel free to try to proof me wrong.
When you reply to a comment so deep down a thread you gotta take the full conversation into context. You reply to me as if I think the US kicks ass at rule of law and liberty. I’m merely saying they’re the least bad at it of the superpowers (despite monsters like Kissinger)
You are not an ally, you are a de facto vassal. Compared to other vassals in history you don't have to send much in the way of tribute.
Frankly, you have a pretty good deal. We provide your protection, you can do your Dutch things, and we don't bother you too much other than the occasional McDonalds garrison.
> The rest of the west is allied with the US because they’re the least evil guys, not because they’re the good guys.
No, because the US controls the "free media" and politicians in those countries. It's funny how almost all Kissinger article today were positive in this country.
> we have on the books the authorization to be able to invade the Hague in case any US person was being held or tried. Hague Invasion Act / ASPA is wild.
That's more the reason to move the court to a country with nukes, say France, Strasbourg and put some retaliation Act in place if Americans put Strasbourg Invasion Act in place
Rhetoric can be used to craft any message, no matter how absurd. Eloquent defenses exist for all of the most heinous actions by men. We have to assess the viewpoint before we grant it legitimacy, not absorb it simply because it exists.
"The logical fallacy you're committing is called the Straw Man Fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone misrepresents or distorts an opponent's argument or position, creating a weaker or exaggerated version of it."
So what's the unbiased take going to be? "Yeah he caused a lot of damage and suffering, but sometimes he also progressed our (the US) interests without hurting anyone"?
Yes, basically. I disagree strongly with that Kissinger was anything of a balanced man, and I think it took too long for him to die, the world would have been a better place without him, and so on.
But I still think it's valuable for people who don't share that view, to make their own opinions public, as we all get richer by having multiple and sometimes opposing views out there.
What "nuance and unbiased conversation". Forgive me for not giving an inch to someone who watched as millions were murdered by bombs. A factual retelling of the man's "achievements" should make any sane person cringe with disbelief that he lived to be a hundred and wasn't jailed. There's a time and place for multiple viewpoints and this is not it. Sometimes "the other side" really has no place
If you are not willing to engage with or understand the other side of the debate you will have no capacity to understand or debate the modern day Kissingers who are currently in government.
How does that follow? Firstly, he likely understands the “other side of the debate”, but even if he didn’t, how does that preclude him from understanding modern Kissingers?
There is "understand the other side of the debate" and then there is knee jerk insistence to both side everything.
Nuance and unbiased conversation would actually allowed for conclusion that someone could do a lot more harm then good. If you insist that powerful people needs to be always talked about in good terms and discussion of bad stuff needs to contain "balancing" good stuff, you are neither unbiased nor nuanced.
Why is the default response that I haven't "engaged or understood" the "other side of this debate"? What's the "other side" here? That I have sympathy for this man? Where is this whole thing going? Is doing research on what he's done and perpetrated and quotes by his own voice not enough? And how does that lead to me not understanding modern day Kissingers?
I refuse to give this any more headspace. This sage-like almost apathetical both-sidesing is more dangerous to me than taking a stand.
Please ask the people of Laos to "understand how it happened". A country where thousands have died after they were bombed to hell and back because of the unexploded bombs which still makes farming unviable. I don't need to understand the "how" because there is no "how" beyond imperialism which I understand perfectly well enough. There's no complex morality here
People here should really stop pretending that reading "both sides" of everything is some form of enlightenment. It is delusional
Americans bombed the people of Laos for sport killing tens of thousands and crippling many more. Kissinger directly enables and supported this. The man was a monster and should have died long ago.
I have read critique that the terms presented to Serbs were unreasonable. Maybe, maybe not, but let's keep in mind that Serbs had already committed genocide and kept aiming for it.
I suggest reading up on the subject now that enough time had passed that information is more readily available.
The KLA was designated as a terrorist organisation by (among others) Amnesty International and the FBI itself removed it from its terrorist list only months before the bombing started.
But even past that point, Rambouillet was not in good faith by any way you look at it, it was designed to be unacceptable and justify a military operation that did nothing to help the people out claimed to protect.
Haven't listened to the podcast (yet) and don't know much about kissinger but the description "the Forest Gump of war crimes" made me laugh out loud, whether or not it's accurate.
Jews are often accused of dual loyalty. Kissinger would have been livid at the suggestion that he placed Jewish interests above the American national interest.
"Placing Jewish interests above American national interests" is a contradictory accusation, there are just as many Jewish people in the United States as there are anywhere else. Showing preference for a foreign country he has been engaged in diplomacy with is an accusation that has dogged much of Kissinger's career, including a lot of criticism for being soft on the Soviets due to how nicely their diplomats treated him. Peace with the soviet union was probably not against US interests as his neoconservative critics of the time would have claimed, and Israel has done a lot at the behest of the united states - so maybe they are both wrong, but it is not necessarily an antisemitic accusation. Of course some people will think Kissinger was soft on Israel, he existed at one point on the spectrum of policy and he was not at an extreme.
P.S. If you want to hear my opinion, it's that ascribing to Kissinger the overall direction of our government's foreign policy is usually not the right answer, given that he was always surrounded by many others who agreed with him. You don't get to be a well-liked figure in Washington by acting like a disagreeable outsider slash maverick...
Strange. The alt link given to me in this thread worked. The original one says:
Video unavailable
This video is unavailable
Only after clicking it. The initial screen loads up as if it's going to play normally. Usually if there are geographical limits or whatever, it mentions that. But this error says the video simply isn't there.
Youtube seems to be acting weird for me recently. I assume it has something to do with their war against ad blockers. Moving too fast and breaking some things? I don't know, just a thought.
I can understand why people despise Kissinger, but he’s a pretty interesting figure on the whole. Not the best diplomat or Secretary of State we’ve had, but certainly a seminal figure in American foreign policy.
Certainly, but lots of terrible people are also interesting. Kissinger strikes me as a prime example of Lord Acton's dictum at how power corrupts; by any reasonable standard he committed absolutely egregious acts, but because they inured to the USA's strategic benefit, there has never been any political will to hold him accountable. It's like how the US promotes the idea of a 'rules based international order' but habitually diminishes the UN, refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court and so on.
Because "rules based international order" can only really be enforced by a hegemon, and obviously the hegemon can't really "be it" and "be in it" simultaneously
Theres a semi apocryphal story that one of Kissingers friends warned him before he started working under clearance, that once he had access to "Intelligence" that other people didn't have, he would lose his humanity to the spooks, and assume he was smarter than the people without clearance. Which seems to be sort of what happened.
> assume he was smarter than the people without clearance
Idk, it's actually wild how HN is almost entirely "Kissinger is a war criminal" meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it. Meanwhile, if you read any Kissinger, you'd realize he understood history and the international relations better than 99% of these comments. Truly, word-for-word basis you will undoubtedly learn far more about history reading World Order than you will these HN comments. Personally, I have little hope in their uneducated decisions in a position of astronomical consequences and no 20/20 hindsight.
> meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it.
This is a good point. Can we really say for certain that “bombing noncombatant countries both during a war and after a treaty was signed” is a war crime, and even if it were would “coming up with the whole idea” even count as contributing to something like that? It is confusing stuff like this that has led to no person ever being convicted for war crimes — the concept is too nebulous and complex to nail down.
Surely if Kissinger were a war criminal he would have said so in the books that he wrote
Indeed - that's why I didn't deny above that Kissinger was interesting; he was a deep thinker, and I can see the motive behind many of his decisions, though I don't agree with it. Likewise I read Nixon and many other people whose politics I find disagreeable or even atrocious. What I dislike about Kissinger are both his extremely cynical strategic policies and that in the ~50 years since, he appears to have spent most of his time defending those policies and the ideas behind them, while making little or no effort to mitigate the negative outcomes.
See, this is what I'm talking about. You can read about Operation Menu for yourself.
"In 1966, Sihanouk made an agreement with Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China that would allow PAVN and VC forces to establish base areas in Cambodia and to use the port of Sihanoukville for the delivery of military material
Before the diplomatic amenities with Sihanouk [and the US] were even concluded, Nixon had decided to deal with the situation of PAVN/VC troops and supply bases in Cambodia.
On 30 January 1969, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Earle Wheeler suggested to the president that he authorize the bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries. He was seconded by General Creighton W. Abrams, who also submitted his proposal to bomb the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), the elusive headquarters of PAVN/VC southern operations, located somewhere in the Fishhook region of eastern Cambodia. Abrams claimed to Nixon that the regions of eastern Cambodia to be bombed were underpopulated and no civilian deaths would be caused."
But instead, all any snarky layman hears from the grapevine is that Kissinger is coming up with the whole plan to bomb a random Commie country for zero reason. That you know Kissinger's name and not any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sec Def, or Sec State at the time involved in these decisions tells everything. People need an evil mastermind scapegoat, like McNamara was for Vietnam, because they can't comprehend the complexities involved in fog of war decision making, with no hindsight, and all the actors involved.
This is a good point. Maybe bombs were just going to fall on Cambodia naturally without a senior American official directing them to. It is a mystery as to whether or not Cambodia would just become bombed on its own without Kissinger selecting targets.
Given the intricacies of the natural bomb migration patterns, who is to say if any person can be thought of as participating in how they fall? It is a philosophical question for theologians and meta physicists.
Ok so by deferring to a teenager’s sarcasm, instead of any evidence that supports your original assertion, we’ve established that there’s no further case to your inaccurate judgement.
I am not sure if it’s possible to rise to the level of excellence in reasoning that you’ve established while laying out your thesis of “only uneducated laymen think that Kissinger was a war criminal”.
You have a fascinating point that you are very smart and the act of disagreeing with you on this categorically makes others very dumb.
I suppose you can claim a victory in that I decline to refute your idea that “an action can’t be a war crime if multiple people are involved, also knowing who Henry Kissinger is means you don’t know who anyone else is”, it is simply a thought too eloquent and genius to craft an equally compelling riposte.
Anyway, you’re welcome to directly address the primary sources I linked and make a bullet pointed list explaining why each part is proof that Henry Kissinger did not commit any war crimes.
From your own selected sources, we have Kissinger telling Nixon that the Air Force isn’t designed for this, but has to relay Nixon’s orders to General Haig.
This is a good point. If you think about it Kissinger was just an intern that passed notes back and forth. As a man with zero influence in any real outcomes he should be remembered for his ability to take dictation with aplomb. It is a mystery to scholars why he is regarded as anything at all
Should a country overthrow the democratically elected government of another country because of non-life-threatening business losses? (Chile)
Should a country delay a peace process with an enemy nation for several years for the sake of optics over peace? (Vietnam)
Should a world leader meant to promote peace and de-escalation of armed conflict intentionally snub and antagonize their chief political rival with nukes, for the sake of optics? (USSR regarding wars in the mideast)
From my brief reading in the past few hours, it seems he decided a number of US policy positions that not only killed a large number of humans, but did so by expressly ignoring the stated principles of liberalism, self-determination and human decency and honor.
So I guess if people were to fully support him and his actions, I would at least ask them to be consistent and say "I do not believe in a rules-based world order and I do not believe the US has any obligation to advance human rights worldwide".
There are times the US has done things that were horrific, but were deemed absolutely essential to saving more lives than they cost - such as the bombing of Japan. Kissinger's difference is that none of the moves he endorsed seem to have been necessary to the survival of the "West" or the US, but it cost more lives than the bombings.
He also tried to intimidate India from intervening militarily in Bangladesh to stop the Pakistani Army’s genocide there, in collaboration with the British and the Chinese. Fortunately he failed, in no small part due to the Soviets, who were the good guys in this instance.
Thanks for pointing this out, his book title Diplomacy was very enlightening.
One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).
I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.
I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.
Yes, topics like these mask off that HN is only a step above uneducated right wing echo chambers. People would rather throw out Bourdain, Hunter Thompson, or Rolling Stones and Huffington Post quotes than read a history book around the 60s. In some part, I blame the Reddit like upvoting that reinforces people to regurgitate the current popular opinions for affirmation. Convinced their shallow take is right, unaware of how little they could actually tell you what specifically happened 50 years ago.
Are we sure? I was beginning to wonder if the afterlife was going to be holding out on this one.
Poor taste jokes aside - is there anyone else as directly responsible for as much modern day suffering, who has "gotten away with it" more cleanly in the eyes of the public? I've always found the disconnect between history and legacy to be rather... jarring.
The neocons? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kagans, Nuland, Bolton, et al.
In terms of stopping ongoing and future conflicts, this is the group we need to hold accountable. Not Kissinger, whom they hate(d), and hasn't been making policy for decades.
> one of the few publications with the integrity to publish those words
And a symptom of the term being neutered into meaninglessness.
A critical element of war criminality is command. If you don’t command armed forces, it’s difficult to commit war crimes, legally speaking. You can have condoned or collaborated or contributed to them.
Yes, I’m sure that’s why he was never seriously threatened legally: the closest you could get to command would probably be Cambodia where he very explicitly told General Haig to start bombing a neutral country but in that case was also very clearly passing on Nixon’s direct order: “He 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. You got that?”
I’m sure that if he’d ever had to face a hostile inquiry his defense would have been that when the President of the United States tells you to make a phone call, you do, and he’d almost certainly have been successful.
For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.
We did this for practical reasons. In Iraq, we fired the Ba’athist civilian state along with its military. So not only was the successor left without its bureaucracy, said bureaucracy was also unemployed. Ripe for the taking.
Legally, focussing on the originator and executor of an order is cleaner. It’s stark in a way involving every interlocutor isn’t.
> For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.
For a fairly comparable role (foreign minister), Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted (among other things, for "crimes against peace" and "deliberately planning a war of aggression") and executed at Nuremberg. Plenty of ministers in the list there.
It's hard to argue Kissinger wasn't involved in "deliberately planning a war of aggression" against Cambodia.
This is fair. Were America to find itself at the mercy of a foreign power, he would likely have been prosecuted. That said—and I’m not a Hague expert, so please take this with the grain of salt an internet discussion should carry—the intent of Nuremberg was a balance of practicality and precision, on one hand, with deterrence and retribution, on the other hand.
Yes, but we haven’t exactly set the same precedent for our own war criminals. I had hoped that Obama would’ve had more courage but a lot of people convinced him to make the wrong call.
The level at which Henry Kissinger micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians can not be overlooked. Even by fairly stringent definitions he is a war criminal.
> level at which Henry Kissinger micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians can not be overlooked
Sure. But legally irrelevant. He didn’t command them. The person receiving the order could—and in many cases, should—have refused. That’s different if e.g. Nixon ordered it directly, because in that case it’s a military command.
Again, these terms had meaning. But they’re practically unenforceable even in public opinion, now, because they’re bandied about loosely. That gives cover for actual war criminals.
That's the point. He was giving direct targeting data to bomber pilots that bypassed the chain of command. You can't say someone can't be a war criminal if they had underlings, supervisors, or peers who should have known better and stopped them. There would never be war criminals in that case.
To execute it. Kissinger didn’t execute. He relayed. It’s a subtle, frustrating but—I think—necessary distinction to preserve the sanctity of the term required to prosecute heads of state, a novel concept in its own right.
This is like arguing Eichmann had no part in the holocaust because he just organized the trains. I imagine the Cambodians would make the same distinction the Israelis did, in that both men were clearly evil people.
Nobody asked if he was “deeply involved.” Nobody is even contesting that he acted illegally. Solely that he was a war criminal, which has a specific legal meaning.
War criminal is the new RICO. Except the latter doesn’t lose legitimacy when the public mis-uses it.
This is a natural response to divergent opinions [1]. It’s the mechanism through which social media polarises populations [2][3].
Our brains simply didn’t evolve to deal with multiple hypotheses and different opinions, and most of us never get the training to do so calmly and effectively.
> still a ghoul if you defend a man who was personally involved in bombing 150,000 civilians
If you can't see the difference between defending a person and defending the meaning of a statute, sure. It makes life simpler when we turn up the contrast to absolutes.
If your argument starts with "Sure, he micromanaged the bombing of innocent civilians but", then I think you've gotten lost in the technicalities of being right on the Internet.
> then I think you've gotten lost in the technicalities of being right on the Internet
Legality is entirely technical. When we lose sight of that, and turn legal terms like war criminal into colloquial ones, we sap the terminology of strength. If everyone horrific is a war criminal, then it’s all just banal evil. Nuremberg attempted to draw a line. This type of rhetoric loses its clarity.
No one said that everyone horrific is a war criminal, this is a straw man argument. The claim is that someone who personally "approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids" that killed 150,000 civilians can reasonably be called a war criminal. If you think that's diluting the term then I really don't know what to say.
> In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By summer 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger – who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command – was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 700,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.
So he cannot be a war criminal because he's not in the military? And being part of the war cabinet and directing which villages to bomb on a map is somehow not commanding the military?
> being part of the war cabinet and directing which villages to bomb on a map is somehow not commanding the military?
Not in the way the Conventions define it. (Kissinger absolutely violated international law. He should have been prosecuted. But not as a war criminal.)
The pro-Kissinger side will obviously have plenty of defense. Here's a good unrolling of the "piss on his grave" perspective for those who are confused (or angry but concerned they may not be showing enough consideration to a different perspective): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger [0]: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
And [1]: "Frequently, I’ve come to regret things I’ve said. This, from 2001, is not one of those times"
To quote Tom Lehrer: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Kissinger's legacy will be debated for a long time and I have personally only scratched the very surface. I do however intend to read Hitchen's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" [1] one day, if not just to enjoy the fire with which he could write.
Good question. I have heard it referenced multiple times, but that does not make it true. Wikiquote cites The Sydney Morning Herald [1], but that is probably not a great source. I did a bit of digging online and also found The Guardian mentioning it too around the same time [2] (some twenty or so years ago). But I do not have a source that I would be willing to bet my life on.
This feels like a rabbit hole best left to proper quote investigators (and a timely one at that). Lehrer is alive though (unlike a certain someone...), so maybe one could even ask him?
Do you have a source questioning the authenticity? Not asking you to prove a negative here, just asking since I did not find one skimming a few pages on DuckDuckGo.
Excellent! Thank you! Right from the man himself: "I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize." So his objection is not to the quote itself, but rather the implication that he would have retired as a form of protest in relation to said quote.
> The Onion: I'd long heard that you stopped performing as a form of protest, because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
> Tom Lehrer: I don't know how that got started. I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize. For one thing, I quit long before that happened, so historically it doesn't make any sense. I've heard that quoted back to me, but I've also heard it quoted that I was dead, so there you are. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. I've heard that I stopped because Richard Nixon was elected, or because I got put away in an insane asylum, or whatever. It was just a remark about political satire, because it was true. Not literally, but everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think. Years ago, it was much easier: We had Eisenhower to kick around. That was much funnier than Nixon.
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu, and didn't understand how Kissinger's actions caused Cambodian Civil War. Can you explain? (I assume it is the Civil War the he's blamed for?)
> 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.
I don't know how to take such a claim seriously. AFAICT the evidence for this claim is that Kissenger fed some info about the peace negotiations to the Nixon camp during the 1968 election campaign. That's it.
"some info" is an interesting phrase. The text of the Bible is "some info". The source code to Windows is "some info". The codes to arm United States nuclear missiles is "some info".
Every "some info" has some level of classification. In this case, the "some info" is information about ongoing diplomatic negotiations. I think it's safe to assume that such information is at least Confidential (as defined under US Executive Order 12356 or 13292).
The claim isn’t just that he passed along some dry academic trivia but enough specific details for Nixon to successfully convince the Vietnamese government not to accept the deal on offer, claiming he’d make a better deal of he was elected. Nixon never did say who tipped him off that the peace talks were happening, although he acknowledged how unusual it was, but if true that entire chain of events started on Kissinger betraying the confidences placed in him so he could secure the job he wanted in the next administration.
Yes I still find this absurd. So, first of all, here's an article on the Nixon campaign's efforts to prevent a peace deal. [0] It doesn't mention Kissinger at all. If any single person should be 'blamed' for this, surely it's Nixon? But secondly, there's no evidence at all that these efforts actually had anything to do with the failure of the Johnson administration to reach a peace agreement:
> Moreover, it cannot be said definitively whether a peace deal could have been reached without Nixon’s intervention or that it would have helped Mr. Humphrey. William P. Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser to Johnson and John F. Kennedy who was highly critical of Nixon, nonetheless concluded that prospects for the peace deal were slim anyway, so “probably no great chance was lost.”
Even if we do accept that this peace agreement would have happened and that Kissinger was the crucial linchpin in destroying it, U.S. involvement in the war continued for another 5 years, and then there were 2 further years of war without direct U.S. involvement. There were many decisions made by people in the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments that kept the war going over these years, and they had wide support from their respective populaces. Continuing to fight the war until a peace that preserved South Vietnam could be secured was the orthodox position in the U.S. well into the 1970s. How can all of the moral blame for continuance of the war fall on one person?
Then, finally, assigning moral blame to someone for all the consequent downstream effects of their actions is anyway absurd. If Kissinger is a war criminal for 'causing' all the deaths in Vietnam from 1968 forward, then surely Johnson is a larger one, and Kennedy is still a larger one, since after all the war would have been over years earlier if not for them. Or we could go further and blame Napoleon III for invading Vietnam in the first place, he's surely responsible for every death in the consequent wars since then, right?
Again, we don't have hard proof. The theory is while Nixon had a channel to the South Vietnamese he hadn't used it effectively but stepped it up when Kissinger tipped him off that the peace talks might be moving again:
> According to Haldeman’s notes, Kissinger alerted the Nixon campaign in late September, and again in early October, that something was up. Johnson was willing to halt the U.S. bombing of the North, and with the Soviets applying pressure on Hanoi to meet certain American conditions, the odds were never better for an early settlement of the conflict, which had already claimed 30,000 American lives and torn America apart.
No, that doesn't mean that the responsibility is entirely his – Nixon in particular shouldn't have been ignored after impeachment – but it does raise the question of how many people would have lived had Kissinger not bought his way into the National Security Adviser. He must, after all, have delivered something of value to have not only switched sides (he'd previously been affiliated with Nixon's opponents) but done so moving into a prestigious position without any prior government service.
Subscribers get 10 gift links a month. They added this sometime in the last year or two.
I've been able to stay perennially subscribed to the NYT for $5/month. It's a love/hate relationship and I've probably unsubscribed and re-subscribed more than a dozen times. Unsubscribing got a lot easier a few years back. It used to be super annoying.
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
It's also a good reminder that public judgement isn't worth much for any personality who had access to lots of bonafide top secret information.
A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
Not necessarily 'unjustly vilified', but most of Edgar Hoover's biography were done before the extend on soviet spying in the US was declassified. It talked about a very interesting podcast on a previous comment [1].
For example, Harry Truman, and his sacking of MacArthur. Now that there's been more info released regarding Army biowarfare programs in the late 40s/early 50s, recruitment of the Japanese specialists immediately after WW2, etc...
JRK got us into it, and Nixon got us out of it while navigating the complexities of China, the cold war, and a potential WW III if we appeared too weak.
JFK and Johnson deserve the blame for starting the war, by the end of Johnson’s term it was obvious the public wanted out of the war and he was negotiating the end of it. Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for political reasons. They met behind the American governments back with the south Vietnamese and convinced them to hold out for a better deal from the republicans, and they withdrew from talks and tanked Johnson’s peace deal. They eventually negotiated almost the same deal but worse after many American lives, and many more Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives were spent. By all appearances, for nothing more than electing Nixon.
The whole point of the joke is that Nixon famously said "People have gotta know whether or not their president is a crook. Well I am not a crook".
Posting a gibe that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon after Kissinger died is just stupid. At least post what he wrote about Kissinger:
> It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
> Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
672 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAlso, this ruins my "Jimmy Carter v. Henry Kissinger in 2024"-joke.
The BBC usually takes its time (sometimes to the point of absurdity — more than any other news outlet I can think of).
I doubt it. The economy of Henry Kissinger Grim Reaper claw machine memes has been going strong for the last four years at least.
EDIT: Apologies if you meant "forty" years. That'd be about right for mainstream.
That one might actually be new.
> Born in Germany in 1973,
The BBC tend to keep separate breaking news (which they usually keep short, or run a live feed) and more long term articles about the state of the world, obituaries, etc.
This is how it works. If you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all.
[0] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-kissinger
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-two-kissinger
[2] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-three-kissing...
[3] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-four-kissinge...
[4] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-five-kissinge...
[5] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-six-kissinger
Tl;dr version: Kissinger was an almost superhuman ass-kisser. He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
And he used that power to stay in the halls of power whoever was in charge.
The only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
That and being a total horn dog.
You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?
Hahahahaha nope, he literally was just a leech on society that got into high enough positions that his vapid bullshitting didn’t just fool his bosses into paying him a good wage but directly contributed to the deaths of countless innocent humans… for absolutely zero good reason from any perspective other than kissingers. Seriously this isn’t serial killer level stuff, this is war criminal mass murderer levels off violence and he never ever faced any real consequences for it.
I am not religious but Kissinger makes me want to believe in hell just so I can fall asleep with the comforting thought that Kissinger is burning in hell forever. He deserves nothing less, rest in piss, Kissinger.
No.
Diplomacy would further the needs of a state or at least a faction of people. Ass-kissing for personal gain seems like a different thing that may even hinder more genuine diplomatic efforts.
At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.
Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated.
It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.
Bombing Cambodia had the much more cynical purpose of convincing Ho Chi Min that Nixon was an unrestrained madman whose demands in peace talks had to be surrendered to, to avoid further mindless devastation for all involved. Yes, it was more complicated in the details, but pretty damn clear in the larger picture.
Did you happen to forget that the United States occupied and reconstructed Japan from 1945-1952?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan
It helps to be familiar with history before making judgements about it.
He was very effective at remaining in a position of power and influence. I don't think you'll find many who believe he was as consequentially good for America.
This piques my curiosity. Does anyone have the mechanical specifics of how this worked, as in actual conversations when Kissinger was in his element that demonstrated this quality in action?
Teens today who have never experienced Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field normally don't believe my shorthand description of the RDF like the above encapsulated description of "superhuman ass-kisser". Fortunately, I can show them the historical records, giving them not just the video of his meticulously-rehearsed MacWorld presentations, but the context of the enormous stakes he was playing with, to change their minds. And to teach them that what seems extraordinary can be accomplished with extraordinary effort, if one is willing to relentlessly study and practice.
So whenever I hear about extraordinary abilities, I'm always curious to see how they worked up close, mechanically, in dissect-able action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> The Act gives the President power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
I’m glad for The Hague Invasion Act.
am not well educated on it, for context
If you're going to propagate conspiracy theories, at least try to do so in such fashion as avoids making you look as if you can't be bothered to read.
If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
Except the optics and power that his party holds (politics), which is what keeps many congress critters in positions of power. The power that the US wields (economically and militarily) kept the other countries at bay.
People pretending, that the reasons are unclear, are being disingenuous.
And it isn't about the personnel being "above" anything. It's simply that the ICC is not a court and does not respect due process, so we do not subject American citizens to it (and indeed it would be an interesting Constitutional question as to whether that's even truly possible).
From a more pragmatic perspective, as long as Russia and China don't recognize the ICC's authority, it would be a major global strategic blunder to impose checks and balances only on the United States.
Of course there are other threads that bring up the possibility of treason. But I don’t see why there’s a need to explain the (obvious, right?) fact that the ICC wouldn’t prosecute treason.
> “If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?”
Which, I guess I just meant, prosecuted by whom? He was the US government at the highest levels and there is no international body with jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem like nobody being able to press charges means a man is innocent.
I'm not saying his legacy is positive or negative overall, but folks need to look at both sides of it. He's a great example of someone who had a major hand in a lot of major decisions and has a very very mixed legacy because of it.
Things are much blurrier than we make them out to be these days. Anyone who has a major impact often has significant positive and negative impacts. Kissinger was not a one sided character.
And with that said, I can't believe I just defended Henry Kissinger, but it's still worth saying...
The Nobel prize is based on explosives. Most scientists 100 years ago were eugenicists. It's difficult to judge people's beliefs and decisions outside of their era. That doesn't mean that you can't build a moral or ethical system outside of it, but they're all based on assumptions of what is good.
It's not like there weren't people calling out Kissinger contemporaneously, or even Lincoln (for his handling of the Dakota). It's more weird when people obliviously deny recent history or create hagiography upon their death.
The biggest problem is that what a lot of people know about Kissinger is "folk knowledge" they picked up from other people, and this gets passed down as a game of telephone until it's common knowledge, but no one has bothered to check if it's accurate or not. It doesn't help when there are articles like the Rolling Stones one that's been posted, which seem more interested in cherry-picking facts to fit the narrative then in actually looking at what happened with open eyes.
A few years ago, I thought to myself that since people talk about Kissinger so much, I should go and look at what he actually did. I was surprised to see that he didn't seem to be the driving force behind bad policy decisions in the Nixon White House. He was certainly involved as National Security Advisor, but most of the time it looked like Nixon would have made the same decisions without him. Yet for some reason, Kissinger is usually blamed much more than Nixon.
For instance, at least according to the State Department Historian[1] it was General Creighton Abrams that first suggested bombing enemy bases in Cambodia. Nixon agreed, and involved Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor. But the bombing is usually presented as Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. General Abrams isn't mentioned in the Rolling Stones article at all. Compare the Google results for "Creighton Abrams Cambodia" with "Henry Kissinger Cambodia" to see how slanted things are.
That's not even getting into the fact that blaming the Khmer Rouge on the bombing campaign is an extreme stretch. But that's how people approach the folk knowledge - they get told something is true, believe it to be true, then stitch together whatever facts they can find to support the narrative they've already set their mind on.
[1] https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/vi/64033.htm
But we somehow feel compelled to weigh war crimes that lead to the death and suffering of millions against other positive accomplishments as if one justifies the other. We're basically conceding to Kissinger yet again by evaluating his legacy in terms of realpolitik.
Kissinger himself said many times that relations between states aren't based on morality, so people who act in the name of states can't be bound by international laws. It's an idea that is the basis of the realist philosophy. A lot of people in the the foreign policy establishment share that view.
The USA for example supports the International criminal court, but not for its citizens, so Kissinger can never be prosecuted like Milošević. Those who say the ICC is just an instrument of power are not entirely wrong.
I’d say exactly the same if I were a war criminal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeLV7oL5gg
Edit: and there’s nothing wrong with that! Just recognize when something is entertainment vs. trying to be objective.
Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere, but to expect an entire series of episodes to average out to anything close to that is too high of an expectation.
That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
Much like comments written on the internet.
> That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
See above.
This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.
You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.
Mentioned the reasons in my last post.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
Tom Lehrer retired when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, because he said satire was dead at that point[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...
"Only the good die young, only evil seems to live forever". Iron Maiden
I don't know, for the record. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't sound like a reasoned consideration of the evidence taking into account the historical context. It sounds like someone who thought "I bet Henry Kissinger was a bastard", then found a book that says "Henry Kissinger was a bastard!" and then made a podcast saying "See? I knew it!"
That analysis approach is useful for historian to understand human behaviors but should not be the bar one uses to evaluate a legacy. Hitler believed that the raising of the Third Reich was absolutely necessary for German survival. We can acknowledge that in understanding how a person becomes pure evil while also observing that, yes, he was pure evil.
Nobody is the villain of the story they've told themselves. We have the privilege and perspective to evaluate whether that story was awful and should never be repeated.
Well worth a listen imo, I ended up binging every episode over the course of a year or two.
Nobody is doing this kind of podcast "on the fly"
In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
It's harsh to fault them for having an opinion on the subject they dug to the end, and a conclusion already made at the time they start recording the series.
This is false. Age of Napoleon is quite good at presenting the factual history of its topic and then weighing dual interpretations of events. He highlights that something is his opinion when he gives it. The result is a wildly engaging podcast.
Hell, he's an avowed Marxist, which is a belief system I find repugnant. However, other than one or two clearly labeled bonus interview episodes, his views are AFAICT, totally absent from his presentation of history. He strives very hard to not tell you what to think.
It is disheartening that you believe information must be presented with an agenda.
There's a ton of distance between the author and the subject, it's about something they deeply enjoy and decided to dedicate more than a hundred episode to, and I'm not sure how much being Marxists matters here, when Marx started becoming famous after Napoleon died.
That's a lot different from discussing a politician of your own country who's still alive and untried at the time you do your podcast series.
And I'll just add this in. When I was 24 I got a job at the New York Times working on the tech team that would launch nytimes.com. The "web editor" was one Bernard Gwertzman. Look him up. He was the foreign desk editor of the paper of record for decades. He made his name reporting on the Vietnam war. Would you like to know who his best friend was in 1996 when I met him? Henry Kissinger. He had lunch with him every wednesday at the Harvard Club. Having read Manufacturing Consent more than once I was flabbergasted. If Chomsky had known this... Anyway, he and I were the first ones to show up for a meeting one time and I asked him how he and Henry K had met. He leaned over and said (with a literal wink) "while I was reporting on Vietnam, but don't tell anyone!"... said the man who among many other things 1. reported that we were not bombing Cambodia, 2. Supported Pinochet and 3. didn't report on the East Timor genocide. All policies that were 100% Kissinger.
Rest in piss. Both of them.
Chomsky have denied genocide that Kissinger helped perpetrate, so he could have known.
Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:
1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.
This was reported as a belligerent statement.
2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.
This was not reported at all.
Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?
It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
I’m Dutch and knowing that the US has a constant threat of extreme violence against us written into their law scares the crap out of me. We’re supposed to be happy jolly NATO allies but srsly that shit is not cool.
Maybe you should read about Kissinger and his relation with the above.
Frankly, you have a pretty good deal. We provide your protection, you can do your Dutch things, and we don't bother you too much other than the occasional McDonalds garrison.
No, because the US controls the "free media" and politicians in those countries. It's funny how almost all Kissinger article today were positive in this country.
That's more the reason to move the court to a country with nukes, say France, Strasbourg and put some retaliation Act in place if Americans put Strasbourg Invasion Act in place
https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissingers-century-01a1a9...
It was written by a man who already wrote the book: "Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist."
But I still think it's valuable for people who don't share that view, to make their own opinions public, as we all get richer by having multiple and sometimes opposing views out there.
If you are not willing to engage with or understand the other side of the debate you will have no capacity to understand or debate the modern day Kissingers who are currently in government.
Nuance and unbiased conversation would actually allowed for conclusion that someone could do a lot more harm then good. If you insist that powerful people needs to be always talked about in good terms and discussion of bad stuff needs to contain "balancing" good stuff, you are neither unbiased nor nuanced.
I refuse to give this any more headspace. This sage-like almost apathetical both-sidesing is more dangerous to me than taking a stand.
No. That you understand how it happened.
> That I have sympathy for this man?
That’s fine. Stay away from geopolitical decision making. Most people shouldn’t have to weigh moral systems.
People here should really stop pretending that reading "both sides" of everything is some form of enlightenment. It is delusional
Nobody is doing that. They’re distinguish immoral and even illegal acts from the violation of a particular statute.
> imperialism
Another word you don’t understand. Hint: spoils. Iraq was imperialist. Laos was not.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambouillet_Agreement
Also “light entertainment” really depends on the particular episode’s subject imo
P.S. If you want to hear my opinion, it's that ascribing to Kissinger the overall direction of our government's foreign policy is usually not the right answer, given that he was always surrounded by many others who agreed with him. You don't get to be a well-liked figure in Washington by acting like a disagreeable outsider slash maverick...
https://youtu.be/ABeGhyAD_DM?si=6eAeatEaB7U_znd7
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christopher+hit...
Video unavailable
This video is unavailable
Only after clicking it. The initial screen loads up as if it's going to play normally. Usually if there are geographical limits or whatever, it mentions that. But this error says the video simply isn't there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVGV6lvNTR4
(Edit : added another)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En7bhLPso2Y
Thanks!
I went back to the original link and it still gives the same error. All good now though.
is it tacky to dance on a war criminals grave? probably, but i'm not sure i care at the moment.
Idk, it's actually wild how HN is almost entirely "Kissinger is a war criminal" meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it. Meanwhile, if you read any Kissinger, you'd realize he understood history and the international relations better than 99% of these comments. Truly, word-for-word basis you will undoubtedly learn far more about history reading World Order than you will these HN comments. Personally, I have little hope in their uneducated decisions in a position of astronomical consequences and no 20/20 hindsight.
This is a good point. Can we really say for certain that “bombing noncombatant countries both during a war and after a treaty was signed” is a war crime, and even if it were would “coming up with the whole idea” even count as contributing to something like that? It is confusing stuff like this that has led to no person ever being convicted for war crimes — the concept is too nebulous and complex to nail down.
Surely if Kissinger were a war criminal he would have said so in the books that he wrote
"In 1966, Sihanouk made an agreement with Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China that would allow PAVN and VC forces to establish base areas in Cambodia and to use the port of Sihanoukville for the delivery of military material
Before the diplomatic amenities with Sihanouk [and the US] were even concluded, Nixon had decided to deal with the situation of PAVN/VC troops and supply bases in Cambodia.
On 30 January 1969, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Earle Wheeler suggested to the president that he authorize the bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries. He was seconded by General Creighton W. Abrams, who also submitted his proposal to bomb the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), the elusive headquarters of PAVN/VC southern operations, located somewhere in the Fishhook region of eastern Cambodia. Abrams claimed to Nixon that the regions of eastern Cambodia to be bombed were underpopulated and no civilian deaths would be caused."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
But instead, all any snarky layman hears from the grapevine is that Kissinger is coming up with the whole plan to bomb a random Commie country for zero reason. That you know Kissinger's name and not any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sec Def, or Sec State at the time involved in these decisions tells everything. People need an evil mastermind scapegoat, like McNamara was for Vietnam, because they can't comprehend the complexities involved in fog of war decision making, with no hindsight, and all the actors involved.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cold-war-henry-kissi...
Given the intricacies of the natural bomb migration patterns, who is to say if any person can be thought of as participating in how they fall? It is a philosophical question for theologians and meta physicists.
You have a fascinating point that you are very smart and the act of disagreeing with you on this categorically makes others very dumb.
I suppose you can claim a victory in that I decline to refute your idea that “an action can’t be a war crime if multiple people are involved, also knowing who Henry Kissinger is means you don’t know who anyone else is”, it is simply a thought too eloquent and genius to craft an equally compelling riposte.
Anyway, you’re welcome to directly address the primary sources I linked and make a bullet pointed list explaining why each part is proof that Henry Kissinger did not commit any war crimes.
[1] https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
[2] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/3%20%20Kissinger...
Should a country delay a peace process with an enemy nation for several years for the sake of optics over peace? (Vietnam)
Should a world leader meant to promote peace and de-escalation of armed conflict intentionally snub and antagonize their chief political rival with nukes, for the sake of optics? (USSR regarding wars in the mideast)
From my brief reading in the past few hours, it seems he decided a number of US policy positions that not only killed a large number of humans, but did so by expressly ignoring the stated principles of liberalism, self-determination and human decency and honor.
So I guess if people were to fully support him and his actions, I would at least ask them to be consistent and say "I do not believe in a rules-based world order and I do not believe the US has any obligation to advance human rights worldwide".
There are times the US has done things that were horrific, but were deemed absolutely essential to saving more lives than they cost - such as the bombing of Japan. Kissinger's difference is that none of the moves he endorsed seem to have been necessary to the survival of the "West" or the US, but it cost more lives than the bombings.
Kissinger might be worse than average but he certainly isn't exceptional.
Bush got us into Iraq, for what?
This doesn't mean Kissinger doesn't deserve criticism.
https://jacobin.com/2023/11/kissinger-in-bangladesh
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/when-russia-stunned-us...
One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).
I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.
I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.
He had a time machine ? :) I think there was a typo in the article, they many 1923 I would say.
Anyway, may he Rest in Peace.
EDIT: the date is now fixed
you must be joking. may he absolutely not
Poor taste jokes aside - is there anyone else as directly responsible for as much modern day suffering, who has "gotten away with it" more cleanly in the eyes of the public? I've always found the disconnect between history and legacy to be rather... jarring.
In terms of stopping ongoing and future conflicts, this is the group we need to hold accountable. Not Kissinger, whom they hate(d), and hasn't been making policy for decades.
"Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100."
And a symptom of the term being neutered into meaninglessness.
A critical element of war criminality is command. If you don’t command armed forces, it’s difficult to commit war crimes, legally speaking. You can have condoned or collaborated or contributed to them.
I’m sure that if he’d ever had to face a hostile inquiry his defense would have been that when the President of the United States tells you to make a phone call, you do, and he’d almost certainly have been successful.
For subordinates who executed the illegal actions. Within the command structure. Being in the command structure was important.
We did this for practical reasons. In Iraq, we fired the Ba’athist civilian state along with its military. So not only was the successor left without its bureaucracy, said bureaucracy was also unemployed. Ripe for the taking.
Legally, focussing on the originator and executor of an order is cleaner. It’s stark in a way involving every interlocutor isn’t.
For a fairly comparable role (foreign minister), Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted (among other things, for "crimes against peace" and "deliberately planning a war of aggression") and executed at Nuremberg. Plenty of ministers in the list there.
It's hard to argue Kissinger wasn't involved in "deliberately planning a war of aggression" against Cambodia.
Sure. But legally irrelevant. He didn’t command them. The person receiving the order could—and in many cases, should—have refused. That’s different if e.g. Nixon ordered it directly, because in that case it’s a military command.
Again, these terms had meaning. But they’re practically unenforceable even in public opinion, now, because they’re bandied about loosely. That gives cover for actual war criminals.
This isn’t true. The persons who carry out the order are liable. As is the commander.
Eichman was an SS officer! In what way did he lack command authority?
War criminal is the new RICO. Except the latter doesn’t lose legitimacy when the public mis-uses it.
This is a natural response to divergent opinions [1]. It’s the mechanism through which social media polarises populations [2][3].
Our brains simply didn’t evolve to deal with multiple hypotheses and different opinions, and most of us never get the training to do so calmly and effectively.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_sorting
[2] https://pnas.scienceconnect.io/api/oauth/authorize?ui_locale...
[3] https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/80/S1/351/2223236?login...
If you can't see the difference between defending a person and defending the meaning of a statute, sure. It makes life simpler when we turn up the contrast to absolutes.
Legality is entirely technical. When we lose sight of that, and turn legal terms like war criminal into colloquial ones, we sap the terminology of strength. If everyone horrific is a war criminal, then it’s all just banal evil. Nuremberg attempted to draw a line. This type of rhetoric loses its clarity.
Not in the way the Conventions define it. (Kissinger absolutely violated international law. He should have been prosecuted. But not as a war criminal.)
* see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38468485
Thank you for your military service Mr. Secretary. Fighting real Nazis earns my gratitude.
Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger [0]: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
And [1]: "Frequently, I’ve come to regret things I’ve said. This, from 2001, is not one of those times"
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
[1] https://twitter.com/Bourdain/status/960322190993477632
Kissinger's legacy will be debated for a long time and I have personally only scratched the very surface. I do however intend to read Hitchen's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" [1] one day, if not just to enjoy the fire with which he could write.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stop-cla...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...
This feels like a rabbit hole best left to proper quote investigators (and a timely one at that). Lehrer is alive though (unlike a certain someone...), so maybe one could even ask him?
Do you have a source questioning the authenticity? Not asking you to prove a negative here, just asking since I did not find one skimming a few pages on DuckDuckGo.
> The Onion: I'd long heard that you stopped performing as a form of protest, because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
> Tom Lehrer: I don't know how that got started. I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize. For one thing, I quit long before that happened, so historically it doesn't make any sense. I've heard that quoted back to me, but I've also heard it quoted that I was dead, so there you are. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. I've heard that I stopped because Richard Nixon was elected, or because I got put away in an insane asylum, or whatever. It was just a remark about political satire, because it was true. Not literally, but everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think. Years ago, it was much easier: We had Eisenhower to kick around. That was much funnier than Nixon.
> 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.
I don't know how to take such a claim seriously. AFAICT the evidence for this claim is that Kissenger fed some info about the peace negotiations to the Nixon camp during the 1968 election campaign. That's it.
Every "some info" has some level of classification. In this case, the "some info" is information about ongoing diplomatic negotiations. I think it's safe to assume that such information is at least Confidential (as defined under US Executive Order 12356 or 13292).
And with that, I point you to https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2011/12/life-lessons-from-the-...: Maybe comment threads and trolls didn't exist during the time of the Vietnam War, but its message still applies.
> Moreover, it cannot be said definitively whether a peace deal could have been reached without Nixon’s intervention or that it would have helped Mr. Humphrey. William P. Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser to Johnson and John F. Kennedy who was highly critical of Nixon, nonetheless concluded that prospects for the peace deal were slim anyway, so “probably no great chance was lost.”
Even if we do accept that this peace agreement would have happened and that Kissinger was the crucial linchpin in destroying it, U.S. involvement in the war continued for another 5 years, and then there were 2 further years of war without direct U.S. involvement. There were many decisions made by people in the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments that kept the war going over these years, and they had wide support from their respective populaces. Continuing to fight the war until a peace that preserved South Vietnam could be secured was the orthodox position in the U.S. well into the 1970s. How can all of the moral blame for continuance of the war fall on one person?
Then, finally, assigning moral blame to someone for all the consequent downstream effects of their actions is anyway absurd. If Kissinger is a war criminal for 'causing' all the deaths in Vietnam from 1968 forward, then surely Johnson is a larger one, and Kennedy is still a larger one, since after all the war would have been over years earlier if not for them. Or we could go further and blame Napoleon III for invading Vietnam in the first place, he's surely responsible for every death in the consequent wars since then, right?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-t...
> According to Haldeman’s notes, Kissinger alerted the Nixon campaign in late September, and again in early October, that something was up. Johnson was willing to halt the U.S. bombing of the North, and with the Soviets applying pressure on Hanoi to meet certain American conditions, the odds were never better for an early settlement of the conflict, which had already claimed 30,000 American lives and torn America apart.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vie...
No, that doesn't mean that the responsibility is entirely his – Nixon in particular shouldn't have been ignored after impeachment – but it does raise the question of how many people would have lived had Kissinger not bought his way into the National Security Adviser. He must, after all, have delivered something of value to have not only switched sides (he'd previously been affiliated with Nixon's opponents) but done so moving into a prestigious position without any prior government service.
They've paid for 3 years of domain registration, and missed their big day
I've been able to stay perennially subscribed to the NYT for $5/month. It's a love/hate relationship and I've probably unsubscribed and re-subscribed more than a dozen times. Unsubscribing got a lot easier a few years back. It used to be super annoying.
https://youtu.be/subNgWRPLg4?si=IsF0hQTJ-4D6otOJ
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
Linked on HN numerous times but largely only discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257604
It’s hard to imagine what Kissinger knew that would drastically change my perception on him.
JRK got us into it, and Nixon got us out of it while navigating the complexities of China, the cold war, and a potential WW III if we appeared too weak.
Whatever the case, it was incisive and memorable prose.
Posting a gibe that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon after Kissinger died is just stupid. At least post what he wrote about Kissinger:
> It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
> Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.