Yves here. Kissinger deserves a special place in the hall of shame of American foreign policy makers, he does have plenty of company. For instance:
The death of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was "a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it" ~Madeleine Albright pic.twitter.com/gOA3KkZv44
— The Serfs (@theserfstv) March 23, 2022
I suspect readers can add to this list.
By Rebecca Gordon. Originally published at TomDispatch
Henry Alfred Kissinger turned 100 on May 27th of this year. Once a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, for many decades an adviser to presidents, and an avatar of American realpolitik, he’s managed to reach the century mark while still evidently retaining all his marbles. That those marbles remain hard and cold is no surprise.
A couple of months after that hundredth birthday, he traveled to China, as he had first done secretly in 1971 when he was still President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. There — in contrast to the tepid reception recently given to U.S. officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry — Kissinger was welcomed with full honors by Chinese President Xi Jinping and other dignitaries.
‘That ‘lovefest,’” as Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy wrote at Politico, “served the interests of both parties.” For China, it was a signal that the United States would be better off pursuing the warm-embrace policy initiated so long ago by Nixon at Kissinger’s behest, rather than the cold shoulder more recent administrations have offered. For Kissinger, as Drezner put it, “the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office: maintain his relevancy and influence.”
Even as a centenarian, his “relevancy” remains intact, and his influence, I’d argue, as malevolent as ever.
Rehab for Politicians
It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.
This was certainly the case for Richard Nixon who, after resigning in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1974, worked hard for decades to once again be seen as a wise man of international relations. He published his memoirs (for a cool $2 million), while raking in another $600,000 for interviews with David Frost (during which he infamously said that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”). His diligence was rewarded in 1986 with a Newsweek cover story headlined, “He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.”
Of course, for the mainstream media (and the House of Representatives debating his possible impeachment in 1974), Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors involved just the infamous Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. Among members of the House, only 12, led by the Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, had the courage to suggest that Nixon be charged with the crime that led directly to the death of an estimated 150,000 civilians: the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war.
More recently, we’ve seen the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, under whose administration the United States committed repeated war crimes. Those included the launching of an illegal war against Iraq under the pretext of eliminating that country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, attempting to legalize torture and unlawful detentions, and causing the death of almost half a million civilians. No matter. All it took for the mainstream media to welcome him back into the fold of “responsible” Republicans was to spend some years painting portraits of American military veterans and taking an oblique swipe or two at then-President Donald Trump.
A “Statesman” Needs No Rehabilitation
Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice — formal or otherwise — to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his hundredth birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.
His crimes did come up in the mainstream, only to be dismissed as evidence of his career’s “broad scope.” CNN ran a piece by David Andelman, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and one-time student of Kissinger’s at Harvard. He described watching “in wonder” as demonstrators gathered outside New York City’s 92nd Street YMCA to protest a 2011 talk by the great man himself. How, he asked himself, could they refer to Kissinger as a “renowned war criminal”? A few years later, Andelman added, he found himself wondering again, as a similar set of protesters at the same venue decried Kissinger’s “history concerning Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Angola, and elsewhere.”
The “events they were protesting were decades in the past,” he observed, having happened at a time when most of the protestors “were only barely alive.” In effect, like so many others who seek to exonerate old war criminals, Andelman was implying that the crimes of the past hold no meaning, except perhaps in testifying “to the broad scope of people, places, and events that [Kissinger] has influenced in the course of a remarkable career.” (“Influenced” serves here as a remarkable euphemism for “devastated” or simply “killed.”)
Fortunately, other institutions have not been so deferential. In preparation for Kissinger’s 100th, the National Security Archive, a center of investigative journalism, assembled a dossier of some of its most important holdings on his legacy. They provide some insight into the places named by those protestors.
A Dispassionate Cold Warrior
If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.
Richard Nixon’s presidency was, of course, the period of Kissinger’s greatest influence. Between 1969 and 1974, Kissinger served as the architect of U.S. actions in key locales globally. Here are just a few of them:
Papua, East Timor, and Indonesia: In 1969, in an effort to keep Indonesia fully in the American Cold War camp, Kissinger put his imprimatur on a fake plebiscite in Papua, which had been seeking independence from Indonesia. He chose to be there in person during an “election” in which Indonesia counted only the ballots of 1,100 hand-picked “representatives” of the Papuan population. Unsurprisingly, they voted unanimously to remain part of Indonesia.
Why did the United States care about the fate of half of a then strategically unimportant island in the South China Sea? Because holding onto the loyalty of Indonesia’s autocratic anticommunist ruler Suharto was considered crucial to Washington’s Cold War foreign policy in Asia. Suharto himself had come to power on a wave of mass extermination, during which between 500,000 and 1.2 million supposed communists and their “sympathizers” were slaughtered.
In 1975, Kissinger also greenlighted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, during which hundreds of thousands died. In contravention of U.S. law, President Gerald Ford’s administration (in which Kissinger continued to serve as national security adviser and secretary of state after Nixon’s resignation) provided the Indonesian military with weapons and training. Kissinger waved off any legal concerns with a favorite aphorism: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
Southeast Asia: Beginning in 1969, Kissinger was also the architect of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an attempt to interdict the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to the revolutionary Viet Cong in South Vietnam. He believed it would force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. In this, the great statesman was sadly mistaken. It’s fair to say, in fact, that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam, from the carpet bombing of North Vietnam to the widespread use of napalm and the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which led to the torturing or killing of more than 20,000 people.
The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger. He was acting as a conduit to North Vietnam for the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, which was working on a peace deal it hoped to announce before the 1968 presidential election. Believing Republican candidate Richard Nixon would be more likely to advance his version of U.S. strategic interests in Vietnam than Democratic candidate and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Kissinger passed information about those negotiations with the North Vietnamese on to the Nixon campaign. Although Nixon had no clout in Hanoi, he had a channel to U.S. ally and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and convinced him to pull out of the peace talks shortly before the election. Thanks to Kissinger, the war would follow its cruel course for another seven years of death and destruction.
Pakistan and Bangladesh: In 1971, in a famous “tilt” towards Pakistan, Kissinger gave tacit support to that country’s military dictator General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. In response to a surprise victory by an opposition party in Pakistan’s first democratic election, Yahya then loosed his military on the people of East Pakistan, that party’s geographical base. Three million people died in the ensuing genocidal conflict that eventually led to the creation of the state of Bangladesh. In addition, as many as 10 million members of Bengali ethnic groups fled to India, inflaming tensions between Pakistan and India, which eventually erupted in war. Although the U.S. Congress had forbidden military support for either nation, Kissinger arranged for an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to travel to the Bay of Bengal and provide war materiel to Pakistan. (By then, contempt for congressional restrictions had become a habit for him.)
But why the tilt toward Pakistan? Because that country was helping Kissinger create his all-important opening to China and because he also viewed India as a “Soviet stooge.”
For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning. Only the actions or interests of the great powers could adequately explain events anywhere in the world.
Latin America: There was a time when September 11th called to mind not the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the violent 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected socialist president. That coup, which made General Augusto Pinochet the country’s dictator, was the culmination of a multi-year U.S. campaign of economic and political sabotage, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.
Once again, a genuinely indigenous economic reform movement was (mis)interpreted as evidence of growing Soviet strength in South America. Within the first few days of the coup, 40,000 people would be imprisoned at the National Stadium in the capital, Santiago. Many of them would be tortured and murdered in the first stages of what became a regime characterized for decades by institutionalized torture.
Similarly, Kissinger and the presidents he advised supported Argentina’s “Dirty War” against dissidents and the larger Operation Condor, in which the CIA coordinated coups d’état, repression, torture, and the deaths of tens of thousands of socialists, students, and other activists across Latin America.
So, what should we give a hundred-year-old presidential adviser for his birthday? How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?
What’s Real about Realpolitik?
If you google images for “realpolitik,” the first thing you’ll see is a drawing of Henry Kissinger holding forth to a rapt Richard Nixon. As a political thinker who prides himself on never having been swayed by passion, Kissinger would seem the perfect exemplar of a realpolitik worldview.
He eschews the term, however, probably because, given his background, he recognizes its roots in the nineteenth century German liberal tradition, where it served as a reminder not to be blinded by ideology or aspirational belief when taking in a political situation. Philosophically, realpolitik was a belief that a dispassionate examination of any situation, uninflected by ideology, was the most effective way to grasp the array of forces present in a particular historical moment.
Realpolitik has, however, come to mean something quite different in the United States, being associated not with “what is” (an epistemological stance) but with “what ought to be” — an ethical stance, one that privileges only this country’s imperial advantage. In the realpolitik world of Henry Kissinger, actions are good only when they sustain and advance American strategic power globally. Any concern for the wellbeing of human beings, or for the law and the Constitution, not to mention democratic values globally, is, by definition, illegitimate if not, in fact, a moral failing.
That is the realpolitik of Henry Alfred Kissinger, an ethical system that rejects ethics as unreal. It should not surprise anyone that such a worldview would engender in a man with his level of influence a history of crimes against law and humanity.
In fact, however, Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik is itself delusional. The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state — a dying empire whose citizens live in ever-increasing insecurity. In fact, choosing America first (as Donald Trump would put it) is not the only choice, but one delusional option among many. Perhaps there is still time, before the planet burns us all to death, to make other, more realistic choices.
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Doesn’t anyone, and I ask with hardly any hyperbole, read a damn book anymore? Hell, I knew about him while in high school forty years ago. There are plenty of Boomers who would have clearer personal memories of his crimes. And yet, he is Hilary Clinton’s guru and a beloved and respected political elder. Barf. It is as if we, as a nation, regularly put any of our memories older than last week down the memory hole to be incinerated.
Of course, if nobody remembers anything inconvenient, then nobody can be guilty of anything.
Yes. I think it testimony to the paucity of truly moral and deep-thinking people in our current muddy realms of politics, diplomacy, media that people such as Kissinger, W, et al. are constantly resurrected, their past crimes declared inconvenient and forgiven. God forbid we call things by their real name.
Crack open a book? No, that takes too much time and effort. There are millions of arm-chair experts who get their “news and information” from the MassMediaCartel. (of course, the MMC now includes FB/Twitter etc.) It’s fast, cheap and easy, kinda like McDonalds.
United States of Amnesia?
How come no mention of 1974 Kissinger report advocating depopulation—and mentorship of allays and WEF?
Kissinger’s reputation is a great example of people being brainwashed. The establishment media has effectively glossed over this buffoon’s entire place in history.
The incident before the 1968 peace talks, was something LB Johnson had called “treason”. The LBJ library in texas has a letter by walt Rostow, which was opened up in 1994, (earlier than the 50 years it was supposed to languish in darkness) about the 1968 affair. They also have some of the taped phone calls from johnson and others talking about this.
Kissinger and “the dragon lady” anna chennault(wife of senator chennault/ chinese nationalist from formosa), effectively conspired with a foreign governmnet in a time of war, to PREVENT peace. The FBI was taping phone calls, so johnson found out exactly what was going on; but like FDR not wanting to go after the 1934 fascist coup plotters smedly butler exposed, for the sake of normalcy during a crisis, instead decided to not tell the people.
But this is still treason. Kissinger and nixon were just citizens at that moment in time.
How many acts of treason does someone have to commit to be a war criminal?
I ask vietnam vets and people who were old enough to remember the situation in 1969-1974, If anyone ever told them that the 1968 peace deal was a on the road to success. We even stopped bombing for a moment to help it along. I would ask how many people died between 1969 and 1974? how about got disabled? or just lived through a time when their decisions were BECAUSE a war was going on.
After all, this was what Watergate, was really all about. Nixon was worried that the democrats would do something to get back at him for his “october suprise” in 1968.
Another telling thing about the 1968 treason, was that walt rostows brother eugene, found out about the foreign policy meddling through the head of chase bank, who at that time were confident the derailing of the peace talks was a “go”, before hand… and they structured their investment outlook on continued war…So, it was also insider trading, with thousands of dead americans and vietnamese as fodder for corporate profit.
And two books on kissinger..
Christopher Hitchens had a good one on Kissinger, “the trial of henry Kissinger”.. has a bunch on the cyprus and east timor stuff and others.
Also.
A council on foreign relations view from David Rothkopf.
About kissinger and associates… and he name drops all the people who are “two-degrees” from kissinger… like the six degrees from kevin bacon thing…. about how many policy people are connected to kissinger and associates.
Kissinger really is the scum of the earth.
I was reading an article this morning in The Guardian about Lucy Letby and the term ‘schema’, for the cognitive framework we all have about others based on their gender and occupation, and how we expect people to behave based on our personal experience of those. She hid in plain sight under the cover of the belief and trust of others who might have stopped her, due to her appearance and their need to feel confident that she was worthy of that trust (behind which there are some strong financial incentives to look the other way).
So my question is…. can a country like the U.S. have ‘war criminals’, that we publicly and uniformly acknowledge? We have traitors certainly, some convicted and imprisoned, but ‘war criminals’? A slippery slope for the U.S. trying to define such criminality and the number of operators inside and outside our government suddenly labeled, and of course there would be the unpleasant consequences for such an admission… and so we have Kissinger, the ultimate ‘Lucy’, a war criminal hiding in plain sight, directly and indirectly responsible for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands, whose political career will always be celebrated publicly because we can’t afford the consequences of acknowledging what he really is… a serial killer, our monster.
Combine this coverage of Kissinger and overlap with the worthy article linked recently by author John Pilger. America, an empire of lies or an empire of light and goodness. I once firmly believed in the latter, so gullible and young.
In a toss up of who gets sent into Hades first, who do we vote second or choose to keep; Dick Cheney or Kissinger? Asking for a friend…Added thought, I highly recommend the well done, largely entertaining film on the David Frost interview.
Rebecca Gordon keeps hitting nails right on the head. Don’t buy it here, but Greg Grandin also did a great job on Henry the K.
A favorite comment at the link: “Niall Ferguson, Kissinger’s authorized biographer, begins the arduous task of rolling his subject’s fallen reputation back up the hill. The historian Greg Grandin kicks it right back down again.”
―Washington Monthly
IIRC, Kissinger was basically shouted down in the late 1970s on a visit to Athens, Georgia, probably invited by one of his buddies Dean Rusk, Charter Member of the Best and the Brightest Club, then on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Law. Interesting times, for someone who missed the Vietnam Era Draft by one year. I still have my Draft Card. Some things stick with you.
The reference to a fawning interview by Judy Woodruff brought a smile to my face. Judy could fawn with the best of them. I missed the interview with K, but saw her drop into full fawn with Christine Lagarde. You’d think that CL had just lost her parents, spouse, dog and children in a house fire.
When news anchors and/or journalists rehabilitate war criminals, are they not complicit in those crimes? In my book, downplaying, whitewashing, or straight up ignoring war crimes and genocide would make one party to such crimes – and future ones as well. I often dream of someone confronting someone like Judy Woodruff, Anderson Cooper, Lester Holt, or Bret Baier about all this.
Wolf Blitzer, cheerleading the wars in 1990 and 2003. I will never forget these shows set up each quiet night in the Iraqi cities/towns to be bombed and then all the dogs barking hysterically before the missiles were seen/heard on camera.
Lester Holter moderating 2016 presidential debate with a certain candidate signaling to each other like comic third base baseball coach Max Patkin. If Lester wants to cover wars, he should go back to the streets of Chicago on the weekends.
Pardon my parse, but “…he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties.” Couple of errors here: there has been one foreign policy since WWII, and there is one duopoly…simplifies the imprint.
This is how he did it…
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=dr+stranglove+mien+fureur+video&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:a2f0a755,vid:A9ihKq34Ozc
Kissinger broke the glass ceiling when crooked Nixon made him Secretary of State. Nixon understood that nothing would stand on the way of such rapacious corrupt man – willing to do “ what it takes”, as he proved. Kissinger’s elevation coincided with the unhurling of neoliberalism, in which he’s thrived. Unlike previous Secretaries of State, he turned his former status into a multibillion enterprise, selling access to the US government.
The “relevancy and influence,” mentioned is not about realpolitik or protecting US interests, but money, money, money, and helping Israel become the apartheid country it is.
The many amoral, criminal examples mentioned are simply collateral damage, necessary to achieve his greedy and criminal agenda.
Shameless and greed is the guiding principle of friends an admirers who followed his example. Consider how the Dallas Fed president, Robert Kaplan & Boston Fed president, Eric Rosengreen were removed due to insider trading. This is the Fed that grifter Larry Summers is trying to guide into creating mass unemployment & wage reduction. You can’t make this stuff up.
Growing up, Kissinger was always in the news though we used to joke that the one thing abut Kissinger’s peace plans was that they never lasted. Certainly the guy knew how to network as shown by this article-
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/20/henry-kissinger-networking-216482/
Thing is, I do wonder how he got his start initially, It was the Rockerfellers that recruited him from Harvard University because they like what he had to say. The Rockerfellers became his patron and they helped advanced his career. Once while he was still at Harvard and before he became Nixon’s top national security adviser, Rockerfeller gave him $50,000 just like that which verged on illegality at the time. And I note that this was $50,000 in 1969 dollars so do your own conversions-
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,944987,00.html
So maybe in the same way that the Koch brothers were recruiting politicians and DAs to advance their own agenda, the Rockefellers brothers were doing this decades ago and Henry was their prize recruit. And it should be noted that Henry went on to help advance Klaus Schwab later on too-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CQ-yn38pZU (2:19 mins)
Kissinger became a member of the council on foreign relations in 1956. That would fit with becoming noticed in the rockefeller sydicate…. I’m pretty sure most of the secs of state in the US since WWII, were members of the council on foreign relations. before/or after /or during….. but it is a network for boosting and enabling, for sure.
Just to state the obvious, “war criminal” is not an existential status. Insofar as it has any meaning at all now (which is not much) it means someone who has been indicted and convicted by a court with temporal and geographical jurisdiction on the basis of crimes committed during a recognised armed conflict and on the basis of a body of law set out in the Geneva Conventions or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and to a standard of proof beyond as reasonable doubt, as assessed by a group of independent judges. It doesn’t mean “somebody I dislike” no matter how unpleasant they may be, and its use in the rhetoric of the lynch-mob does a lot of harm to what little remains of the credibility of international criminal justice. I understand the impulsion to click-bait headlines these days, but it’s perfectly possible to show that Kissinger is a disgusting human being, and its even possible to argue that some sort of a court should be established to put him on trial, under some legal system or other, without misusing the law for political purposes as is all too common these days – the Putin “indictment” for example.
In an ideal world, that is the normative prescription. However, there is no “rule of law”, there is only power and interests. The Law of the Jungle applies here. Prison and taxes are for the “litttle people”
Well, as Justice Potter Stewart remarked about “obscenity”, I know it when I see it, I see Henry Kissinger easily fits the colloquial understanding of War Criminal.
(The two million Vietnamese that died during the US war on Vietnam are likely to agree.)
That is why Christopher Hitchen’s book on Kissinger was titled “the trial of henry Kissinger”.
And my guess is that That will be as close to a “trial” as kissinger gets ,in this lifetime. One of the benefits of having powerful friends.
The single creature alive today whose demise might tempt this atheist to believe in heaven and hell.
My theory is that he is still around because not even hell will take him
now who’s being naive kay?
There is no Simon Wiesenthal for the goys who populate the nations this article lists where Kissinger planned and executed his “Final Solutions” under the guise of “anti-communism”. Unfortunate. One has to admire the sustained effort from the supporters of Israel to always keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Something like that to remember the crimes of our war mongering DC elite would be nice, starting with those of Kissinger. Wasn’t Kissinger a Rockefeller man? I remember reading in one of the books that Kissinger requested Rockefeller’s help to store his records and was given a place to do so. Zebignew Brezenski too was a Rockefeller man IIRC. It seems to me that American foreign policy was sub-contracted to our rich plutocrats since the Dulles brothers entered the State department. It has continued like that ever since. They do a spectacularly brilliant job of hiding the real intent behind every foreign intervention with the fawning help of the media (Henry Luce, Time, Graham, Washington Post, Sulzerberger, NYT).
It’s funny, except for Wiesenthal; Every name you mentioned was a member of the council on foreign relations..
Fraternity brotherhoods(women too)….these seem to be the bonds that endure… good for the resume
Of course Kissinger is a war criminal. What does anyone propose to do about it? He is feted by The Great And Good, just as the architects of the War On Iraq are to this day haled as Serious Thinkers And Foreign Policy Heavyweights.
The Hindus had to invent reincarnation, as there is no justice to be had in this lifetime. Maybe Kissinger will be reincarnated as a Gila Monster or a bacillus of some sort.
Comments here have things pretty much covered. The sycophantic stenographers that are called “journalists” worship war criminals and corrupt politicians as god-like, in true Orwellian fashion (I know Orwellian has become cliche but…) Since the heavily-subsidized WMD corps (MIC) and CIA basically control mass media reports on foreign policy and war, this comes as no surprise.
The worship of Henry K. is a great example of this. He and Obama hold Nobel Peace Prizes ffs. The whole Nobel prize BS is clearly just a self-congratulatory exercise to BS the plebs. One of Henry Ks heroes, Prince Klemenz von Metternich reportedly quipped “foreign policy is not for the plebs”. This mantra is still held today and very little has changed.
They should give a Nobel Peace Prize to Biden/Blinkie/Nuland or maybe Tony Blair and Bush Jr./Cheney
Didn’t Michelle Obama hold hands with Bush Jr. during the funeral of war criminal John McCain? Or was that Bush Sr. Anyway, the moral reprehension and disgust continues…
In ‘merka we are taught to worship some of the most immoral, perverse, and wicked people in history. At the same time we are taught to hate foreign nations and peoples: China, Russia, Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba etc.
Decades ago, a couple of musicians from dirt-poor backgrounds, with only a sixth grade education had it figured out. Nowadays, most privileged and highly educated are either in deep denial or too stupid to figure it out
“…building church and university…
graduating thieves and murderers..” (Bob Marley, Babylon System)
“what these ‘great men’ were doin…
robbin, rapin, kidnappin and a killin'” (Peter Tosh, Can’t Blame the Youth)
Kissinger: Those whom the Gods love, die young.
Agree wholeheartedly with the article and the comments on Kissinger’s well-deserved label as a war criminal. But it’s a measure of how banal–even normative–such criminality has become in the US that Kissinger’s recent expressed reservations about our war in Ukraine are disregarded by the latest generation of those who’ve inherited his position of imperial power. Starting from Hiroshima and Nagasaki right up to the present day, the murderous criminality of our elites has no equal on the world stage. The Bernays sauce required to make hoi polloi think otherwise is unequaled also.
Heavy on the Bernays sauce! Lol. That’s a new one for me, cheers!
As disgusting as he is, and wrong about most things, and with utter disregard for human life, or even right/wrong, somehow or other he’s now correct on China.
I guess as with most horrible people who deserve our contempt for their positions, they sometimes say things which, taken on its own merits, we can agree with. Disagreeing with anything someone says just because its them saying it would be silly.
But I can’t help but feel this is an anti-China piece. Kissinger made peace overtures to China. Kissinger is a very bad man, very bad. *insert finger wag* Therefore, China must be bad.
I must have missed it. I didn’t see any reference to china being bad. not at all.
Isn’t it possible for someone to make a Citizens Arrest and get the legal ball rolling?
You ever notice how these malevolent yahoos live forever with their mental “cookies” intact? Just another perverse law of nature regarding homo sapiens!