From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting."
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
> He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
There's a little known law in the USA which states the following;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
A. Different times.
B. Hunter was a bit of a hack who was not taken seriously. His work is just a couple notches above mad magazine. It is entertaining satire that is obviously without connection to reality.
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.
Remember when Hamas said Israel air bombed a hospital killing hundreds and everyone believed them and it turned out they were lying and it was actually a PIJ misfire.
While I agree to an extent, this begs an obvious question:
How far do we take this line of thinking?
Is an attack like 9/11 justified since even the twin towers were used by the US government indirectly, owing to nearly everyone within paying taxes that supported US wars and expeditionary-ism?
Likewise, I'd want to keep in mind things like relative size and options on the table. WW2 incendiary and atomic bombing is one thing in the context of the ferocity and consumption of that war. Yet in the case of a small territory under varying degrees of military occupation and without full self determination, is there really no capability to take any action but bombing such places? (And no moral imperative to try to cause less collateral if it's realistically possible?)
There is zero evidence that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes.
Unless you are saying that people use schools to get education and hospitals to get medical treatment, well then yes.
Couldn’t find the original link, but here’s news coverage for a game called September 12th.
> In this Serious Game you need to kill terrorists shooting missiles. The action uses first person perspective in order to enhance immersion. The problem is that terrorists are surrounded by civilians and it is almost impossible to attack terrorists without killing civilians too. The dead are mourned and the rage of the survivors turns them into terrorists. You just have to play for a couple of minutes to realize that the only way to avoid ‘collateral damage’ is not to play.
This nicely completes the loop back to Kissinger’s choices in life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
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).
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...
> 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.
As a person from the third world and more specifically Africa, I cannot find myself to mourn his death or say any good thing about Kissinger. Good riddance actually. I would have loved to see him get his day in court when he was still alive.
What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.
I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.
I think many people from the Global South would agree with you and not just Africans. That was also exactly my thought when i read the headline, even though he did nothing against my native Kenya. Also, the phrase "Third World" isn't the most appropriate one to describe a good chunk of the world.
While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.
There are plenty of people all around the world who know what heinous things he did. He won’t ever be mourned, and hopefully we never see the likes of him again
It's disturbing the vast difference of opinion between ordinary citizens of the US who think he's a monster that inflicted an enormous amount of evil upon the world. Ever more worse because it was in our name. And how the political class in the US views him.
It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.
I often think of an interesting quote found inside Samuel Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations” (which is pretty meh, IMHO):
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
Kissinger is way over hyped. What I find more interesting is the total deflection of the blame of everything that happened to his person. I believe that Kissinger is talented but far from being the person who orchestrated a world order. He was a tool. A very nice and charismatic persona who took the fall when events went south. He was paid for it and protected up until his death.
Not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to Henry Kissinger as "a very nice and charismatic person".
Even if he was just "the face" of US Policy at the time, and not an actual implementer, he was instrumental in furthering the suffereing of millions around the world through meddling in foreign governments/civil unrest.
If I make $10 dollars off of your suffering in perpetuity, and let it continue as the public face of your suffering, am I less evil than the actual person implementing your suffering?
His value was similar to the value of consulting companies to a CEO.
When a CEO decides he wants to do a layoff, he can either show up one morning and say he has decided to fire 7% of the workers, or he can hire a consulting company to prepare a thorough and very expensive report which the CEO knows will contain advice to layoff precisely 7% of the workers.
Firing people is sometimes necessary in a budgeting process, and bombing people is sometimes necessary in a war, but it's better if it looks like it is someone else's decision, even when the responsibility obviously rests with the executive.
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"
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?)
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.
> 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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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
Not only was he a war criminal, but he was a major player on the Theranos board who brought in multiple investors and raked in over a half million a year between his board position and "consulting."
I revised my opinion of Elizabeth Holmes somewhat for the better when I found out how much of Henry Kissinger's money she ran off with. Mixed with her fraud, a genuine public service!
My grandmother made it to 98, she rode horses when she was a younger woman (in Australia during the war, she was able to follow my grandfather who was an RAF mechanic out there on the last passenger ship through the Suez).
She used to enjoy a tipple, never smoked though, but in her later years never really exercised.
Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands
All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.
I always go back to this quote from Bourdain when it comes to Kissinger:
“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.”
> He has a brother who came to America when he did. Recently, the brother was asked why he had no German accent but Henry did. “Because,” said the brother, “Henry never listens.”
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1223820
The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
How about this one then, my grandmother is named Lillemor which is Swedish for "little mother". It was a fairly common name even. People out there naming their kids "little mother".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
He was responsible for the genocide of millions of Bengali Hindus, he supplied weapons and arms meant to kill us, knowing fully-well what its sole purpose was.
The only thing he was great at doing, was spilling innocent blood across the world.
I think it's a generational thing. Kissinger should have stopped commenting on world affairs 20 decades ago. It became increasingly oblivious that the world was evolving in a direction he didn't understand or comprehend. He continued to attempt to apply his cold war era world view and solutions to current issues, when it was obvious to most that his ideas where nonsense.
An example: His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
Had he stepped back from the public 20 years ago, then may the majority of at least Americans would have remembered him as a great statesman, but he need to be heard and saying stupid shit has made people more aware of his past and his terrible actions.
> His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
And yet it is exactly this behind the scenes that Ukraine European backers are pushing Zelensky to do. When it is clear that the war is a quagmire and Ukraine is underperforming.
How can an obit about a 100 year old man garner 328 comments in 5 hours on HN? This is Nixon era stuff. I would have assumed most HN reader’s parents weren’t born when Kissinger was actually relevant. The HN demographic is way older than I imagined.
It's because we'll never stop feeling the effects of trade normalization with China that placed the final nail in the coffin of unionized labor in the US, resulting in the poor quality of life we feel daily here.
Kissinger was a truly awful and hypocritical human being. Despite being a refugee from a murderous regime, he sat around and cracked jokes with a dictator whose body counts was in the multiples of the dictator he fled from. The "rapprochement" (read: appeasement) with the PRC that he spearheaded benefited China immensely while it was nothing but damaging to US interests. The damage he did to the long term peace in the Taiwan strait can still be felt to this day.
He would remain a close friend of that regime until his dying days - I believe he met Xi this year.
“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.”
Hey have you ever thought about the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential:
> "Kissinger then defines what the U.S. wants overall, agreed broadly in the group: Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
>"Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
explain what is nuts about that in the middle of the cold war. The US has intelligence that Israel has the bomb, and Kissinger thinks we shouldn't broadcast it?
>the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential
what role is that in the development of Israel's weapon? (If there is one weapon you aren't going to keep the Jewish state from developing, I'd think it would be one based on 20th century physics...)
Other than "oooh Kissinger bad", I don't get what you are saying.
The fact that nuclear weapons are about deterrence means you don't want them to be secret. A secret nuclear weapon's primary use would be a revenge weapon. Or to blow up a city in a surprise attack. Neither of which is particularly "defensive".
There's a reason why we have arms treaties and try to be transparent about our nuclear capabilities. I know it's a movie but Dr. Strangelove is a great example of the thinking behind this.
I get that the point is to keep the balance of power in the favor of the US, but the practical outcome was letting Israel secretly develop a revenge/offensive nuclear bomb. If it got used potentially millions would die, and you can't even make the argument that it acts as a stabilizer via MAD.
I found Diplomacy by him to be surprisingly good. I came into it with a negative perception of him presumably from being around threads like this one and found a cogent framework to think about foreign relations well articulated.
It's well articulated, in the same sense that lebensraum can be well-articulated. If you don't believe in the rule of law, but do believe in might makes right, it's entirely coherent.
It also puts you on a similar moral ground, and value to civilized society that being, say, a mob boss, or some other violent, dangerous psychopath does.
Right, I would like to stick my head in the sand and not understand people who influenced modern history as well. Or maybe you would like to read about anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism of which there are plenty of books, get your fill. Most direct criticisms are poorly written and sprinkled with conspiratiorial delusions, such as A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson if you truly want a recommendation, which certainly attempts to go for the jugular but not well at all.
No newspaper obituary will say it like this, so I feel obliged to say it.
One of the world's most notorious war criminals, a man with millions of people's blood on his hands, a man directly responsible for the rise of anti-liberal regimes across the world from Russia to Iran, died today.
He brought misery to the world and set the course of human progress back by decades.
People only think of the likes of Stalin or Pol Pot when they think of "evil". But the name Henry Kissinger belongs right up there.
He saw mass murder and genocide along with the rape of tens of thousands of women in East Pakistan in 1970 and not only did nothing he said nothing should be done at all because Pakistan was an US ally.
He did it all full on record and on paper.
There's nothing "alleged". He is a war criminal. Plain and simple. And I abhor this man.
i think he had his moment here with the 1975 Helsinki accord. That one is often overlooked, but it gave dissidents in communist countries a basis to press their case, where their own government signed a document that on paper obliged them to respect human rights.
>
“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.”
The DeathList website finally gets to mark him off their list, after nominating him for likely death in the next year 10 times previously (and I believe he first made the list back in 1993).
A shadowy character. For all his public appearances brokering Peace Deals, he engineered military coups all over Latin America in the 70s (Allendes government for one) and helped set up “School of the Americas” in Panama, where the US trained military juntas how to fight leftist “insurgency”(or civilian opposition, depending who you ask). A lot of the torturing and dirty wars that crippled Latam for 15 years is his doing.
While I recognize a number of good deeds he pulled, I get upset when his shadowy part gets untold.
I just can’t help think how much wider the global support for the west (incl eg ukraine) would be today if Kissinger’s “we can do war crimes and install dictators all we like cause we’re the good guys” doctrine hadn’t made it to the forefront of US policy. Even from a hardcore neorealist perspective, the harm has by now well outlasted the benefit.
Kissinger is on record (from WEF/Davos of all places) as having criticized the West's position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The only reason he swum against the tide was because he was 98 at the time and probably doesn't give a shit what anybody thinks of him.
He's a monster and I'm glad he's dead but he was spot on about the inevitable outcome in Ukraine and how sanctions and enmity have pushed Russia even further into china's loving embrace.
> Kissinger is on record (from WEF/Davos of all places) as having criticized the West's position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The only reason he swum against the tide was because he was 98 at the time and probably doesn't give a shit what anybody thinks of him.
Kissinger’s support for accepting Russian imperialist crimes against prace and war crimes in Ukraine is grounded in the same realpolitik as his advocacy of US imperialist crimes against peace and war crimes throughout his career, and his advice on tape to Nixon in the 70s about the plight of Jees trying to flee persecution in the USSR that even if rose to the level of gas chambers, it shouldn't be considered a US concern.
Realpoliticans are always playing for the autoritarian team, as it flattens the playing field, giving up the moral high ground, one of the reasons russian bots desperatly push it as the "default" mindset. Got to turn everyone a psychopathic maniac out for themselves, to justify being one.
That's nonsense and Russia has repeatedly stated it won't do X (if Ukraine does Y), then did it regardless. Appeasement has always been a shit strategy.
Most prominently Russia claimed it won't invade Ukraine if Ukraine doesn't join NATO - Ukraine's NATO bid occured after Russia's full-scale invasion happened anyways.
Similar story with the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine.
One has to be especially gullible to trust Russia at this point.
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.
I was riding an elevator to my hotel room when it stops on another floor and in gets Henry Kissinger in the company of beautiful young blonde.
So I say "Hey! Aren't you Kissinger?"
Henry replies "no I'm Fsckinger."
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.
Ah and OF COURSE I get downvoted. I know it. This fucking site is filled with braindead morons, almost as bad as Reddit. But also some people with brains who point out who he really was. A disgusting war criminal and nothing less.
But you gonna honor a war criminal because the MSMBS media brainwashed you into praising him as a good man and great advisor or whatever the fuck they tell you to believe. He was the personification of evil foreign policy, typical elitist with no empathy and only one goal to expand the US empire by all brutal means possible. Seeing millions of lives just to be sacrificed for his great chess game.
Many on this site believe that unregulated technology and capitalism is the surest way to a better world, so it really shouldn't be surprising that some of the people who benefit the most from the neoliberal order are praising one of its architects.
Kissinger gets a lot of flak for the bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam, but... I mean, it was awful when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and it was also awful when the Viet Cong took over Vietnam.
The Viet Cong were also horrible (excepting, of course, their intervention in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge!) and devastated Vietnam, and the CPV rules it with an iron fist to this day.
Communism really is and was extremely, horribly bad.
In South Korea, the seemingly insane plan of the US (install a pro-Western dictator as a bulwark against Communism, and eventually transition to a liberal democracy) eventually worked. The Korean War pre-dates Kissinger's rise to power, but his overall principle of oppose-Communism-no-matter-what seems kind of reasonable, even in hindsight.
Anti-communist dictatorships and militias were often terrible, too, but it is really hard to be worse than Communists.
It worked in South Korea and it failed everywhere else. Everything this man did was extremely short-sighted and had cause widespread mistrust of America in the majority of the world.
His own biographer credited Kissinger with killing 3 million people, those numbers make the Khmer Rouge blush, but your bias against communism makes you see Kissinger as some sort of hero? That's morally fascinating.
I don't think there's any evidence that Allende was worse than the regime that took over. You might argue Allende wasn't a communist (which would be true), but the coup was of Kissinger's making. Cuba was communist, and was absolutely not the hell-hole that Cambodia was or North-Korea is.
Binary thinking will do that - you’re making a very sweeping claim without acknowledging that not everything fits cleanly into it. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that, say, the North Vietnamese government was terror on earth justifying any possible action against it, Allende wasn’t a Communist and nor were East Timor, Bangladesh, Cambodia, etc. so this is effectively arguing that you let someone be shot because you thought they might grow up to be a murderer.
In foreign policy you have to walk a line between moralism and realism. Kissinger was too much a realist. But moralism has its dangers too, as we saw with the Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan) and Obama (Libya) administrations.
At any rate, it's hard to think of anyone who is more responsible for the continued post-war global dominance of the US than Henry Kissinger.
America's global dominance, and China's challenge to it, depends far more on economic heft than the machinations of diplomats, even ones as ruthless as Kissenger.
Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands people. They had families. They were real people who died.
Death doesn´t absolve someone from committing crimes against humanity. To claim that people should only talk about the good things person did is a serious case of decorum poisoning.
Nobody celebrates serial killers.
He was partially responsible for the deaths of thousands of people around the world, and was responsible for some of the darkest chapters of us foreign policy during the 20th century. When do you think is an appropriate time to have these conversations? He's dead. Criticizing his impact on the world can hardly affect him now. The people in Cambodia he helped murder had families too. Are hackers not supposed to care about ethics or humanity? Why wouldn't Kissinger's death be an inappropriate time to discuss his legacy?
RIP Henry Kissinger. I am as far apart on the political spectrum from Kissinger as can be imagined, but it is useless to imagine a counterfactual, somehow better, history where he did not make his mark.
We often think powerful people have the power to command the course of history, and therefore is somehow more culpable than the cheering onlooker. But we are all vessels on the tides of history.
Applying criminal law to state leaders, spearheads of broad sectors of society is therefore fraught with peril bordering on a misuse of the judiciary, unless they broke some law that is also applicable to anyone else, like theft, willful deceit or bodily harm to others (in their vicinity).
Kissinger's book "Diplomacy”(1994) is incredibly good and well-written Must read for anyone interested in international politics.
To understand Kissinger, you must understand his worldview. He had an acute sense of tragedy, and understanding that things can go wrong in an instant. For him the job of foreign policy was very modest: to keep the most horrible disasters away by using power against power. By preventing the worst from happening, others had the opportunity to better the humanity. Cynical realpolitik was necessary to prevent everything from going to hell.
In the last 30 years Kissinger was not very consistent or well thought in his opinions in public. He just wanted to get included and consulted in the highest level, so his opinions were often grafted to be accepted. For example, the plan to invade Iraq was fundamentally against Kissinger's realpolitik world view. Neoconservative foreign policy is idealistic (spread democracy trough military strength) but Kissinger rationalized the invasion for neocons.
> "The book discusses Henry Kissinger, the 1970s oil embargo, and the Iranian Revolution. Cooper had stated that the story on how the U.S. became dependent on Saudi Arabia and how U.S. reliance on oil began was "Less well known" compared to the general understanding of U.S. reliance on oil."
Henry Kissenger along with his British and Gulf Arab partners seem to have invented the concept of petrodollar recycling which has buoyed up the value of the US dollar since about 1975 or so. Balance of payments was a problem and Kissenger said to the Gulf Arabs, "we'll maintain your medieval system of government and the special priviledges of the House of Saud just so long as you keep investing the bulk of those profits back into the US economy (see Saud investments in Uber, today)."
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
> If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
Have you actually read 'The Prince'? It's hopelessly naive, and doesn't have much to do with real politics (or real life in general). So I doubt you could learn everything there is to know about Henry Kissinger in there.
(To explain more: 'The Prince' is willing to say some things that shocked contemporaries, and might even shock some people today. But it's still rather naive in its reasoning, and believes in simple 'one weird tricks'.)
Before Henry Kissinger, there were walls in the world - just as there are now. The difference was those walls - by-and-large - were designed to keep people _in_. A very subtle but meaningful difference. The people who built _those walls_ wanted you inside with them. That was their dream - and they were quite frank about it. Just something to ponder.
Those places exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule in 2023. I'm not offering a full-throated apology of Kissinger (or, by extension, Nixon) just pointing out that a lot of the people jumping out to proclaim what a terrible human he is a few hours after his death was announced might consider that they would be demonstrably worse off if the forces Kissinger worked to keep at bay had prevailed.
I have a feeling that people who hate him were on the receiving end of his work, or associate him as one of those bogeyman characters that their in-group is expected to hate, or whom it's popular and fashionable to hate.
He seems to have been quite good at what he did, and this made his opponents hate him particularly vehemently. If you bother to read what he wrote, he had a pretty humble but accurate view of things in their moment, and also contrarian ideas that might have proven out to be correct despite the horror they imply.
The victims "were on the receiving end of his work", like I said. The man served the US and the US first and wasn't shy about sacrificing left and right for his perceived greater good. In the trolley problem, he was clear eyed. You may disagree with his trolley problem solution, but then would you have one, or would you stall and do nothing in the face of this problem?
From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting."
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
That last sentence is a massive step beyond common knowledge, if it's true... and I don't think it is, what can doctors do?
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Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
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In this case, Kaufman died at 71 of an incurable cancer though.
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They might have more money but there's no higher class.
Perhaps worth noting that he lived 13 years past the time the obituary was penned.
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Common? Give us another example
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The reasons have much more to do with much better diets, getting better sleep, not working stressful and physically demanding and dangerous jobs, etc.
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Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
> Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful.
I'm continuously astonished how people pay 20$ per-month to be lectured like that. I guess I shouldn't be by now...
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> I told it to he had passed away, it checked the internet
Are you sure it didn't just "believe" what you told it, the same way LLMs can be badgered into falsehoods?
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archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231130042426/https://www.nytim...
It's kind of nice to have some of your work outlive you, especially in such a transient medium.
By over a decade!
I am reminded of Hunter S Thompsons euology for Nixon. Good Riddance! Should have died in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
Wow. What a refreshing directness:
> He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
There's a little known law in the USA which states the following;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
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Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-3-9vtpjdU
You can't libel the dead
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The judge who would give them punitive fines and forcing them to pay opposing party expenses.
A. Different times. B. Hunter was a bit of a hack who was not taken seriously. His work is just a couple notches above mad magazine. It is entertaining satire that is obviously without connection to reality.
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.
Guy was a crook and had no remorse for killing millions of civilians and cozying up with dictators. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...
The world needs less people like him.
No one should ever be complicit in carpet bombing. It's inhumane.
We in the US ought to hold the govt accountable everytime they drop bombs from the sky on civilians.
We're currently helping Israel do that in Gaza with our tax dollars. Hospitals and Schools getting air bombed. That is not who we are.
>That is not who we are.
No, that is not who you would like us to be/have been. Very evidently, that is who we are.
Remember when Hamas said Israel air bombed a hospital killing hundreds and everyone believed them and it turned out they were lying and it was actually a PIJ misfire.
Hospitals and schools that are used by Hamas.
While I agree to an extent, this begs an obvious question: How far do we take this line of thinking?
Is an attack like 9/11 justified since even the twin towers were used by the US government indirectly, owing to nearly everyone within paying taxes that supported US wars and expeditionary-ism?
Likewise, I'd want to keep in mind things like relative size and options on the table. WW2 incendiary and atomic bombing is one thing in the context of the ferocity and consumption of that war. Yet in the case of a small territory under varying degrees of military occupation and without full self determination, is there really no capability to take any action but bombing such places? (And no moral imperative to try to cause less collateral if it's realistically possible?)
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There is zero evidence that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes. Unless you are saying that people use schools to get education and hospitals to get medical treatment, well then yes.
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Couldn’t find the original link, but here’s news coverage for a game called September 12th.
> In this Serious Game you need to kill terrorists shooting missiles. The action uses first person perspective in order to enhance immersion. The problem is that terrorists are surrounded by civilians and it is almost impossible to attack terrorists without killing civilians too. The dead are mourned and the rage of the survivors turns them into terrorists. You just have to play for a couple of minutes to realize that the only way to avoid ‘collateral damage’ is not to play.
This nicely completes the loop back to Kissinger’s choices in life.
https://www.onseriousgames.com/september-12th-a-toy-world-ne...
And? Hamas defending their homes from invaders.
>helping israel
>not who we are
It is absolutely who we are. We unconditionally support israel no matter what they do. They are our greatest ally!
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Probably as good a time as any to re-link the Mother Jones piece "Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691
Ellsberg had access to the information Kissinger had and still thought the Vietnam war was unjust and unwinnable.
It’s hard to imagine what Kissinger knew that would drastically change my perception on him.
The Vietnam war was unjust and unwinnable.
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.
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Great link!
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.
Non human life? Like cats?
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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.
Can you give any examples of somebody that was unjustly vilified by the public until top secret information was released that exonerated them?
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That's all very fine but worthless for people voting today.
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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.
[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
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.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIVDZYVDraM
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.
It’s a light entertainment show. The host is an ex Cracked writer. It’s mean-spirited but very funny.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Rest in piss. Both of them.
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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.
You're expecting a podcast titled "Behind the Bastards" to be an objective source?
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A podcast like this is not "spontaneous", they will have a rough script
Nobody is doing this kind of podcast "on the fly"
in my experience, this is basically how all podcasts and documentaries seem to be made.
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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
Try listening to it
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What exactly would an “objective” source look like?
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You're judging a book by its cover, more or less.
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National's geographic Kissinger also does a good job highlighting his "achievements".
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.)
I've already listened and it's excellent.
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.
>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?
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> 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.
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> ...was an almost superhuman ass-kisser.
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.
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A villain that he was, even he called out the Rambouillet text [1]
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambouillet_Agreement
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.
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For some counter programming, here is an obituary written by someone more pro Kissinger:
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."
I'm sorry but not every person needs "counter programming". Kissinger was a war criminal and we don't need a "balanced take" of a monster
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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.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
Millions according to the Rolling Stone article.
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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).
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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...
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> 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.
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Some might consider the normalization and growth of China as a competitor superpower treasonous to US interests.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...
After failing in the prosecution of a dumb war, the Paris Peace Conference can’t be seen as any singular accomplishment.
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As a person from the third world and more specifically Africa, I cannot find myself to mourn his death or say any good thing about Kissinger. Good riddance actually. I would have loved to see him get his day in court when he was still alive.
What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.
I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.
A lot of people in the US sadly have 0 knowledge about his crimes in Africa :( It doesn’t even get mentioned in pretty critical articles!
It's the Donald Trump/George Santos blizzard method: do so much crime it's impossible to keep track of it all!
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I think many people from the Global South would agree with you and not just Africans. That was also exactly my thought when i read the headline, even though he did nothing against my native Kenya. Also, the phrase "Third World" isn't the most appropriate one to describe a good chunk of the world.
"Third World" is very much a Cold War term, with roots in French history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World#Etymology
While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.
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There are plenty of people all around the world who know what heinous things he did. He won’t ever be mourned, and hopefully we never see the likes of him again
It might be some small consolation that I know a lot of Americans who are celebrating his death, rather than mourning it.
I definitely raised a glass to his newfound status as a corpse.
It's disturbing the vast difference of opinion between ordinary citizens of the US who think he's a monster that inflicted an enormous amount of evil upon the world. Ever more worse because it was in our name. And how the political class in the US views him.
It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.
I often think of an interesting quote found inside Samuel Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations” (which is pretty meh, IMHO):
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
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“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” - Henry Kissinger
Monty Python tribute to Henry Kissinger:
https://youtu.be/ABeGhyAD_DM?si=6eAeatEaB7U_znd7
YouTube seems to have made it unplayable (for now). You get a vague error when you try to play it.
Alternative link :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVGV6lvNTR4
(Edit : added another)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En7bhLPso2Y
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Works for me.
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or this one... https://youtu.be/V00Crn56wk0?si=W36uEA20Ce6BwaDr
is it tacky to dance on a war criminals grave? probably, but i'm not sure i care at the moment.
First thing that came to mind.
for me it was the great late Christopher Hitchens and his crusade against Kissinger
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christopher+hit...
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Between Kissinger and Wernher von Braun, it's a wonder where the US would be without Nazi Germany.
Kissinger is way over hyped. What I find more interesting is the total deflection of the blame of everything that happened to his person. I believe that Kissinger is talented but far from being the person who orchestrated a world order. He was a tool. A very nice and charismatic persona who took the fall when events went south. He was paid for it and protected up until his death.
"very nice and charismatic persona"
Not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to Henry Kissinger as "a very nice and charismatic person".
Even if he was just "the face" of US Policy at the time, and not an actual implementer, he was instrumental in furthering the suffereing of millions around the world through meddling in foreign governments/civil unrest.
If I make $10 dollars off of your suffering in perpetuity, and let it continue as the public face of your suffering, am I less evil than the actual person implementing your suffering?
His value was similar to the value of consulting companies to a CEO.
When a CEO decides he wants to do a layoff, he can either show up one morning and say he has decided to fire 7% of the workers, or he can hire a consulting company to prepare a thorough and very expensive report which the CEO knows will contain advice to layoff precisely 7% of the workers.
Firing people is sometimes necessary in a budgeting process, and bombing people is sometimes necessary in a war, but it's better if it looks like it is someone else's decision, even when the responsibility obviously rests with the executive.
To have Hitch alive right now to comment, the Rollingstone article was pretty on point but his would have been special.
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"
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
[1] https://twitter.com/Bourdain/status/960322190993477632
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?)
Parent did not claim that Kissinger caused the war. Try reading the link you posted again. And maybe following it to this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
Do you have a source for the Lehrer quote? I've been told he didn't say that.
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The first article reads to me as totally absurd:
> 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.
The claim is that Kissinger sabotaged peace talks thus extended the war in order for his guy to win the elections.
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.
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"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).
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.
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Add the division of Cyprus to his accomplishments
https://twitter.com/eevriviades/status/1036176772478496768
Here's a good writeup of his war crimes: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...
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.
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.
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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
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He is interesting in the way Hitler, Stalin, or Churchill are "interesting".
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My thoughts to the people whose family still reel from his actions
Full NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.h...
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.h...
Don't even know this is a thing. Thank you kind stranger.
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Not only was he a war criminal, but he was a major player on the Theranos board who brought in multiple investors and raked in over a half million a year between his board position and "consulting."
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-trial-ther...
I revised my opinion of Elizabeth Holmes somewhat for the better when I found out how much of Henry Kissinger's money she ran off with. Mixed with her fraud, a genuine public service!
I read Kissinger The Adventures of Super-Kraut [1] when it came out in 1972. It was a fun read at the time.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Adventures-Super-Kraut-Char...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
Rolling Stone said it best
The good ones die so young...
Not a second too soon. He's responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths around the world. Do not celebrate him.
Celebrate his death, may he and any other neocon burn in hell for eternity
Will we ever get to see the Coens' biopic, "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go"?
https://youtu.be/subNgWRPLg4?si=IsF0hQTJ-4D6otOJ
On a practical side of things, how did he manage to make it to 100? Did he maintain a nutrition plan, was he physically active?
Fun fact: Henry Kissinger was elected an international member of Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016.
Some people just live longer.
My grandmother made it to 98, she rode horses when she was a younger woman (in Australia during the war, she was able to follow my grandfather who was an RAF mechanic out there on the last passenger ship through the Suez).
She used to enjoy a tipple, never smoked though, but in her later years never really exercised.
My grandma lived to 93 and smoked her whole life. Didn’t die of any lung related illness either. Obviously don’t recommend
I can’t remember if it was Kissinger or Nixon that Hunter S. Thompson claimed required screws to affix their pants to their crooked bodies.
Whatever the case, it was incisive and memorable prose.
It was Nixon. The joke doesn't apply to Kissinger because he wasn't a crook.
You're right. Kissinger was way worse.
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>Born in Germany in 1973, Kissinger first came to the US in 1938
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
I hope his rest ISN'T peaceful.
> Anyway, may he Rest in Peace.
you must be joking. may he absolutely not
Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands
All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.
I always go back to this quote from Bourdain when it comes to Kissinger:
“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.”
Referenced many places, but I got it from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/anthony-bourdain...
I think his book on World Orders is interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Order-Henry-Kissinger/dp/014312...
About 100 years too late
> He has a brother who came to America when he did. Recently, the brother was asked why he had no German accent but Henry did. “Because,” said the brother, “Henry never listens.”
https://jacobin.com/2012/08/gore-vidal-dead-and-yet-henry-ki...
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1223820 The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
I remember that he visited his old football club in Germany a couple of years ago and spoke in German on the occasion.
Henry is such a strange name for a child. It just doesn't make sense to me. Henry is like an adult name :/
How about this one then, my grandmother is named Lillemor which is Swedish for "little mother". It was a fairly common name even. People out there naming their kids "little mother".
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This is the most perplexing comment I've ever read.
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His birth name was "Heinz Alfred" but I don't know if that makes it any better.
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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.
We've changed the URL from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38469147) has obviously been in the works for...decades at this point.
I had a grandfather who was a boozing, gambling, cheating, abusive, no-good man who had a similarly short obit.
This is how it works. If you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all.
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.
> were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100...?
I doubt it. The economy of Henry Kissinger Grim Reaper claw machine memes has been going strong for the last four years at least.
I saw one that says "GOT HIM!"
That one might actually be new.
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.
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I’m really surprised to see such a glaring typo, I don’t think I ever seen one before from the BBC:
> Born in Germany in 1973,
It is a side-effect of the learning cutoff date for the LLM they are using to write articles. </sarc>
If that was the only issue with BBC reporting, that'd be nothing...
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).
Yes exactly, so why doesn't the BBC have more than 3 lines on Kissinger?
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There you go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19872410
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.
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.
They omitted the war crimes out of "respect for the dead". That left the article fairly short.
I think it’ll come. Probably within fifteen minutes or so.
The BBC usually takes its time (sometimes to the point of absurdity — more than any other news outlet I can think of).
BBC are asleep.
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He was responsible for the genocide of millions of Bengali Hindus, he supplied weapons and arms meant to kill us, knowing fully-well what its sole purpose was.
The only thing he was great at doing, was spilling innocent blood across the world.
[1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide)
[Nixon-Kissinger](https://youtu.be/bEytw5Zv0wc?si=P_tbwHcvsm1N8amP)
Many people have a positive view of Kissinger --https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissingers-century-01a1a9...
Americans maybe. Plenty of Cambodians, Chileans, Argentinians, and more, will spit on the grave.
He’s quite popular in China too.
I think it's a generational thing. Kissinger should have stopped commenting on world affairs 20 decades ago. It became increasingly oblivious that the world was evolving in a direction he didn't understand or comprehend. He continued to attempt to apply his cold war era world view and solutions to current issues, when it was obvious to most that his ideas where nonsense.
An example: His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
Had he stepped back from the public 20 years ago, then may the majority of at least Americans would have remembered him as a great statesman, but he need to be heard and saying stupid shit has made people more aware of his past and his terrible actions.
> His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
And yet it is exactly this behind the scenes that Ukraine European backers are pushing Zelensky to do. When it is clear that the war is a quagmire and Ukraine is underperforming.
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It's hard to do that level of genocide and escape the Hague without a few admirers
Even those that did not escape the Hague have admirers.
How can an obit about a 100 year old man garner 328 comments in 5 hours on HN? This is Nixon era stuff. I would have assumed most HN reader’s parents weren’t born when Kissinger was actually relevant. The HN demographic is way older than I imagined.
It's because we'll never stop feeling the effects of trade normalization with China that placed the final nail in the coffin of unionized labor in the US, resulting in the poor quality of life we feel daily here.
Kissinger was a truly awful and hypocritical human being. Despite being a refugee from a murderous regime, he sat around and cracked jokes with a dictator whose body counts was in the multiples of the dictator he fled from. The "rapprochement" (read: appeasement) with the PRC that he spearheaded benefited China immensely while it was nothing but damaging to US interests. The damage he did to the long term peace in the Taiwan strait can still be felt to this day.
He would remain a close friend of that regime until his dying days - I believe he met Xi this year.
Good riddance.
“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.”
― Anthony Bourdain
Hey have you ever thought about the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential:
> "Kissinger then defines what the U.S. wants overall, agreed broadly in the group: Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
Sounds nuts, right? Reputable source I guess:
https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/blog/israeli-nuclear-pro...
Kissenger was a remarkable character, his legacy is worth examining with a fine-tooth comb... isn't it?
>"Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
explain what is nuts about that in the middle of the cold war. The US has intelligence that Israel has the bomb, and Kissinger thinks we shouldn't broadcast it?
>the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential
what role is that in the development of Israel's weapon? (If there is one weapon you aren't going to keep the Jewish state from developing, I'd think it would be one based on 20th century physics...)
Other than "oooh Kissinger bad", I don't get what you are saying.
(*fine-toothed comb)
The fact that nuclear weapons are about deterrence means you don't want them to be secret. A secret nuclear weapon's primary use would be a revenge weapon. Or to blow up a city in a surprise attack. Neither of which is particularly "defensive".
There's a reason why we have arms treaties and try to be transparent about our nuclear capabilities. I know it's a movie but Dr. Strangelove is a great example of the thinking behind this.
I get that the point is to keep the balance of power in the favor of the US, but the practical outcome was letting Israel secretly develop a revenge/offensive nuclear bomb. If it got used potentially millions would die, and you can't even make the argument that it acts as a stabilizer via MAD.
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Henry Kissinger, how I'm missing you, and wishing you were here. He's got better legs than Hitler, and nicer tits than Cher!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5vo7jLGOb8
He wrote a fair amount of books for the interested
I found Diplomacy by him to be surprisingly good. I came into it with a negative perception of him presumably from being around threads like this one and found a cogent framework to think about foreign relations well articulated.
I've read that book
It's well articulated, in the same sense that lebensraum can be well-articulated. If you don't believe in the rule of law, but do believe in might makes right, it's entirely coherent.
It also puts you on a similar moral ground, and value to civilized society that being, say, a mob boss, or some other violent, dangerous psychopath does.
I'm suddenly interested in books for the disinterested.
Right, I would like to stick my head in the sand and not understand people who influenced modern history as well. Or maybe you would like to read about anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism of which there are plenty of books, get your fill. Most direct criticisms are poorly written and sprinkled with conspiratiorial delusions, such as A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson if you truly want a recommendation, which certainly attempts to go for the jugular but not well at all.
No newspaper obituary will say it like this, so I feel obliged to say it.
One of the world's most notorious war criminals, a man with millions of people's blood on his hands, a man directly responsible for the rise of anti-liberal regimes across the world from Russia to Iran, died today.
He brought misery to the world and set the course of human progress back by decades.
People only think of the likes of Stalin or Pol Pot when they think of "evil". But the name Henry Kissinger belongs right up there.
I won't say that I'm glad, just that I hope the world becomes a better place.
The article is just the headline
A war criminal.
He saw mass murder and genocide along with the rape of tens of thousands of women in East Pakistan in 1970 and not only did nothing he said nothing should be done at all because Pakistan was an US ally.
He did it all full on record and on paper.
There's nothing "alleged". He is a war criminal. Plain and simple. And I abhor this man.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
- Clarence Darrow
Not the only war criminal to ever win a Nobel Peace Prize, but he's surely in the running for the one with the most blood on his hands.
poor comparison but his legacy will probably be split like churchill.
anyways for me it was a reminder that the world is not fair.
Kissinger wrote an interesting book "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822", actually found it online:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012330695&se...
i think he had his moment here with the 1975 Helsinki accord. That one is often overlooked, but it gave dissidents in communist countries a basis to press their case, where their own government signed a document that on paper obliged them to respect human rights.
Good! Lets start the clock for Nuland then.
Great News for the peace of the world.
Go to the hell
Finally
He died a long time ago.
He's the reason why the middle east has been in shambles since the 70s.
Since the 70's? There's a Bible with stories about those shambles!
You may be surprised to learn it's been in shambles for a while longer than that.
Yeah, but it was meaningfully stabilizing before we fucked it again.
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Religion is also an important reason.
Rest in piss.
> “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.”
— Anthony Bourdain
https://henrykissinger.rip/
RIP bozo!
Rest in peace patriot.
The DeathList website finally gets to mark him off their list, after nominating him for likely death in the next year 10 times previously (and I believe he first made the list back in 1993).
https://deathlist.net/
https://forums.deathlist.net/forum/31-2023-names/
A shadowy character. For all his public appearances brokering Peace Deals, he engineered military coups all over Latin America in the 70s (Allendes government for one) and helped set up “School of the Americas” in Panama, where the US trained military juntas how to fight leftist “insurgency”(or civilian opposition, depending who you ask). A lot of the torturing and dirty wars that crippled Latam for 15 years is his doing.
While I recognize a number of good deeds he pulled, I get upset when his shadowy part gets untold.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
"Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100."
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It doesn't take much intellect to realise that laudable ends* never justify ignominious means.
* see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38468485
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Maybe one of the few publications with the integrity to publish those words.
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http://ishenrykissingerdead.com/ is lagging behind the news
They had one job!
Domain creation Date: 2020-11-26T22:32:58Z
They've paid for 3 years of domain registration, and missed their big day
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God, I hope the person who made that site didn't die before they could make this update.
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I just can’t help think how much wider the global support for the west (incl eg ukraine) would be today if Kissinger’s “we can do war crimes and install dictators all we like cause we’re the good guys” doctrine hadn’t made it to the forefront of US policy. Even from a hardcore neorealist perspective, the harm has by now well outlasted the benefit.
Kissinger is on record (from WEF/Davos of all places) as having criticized the West's position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The only reason he swum against the tide was because he was 98 at the time and probably doesn't give a shit what anybody thinks of him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOZw0zGFvzI
He's a monster and I'm glad he's dead but he was spot on about the inevitable outcome in Ukraine and how sanctions and enmity have pushed Russia even further into china's loving embrace.
> Kissinger is on record (from WEF/Davos of all places) as having criticized the West's position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The only reason he swum against the tide was because he was 98 at the time and probably doesn't give a shit what anybody thinks of him.
Kissinger’s support for accepting Russian imperialist crimes against prace and war crimes in Ukraine is grounded in the same realpolitik as his advocacy of US imperialist crimes against peace and war crimes throughout his career, and his advice on tape to Nixon in the 70s about the plight of Jees trying to flee persecution in the USSR that even if rose to the level of gas chambers, it shouldn't be considered a US concern.
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Realpoliticans are always playing for the autoritarian team, as it flattens the playing field, giving up the moral high ground, one of the reasons russian bots desperatly push it as the "default" mindset. Got to turn everyone a psychopathic maniac out for themselves, to justify being one.
“ incl eg ukraine” is in the wrong place. It should be here:
“We can support war crimes and install really bad regimes (incl eg ukraine) all we like cause we’re the good guys”.
Otherwise OK.
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> Ukraine. It could very well have maintained neutrality and avoided the invasion.
This seems naive. Ukraine was already invaded in 2014. I guess you are not from Eastern Europe when you deny these nation sovereignty.
Nonsense. Ukraine already had an agreement with Russia that turned out to be worth less than the paper it was written on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
That's nonsense and Russia has repeatedly stated it won't do X (if Ukraine does Y), then did it regardless. Appeasement has always been a shit strategy.
Most prominently Russia claimed it won't invade Ukraine if Ukraine doesn't join NATO - Ukraine's NATO bid occured after Russia's full-scale invasion happened anyways.
Similar story with the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine.
One has to be especially gullible to trust Russia at this point.
It's honestly refreshing to see this information about Ukraine posted with minimal partisanship.
The West has, with every decision, made the choice that put Ukrainian lives and sovereignty at risk starting from practically the day the wall fell.
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.
Depends on perspective I suppose. Lots of people in Russia, for instance, feel this way about Gorbachev. Putin even denied him a state funeral.
Bush is probably a contender.
Churchill?
As a British person, I’m thankful to Churchill that I’m not typing this response in German.
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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.
I was riding an elevator to my hotel room when it stops on another floor and in gets Henry Kissinger in the company of beautiful young blonde. So I say "Hey! Aren't you Kissinger?" Henry replies "no I'm Fsckinger."
(The last time I can tell a 50 year old joke)
That's not how Kissinger is pronounced. It's a soft g. Sorry to spoil your joke, but as you say it's reached the end of its natural life anyway.
Damn, he was cooking here
When people like this guy die, I always wish that hell is actually real place because he has by all accounts earned a seat at that table.
I wonder who won the tontine: https://henrykissinger.rip
Does this mean the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been resolved? If so, he probably died of boredom.
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He was a very influential political operator. It’s true what they say though, at least in this case. Only the good die young.
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Hate that Imma live forever like him :(
Corollary to genius and madness only being definitively discernible after the fact.
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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.
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Eternal hellfire
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And Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Bangladesh, Angola, Timor-Leste, ...
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Ah and OF COURSE I get downvoted. I know it. This fucking site is filled with braindead morons, almost as bad as Reddit. But also some people with brains who point out who he really was. A disgusting war criminal and nothing less.
But you gonna honor a war criminal because the MSMBS media brainwashed you into praising him as a good man and great advisor or whatever the fuck they tell you to believe. He was the personification of evil foreign policy, typical elitist with no empathy and only one goal to expand the US empire by all brutal means possible. Seeing millions of lives just to be sacrificed for his great chess game.
https://www.corbettreport.com/kissinger/
Many on this site believe that unregulated technology and capitalism is the surest way to a better world, so it really shouldn't be surprising that some of the people who benefit the most from the neoliberal order are praising one of its architects.
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Good night, sweet prince.
Ah yes, the real life Varys.
> Kissinger saw combat with the [84th Infantry Division] and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.
Thank you for your military service Mr. Secretary. Fighting real Nazis earns my gratitude.
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Kissinger gets a lot of flak for the bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam, but... I mean, it was awful when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and it was also awful when the Viet Cong took over Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge murdered 25% of the country! 2 million people!! https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian-genocide
The Viet Cong were also horrible (excepting, of course, their intervention in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge!) and devastated Vietnam, and the CPV rules it with an iron fist to this day.
Communism really is and was extremely, horribly bad.
In South Korea, the seemingly insane plan of the US (install a pro-Western dictator as a bulwark against Communism, and eventually transition to a liberal democracy) eventually worked. The Korean War pre-dates Kissinger's rise to power, but his overall principle of oppose-Communism-no-matter-what seems kind of reasonable, even in hindsight.
Anti-communist dictatorships and militias were often terrible, too, but it is really hard to be worse than Communists.
It worked in South Korea and it failed everywhere else. Everything this man did was extremely short-sighted and had cause widespread mistrust of America in the majority of the world.
That's readily disproven by example.
https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/opinion/editori...
His own biographer credited Kissinger with killing 3 million people, those numbers make the Khmer Rouge blush, but your bias against communism makes you see Kissinger as some sort of hero? That's morally fascinating.
I don't think there's any evidence that Allende was worse than the regime that took over. You might argue Allende wasn't a communist (which would be true), but the coup was of Kissinger's making. Cuba was communist, and was absolutely not the hell-hole that Cambodia was or North-Korea is.
Can't say I'm surprised that this is my most downvoted post! HN, classy as ever.
Binary thinking will do that - you’re making a very sweeping claim without acknowledging that not everything fits cleanly into it. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that, say, the North Vietnamese government was terror on earth justifying any possible action against it, Allende wasn’t a Communist and nor were East Timor, Bangladesh, Cambodia, etc. so this is effectively arguing that you let someone be shot because you thought they might grow up to be a murderer.
In foreign policy you have to walk a line between moralism and realism. Kissinger was too much a realist. But moralism has its dangers too, as we saw with the Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan) and Obama (Libya) administrations.
At any rate, it's hard to think of anyone who is more responsible for the continued post-war global dominance of the US than Henry Kissinger.
FDR, Eisenhower, Truman. Hell even Clinton is more responsible for post war global dominance than Kissinger.
Any number of Fed chairs. Whoever started DARPA.
America's global dominance, and China's challenge to it, depends far more on economic heft than the machinations of diplomats, even ones as ruthless as Kissenger.
It’s really inappropriate how many people are glad he’s dead.
Now is not the time or place to have a hate fest. He’s dead. He had family. He’s a real person who died today.
I don’t know what this has to do with Hacker News ethos.
And using someone’s death as occasion to talk ill about them just isn’t appropriate.
Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands people. They had families. They were real people who died. Death doesn´t absolve someone from committing crimes against humanity. To claim that people should only talk about the good things person did is a serious case of decorum poisoning. Nobody celebrates serial killers.
He was partially responsible for the deaths of thousands of people around the world, and was responsible for some of the darkest chapters of us foreign policy during the 20th century. When do you think is an appropriate time to have these conversations? He's dead. Criticizing his impact on the world can hardly affect him now. The people in Cambodia he helped murder had families too. Are hackers not supposed to care about ethics or humanity? Why wouldn't Kissinger's death be an inappropriate time to discuss his legacy?
RIP Henry Kissinger. I am as far apart on the political spectrum from Kissinger as can be imagined, but it is useless to imagine a counterfactual, somehow better, history where he did not make his mark.
We often think powerful people have the power to command the course of history, and therefore is somehow more culpable than the cheering onlooker. But we are all vessels on the tides of history.
Applying criminal law to state leaders, spearheads of broad sectors of society is therefore fraught with peril bordering on a misuse of the judiciary, unless they broke some law that is also applicable to anyone else, like theft, willful deceit or bodily harm to others (in their vicinity).
Kissinger's book "Diplomacy”(1994) is incredibly good and well-written Must read for anyone interested in international politics.
To understand Kissinger, you must understand his worldview. He had an acute sense of tragedy, and understanding that things can go wrong in an instant. For him the job of foreign policy was very modest: to keep the most horrible disasters away by using power against power. By preventing the worst from happening, others had the opportunity to better the humanity. Cynical realpolitik was necessary to prevent everything from going to hell.
In the last 30 years Kissinger was not very consistent or well thought in his opinions in public. He just wanted to get included and consulted in the highest level, so his opinions were often grafted to be accepted. For example, the plan to invade Iraq was fundamentally against Kissinger's realpolitik world view. Neoconservative foreign policy is idealistic (spread democracy trough military strength) but Kissinger rationalized the invasion for neocons.
If you really want to understand the Kissenger era, the best raw source IMO is this:
> "The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East is a 2011 book by Andrew Scott Cooper"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Kings
> "The book discusses Henry Kissinger, the 1970s oil embargo, and the Iranian Revolution. Cooper had stated that the story on how the U.S. became dependent on Saudi Arabia and how U.S. reliance on oil began was "Less well known" compared to the general understanding of U.S. reliance on oil."
Henry Kissenger along with his British and Gulf Arab partners seem to have invented the concept of petrodollar recycling which has buoyed up the value of the US dollar since about 1975 or so. Balance of payments was a problem and Kissenger said to the Gulf Arabs, "we'll maintain your medieval system of government and the special priviledges of the House of Saud just so long as you keep investing the bulk of those profits back into the US economy (see Saud investments in Uber, today)."
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
> If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
Have you actually read 'The Prince'? It's hopelessly naive, and doesn't have much to do with real politics (or real life in general). So I doubt you could learn everything there is to know about Henry Kissinger in there.
(To explain more: 'The Prince' is willing to say some things that shocked contemporaries, and might even shock some people today. But it's still rather naive in its reasoning, and believes in simple 'one weird tricks'.)
> If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
I mean Steve Jobs didn't do a lot of invention either, but he was still quite the character and bent the course of history
Well yes, right up there with Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin, I guess. Which circle of Dante's Inferno do you think these characters end up in?
>If you read Machiavelli's "the prince"
I don't think think we can read 1 book and understood modern politics lol. It's also very funny to say that book to would be the prince.
Man, too bad, I really wanted to see what Kissinger thought of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
RIP Mister. You were a great intellectual.
For anyone else who might care I found yesterday a great take on that conflict by Lawrence Freedman.
[1] https://samf.substack.com/p/why-not-losing-is-not-tantamount
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZwtaM2EcgY
Before Henry Kissinger, there were walls in the world - just as there are now. The difference was those walls - by-and-large - were designed to keep people _in_. A very subtle but meaningful difference. The people who built _those walls_ wanted you inside with them. That was their dream - and they were quite frank about it. Just something to ponder.
Are you suggesting there aren’t today? You’ve never heard of North Korea? Xinjiang?
If you’re referring to the USSR - Jimmy Carter is the first president to arm the Mujahideen (for better and worse), without the help of Kissinger.
Those places exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule in 2023. I'm not offering a full-throated apology of Kissinger (or, by extension, Nixon) just pointing out that a lot of the people jumping out to proclaim what a terrible human he is a few hours after his death was announced might consider that they would be demonstrably worse off if the forces Kissinger worked to keep at bay had prevailed.
I have a feeling that people who hate him were on the receiving end of his work, or associate him as one of those bogeyman characters that their in-group is expected to hate, or whom it's popular and fashionable to hate.
He seems to have been quite good at what he did, and this made his opponents hate him particularly vehemently. If you bother to read what he wrote, he had a pretty humble but accurate view of things in their moment, and also contrarian ideas that might have proven out to be correct despite the horror they imply.
It isn't only his opponents who hated him, it's the countless families and friends of the innocent bystanders who got caught in Kissinger's crossfire.
The victims "were on the receiving end of his work", like I said. The man served the US and the US first and wasn't shy about sacrificing left and right for his perceived greater good. In the trolley problem, he was clear eyed. You may disagree with his trolley problem solution, but then would you have one, or would you stall and do nothing in the face of this problem?
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