Comment by Kye
2 years ago
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...
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.
Good question. I have heard it referenced multiple times, but that does not make it true. Wikiquote cites The Sydney Morning Herald [1], but that is probably not a great source. I did a bit of digging online and also found The Guardian mentioning it too around the same time [2] (some twenty or so years ago). But I do not have a source that I would be willing to bet my life on.
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stop-cla...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...
This feels like a rabbit hole best left to proper quote investigators (and a timely one at that). Lehrer is alive though (unlike a certain someone...), so maybe one could even ask him?
Do you have a source questioning the authenticity? Not asking you to prove a negative here, just asking since I did not find one skimming a few pages on DuckDuckGo.
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Lehrer said it, but the myth is that Lehrer stopped performing for that reason — the truth is, he had stopped performing long before that, simply because he was bored of it. From https://web.archive.org/web/20051025051240/https://avclub.co...
> The Onion: I'd long heard that you stopped performing as a form of protest, because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
> Tom Lehrer: I don't know how that got started. I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize. For one thing, I quit long before that happened, so historically it doesn't make any sense. I've heard that quoted back to me, but I've also heard it quoted that I was dead, so there you are. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. I've heard that I stopped because Richard Nixon was elected, or because I got put away in an insane asylum, or whatever. It was just a remark about political satire, because it was true. Not literally, but everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think. Years ago, it was much easier: We had Eisenhower to kick around. That was much funnier than Nixon.
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.
Yes I still find this absurd. So, first of all, here's an article on the Nixon campaign's efforts to prevent a peace deal. [0] It doesn't mention Kissinger at all. If any single person should be 'blamed' for this, surely it's Nixon? But secondly, there's no evidence at all that these efforts actually had anything to do with the failure of the Johnson administration to reach a peace agreement:
> Moreover, it cannot be said definitively whether a peace deal could have been reached without Nixon’s intervention or that it would have helped Mr. Humphrey. William P. Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser to Johnson and John F. Kennedy who was highly critical of Nixon, nonetheless concluded that prospects for the peace deal were slim anyway, so “probably no great chance was lost.”
Even if we do accept that this peace agreement would have happened and that Kissinger was the crucial linchpin in destroying it, U.S. involvement in the war continued for another 5 years, and then there were 2 further years of war without direct U.S. involvement. There were many decisions made by people in the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments that kept the war going over these years, and they had wide support from their respective populaces. Continuing to fight the war until a peace that preserved South Vietnam could be secured was the orthodox position in the U.S. well into the 1970s. How can all of the moral blame for continuance of the war fall on one person?
Then, finally, assigning moral blame to someone for all the consequent downstream effects of their actions is anyway absurd. If Kissinger is a war criminal for 'causing' all the deaths in Vietnam from 1968 forward, then surely Johnson is a larger one, and Kennedy is still a larger one, since after all the war would have been over years earlier if not for them. Or we could go further and blame Napoleon III for invading Vietnam in the first place, he's surely responsible for every death in the consequent wars since then, right?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-t...
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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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