Comment by AYBABTME

2 years ago

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.

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AYBABTME

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kelnos  2 years ago

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.

  • AYBABTME  2 years ago

    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?

    • defrost  2 years ago

      > You may disagree with his trolley problem solution

      Many more correctly disagree with his championing of a specific Trolley Problem framing that likely didn't exist outside a hobgoblin of tiny minds frightened of reds under the bed.

      Kissenger loved that Domino Theory: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/27/archives/skepticism-on-do...

          That judgment, however, is not shared by Administration foreign policy specialists, the American intelligence community or many foreign diplomats.

      The U.S. put much effort into suppressing "people’s movements" in Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.

          “The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, 'Why not us?'”

      ~ Chomsky on the “threat of a good example".

    • __loam  2 years ago

      Man, you're talking about this guy like he wasn't directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. I don't think there's any way to justify that unless you are a full on nazi. Kissinger killed 150,000 people in Cambodia when the country had a total population of 700,000. How anyone can look at that and say shit like "Oh you just disagree with his solution to the problem" is so beyond me to understand. What was the problem? That there were too many Cambodian children still alive? Fuck off.