David Corn: Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal.

[Celerity]

Forget the birthday candles, let’s count the dead.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/henry-kissinger-at-100-still-a-war-criminal/



Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century. The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued détente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.

Cambodia: In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.



Bangladesh: In 1970, a political party advocating autonomy for East Pakistan won legislative elections. The military dictator ruling Pakistan, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, arrested the leader of that party and ordered his army to crush the Bengalis. At the time, Yahya, a US ally, was helping Kissinger and Nixon establish ties with China, and they didn’t want to get in his way. The top US diplomat in East Pakistan sent in a cable detailing and decrying the atrocities committed by Yahya’s troops and reported they were committing “genocide.” Yet Nixon and Kissinger declined to criticize Yahya or take action to end the barbarous assault. (This became known as “the tilt” toward Pakistan.) Kissinger and Nixon turned a blind eye to—arguably, they tacitly approved—Pakistan’s genocidal slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus.

Chile: Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. This included Kissinger supervising clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile and triggering a military coup. This scheming yielded the assassination of Chile’s commander-in-chief of the Army. Eventually, a military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, and implemented a dictatorship, Following the coup, Kissinger backed Pinochet to the hilt. During a private conversation with the Chilean tyrant in 1976, he told Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”



snip

[Bayard]

1. Much better people deserved that milestone

Evil triumphs again.

[underpants]

2. Sad.

[malaise]

3. A fucking global criminal

that is all

[Upthevibe]

4. Celerity......

Disturbing beyond measure...

[Autumn]

5. The longer this bastard lives the more I hate him. When I hear someone praise him that person

sickens me.

[Faux pas]

6. ...

and living in the lap of luxury with a net worth of $50 million.

[LudwigPastorius]

7. Satan is just dry aging him like a top butt sirloin.

[2naSalit]

8. I was thinking...

He rejected the bastard.

[mike_c]

9. when Kissinger walks outdoors...

...flowers droop and die as he passes. His footprints blacken in the grass. He pollutes the land he slithers upon and poisons the air he breathes. He's still alive because the rest of the universe rejects the foul molecules from which he is made.

[Marthe48]

10. I can't think of this massive turd

without thinking of the lives he ruined in one country after another.

What a shame he ever existed.

[jaxexpat]

11. Kissinger is the perfect example of why we can't have nice things.

Too many criminals, people guilty of the most heinous types of stuff, like bombing children at hospitals and schools, live out their lives as if they never did anything wrong. How is that a thing? There is no mechanism in our criminal justice system to hold them accountable. They don't have to answer questions or explain themselves to the public. Those in power, political and business, monetize and factor in, transactional-ize, criminality as a matter of course, like it's some sort of relative-association-erasure free pass from responsibility; a long-distance separation from accountability paid in full. Hell, it was in the budget anyway. The worse the crime, the more closely held the myth of innocence. That's what the public gets, manufactured mythology while you wait. Take a number and they'll get right to you.

Maybe we need a "Today's Guilty Pilgrim" weekly reality show (maybe daily). Where the facts of a public official person's official crimes are aired, and they get their 15 minutes of fame for what they actually did, complete with the bullshit reasons/excuses for how they escaped justice, instead of some myth lost in the mist of mistrust. I think it would not cause more harm than the current horrifying silence.

[Solly Mack]

12. And yet when he dies his praises will be sung.

Ain't that America.

[PCIntern]

13. On top of all this horror,

this prick got married on Yom Kippur just to spite his parents. It is hard to believe that this old piece of shit… Was once a young piece of shit.