Gregory of Tours was a sixth century bishop who wrote a long History of the Franks which is one of our principal sources of information about the Merovingian period in early medieval Europe. In the late spring of 1958, I read it along with many other books of European history in my desperate effort to prepare myself to join five brilliant young Harvard Assistant Professors of History in teaching Social Sciences 5. At one point, Gregory describes the rather scrimy life of a minor Merovingian princeling who spent his time feuding and whoring and killing and generally being a bad actor. The otherwise forgettable lout managed to live to be about 80, which was of course very long in those days, before dying peacefully in bed. Gregory sanctimoniously observes of him, “and thus God’s justice was demonstrated yet again” or something to that effect.
I thought about this passage when I got up this morning and
read that Henry Kissinger had died at the age of 100.
72 comments:
A day one wishes there were a hell.
I warmly recall that when Thatcher died ten years ago a wave of jubilation swept England, peaking in the north and in Scotland. 'Ding dong, the witch is dead' re-arose as the #1 song; and who didn't join in with the ten thousand or so Liverpool FC fans singing 'We're all havin' a party/ We're all havin' a party/ We're all havin' a parrr-teee/When Maggie Thatcher dies'? It wasn't surprising, but still a bit sad, that there was nothing similar here for Reagan. I remember thinking that I wouldn't be hearing such things again until Kissinger popped his clogs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-4FJcnX0i8&ab_channel=lilyhughes10
Your thoughts on Kissinger are headlines in Leiter's blog.
To be frank (why not?), seeing that Kissinger had made it to 100 and was still functioning and lucid, I, at age 77, realized that I might have a few more years of lucid functioning that I previously had imagined. So no, I didn't cheer at his death.
As to hell, no, I'm not as vindictive as a good Christian is. Nietzsche takes that up in the Genealogy of Morals.
I'm British, and my emotions when Thatcher died were quite complicated - not pleasure so much as a flood of relief that all that was over, coupled with a concentrated flashback of the anguish of all that. I didn't feel like having a party.
Hearing the news about Kissinger, though, I'm afraid I just felt glad; I'd be happy to raise a glass to a world without him in it. My feelings might be more complicated if I were American (or indeed if I were Chilean, or Cambodian, or Kurdish, or...).
...or Bangladeshi/Bengali
(I'm not aware of any particular connection of Kissinger to the Kurds, but that's prob just my ignorance.)
One more thing, referring back to your older post about Kissinger. I was interested that you referred to Herman Kahn as a fraud. I read On Thermonuclear War once; the first thing I did when I was embarking on postgraduate study was take a option on International Relations, goodness knows why. I found Kahn's book morally appalling, but I don't remember the scholarship seeming particularly shoddy - but I was still feeling my way academically, and didn't have a lot to compare it with. It's nice to think that if I went back to it now I'd like it even less!
Was it not Kissinger who promised the Kurds the Earth (or international recognition, anyway), strung them along for several years then dropped them like a hot brick? I should re-read my William Blum.
Those who didn't read William R. Polk's essays on the background to the Palestine conflict would have missed this:
"Henry Kissinger, newly appointed director-designate of the National Security Council [in 1967, after Egypt and its Arab allies' defeat in the Six Day War], asked me to discuss the possibility of a peace treaty with President Nasser. At his request, I flew to Cairo, spent some hours with Nasser and the head of his national security council, and returned to report that I thought a deal was possible. Kissinger then asked me to return to Cairo 'and push as far as you can get toward a peace treaty.'
The main issues to be included in such a treaty on the Egyptian side had to be: Egypt (1) adhering to the treaty that would make the Enterprise Passage at the Straits of Tiran legally an international waterway; 2) demilitarizing the Sinai Peninsula once it was returned to Egypt; 3) moving toward free trade with Israel; and (4) recognizing Israel with all deliberate speed. In our many hours of discussion, Nasser agreed with these points and corrected in red ink the draft I wrote between the time when we were actually meeting. He went further: he cabled Kissinger, who had moved into the White House, asking him to meet me urgently.
When I met with Kissinger and handed over the draft peace treaty, he expressed no interest and would not even read it. I was absolutely astonished. I pointed out that this agreement was what the US government had been seeking for many years and was a unique opportunity to bring peace to the Middle East. He said he was busy, but that if I left the treaty on his desk, he would read it when he had time. That time never came. The opportunity to move toward peace was lost. Fighting along the Canal continued. As a result in the following months, at least 30,000 more people were killed."
In other news, after apparently sidelining its three Muslim anchors at the beginning of the Gaza conflict, MSNBC is now canceling Mehdi Hasan's cable & podcast shows.
Here was Hasan challenging Netanyahu's senior adviser Mark Regev on air recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD-yRuTasHU
You have a remarkable memory. I read that book several months ago for a Classics book discussion group. (Anything prior to 1400). I recall virtually nothing from the book, other than that it was a collection of anecdotes of one war after another, with no overall theme or structure. Cruelty and deceit were the orders of the day. (Henry Kissinger would have loved it.) The book was a far cry from Herodotus and Thucydides, or even the Roman historians.
@ Eric
You confuse your antisemitism for idealism. You know nothing about our history and everything you think you know is propaganda You are guilty of emotional reasoning, labelling, magnifying, personalizing, and other cognitive distortions. You don't even know your own feelings.
It is contemptible that a grown man would behave like the pro Palestinain rioters whose ignorance derives from their having not been weaned yet.
You somehow forget the victims of 10/7 who were sacrficed to the volcanic rage that is Hamas and you are my enemy for shining the shadow of a Holocaust on Jews of Israel.
That is not justcie but genocide.
When there is someoneon your side who seeks peaceful coexistence, we'll talk, until then you'll get the war you deserve
Everything is opposite of what you once believed. I hated Thatcher. I have to grumblingly admit that she closed the dreadful coal mines and was a major reason why Argentina transitioned back to democracy. Kissinger and the"realists" more generally is unfortunately a similar story, at least in the Middle East .
Anonymous @2:16 p.m. wrote:
Kissinger and the "realists" more generally is unfortunately a similar story, at least in the Middle East.
This needs elaboration; otherwise it's just an assertion.
Although it's not all one should read on Kissinger, I'd recommend the relevant chapter in M.J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (1986). [disclosure: the author was a teacher of mine in college]
From p. 216:
"Thus in the 'paradoxical brilliance' of Henry Kissinger, the idea of realism finds ironic fulfillment. His reliance on great power diplomacy and a conservative concept of international legitimacy proved too simple for a complex world yet too complicated and elitist for the domestic polity on whose behalf it was advanced.... And the realist insistence on an ethic of responsibility ended in Kissinger as an ethic of personal vision essentially unknowable to anyone but the statesman himself."
p.s. That's a more charitable assessment of Kissinger than mine would be, but still gets at some of the issues.
Henry Kissinger fought in the Battle of the Bulge (1944-1945)--the U.S. operation wIth the most U.S. casualties in history. I believe just for that he is a good, patriotic man. Would he have saved my life if I were there? I believe he would have.
Now fire your mortars at me as I take one or two for Dr. Kissinger. Incoming...
If the Nixon administration would have saved South Vietnam from falling to the North, would history (and many others) have looked more favorably upon Dr. Henry Kissinger? Yep.
That just proves that Fortuna has more sway over men's opinions than the true intentions of anyone's actions.
Good piece in WaPo about Kissinger's "legacy" in Cambodia. 500,000 tons of bombs dropped, 150,000 civilian casualties.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-cambodia-bombing-war/
@ M Llenos
If the Nixon administration would have saved South Vietnam from falling to the North, would history (and many others) have looked more favorably upon Dr. Henry Kissinger? Yep.
Congress eventually cut off aid to the South bc it was sick of pouring money down the rathole, so to speak. While there have been revisionist efforts to rehabilitate Thieu's reputation, it was a regime that had not shown itself able to gain the kind of widespread, deep loyalty and legitimacy from the pop required for its survival in that context. Your counterfactual is weird on several levels.
Anonymous at 1:59:
Are you Marc Susselman? You sure sound like him?
David Zimmerman,
No, it's not Marc. Marc proof-reads what he writes more carefully, does not make spelling mistakes and in generally writes better. I say that as an ex professor of college composition.
Anonymous @1:59 sounds very much like Howard (Howie) in terms of writing style. But if he wants to post anonymously when engaging in vitriol, I guess that's his "right," for lack of a better word.
"Congress eventually cut off aid to the South bc it was sick of pouring money down the rathole, so to speak."
They only had the opportunity because of Nixon's resignation. Otherwise they didn't have the power to do so until after Watergate.
Michael Llenos
I don't really follow your comment. The weariness with --and opposition to -- continuing to fund the war grew in Congress until there was finally a majority to cut off funding. Nixon and Kissinger had promised Thieu that the U.S. wouldn't "abandon" S. Vietnam if the North resumed hostilities after (and I believe in contravention of) the Paris agreement (which it did), but that promise by Nixon was necessarily conditional on Congress being willing to vote the funds. Watergate might have had some impact but it wasn't determinative, imo. What was more important was that, w U.S. soldiers no longer on the ground, Congress was no longer willing to fund the S Vietnamese govt. and its military bc the war was unpopular by that pt and they'd had enough. On the one hand you cd say this was abandonment of an ally. On the other hand it was an ally that had never shown itself capable of inspiring the kind of loyalty and devotion from the mass of the population that is needed to fight a war successfully vs. ideologically committed opponents who are willing to absorb enormous amounts of punishment and hardship.
Anonymous @2:16
"I hated Thatcher. I have to grumblingly admit that she closed the dreadful coal mines..."
No doubt about it, the coal mines were pretty dreadful, especially if you had to workin one. My grandfathers and uncles always told those of us of a younger generation not to end up working in one, as they did. But (a) it was reliable work and (b) the mines were central to working class communities which were very meaningful to those who lived in one of them, as I did while I was growing up. What was most reprehensible about Thatcher's actions was that (a) she destroyed the source of income of a great many families without making any kind of alternative available (something typical of the 'creative destruction' economy; and (b) she left those increasingly impoverished working class communities to survive as best they might given her and her party's approach to social provision. Thank goodness she's gone--though sadly her spirit lingers on, and not just in her Tory Party. And thank goodness Kissinger is gone--though sadly his spirit will linger on among Republicans and Democrats.
Also, M. Lienos, "South Vietnam" was pretty much a construction of Western--US--Cold War politics. So you should think again about "saving" the place. Ho Chi Minh and the NLF had the right of it.
LFC,
I agree. The attack on Eric is much more likely to have come from Howard than from Marc.
The thing is that Marc got banned for such attacks, while whoever the Anonymous is, he or she avoids the consequences of their actions while Marc at least had the courage and honesty to face them.
By the way, I do not believe that Eric is an anti-semite.
This is an interesting account of a meeting featuring kissinger. It includes a brief account of an exchange between k. and Daniel Ellsberg--someone who desreves to be mourned.
https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/30/an-evening-with-henry/
S.W., all the major religions have their hells.
"On the one hand you cd say this was abandonment of an ally."
LFC, we should keep in mind that our "ally conspired with an American presidential candidate to prolong the war leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans. Allies don't do that.
anon, no good guys here. Both sides were nationalists AND constructs of foreign powers (France, the U.S., the USSR).
aaall
I need to go back and look at the details of that whole '68 episode, but for now I'll (at least partially) accept your point.
The basic problem was that the Thieu govt needed US military aid to survive. When US soldiers were no longer there in substantial numbers, the Thieu govt was reliant on US airpower. But that couldn't continue indefinitely given the disenchantment w the war in Congress. Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the war for the elusive goal of maintaining U.S. "credibility," but it's not clear how their policy even did that. Their pursuit of a chimerical "peace with honor" cost enormous numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian (and prob some Laotian) lives, plus about 20,000 additional U.S. lives. Presumably you agree on this pt, so I'm addressing this more to Michael L.
s.w.,
I agree that Anonymous @1:59's attack on Eric is not constructive. Telling someone, as Anonymous does, that "you don't even know your own feelings" is, imo, silly, and so is the next sentence of Anonymous's comment. This is a blog, not a psychoanalysis session.
The whole antisemitism discussion, and I don't mean only or primarily on this blog, is plagued by uncertainty about line-drawing. Sen. Schumer in his NYT op-ed, acknowledging that criticism of Israel is not itself antisemitic, argued that at a certain point utterances or actions can "cross the line" into antisemitism. As a general proposition I'd agree with that, but the problem is: where exactly is that line? I'm not sure Schumer, in his speech or NYT op-ed, offered a fully persuasive answer. There's perhaps an impulse to say it's like pornography à la Justice Stewart and you know it when you see it, but I'm not sure when it comes to the current context that that's an adequate approach. I don't know exactly what the right approach is, but I'm inclined not to make allegations of antisemitism without a really clear basis and justification.
LFC,
For me an anti-semite attacks Israel because they're Jewish, and Eric and others in this blog attack Israel because they're oppressing and killing Palestians.
Those Israelis who oppress and kill Palestinians are Jewish of course, but I believe that Eric and people like him would attack them if they were from any Western power and of any ethnic group of European origen. He'd attack Biden with the same vehemence, perhaps with more vehemence, if the United States were engaged in similar behavior. Imagine if it were Trump, who does not look Jewish to me.
Israel is seen as a settler colonialist imperialist power attacking an oppressed third world people and that's why it is condemned.
I don't agree this narrative completely. Leiter has pointed that Israel becomes a settler colonialist power only after the 1967 War when it occupies the West Bank and then Gaza and I agree with Leiter.
However, the narrative is not anti-semitic.
s.w.
I think I mostly agree, but the harder questions may have to do with particular phrases and actions.
For example, the Jewish students at Cooper Union who felt so threatened they had to barricade themselves in the library. Were they feeling physically threatened, and being physically threatened, because they were Jewish (or perceived as such)? Probably, though I haven't read the details of the incident. Those threatening them might well have assumed that their being Jewish meant they supported Israel's actions in Gaza, not necessarily a correct assumption. So if you're being threatened because you're Jewish, then yes, antisemitism is in play.
Just as Islamophobia (or pick another word if you prefer) seems clearly to have been in play when the guy in Vermont shot the three Palestinian-American students.
What about advocating that Israel should not exist? Here things may get tricky. Is opposing the idea of a Jewish state -- even a more secular, less ethno-nationalist, more democratic one than Israel is today -- antisemitic? Not necessarily, I think. On the other hand, advocating that all Jews currently living in Israel should be rounded up and involuntarily transported to somewhere else, or somehow magically disappear, does definitely strike me as antisemitic. What about the slogan "from the river to the sea"? Does it depend on exactly what the person saying it means by it? Etc. etc. Well, I'm turning off my computer for the night.
"Nixon and Kissinger had promised Thieu that the U.S. wouldn't "abandon" S. Vietnam if the North resumed hostilities after (and I believe in contravention of) the Paris agreement (which it did), but that promise by Nixon was necessarily conditional on Congress being willing to vote the funds. Watergate might have had some impact but it wasn't determinative, imo. What was more important was that, w U.S. soldiers no longer on the ground, Congress was no longer willing to fund the S Vietnamese govt. and its military bc the war was unpopular by that pt and they'd had enough."
There were two major phases in the communist struggle: the Guerilla Warfare phase, and finally the last phase: Conventional Warfare. When the U.S. pulled out, the North was into the Conventional Warfare Struggle. And the latter method the NVA sucked at. They were good at Guerilla Warfare though like also the VC. Like in the progression of the movie Platoon, there is a shift from Guerilla Warfare to more Conventional Attacks. However, even with the Division vs. Division combat at the end of the movie Platoon that is still not Conventional Warfare. Conventional Warfare is moving entire Divisions, Corps, and Army Groups to South Vietnam and fighting like that enmasse without separating the Army units into smaller units. The VC were decimated in the Tet Offensive '68 & didn't really recover after that. But the North sent many NVA soldiers to the South to fill in the empty VC ranks. After Tet in 1968, the NVA were mostly in charge of the Communist Effort for the rest of the war. They resumed Guerilla style of warfare until the U.S. pulled out. Then the conventional attacks began to begin again.
However, the South Vietnamese Army was itself surprisingly good at Conventional Warfare. But not so good at counter Guerilla fighting. After the U.S. pulled out there were more Tet like conventional communist attacks against the South with the South Vietnamese military doing a great job in beating the communist forces. Nixon supplied the South with the equipment and arms they needed to fight with. When Nixon resigned because of Watergate, the U.S. diplomats made a deal with the North in Paris for the U.S. to supply the South with very little ammunition--a action pushed by the anti-war party in in the U.S. Congress. So when the South Vietnamese soldiers ran out of the little ammunition they were each supplied with to fight with, they ran from the battlefield. And soon after... Saigon fell.
And one must remember that there is a big difference between gauging a military victory from the confused crap reporters show on TV. The biggest asset Ho Chi Minh had in winning the Civil War in Vietnam was the American television set. The second biggest asset he had was the U.S. Draft. All nations and countries hate a Military Draft. The Chinese philosopher Mencius was very much against a State Draft. He believed that Kings should give edicts in an alternative to a Military Draft in the form of civilian construction labor or even working in agriculture.
10 years ago I was in Israel for my son's Bar Mitzva. If you are an American Jew on tour in Israel you will be familiar with the organized and persistent message you hear at certain tourist sites catering to Americans. The subtext is obvious. "You need to support Israel because it's only a matter of time before even in America you are not safe." I was in the Negev and a C-130 transport was flying overhead. The tour guide said those are the planes in the future that will be shuttling American and European Jews to Israel. This fundamental belief exists in all Israelis, from the hipster artist in Tel Aviv to the most radical settlers in the West Bank.
I believe there is a serious misjudgment of Israel in the west. People regard Israel as a "western" state, similar to American or European countries. That is wrong. Israel is a Middle Eastern country, where the only currency any state respects is power. Any critic of Israel fails to appreciate this when they judge them by "Western" standards.
I believe this is the first time I've seen the claim that the ARVN lost because it ran out of bullets, though maybe it did. (I assumed that the US aid that was eventually cut off had to do w more sophisticated stuff.) There is a revisionist strain in the historiography of the war, which argues a pulled-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory thesis. My bias is vs that interpretation, but since I haven't read most of the revisionist work I suppose I shd withhold judgment to a degree.
Above comment directed to M. Llenos.
I really like Phil's comment about the sense of relief he felt when Thatcher died -- know that all "that" was over. I imagine that is how I will feel once Trump finally leaves this Earth. I can't wait.
-- Jim
The problem with the Reagans, Trumps and Thatchers of this world is that they are unfortunately only the projection screens on whose surface all the unresolved problems of our time condense. That is why there is this invisibly functioning genetics, according to which there is always a successor. Or you see them wandering around the houses at night as the undead. Some of them are like Ahab's spawn, chained to the back of a whale and waving to those left behind on board.
LFC,
As to the Jewish students who feel threatened, do the students from Jewish Voice for Peace feel threatened too?
Would Norman Finkelstein feel threatened, would Noam Chomsky, would Professor Wolff?
I'm not say that it's fine to threaten other students, but there's a difference between threatening students because they're Jewish (as the Nazis did) or because they support what is seen to be a "genocidal" war.
I don't agree that Israel is commiting genocide, by the way. They carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
s.w.,
I don't want to get into a long debate about this, and the facts vary from case to case, but in many or some of these cases I think students are being threatened or harassed etc. because they are Jewish. Just as in some cases students are being threatened or harassed bc they are Muslim or Palestinian. What comes to the fore is their actual (or perceived) identity rather than their actual (or perceived) position on the conflict. That is my impression from various reports; I rarely have occasion to be on a campus, however, so I don't have first-hand experience of what's going on. But some students are reporting feeling unsafe because of their identity, not bc of their position on the conflict.
Jeffrey St. Clair's Friday round-up today at Counterpunch starts with 20 or so items about Kissinger. St. Clair's most telling remark is that if you present yourself as a humanitarian realist, there's no limit to the number of people you can have killed. Other highlights include noting Kissinger's attractiveness to women, anti-Semitism that would make a Nazi blush, and Orson Welles alliterative characterization him as 'a selfish, self-serving shit'. Caution: there're also a couple of photos of HK's magisterial nose-picking in Brazil. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/01/the-dr-caligari-of-the-american-empire/
@ J Rapko
I read some of the St. Clair thing. Many of the criticisms are justified, but there are a few problems w the piece.
- Samantha Power came to prominence w a book on genocide (A Problem from Hell, I think it was called). Haven't read it but it's impossible to imagine HK devoting a bk to the topic. I'm not sure exactly why they were friends but their perspectives don't seem identical.
- The phrase "humanitarian realist" doesn't mean a whole lot. HK's career shows that he was not v interested in what's called "humanitarian intervention." On the contrary. In some of his writing he goes through the motions of talking about values, but he was steeped in the realist notion of (as Morgenthau put it) the natl interest defined in terms of power. And Morgenthau himself had a more nuanced, "humanitarian" version of realism than HK.
- Far from inflicting "global misery" at the World Bank, as St Clair says, McNamara put the concern w poverty in the global South at the center of the Bank's operations. There's a fairly recent bk on this subject called _Robert McNamara's Other War_.
HK's overriding preoccupation was great-power "equilibrium," which has as one goal avoidance of war among the great powers. But to the limited, partial extent he succeeded in fashioning or maintaining an equilibrium, he did it at the expense of imposing or inflicting or facilitating a lot of suffering in various parts of the world. As Morgenthau pointed out in a 1975 piece, HK was not at all attuned to the roots of mass discontent in what was then called the Third World. The result was the disasters that are common knowledge.
LFC--Thanks for the exceptionally valuable comments and clarifications. I think Counterpunch would be open to publishing a response from you.--I'm inclined to think that there is nonetheless a kind of value in using even vague phrases like 'humanitarian realist'; like my own favorites 'limousine liberal' and 'caring neoliberal', they condense whole atmospheres of ideology, cognitive dissonance, deception, and self-deception.
Scott Ritter, in a
very long blog post, credits Kissinger for the lack of a major nuclear war, and all that would have followed from that. He also mentions that he was charming in person. He believes that this out-weighs all his other sins.
He writes: It turns out that without Henry Kissinger, there probably would have been no INF treaty, no START treaty, no SALT agreements, no ABM treaty—no arms control.
Without Henry Kissinger, there would very likely have been a nuclear war.
This follows a long passage, that builds up to that as the conclusion.
It's worth at least a skim if only to remind us that the world is complex and contradictory, and simple, black and white judgments necessarily leave out a lot.
Greg Grandin's obit on Kissinger in The Nation from a couple of days ago--With remarkable prescience he begins the fourth paragraph by noting that "Kissinger has many devotees, and many of his obituaries will no doubt urge balance. Transgressions, they’ll say, need to be weighed against accomplishments: détente and subsequent arms treaties with the Soviet Union, opening up Communist China, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East". https://www.thenation.com/article/world/henry-kissinger-obituary/
@ marcel proust
I agree that "simple, black and white judgments necessarily leave out a lot," but the notion that without HK there would likely have been a nuclear war strikes me as a wild overstatement. However, I will look at the Ritter post.
Kissinger was not Milton's Satan who vowed to do only evil nor a James Bond villain.
So having a lot of power, he undoubtedly did some good things amidst all the bad ones.
The point is not to deny that Kissinger did some good things, but that the negative things he did outweigh the positive ones.
LFC: I'm not aware of any particular connection of Kissinger to the Kurds
Daniel Schorr in 1991:
"President Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, visiting Tehran on May 31, 1972, on their way home from a Moscow summit, were asked by the shah to arm and finance an insurrection of the Iraqi Kurds as a favor to the Iranian ruler, 'who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies and who had come to feel menaced by his neighbor.'
The covert-action project was put together within weeks by the White House and the CIA (headed by Richard Helms, who, a year later, would be observing the operation from the other end as ambassador to Tehran). Kissinger decided to keep Secretary of State William P. Rogers and the entire State Department in the dark....
It carried a $16-million price tag and called for supplying the Kurds mainly with Soviet weapons provided by Israel, which was a partner in the enterprise. The shah could easily have financed the operation himself, but the Kurds, not trusting him, insisted that the United States be the 'guarantor.' ...
For three years the Kurds fought the Iraqi forces, sustaining thousands of casualties...."
When the Shah and Iraq settled their dispute in 1975, US support to the Kurds was abruptly cut off.
"A message to the CIA from Kurdish headquarters said, 'There is confusion and dismay among our people and forces. Our people's fate in unprecedented danger. Complete destruction hanging over our head. No explanation for all of this ...'
Some 200,000 Kurds escaped into Iran, of whom 40,000 were forcibly returned to Iraq. Appeals for humanitarian assistance and for political asylum in the United States were ignored."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/04/07/1975-background-to-betrayal/aa973065-ea5e-4270-8cf9-02361307073c/
When asked by a congressional committee to comment in secret testimony on why his State department refused assistance to the Kurds, Kissinger infamously said, "covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
You don't get credit for putting out a fire that you poured gasoline on.
Kissinger pushed the arms race, as Prof Wolff has described.
And, as mentioned in the Counterpunch piece, Kissinger was part of the McCarthyite witchhunt at Harvard that fed the Cold War mentality, which was to a large degree the basis for the arms race.
"The document, an internal memorandum from the bureau's Boston office to the F.B.I. Director, J. Edgar Hoover, in Washington, was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act....
The memorandum states that Mr. Kissinger telephoned the Boston office of the bureau Friday morning, July 10, 1953, identified himself as a teacher at Harvard, 'stated he had information of interest to this bureau and requested an agent contact him that afternoon.'...
A special agent interviewed Mr. Kissinger that day. In his report, he described Mr. Kissinger as a teaching fellow in government as well as executive director of an international seminar at the summer school and editor of “Confluence,” an international forum....
The report states that Mr. Kissinger opened one of the 40 letters, and it continues: 'Enclosed in an inner envelope was an eightpage flyer captioned ‘A Few Grains of Truth.’ The flyer, in general, was highly critical of the American atom bomb project and set out what purported to represent the shame and anguish of the American population on American preparation for war.'...
The special agent reported that Mr. Kissinger 'promised to provide the Boston division any additional information at similar attempts'..."
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/03/archives/kissinger-gave-fbi-information-as-teacher-in-1950s-memo-says-fbi.html
Similarly, Kissinger, leaking information to the Nixon campaign from the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese in the fall of 1968, helped Nixon kill any peace plan Johnson might have achieved when only(!) 30,000 American servicemen had been killed. In return for that treachery, Kissinger sought and was granted the job of national security adviser when Nixon won the election. That was years before the carpet bombing that led to the deaths & maiming of hundreds of thousands began.
Eric,
Thanks for the info in your comment @5:57 p.m.
(Reminds one a little bit, though it's not an exact analogy of course, of how Trump treated the Syrian Kurds who helped the U.S. and others in the fight vs. ISIS.)
There is an expression ‘I would not wish that on my worst enemy’. In many ways Margaret Thatcher was MY worst enemy. Because of her I had to leave my native land if I was to pursue a career as a philosopher, and though in the end it all worked out for me, it did mean that I only met my Father a few times in the last fourteen years of his life and that over the last thirty-seven years I have had much less contact with my British family than I would otherwise have wanted. In my view Thatcher destroyed much of what was the best about British society and British culture. She made Britain a mean-spirited selfish place and created a culture of upper class revanchisme devoted to the restoration of privilege and inequality. I think she was the direct and indirect cause of a massive amount of low-level suffering. But when I found out that she was suffering from dementia I was sorry for her and if a wish of mine could have restored her to psychological health I would have made that wish. As for post-death suffering (in which of course I do not believe) if the Kissingers and the Tony Blairs of this world experienced a fraction of the pain they have caused – say the pangs of grief of some of those widowed and orphaned by their policies, each pang experienced successively – well, I guess if I had God-like powers I might just visit this upon them. But I, like Nietzsche, am much more merciful than the Christian God because after a few centuries I would let them off. Nobody (not even Hitler or Stalin) deserves to suffer forever. Finite crimes; finite punishments.
Charles Pidgeon,
You say it better than I can, but I compare all the leftists gloating and cheering Kissinger's death to the mobs that cheered the guillotining of aristocrats and royals during the French Revolution.
Maybe I shouldn't have read the Tale of Two Cities in high school, but it did not leave the best impression of the Paris mob during the reign of terror.
"But I, like Nietzsche, am much more merciful than the Christian God because after a few centuries I would let them off."
I have noticed that the same people who say this sort of thing in life have this in common: They have never been God. But they think they know what it is like to be God anyway.
"...Because after a few centuries I would let them off."
Before you pat your clemency so graciously upon your shoulders, read the writings of the 2nd century Christian theologian & philosopher Origen. He was extreme. He believed that over time, even after the Final Judgement, everyone would be saved--including Satan. I personally don't believe this will happen. If the New Heaven & the New Earth would exist forever, why would anyone obey the rules (or, maybe decorum) since everyone would eventually be allowed to return from the realm of the 2nd Hell (or Gehenna) no matter what they do in the future. In Catholicism, there are two Hells. The 1st is called Hades, which is directly under the Earth, which is what Plato, Homer, Dante, and Virgil describe. And the Second Hell is called by Catholics: Gehenna (or, the Second Death), and this Hell is the only Hell which the Holy Qu'ran describes.
The entire summarization of what happens during the Day of Judgement can be summed up in the Gospel of Matthew 25:31-46.
s.w. It seems to me that you’re slowly but surely heading for the dark side. It would take more energy than I presently have, having just tested positive for covid—that’s what comes, I suppose, from being so careless as to drive back and forth at an advanced age (though not quite as advanced as our host) across the USA for Thanksgiving—so I won’t be hunting down every instance of the things you’ve written in recent postings of an exculpatory or forgiving nature about those who surely merit some condemnation, that have been leading me to that conclusion. But I will point to your assertion “all the leftists gloating and cheering Kissinger’s death. A great many of my friends are leftists of some sort, and I didn’t see any of them gloating and cheering. On the other hand, I—and they—shed no tears for him (or Thatcher). And we make no bones about doing so when today's media tends to praise the fallen establishment heroes no matter what they did. But that’s surely an important moral distinction. And I'm surprised someone who regularly mentions his Chilean vantage point could so readily ignore his awful role in events there. Surely, it's a necessary educative role, to make clear to people who have forgotten or were too young to learn first hand, just how little so many 'political giants' deserve praise devoid of any criticism.
As to taking a Tale of Two Cities to be a trustworthy representation of “the Paris mob.” Even your terminology—“mob,” indeed—is a bit biassed. In mourning the plumage you forget the dying bird?
James Wilson,
I got this in my Youtube feed, Kissinger finally croaks. Haven't listend to it, but it's title seemed in a bad taste, to say the least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAh1S_dReD8
To be frank some of the comments in this blog and in other spaces online I would also qualify as gloating and cheering.
I am quite aware of Kissinger's role in the Chilean coup, the dire consequences of which cost my partner's father his life and led to several friends being tortured. My partner, by the way, did not cheer or celebrate Kissinger's death either, although I saw people whom I know who did, which lessened them in my esteem. Not that they had to mourn him, but celebrating another's death is, if you don't like the French Revolution analogy, like the crowds who used to gather to celebrate public hangings in many countries.
I'm not that vindictive, sorry. It's not a religious feeling by the way.
Maybe it's the Donne stuff, it tolls for thee or something like that.
Dear s.w.
You are honored that you see it that way. Although I believe there are differences. When Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide in April 45, and other Nazi henchmen followed or even preceded them, those were good days for human civilization. It shows that the phrase "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" is not advice that must always be followed.
Jon Stewart for President?
https://www.salon.com/2023/12/03/jon-stewart-for-president-last-ditch-campaign-hopes-to-escape-biden-nightmare/
I would love to see a presidential debate between Stewart and Trump.
Q: Is celebrating Kissinger's death an instance of 'gloating'?
A: It seems to me that one ought to begin with a rough distinction between secular and religious contexts. Gregory of Tours was seemingly gloating at the thought of the torments to which Merovingian princeling would suffer. Recently I re-read Dante's Inferno, and was repulsed by the quality of his Christian moral imagination generally, where a single instance of some 'sin' commits someone to eternal suffering and damnation (contrast the beauty of Origin's thought that the imperfect soul might continue its spiritual progress after death), but especially with the vivid descriptions of the torments of the political enemies of his faction. Now that's some religious gloating; and recall Nietzsche's remarks in The Genealogy of Morals about the Christian soul's intensified pleasure in Heaven at the sights of the damned in Hell. To my mind, in a secular context the paradigm of such gloating was Hillary Clinton giggling in public at the horrific death of Muammar Gaddafi. I don't see how the celebrations of the deaths of, say, Thatcher and Kissinger (if indeed there are any of the latter) could count as gloating in a secular context. They were people of great political power for long periods, who during their long lives did not obviously suffer anything more than the constitutional miseries of human life, but inflicted enormous amounts of suffering on countless others. It's not as if anyone is wishing that Thatcher had had her milk snatched and been teleported to the Belgrano, or that Kissinger had been transported to Cambodia in 1969 to experience first-hand his 'sideshow'.
If misspelling on blog comments were a sin, I'd be stuck upside down in some frozen mud. In my previous comment, the beloved Church Father's name is of course 'Origen'.
John Rapko,
First of all, since I was the person who used the word "gloat" above, I did not mean to offend you. I have a lot of respect for your contributions to this blog.
Maybe the word "gloat" is a bit strong. It may sound strange, but I don't habitually use English except in this blog and to write my sister a short email about once a week.
Let's go with "celebrate".
Today I read in Spanish an article by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-Argentinian writer and academic (he wrote the screenplay for Death and the Maiden, a 1994 movie directed by Roman Polanski) where he expresses his hopes that Kissinger does not rest in peace.
The article says nothing new about Kissinger, but I'd wager that the title, I hope that he does not rest in peace, got him more readers than a more neutral title. A little bit of sensationalism stirs up the adrenaline and there's nothing wrong with that, I guess.
After the 1973 coup and Allende's suicide, rightwingers in Chile gathered to celebrate, opening the champagne in honor of the occasion. Jorge Edward's novel, El Convidado de Piedra, frames the narrative with that scene.
The other day I had an argument with my partner. I claimed that "we" are not like "them", that "we" are "better people". She said, no, "we" are exactly like "them" except with a different ideology.
I always did wonder why we mocked the Trump people when they chanted "lock her up" about Hillary Clinton and in turn we chant in our own more sophisticated, politically correct way, "lock him up" about Trump.
So maybe my partner is right and let's break out the champagne to celebrate Henry K's death. Cheers!!!
The difference between the "lock.... up" chant about Hilary Clinton and about Trump is obvious: He has been indicted on 91 felony counts, she has been indicted on none.
Sorry for the duplication.... Blame the wretched "Captcha" feature.
Haven't read all of the thread, but a couple ideas in response to John Rapko's question:
Gloating seems to be a relative of schadenfreude, or delight in another's misfortune. (I can never resist an excuse to use the word!) I'd say gloating is an open, often ostentatious, display of schadenfreude, often with moralistic overtones.
Regarding some of the qualifiers: Schadenfreude would be the delight itself, which need not actually be displayed. Gloating of the non-moralistic sort could have a friendly rival or competitor (rather than actual villain) as its object. Otherwise, gloating can be moralistic (not merely moral) in that it can have an ulterior purpose of, say, impressing an audience with one's own superiority, or of "rubbing it in." I guess "rubbing it in" means: adding to the suffering of the misfortune-sufferer (and to the suffering of their sympathizers), beyond what's decent or necessary.
Given this, one possible reason to doubt that "gloating" applies in the present case is: It might seem strange to consider dying at home at the age of 100 a "misfortune" for the person who dies. (There are much worse ways to go!) But that's kind of a minor concern.
An expression of approval of a wrongdoer's deserved misfortune (e.g., someone's merely stating, in accordance with their values, "There would be less evil and injustice in the world if not for the opportunities afforded to Kissinger-types to exercise their influence") isn't quite the same as gloating, I think; but maybe the expression crosses over into gloating when it's accompanied by delight, especially of the attention-seeking, self-congratulatory, "rubbing-it-in" sort.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with taking genuine pleasure at the news that a vile person like Henry Kissinger no longer walks the earth.... It should have happened years ago.... 1966 would have been nice.
To Michael Llenos
Actually I was well aware that Origen thought that everyone , even devils, would be saved in the end, but as I understand it his views are generally regarded as heretical, or at least that they have been throughout most of Christian history. He is thus one of the few Christian theologians NOT tainted by cruelty. For more on this see David Lewis's posthumous paper (reconstructed from notes and letters by Phillip Kitcher) 'Divine Evil'.
People who want to know more about Origen, should check out the relevant chapter in Peter Adamson's 'Philosophy in the Hellenic and Roman Worlds'.
In reply to Wallenstein.
There is a difference between wanting somebody to be lightly punished for real crimes and vindictively punished for minor or imaginary crimes. There is a lot that Hilary Clinton (as a leading light in her husband's administration) has to answer for, but the Trumpists did not want to ‘lock her up’ for *those* misdeeds but for some minor jiggery-pokery with a computer. But Wallenstein’s post correctly points to a real spiritual danger for those of us on the Left, a danger represented by the hideous history of Leninism. A progressive ideology and a supposedly humanitarian outlook did not preserve Lenin and his followers from cultivating a kind of vindictive cruelty that was acted out with catastrophic effects in real life. (Hundreds of thousands of deaths during the Civil War and thereafter.) What is the difference between a righteous desire to pull down the mighty from their seats and to punish them for their crimes and the bloodlust of the tricoteuses and the architects of Terror who created the spectacle? I think there must be an insistence of the basic human rights of the mighty, including a right to due process and a defeasible right not to be condemned for actions that were not illegal when they were perpetrated (Defeasible because I do not consider the activities of the Nuremberg trials to be unjust , though the war crimes and the crimes against humanity of which the Nuremberg defendants were convicted were not technically illegal when they were committed.) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are directly and indirectly responsible for a great deal of evil. But to punish them for these misdeeds would indeed be unjust since (mostly at any rate) the were not illegal at the time. Furthermore, there is a certain sense in which the punishment should NOT fit the crime. Henry Kissinger was indeed a war criminal and in my view prosecutable as such under international law. He visited unspeakable sufferings on hundreds of thousands of people. But for all that it would have been wrong, for example, to repeatedly spray him with napalm, allowing him to heal before spraying him with napalm all over again. Even in his case I would have been against the death penalty. If anyone deserved to die he did. Nonetheless, for me, a life sentence would have been enough.
I am strongly favour of criminalising activities common among the super-rich such as polluting and union-busting. But the union busters would not go to jail for union-busting activities done *before* they were criminalised and they would be entitled to due process.
However, the basic rights that ought to be respected do not include property rights, at least if these are meant to include a right to current holdings. Depriving the powerful of their wealth (and therefore of their power to do evil) would not be unjust. If Bezos and Musk were stripped of most of their fortunes as part of a redistributive political program that would not be unjust though it would be wrong to go after them thereafter.
I do think that there is a problem about ending the culture of impunity for the rich and powerful without creating a culture of cruelty, but due process and a respect for basic rights probably hold the keys.
Charles Pigden,
I'm certainly aware that Trump has committed more crimes, done more things that are illegal than Hillary Clinton too.
What weirds me out is the collective self-righteous desire to punish others, whether they deserve it or not. Whether it be Clinton, Trump, Jeffrey Epstein or Kissinger.
I've seen enough collective self-righteousness in my life and have been on the receiving end of enough of it for it to turn me off as very ugly and primitive.
I believed that we leftwing intellectuals were above that, but as usual, I was wrong.
Remember the 2 minute hate in Orwell's 1984? For me it hardly matters whether the 2 minute hate is directed at Goldstein (Orwell's fictional character vaguely based on Trotsky) or at Kissinger?
For me, but apparently not for most leftwing intellectuals, the 2 minute hate is the 2 minute hate.
"I'm certainly aware that Trump has committed more crimes, done more things that are illegal than Hillary Clinton too."
???. Epstein was a convicted criminal. Trump has been adjudicated a rapist and fraudster in civil trials and is currently under multiple criminal indictments. The historical record on Kissinger arguably includes treason and war crimes. Why the need to both sides this with throwing Clinton in?
Epstein's crimes involved kids. Trump defrauded regular folks, attempted a coup, and is plotting to get it right next time. Kissinger helped set the stage for Trump and killed millions.
I'm not sure self-righteousness in some folks is all that much of a problem. Besides, I find the thought of Henry doing laps in the Lake of Fire somewhat amusing.
Well here is a lake of fire joke.
Putin goes to hell (as of course he deserves) and find himself up to his neck in molten lava. Next to him he sees Stalin. Stalin is not in up to his neck – he's only in up to about his waist and in comparison with Putin, who is having to continually gasp for air, he looks comparatively smug as he puffs away at his pipe. Putin is puzzled.
'How come, Comrade Marshal that I am in up to my neck– really almost up to my chin – and you are only in the lava up to your waist? Sure, I murdered lots of people and visited death, misery and destruction on many others but my victims run into hundreds of thousands (and that's if we are bing generous) whereas your victims run into many millions! Forgive me for saying so, Yosif Vissarionovitich, but it does not seem fair!
'Well Comrade' explains Stalin,'the thing is , as I always said, I'm staying on the shoulders of Lenin'.
Ach ruined hte punchline *Standing* on the shoulders of Lenin
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