Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
All too often, the question of Palestine is framed as an eternal conflict arising from ancient ethnic or religious hatreds, with questions regarding the origins of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of land claims reduced to matters of scriptural interpretation. Such views entirely omit the actual history of Palestine and the Zionist movement. The colonization of Palestine, a process still playing out before our eyes to this day, has definite historical origins at the turn of the 20th century, when Zionism was born and the encroachment of Palestinian land began. Historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundreds' Year War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917- 2017, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a look into this essential history, and how it can help us frame Israel's present war on Gaza.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and the author of several books.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
In the Company of Radical Women Writers by Rosemary Hennessy University of Minnesota Press, 2023
[Publication date: August 8, 2023]
Recovering
the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist
society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s—a decade unnervingly
similar to our own
In the Company of Radical Women Writers
rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven
writers—Black, Jewish, and white—who as young women turned to communism
around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke
to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide urgent,
thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the
courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we
still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial
injustice, and environmental devastation.
As Hennessy
brilliantly shows, the documentary journalism and creative and
biographical writings of Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson,
Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and
Muriel Rukeyser recognized that life is sustained across a web of
dependencies that we each have a duty to maintain. Their work brought
into sharp focus the value and dignity of Black women’s domestic work,
confronted the destructive myths of land exploitation and white
supremacy, and explored ways of knowing attuned to a life-giving erotic
energy that spans bodies and relations. In doing so, they also expanded
the scope of American communism.
By tracing the
attention these seven women pay to “life-making” as the relations
supporting survival and wellbeing—from Harlem to the American South and
Midwest—In the Company of Radical Women Writers reveals their groundbreaking reconceptions of the political and provides bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice.
REVIEWS:
"This
truly revelatory work pushes the already rich encounters between
contemporary left feminist scholars and 1930s radical women writers in
new directions—new ways of thinking and new fields of desire.
Beautifully written, it is a model of engaged, compassionate, and
grounded activist research."—Paula Rabinowitz, author of American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street and coeditor of Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940
"Rosemary Hennessy’s latest book (re)introduces women writers of the
Communist Left who thought the unthinkable of their time and
increasingly ours: Black left feminism, radical ecology, the ‘erotics of
race work.’ Their work, and Hennessy’s, are primers and love letters
for liberation. In the Company of Radical Women Writers
exemplifies materialist feminism, scholarship on the American Left, and
literary studies for the twenty-first century."—Cheryl Higashida,
author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995
"In the Company of Radical Women Writers is
significant; it covers 1930s literary history, the civil rights and
women’s rights movements, and the under-heralded work of seven powerful
writers."—Foreword
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rosemary
Hennessy is L. H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of
English at Rice University. She is author of three other books,
including Fires on the Border (Minnesota, 2013).
PHOTO: Richard Nixon and Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Nixon congratulates Henry Kissinger after he's sworn in as secretary of state in 1973 at the White House, making the German-born Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 the first foreign-born American citizen to hold the diplomatic U.S. role. Photo: Via Getty Images
“...Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity. Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement. Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.” Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological. Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake. IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live. On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.” Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency. Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it. The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order. Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others. Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt. In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents. Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.” Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history? But Iraq, and the broader War on Terror that Kissinger wanted expanded lest it “pete[r] out into an intelligence operation while the rest of the region gradually slides back to the pre-9/11 pattern,” presaged the world Kissinger made coming apart at the foundations. The man who repositioned U.S. foreign policy as a wedge between Russia and China lived long enough to see the February 4 Declaration uniting Moscow and Beijing. The reactionary forces he encouraged at home and abroad are showing the world that the rules-based international order is about capitalism, not democracy. Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh.” -- Spencer Ackerman, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies”, Rolling Stone, November 29, 2023
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him by Spencer Ackerman November 29, 2023 Rolling Stone
PHOTO: Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 9/7 on his nomination to be secretary of state, Henry Kissinger pledged to cooperate closely with Congress in conducting foreign policy for a "durable peace." Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.
Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed.
McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”
No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.
Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman.
Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who was the most prominent exception to the fawning coverage of Kissinger, watched journalistic deference take shape as soon as Kissinger entered the White House in 1969. “His social comings and goings could make or break a Washington party,” Hersh wrote in his biography The Price of Power. Reporters like the Times’ James Reston were eager participants in what Hersh called “an implicit shakedown scheme” — that is, access journalism — “in which reporters who got inside information in turn protected Kissinger by not divulging either the full consequences of his acts or his own connection to them.” Kissinger’s approach to the press was his approach to Nixon: sniveling obsequiousness. (Although Kissinger could vent frustration on reporters that he never could on his boss.) Hersh quotes H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, remarking that Kissinger was the “hawk of hawks” inside the White House, but “touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.”
Reviewing one of Kissinger’s litany of books, Hillary Clinton in 2014 said Kissinger, “a friend” whose counsel she relied upon as secretary of state, possessed “a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” Kissinger told USA Today within days that Clinton, presumed then to be a president-in-waiting, “ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” The same story noticed a photograph autographed by Obama thanking Kissinger for his “continued leadership.”
It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.
KISSINGER’S ASCENT OCCURRED THROUGH AN OBSCENITY THAT TIME CANNOT DIMINISH. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in tacit recognition of the nightmare he, building on the works of his two immediate predecessors, brought to life in Vietnam. Kissinger, an influential Cold War defense intellectual at Harvard, had access to members of the diplomatic delegation to the Paris talks. He used it to feed information from the negotiations to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign — a campaign whose defeated GOP rival, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger advised — and despite Kissinger’s closer political ties to the coterie around Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic rival.
Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory.
“It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.”
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. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.
Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi. In the hopes of manufacturing one, they came up with the “Madman Theory,” the idea that North Vietnam would negotiate peace after they came to believe Nixon was adventurous and bloodthirsty enough to risk anything. In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By the summer of 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger — who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command — was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 7,000,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.
Cambodia, like Laos before it, was a formally neutral country, meaning that bombing it was an illegal aggression under the United Nations Charter. But beyond the control of Prince Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese used Cambodian territory for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a weapons pipeline not unlike the one America is currently operating for Ukraine. In April 1970, following a coup by American client Col. Lon Nol that overthrew Sihanouk, Nixon ordered U.S. troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia outright. In the air or on the ground, they were unable to destroy the trail, only human beings. Those who survived reacted. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit the little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge,” a former Khmer Rouge cadre told historian Ben Kiernan, founder of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program.
Nixon and Kissinger’s failure in Cambodia prompted in 1971 the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, another failure. Kissinger later blamed defeat on the U.S.’ clients, rather than, say, people like himself. “In retrospect, I have come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.
At the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia was a startling offense that prompted substantial political backlash when it became public. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 held that bombing Cambodia was a constitutional usurpation of Congress’ war powers. But on July 30, the committee ended up rejecting the article, 26 votes to 12, and it never became part of the coalescing impeachment effort that stopped with Nixon’s resignation.
Forty years later, and likely as a consequence, U.S. presidents routinely bomb countries the U.S. is not at war with. They provide the barest minimum of disclosure that the bombs have fallen, and often not even that. When the U.S.’ declared wars fail, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, their architects and stewards blame the client militaries and governments they propped up. They cover their troop withdrawals with futile bombing campaigns that kill people so American statesmen can save face. Whether he realized it or not, when President Biden in July 2021 blamed the Afghans for losing the Afghanistan war — “the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight” was a typical line — he was reaching for Nixon and Kissinger’s template.
PHOTO: Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 2016. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
KISSINGER PLAYED A ROLE IN THE DEATHS OF SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLES that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book. Here is one example among many of the sort of carnage Kissinger inflicted indirectly rather than by edict. In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.
That perspective typified Kissinger. The Cold War was a geopolitical balance among two great powers. The purpose of Cold War statecraft was to maximize American freedom of action to inflict Washington’s will on the world — a zero-sum contest that meant restricting the ability of the Soviet Union to inflict Moscow’s — without the destabilization, or outright armageddon, that would result from pursuing a final defeat of the Soviets. That last part explains much right-wing hostility toward Kissinger. Kissinger represented anticommunism without ideological zeal. He was an energetic, even relentless practitioner of the Cold War, the theater of anticommunist conflict. But like George Kennan before him, Kissinger thought viewing the Cold War in ideological terms missed the point. The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary. That permitted Nixon and Kissinger the creativity to reopen China, something Nixon would have demagogued anyone else for attempting.
Reopening China was by far the greatest achievement of Nixon’s foreign policy. It was the rare geopolitical initiative where Kissinger was a mere facilitator. Sy Hersh, in The Price of Power, calls Nixon “the grand theoretician” of rapprochement with Beijing, with Kissinger Nixon’s “occasional operative.” Kissinger’s dramatic, secret July 1971 trip to Beijing in advance of Nixon’s visit probably renders that description parsimonious. But, writes Hersh, “there is no evidence that Kissinger seriously considered the question of an American-Chinese rapprochement before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.” Once it happened, Kissinger became an overnight celebrity, the sort of person destined to be shrouded in myth and apology.
PHOTO: President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger confer aboard Air Force One. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anticommunist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. When Kissinger came under attack from neoconservatives and others on the right who couldn’t tolerate detente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, neither he nor they recognized that both of them were driven by the Cold War forces that Kissinger stoked when convenient.
Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity.
Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.
Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”
Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.
Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake. IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live.
On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Protesters shout “Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes” as Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger waits to testify in 2015. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.”
Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency.
Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.
The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order. Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others. Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt. In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents. Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.” Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history? But Iraq, and the broader War on Terror that Kissinger wanted expanded lest it “pete[r] out into an intelligence operation while the rest of the region gradually slides back to the pre-9/11 pattern,” presaged the world Kissinger made coming apart at the foundations. The man who repositioned U.S. foreign policy as a wedge between Russia and China lived long enough to see the February 4 Declaration uniting Moscow and Beijing. The reactionary forces he encouraged at home and abroad are showing the world that the rules-based international order is about capitalism, not democracy. Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh. In this article: Henry Kissinger, obit, Obituary Politics Politics News
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100
We
now know a great deal about the crimes he committed while in office,
from helping Nixon derail the Paris Peace Talks and prolong the Vietnam
War to green-lighting the invasion of Cambodia and Pinochet’s coup in
Chile. But we know little about his four decades with Kissinger
Associates.
Henry Kissinger should have gone down
with the rest of them: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and Nixon.
His fingerprints were all over Watergate. Yet he survived—largely by
playing the press.
Until 1968, Kissinger had been a Nelson Rockefeller Republican—though
he also served as an adviser to the State Department in the Johnson
administration. Kissinger was stunned by Richard Nixon’s defeat of
Rockefeller in the primaries, according to the journalists Marvin and
Bernard Kalb. “He wept,” they wrote. Kissinger believed Nixon was “the
most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President.”
It wasn’t long, though, before Kissinger had opened a back channel to
Nixon’s people, offering to use his contacts in the Johnson White House
to leak information about the peace talks with North Vietnam. Still a
Harvard professor, he dealt directly with Nixon’s foreign policy
adviser, Richard V. Allen, who in an interview
given to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia said that
Kissinger, “on his own,” offered to pass along information he had
received from an aide attending the peace talks. Allen described
Kissinger as acting very cloak-and-dagger, calling him from pay phones
and speaking in German to report on what had happened during the talks.
At the end of October, Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, “They’re
breaking out the champagne in Paris.” Hours later, President Johnson
suspended the bombing. A peace deal might have pushed Hubert Humphrey,
who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. Nixon’s people
acted quickly; they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks.
Through wiretaps and intercepts, President Johnson learned that
Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese “to hold on until
after the election.” If the White House had gone public with this
information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey.
But Johnson hesitated. “This is treason,” he said, as quoted in Ken Hughes’s excellent Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate. “It would rock the world.”
Johnson stayed silent. Nixon won. The war went on.
That October Surprise kicked off a chain of events that would lead to Nixon’s downfall.
Kissinger, who’d been appointed national security adviser, advised
Nixon to order the bombing of Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to
the negotiating table. Nixon and Kissinger were desperate to resume the
talks that they had helped sabotage, and their desperation manifested
itself in ferocity. “‘Savage’ was a word that was used again and again”
in discussing what needed to be done in Southeast Asia, recalled one of
Kissinger’s aides. Bombing Cambodia (a country the US wasn’t at war
with), which would eventually break the country and lead to the rise of
the Khmer Rouge, was illegal. So it had to be done in secret. The
pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration,
leading Kissinger and Nixon to ask J. Edgar Hoover to tap the phones of administration officials.
Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak sent Kissinger into a panic. He
was afraid that since Ellsberg had access to the papers, he might also
know what Kissinger was doing in Cambodia.
On Monday, June 14, 1971—the day after The New York Times
published its first story on the Pentagon Papers—Kissinger exploded,
shouting, “This will totally destroy American credibility forever…. It
will destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy in confidence…. No
foreign government will ever trust us again.”
“Without Henry’s stimulus,” John Ehrlichman wrote in his memoir, Witness to Power,
“the president and the rest of us might have concluded that the papers
were Lyndon Johnson’s problem, not ours.” Kissinger “fanned Richard
Nixon’s flame white hot.”
Why? Kissinger had just begun negotiations with China to
reestablish relations and was afraid the scandal might sabotage those
talks.
Keying his performance to stir up Nixon’s resentments, he
depicted Ellsberg as smart, subversive, promiscuous, perverse—and
privileged: “He’s now married a very rich girl,” Kissinger told Nixon.
“They started cranking each other up,” Bob Haldeman remembered
(as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Kissinger), “until they
both were in a frenzy.”
If Ellsberg gets away unscathed, Kissinger told Nixon, “it shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” prompting Nixon to establish the Plumbers—the
clandestine unit that conducted buggings and burglaries, including at
the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex.
Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein all filed stories
fingering Kissinger for the first round of illegal wiretaps—set up by
the White House in the spring of 1969 to keep his Cambodia bombing
secret.
Landing in Austria en route to the Middle East in June 1974 and
finding out that the press had run more unflattering stories and
editorials about him, Kissinger held an impromptu press conference and threatened to resign.
It was by all accounts a bravura turn. “When the record is written,” he
said, seemingly on the verge of tears, “one may remember that perhaps
some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease,
but I leave that to history. What I will not leave to history is a
discussion of my public honor.”
The gambit worked. He “seemed totally authentic,” New York magazine gushed.
As if recoiling from their own sudden doggedness in exposing Nixon’s
crimes, reporters and news anchors rallied around Kissinger. While the
rest of the White House was revealed as a bunch of two-bit thugs,
Kissinger remained someone America could believe in. “We were
half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable
man,” ABC News’ Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing
Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” He was, Koppel added,
“the best thing we’ve got going for us.”
Kissinger Associates was an early player in the wave of
privatizations that took place after the end of the Cold War—in the
former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Latin America—helping to create
a new international oligarchic class. Kissinger had used the contacts
he made as a public official to found one of the most lucrative firms in
the world. Then, having escaped the taint of Watergate, he used his
reputation as a foreign policy sage to influence public debate—to the
benefit, we can assume, of his clients. Kissinger was an eager advocate
of both Gulf Wars, and he worked closely with President Clinton to push
NAFTA through Congress.
The
firm also made book on policies put into place by Kissinger. In 1975,
as secretary of state, Kissinger helped Union Carbide set up its
chemical plant in Bhopal—working with the Indian government and securing
funds from the United States. After the plant’s 1984 chemical leak
disaster, Kissinger Associates represented Union Carbide, brokering a
paltry out-of-court settlement for the victims of the leak, which caused nearly 4,000 immediate deaths and exposed another half-million people to toxic gases.
A few years ago, much fanfare
attended Kissinger’s donation of his public papers to Yale. But we’ll
never know most of what his firm has been up to in Russia, China, India,
the Middle East, and elsewhere. He’ll take those secrets with him when
he goes.
PHOTO: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger speaks to State Department employees on Sept. 28, 1973. Kissinger urged them to seize what he described as unparalleled opportunity to bring about a peaceful international structure. The speech came just two weeks after Kissinger and the U.S. backed a military coup in Chile that established a brutal dictatorship that is estimated to have left 3,000 people dead or tortured and 40,000 more missing. via Associated Press
Henry Kissinger — who as a top American foreign policy official oversaw, overlooked and at times actively perpetrated some of the most grotesque war crimes the United States and its allies have committed — died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger’s death was announced by his consulting firm on Wednesday evening. No cause of death was immediately given.
Kissinger served as secretary of state and national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, positions that allowed him to direct the Vietnam War and the broader Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to implement a stridently “realist” approach that prioritized U.S. interests and domestic political success over any potential atrocity that might occur.
The former led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war.
During his time in charge of the American foreign policy machine, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.
Even the most generous calculations suggest that the murderous regimes Kissinger supported and the conflicts they waged were responsible for millions of deaths and millions of other human rights abuses, during and after the eight years he served in the American government.
Kissinger never showed remorse for those misdeeds. He never paid any real price for them either. He maintained a mocking tone toward critics of his human rights record throughout his life, and remained a member in good standing of elite Washington political society until his death.
In May 2016, for instance, President Barack Obama came as close as the United States ever does to apologizing for its role in a human rights atrocity during a visit to Argentina. The U.S. “has to examine its own policies as well, and its own past,” Obama said, in an expression of regret for the United States’ role in the “dirty war.” “We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights, and that was the case here.” He pledged to declassify thousands of documents related to the dictatorship’s reign of terror and U.S. support for it.
The examination must have been quick. Two months later, the Obama administration handed Kissinger, who those documents showed had cozied up to Argentine military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in the 1970s, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest honor the Pentagon offers civilians.
Kissinger’s acolytes argue that honors like these are more than deserved. His accomplishments, including an opening of relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, outweigh any abuses that helped make them possible. At the very least, they posit, the abuses were part of a cold calculation that “ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little room for private morality,” as Robert D. Kaplan argued in 2013. Kissinger’s defenders suggest that even more death may have occurred if the U.S. had pursued a more morally grounded foreign policy instead.
His critics have made persuasive cases in numerous books, documentaries and publications that Kissinger was not just a war criminal but responsible for the creation of an imperial foreign policy that eventually embroiled the U.S. in a state of perpetual war and led it to commit and overlook numerous abuses of human rights in the decades after he left power.
Kissinger (center) remained a member in good standing of the Washington political, press and societal elite throughout his life, even among leaders like President Barack Obama (left), who criticized the human rights abuses that took place on his watch. WHITE HOUSE POOL via Getty Images
Still others have argued that Kissinger was, in the words of New Yorker essayist Thomas Meaney, “a far less remarkable figure than his supporters, his critics — and he himself — believed.” Rather than an outlier, Meaney and others have suggested, Kissinger was a consummate political actor and a natural product of the American war machine, if one who had an outsize sense of self-importance even compared with many of the supposedly “great men” who’ve led the country before and after him.
Settling on an ultimate legacy for Kissinger is an enticing task — one historians, foreign policy experts and journalists have sought to perfect for decades. It is a pertinent endeavor, too, for determining if Kissinger’s war crimes made him a particularly evil figure, or if they reveal that it is simply impossible to steer an empire the size of the United States for so long without doing some heinous things. Maybe both can be true.
What is undeniable, on the occasion of his death, is that millions of Argentinians, Bangladeshis, Cambodians, Chileans, East Timorese and others cannot offer their opinion on Henry Kissinger’s legacy or the world he helped create, because they died at the hands of the tyrants Kissinger enabled.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Bavaria in 1923, Kissinger and his family immigrated to the United States in 1938 to flee Nazi persecution of German Jews.
Kissinger forever downplayed the effect that had on his life, but historians have argued differently: Kissinger’s experience as a child likely shaped his “legendary insecurity, paranoia and extreme sensitivity to criticism” and planted the seeds of his “emphasis on stability and equilibrium, and his fears about revolution and disorder,” Thomas A. Schwartz, a Vanderbilt University historian, wrote in his biography of Kissinger in 2020. That Kissinger’s father, a teacher who was fired for being Jewish, lost everything, Schwartz continued, “contributed to Kissinger’s own sense that not only do the meek not inherit the earth, but that power is the ultimate arbiter in both life and international relations.”
Or, as a longtime Kissinger colleague put it in another quote Schwartz relayed: “Kissinger’s philosophy of life was that ‘good will won’t help you defend yourself on the docks of Marseilles.’”
Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Kissinger served in Germany during World War II and became an accomplished intelligence agent. He earned a Bronze Star in part for his success in hunting down members of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret police force, in the immediate aftermath of the war.
After returning to the U.S. and graduating from Harvard, he fast-tracked his way to foreign policy influence, initially gaining fame within the establishment by arguing that President Dwight D. Eisenhower needed to accept that “limited nuclear war” in Europe might be necessary to protect the U.S. and its allies from the emerging power of the Soviet Union.
President Richard Nixon (left) and Kissinger, as national security adviser, talk together in Washington on Nov. 25, 1972. White House via Consolidated News Pictures via Getty Images
Kissinger’s rapid ascent up the foreign policy ladder was also possible because he was such a skilled political operator, Schwartz argued. He offered diplomatic and foreign policy advice to both Eisenhower, a Republican, and to President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.
He advised former New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in three separate bids for the presidency. But when Rockefeller failed to win the GOP nomination in 1968, Kissinger maintained positive relations with both Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey throughout the general election. It was almost a given in Washington that Kissinger would assume a prominent role in the next administration, no matter the outcome.
Nixon prevailed and made Kissinger his first major foreign policy appointment, naming him White House national security adviser. Kissinger, like Nixon, was an ardent skeptic of bureaucrats he believed were too idealistic and moralistic in their approach to the Vietnam War and Soviet communism, and early in his tenure reshaped the White House National Security Council into its modern form in order to “tame the bureaucracy” and foster “a more centralized and secretive approach to foreign policy,” Schwartz wrote.
It would come in handy. Kissinger may have sought out the status he earned as a celebrity diplomat, and he sensed the importance of public opinion to an administration’s ability to exercise its foreign policy. But he preferred to do his dirtiest work in secret, away from the potentially scornful eyes of State Department diplomats, Congress, journalists or the public.
In the spring of 1969, desperate to bring an end to the Vietnam War, Kissinger authorized one of its most horrific chapters: the secret carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia. The theory was that it would force North Vietnam to accept improved U.S. conditions for ending the war, an early use of a “bombs as an instrument of diplomacy” approach, as Yale historian and fierce Kissinger critic Greg Grandin has described it, that has become a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy.
From 1969 to 1973, when a Congress that had been largely kept in the dark about the Cambodian campaign moved to halt it, the United States dropped a half-million tons of bombs on the neutral country. Kissinger personally “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids” that occurred between 1969 and 1970, according to a Pentagon report released later.
The bombing campaign ultimately killed between 150,000 and a half-million Cambodian civilians, various estimates suggest. It also helped unleash a civil war inside Cambodia that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, a dictator whose regime killed as many as 2 million Cambodians, according to modern appraisals.
The Cambodian landscape in 1968 shows the damage inflicted by B-52 bombing there. Tim Page/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Kissinger and the U.S. negotiated the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam in 1973, paving the way for the war’s end. It earned Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize. Two prize committee members resigned in response.
That was the second of his major accomplishments. The year prior, he had helped Nixon reestablish diplomatic relations with China, which both Kissinger and Nixon saw as crucial to deepening a divide between it and the Soviet Union, the world’s two largest communist powers.
The two episodes define Kissinger’s career and how it has been interpreted. They made him a superstar within the Nixon administration and the American foreign policy establishment. The accomplishments they paved the way for — including major arms limitation treaties with the Soviet Union and the full restoration of diplomatic recognition with China — are still cited as lasting Kissinger victories.
They also came at an incredible human cost that was a direct result of Kissinger’s desperation to achieve them. Much like the end of the Vietnam War had been, the opening of relations with China was directly preceded by an atrocity the United States broadly ignored: the 1971 Pakistani killings of at least 500,00 people in present-day Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan.
Focused on Beijing, Nixon and Kissinger did not merely look the other way when what was then known as West Pakistan launched an aggressive campaign against East Pakistan. Kissinger and Nixon saw West Pakistan as a crucial ally against the Soviets and a “gateway to open diplomatic relations with China.” In an effort to keep that door open, the Nixon administration largely refused to condemn West Pakistan’s efforts to repress Bengalis in the east, and even authorized potentially illegal arms shipments to West Pakistan.
Bengali forces, with support from India, eventually forced the Pakistanis to surrender, leading to the creation of independent Bangladesh — but not before Pakistani armed forces and other allied militant groups killed as many as 3 million people and raped some 400,000 women, according to modern estimates. The crisis forced millions of others to flee the country.
To Kissinger, it mattered little. In 1971, the Pakistanis helped shuttle him into China for a secret visit that helped pave the way for Nixon’s eventual trip to Shanghai.
“Not one has yet understood what we did in India-Pakistan and how we saved the China option which we need for the bloody Russians,” Kissinger said to Nixon in 1972, according to reports from the Press Trust of India based on memos that were declassified decades later. “Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh?”
Declassified memos and notes have made clear that Kissinger rarely missed a chance to take a similarly cavalier approach to human rights and democracy as his career progressed.
After Chileans elected socialist President Salvador Allende in 1970, Kissinger and Nixon almost immediately began plotting the overthrow of his government. The Chilean military carried out a coup in 1973, and Gen. Augusto Pinochet established a murderous dictatorship that killed an estimated 3,000 supposed dissidents and tortured as many as 40,000 more, according to a national truth commission established after Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, an Army general, took power in a U.S.-supported coup in 1973 and embarked on a brutal reign of tyranny. Kissinger knew of the abuses and murders that took place on Pinochet's watch but regarded him as a defense against communism even as his contemporaries in the State Department criticized his approach. Bettmann via Getty Images
Ever disdainful of what he saw as moralistic bureaucrats,
Kissinger mocked the concerns State Department officials expressed about the dictatorship’s abuses.
“I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights,” he told a U.S. official about Chile in 1973, according to records obtained by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit library of public records and declassified documents. “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”
Kissinger, who became secretary of state just a month after Pinochet’s coup, told State Department officials in October 1973 that the United States should not position itself as a defender of the military regime’s human rights abuses. But U.S. policy, he explained, was that “no matter how unpleasant they act, the [Pinochet] government is better for us than Allende was.”
Three years later, he told Pinochet in an official meeting that the Chilean dictatorship had become the victim of international propaganda efforts that had distorted its human rights record, according to declassified documents that notably were not shared with a U.S. Senate select committee that investigated covert American actions in the Chilean coup.
Top left: The Chilean presidential palace La Moneda under fire during the coup led by Pinochet in Santiago in 1973. Top right: Aides and others involved with the presidency of Salvador Allende are guarded by soldiers outside La Moneda. Bottom left: Chilean soldiers take cover behind a tank from fire by Allende's bodyguards during the ground attack. Bottom right: Soldiers supporting the coup take cover as bombs are dropped on the presidential palace. AP/Reuters
“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 that was going Communist,” he told the Chilean.
In December 1975, Kissinger and Ford flew to Indonesia to meet with Suharto, a military dictator who took control of the country after the overthrow of Sukarno, an Indonesian nationalist, in 1967. At the time, Suharto was considering an invasion of neighboring East Timor, which was seeking independence.The U.S. and Suharto feared the independence effort could lead to an anti-colonialist government sympathetic to the Soviets.
Suharto launched the invasion not long after Kissinger and Ford returned to the United States, and declassified memos have shown that he did so “knowing that he had the full approval of the White House.”
“It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger told Suharto, according to declassified memos obtained by the National Security Archive. “It would be better,” he continued, “if it occurred” after he and Ford had returned to the United States.
Indonesian forces proceeded to carry out what some historians now regard as a genocide of East Timorese populations — some estimates suggest they murdered 2,000 people in the initial days of the invasion alone. A truth and reconciliation committee later suggested that between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese people died throughout the conflict and the resulting Indonesian occupation of the island, which lasted until 1999.
“Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities.” - Arthur Blood, then-U.S. consul general to East Pakistan, in a 1971 memo
Near the end of his time as secretary of state, Kissinger relayed similar messages to Argentina’s military dictatorship, which overthrew its government in 1976. In a meeting that year, Kissinger told the country’s foreign minister to “get the terrorist problem” — by which he meant dissenters against the new dictatorship — “over as quickly as possible,” according to memos declassified in 2002 and obtained by the National Security Archive. The Argentine left the meeting convinced the U.S. had greenlighted its “dirty war” and that Kissinger considered the elimination of dissenters far more important than human rights.
The same year, Kissinger visited Brazil and showered praise on the country’s military dictatorship, which had come to power in a coup in 1964, before Kissinger entered government. By then, though, it was well known that the regime was in the midst of its most brutal period of repression. In 2014, the country’s national truth commission found that the dictatorship killed at least 434 political dissidents and tortureding thousands more.
Kissinger’s sympathy for tyrants continued after he left the government in 1977. Kissinger attended the 1978 World Cup in Argentina as a special guest of Videla, the dictator, and lauded the regime for its success in “wiping out” its opponents, documents declassified in 2016 showed.
At the time, a State Department official expressed concern that the Argentines “may use Kissinger’s laudatory statements as justification for hardening their human rights stance.” Indeed, the dictatorship, which was fond of throwing dissenters out of helicopters and into the sea, eventually disappeared as many as 30,000 people.
After serving as national security adviser under Nixon, Kissinger became secretary of state under President Gerald Ford. David Hume Kennerly via Getty Images
There is no doubt that Kissinger knew these many abuses were taking place throughout his career.
In 1971, Archer Blood, the U.S. consul general in East Pakistan, wrote a memo detailing Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh, telling his superiors that Pakistan was “systematically eliminating” Bangladeshis “by seeking them out and shooting them down.” A month later, he authored another telegram accusing the U.S. of displaying “moral bankruptcy” for refusing to condemn or attempt to limit the violent crackdowns on East Pakistan. “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities,” the telegram said.
Not long after Blood sent the memo about Pakistan, Kissinger and Nixon reassigned him to a diplomatic post in Washington.
As Kissinger plotted an overthrow of Allende’s government in Chile, a National Security Council official warned that it was “patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets.” But the warnings did nothing to stop Kissinger from fomenting coups and singing the praises of those who committed atrocities.
Kissinger believed these atrocities were worth it, both to stop the spread of Soviet communism and to bolster American interests and credibility in the world.
Former President George H.W. Bush, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon, described Kissingeras paranoid, according to Princeton historian and Kissinger critic Greg Bass, and this paranoia about communism appeared repeatedly during his career.
Kissinger saw Allende’s election in Chile as evidence of the unstoppable march of Marxism that might overtake the world if the U.S. didn’t act to stop it, and the Pinochet regime’s abuses as merely a necessary price to pay to stop it.
In 1973, he asked a top Latin America official at the State Department whether Pinochet’s human rights violations were “that much worse than in other countries in Latin America.” When the official told him they were, he said only that cutting off military aid would have “very serious” consequences.
Kissinger did not believe that American foreign policy could be successful if it let morality overtake pragmatism and self-interest. Moral outcomes, he argued, came from the advance of human freedom, and he believed his actions achieved that.
“A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security,” Kissinger wrote in his 1994 book, “Diplomacy.”
He also despised armchair quarterbacks. Governing, he posited, is difficult, and doesn’t allow for the luxury of hindsight that academics and his critics enjoy.
“The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise,” he wrote in “Diplomacy.” “The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable.”
Kissinger’s defenders argue that his critics now treat “the West’s victory” in the Cold War “as a foregone conclusion,” and that across the world, “revolutionary nihilists” were busy massacring people too. But these are convenient excuses for many of the atrocities Kissinger tolerated or authorized, and they ignore that many of Kissinger’s contemporaries often saw clear paranoia and fault in his actions well in advance.
“Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.?” Viron Vaky, the NSC official who criticized Kissinger’s efforts to foment a coup in Santiago, asked in a 1970 memo that was later obtained by the National Security Archive. “It is hard to argue this.”
In 2003, the film director Errol Morris released “The Fog of War,” a documentary featuring former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who oversaw much of the Vietnam War. The film centered McNamara detailing lessons he had learned from the experience as he sought to make peace with the “immense moral burden of his actions” in Vietnam, as The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson wrote in 2016.
Kissinger never engaged in any such reflection. Instead, he continued to peddle lies about his actions, including an absurd suggestion, in 2014, that U.S. drone warfare had resulted in more deaths than the Cambodian bombing campaign.
“Unlike Robert McNamara, Kissinger has shown little in the way of a conscience,” Anderson wrote. (Kissinger, as Anderson noted, in fact mocked McNamara for espousing regret in the film.) “And because of that, it seems highly likely, history will not easily absolve him.”
Washington, however, spent the final decades of Kissinger’s life doing exactly that.
Kissinger served as an informal adviser to numerous presidents, secretaries of state and foreign policy heavyweights even after he left the government. He was welcome at Washington’s swankiest dinner parties, feted by leaders of both major political parties and large think tanks, and given generous platforms to offer his advice and perspective on American military crusades in the pages of the country’s most prominent newspapers and on the airwaves of its biggest TV and radio networks.
Kissinger with President George W. Bush, who leaned on the former official as an informal adviser throughout the administration's global "war on terror." Kissinger was an ardent supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Photo by Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images
He used those platforms to, among other things, cheerlead for war in Iraq: In 2002, a year before the U.S. invaded, he called for regime change in Baghdad. Kissinger served as an “informal adviser,” as historian Grandin described it, to President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top aide Karl Rove throughout that war, during which as many as 200,000 Iraqi civilians may have died, according to estimates, and the U.S. amassed a litany of new human rights abuses to add to its record.
Kissinger’s sense of bipartisanship never faltered. Hillary Clinton leaned on him for advice as secretary of state and called him a friend. Samantha Power, who served as Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, often criticized Kissinger and argued that human rights should play a much more prominent role in American foreign policy. Yet in 2014, she attended a Yankees-Red Sox game with Kissinger, and two years later accepted an award named for him. The Obama administration leaned on the bombing of Cambodia as the legal justification for its drone wars, including the targeted killings of American citizens abroad.
That his influence never waned makes it easy to see Kissinger’s fingerprints on every ill — or accomplishment, as his acolytes would frame them — that followed. There’s probably some truth, too, to the idea that Kissinger maintained that influence in large part to help ensure his place in history as America’s most significant foreign policy mind, no matter who wrote it.
The United States, after all, overthrew numerous democratically elected governments, waged secret bombing campaigns, and committed and permitted human rights abuses well before Kissinger came to power. And the U.S. government has carried out decades of endless war that have resulted in significant civilian death tolls, the expanded use of torture, indefinite detention, illegal rendition and extrajudicial murder since Kissinger left government.
Much like Kissinger, the architects of those disasters faced few, if any, meaningful repercussions. A country that so often predicates its concern for human rights on the specific humans in question, and in which elite accountability for even the most blatant crimes and abuses is so rare, seems to have made up its mind about morality’s place in politics and public policy without much need for Kissinger’s help. He was just happier than most to provide it.
Perhaps, then, Kissinger’s life was most remarkable for how brightly it illuminated a simple and ugly truth about the nation he served.
“If all the sins of the U.S. security state can be loaded onto one man, all parties get what they need: Kissinger’s status as a world-historic figure is assured, and his critics can regard his foreign policy as the exception rather than the rule,” Meaney, the essayist, posited for The New Yorker in 2020. “It would be comforting to believe that American liberals are capable of seeing that politics is more than a matter of personal style, and that the record will prevail, but the enduring cult of Kissinger points to a less palatable possibility: Kissinger is us.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Travis Waldron is a reporter for the Huffington Post
George Zornick is Senior Enterprise Editor for the Huffington Post
Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake. Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not.
From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy. If his German Jewish origins and accented English set him apart, the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself. Thirty years after Mr. Kissinger retired into the comforts of the private sector, I served for eight years in a bigger post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 national security apparatus. As a deputy national security adviser with responsibilities that included speech writing and communications, my work often focused more on the story America told than the actions we took.
In the White House, you’re atop an establishment that includes the world’s most powerful military and economy while holding the rights to a radical story: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient.
Mr. Kissinger was not uncomfortable with that dynamic. For him, credibility was rooted in what you did more than what you stood for, even when those actions rendered American concepts of human rights and international law void. He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.
The fact that those reforms were initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the same Chinese leader who ordered the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, speaks to the ambiguous nature of Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. On the one hand, the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement contributed to the outcome of the Cold War and improved standards of living for the Chinese people. On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the principal geopolitical adversary of the United States and the vanguard of the authoritarian trend in global politics, putting a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and threatening to invade Taiwan, whose status was left unresolved by Mr. Kissinger’s diplomacy. Mr. Kissinger lived half of his life after he left government. He blazed what has become a bipartisan trail of ex-officials building lucrative consulting businesses while trading on global contacts. For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power. He wrote a shelf of books, many of which polished his own reputation as an oracle of global affairs; after all, history is written by men like Henry Kissinger, not by the victims of superpower bombing campaigns, including children in Laos, who continue to be killed by the unexploded bombs that litter their country.
You can choose to see those unexploded bombs as the inevitable tragedy of the conduct of global affairs. From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history. Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter. Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it.
But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — with wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West. Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story.
Ironically, part of Mr. Kissinger’s allure stemmed from the fact that his story was uniquely American. His family narrowly escaped the wheel of history, fleeing Nazi Germany just as Hitler was putting his diabolical design into effect. Mr. Kissinger returned to Germany in the U.S. Army and liberated a concentration camp. The experience imbued him with a wariness of messianic ideology wedded to state power. But it didn’t leave him with much sympathy for the underdog. Nor did it motivate him to bind the postwar American superpower within the very web of norms, laws and fidelity to certain values that was written into the American-led postwar order to prevent another world war. Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings. But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests. Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own. Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine. In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms. Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party. This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.
All of this cannot be laid on Henry Kissinger’s shoulders. In many ways, he was as much a creation of the American national security state as its author. But his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad. That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
