Headline, Rolling Stone. Excerpts from the article:
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…
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.
… 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.
… 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.
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More, from David Klion in the New Republic.
In his obsessive mastery of his own public image; in his eagerness to share a stage with anyone who seemed to matter; in his zealous personal ambition, his total lack of shame about the human cost of that ambition, and above all how richly his ambition and shamelessness were rewarded, right up to the moment of his death, Kissinger was, as Greg Grandin has argued, the quintessential American…
The point of associating oneself with Kissinger wasn’t to express specific support for, say, wiretapping American journalists or disappearing Argentine dissidents—it was to present oneself as above caring either way about such things.
November 30th, 2023 at 2:40PM
“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,”
‘Made’ is doing an awful lot of work here. In neither of those situations was Kissinger the ultimate decision-maker. As NSA, he didn’t have any policy-making power at all, and as Sec of State he still answered to Gerald Ford. Yet when Ford died he was not held up as a war criminal (if Kissinger was for what he did as Sec of State under Ford, then so was Ford). The left has a weird obsession with Kissinger that gives him a lot more power than he had most of the time and also strips the agency of a lot of other people. The Indonesians committed genocidal acts in East Timor, not Henry Kissinger.
November 30th, 2023 at 3:26PM
Total: I agree with much of what you say here. I mainly quoted these extracts because, agree with their claims or not, they are strikingly well-written (I’ve given the post the category “Great Writing”). I take seriously Hitchens‘ attack on Kissinger, and Seymour Hersh’s, and also this attack, but I agree that singling Kissinger out for demonization is highly questionable
November 30th, 2023 at 9:51PM
There is no evidence that Donald Trump directed the storming of the US capitol. Nevertheless his emphasis on self and his own aggrandizement created the environment for it to happen. Kissinger may not have been president but he wielded outsize influence with more than one. See also Dick Cheney.
December 1st, 2023 at 12:16AM
Dmitry: Yes. Kissinger was the one wielding the persuasive theories/tactics.