I was beginning to think that nothing new or relevant could be said about the life of Sir Kissinger (he was made a Knight of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1995). But with the smell of Messianic fanaticism weighing heavily in the air of Jerusalem these days, I realized I was quite mistaken. In 2012, Kissinger said something quite curious that very few people have taken seriously, yet his statement opens the door to an important lesson about world history—and Kissinger’s peculiar life gives us a window into it.

Speaking on Israel’s future in 2012, Kissinger sent shock-waves of confusion through the world when he said, “in 10 years, there will be no more Israel.”

Why would Kissinger, a man who devoted such a major part of his life to the cause of Zionism, believe with certainty that Israel would no longer exist in 10 years? What was supposed to happen under a Hillary Clinton regime that would have resulted in Kissinger’s prediction unfolding in 2022?

Did Kissinger not want the Middle East stability he so often spoke so highly of?

His apparent dual support for Zionist empowerment on one hand and his belief in the impending destruction of Israel on the other is not a glitch in the matrix nor a contradiction in Sir Kissinger’s thinking. Rather, it represents two sides of one bloody program that ultimately involves purging the Holy Land of both Jews and Arabs.

Since Kissinger’s 2012 opinion provided such an important, ironic crack in the machinery of oligarchism, I’d like to take a moment to invite you to join me as we peek through this crack into a story that may take us as far back as Babylon…

‘Greater Israel’ as a British Imperial Project

In 1914, the man who later became Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizman, stated:

Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews there-perhaps more; they would. . . form a very effective guard for the Suez/Canal.”

These words indicated a deeply underappreciated value that leading Jewish Zionists had for the British empire’s plans for global control over a century ago; these Zionists believed the empire could further their own plans for a Jewish state. Lord Shaftesbury’s Zionist project was launched in 1839, the British Empire created the Palestinian Exploration Fund in 1865, and the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, joined the cause of convincing the world’s Jews to live in the desert, but the role of British intelligence’s hidden hand in shaping the state of Israel, as well as international fascism more broadly, is often ignored. [1]

It wasn’t ignored by Sir Winston Churchill, then Lord of the British Admiralty during WWI. He wrote forcefully about the international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world on one hand, but he also spoke proudly of Zionism, saying in 1917: “If, as it may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish state under the protection of the British crown … [it] would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”

While Churchill could not be said to be a supporter of Hitler’s National Socialism, up until 1935, he loudly proclaimed his admiration for Hitler and also spoke fondly of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Churchill was also a rampant racist who presided over the mass extermination of ‘lower races’ as displayed in the controlled Bengal famine (killing three million Indians) in 1943. Like most other dominant Round Table leaders of Britain at this time, Churchill was an ‘imperial socialist,’ which has always been at the heart of 20th-century fascism.

Without the force of numerous antisemitic fascists throughout the last two centuries, Zionism would have never been possible.

Take as an example the case of Lord Arthur Balfour, a leading strategist of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group. Balfour co-authored the Balfour Accords in 1917 alongside Leo Amery, Lord Milner, and Walter Rothschild. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that, like Churchill, Lord Balfour was also a devoted white supremacist, Zionist, and supporter of fascism. Prime Minister Lloyd George, who oversaw the project at this time, was an ardent social imperialist (aka international fascist) who openly praised Nazism alongside another pro-Nazi royal named King Edward VIII.

While Leo Amery was not openly antisemitic, his son John was a devoted supporter of British Nazism and Adolph Hitler. His other son, Julian Amery, worked closely with unreconstructed Nazis after World War Two as part of Operation Gladio. It was under Julian Amery [2] that Nazis like Otto Skorzeny, Walter Rauft, and Alois Brunner were transplanted to the Middle East and even worked for the Mossad after the CIA played a direct role in establishing that organization in 1951.

Additionally, Leo Amery was a close collaborator of pro-fascist Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky during the former’s management of British Mandate Palestine (1925-1929) and co-founder of the Jewish Legion, which Jabotinsky went on to control. More than a Zionist, Amery was a believer in Cecil Rhodes’ vision for “a Church of the British Empire.”

Amery stated of his peculiar religion: “The Empire is not external to any of the British nation. It is something like the Kingdom of Heaven within ourselves.” (Take note that the term “Kingdom of Heaven” was the name of the Templar Kingdom of Jerusalem, which will play a larger role in this story).

After leading the passage of anti-Jewish immigration laws in England in 1905 that prevented persecuted Russian Jews from coming to the UK, Balfour wrote in 1919 that Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Balfour saw the creation of Israel as one stone that could kill two birds by 1) providing an excuse to purge the Jews from Europe and 2) creating a perfect weapon for destabilization in the geopolitical pivot of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland and the cross-section of all major civilizational forces on the earth.

 Caption: The Silk Road trade routes of the Han Dynasty were revived again under the Tang Dynasty and have historically played a major role in disrupting systems of global empire by encouraging trade, cooperation, and understanding around diverse cultures (in opposition to the Crusader agenda that has promoted ‘clash of civilizations’ ideologies).

In his book Der Judenstat, Theodor Herzl openly admitted this when he said:

We should, there, form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral state, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.

Herzl was clear that like his British Imperial (and typically antisemitic pro-fascist sponsors), he envisioned Israel’s borders to extend “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”

In the 1890s, Herzl was not yet settled on the specific location of the Jewish national homeland. William Eugene Blackstone, a devotee of John Nelson Darby, leader of a British sect called “The Plymouth Brethren,” sent him a voluminous report justifying Jerusalem as the only location ordained by God. This earned him the title of “the father of Zionism” by American Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1891, Blackstone drafted a memorandum dubbed “Palestine for the Jews,” which called for US leadership in establishing a homeland for the persecuted Jews of Russia. The memorandum was signed by 413 prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Cyrus McCormick, the heads of dozens of major newspapers, the Speaker of the House, and many members of Congress.

In the 1890s, Herzl was not yet settled on the specific location of the Jewish national homeland. William Eugene Blackstone, a devotee of John Nelson Darby, leader of a British sect called “The Plymouth Brethren,” sent him a voluminous report justifying Jerusalem as the only location ordained by God. This earned him the title of “the father of Zionism” by American Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1891, Blackstone drafted a memorandum dubbed “Palestine for the Jews,” which called for US leadership in establishing a homeland for the persecuted Jews of Russia. The memorandum was signed by 413 prominent Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Supreme Court Justice Cyrus McCormick, the heads of dozens of major newspapers, the Speaker of the House, and many members of Congress.

The Plymouth Brethren Gnostic Overhaul of Christianity

The Plymouth Brethren were a gnostic sect of pseudo-Christians founded in 1829 by an agent of the British East India Company named Anthony Norris Groves. Groves was sent to the Ottoman Empire and then India in 1830 as an orientalist engaged in recruiting young elites to train in British universities while carrying out espionage under the banner of Christian missionary work. Groves was soon joined by John Nelson Darby (godson of Admiral Horatio Nelson and father of modern rapture theology).

Darby, who considered himself a prophet, conducted six tours of the US seeding his doctrine into dozens of gnostic cults. Each one taught followers to interpret Bible prophecy the same way. This obviously required sending all Jews to Palestine, at which point a “secret rapture” for believers would unfold—followed by a hellscape of pain for heathens left to burn under the fires of global war and the anti-Christ.

Of course, in 1856, Darby’s prophetic gifts taught him that Russia—then Britain’s dominant nemesis after the US—was the anti-Christ and that the Civil War was a sign of the End Times. Darby went so far as to encourage his American followers not to fight to save the union since that would go against God’s will (to blow up the universe). Instead, he believed they should wait like good passive sheep atop their barns to be beamed up to heaven.

Among those American Christian movements influenced (and even created by Darby and the Plymouth Brethren sect), we have Cyrus Scofield. His 1909 reference bible became the most popular in the US during the 20th century and drew heavily upon Darby’s works.

Darby’s influence can also be seen in the works of Charles Fox Parham (the founder of Pentecostalism), George Pember, (the originator of the ‘fallen Nephilim’ interpretation of demonology now advanced by the alien disclosure movement), Dwight Lyman Moody (founder Moody Bible College), and James Hall Brookes (founding father and president of the Niagara Bible Conference, which helped spread Dispensationalism across America).

In fact, the entire Christian Zionist movement of war-pushing, faith-healing, rapture-loving preachers from John Hagee to Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson all sit on foundations created by Darby’s Plymouth Brethren—not the Bible.

The 1826 Albury Conferences on Prophecy

The Plymouth Brethren emerged onto the scene in tandem with a tightly knit network of Anglican/Jesuit intelligence operatives who operated under the leadership of 1) Henry Drummond (financier and co-founder of the New Apostolic Church founded in 1834), 2) Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7^th Earl of Shaftesbury, and 3) John Nelson Darby (founder of the ‘Exclusive Brethren’ Plymouth Brethren and leader of the sect).

Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper was a follower of Henry Drummond, who devoted himself to the cause of “Premillennial Dispensationalism” soon after a series of conferences on prophecy were held between 1826 and 1830. They were dubbed “The Albury Conferences.”

These conferences, overseen by Drummond at a vast estate he purchased featuring 70 bedrooms in Surrey, England, included leading figures of London’s gnostic intelligentsia. This included occultists Robert Haldane and Sir Thomas Carlyle, both of whom went on to become 12 “apostles/prophets” of the New Apostolic Catholic Church created by Drummond and George Irving in 1830.

The Albury Conferences themselves were sparked by the rediscovery of the writings of the influential Jesuit Francisco Ribera (1537-1591) of Salamanca, who played a major role in the Council of Trent of 1545, which ensured never-ending wars between Catholics and Protestants. This council and its Jesuit controllers are sometimes called ‘the counter-reformation.’

A Jesuit Sleight of Hand Sets the Stage for Zionism

Ribera’s primary task was to create an intellectual argument in opposition to the Protestant affirmation that the end times were now (i.e. 545) and that the Whore of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation was the Catholic Church. Ribera’s solution was simple: make the case why the events of Revelation were neither in the present nor in the past (the majority of Christians at the time believed that the subject of the “Whore of Babylon” was Nero’s Rome). Rather, he argued, they were to take place at some distant moment in the future.

Jesuit grand strategist and true father of Christian Zionism Francisco Ribera (1537-1591). Note the Templar Cross. That will make more sense later.

Moreover, in his 500-page treatise In Sacrum Beati Ioannis Apostoli, & Evangelistiae Apocalypsin Commentari, Ribera explained that the signs of the end times would only occur when the temple of Solomon, destroyed in 70 CE during the first Roman Jewish War, was rebuilt (additionally implying the restoration of Jews to their homeland). Ribera’s writings became known as the Futurist School of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalism, from which arose such modern perversions of Christian-Zionism, Rapture theology, and the diverse array of End Times Cultists of Christian and Jewish brands in our modern era.

By the early 17th century, Ribera’s writings had fallen into obscurity. They were only rediscovered when S.R. Maitland (Keeper of Manuscripts for the Archbishop of Canterbury) found himself working in the Vatican archives. Maitland believed the Jesuitical concepts were revolutionary, and they inspired him to write books on the antichrist and End Times in the form of An Inquiry into the Grounds of the Prophetic Period in Daniel and St, John (1826), A Second Inquiry (1829), and An Attempt to Elucidate the Prophecies Concerning Anti Christ (1830).

Perhaps most importantly, Ribera’s eschatology lent itself to the geopolitical aims of a British Empire struggling to 1) prevent the spread of independence movements across the world that followed America’s lead and 2) maintain a system of global enslavement with India, Russia, Egypt, China, and the Ottoman Empire as prime targets.

The obvious danger of the renewal of Silk Road routes of cooperation connecting these ancient civilizational states would be a disaster for the British Empire’s ambitions to become a New Roman Empire retaining control through divide-to-conquer tactics.

The Cabalistic Fraud of Apostolic End Times Cults

Echoing a similar gnostic ‘secret doctrine’ that paralleled the Cabalistic traditions of ‘exoteric’ (public) Torah and esoteric (hidden/oral) Torah, these self-professed ‘apostles’ claimed to hold prophetic gifts and that they could interact with angels and Jesus through what they called ‘the holy spirit’ (a practice commonly involving going into self-induced trances and speaking in uncontrolled gibberish/tongues).

Dozens of End Times cults splintered off from this source. Various prophets like Edward Irving (founder of the Irvingites), John Dowie (founder of Zion Illinois), John Darby (founder of Exclusive Brethren), Charles Parham (founder of Pentecostalism), Joseph Smith of the Mormons, and Dwight L. Moody (founder of Moody Bible College) created occult societies masquerading as “Christian” movements.

The thread tying these new sects together tended to revolve around 1) rapture interpretations of the Bible, 2) the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, and, in most cases, 3) the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple.

Were these actions to occur, it was taught by those with ‘special gnostic knowledge,’ the apocalyptic End Times would be invoked. The dual origins of Christian Zionism and End Times rapture theology are found here—not in the Bible.

The Fraud of British Israelism

It is also noteworthy that many of these “apostolic” cult creators were also devotees of “British Israelism,” which claimed that the 10 lost Tribes of Israel actually settled in Britain, and the British Royal family was directly descended from the House of David—the ‘secret children’ of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Films such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and the popular book Holy Blood Holy Grail made these actual beliefs of the oligarchy into articles of popular mythology in the minds of plebian consumers.

Most people watching King Charles III sprinkled with water from the River Jordan during his coronation had no idea what insane symbolism was occurring. In the mind of Charles and the broader oligarchy he represents, this ritual symbolizes Charles as the blood heir to the throne of Christ himself. The choice to carry a metallic globe and cross symbolizing his divine right to rule the entire globe as prima inter pares (first among equals)—a symbol of the Holy Roman Emperor—should also not be ignored (see image below).

In 1834, British Israelite Henry Drummond stated that “The majority of what was called the religious world, disbelieved that the Jews were to be restored to their own land, and that the Lord Jesus Christ was to return and reign in person on this earth.”

The Logic of England’s Use of Zionism

In January 1839, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper wrote an article in the London Quarterly Review commonly referred to as the first public call for the restoration of the Jews in Palestine:

The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigencies of Great Britain; the finest cotton may be obtained in almost unlimited abundance; silk and madder are the staple of the country, and olive oil is now, as it ever was, the very fatness of the land. Capital and skill are alone required: the presence of a British officer, and the increased security of property which his presence will confer, may invite them from these islands to the cultivation of Palestine; and the Jews, who will betake themselves to agriculture in no other land, having found, in the English consul, a mediator between their people and the Pasha, will probably return in yet greater numbers, and become once more the husbandmen of Judaea and Galilee. (Cited in Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon, p.67)

In 1840, Lord Palmerston (Lord Cooper’s cousin and British Foreign Secretary) echoed this proto-zionist outlook in a letter to the British ambassador to Constantinople:

There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe, a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine… It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine… I have to instruct your Excellency to recommend to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine.

In 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to then-Prime Minister Aberdeen describing Syria as “a country without a nation, which should be matched to a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is. The ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!”

Shaftesbury recognized the need to map Palestine (which also involved finding the location of Solomon’s Temple) in preparation for this vast project. To this end, he worked closely with his cousin Lord Palmerston and the Prince of Whales (later King Edward VII) to create the Palestinian Exploration Fund in 1865.

Templars, Mithra, and the Roots of the Palestinian Exploration Fund

This project was been put into motion a little earlier, when in 1862, Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Edward Albert, led an expedition to Palestine. The first secretary of the Palestinian Exploration Fund (PEF), Walter Besant, described the importance of the King’s venture to the Holy Land in his work Twenty-One Years Work in the Holy Land (1886):

Hitherto the opportunity for such systematic research has been wanting. It appears now to have arrived. The visit of HRH the Prince of Wales to the Mosque at Hebron has broken down the bar which for centuries obstructed the entrance of Christians to that most venerable of the sanctuaries of Palestine; and may be said to have thrown open the whole of Syria to Christian research.

The fact that Walter Besant of the Palestinian Expedition Fund was the brother-in-law of Annie Besant, leader of the international Theosophy movement, should raise some alarm bells since it has been noted that John Nelson Darby infused his translations of the Bible with language and terms only being used by the Theosophists.

Before Prince Edward Albert’s trip, the last royal to step foot in Jerusalem was King Richard the Lionheart in 1192 CE during the 3rd Crusade overseen by the Templars.

The Templars were a mercenary cult established by Cistercian grand strategist Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118 CE. They were officially called “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.” Not living up to their aspirations of poverty, this order of elite Christian mercenaries soon became the dominant financial empire across Europe and the Mediterranean sphere. It oversaw a network of Mithraic mystery cults throughout the world stretching from Russia to Europe, England, and the Middle East.

In fact, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which reigned from 1099-1291, was frequently managed by the Templars and ranged widely in size during several bloody Crusades against the Muslims. An animation of the Kingdom can be seen here:

The Kingdom’s flag can be seen here:

The Jerusalem crosses became affiliated with the Templars before the order was dissolved (at least publicly) and appeared on the insignia of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, established as a papal knighthood in 1098. It currently has 30,000 official members under an Order not too dissimilar in structure to Jesuit Generals [3]. Keep in mind that this papal knighthood was established 20 years before the founding of the Clairvaux’s Templars.

According to the sect’s website, the Knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre is devoted to “absolute fidelity to the Popes” and seeks to “sustain and aid…the Catholic Church in the Holy Land.” In Freemasonic fashion, the Order is organized around a Grand Master and a chain of command of obedience down to the lower degrees.

Among the priorities of the order today are the funding and maintenance of religious schools across Palestine, Israel, and the broader Middle East.

Below, one can see a Good Friday ritual celebrated by a group of Knights of the Sepulchre in Bolivia. I’m sure the similarities to the KKK (which emerged out of the Masonic Knights of the Golden Circle that nearly became the occult center of North America under Albert Pike’s command in the 19th century) are a complete coincidence.

In 1222, Francis of Assisi (ordained as the environmentalist’s saint) established a subdivision of his Franciscans dubbed “The Order of Penitent Brothers and Sisters.” Like its later incarnation in the Jesuits, the order was arranged around a general and featured an outward (exoteric) practice of strict Benedictine asceticism (this involved self-flagellation).

This order became known as the Franciscan Minorite Order and selected for themselves a very peculiar emblem.

This is important to keep in mind since the Prince of Whales Albert Edward celebrated his 1862 arrival in the Holy Land by engraving a tattoo featuring the Templar crosses on his arm. The Templar headquarters in Jerusalem were found in the elaborate crypts built under the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the supposed location of Solomon’s Temple) and are the source of much speculation. The likelihood of a Mithraic temple as part of a network of thousands scattered across the Holy Land and Europe is the most attractive hypothesis this author has yet seen.

Working directly under Prince Albert Edward was Sir Charles Warren, chief of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) and First Grand Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, which was established in 1886. The Quatuor Coronati (Four Crowns) was the first archeology lodge devoted to mapping out the Middle East and ultimately rebuilding Solomon’s Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE.

Additional aims of the lodge and Palestinian Exploration Fund involved locating the ark of the covenant and holy grail. The geopolitical benefits of mapping the Middle East for the British High Command (as well as mapping out the tribal relations of Arabs living there under the manipulation of British orientalists) were obvious.

The entire field of ‘Biblical Archeology’ was created—and continues to be shaped—by the Quatuor Coronati. Upon founding the PEF, Warren stated that it was designed with the avowed intention of “gradually introducing the Jews, pure and simple, who are eventually to occupy and govern this country.”

In 1886, Sir Charles Warren was appointed the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, where he was assigned to protect the Prince of Whales’ ritualistic murder of prostitutes across London in a famous unsolved case called “Jack the Ripper.” Warren worked with Plymouth Brethren member Sir Robert Anderson, head of Scotland Yard, to sabotage the investigation into the masonic ritual murder of prostitutes across London. These murders most likely occurred at the hand of Prince Albert Edward’s eldest son Prince Albert Victor. The 2001 Hollywood film From Hell, starring Johny Depp, was but one of many films banalizing this grotesque chapter of history in the form of popular entertainment.

It is also worth noting that author Michael Baigent—who wrote Holy Blood Holy Grail, which informed Dan Brown’s Davinci Code—was also a member of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge.

The Plymouth Brethren Start Religious Fires

Another Plymouth Brethren cultist played an important role in British Mandate Palestine. Colonel Charles Wingate was a leading figure in Darby’s sect and ensured that his son, Colonel Orde Wingate, would follow in his father’s shoes as a deviant imperialist and Christian Zionist.

Orde Wingate worked closely with Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes of Sykes-Picot fame) and was sent to British Mandate Palestine in 1935 to train Zionist paramilitary groups. He created a network of elite ‘Night Squads’ working in tandem with Jabotinsky’s Haganah paramilitary group.

As demonstrated by the pioneering work of Steven P. Meyer, Vladimir Jabotinsky was a British intelligence asset from Ukraine who was groomed in the Freemasonic Young Turk operation set into motion by Lord Palmerston and Giuseppe Mazzini in the 1840s. He was a Jewish fascist admirer who Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called “Vladimir Hitler” due to his adoption of Nazi practices and his rabidly racist ethnonationalist attitude.

In a letter to his cousin, Orde wrote:

The Jews are loyal to the Empire… Palestine is essential to our Empire- our Empire is essential to England- England is essential to world peace. We have the chance to plant here in Palestine and Transjordan a loyal, rich and intelligent nation, with which we can hold for us the key to world domination without expense or effort on our part.

It is a notable irony that Col. Orde Wingate had two very influential “pro-Arab” Orientalist cousins: 1) E.G Browne (sponsor of Al-Afghani, the spiritual father of Salafiyyism) and 2) T.E. Lawrence, whose manipulation of Bedouin Hashemite tribes drove the British Empire’s first ‘Arab Spring’ against the weak Ottoman Empire during World War One.

British Mandate Palestine Grand Mullah Haj Amin frequently collaborated with British intelligence from Britain’s Cairo office, including the Muslim Brotherhood, to 1) assassinate moderate Arabs seeking economic cooperation with the Jews and 2) kill Jews to stoke revenge sentiments similar to the earlier program of keeping Protestant vs. Catholic wars ablaze in Europe.

Haj Amin’s story as a British asset and provocateur is told in full by Cynthia Chung in her book The Empire in Which the Black Sun Never Set. [4]

British intelligence’s support of Islamist cults throughout the Arab world, from al-Afghani (founder of Salafyyism) to the Muslim Brotherhood, and their simultaneous support of the most fascist and violent Zionist ideologues should not be seen as contradictory in any way. Rather, this support is united by one firm principle: maintain global dominance for the Church of the British Empire.

With a game so dirty, one shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Wingate’s fellow British intelligence agent and self-professed satanist Aleister Crowley himself emerged out of Darby’s Plymouth Brethren sect.

Mystery Babylon from a New Lens

Plymouth Brethren grand strategist George Hawkins Pember (1837-1910) is known as one of the most influential of Darby’s sect. His works on ancient mystery cults, Zionism, prophecy, and even alien interpretations of scripture have done an incredible amount of damage in shaping imperial strategic planning for over 150 years.

In his book The Antichrist, Babylon, and the Coming of the Kingdom, Pember laid out the challenge of interpreting what the ‘Whore of Babylon’ might be. This information is very important for anyone wishing to calculate the days until the End Times.

Pember followed the Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist line by extracting the cataclysmic events into the future. “It would seem, that Babylon must be rebuilt and become again the center of the world and the glory of kingdoms, as we have it represented in the eighteenth chapter of the apocalypse,” he wrote.

But who is this Babylon that must rise to power to usher in the End Times? Is it Russia? Is it the papacy? Is it the British Empire? Or is it something else?

As a devout Christian Zionist cut from the cloth of Palmerston, Churchill, or Eichmann, the answer is clear, according to Pember. In his book The Antichrist, Babylon, and the Coming of the Kingdom, he wrote:

The wonder is that the restoration of Babylon has never yet been attempted…As soon, however, as Christendom is united in the form of the Ten Confederate Kingdoms, all jealousy will be at an end, and the great prize may then be seized for the common good. No doubt commerce will be the exciting motive: the civilized world will, perhaps, combine to build a great central emporium, which by their united exertions will quickly surpass all other cities, and finally become the capital of the Antichrist.

Keeping in mind the role of the Plymouth Brethren and gnostic intelligence operatives of the Palestinian Expedition Fund in creating Zionism in the first place, let’s review once more the region proclaimed by Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Greater Zionists as the divine land ordained by God’s covenant for the “chosen people”…

Today, the Anglo-Zionist project has grown from an aggressively demonic fetus to a vicious, full-grown monster. It appears intent on fulfilling a divine prophecy to recreate a new Babylon while provoking a war with literally every Arab neighbor surrounding them. The maps of Babylon 539 BCE and Herzl’s fantasy are eerily similar.

America’s nuclear arsenal will likely support Zionist ambitions to purge the land of Arabs, starting with Palestine and followed by Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and possibly Saudi Arabia, as outlined by the neo-con Clean Break Doctrine submitted to Netanyahu in 1996. But are all Americans (or even Israelis) happy about this scenario? Judging from the mass protests in the US against Netanyahu’s current war and the collapse of his support within Israel itself, the answer is no.

But do the voices of the people who will be exterminated in the wake of a global nuclear war have any influence over the decisions made by imperial ideologues marching about Washington, London, or Tel Aviv? That remains to be seen.

I would also pose the question: Is it at all possible that the forces that birthed the Zionist project may ultimately see their creation as a disposable pawn in the great game? Is it also possible that these same forces don’t even see the US as a permanent fixture of the “end of history” some imperialists wish to see emerge onto the scene? These are just a few questions to ponder.

With all of this in mind, it is worth revisiting Henry Kissinger’s 2012 prophecy that “in 10 years, there will be no more Israel.”

The Fall of Babylon 2.0?

The Truth Concerning the Land is Revealed in Cabala. Jewish Mysticism (Cabala) militates for life in the Land of Israel. Rationalistic approaches to Judaism place no special value on the Land of Israel. In wars, national characters crystalize. Israel, as the universal reflection of mankind, benefits thereby. The heels of Messiah follow upon World Conflageration… At the hour of the downfall of Western civilization, Israel is called upon to fulfill its divine mission by providing the spiritual basis for a New World Order. [emphasis added]

— Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cohen Kook, Greater Israel champion, End Times cultist, Chief Ashkenaz Rabbi for British Mandate Palestine (1919-1935)

The genie of Greater Israelism, as promoted by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Rabbi A.I Kook, and the army of gnostic Christian Zionist heirs of John Nelson Darby begging for a first strike onto Iran represents a level of zealotry and fanaticism that may spell disaster for much of humanity. Unlike most End Times cults that have stained this world, this one happens to possess a nuclear arsenal, and it is supported by raving hordes of rapture-believing Christian Zionists in America hungry for Armageddon.

A strange collusion of the Jesuit-run papacy of Pope Francis and the Anglican Church of the eco-Crusader King Charles III has united on multiple fronts. This includes Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism under the banner of the World Economic Forum. Additionally, why did Pope Francis (who took the name from the Templar-connected Francis of Assisi) choose to give shards of the cross upon which Jesus died (so it is claimed) as a coronation gift to a man who is a British Israelite who probably believes himself to be a blood heir to Jesus himself?

For that matter, why did Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton, present her second baby to the world dressed in an outfit made famous by accused satanist and pedophile Roman Polanski in the film Rosemary’s Baby (featuring the story of a woman who is impregnated by a satanic cult leader and gives birth to the anti-Christ)?

This cult is also operating in a world shaped in large measure by a collapsing hegemon sitting atop a systemic financial meltdown that may make the 1929 depression look like a cakewalk.

Kissinger’s Role as a Midwife to Satan

Sir Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in converting the US from a republic that aspired to uphold liberty to a nation fully committed to empire under the control of a techno-feudal priesthood.

It is important to keep in mind that throughout his long and destructive life, Kissinger cannot really be accused of being a cause of anything. Rather, he was always an instrument enslaved to a higher agency far beyond him. He was perhaps a fully witting agent—and thus all the more reprehensible than the many lower auxiliaries of technocracy who are ignorant of the evil they represent… but he was a slave nonetheless.

As a prized student of Rhodes Scholar William Yandall Elliot (who served as a guru to a nest of sociopathic young men at Harvard), Kissinger’s devout misanthropy, idealization of oligarchism, and spiritual devotion to systems of stasis were recognized by his handlers. He soon found himself working for the director of the CIA’s Office of Psychological Strategy Board in 1952, where he was brought into the inner sanctum of global intelligence operations.

Kissinger’s star rose quickly as he was made a member of the Round Table’s American think tank in 1956—The Council on Foreign Relations—and was soon brought into the Rockefeller Commission’s 1956 study group on America and the New World Order (named ‘Prospects for America’). There, he worked closely with Rhodes Scholar Dean Rusk and American fascist Henry Luce. This was soon followed by admission to the Bilderberg Group in 1957, where he went on to lead its steering committee.

Like his Rhodes Scholar mentor earlier, Kissinger found his own protégé in the form of a young sociopath named Klaus Schwab, whom he taught at a CIA-sponsored program at Harvard. Kissinger wasted no time setting the stage for the post-industrial era of deregulation, nation-stripping, and war as he brought the new Trilateral Commission into reality alongside David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

During his time as secretary of state and national security advisor, Kissinger worked closely with George Schultz in removing the US dollar from the fixed exchange rate gold reserve system, ensuring that what was once a viable industrial capital system would become a speculative weapon of mass destruction.

Once this was achieved, Kissinger’s work in orchestrating the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and broader oil shocks that resulted in a US dollar pegged to the price of OPEC oil was a cakewalk [5]. Kissinger’s next step in drafting the NSSM-200 program, transforming America’s foreign policy from a pro-industrial growth orientation toward “population control,” was another step into hell.

But were any of these policies designed to serve the interests of America or even Israel or Saudi Arabia in the long term?

Were any of these policies designed to serve any nation, or were they all simply different elements to the same abstract painting of chaos that he served on behalf of a higher agency?

What agency could that be if not American or Israeli or Saudi?

Kissinger’s Devotion to the British Empire Means More Than You Think

Sir Kissinger let the cat out of the bag on May 10, 1982, during a Chatham House (see: Round Table) conference in Britain. He described the principled schism between traditionally American vs. British imperial ways of looking at the world and demonstrated his commitment to the British imperial paradigm:

Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, and evading responsibility for helping secure the global equilibrium. The dispute was resolved according to American preferences- in my view, to the detriment of postwar security… The disputes between Britain and America during the Second World War and after were, of course, not an accident. British policy drew upon two centuries of experience with the European balance of power, America on two centuries of rejecting it.

Where America had always imagined itself isolated from world affairs, Britain for centuries was keenly alert to the potential danger that any country’s domination of the European continent-whatever its domestic structure or method of dominance-placed British survival risk… Britain rarely proclaimed moral absolutes or rested her faith in the ultimate efficacy of technology, despite her achievements in this field. Philosophically she remains Hobbesian: She expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. In moral matters Britain has traditionally practiced a convenient form of ethical egoism, believing that what was good for Britain was best for the rest…. In the nineteenth century, British policy was perhaps the principal factor in European system that kept the peace for 99 years without a major war ….

Perhaps most revealing was his description of his own role as secretary of state when he described his relationship with the British Foreign Office:

The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic.

For those who may not be aware, Kissinger’s recruitment to William Yandall Elliot’s Round Table operation in Harvard, his allegiance to the Round Table movement’s Chatham House operation in London and New York (dubbed “The Mothership” by Hillary Clinton), and his words above are nothing less than an admission of allegiance to a new Templar order.

The secret society that Cecil Rhodes established in his last will and testament as “a Church of the British Empire,” modeled on “The Jesuit Constitution” was explicitly based on the Grail Myths of the Knighthood of the Round Table. These were designed in the 13^th century to promote the Templar-managed Crusades and the reconstruction of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.[6]

As even Scottish Rite Grand Master Albert Pike stated in 1871, the Jesuit Order was itself a reconstructed and more disciplined Templar Order. In his Morals and Dogma, he wrote:

The Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits. Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them.

It has also been demonstrated that the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi was additionally a Templar Order (with the additional attributes of a Magna Mater cult of Cybele that dominated Rome as a nature-worship sect). This order also merged into the later Jesuit society. With this in mind, the union of Jesuits and Franciscans in 2013 takes on new meaning and should raise eyebrows.

It was, after all, the Jesuit influence on the 1545-1563 Council of Trent that both fueled the flames of never-ending religious wars across Europe and established the foundations of Christian Zionism and the End Times cults of our modern-day.

Whether it was the British Empire that created political Zionism as part of the Great Game as Winston Churchill, Lord Shaftesbury, or Lord Balfour believed, or whether Jewish cabalistic bankers were attempting to create a Greater Israel capital for a New World Order as Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, or Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook likely believed…it may not matter which imperial monstrosity is wagging the tail: both may be destined to the same fate that befell the first Babylon over two millennia ago.

Perhaps Kissinger knew what this new age of Babylon would involve… but he’s too busy dealing with other problems at this moment.

One thing is certain: the thing calling itself ‘the antichrist’ has been very angry with something very special within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for a very long time. It’s time to rediscover what that is before the End Times cult Kissinger served achieves its final act.

Footnotes

[1] According to evidence available on record, Theodor Herzl was many things, but his own man was likely not one of them. His rise to prominence from a low-level journalist in 1893 to the leader of global Zionism within three years is unprecedented and doesn’t happen without vast institutional patronage. Additionally, his connection to Colonel Goldsmid (head of London’s Maccabee movement) from 1894 to 1904 is one of many important red flags of higher influences interfacing with Herzl. Colonel Goldsmid played a role in the Boer War alongside the new Round Table movement and was also the overseer of the British Empire’s Jewish colonial project in Argentina, which is no small thing. The Jewish colonial projects overseen by the British Empire in Argentina—like the Uganda scheme proposed by Chamberlain later (and submitted by Herzl to the World Zionist Congress in 1903)—was an indirect way of corralling international Jews from across Russia and Europe into controlled zones of British imperial domain that would serve as gateways towards a final Palestinian Zionist infusion. Ultimately, the empire’s success in sparking World War One and undermining the Ottoman Empire sped things up and made these stepping stones unnecessary. The fact that Herzl was also an antisemite who saw great practical use in antisemitism to make Europe and Russia unliveable for the Jews is a big red herring. It places him in conjunction with the intelligence agencies (often occult-theosophical) throughout the secret police operations of the Russian, French, Prussian, and British empires that coordinated the Dreyfuss Affair fiasco in France and the Protocols of Zion forgeries in Russia and their translations across the English world.

[2] In 1954, Egypt and the United Kingdom signed an agreement over the Suez Canal and British military basing rights. It was short-lived. By 1956 Great Britain, France, and Israel concocted a plot against Egypt aimed at toppling Nasser and seizing control of the Suez Canal, a conspiracy that enlisted the Muslim Brotherhood. The British went so far as to hold secret meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva. According to author Stephen Dorril, two British intelligence agents, Col. Neil McLean and Julian Amery (Leo Amery’s son), helped MI6 organize a clandestine anti-Nasser opposition. Julian Amery would be directly linked to the Gladio networks. In Stephen Dorril’s book MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations he writes, “They [McLean and Amery] also went so far as to make contact in Geneva…with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, informing only MI6 of this demarche which they kept secret from the rest of the Suez Group [which was planning the military operation via its British bases by the Suez Canal]. Julian Amery forwarded various names to [Britain’s Foreign Secretary].” The full story can be found in Dorril, Stephen. (2000) MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations. The Free Press, New York p. 356, 629 and Chung, Cynthia, (2022) Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set, Canadian Patriot Press p. 286

[3] The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (or Knights of the Holy Sepulchre), is a Catholic Order of knighthood (f.1099) under the protection of the Holy See. The pope is the sovereign of the Order. The Order creates canons as well as knights with the primary mission to “support the Christian presence in the Holy Land.” It is an internationally recognized Order of chivalry. The Order today is estimated to have some 30,000 knights and dames in 60 lieutenancies around the world. The cardinal grand master has been Fernando Filoni since 2019, and the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem is grand prior. Its headquarters are situated at Palazzo Della Rovere and its official church in Sant’Onofrio al Gianicolo, both in Rome, close to Vatican City.” [description from Wikipedia]

[4] Specifically Chapter 11: “Nazis, the British, and the Middle East.”

[5] Under his careful watch, oil prices increased 400% during the 1973 OPEC crisis. This has been acknowledged to have played a big role in driving the 1973-79 inflation. But as researcher William Engdahl demonstrated in his 1992 A Century of War, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more of a role in manufacturing this crisis from scratch by keeping hundreds of tankers replete with petrol from being unloaded in the US and facilitating the 400% interest rate increase with the assistance of several high-level oil ministers in the Middle East beholden to Kissinger. In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s OPEC minister at the time of the crisis corroborated Engdahl’s research stating: “I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.”

[6] See From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston, Cambridge University Press, 1920.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matthew J.L. Ehret.

Photograph Source: White House Photo Office Collection – Public Domain

This may come as a shock to you, but your average terrorist isn’t actually a three-armed monster from hell who eats human flesh and breaths fire. Your average terrorist, if there really is such a thing, is in fact a human being and more often than not that human being is actually just some desperate, pissed-off, rube from a badly battered country with nothing left to lose but a dead-end life with little hope for a future. But just try suggesting this at the next neighborhood potluck in suburban Middle America and count the seconds before that tribe of docile orthodontists builds you a noose from the holiday lights.

To your average flag saluting normie, a terrorist is a completely different species that exists exclusively behind the label of ‘other.’ It’s not altogether hard to see how simpletons could come to such conclusions when you consider their sources. Turn to any cable news channel you like, and you won’t have to wait long for a lesson in the distinct otherness of your average terrorist. Within minutes you will be supplied with a cartoon caricature of a blood-drinking foreigner, worshipping a weird god and blowing himself to bits for fun and virgin pussy. Even the supposedly woke networks will basically tell you that the only white terrorist is a hillbilly with a heart full of black tar. And yet somehow Henry Kissinger doesn’t make the cut.

During a news week filled to the brim with breathless condemnations of the average terrorist creatures of Hamas, Henry Kissinger, a man with a well-known body count higher than most forms of cancer, is mourned as a national icon. Oh sure, all the assholes on cable will admit to the centurion statesman’s bloody misdeeds but always coupled with some convenient misnomer about the man being “complicated”, “controversial”, even “brooding.” Reading the New York Times, you would think he was some kind of conflicted heartthrob from a lost chapter of the Twilight saga. “Sure, he’s a monster, but I can fix him.”

They all go on and on about how intelligent and calculating and charming this creature was but let’s just cut the shit right now. This man was a fucking terrorist. The only thing that separated him from your average jihadist was that he was charming enough to turn political violence into a long, well-paying career, and this country of noose tying orthodontists was sick enough pay him.

The sheer number of crimes that Mr. Kissinger managed to commit during a relatively short stint in power is downright staggering. Between the years of 1969 and 1975, Henry served two administrations, first Richard Nixon’s, then Gerald Ford’s, as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and during those eight years, the bodies never stopped dropping. Kissinger was instrumental in prolonging the bloodbath in Vietnam by nearly a decade and expanded it across Southeast Asia, slaughtering somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million people with more bombs than the Second World War.

Henry was also instrumental in launching the 1973 coup against the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and having him replaced with a vicious fascist general named Augusto Pinochet who would hold that country hostage for nearly twenty years. Once Pinochet was finished machine gunning college students in converted soccer stadiums and building internment camps for some 80,000 political dissidents, the venerable Secretary of State helped him take that horror show on the road with Operation Condor, a CIA mission to cleanse the Southern Cone of South America of anything to the left of Phyllis Schlafly. 60,000 people simply disappeared across half a dozen countries between 1975 and 1983, including pacifists, missionaries, monks and nuns, many of them simply thrown from American helicopters into the sea.

Henry spread the love to East Timor in 1975 when he helped America’s favorite mononym monster, Suharto, carry out and get away with one of the worst acts of genocide of the Twentieth Century, slaughtering somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 men, women and children or a third of that tiny island nation’s impoverished population over the next twenty years. Kissinger, a perpetually celebrated refugee of the Holocaust, seemed to have a kink for genocide. Aside from East Timor, he also offered America’s support to Pakistan while they slaughtered 3 million Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971 and even encouraged the Chinese to arm the Khmer Rouge during the height of their own final solution.

Shockingly, the list just keeps going on and on like this, from feeding the Kurds to a Baathist massacre to putting a junta in charge of Argentina and encouraging them to hurry up and kill their opponents before the gringo press could catch wind of the burning bodies. From backing the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus which continues to this day to the backing of the Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi which, wouldn’t you fucking know it, also continues to this motherfucking day. Kissinger’s shadow continues to linger over thousands of graveyards across the globe and an American war machine that owes God knows how many more corpses to his influence.

But Henry Kissinger’s most sickening act of international terrorism was getting away with it. For all his crimes, for all the bodies and bombs and genocide, Henry was awarded with the reputation of a global sex symbol. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he broke his ass to prolong and expand. He was wined and dined by A-list celebrities and given the star treatment on every primetime news show from Crossfire to Nightline. They all knew Henry was a monster and they fucking loved it.

Some might call this popular perversion a cult of personality but it’s actually way more twisted than that. Henry Kissinger isn’t the only ugly American celebrated for his career as an unapologetic terrorist. This country’s history is jam packed with fabulous monsters. Thomas Jefferson invented “American Democracy” when he wasn’t busy raping his own slaves and killing Indians. FDR led us out of the Great Depression with programs modeled after the state expansions of Mussolini’s Italy and put an entire race of people into concentration camps for a Japanese invasion that he purposely provoked and allowed to happen. Ronald Reagen saved the world from communism while still making time to sling crack for baby killers in Nicaragua. And Barack Obama proved that America’s appetite for destruction was finally color blind when he became the first person of color to use the White House as a base to murder teenagers with model airplanes.

These terrorists didn’t get a pass because they were charming or charismatic. If that were true, George W. Bush would be painting shitty pictures of his feet in Guantanamo Bay right now. Every powerful American is lionized and sainted sooner or later for the simple fact that American power is exceptional. One cult of personality isn’t enough for the greatest empire since Rome. America has constructed an entire culture of personality that could redeem a club-faced cattle rapist if he spent a long weekend in the White House. This is a sickness caused by the greatest concentration of institutional power in human history and the only defense that sane human beings have against it is to smash the mythology itself.

Osama Bin Laden was a killer. Henry Kissinger was a killer. Adolf Hitler was a killer. You can dress it up however you want, declare the perpetrator to be a terrorist, a statesman, or a dictator, but it’s all the same to me and none of it deserves any special treatment. Powerful people kill poor people because they can and the more power they get, the more they kill, so stop giving them more power with fancy titles and couture categories for their crimes. Terrorists kill people, period, so fuck all terrorists.

Throw Kissinger’s rotting carcass in the same hole as those cunts in Hamas and the IDF and stop pretending like any of them are special for doing dreadful things to innocent people. Now where’s my fucking noose? I’m not getting any more moderate here…

The post Terrorism with Honor: Henry Kissinger and America’s Infuriating Culture of Personality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

1975, April 28 – Roosevelt Room – The White House

Henry Kissinger wrote his doctoral dissertation about Europe’s “long peace” after the defeat of Napoleon, focusing on how conservative statesmen negotiated the Concert of Europe through a mixture of diplomacy and military power. Kissinger was enamored of this approach to achieving an “equilibrium of forces.” The lesson he absorbed, and later applied as a presidential advisor, was the imperative of suppressing rebellious elements, be they reactionary or revolutionary, in order to preserve a stable status quo.

It was this seemingly old-fashioned approach to geopolitics that Kissinger smuggled into the second half of the twentieth century. He saw no role in global affairs for morality, particularly in its modern version of human rights. He spent long hours analyzing the global balance of power in order to reinforce a world order favorable to the United States. He wanted to sustain the “long peace” of the Cold War even if it meant the deaths of millions of people who lived far from Washington, Moscow, or the Berlin Wall.

Many obituaries of the recently deceased centenarian have highlighted his high crimes and misdemeanors: his recommendations to expand the Vietnam War to Cambodia, his role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile, his support for Pakistan’s generals as they slaughtered up to 3 million people in East Pakistan, his effective greenlighting of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus.

Kissinger certainly shares responsibility for this catalogue of war crimes. In this respect, he is no different from many of the despots whose rings he kissed: Mao in China, Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran. Because he spoke their idiom—a transnational language of power salted with frequent brutality—Kissinger could serve as the ideal interlocutor between a putatively democratic country and a series of dictatorships.

Kissinger was thus a throwback to previous centuries of statecraft when force of arms took precedence over force of argument. What made him different—larger than life and attractive to autocrats and celebrities alike—was the country that he served. If Kissinger had been a foreign minister in post-war Austria or Germany, he would not have had such global impact. Instead, having relocated as a young man to America before World War II, he became a Metternich with nukes. And that was a very dangerous thing indeed.

But aside from the fingerprints he left on any particular atrocity, Kissinger’s insertion of his version of realpolitik into U.S. foreign policy will represent perhaps his most toxic legacy.

Getting Real

The concept of realpolitik, formulated in 1853 by German theorist Ludwig August von Rochau, was a challenge to liberals of the time to “get real”—to acknowledge that apex predators rule the jungle. That didn’t mean, in Rochau’s book, to go all “red in tooth and claw” in response. Rochau simply reminded his fellow liberals that ideals and moral suasion would not necessarily win the day. As Rochau put it rather elegantly, if you want “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitik thinks that lacking better tools, the most simple pickaxe is more effective than the sound of the most powerful trumpets.”

The conflict between a policy based on the world as it should be (idealism) and one grounded in the world as it is (realism) engaged many a thinker and government official in the decades since Rochau. Kissinger’s innovation, such that it was, involved the application of realpolitik, a term encrusted with many associations over the years, to the realm of the Cold War.

During that 40-year span, in an atmosphere of compulsive and often compulsory anti-Communism, conservatives maintained an unrelenting hostility toward the Soviet Union, China, and their sympathizers. Liberals did too, for the most part, though they were notably pinker in their approach to domestic policy. Progressives on the other hand favored détente with Communist regimes, either out of sympathy for some putatively shared socialist goals or out of a fear of nuclear war.

Kissinger didn’t care about those forms of ideology. He looked at geopolitics as if it were a game in which the players must outmaneuver one another for maximum gain (no game, no gain). Ideology was just so much heavy baggage that could prevent the odd alliances necessary for such game-playing. Thus, Kissinger urged the Nixon administration to negotiate an opening with China to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. And he favored nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union not because he was a fan of disarmament but because he believed the United States could profitably redirect its resources in order to retain (or regain) a strategic advantage.

This single-minded focus on geopolitical advantage rendered all other considerations irrelevant. Kissinger once asserted that “nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo.” It was no accident that the axis of history overlapped the axis of his personal fortune. Kissinger made much money from helping companies invest in the same China that he’d helped to open years before. No surprise that some of his most flattering obituaries have come from the Chinese.

The categories of idealism and realism inevitably became entwined in Kissinger’s mind. He wasn’t bowing to any reality by driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. He was creating a reality, a version of the world as he wanted it to be. He was not rigorously anti-ideological. He was pursuing an ideology of his own making, a liberal internationalism presided over by the United States. He simply embraced Deng Xiaping’s preference for an effective mice-catcher regardless of the color of its fur.

Kissinger’s Legacy

Let’s get realpolitik here for a moment.

The Biden administration, looking at the geopolitical map, could decide that the current alliance between China and Russia does not serve U.S. interests or those of its European allies. It could decide that even though Chinese policies have become considerably more nationalistic and assertive over the last decade, the leadership in Beijing today is certainly more level-headed than were Mao and his advisors in the late 1960s. Borrowing a page from Kissinger’s book, Biden might decide to dial down the current anti-China enmity in the United States and semi-secretly negotiate a rapprochement that effectively drives a wedge (once again) between Beijing and Moscow. This deal would be considerably more equitable than what Kissinger managed, given the current size of the Chinese economy, but the effect would be comparable: a reduction of Russia’s influence.

When Kissinger’s brand of Chinapolitik prevailed in the 1970s, critics accused him of selling out the Tibetans and the Taiwanese, among others. If the Biden administration were to revive this strategy, critics would similarly accuse the president of abandoning the Uighurs and the Taiwanese.

But this time, Washington would have another, rather un-Kissinger-like priority: decarbonizing the global economy. Cooperation with China could speed innovation, direct more investments on an international level toward sustainable energy, and help to rewrite the rules of the global economy to make the transition away from fossil fuels possible. The argument for China to downgrade its relationship with Russia would rest not on the latter’s human rights record but on its stubborn dependence on a petro-economy.

The question, then, is whether this kind of chess-playing diplomacy can be stripped of its national arrogance—increasing the power and status of the United States—and applied to collective goals like saving the planet. In this case, as in the 1970s, ideals like human rights would not be jettisoned but rather delinked from singular priorities. In the 1970s, nuclear arms control agreements were largely protected from conditionalities like adherence to this or that human rights convention; today the same would apply to climate agreements.

To be clear, Kissinger-style realpolitik lives on in its most noxious forms. The Biden administration is making deals with the Saudi government regardless of its human rights record, much as Kissinger disregarded the Shah’s ruthlessness in Iran. What Kissinger did with Pakistan, a succession of U.S. administrations is now doing with India, this time in the name of containing China rather than opening it up. Trump’s greenlighting of Turkey’s invasion of Syria echoed Kissinger’s backing of Turkey’s incursion into Cyprus.

But the world has also moved on from the Kissinger era. Human rights agreements, institutions, and civil society organizations exert a powerful influence on global policy. The United States no longer has quite the free hand that it did in the 1970s; both China and the European Union represent alternative centers of power. Countries of the Global South—Brazil, South Africa, India—have taken their revenge on Kissinger by becoming important geopolitical players.

At 100, Henry Kissinger had become an anachronism, much as his version of realpolitik was an anachronism when he reintroduced it into U.S. policy in the 1960s and 1970s. Pragmatism, of course, has long been an engine of politics. But a systematic indifference to moral concerns became untenable after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, two years before Kissinger submitted his undergraduate thesis at Harvard.

From Ukraine to Climate Change

Now that Kissinger is gone, it’s time to reassess realpolitik for this era.

Over the last decade, Kissinger viewed Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence,” though near the end of his life he shifted to supporting Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Either way, he was calculating the likelihood of different scenarios based on his assessment of the balance of power on the ground. Although it would be ludicrous to ignore such assessments, it’s critically important to incorporate international law and human rights in any policy recommendation, namely that Russia violated international law by invading Ukraine and has committed extensive atrocities during the war. Negotiations that contribute to undermining these norms, along with Ukrainian sovereignty, would represent the worst kind of realpolitik, as does the notion that Ukraine should “give up” simply because Russia has a larger and stronger military.

Support for Ukraine on these grounds is no mere idealism. The UN, after all, exists, as does international law. A realpolitik rescued from Kissinger would acknowledge power politics and the ruthless reality of military force but would nevertheless find ways to assert the importance of norms and strengthen the hand of the weak, the poor, and the victimized.

Even more critically, the planet needs a new realpolitik for the waning of the Anthropocene era.  Addressing climate change is not idealistic or ideological. It is also not in the interests of a single country or some subset of UN member states. Rather, the rising water, the burning wildfires, and the super-storms are as real as it gets—for all countries. But to address these problems fairly requires adherence to norms of equity, for instance in the climate debt the Global North owes the Global South so that it too can transition away from fossil fuels.

That’s what Rochau was driving at when he coined the term realpolitik. Addressing climate change will require a hard look at the powerful forces maintaining the fossil-fuel status quo and a forging of alliances across disparate ideologies. But it will also need that ingredient that Kissinger scorned: a respect for rights and international law.

Kissinger is gone. By purging geopolitics of his antiquated notions of amorality, let’s put to rest his toxic legacy as well.

The post Rescuing Realpolitik From Henry Kissinger appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

The author’s first passport photo and Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger died last week.  So far, I’ve been handling my grief pretty well.

Kissinger was the most esteemed war criminal in American history. Kissinger, who was Nixon’s National Security Advisor,  summarized Nixon’s order for  bombing Cambodia; “Anything that flies on everything that moves.” In a 1972 conversation captured by the secret White House taping system, Nixon told Henry Kissinger: “The only place where you and I disagree… Is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” Kissinger replied: “I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.”  In a later conversation with Nixon, Kissinger boasted: “Once we’ve broken the war in Vietnam… then no one will give a damn about war crimes.”  Regardless of the atrocities he spawned, Kissinger was endlessly feted by the establishment.   Humorous songwriter Tom Lehrer aptly observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Kissinger accounted for one of the biggest road trip surprises I ever received, at least from the New York Times.  On Thanksgiving Day, I was driving 300 miles back home after a visit to kinfolk in southwest Virginia.  In the hundred-mile stretch from Roanoke to Harrisonburg, there was damn little along Interstate 81 in those days.

I stopped at a sprawling Sheetz gas station at the Staunton exit, “strung out from the road,” as the Bob Seeger song goes.

Things were looking grim for America at that time.  George W. Bush was lying the nation into war against Iraq.  Most newspapers had a “Non-Warmongers Need Not Apply” standard so my op-eds were striking out.  I did get a hit the prior month in USA Today headlined, “Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield.” I wrote that “a desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill.”  I warned, “Perpetual war will inevitably mean perpetual repression. When Bush attacks foreign nations, his administration will also be striking against American freedoms.”

But Bush administration fearmongering was stampeding the media and most of the American public.  I was astounded to hear Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney portraying Saddam as the culprit behind the 9/11 attacks – the biggest load of crap that topped all their other shameless deceits. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed to possess “bulletproof” evidence linking Saddam and Al Qaeda. But the “bullet” was so sensitive that it could never be exposed to sunlight.

But there were a few rays of hope in those days.  For instance, former Nixon administration National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was getting hounded by protestors when he spoke in foreign nations.  There was a growing clamor to indict him for the genocides he helped inflict on Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.   Was the civilized world on the verge of taking a stand against the wrongful killing of millions of civilians?

Walking around that Sheetz mini-market after getting my 32-ounce Dr. Pepper and a cheap cigar to propel me northward, I ambled by the newspaper stand and HOLY SMOKE!

The New York Times had a big picture of Kissinger above the fold and his name was trumpeted in a banner headline.

So that sonuvabitch was finally indicted on war crimes?!? Make my day!

Then I got closer, squinted, and read the headline: “President Names Kissinger to Lead 9/11 Commission.” On Thanksgiving Eve, George Bush had designated Kissinger as the chairman of the new National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States.

At that moment, I realized that maybe George W. didn’t really want the truth to come out about 9/11.    Actually, the Bush administration had fought vociferously to block congressional proposals for any independent commission.  And when Congress proved untamed on this issue, Bush sought to rig any investigation by appointing Kissinger as its chief.  Kissinger was notorious for stonewalling and misleading congressional and other investigations when he worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations. What better choice than a Grand Deceiver to safeguard the storyline of Bush as America’s heroic savior?

But the Kissinger fix collapsed. All the 9/11 Commission panelists were obliged to disclose the identity of any person, company, or foreign government that had paid them more than $5,000 in the prior two years.  But Saint Henry refused to disclose the list of the foreign clients for his consulting firm.  Some cynics suspected that Kissinger might be biased because of who poured millions of dollars into the firm’s coffers.  Bush publicly lamented the collapse of his fix, stating that Kissinger’s “would have provided the insights and analysis the government needs to understand the methods of our enemies and the nature of the threats we face.”

The 9/11 Commission became the Bush administration’s most famous faith-based initiative. The commission appeared far more concerned with restoring trust in Washington than in revealing truth. Bush and Cheney were allowed to testify without a transcript and not under oath. Americans never heard what they said. Instead, the commission offered a synopsis of their comments—as if it would have been impious to quote them directly. The White House was allowed to edit the final version of the commission’s report before it was publicly released.  The final report ignored 28 pages of damning evidence that congressional investigators exposed linking the Saudi government to the 9/11 attackers – evidence that Bush suppressed to justify blaming Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq. The commission’s cravenness was no surprise after its tainted launch.

Kissinger was revered among those poohbahs and insiders who believe that deceiving the American people is a victimless crime.  The Washington Post made Kissinger a columnist despite his endless deceits.   Kissinger’s career and prestige should permanently vaccinate Americans against trusting the Washington establishment.

Tributes to Kissinger have poured in after his death, though some have noted that “antiwar” activists rankled at Kissinger’s death toll.   Some days I suspect the official scorekeepers are not on our side.

** An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

The post Kissinger and My Interstate 81 Epiphany appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

Why did Kissinger come to Geneva? He was a friend of Professor Curt Gasteyger of the Graduate Institute. I knew that because I had written a critical assessment of Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy as a student in Gasteyger’s seminar. In my paper, I had overviewed all the negative reviews of the 1957 best seller that launched Kissinger’s career. Gasteyger had rejected my paper with an explanation of the importance of Kissinger and their relationship.

Gasteyger had invited Kissinger to come to Geneva to celebrate an anniversary of his program in international security. I bet with Gasteyger Henry wouldn’t come. Geneva, in my opinion, was too small for him. The bet was CHF 100. If Kissinger came, I would have the first question. If he didn’t, Gasteyger would pay me CHF 100.

Kissinger came. I spent weeks preparing my question. What to say to a man I felt responsible for prolonging the Vietnam War among other unethical policies? How to be polite in front of a packed distinguished Geneva audience?

I spent weeks preparing one question. How to be diplomatic in front of that audience while asking what I really wanted to know? “Dr. Kissinger,” I began, trying to sound as respectful as I could, “in your long and distinguished career, is there anything you regret, is there anything that you would have done differently?”

I was sure he heard my New York accent (He was raised in Inwood Park in the Bronx. I was raised near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, not far away.) He saw my age. For a moment I was back in the 60s, my hair longer, my voice more strident, screaming that Kissinger and Nixon were war criminals. Did he hear me then? Did he hear me now?

He gave me a look of condescension. He made it known that the question was misplaced, irrelevant. He had no qualms about any of his actions. “Young man,” he pontificated, “if you mean Vietnam, it was the highlight of my career.”

People applauded. I was stunned. 57,000 Americans dead. Millions of Vietnamese. Many who died could have lived had he stopped the war earlier. That we learned before 1999.

At the end of the evening people left the auditorium in awe of him and his verbal dexterity. Years later, friends have told me they remember my question.

Super Henry or Evil Henry? That evening all his diplomatic finesse was on display. And that day, the Geneva audience, except for very few, were duly impressed.

The post Henry Kissinger and I in Geneva appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

Photograph of Henry A. Kissinger Dressing for a State Dinner – Public Domain

On the occasion of his death at 100, praises and denunciations of Henry Kissinger are being sung and spewed out in record numbers. Let me add to the “praises.” More than anyone else, Henry, along with his boss, Richard Nixon, was responsible for my transformation into an activist.

This transition from being a free-floating intellectual into an activist took place unexpectedly. It happened sometime in April 1970, when Kissinger and Nixon said they were going to end the war in Vietnam by expanding it to Cambodia. I was rushing along Prospect Road—where Princeton’s “eating clubs” or fraternities were located—to attend class when I was attracted to a commotion at a building housing the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). A crowd of about 100 surrounded some 15 people who had sat down and linked arms to block the entrance to the Institute, which was known to be doing contract work for the Pentagon. I crossed the street to see things, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then a phalanx of policemen arrived and shoved people aside in order to clear a path to arrest those who were seated on the ground with arms linked.

When the police started to brutally cut the human chain and pull people into the paddy wagon, something in me snapped and I leaped into the empty space opened up by an arrest and found myself linking up with two people that I later learned were Arno Mayer, a distinguished professor of diplomatic history, and Stanley Stein, an equally prominent professor of Latin American history. All I was conscious of as I joined them was: there goes my PhD. At that time, foreign students who were arrested in political events could expect deportation according to Immigration and Naturalization Service rules. In a split second, I had given up my future as a sociologist.

As we were processed after arrest at the Princeton police headquarters, I called Madge, my wife, and told her what had happened but left unmentioned the likelihood that we would be deported. I had made the leap, and, surprisingly, I had no regrets since I felt I had found my place in life: being an activist, an organizer for social change. Like the other participants in the IDA rally, I was judged guilty of trespassing and resisting arrest and given a punishment of community service, that is, cleaning the streets of Princeton on weekends for a whole month.

I waited for the deportation order. And waited. After a month of waiting, I began to realize what was happening. The local government in Princeton was not coordinating its work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as I had been led to expect. That would not happen until after 9/11, under the aegis of the newly established Department of Homeland Security, over 30 years later.

My profession as a sociologist, for which I was being trained at Princeton, was given a new lease on life. But I was no longer the same. The arrest had transformed me.

At that point, my priority during my stay at Princeton became stopping the war in Vietnam, and when I was not deep into reading Marx and Marxists and post-Marxists, much of my work was leading or participating in discussion groups on how to organize more and more students into a critical mass on campus against the war.

By the time that Kissinger and Nixon invaded Laos early in 1971 to destroy the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I had become part of the informal leadership of the anti-war movement on campus. We called for a boycott of classes, but the coup de main was the takeover and shutting down of what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton’s school of public administration that served as a recruiting ground for the Central Intelligence Agency and the trained bureaucrats of foreign governments allied with the United States. I led the successful occupation of the School by hundreds of students, but at the price of my incurring the perpetual enmity of one of its professors. The prominent sociologist of modernization Marion Levy tried his best in the next few years to worm his way onto my dissertation panel with the sole aim of torpedoing the person he regarded as sullying his beloved Woodrow Wilson School.

I went on to do my dissertation, a study of the counterrevolution in Salvador Allende’s Chile from a Marxist perspective, and this was approved in 1975, thanks partly to the successful effort of the department chairman, Marvin Bressler, to keep the vengeful Marion Levy from getting onto my committee.

I went on to do full-time underground work as a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines for the next 15 years, incurring more arrests and jailing for civil disobedience in protests in the United States against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Later, as an international activist during the George W. Bush era, I again gave full play to my anti-war addiction, participating in mobilizations across the globe, from Baghdad to London to Beirut.

So, here’s to you, you old devil, Henry, for saving me from what would surely have been an unexciting academic life specializing in some godawful field such as Marion Levy’s “modernization theory.”

The post And Here’s to You, Henry Kissinger… appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Walden Bello.

Photograph Source: Marsha Miller – Public Domain

After the New York Times begn publishing “The Pentagon Papers” on June 13, 1971, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told President Richard M. Nixon that Daniel Ellsberg was “the most dangerous man in America and that he must be stopped at all costs.”  Nixon was not inclined to seek legal action against Ellsberg and the Times, but Kissinger convinced the president to do so.  Kissinger was never tarred with the crimes of Watergate, but his obsession with Ellsberg contributed to the worst aspects of Watergate.

The obituaries for Kissinger in the Washington Post and the New York Times paint a dramatic picture of a dangerous man, an amoral man, who was unscrupulous in his handling of the foreign and national security policies of the United States.  These obituaries document the deceit and duplicity of the only man to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser.  His dangerous policies included the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos over the objections of the secretary of defense; the “tilt” toward Pakistan that ignored Islamabad’s responsibility for the tragic events in East Pakistan; the green lighting of Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; and the sponsorship of a coup in Chile that led to the deaths of  Chilean President Salvador Allende and Commander in Chief General Rene Schneider over the objections of the deputy secretary of state.  While Schneider was dying in a Santiago hospital, Kissinger told Nixon that the Chilean military was a “pretty incompetent bunch.”

Kissinger’s most dangerous action, which could have led to a direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, received no mention in the obituaries of the Post and the Times.  In the end game of the October War in 1973, Kissinger chaired a meeting of the National Security Council that raised our military and nuclear forces to DefCon-III.  [DefCon-I is war; DefCon-II means attack is imminent; DefCon-III means increased readiness without a determination that war is imminent.  U.S. forces in the Pacific were permanently at DefCon-III because of the Vietnam War.]  The conventional wisdom is that the Soviet Union was threatening to intervene militarily because of Israeli violations of the ceasefire that were leading to the annihilation of the Egyptian III Corps.  As a result of Kissinger’s decision, according to the conventional wisdom, the heightened state of alert convinced the Soviet Politburo to reverse its decision to intervene.   It’s true that Israel violated the ceasefire that Kissinger arranged with Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, but there is no truth to the view that the Kremlin was preparing to intervene.

Kissinger must have known that the Soviet Union lacked the means to conduct power projection, particularly in the Middle East, where Israel held the upper hand, and the United States had deployed significant military forces.  The Soviets lacked the ability to conduct military operations in distant areas.  They had no network of foreign military bases; no conventional aircraft carriers.  Their tactical air forces had limited range and no aerial refueling capabilities; their amphibious lift was extremely limited and their naval infantry was extremely small.  For these reasons, the principal members of the NSC (secretary of defense, director of the CIA, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff) opposed the idea of an enhanced military and nuclear alert.

Far more worrisome is the rarely discussed fact that Kissinger’s chairing of the NSC and his decision regarding DefCon-III were serious violations of the National Security Act of 1947, which created the national security architecture that still shapes U.S. decision-making.  The National Security Act states that only the president or the vice president can chair a NSC meeting.  Nixon was asleep at the time of the meeting; his military aide, General Alexander Haig, refused to wake the president; and the new vice president, Gerald Ford, had not been confirmed.  The meeting was held after 11pm.  When Kissinger instructed Haig to get Nixon to the meeting, Haig refused.

No one enjoyed military or coercive diplomacy more than Henry Kissinger.  There were times when Kissinger wanted to deploy military forces, and Nixon had to talk him back.  In 1970, Kissinger wanted to deploy military forces to prevent the possibility of a Soviet naval repair facility in Cuba, Nixon said “I think we can resolve this with diplomacy.”  Diplomacy was applied, and Pravda announced almost immediately that Moscow had no plans to build a naval facility in the Caribbean.  In 1971, Kissinger sent an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal during the Indian-Pakistani War despite the Pentagon’s objections.  Fortunately, India ignored the presence of the carrier.

In 1975, Kissinger deployed forces to rescue the crew of the Mayaguez (who had already been released) in order to demonstrate that the new president, Gerald Ford, was willing to deploy military force.  The final 41 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall represent 25 Air Force pilots and crew, 2 Navy corpsmen, and 14 Marines; these were the men killed in the operation to rescue the crew of the Mayaguez.

Kissinger’s illegal declaration of DefCon-III did great harm to Soviet-American relations in the wake of the important arms control agreements the previous year.  It put detente on hold for several years, and it could have led to a Soviet-American confrontation.  It also did great harm to the NATO alliance, since the members of NATO were never consulted or even advised.  Moreover, they were never persuaded that there was an evidentiary basis for the decision in the first place.  Kissinger was probably our most powerful secretary of state, but he was not the wisest.  The mainstream media comparisons of Kissinger to Thomas Jefferson and George Marshall are misplaced.

Like most secretaries of state and national security advisers during the Cold War, Kissinger consistently exaggerated Soviet behavior, intentions, and capabilities in order to justify U.S. military actions, including the use of force in Vietnam.  The current warmongering among U.S. politicians and pundits with regard to China suggests that history is repeating itself.

The post Kissinger: “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

Photograph Source: Marsha Miller – Public Domain

After the New York Times begn publishing “The Pentagon Papers” on June 13, 1971, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told President Richard M. Nixon that Daniel Ellsberg was “the most dangerous man in America and that he must be stopped at all costs.”  Nixon was not inclined to seek legal action against Ellsberg and the Times, but Kissinger convinced the president to do so.  Kissinger was never tarred with the crimes of Watergate, but his obsession with Ellsberg contributed to the worst aspects of Watergate.

The obituaries for Kissinger in the Washington Post and the New York Times paint a dramatic picture of a dangerous man, an amoral man, who was unscrupulous in his handling of the foreign and national security policies of the United States.  These obituaries document the deceit and duplicity of the only man to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser.  His dangerous policies included the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos over the objections of the secretary of defense; the “tilt” toward Pakistan that ignored Islamabad’s responsibility for the tragic events in East Pakistan; the green lighting of Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; and the sponsorship of a coup in Chile that led to the deaths of  Chilean President Salvador Allende and Commander in Chief General Rene Schneider over the objections of the deputy secretary of state.  While Schneider was dying in a Santiago hospital, Kissinger told Nixon that the Chilean military was a “pretty incompetent bunch.”

Kissinger’s most dangerous action, which could have led to a direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, received no mention in the obituaries of the Post and the Times.  In the end game of the October War in 1973, Kissinger chaired a meeting of the National Security Council that raised our military and nuclear forces to DefCon-III.  [DefCon-I is war; DefCon-II means attack is imminent; DefCon-III means increased readiness without a determination that war is imminent.  U.S. forces in the Pacific were permanently at DefCon-III because of the Vietnam War.]  The conventional wisdom is that the Soviet Union was threatening to intervene militarily because of Israeli violations of the ceasefire that were leading to the annihilation of the Egyptian III Corps.  As a result of Kissinger’s decision, according to the conventional wisdom, the heightened state of alert convinced the Soviet Politburo to reverse its decision to intervene.   It’s true that Israel violated the ceasefire that Kissinger arranged with Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, but there is no truth to the view that the Kremlin was preparing to intervene.

Kissinger must have known that the Soviet Union lacked the means to conduct power projection, particularly in the Middle East, where Israel held the upper hand, and the United States had deployed significant military forces.  The Soviets lacked the ability to conduct military operations in distant areas.  They had no network of foreign military bases; no conventional aircraft carriers.  Their tactical air forces had limited range and no aerial refueling capabilities; their amphibious lift was extremely limited and their naval infantry was extremely small.  For these reasons, the principal members of the NSC (secretary of defense, director of the CIA, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff) opposed the idea of an enhanced military and nuclear alert.

Far more worrisome is the rarely discussed fact that Kissinger’s chairing of the NSC and his decision regarding DefCon-III were serious violations of the National Security Act of 1947, which created the national security architecture that still shapes U.S. decision-making.  The National Security Act states that only the president or the vice president can chair a NSC meeting.  Nixon was asleep at the time of the meeting; his military aide, General Alexander Haig, refused to wake the president; and the new vice president, Gerald Ford, had not been confirmed.  The meeting was held after 11pm.  When Kissinger instructed Haig to get Nixon to the meeting, Haig refused.

No one enjoyed military or coercive diplomacy more than Henry Kissinger.  There were times when Kissinger wanted to deploy military forces, and Nixon had to talk him back.  In 1970, Kissinger wanted to deploy military forces to prevent the possibility of a Soviet naval repair facility in Cuba, Nixon said “I think we can resolve this with diplomacy.”  Diplomacy was applied, and Pravda announced almost immediately that Moscow had no plans to build a naval facility in the Caribbean.  In 1971, Kissinger sent an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal during the Indian-Pakistani War despite the Pentagon’s objections.  Fortunately, India ignored the presence of the carrier.

In 1975, Kissinger deployed forces to rescue the crew of the Mayaguez (who had already been released) in order to demonstrate that the new president, Gerald Ford, was willing to deploy military force.  The final 41 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall represent 25 Air Force pilots and crew, 2 Navy corpsmen, and 14 Marines; these were the men killed in the operation to rescue the crew of the Mayaguez.

Kissinger’s illegal declaration of DefCon-III did great harm to Soviet-American relations in the wake of the important arms control agreements the previous year.  It put detente on hold for several years, and it could have led to a Soviet-American confrontation.  It also did great harm to the NATO alliance, since the members of NATO were never consulted or even advised.  Moreover, they were never persuaded that there was an evidentiary basis for the decision in the first place.  Kissinger was probably our most powerful secretary of state, but he was not the wisest.  The mainstream media comparisons of Kissinger to Thomas Jefferson and George Marshall are misplaced.

Like most secretaries of state and national security advisers during the Cold War, Kissinger consistently exaggerated Soviet behavior, intentions, and capabilities in order to justify U.S. military actions, including the use of force in Vietnam.  The current warmongering among U.S. politicians and pundits with regard to China suggests that history is repeating itself.

The post Kissinger: “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

1975, April 28 – Roosevelt Room – The White House

Henry (Heinz) Alfred Kissinger, national security director and secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and advisor to eight other presidents, died at 100 years of age on November 30.

Already the corporate media and politicians are memorializing him as a great statesman and brilliant diplomat, but for the many countries his advice and Cold War machinations destroyed and the millions of innocent lives lost and their bereft families, it came decades too late. Indeed, when the ditch is dug for Kissinger’s casket, the gravedigger should make room under it for a gravel-filled catch basin to collect and carry away all the blood that will likely drain from his hands, lest it bubble up through the sod and stain the grass red.

It was Kissinger who dreamed up Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam as a campaign theme to win support from a war-weary nation and ensure Nixon’s election victory over the hapless Cold Warrior Hubert Humphrey. That “plan,” as it turned out, was to expand the US war into neutral Cambodia and Laos, and later, when that didn’t work, to launch, in mid-December 1972 just ahead of the start of Nixon’s second disastrous term, a weeks’ long B-52 carpet-bombing of North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam).

It was a massive war crime that saw Red River dikes, power plants, hospitals, schools and even the national music conservatory, destroyed and countless civilians killed in hopes of “breaking the will” of the North Vietnamese people to fight on. The plan failed, like many of this supposedly brilliant or at least canny “diplomat’s” creation, but at a huge cost in civilian lives and the lives of soldiers fighting for their country.

A year later, Kissinger, as Nixon’s key international “security” advisor, orchestrated a coup in Chile by first destroying the country’s economy with sanctions (“Make the economy scream,” he cruelly advised), and then encourage revolt by the formerly apolitical Chilean military under the direction of the bloody-minded and power-hungry Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew and killed the country’s popular and popularly elected Marxist socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens, as well as killing and “disappearing” over 20,000 supporters — a catastrophe from which formerly democratic Chile is still recovering 50 years later.

Like Vietnam, Chile posed no possible threat to the United States at any time, yet both countries and their people were put through hell by Kissinger. For those crimes alone, if there were a hell he should be consigned to eternal damnation in it himself, at the deepest level of torment.

The list of Kissinger’s other atrocities and war crimes is long, ranging from green-lighting the massacre of independence advocates on the Island territory of East Timor by Indonesian military forces, Pakistan’s military slaughter of independence-seeking Bengalis in the eastern half of that country, the so called “dirty war” against leftists in Argentina by the military junta then ruling that country, as well as support for white colonial forces and white-ruled South Africa against African liberation forces in colonies like Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and elsewhere on that continent.

Heinz Arthur Kissinger, an immigrant to the US who at 15, fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish family taking the given name of Henry, never showed any remorse for the bloody trail he left around the globe (and at home in the form of physically and mentally wounded US troops), or for the disasters his “policy advice” caused in the impacted countries. That said, he certainly knew he was loathed internationally and was guilty of war crimes deserving imprisonment or worse.

Kissinger, who in his later years when he got rich capitalizing on his government experience by founding Kissinger & Associates, a Wall Street geopolitical consulting firm for foreign companies and foreign leaders, was cautious about where he traveled abroad on business for fear that in some countries he could find himself arrested and charged with war crimes. He was also cautious about keeping his client list of wretched capitalist and vicious autocratic leaders secret to avoid embarassing them or himself.)

He wasn’t just being paranoid either. On several occasions this nearly happened, as in 2002 when he was in London and was nearly arrested on Irish charges relating to his policies and tactics in Vietnam. A year earlier, while drumming up business in France, Paris gendarmes served him at his luxury Paris hotel with a writ requiring to him to appear at an inquest into possible war crimes in Laos and Cambodia. He managed with French government assistance to flee the country.

Kissinger was always treated with undeserved respect by the establishment US media and by politicians of both parties, and was given credit for such noted diplomatic “breakthroughs” as the US turn from pathetic refusal to recognize the Communist government of China, which had been established in 1949, and the 1979 Camp David Accords that produced for a time aan easing in the bitter relationship between Israel and the Palestinians in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Those much praised successes, however, were not an indication of any humanism on his part, but of cold calculations about US national interest in isolating the Soviet Union in one case, and solidifying Israel’s position as a lynchpin of US power projection in the Middle East on the other.

Kissinger was in fact in 1973 selected, together with DRV diplomat Le Duc Tho, to share in being offered a Nobel Peace Prize. It was a controversial decision that led two members of the Nobel Committee to make the unprecedented decision to resign in public disgust. Le Doc Tho himself had the decency to decline the award as inappropriate. Kissinger in contrast happily accepted it (like an unworthy President Obama did almost 30 years later), and added it as a trophy to his already shamelessly inflated resume.

I know it is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead but in the case of Kissinger, an egocentric, self-promoting, power-seeking guy who never expressed the slightest contrition for the death and mayhem he caused through his criminal policies — either those that were “successful” or those that were unmitigated disasters. At least Nixon had some of his crimes catch up with him, and was compelled to resign the presidency to avoid impeachment, conviction and prison time. Many other historic villains have suffered public humiliation, arrest and jail, or even execution, but Kissinger managed to avoid any such public reckoning and so it seems fair to at least call him out in death.

Given the number of heroes who die early, and the number of evil-doers who live to ripe old age it’s clear that nature seems to do a poor job of divining who deserves to grow old and who gets cut down too early. Maybe some medical research should be done to see if Kissinger had a heart. At the very least it would be scientifically interesting if it were discovered that he survived for decades without a working one.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff.

For a refresher on Kissinger’s legacy, which was revealed to be even worse than previously known, listen to the Gaslit Nation spring 2023 interview with investigative journalist Nick Turse on his reporting for The Intercept into the generational trauma of Kissinger in Cambodia. Not content to prolong the Vietnam war, Kissinger spread the conflict to formally neutral Cambodia, helping bring to power the repressive Khmer Rouge. Add to that his enabling of genocides in East Timor and Bangladesh, as well as backing dictators and murder squads in Latin America. It’s obvious why he was also a fan of Trump. All this is to say, where were you when you first heard the news that Kissinger will no longer be advising other war criminals, and how did you celebrate? 

Andrea shares a story of spotting Kissinger at a party while holding a throwable glass of wine in her hand, and why it’s important to celebrate the demise of war criminals–that’s how you build a culture to prevent future war criminals. The Patreon-only portion of this week’s bonus episode features comments and questions from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. Topics range from turning our current rollercoaster of living history into the next Nineteen Eighty-Four, celebrating our acts of civil resistance, books to read to find your voice in the world, and more! To join the conversation, sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit. 

Show Notes:

Henry Kissinger, responsible for millions of deaths, dies at 100 https://theintercept.com/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-death/

Henry Kissinger: ‘If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.’ https://forward.com/culture/470300/kissinger-at-100-if-it-were-not-for-the-accident-of-my-birth-i-would-be/

Alex Gibney Documentary: The Trials of Henry Kissinger https://www.amazon.com/Trials-Henry-Kissinger-Eugene-Jarecki/dp/B00A9IFSBY

Kissinger on the Nixon tapes https://youtu.be/OKoqIqQ0E08?si=vV7uM8nNwyPiHoMI

Kissinger, a longtime Putin confidant, sidles up to Trump  https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-kissinger-russia-putin-232925

Andrea’s celebratory tweet: What is the first thing Satan said to Kissinger? https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa/status/1730055040985874722?t=UftX3tgzsaT9HQzlkzYbMw&s=19

Monty Python song “Henry Kissinger”: https://youtu.be/ABeGhyAD_DM?si=3t1FR3jsar78sqKv

Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck0.uBQX.Rdb-cCaQzu18&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Former U.S. secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. He leaves behind a legacy of American statecraft that brought war, covert intervention and mass atrocities to Southeast Asia, South Asia and South America. “Few people have had a hand in so much death and destruction,” says our guest, human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. By some accounts, Kissinger was responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million people. We focus today on Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, Bangladesh (previously East Pakistan) and East Timor, where, Brody argues, Kissinger ordered and oversaw U.S. actions that would make him “liable for war crimes.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph Source: meesh from washington dc – CC BY 2.0

Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers.

CH:   Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to encounter here. All the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports of your demise.

HK:   You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically, assess the odds.

CH:   You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?

HK:   Everything is open to negotiation.

CH:   Have you threatened to bomb Heaven — secretly of course?

HK:   Very funny. As a matter of fact, Woytila — Pope John Paul II, I should say — has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.

CH:   What about?

HK:   That worthless book you wrote about me — The Trial of Henry Kissinger. John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign this affidavit — my lawyers have already prepared it — saying that you unconditionally withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were forced on you by your Harper’s editors.

CH:   Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!

HK:   Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.

CH:   Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate…

HK:   My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the matter as mature adults — both of us, if I may say, now in potentially challenging circumstances.

CH:   Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I have not dropped off the perch.

HK:   Off the perch… How very English.  You will dismiss these as a mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your part, but (flourishes bundle of newspapers) The New York Times certainly thinks you’re dead. The Washington Post thinks you’re dead.

CH:   Let me look at those… (snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently)

HK:   Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.

CH:   They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine…. I… I… (passes hand over brow) Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?

HK:   Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (pulls a large flask from his pocket). Some schnapps?

CH:   I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm. (drinks)

HK:   Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?

CH:   He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”

HK:  Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called The Missionary Position.

CH:   Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.

HK:   The “old slag”, as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in libraries and all over the Internet.  She, like me, would dearly love to see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.

CH:   And that, of course, I will not do!

HK:   You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?

CH:   Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe is infinite.

HK:   Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.

He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room. HK makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near the space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room.

CH:   Great God!

HK:   You seem to have reverted to religious belief with startling speed.

CH:   No, no. It was purely a façon de parler. Not a pretty sight.

HK:   But in your view, a pure hallucination, nein? No need to kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson.

Before CH can answer, the fallen angels seize him and start dragging him toward the open curtains. They are about to hurl him into the pit, when…

ST. MICHAEL (suddenly appearing through the gates of Heaven)   Stop!

He hands CH and HK tickets.

These are one-day passes to Heaven. In Mr. Hitchens’ case, for purposes of interrogation by the Board of Inquiry and Final Judgment.

Exeunt St. Michael, HK and CH through ornate gilded doors to Heaven. 

SCENE TWO

Heaven. A vast Baroque gallery, in which an animated throng is enjoying itself in something closely resembling a cocktail party.

ST. MICHAEL:   We’ve just remodeled. Before, we had something in the Gothic style, but the feeling was that in keeping with the times there should be more gold, more sense of extravagant illusion. And that of course brought us to the Baroque. You will no doubt detect many echoes of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.

HK:   I think I see His Holiness John Paul II, over there. With your permission, I might have a word?

ST. MICHAEL:   Of course. And Mr. Hitchens, before we get to the Board of Inquiry, I’m sure there are some immortals you’d like to tip your hat to.

CH:   The hat is all very well, but….

ST. MICHAEL:   How forgetful of me! In general we’re an abstemious crowd here, but there’s no ban on moderate enjoyment.

A cherub swoops down, proffering a well-stocked tray.

CH:   (gulping down one glass quickly and taking another)  Angel!

POPE PIUS V (joining the group):  Michael, I couldn’t help overhearing your reference to the Palazzo Colonna, built in the late seventeenth century, and of course memorable for the marvelous depictions on the ceiling of its Grand Gallery of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, our Holy League’s historic defeat of the Ottomans.

CH:   Ha! The wily Turk, lurking like a cobra ’midst the fairest flowers of God’s creation, lies ever ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting traveler and bugg…

PIUS V:   I don’t believe I’ve had the honor.

ST. MICHAEL:   This is Mr. Hitchens, a British-American writer here on a possibly brief visit. And (to CH) this is St. Pius V, who indeed occupied the Holy See at the time of Lepanto.

CH  (theatrical bow):  The honor is mine.

PIUS V:   Those were the days, when the wind was truly at our backs!  210 ships of the Ottoman armada — almost their entire fleet — sent to the bottom of the Gulf of Patras; the Counter Reformation in full spate; the Council of Trent a magnificent success; heresy confronted and extirpated by our Inquisitors.

CH:   The screams of their victims no doubt inaudible amid the general brays of triumph.

PIUS V:   Speaking as a former Inquisitor, let me say that by modern standards of bloodshed consequent upon religious or ideological conflicts, the number of those who perished by reason of their adamant heresy was startlingly small. Have you kept up with recent scholarship on the topic? I thought not. Out of 62,000 cases judged by the Inquisition in Italy after 1542, only 1,250 ended with death sentences. The Spanish Inquisition held an average of 350 trials a year between 1560-1700 and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people.

CH (snatching two more glasses from the tray of a passing cherub):  I do not propose to stand silently here, your so-called Holiness, and endure from a dotard in a white petticoat filthy apologias for atrocious barbarism in the name of his so-called God.

ST. MICHAEL:   Mr. Hitchens! I suggest you moderate your language immediately.

PIUS V (walking away):  Brutto insolente, ignorante, ubriacone pieno di merda!

MOTHER TERESA (approaching, with Pope John Paul II; HK lurking discreetly):  Brutto insolente, indeed! Mr. Hitchens, I understand from Dr. Kissinger that you are prepared to repudiate your libels upon me.

CH:   Certainly not.

JOHN PAUL II:   But why not? After all, your arguments against the Blessed Teresa were either trivial or absurd, and in all instances morally odious. To focus on the latter: by 1996, the Blessed Teresa was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. And you, what were you doing for the poor? Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?

CH:   I have never had pretensions to be in the professional charity business.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE:   If I may intrude. Of course, as a great admirer of Mother Teresa, I was in receipt of Mr. Hitchens’ barbs, so I do speak as a biased witness. I regard it as truly extraordinary that while Mr. Hitchens was blithely ladling his sewage over our heads, he was — as a sometime US correspondent, I have followed these matters closely from here in Heaven — a fierce and influential advocate of one of the most violent onslaughts on the poor in recent historical memory: first, the sanctions on Iraq, which caused untold misery to Iraq’s poorest citizens; then the actual attack of 2003, which eventually prompted the deaths of over a million Iraqis and a crisis that still virtually paralyses that wretched nation.

CH:   I would not change a syllable of what I wrote.

MM:   Worse still — I speak also as someone who reported from the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule — Mr. Hitchens displayed himself as a craven apparatchik of the Bush White House, actually going to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the night before the invasion to give a pep talk to the President’s staff about their noble mission.

Since Beatrice Webb was my wife’s aunt, I am intimately familiar with the follies of socialists. You, in your contempt for  “lesser” cultures, remind me of the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, who argued that to oppose Rhodes’s suppression of the Matabele uprising was to oppose “the spread of civilization”, and that “the higher culture always has the greater right on its side over the lower; if necessary it has the historical right, yea, the duty, to subjugate it.”

CH:   The mission to Baghdad was noble: the eviction of a filthy tyrant…

MM:   …was worth the denial of medicine and medical equipment for babies, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis into near starvation, the creation of millions of internal refugees plus those who managed to flee the country, the unleashing of sectarian bloodshed on an unparalleled scale? Just so that your hero, Tony Blair, and your supreme leader, Mr. Bush, could boast, “Mission Accomplished”?

CH:   Since His Holiness St. Pius V, who has departed the field of disputation, was invoking the Battle of Lepanto, I’m surprised not to hear any parallels drawn between that engagement and the Crusade against Islam, of which the war in Iraq — and the terror axis of Hussein and Osama — was a significant element.

MM:   You mean your precious crusade against so-called “Islamo-fascism”, the bizarre coinage of a Trotskyite, such as you once were? Lepanto at least saw the Ottoman armada, and the unfortunate slaves who rowed their galleys, sent to the bottom of the sea. Your crusade in Iraq saw the triumph of the Shi’a, and a significant victory for Iran. With Vice President Cheney you must be the last two men alive who believe in the Hussein/Osama axis.

JOHN PAUL II:   The Holy See strongly opposed the war. Before it began, I sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to tell Bush it would be a disaster and would destroy human life. The war was useless, served no purpose and was a defeat for humanity. Such was my view, which was the recorded opinion of the Holy See.

MM:   Surely, a more humane posture than your own hosannas to cluster bombs: “Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and, guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”

CH:   Rather well put, if I say so myself.

MM:   You are impervious to rebuke, which is not surprising, since if one rebuke is let in the door, it can usher in another, and then some serious inner reflection may become unavoidable. As Cardinal Newman put it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

CH:   Newman, that old queen!

MM:   Like St. Pius, I’ll quit the field now, but let me return to something His Holiness John Paul II said. “Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?”

What has constantly struck me is the desolate sterility of your atheism. We had atheists in our generation, of course, but they lived in a world and consorted with people for whom religion had profound meaning, often inspiring them to acts of nobility and extraordinary self-sacrifice. In your book, religious people are stupid. But they weren’t stupid, and the atheists — I’m thinking of my dear friend, a man you profess to have admired, Claud Cockburn — didn’t deride them, but cheerfully swapped quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. The context was one of respect and mutual striving for a better world.

What sort of moral leadership did you, the great and ultimately rather wealthy exponent of atheism display? Extreme disloyalty to close friends, constant public drunkenness and brutish rudeness, particularly to women,  and a life, if I may say so, of almost psychotic self-centeredness and exhibitionism. You had your claque — Messrs Amis, Fenton and the others — and their energies in promoting you as a major intellectual and stylist were unceasing, and in their somewhat homoerotic loyalty, rather touching, but I don’t think the verdict of history will be quite so kind.

SCENE THREE

Antechamber to Heaven.  CH is sitting on a bench. Door opens and St. Michael bids HK a cheerful goodbye.

HK:   Mr. Hitchens. You seem somewhat subdued. (proffering flask) A little schnapps?

CH:   My dear fellow! (drinks deeply) You arranged your affairs successfully?

HK:   Entirely so. In large part owing to you. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, not to mention St. Pius V, were so shocked by your views and by your language that they entirely discounted the charges you leveled against me, and believe me to have been vilely traduced.

CH:   I suppose I should be glad to have been of service. But let me ask a question: since you are Jewish, why would you be taking such trouble to build up contacts in what is clearly a Christian Heaven?

HK:   Between ourselves, I am preparing for a final conversion and absolution. Jews are vague about heaven and, after a lifetime’s observation, I am inclined to think that the atmosphere in Gehenna would be extremely acrimonious. Your plans?

CH:   Once again, I feel it necessary to insist that I do not recognize myself as being in Heaven, or disputing with a sixteenth-century pope, or indeed being reprimanded by St. Michael and Malcolm Muggeridge. Or talking affably with Henry Kissinger. So, please, regard this as ongoing cerebral activity on the part of C.H. Hitchens, patient at M.D. Anderson.

HK:   As you wish. But here, (slips him the flask) just remember Dr. Johnson’s stone. Farewell, my friend.

Lights fade to a dark red.

This was originally published in the April 20, 2012 edition of CounterPunch.

The post Hitchens and Kissinger at the Pearly Gates appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alexander Cockburn.

Photograph Source: The Central Intelligence Agency – Public Domain

“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”
– Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters. Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity. The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments. Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations. Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise. He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play. His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium. Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid of revolutionary movements. It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom. As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command. His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974. The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions. Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”. Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

This also meant that such abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973. In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the pedlar whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment. By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive. The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.” But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster. When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”. When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough. He made it to a century without his collar being fingered. He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France. Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil. And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

The post Henry Kissinger: Snake Oil Salesman of Gangster Realism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

1975, April 28 – Roosevelt Room – The White House

The earth is freed of one of its more despicable demons. Henry Kissinger is dead. A corpse. One of history’s most evil humans has shed his mortal coil. There are other writers who will list his deeds.  Those who operated in the same hellish sphere of power and death as Kissinger will laud his statesmanship and his intellectual prowess.  Those who disagreed with his agenda will mention the millions he killed, the destruction he commanded, and the numbers left sick and homeless in his wake. My task here is to remind the living of the callowness and callousness with which he dispatched these deeds.

There is a Saturday Night Live episode where the late John Belushi plays the role of Henry Kissinger.  In his inimitable comedic genius, Belushi made Kissinger look and sound like the swine he was. I always find it worth the moment it takes to watch.  Kissinger was considered a voice of sanity in the Nixon White House. That doesn’t mean he was, just that the rest of the men there were even more insane.  The list of murderous atrocities Henry Kissinger was in some part responsible for is rivaled only by Adolf Hitler in 20th century history. That list begins with the secret bombing of Cambodia, the genocide in Timor, the coup in Chile and the subsequent decades of fascist rule. It continues from there. If asked, I would argue that the primary difference between Hitler and Kissinger was the calculating and dispassionate manner in which Kissinger dispatched people to their deaths.  Indeed, when asked about whether or not the bombing of Cambodia was effective, Kissinger responded by saying, “Whether we got it right or not is really secondary.”  The deaths of more than a hundred thousand Cambodians in the bombing (and the subsequent coup and murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge after the defeat of Saigon) were inconsequential in his mind.  This epitomizes Kissinger and is a primary reason he is near the forefront of history’s mass murderers.

Despite his record of sociopathic disregard for humanity, or perhaps because of it and the accompanying notoriety, Kissinger remained a go-to man for the establishment media looking for justification of the Pentagon’s latest assault or Wall Street’s next economic victim.  These members of the media who admired his ability to ignore humanity in the pursuit of power are accomplices in his rampage of mass murder and deserve a trial Kissinger never had to face.

Kissinger began his notorious career when he wrote his doctoral thesis on the strategic use of nuclear weapons.   In that dissertation, he rationalized the use of such weapons in the course of war.  In an almost Eichmannesque way, he actually provided answers to the question: what would justify the devastation and death a nuclear attack would cause?  One of his final public utterances included a remark on how “tempting” a nuclear attack on northern Korea  would be.  Like the Nazis who set up the death camps and managed the trains traveling to those camps, Kissinger’s lack of compassion was notable in its failure to even acknowledge such an emotion existed.  Although casualty figures were acknowledged in the aforementioned treatise on the efficacy of nuclear war (deaths that are now known as collateral damage), the humanity of those casualties was not. The primary concern for Kissinger was always the expansion of capitalist power.  Humans were mere obstacles to overcome in pursuit of that evil elixir.

The great journalist I.F. Stone wrote this about Kissinger in 1972:

“In his books and in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund report of 1957-1958 on “International Security: The Military Aspect” which was prepared under his direction, Kissinger, like his hero Metternich, put his great talents and greater energies at the service of a rickety and anachronistic order. “The willingness to engage in nuclear war when necessary,” said the Rockefeller report, “is part of the price of our freedom.’”(NYRB 11/2/1972)

If there is a hell, and if there is eternal justice, I imagine Henry Kissinger has had a place reserved there for several decades already. If so, and if Satan has any sense of where justice and irony intersect, the flames already searing Kissinger’s soul are fueled by napalm.  Those on earth who still seek his counsel will finally have to visit this deputy of Satan in surroundings more appropriate to his soulless corpse.

If there is nothing after this earthly life, then I am certain that any ground Henry Kissinger is buried in will be forever tainted.  Indeed, I would not be surprised if no trees or other life grew nearby and the worms refused to eat his rotting flesh.

The post Kissinger Finally Departs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

Nixon and Kissinger at the White House. Photo: Presidential Material Staff, Nation Archives and Research Administration [NARA].

I am a scholar of American foreign policy who has written on Kissinger’s service from 1969 to 1977 as national security adviser and secretary of state under the Nixon and Ford administrations. I have seen how his foreign policy views and actions played out for good and, mostly, for ill.

When Kissinger entered government as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, he espoused a narrow perspective of the national interest, known as “realpolitik,” primarily centered on maximizing the economic and military power of the United States.

This power- and transactionalist-oriented approach to foreign policy produced a series of destructive outcomes. They ranged from fomenting coups that put in place murderous dictatorships, as in Chile, to killing unarmed civilians, as in Cambodia, and alienating potential allies, as in India.

Damaging approach

In his dissertation turned first book, Kissinger argued foreign policymakers are measured by their ability to recognize shifts in political, military and economic power in the international system – and then to make those changes work in their country’s favor.

In this model of foreign policy, the political values – democracy, human rights – that make the United States a distinctive player in the international system have no role.

This perspective, with its self-declared realistic agenda, along with Kissinger’s place at the top of the foreign policy establishment as national security adviser and secretary of state for the better part of a decade, made Kissinger into something of a foreign policy oracle for American policymakers of all stripes.

Yet Kissinger’s record reveals the problems with the narrow conception of national interest devoid of values. His time in government was characterized by major policy decisions that were generally detrimental to the United States’ standing in the world.

Cambodian carnage

When Nixon took office in 1968, he had promised an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.

Nixon faced a problem, however, in trying to gain control of the conflict: the porousness of Vietnam’s borders with Cambodia, through which supplies and soldiers from North Vietnam flowed into the South.

To address this problem, Nixon dramatically escalated a bombing campaign in Cambodia started under his predecessor, President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon later initiated a ground invasion of Cambodia to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes.

As William Shawcross details in his defining book on the subject, Kissinger supported Nixon’s Cambodia policy.

Despite the fact that Cambodia was not party to the conflict fought in Vietnam, U.S. bombing of Cambodia is estimated to have exceeded the total tonnage of all the bombs dropped by the U.S. during World War II, including the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The campaign killed tens of thousands of Cambodians and displaced millions. The destruction caused by the bombing as well as partial American occupation in 1970 were crucial to creating the political and social instability that facilitated the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. That regime is estimated to have killed 2 million Cambodians.

Supporting a genocidal leader

In 1970 and 1971, Nixon, with Kissinger’s advice and encouragement, supported Pakistan’s dictatorial president Yahya Khan in his genocidal repression of Bengali nationalists and war against India.

That conflict is estimated to have killed at least 300,000 and possibly more than a million Bengalis. Khan targeted for complete elimination the Hindus in what would become Bangladesh.

In frustration at pressure from India over the subsequent refugee crisis, Kissinger agreed with Nixon that India – a fellow democracy bearing the burden of millions of refugees from East Pakistan — needed a “mass famine” to put the country in its place.

The duo went so far as to send an aircraft carrier battle group to threaten India after it suffered a series of cross-border attacks by Pakistan.

Nixon and Kissinger’s policy in support of Pakistan during a period of unvarnished brutality and aggression played a significant role in pushing India toward an alignment with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger injected distrust of the United States into the foundations of Indian foreign policy, dividing the world’s oldest and largest democracies for decades.

Exploiting Kurds, empowering Saddam

In 1972, Kissinger agreed to a request from the Shah of Iran to provide military aid to Kurds in Iraq who were seeking an independent homeland. Iran’s goal was to put pressure on the Iraqi regime controlled by Saddam Hussein, while Kissinger sought to keep the Soviets out of the region. The scheme was predicated on the Kurds’ belief that the United States supported Kurdish independence, a point the Shah noted. But the U.S. abandoned the Kurds on the eve of an Iraqi offensive in 1975, and Kissinger coldly noted that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Ultimately, the Iraqi defeat of the Kurds would empower Hussein, who would go on to destabilize the region, kill hundreds of thousands of people and fight unprovoked wars with Iran and the United States.

‘Amoral vision’

After Kissinger left government service in 1977, he founded Kissinger Associates, a geopolitical consulting firm. Publicly, Kissinger consistently advised U.S. policymakers to bend U.S. policy to accommodate the interests and actions of important foreign powers like Russia and China.

These positions were consistent with Kissinger’s demonstrated willingness to trade away rights of others to gain advantage for the U.S. His positions also presumably enabled Kissinger Associates to maintain access with the foreign policy elites of those countries.

In May 2022, Kissinger publicly argued that Ukraine, a victim of unprovoked aggression by Russia, should cede portions of its internationally recognized territory seized by Russia – as in Crimea – or by Russian proxies such as the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Kissinger also maintained that the United States should accommodate China, arguing against a concerted effort by democracies to counter the rising power and influence of China.

Foreign policy is a difficult field, fraught with complexity and unanticipated consequences. Kissinger’s vision, however, does not offer a panacea to the challenge of American foreign policy.

Over decades, Kissinger’s amoral vision of national self-interest has produced its own set of disasters, a reality the American public and foreign policy leaders are well-advised to bear in mind.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post A Tortured and Deadly Legacy: Kissinger and Realpolitik in US Foreign Policy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jarrod Hayes.

“‘He’ll have ye smilin’,” an old Irish saying goes, “while he takes the gold out of your teeth’.”

— Charles Glass, London Review of Books, Oct 20, 2022

The obituaries of criminals, masterful or otherwise, are always going to be sordid matters.  Either one has time for the deeds, giving column space to their execution and legacy, or one focuses on the extraneous details: voice, accent, suit, demeanour. “He may have killed the odd person or two, but he did have style.”

Much of the Henry Kissinger School of Idolatry is of the latter propensity.  The nasty deeds are either misread or diminished – notably when they have to do with the global infliction of mass death, prolongation of conflict, or the overthrow of democratic governments.  Instead, time is given to the perceptions of what is supposedly meant to have been the workings of an oversized brain in international relations.  Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise.  He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.

As former National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, he was meant to be the great exponent of realism, which, rebadged, might simply be described as elevated gangsterism at play.  His 1957 work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 studied the Europe of the admired diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, revealing a mind keen on keeping international power in fine equilibrium.  Stability and order were primary goals; justice and human rights were concepts that had little to no role to play.

Metternich, alongside British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, was to construct a post-Napoleonic order suspicious, even paranoid, of revolutionary movements.  It held social and political progress in check; doused the fires of freedom.  As a result, Kissinger reasons, Europe maintained stability from Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For all that, Kissinger would write that Metternich lacked “the ability to contemplate an abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome – or perish in the process.” As if envisaging his own future role in US diplomacy, he suggested that “men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but the tasks they set themselves.”

This gnomic drivel was precisely the sort that fed a media illusion of the big-brained sage in command.  His bloodied hands were washed on the international stage by such absurd titles as “Henry of Arabia,” one given to him by Time Magazine in 1974.  The same magazine would give him front-cover billing in February 1969 as one keen on “New Approaches to Friends and Foes”, and repeat the treatment on no fewer than fourteen other occasions.  Not to be outdone, Newsweek was positively crawling in depicting the German-Jewish émigré who made his name at Harvard and on the world stage as “Super K”.

As the Establishment Courtesan, Kissinger sought out such society reporters as Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to emetically inquire why she did not assume the master strategist to be “a secret swinger”.  Sadistic touches to his curriculum vitae could thereby be ignored, including a butcher’s bill that would eventually run into roughly 3 million souls from the Vietnam War to Cambodia, East Timor, Bangladesh, the “dirty wars” of Latin America, and a number of encouragements and interventions in Africa.

This also meant that abysmal contributions such as his spoiling role in prolonging the war in Vietnam by several years in order to satisfy the electoral lust of his eventual boss, Richard Nixon, could be overlooked in favour of “shuttle diplomacy ” in ending the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973.  In this, he resembled, as Charles Glass suggested with striking salience, a certain “American frontier archetype: the peddler whose wagonload of patent medicines promised to cure every ailment.  By the time the rubes realised that his bottles contained snake oil, he had left town.”

A far better appreciation of the Kissinger legacy would be gained by consulting such publications as that ever reliable, if bleak source of primary documents, the National Security Archive.  The Archive pursued the US government with admirable tenacity, alleging that Kissinger had sought to remove, retain and control some 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of his phone conversations (“telcons”) as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977.

As the director of the Archive, Tom Blanton, piquantly remarked, “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom.”  But the telcons are also illustrative, less of Kissinger the realist who furnished his employer with fearless advice than that of a truckler, obedient to his paymaster.  When Nixon made the decision to commence the secret bombing of Cambodia to target Hanoi’s supply routes in March 1969, Kissinger conveyed the order to Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird without demur. He also states firmly that “there is to be no public comment at all from anyone at any level either complaining or threatening”.  When public comment did make its way to the New York Times in May that year, Kissinger badgered the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a number of selected government officials and journalists under surveillance.

While one’s death is rarely a planned thing – the Grim Reaper makes calls at all unexpected hours – there was a sense in Kissinger’s case that he had cheated it just long enough.  He made it to a century without his collar being fingered.  He avoided, in the early 2000s, attempted legal suits for human rights violations in the UK and France.  Despite failing health, he was surrounded by the Establishment sycophants of which he had been one, worshipping power over principle while proffering snake oil.  And there were a goodly number of them for the sendoff.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

Credited for arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and shuttle diplomacy in pursuit of Middle East peace, Kissinger had a great impact on events across Asia. 

He was a central figure in President Richard Nixon’s early 1970s U.S. diplomatic opening with China and won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War.

Critics condemn his role in the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, his backing of Pakistan's military despite its 1971 campaign of killings and mass rape in East Pakistan, the future Bangladesh. 

They say he greenlighted Indonesia's seizure of former Portuguese colony East Timor in 1975 that led to a quarter century of brutal occupation.

Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, led arms control talks with the Soviet Union, and worked to improve relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors through intensive shuttle diplomacy. 

He visited China more than 100 times, and met every leader, and advised at least 10 U.S. presidents on foreign policy.

His first, secret, visit to Beijing in 1971 opened the door to diplomatic relations between China and the United States seven years later.

Improved U.S.-China relations gave Kissinger leverage against the the two countries' shared Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, leading to arms control treaties between Washington and Moscow.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Kissinger’s wisdom “led presidents, secretaries of state, national security advisors, and other leaders from both parties to seek his counsel.”

Amid widespread mourning by Chinese state media and social media users, Xi and other top leaders sent condolences to Kissinger's family.

"Dr. Kissinger was a good old friend of the Chinese people. He is a pioneer and builder of Sino-U.S. relations," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a regular news conference.

"China and the U.S. should carry forward Kissinger's strategic vision, political courage and diplomatic wisdom... and promote the sound, stable and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations," Wang added.

 Xi called Kissinger "a world-renowned strategist, and a good old friend of the Chinese people.”

The Shanghai Communique paved the way for diplomatic normalization and trade relations between the U.S. and China.

His last trip to Beijing featured a meeting with President Xi Jinping in July, shortly after Kissinger’s 100th birthday.

"Half a century ago, he made a historic contribution to the normalization of China-U.S. relations with brilliant strategic vision, benefiting both countries as well as changing the world,” Xi said in response to Kissinger's death.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA.

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Sept. 1, 1975.

The encomiums have flowed voluminously for Henry Kissinger, and there have been some condemnations too. But even in the latter, little attention has been paid to his efforts to prevent peace from breaking out in the Mideast — efforts which helped cause the 1973 Arab–Israeli War and set in stone the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This underappreciated aspect of Kissinger’s career adds tens of thousands of lives to his body count, which is in the millions.

Kissinger, who died at 100 on Wednesday, served in the U.S. government from 1969 to 1977, during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. He began as Nixon’s national security adviser. Then, in Nixon’s second term, he was appointed secretary of state, a position he held on to after Ford became president following Nixon’s resignation.

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. 

In the following years, the ultimate fallout from the war — in particular, what, if any, of the new territory Israel would be able to keep — was still fluid. In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this. 

This was significant because at this point, many Arab countries, Egypt in particular, were allies of the Soviets and relied on them for arms supplies. Hosni Mubarak, who later became Egypt’s president and/or dictator for 30 years, started out as a pilot in the Egyptian air force and received training in Moscow and Kyrgyzstan, which was a Soviet republic at the time.

When Nixon took office in 1969, William Rogers, his first secretary of state, took the Soviet stance seriously. Rogers negotiated with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., for most of the year. This produced what American diplomat David A. Korn, then assigned to Tel Aviv, Israel, described as “a comprehensive and detailed U.S. proposal for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 

One person prevented this from going forward: Henry Kissinger. Backstage in the Nixon administration, he worked assiduously to prevent peace.

This was not due to any great personal affection felt by Kissinger for Israel and its expansionist goals. Kissinger, while Jewish, was happy to work for Nixon, perhaps the most volubly antisemitic president in U.S. history, which is saying something. (“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews?” Nixon once wondered in an Oval Office soliloquy. He then answered his own question, explaining, “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”)

Rather, Kissinger perceived all the world through the prism of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Any settlement at the time would require the involvement of the Soviets, and hence was unacceptable to him. At a period when it appeared in public that an agreement with the Soviets might be imminent, Kissinger told an underling — as he himself recorded in his memoir “White House Years” — that was not going to happen because “we did not want a quick success [emphasis in the original].” In the same book, Kissinger explained that the Soviet Union later agreed to principles even more favorable to Israel, so favorable that Kissinger himself didn’t understand why the Soviets acceded to them. Nevertheless, Kissinger wrote, “the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes — as I had intended.”

The results were catastrophic for all involved. Anwar el-Sadat, then Egypt’s president, announced in 1971 that the country would make peace with Israel based on conditions in line with Rogers’s efforts. However, he also explicitly said that a refusal of Israel to return Sinai would mean war.

On October 6, 1973, it did. Egypt and Syria attacked occupied Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. Their initial success stunned Israeli officials. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was convinced Israel might be conquered. Moreover, Israel was running out of war matériel and desperately needed to be resupplied by the U.S.

Kissinger made sure America dragged its feet, both because he wanted Israel to understand who was ultimately in charge and because he did not want to anger the oil-rich Arab states. His strategy, as another top diplomat put it, was to “let Israel come out ahead, but bleed.”

You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

The cost to humans was quite high. Over 2,500 members of the Israeli military died. 10,000-20,000 were killed on the Arab side. This is in line with Kissinger’s belief — recorded in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — that soldiers are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns in foreign policy.

After the war, Kissinger returned to his strategy of obstructing any peaceful settlement. In another of his memoirs, he recorded that in 1974, just before Nixon resigned, Nixon told him to “cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace.” Kissinger quietly stalled for time, Nixon left office, and it didn’t come up with Ford as president.

There’s much more to this ugly story, all available at your local library. It can’t be said to be the worst thing that Kissinger ever did — but as you remember the extraordinary bill of indictment for him, make sure to leave a little room for it.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal “the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment” that ignores how Kissinger’s actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Kissinger in the West Wing as National Security Adviser in April 1975. Photo: White House.

For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.

After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.

The headline over a Washington Post news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”

But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?

The New York Times top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”

And so, the Times spotlighted Kissinger’s role in the U.S. “exit from Vietnam” in 1973 — but not his role during the previous four years, overseeing merciless slaughter in a war that took several million lives.

“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” historian and journalist Nick Turse has noted. He added: “The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. To such figures might be added an estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8 million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.”

All told, during his stint in government, Kissinger supervised policies that took the lives of at least 3 million people.

Henry Kissinger was the crucial U.S. official who supported the September 11, 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile — initiating 17 years of dictatorship, with systematic murder and torture (“trampling on democratic values” in Times-speak).

Kissinger remained as secretary of state during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Lethal machinations continued in many places, including East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. “Under Kissinger’s direction, the U.S. gave a green light to the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor (now Timor-Leste), which ushered in a 24-year brutal occupation by the Suharto dictatorship,” the human rights organization ETAN reported. “The Indonesian occupation of East Timor and West Papua was enabled by U.S. weapons and training. This illegal flow of weapons contravened congressional intent, yet Kissinger bragged about his ability to continue arms shipments to Suharto.

“These weapons were essential to the Indonesian dictator’s consolidation of military control in both East Timor and West Papua, and these occupations cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Timorese and Papuan civilians. Kissinger’s policy toward West Papua allowed for the U.S.-based multinational corporation Freeport McMoRan to pursue its mining interests in the region, which has resulted in terrible human rights and environmental abuses; Kissinger was rewarded with a seat on the Board of Directors from 1995-2001.”

Now that’s the work of a noted statesman.

The professional love affairs between Kissinger and many American journalists endured from the time that he got a grip on the steering wheel of U.S. foreign policy when Nixon became president in early 1969. In Southeast Asia, the agenda went far beyond Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger routinely massacred civilians in Laos, as Fred Branfman documented in the 1972 book “Voices From the Plain of Jars.” He told me decades later: “I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”

Branfman’s discoveries caused him to scrutinize U.S. policy: “I soon learned that a tiny handful of American leaders, a U.S. executive branch led by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, had taken it upon themselves — without even informing let alone consulting the U.S. Congress or public — to massively bomb Laos and murder tens of thousands of subsistence-level, innocent Laotian civilians who did not even know where America was, let alone commit an offense against it. The targets of U.S. bombing were almost entirely civilian villages inhabited by peasants, mainly old people and children who could not survive in the forest. The other side’s soldiers moved through the heavily forested regions in Laos and were mostly untouched by the bombing.”

The U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia was also devastating to Cambodia. Consider some words from the late Anthony Bourdain, who illuminated much about the world’s foods and cultures. As this century got underway, Bourdain wrote: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Slobodan] Milošević.”

Bourdain added that while Kissinger continued to hobnob at A-list parties, “Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

But back in the corridors of U.S. media power, Henry Kissinger never lost the sheen of brilliance.

Among the swooning journalists was ABC’s Ted Koppel, who informed viewers of the Nightline program in 1992: “If you want a clear foreign-policy vision, someone who will take you beyond the conventional wisdom of the moment, it’s hard to do any better than Henry Kissinger.” As one of the most influential broadcast journalists of the era, Koppel was not content to only declare himself “proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger.” The renowned newsman lauded his pal as “certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.”

The post For Media Elites, War Criminal Henry Kissinger Was a Great Man appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Henry Kissinger, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford died Wednesday at the age of 100, his consulting firm said.

A controversial figure, who played a pivotal role in the United States’s withdrawal from Vietnam and helped build bridges with China, Kissinger continued to be involved in foreign policy up to his later years, albeit in an unofficial capacity, meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in July when he was hailed as an “old friend.”

Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize but was heavily criticized for his policies on Southeast Asia and support for Latin American dictators, helping orchestrate the toppling of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

He was also described as a war criminal by his detractors partly due to the massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia.

As secretary of state under Nixon, Kissinger helped bring about the opening up of China to the West, arms control talks with the USSR, improved relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Serving under President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, Kissinger emerged relatively unscathed and continued in his role as Secretary of State under Gerald Ford although he was stripped of his role as national security advisor.

When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger left government to set up a consulting firm, advising corporate leaders, writing books and appearing regularly in the media.

“The world has lost a tireless advocate for peace,” Winston Lord, a former U.S. ambassador to China and Kissinger’s former special assistant at the National Security Council told Reuters. 

“America has lost a towering champion for the national interest. I have lost a cherished friend and mentor. Henry blended the European sense of tragedy and the American immigrant’s sense of hope. 

“During more than seven decades, he transformed America’s role in the world, held the nation together during a constitutional crisis, crafted visionary volumes, counseled world leaders, and enriched the national and international discourse.”

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Germany in 1923, Kissinger moved to the U.S. in 1938, escaping the Nazi holocaust.

He became an American citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. army in World War Two.

He was married twice, to Ann Fleischer with whom he had two children, and then Nancy Maginnes.

Kissinger visited China more than 100 times. State broadcaster CCTV hailed his "historic contribution to the opening of the door to US-China relations," AFP reported.

It called Kissinger "an important witness who experienced the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States and the development of the relationship between the two countries".

China’s ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng said he was “deeply shocked and saddened” to learn of Kissinger’s death.

“History will remember what the centenarian had contributed to China-U.S. relations,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“He will always remain alive in the hearts of the Chinese people as a most valued old friend.”

Edited by Taejun Kang and Elaine Chan.

Updated to include comments from CCTV and China's ambassador to the U.S.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mike Firn for RFA.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

On the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile that deposed democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, we discuss the U.S. contribution to the coup and declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project with Peter Kornbluh. His book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, has been revised and published in Chile for the first time. “​​There’s a lot known about the U.S. role in Chile, but there’s a lot to be reminded of, as well, and then there are the secrets that remain,” says Kornbluh, who says countries around the world must learn from Chile’s history to counter growing misinformation and authoritarianism today. “Very authoritarian voices are rising to dangerous levels that actually threaten our democracy.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

However, the South China Morning Post, quoting a “source,” said the “private visit” had been planned months earlier and the fact that it coincided with Kerry’s trip was coincidental.

The source said that the 100-year-old Kissinger would share his impressions of talks with China’s senior leadership with the U.S. government when he returns home.

Xi met Kissinger at the Diaoyutai state guest house in Beijing, where he told Kissinger Chinese people place a high value on friendship.

“[W]e will never forget our old friend and your historic contribution to promoting the development of US-China relations and enhancing the friendship between Chinese and American people,” Xi said.

Kissinger played a key role in normalizing U.S.-China relations when he was then-president Richard Nixon’s secretary of state in the 1970s. He continues to be held in high regard in China.

Kissinger met with sanctioned Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu on Tuesday, and on Wednesday he met with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official.

Wang reinforced China’s position on Taiwan, telling Kissinger independence was “incompatible with peace across the Taiwan Strait,” according to a statement by China’s foreign ministry.

It is likely that China is nostalgic for a time when it could seemingly do no wrong, and Kissinger is seen as the right man to call on Washington to be more conciliatory. 

“The current U.S. policy toward China is eager to transform China or contain China, which will not succeed and it is doomed to fail. Wang delivered this message to the Biden administration through the talks with Kissinger, urging the incumbent US officials to have the political courage to adjust their China policy,” Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The U.S. State Department indicated that Kissinger was not representing the U.S. in Beijing.

“I will say he was there under his own volition, not acting on behalf of the United States Government. And I don’t have any further updates on his trip,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. 

Miller added that it was not his understanding that Kissinger’s meeting violated any sanctions.

“In fact, we have said that we believe … our own secretary of defense could meet with the sanctioned defense minister, and that would be appropriate to do so,” Miller added.

Political demands

During John Kerry’s climate talks in Beijing this week, Xi warned that China will not have its path to curb emissions dictated by others.

“The path, method, pace and intensity to achieve this goal should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others,” Xi said at a national conference on environmental protection, according to state broadcaster China Central Television.

But Vice President Han Zheng, who met with Kerry on Wednesday, said that Beijing would be willing to work with the U.S. to mitigate the climate crisis, as long as its political demands are met.

Han told Kerry that addressing climate change was “an important aspect of China-U.S. cooperation,” but was predicated on mutual respect, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. He said it must proceed “on the basis of U.S. attendance to core issues that concern both parties, fully engaging and exchanging ideas.”

It is not unusual for China to seek leverage even in areas of shared or global interest, as is the case in global warming.

The two countries are at odds on multiple fronts – China’s claims on Taiwan and the South China Sea, its human rights record and over technology transfers, which the U.S. wants to restrict in its national interests.

U.S.-China relations have frequently in recent months been described as being at a historically unprecedented ebb.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.

The former secretary of state, now 100 years old, was key to U.S. rapprochement with China half a century ago. His visit to Beijing was unannounced, although the U.S. State Department said it was aware of his trip, which he undertook “under his own volition.”

Kissinger met with Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu on Tuesday, according to a state media report that was also posted on the ministry’s website. On Wednesday he met with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official.

Wang reinforced China’s position on Taiwan, telling Kissinger independence was “incompatible with peace across the Taiwan Strait,” according to a statement by China’s foreign ministry.

“China's development has a strong … momentum and inevitable historical logic, and it is impossible to try to transform China, and it is even more impossible to encircle and contain China,” Wang said.

Kissinger told Wang that China and the U.S. should treat each other as equals and maintain contact “no matter how difficult it is,” the ministry said.

The U.S. State Department indicated that Kissinger was not representing the U.S. in Beijing.

“I will say he was there under his own volition, not acting on behalf of the United States Government. And I don’t have any further updates on his trip,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. 

Miller added that it was not his understanding that Kissinger’s meeting violated any sanctions.

“In fact, we have said that we believe … our own secretary of defense could meet with the sanctioned defense minister, and that would be appropriate to do so,” Miller added.

China has frozen high-level military dialogue with the U.S. because the Biden administration refuses to lift sanctions imposed on the defense minister in 2018.

Li declined to sit down and talk to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a security forum in Singapore earlier this year.

Li told Kissinger “friendly communication” between China and the U.S. had been “destroyed” because “some people in the United States did not meet China halfway,” a readout from the Defense Ministry said. It added Kissinger said he was a “friend of China,” words that have a lot of traction in Beijing.

The Chinese statement reported Kissinger as saying, “Neither the United States nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary. If the two countries go to war, it will not lead to any meaningful results for the two peoples.”

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that Kissinger’s role in China-U.S. relations is “indeed unique and currently irreplaceable.

“His visit to China this time is expected to have a positive impact on improving the current situation of limited military exchanges between China and the U.S.,” the professor said. “At the very least, it has facilitated the normalization of communication channels between the two sides.”

A venerated figure

Kissinger may be something of a polarizing figure in international diplomacy – renowned for his conciliatory approach to China – but it’s difficult to overstate his importance in U.S.-China relations.

He played a pivotal role in shaping the diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries in the early 1970s. He was the first U.S. official to visit China secretly in July 1971, paving the way for President Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing in 1972. He helped to establish the framework of engagement and cooperation that guided the bilateral relationship for decades.

China’s ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, visited Kissinger in May to express his best wishes for the former U.S. official’s 100th birthday and in 2019 President Xi sat down with Kissinger in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.

However, Kissinger’s warm welcome in Beijing does not necessarily mean a warm welcome for senior Biden administration aides, who have been petitioning Beijing to open up communications as an increasingly bellicose Xi calls for war preparedness.

The U.S. admiral in charge of the Indo-Pacific Command said Tuesday that attempts to reach out to Chinese counterparts have been “disregarded or declined, including a recent invitation to attend the annual chiefs of defense conference in Fiji next month,” Bloomberg reported.

Climate talks

The surprise trip comes as John Kerry continued a Beijing visit, meeting Chinese officials to discuss how the two countries can cooperate on confronting the climate crisis.

Kissinger and Kerry are the latest in a string of senior U.S. officials who have traveled to China this summer. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited last month.

Kerry’s third trip to China as U.S. special presidential envoy for climate may have cautiously restarted dialogue over global warming, but there were no major breakthroughs from his three-day visit, which wound up Wednesday. 

The U.S. climate envoy met with China’s Vice President Han Zheng on Wednesday, his final day of talks in Beijing. 

“Over the course of the last few years the relationship between the United States and China has faced complications,” Kerry said, as he opened talks with Han, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Kerry met Tuesday with Premier Li Qiang, but was not granted an audience with Xi Jinping, who last month had talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

On Tuesday, Xi warned that China will not have its path to curb emissions dictated by others.

“The path, method, pace and intensity to achieve this goal should and must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others,” Xi said at a national conference on environmental protection, according to state broadcaster China Central Television.

Kerry called for cooperation between the world’s top two polluters since arriving Sunday. He’s expressed concerns that China is continuing to add more coal-fired power even as it rolls out renewable energy at a rapid clip.

“If we can come together over these next months leading up to COP28, which will be the most important since Paris, we will have an opportunity to be able to make a profound difference on this issue,” Kerry said, referring to the United Nations climate summit which begins November in Dubai.

Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Chris Taylor for RFA.

No words for emotions — alexithymia

New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

“Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

“I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

“Little children working,” the visitor replied.

Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

“Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/we-are-in-collective-alexithymia/feed/ 0 412091 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/16/how-henry-kissinger-paved-the-way-for-orlando-leteliers-assassination/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/16/how-henry-kissinger-paved-the-way-for-orlando-leteliers-assassination/#respond Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:26:22 +0000 https://production.public.theintercept.cloud/?p=431800

On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of Chile living in exile in the United States, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C., when a bomb planted in his car exploded, killing him and one passenger while wounding another.

Letelier was assassinated in the heart of Washington by the brutal regime of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, a far-right dictator who gained power in a 1973 coup backed by the Nixon administration and the CIA, overthrowing the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Letelier served as foreign minister for Allende, and later was arrested and tortured by Pinochet. After a year in prison, Letelier was released thanks to international diplomatic pressure and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime.

Even in exile, Letelier still had a target on his back. The Pinochet regime, along with the right-wing governments of Argentina and Uruguay, launched a vicious international assassination program — code-named Operation Condor — to kill dissidents living abroad, and Letelier was one of Operation Condor’s most prominent victims.

Nearly 50 years later, the full story of Letelier’s assassination, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored terrorism ever conducted on American soil, is still coming into focus.

Now, the 100th birthday of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which has been marked in the press by both powerful investigations as well as puff pieces and hagiography, offers an opportunity to reexamine the Letelier assassination and the broader U.S. role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government in order to impose a brutal dictatorship. It was one of the darkest chapters in Kissinger’s career and one of the most blatant abuses of power in the CIA’s long and ugly history.

Tanks arrive in front of La Moneda, Chile, in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état led by Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet.

Photo: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images

Making a Coup

The first steps in the covert campaign by Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA to stage a coup in Chile began even before Allende took office. Their actions were eerily similar to President Donald Trump’s coup attempt following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried to block the congressional certification of the election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

On September 4, 1970, Allende came in first in the Chilean presidential election, but since he did not gain an outright majority, Chile’s legislature had to choose the winner. Scheduled for late October, that legislative action was supposed to be a pro-forma certification of Allende, the first-place candidate, but Nixon, fueled by anti-communist paranoia that led him to oppose leftist governments all around the world, wanted to use that time to stop Allende from coming to power.

The Nixon administration pursued a two-track strategy. The first track included a campaign of propaganda and disinformation against Allende, as well as bribes to key players on Chile’s political scene and boycotts and economic pressure from American multinational corporations with operations in Chile.

The second track, which was far more secretive, called for a CIA-backed military coup. 

On September 15, 1970, in a White House meeting, Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to secretly foment a military coup to stop Allende from becoming Chile’s president. Also attending the meeting was Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Helms later said that “if I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.”

Helms and the other CIA officials involved didn’t think they had much of a chance of mounting a successful coup — and they were right, at least in 1970. Their coup efforts failed that year, but a renewed coup attempt succeeded in 1973, during which Allende died and Pinochet came to power.

Pinochet’s Guardian

By 1976, three years after gaining power in the CIA-backed coup, Pinochet had created a bloody police state, torturing, imprisoning, and killing thousands. Despite its draconian practices, Pinochet’s intelligence service enjoyed close relations with the CIA, while Kissinger remained Pinochet’s guardian in Washington, fending off congressional efforts to punish Pinochet’s regime over its human rights record.

Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him.

By September 1976, when Letelier was killed, Pinochet had good reason to believe he could get away with murder in the heart of Washington. In fact, Letelier’s assassination may have been enabled by a secret meeting between Pinochet and Kissinger three months earlier.

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger — by then the secretary of state for President Gerald Ford — met with Pinochet at the presidential palace in Santiago, just as Pinochet’s vicious human rights record was becoming a major international issue. The Church Committee, the Senate’s first investigation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, had just completed an inquiry into the CIA’s efforts to foment a coup in Chile, and had closely examined a CIA scheme in 1970 to kidnap a top Chilean general who had refused to go along with the CIA-backed anti-Allende plots. As part of its CIA-Chile investigation, the Church Committee secretly interviewed the exiled Orlando Letelier.

Former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier’s car, following his assassination by car bomb in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 1976.

Photo: Peter Bregg/AP

In the summer of 1975, Church Committee staffer Rick Inderfurth and another staffer quietly interviewed Letelier at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was living with his wife and four children. Inderfurth questioned Letelier about a wide range of issues, including how the overt and covert policies of the CIA and the Nixon administration in the years leading up to the 1973 coup had destabilized the Allende government. Letelier provided valuable insights for the Church Committee’s investigation, but he did not testify in public during its hearings on Chile. The fact that Letelier was interviewed by the Church Committee was reported for the first time in my new book, “The Last Honest Man.”

Even though he lived in Washington, Letelier wasn’t safe from Pinochet. 

After the Church Committee’s investigation and other disclosures, Congress was seeking to punish Pinochet’s regime for its use of torture and other human rights abuses, and Letelier met with congressional leaders about how to hold Pinochet accountable. Kissinger, who held broad sway on foreign policy under Ford, was under mounting pressure to publicly reprimand Pinochet.

Kissinger agreed to travel to Chile in June 1976 to give a speech to publicly criticize Pinochet on human rights. But just before his address, Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him. Kissinger made it clear to Pinochet that his public criticism was all for show and part of an effort to placate the U.S. Congress. During their private talk, Kissinger made clear that he thought the complaints about Pinochet’s human rights record were just part of a left-wing campaign against his government. Kissinger emphasized that he and the Ford administration were firmly on Pinochet’s side.

“In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet, according to a declassified State Department memo recounting the conversation, published in “The Pinochet File,” by Peter Kornbluh. “I think that the previous government [Allende’s administration] was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well. … As you know, Congress is now debating further restraints on aid to Chile. We are opposed. … I’m going to speak about human rights this afternoon in the General Assembly. I delayed my statement until I could talk to you. I wanted you to understand my position.” 

After getting Kissinger’s reassurances, Pinochet began to complain that the U.S. Congress was listening to his enemies — including Letelier.

“We are constantly being attacked” by political opponents in Washington, Pinochet told Kissinger. “They have a strong voice in Washington. Not the people in the Pentagon, but they do get through to Congress. Gabriel Valdez [a longtime Pinochet foe] has access. Also Letelier.” Pinochet bitterly added that “Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they are giving false information. … We are worried about our image.” It is not known whether Pinochet was aware that Letelier had been a secret witness for the Church Committee, or whether the dictator only knew about Letelier’s more public lobbying efforts to get Congress to take action against the Pinochet regime.

During the June 8 meeting, Kissinger did not respond to Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier. Instead, he told Pinochet, “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined [Allende] government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” Given the context of the meeting, during which Kissinger signaled to Pinochet that the Ford administration was not going to penalize him for his regime’s human rights record, Kissinger’s silence in the face of Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier must have been viewed by Pinochet as a green light to take brutal action against the dissident. 

Kissinger took further action later in the year that gave Pinochet the freedom he needed to move against Letelier. After the U.S. found out about Operation Condor, State Department officials wanted to notify the Pinochet regime and the governments of Argentina and Uruguay not to conduct assassinations. But on September 16, 1976, Kissinger blocked the State Department’s plans. Kissinger ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter” by the State Department, effectively blocking any effort to curb Pinochet’s bloody plans. Letelier was assassinated in Washington five days later. 

Letelier was one of three witnesses of the Church Committee who were murdered, either before or after they talked to the committee. (The other two were Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli, who were both involved in the CIA’s secret alliance with the Mafia in the early 1960s to try to kill Fidel Castro, a scheme that was the subject of a major investigation by the Church Committee.) Meanwhile, Pinochet remained president of Chile until 1990.

Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in connection with the human rights abuses he committed while in power, and was placed under house arrest in the United Kingdom until 2000, when he was released on medical grounds without facing trial in Britain. He returned to Chile and faced a complex series of investigations and indictments — but no actual trial in his homeland — until his death in 2006.

Henry Kissinger has never been held to account.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

The post Henry Kissinger, the Shrewd Striving Flunky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Fred Gardner.

When he turned a deeply unjust 100 last week, U.S. media feted Dr. K as an urbane "elder statesman" who wielded power "with wisdom and compassion." WTF, said a horrified world that recalled "history's bloodiest social climber," "one of the 20th century's most prolific butchers," and a pitiless strategist for American empire-building. Hence the rise of caustic sites like "Is Henry Kissinger Dead?" Given a "back-of-the-envelope" body count of 3 or 4 million, they argue, "The least he could do is add his own body to it."

The stomach-churning, history-revising hoopla surrounding Kissinger's 100th birthday offered more grievous proof if we needed it there is "precious little true justice in the world." Despite an informal "back-of-the-envelope" tally that his barbarous actions likely caused from three to four million deaths, "one of the most decorated war criminals in 20th century history” remains not only hale but held to no account, swathed in the silken world of wealth and power - "Don't you love to hurt the weak?" - and free to celebrate his heedless decades of support for "brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars...without an arrest warrant or war crimes tribunal in sight." Vapid mainstream accounts described a former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - Nixon and Ford - who has "continued to hold sway over Washington’s power brokers," is "still active in global affairs," and "maintains an international consulting business"; predictably, given his famed duplicity, the accounts fail to name which small, frail democracies he's now working to bomb or undermine. There's his flight as a teenager from Nazi Germany, his "major foreign policy events" like Middle East "shuttle diplomacy" and detente with China and Russia, his jet-setter, "playboy of the Western Wing” status among "America's schmanciest people," who regularly, politely decline to mention his monstrous record.

Amnesiac accolades have long extended across the social and political spectrum, from the Playboy Mansion to Hillary Clinton, who called Kissinger "a really good friend" to Gerald Ford, who deemed him, "An elder statesman who wielded America’s great power with wisdom and compassion in the service of peace" - laughable if not for the "Everest-sized mountain" of dead bodies" left in the wake of his bloody, decades-long policies. Despite those bodies, he remains untouchable in a nation where the rich and powerful champion him as "an asset and not an aberration" for his ceaseless support of empire, from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East. Given this unconscionable moral and legal pass, Dr. K has remained an obdurate, remorseless "stranger to shame," denying all criminality in a long criminal career. He's never apologized for or even questioned his complicity with Nixon to "just cream the fuckers" in the carnage of Vietnam - its lies and miscalculations, its up to two million Vietnamese civilian deaths, its napalm-seared children and ravaged villages and vast devastation from what he boasted was "wave after wave of planes," the dead and maimed U.S. soldiers he deemed “dumb, stupid animals to be used." his complicity with Nixon to "just cream the fuckers" On all those crimes against humanity - a fraction of the ghastly whole - he says, "I fail to see the moral issue."

Of course not only did he help Nixon sabotage peace talks to end a war he'd stoked and lied about, but Kissinger orchestrated the savage, illegal expansion of the war into Cambodia, personally approving each of 3,875 bombing raids - after his chilling call to hit "anything that moves" - against a neutral country we were not at war with. From 1969 to 1973, formerly classified U.S. military documents reveal, the rabid U.S. campaign dropped 540,000 tons of bombs that killed between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians, far more than the U.S. ever acknowledged, in a vain effort to destroy alleged enemy supply lines and otherwise put pressure on an intractable Vietnam. As he argued, “I refuse to believe a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point." He was very hands-on - "Strike here in this area" - and very enthused - "K really excited," wrote a Nixon aide - with records of the illegal attacks assiduously burned. The decimation he undertook, in turn, hastened the overthrow of the Cambodian government by a genocidal Khmer Rouge that killed at least two million Cambodians. There, too, there has been no renunciation: Last week, in an interview with ABC's Ted Koppel, who once called Kissinger “the most admired man in America, the best thing we’ve got going for us" and who now dared to question the "criminality" of Cambodia, the great man sniffed, "It was a necessary step."

Pol Pot's "killing fields" and desperate choppers fleeing Saigon were only the start, a bloody glimpse of the coups, lies, extrajudicial wars and bolstering of tyrants in America's long tradition of toppling governments for corporate profit in the name of defending "freedom." For decades, Dr. K played a vital role in nearly every conflict the U.S. took part in: Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor, Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, Latin America's Operation Condor that helped dictators "disappear" each other's opponents, Argentina's Dirty War - the warning to expect "a good deal of blood" met with, "If there are things that have to be done, do them quickly" - and Chile's "insidious" democratic election of Socialist Salvador Allende, who the CIA overthrew in 1973 to usher in Augusto Pinochet's 20-plus years of fascist terror. On a 1976 visit, Kissinger told Pinochet, "You did a great service to the west." He is not "singularly responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into a monstrosity," writes Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow. "But his example, especially his steadfast support for bombing as an instrument of 'diplomacy,' has coursed through the decades, shedding a spectral light on the road that has brought us to a state of eternal war." Proposing a 1975 intervention in Cyprus, Dr. K summed up his approach: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Inevitably, Kissinger's chaos-spawning practice of subverting or unseating those he views as inimical to American interests - geopolitical rivals, progressive revolutions, insurgencies in unhappily occupied countries, balky electorates in key client states - has played out in a moneyed, perennially unstable Middle East, where in the name of power and petrodollars he counseled U.S. administrations to "capitalize on continuing hostilities” - fueling the fires by helping sell so many arms to so many Gulf states "the proxy wars in the Middle East could last for years." And they have. He urged the removal of Saddam Hussein and the “surgical destruction of Iraq’s military assets”; Dick Cheney said, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more (than) anybody else." He propped up and fawned over the Shah of Iran, but when they went to war with Iraq wistfully mused, "Too bad they both can't lose." He forged an "iron-clad alliance" with a brutal House of Saudi, then ceaselessly funneled arms and money to support their atrocity-filled war on Yemen. He sold out the Kurds, wondered, "Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show we can do it? How about Abu Dhabi?", and baited fellow hawks with Cold War rhetoric about “abdication" and "consequences" in support of dubious interventions and repressive regimes "to ensure favorable conditions for American investors in as much of the world as possible."

Always, en route, he made millions. Over four decades, the globe-spanning consulting work of Kissinger Associates has epitomized the queasy convergence of U.S. corporate and governmental power in both foreign and domestic policy, a symbol of the profitable status quo with no thorny questions asked. Merging his public policy clout with savvy business advice, he's guided behemoths like American Express, Lehman Brothers, Merck, JP Morgan to massive profits as a top strategist for America’s empire. At the same time, he's guarded the secrecy of his "client list" so fiercely that when questions arose - what conflicts of interest? - he resigned as head of George Bush's 9/11 Commission rather than reveal it. Just as consistently, Grandin writes, Kissinger's zealous support for "American interests" no matter the human cost - and his utter lack of consequences for any crimes committed in pursuit of them - further affirms, "The United States can do whatever it wants in the rest of the world." “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Grandin notes Barack Obama once said, thus "offering Kissinger his retroactive absolution" for a lifetime of questionable military adventures and cementing the swaggering belief an unaccountable U.S. has the right to violate the sovereignty of any country. "Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle."

Still, the tributes poured in last week when the "political genius" and "great sports enthusiast" turned 100, with no unseemly mention of war crimes to be heard. The Post let his son David Kissinger tout his dad's "rare brain," "unflagging energy" and glad longevity thanks to "a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel." Dr K will enjoy “centennial celebrations (from) New York to London (to) his hometown of Fürth, Germany,” he said, adding his dad's "force of character" helped him outlive "most of his peers, eminent detractors and students." Among the detractors was the late Anthony Bourdain, who in his 2001 book A Cook's Tour famously wrote, "Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands"; he ripped a "treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag" who ravaged and "threw to the dogs" a country "still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg." After a kick-off event at NYC's Yale Club, Bourdain's fury was bitterly echoed when a Vox writer queried what readers wanted to ask the famed perp: “How does he sleep at night? Can he feel the flames of hell gently tickling his toes? Whose organs did he steal? What do you think your eternal punishment will entail? Which circle of hell do you think is waiting for you?"

Those sentiments animate multiple parody sites eagerly awaiting the great "statesman"'s demise. And no, they insist, despite the left's mandate to be tolerant, none of them are as tasteless as "the amount of blood on Kissinger's hands." “I think Americans in particular are very susceptible to this very stupid idea that it's bad to celebrate the death of an evil person," said a Peruvian law student who runs Is Henry Kissinger Dead? Its posts run the gamut from "NO" and "NOOOOO" to "Soon please God" and, in March, "He is going to make it to 100 FOR FUCK'S SAKE." Others argue Kissinger's "firm refusal to die" through a long career "devoted to destroying every foreign democracy that posed even a minor threat to U.S. hegemony" represents "evil forces bigger than you." To help balance the scales, online charity death pools like Henry Kissinger RIP offer prizes - donations to organizations that undo some of the damage of U.S. imperialism, a “selection of liquors" from countries where Kissinger overthrew elected leaders - to whomever accurately predicts his death day. Facts owe: Despite years of rehabilitation efforts and preposterous declarations like John McCain's, at Dr. K's 90th birthday, that "I know of no individual who is more respected in the world," that "rare and foul beast" Kissinger remains for much of the world a reviled war criminal who "should be ashamed to be seen in public."

He does, in fact, need to think twice before traveling; in recent years, he has avoided visiting several countries, including Chile and Brazil, for fear of being charged with war crimes. In this country, for those of a certain age and political leaning, he often summons Gilbert Shelton's 1962 underground comic-book character "Wonder Wart-Hog," a far-right "Hog of Steel" whose "excessive force often (goes) overboard." All told, he remains wholly unrepentant, stunningly resistant to moral nuance, and awash in a blind hubris so enduring and over-arching he can still babble about his "public honor" and losing a brutish war in Vietnam, not because it was unholy but because, "I didn't have enough power." "Does Henry Kissinger Have A Conscience?" asked one New Yorker profile. Evidently not. Most fundamentally, writes Ben Burgis in Jacobin, it's vital to remember that "Kissinger isn't the only Kissinger." The fact he's free and celebrated isn't an oversight, he stresses, but a symptom of "a much deeper pathology," an American empire that rages and lumbers on. "The ugliest truth about Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster," he argues. "He is an unusually plainspoken representative of a monstrous system of US global hegemony...There may be something almost demonic in how unabashed Dr K is about his crimes. But when it comes to his basic willingness to disregard legal and moral obstacles (to) the U.S. working its will in the world? It's Kissingers all the way down."

“His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.” - Christopher Hitchens in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger."

Henry Kissinger is 100 and still free, somehow | The Mehdi Hasan Show youtu.be

Kissinger and Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet shake bloody hands in 1976.Photo from National Security Archive

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

It is unclear why 100-year-old Henry Kissinger has been elevated by Western intelligentsia to serve the role of the visionary in how the West should behave in response to the Russia-Ukraine war.

But does the centenarian politician have the answers?

Every major global conflict that involved the US and its NATO allies in the past had its own state-sanctioned intellectuals. These are the people who usually explain, justify and promote the West’s position to their own countrymen first, then internationally.

They are not ‘intellectuals’ in the strict definition of the term, as they rarely use critical thinking to reach conclusions that may or may not be consistent with the official position or interests of Western governments. Instead, they advocate and champion stances that are dominant within the various strands of power.

Quite often, these intellectuals have the privilege of time. In the case of Iraq, for example, neoconservative intellectuals, the likes of Bernard Lewis, worked tirelessly to promote war, which ended in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Though the neocons continued to strongly support greater involvement in Iraq and the Middle East through military surges and the like, they were eventually – though not permanently – sidelined by a different group of intellectuals, who supported a stronger American military presence in the Asia-pacific region.

The West also had its own intellectuals who dominated news headlines during the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ The likes of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy played a disruptive role in Libya and labored to shape political outcomes in the whole Middle East, posing as a dissident intellectual and a great advocate of human rights and democracy.

From Lewis, to Levy, to others, the powerful Western intellectual practiced more than mere intellectualism. They have traditionally served a fundamental role in politics without being politicians per se, elected or otherwise.

Kissinger, however, is an interesting and a somewhat different phenomenon.

He is the quintessential US-western politician, who defined a whole era of realpolitik. Such notions as human rights, democracy and other moral considerations were rarely factors in his hawkish approach to politics throughout his stints as a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and other official or non-official political roles.

For Kissinger, what ultimately matters is Western hegemony, particularly the sustaining of the current power paradigm of Western global dominance at any cost.

Thus, Kissinger’s intellect is the outcome of real-life experiences related to his long expertise in US diplomacy, the Cold War and other conflicts involving mainly the US, Russia, China, the Middle East and a host of NATO members.

Another difference between Kissinger and other state-sponsored intellectuals is that the man’s wisdom is now being sought regarding an event that has not, per the West’s own claims, been instigated by US-NATO actions. Indeed, many Western countries believe that they are in a state of self-defense.

Usually, this is not the case. Western foreign policy intellectuals typically shape policies in advance, promote and justify them while these policies are being carried out.

In the case of Kissinger, Western intelligentsia sought his wisdom as a result of their palpable desperation, reflecting their own failure to read and respond to events in Ukraine, in a unified and strategic manner.

It is as if Henry Kissinger is a 100-year oracle, whose prophecy can save the West from the supposed invasion of the hordes coming from the East. This claim is substantiated by the infamous statement made by the EU Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, when he said that “Europe is a garden … (but) most of the rest of the world is a jungle.”

The problem, however, is that the oracle does not seem to make up its mind regarding the proper course of action.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Kissinger sharply contradicted earlier comments he made last September at a forum organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Back then, Kissinger stated that the “expansion of NATO beyond its present context seemed to me an unwise measure.”

Relative to Kissinger’s legacy, that position seemed sensible enough as a starting point for future dialogue. The response to Kissinger’s comment from Western analysts and ideologues, however, forced him to alter his position.

In an article in The Spectator in December, Kissinger articulated his own peace plan, one that ensures the “freedom of Ukraine” within a new “international structure”, one that would allow Russia to “find a place in such an order.”

As for Ukraine and NATO, Kissinger proposed that some kind of a “peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed.”

That too was rejected, and loudly so, by many.

Almost a year after the start of the war, Kissinger shifted further away from his original position, by declaring that Ukrainian membership in NATO was the “appropriate outcome” of the war.

And, finally, in his long interview with the Economist, Kissinger linked Ukraine’s membership in NATO to the very “safety of Europe”.

It would be convenient to claim that the apparent inconsistencies in Kissinger’s position were necessitated by new events on the ground. But little has changed on the ground since Kissinger made his first statement. And the possibility of a global, even nuclear war, remains a real one.

The problem, of course, is not Kissinger himself. The crisis is twofold: The West is unwilling to accept that war, for once, will not solve its problems; but it also has no alternative to ending conflict, except through the triggering of yet more conflicts.

This time around, Kissinger does not have the answer.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

It is unclear why 100-year-old Henry Kissinger has been elevated by Western intelligentsia to serve the role of the visionary in how the West should behave in response to the Russia-Ukraine war.

But does the centenarian politician have the answers?

Every major global conflict that involved the US and its NATO allies in the past had its own state-sanctioned intellectuals. These are the people who usually explain, justify and promote the West’s position to their own countrymen first, then internationally.

They are not ‘intellectuals’ in the strict definition of the term, as they rarely use critical thinking to reach conclusions that may or may not be consistent with the official position or interests of Western governments. Instead, they advocate and champion stances that are dominant within the various strands of power.

Quite often, these intellectuals have the privilege of time. In the case of Iraq, for example, neoconservative intellectuals, the likes of Bernard Lewis, worked tirelessly to promote war, which ended in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Though the neocons continued to strongly support greater involvement in Iraq and the Middle East through military surges and the like, they were eventually – though not permanently – sidelined by a different group of intellectuals, who supported a stronger American military presence in the Asia-pacific region.

The West also had its own intellectuals who dominated news headlines during the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ The likes of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy played a disruptive role in Libya and labored to shape political outcomes in the whole Middle East, posing as a dissident intellectual and a great advocate of human rights and democracy.

From Lewis, to Levy, to others, the powerful Western intellectual practiced more than mere intellectualism. They have traditionally served a fundamental role in politics without being politicians per se, elected or otherwise.

Kissinger, however, is an interesting and a somewhat different phenomenon.

He is the quintessential US-western politician, who defined a whole era of realpolitik. Such notions as human rights, democracy and other moral considerations were rarely factors in his hawkish approach to politics throughout his stints as a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and other official or non-official political roles.

For Kissinger, what ultimately matters is Western hegemony, particularly the sustaining of the current power paradigm of Western global dominance at any cost.

Thus, Kissinger’s intellect is the outcome of real-life experiences related to his long expertise in US diplomacy, the Cold War and other conflicts involving mainly the US, Russia, China, the Middle East and a host of NATO members.

Another difference between Kissinger and other state-sponsored intellectuals is that the man’s wisdom is now being sought regarding an event that has not, per the West’s own claims, been instigated by US-NATO actions. Indeed, many Western countries believe that they are in a state of self-defense.

Usually, this is not the case. Western foreign policy intellectuals typically shape policies in advance, promote and justify them while these policies are being carried out.

In the case of Kissinger, Western intelligentsia sought his wisdom as a result of their palpable desperation, reflecting their own failure to read and respond to events in Ukraine, in a unified and strategic manner.

It is as if Henry Kissinger is a 100-year oracle, whose prophecy can save the West from the supposed invasion of the hordes coming from the East. This claim is substantiated by the infamous statement made by the EU Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, when he said that “Europe is a garden … (but) most of the rest of the world is a jungle.”

The problem, however, is that the oracle does not seem to make up its mind regarding the proper course of action.

In a recent interview with the Economist, Kissinger sharply contradicted earlier comments he made last September at a forum organized by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Back then, Kissinger stated that the “expansion of NATO beyond its present context seemed to me an unwise measure.”

Relative to Kissinger’s legacy, that position seemed sensible enough as a starting point for future dialogue. The response to Kissinger’s comment from Western analysts and ideologues, however, forced him to alter his position.

In an article in The Spectator in December, Kissinger articulated his own peace plan, one that ensures the “freedom of Ukraine” within a new “international structure”, one that would allow Russia to “find a place in such an order.”

As for Ukraine and NATO, Kissinger proposed that some kind of a “peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed.”

That too was rejected, and loudly so, by many.

Almost a year after the start of the war, Kissinger shifted further away from his original position, by declaring that Ukrainian membership in NATO was the “appropriate outcome” of the war.

And, finally, in his long interview with the Economist, Kissinger linked Ukraine’s membership in NATO to the very “safety of Europe”.

It would be convenient to claim that the apparent inconsistencies in Kissinger’s position were necessitated by new events on the ground. But little has changed on the ground since Kissinger made his first statement. And the possibility of a global, even nuclear war, remains a real one.

The problem, of course, is not Kissinger himself. The crisis is twofold: The West is unwilling to accept that war, for once, will not solve its problems; but it also has no alternative to ending conflict, except through the triggering of yet more conflicts.

This time around, Kissinger does not have the answer.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

At the ripe age of 100, Henry Kissinger remains an icon of the governing class and the foreign policy establishment. Amazingly, his advice is still sought, he writes lucidly on foreign affairs, and he commands attention wherever he goes.

Unfortunately, his legacy is tarnished by malevolent intentions and costly outcomes, for example: conspiring with the Chilean military to oust President Salvador Allende, leading to the rise of General Augusto Pinochet; supporting CIA involvement in Operation Condor, a secret campaign founded by Pinochet to keep right-wing dictators in power in Latin America and assassinate or otherwise remove leftist challengers; supporting the bloody Indonesian intervention in East Timor; arming what was then West Pakistan to quash East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh), in a bloodbath that Kissinger and Nixon knew about and ignored; orchestrating the October Surprise to delay peace talks on Vietnam until after the 1968 elections and Nixon’s victory; then secretly undermining the South Vietnamese government in order to ensure a safe US withdrawal; authorizing the bombing of villages in Cambodia and Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of civilians; opposing sanctions on South Africa in the apartheid era.

If the US were a party to the International Criminal Court, these involvements would have put Kissinger in the dock.

Mr. Kissinger’s career only shows how shameless foreign policy realism can be and how paper-thin is the notion of great statesmanship.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mel Gurtov.

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.

— Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002)

If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or otherwise, is extensive, his hand in them, finger fat and busy. There were the murderous meddles in Latin America, the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (The interventions in Laos and Cambodia are said to have left 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 Cambodians dead.) Then came the selective turning of blind eyes in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the ruthless sponsorship of coups in Africa.

Regarding the Vietnam War, this pornographer of power’s deviousness, and his attempt to inveigle himself into the favours of Richard Nixon, running as presidential candidate in 1968, knew no bounds. With privileged access as an advisor to the US State Department, he became the conduit for information to Nixon’s campaign to sabotage the Johnson Administration’s efforts to broker an earlier peace with North Vietnam. This involved convincing South Vietnam that the peace terms they could negotiate would be far more favourable under a Nixon administration. Peace prospects were scuppered; the war continued, eventually yielding a wretched Nobel Peace Prize for the Doctor in 1973. The US forces soon withdrew, leaving the impotent South Vietnamese to be overrun by their stronger Northern opponents.

Nixon’s electoral victory in 1968 ushered in an era of ruthless subversion of the international order, and one that bears repeating in these testy times of China ascending and US imperial anxiety. Kissinger, working with Nixon, thought that convincing North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to return to talks would be helped by targeting North Vietnamese supply routes in Laos and Cambodia. With stomach-churching cynicism, these bombing operations were given various gastronomic names: Operation Menu; Breakfast Plan. When the covert bombing program was exposed by the New York Times on May 9, 1969, Kissinger put the wind up FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to not only place a number of journalists under surveillance, but a select number of government officials, including his aides in the National Security Council. One of the latter, Morton Halperin, would subsequently sue his former boss, Nixon and the Department of Justice for illegal wiretapping of his home and office phones.

In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger poisoned the waters of that country’s politics, destabilising the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende and paving the way for a bloody coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet. A mere eight days after Allende’s election in September 1970, Kissinger, in conversation with CIA director Richard Helms emphatically stated that, “We will not let Chile go down the drain.” Three days later, Nixon, in a meeting including Kissinger, infamously told the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream.”

In November 1970, Kissinger demonstrated an almost callow level of expertise in claiming in a memorandum that Allende’s election “would have an effect on what happens in the rest of Latin America and the developing world; on what our future position will be in the hemisphere; and on the larger world picture”. To permit democratically elected socialist governments in the Americas along the “Titoist” lines of Allende’s government “would be far more dangerous to us than in Europe”, creating a model whose “effect can be insidious.”

Kissinger’s venality, and complicity as a deskbound suited thug, supply us a bottomless reservoir. To commemorate the occasion of his hundredth natal day, Nick Turse of The Intercept revealed a number of unreported attacks on Cambodian civilians during the secret war, suggesting that the program has been more expansive, and vicious, than had been previously assumed. “These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopters gunships and burned and looted by US and allied troops.”

The incidents are too numerous to list, leaving us a catalogue of cruelties ghoulish and despairing. Yet his own accounts do little to shed light on such exploits. The White House Years are barren on his blood-soaked achievements, the doorstop memoirs being a selective account drawing from memos, memcons and telcons that this faux Metternich had generated while in office. In 1977, in typical fashion, Kissinger made off with over 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of phone conversations he was involved in, documents he deviously called “personal papers”. In self-reflective glory, he could pilfer, cut and adjust.

Efforts to seek his richly deserved arrest have been made, though all have ended in a legal and practical cul-de-sac. In January 2015, CODEPINK protesters ventured to make a citizen’s arrest during a US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. In the UK, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell also had a stab in April 2002, seeking a warrant from the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957. The charges asserted that “while he was national security adviser to the US president 1969-1975 and US Secretary of State 1973-1977, [Kissinger] commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”.

The presiding District Judge Nicholas Evans was not willing to play along, hampered by higher powers. To proceed, the Attorney-General’s consent was needed. Lacking that, “there is nothing I can do.” That’s HAK’s way of operation, an oleaginous Brahmin above others. Let the likes of Pinochet be nabbed; the backer always makes his getaway.

Best, then, to conclude this natal day salutation to the man by reflecting on the remarks of that most raw yet delicate of culinary (and social) commentators, Anthony Bourdain. In visiting Cambodia for his Cook’s Tour series, he could only reflect about why such a man was not sharing dock space at The Hague with other war criminals. “You will never be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.” Sadly, for many in the Kissinger cosmos, they continue to do so without so much as flinching.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on Feb. 6, 2023.

Photo: David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

In 2002, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”

At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”

There are several notable things about this.

First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.

Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.

Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?

Think of how Kissinger lives, ensconced in the silken embrace of wealth and power, when you read Nick Turse’s new reporting on his actions while in office. Kissinger, it turns out, was responsible for even more misery and death in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia than was already known — which is truly saying something.

At the top of the pyramid, Kissinger enjoys endless banquets and oceans of acclamation. During the Nixon administration, Kissinger was beloved by Hollywood, often literally. He spoke at the 1996 funeral for a less prominent war criminal, Thomas Enders, an event also attended by David Rockefeller (John D.’s grandson, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank), Paul Volcker (chair of the Federal Reserve who said, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline”), Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (an Argentinian billionaire), and Gustavo Cisneros (a Venezuelan billionaire).

At the height of the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney reported that “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by.” Hillary Clinton referred to Kissinger as “a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” (Clinton rearranged her schedule giving an award to designer Oscar de la Renta so both she and de la Renta could attended Kissinger’s 90th birthday.) In 2014, he attended a Yankees game with noted humanitarian Samantha Power, who later received an award both named after and presented to her by Kissinger.

He served on the board of the fraudulent company Theranos with Jim Mattis, the Marine Corps general who’d go on to be Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, and George Shultz, who was secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. Kissinger joked that he didn’t ask questions of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, because “We were all afraid of her.”

This week, the Washington Post granted Kissinger’s son David — president of Conan O’Brien’s production company — space to tell us that to enjoy his 100th birthday, Kissinger is participating in “centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.” One of the kickoff events was held at the Yale Club in Manhattan:

Then consider those down at the bottom of the pyramid: the Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Timorese, Pakistanis, Latin Americans, and many more, whose lives and bodies were torn to shreds by Kissinger. (The “many more” here includes U.S. soldiers, whom Kissinger referred to as “dumb, stupid animals to be used.”) Here is what Turse writes about one such person he met while reporting in Cambodia: 

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

But Meas Lorn will never, ever get an answer. Turse describes an encounter with Kissinger when he was able to pass her inquiry along:

When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

“Play with it.” It is bracing indeed to understand that the people who run this country find this kind of human being charming and delightful. It makes you wonder if there are any killers from history who they would not celebrate, assuming the killers had conducted their slaughter with the aim of keeping America’s elites rich, warm, and safe behind a phalanx of guns.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

The post Kissinger at 100 (A Prose Poem) appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

A bombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

To believe and perpetrate the “Good War” and “Greatest Generation” myths, we must ignore many sordid realities. I’ve written about some of them here, here, and here (and several other posts).

This time, I’ll focus on the memory-holed topic of AWOL American soldiers running wild in Europe.

“Paris was full of them,” remarks historian Michael C.C. Adams.

Journalist Chet Antonine has written of U.S. troops “looting the German city of Jena where the famous Zeiss company made the best cameras in the world.”

The U.S. compiled a list of “Continental AWOLs” that included as many as 50,000 men. Many of them turned to the black market.

“Allied soldiers [in Italy] stole from the populace and the government, and once, GIs stole a trainload of sugar, complete with the engine,” writes Adams.

V.S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation (April 7, 1945), wrote about GIs stealing cameras, motorbikes, wine glasses, and books.

In the New York Herald Tribune, the legendary John Steinbeck reported on three soldiers arrested for selling stolen watches.

In October 1945 alone, American GIs sent home $5,470,777 more than they were paid.

One illegal form of currency for GIs — AWOL or otherwise — was whiskey. As alcohol dependency rose, desperate soldiers resorted to such homegrown brews as Aqua Velva and grapefruit juice or medical alcohol blended with torpedo fluid.

The buying and trading weren’t limited to moonshine. Throughout the European theater of operations, the Allied soldiers did their best to exploit desperate and vulnerable females.

“In a ruined world where a pack of cigarettes sold for $100 American, GIs were millionaires,” says Antonine. “A candy bar bought sex from nearly any starving German girl.”

“Soldiers had sex, wherever and whenever possible,” Adams reports. “Seventy-five percent of GIs overseas, whether married or not, admitted to having intercourse. Unchanneled sexual need produced rape, occasionally even murder. Away from home, where nobody knew them, some GIs forced themselves on women.”

In northern Europe, venereal diseases caused more U.S. casualties than the German V-2 rocket. In France, the VD rate rose 600 percent after the liberation of Paris.

Where did those 50,000 AWOL GIs go after doing their part to soil the image of a “good” war? Nearly three thousand were court-martialed and one was executed, Private Eddie Slovik of G Company, 109th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division. The Detroit native deserted in August 1944, surrendered in October of that same year and was put on trial a month later.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the execution order of December 23, 1944, and Slovik faced a twelve-man firing squad at St. Marie aux Mines in eastern France shortly thereafter. None of the eleven bullets (one is always a blank) struck the intended target — Slovik’s heart —and it was a full three minutes before he died. Outrage spread quickly and there were no further executions.

Eddie Slovik, minutes before his grisly death

As for the rest of the AWOL GIs, Antonine’s guess seems as good as any: “A goodly number of them undoubtedly stayed on in Europe as they had after World War One. Perhaps some of them got bogged down in ordinary life, marrying and having children. Others may have continued their lives of crime and ended up in prison. Only nine thousand of them had been found by 1948.”

That generation being “great” in Bensheim

Then there was a certain staff sergeant who used his authority to anoint himself the absolute lord of the German town of Bensheim during those black market days: future Nobel Peace [sic] Prize winner, Henry Kissinger.

“After evicting the owners from their villa,” Antonine writes, “Kissinger moved in with his German girlfriend, maid, housekeeper, and secretary and began to throw fancy parties.”

These fancy parties were not the norm in Bensheim, an area where the average German made do with fewer than 850 calories per day. FYI: That’s less food than was given to prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Seventy-eight years later, Kissinger the parasite continues to see himself as an absolute lord. Here’s something I recently wrote about him:

Take-home message: Challenge all myths.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

What do Vladimir Putin and Henry Kissinger have in common?* Late last month, the Russian President threatened the use of nuclear weapons in the war over Ukraine, stating: “To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries.” In the same vein in 1957, Kissinger wrote: “The tactics for limited nuclear war should be based on small, highly mobile, self-contained units, relying heavily on air transport even within the combat zone.” Putin spoke as his country is being stymied in its efforts to incorporate Ukraine into the Russian Federation. Kissinger was writing at the height of the Cold War as the Rapporteur for a study by the Council of Foreign Relations which later appeared in the book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.**

To contextualize the possibility of using nuclear weapons by Kissinger and Putin: Both happened at times of extreme tension between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia. Both occurred when a major confrontation between the two sides was not taking place but could not be excluded.

But there are significant differences between the two. Kissinger’s advocacy of limited nuclear war was his attempt to set out a U.S. strategy to avoid a major, direct confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. He was trying to elaborate a United States military policy for the nuclear age after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hoping any confrontation between the two belligerents could avoid massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction.  Putin’s strategy is to use the nuclear threat to gain bargaining chips in an eventual settlement over Ukraine’s borders. Stymied in an immediate takeover of Ukraine and witnessing continued Ukraine successes as the fighting continues, Putin alluded to using nuclear weapons to hasten advantages in an eventual solution.

While much is being written in the West’s reaction to Putin’s threat about the horrors of using nuclear weapons, it should be remembered what former President Bill Clinton said in 2007: “Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrents to keep the peace, and I don’t believe any President should make blanket statements in the regard to use or non-use.” It should also be remembered that prior to the Cold War the United States used nuclear weapons, leading Putin to argue that the United States’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “created a precedent” for their use.

Besides the political, military and ethical implications of using nuclear weapons, there is also a legal aspect. Many of the arguments for and against the use of nuclear weapons appeared in the 1996 International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons”. In the crucial part of its decision, the Court opined: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” But the Opinion did not completely disqualify their use: “However, in view of the current state of international law, and the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

The Court did not say that the possession of or the threat of using nuclear weapons was illegal. The Court emphasized that there are restrictions on the actions of belligerents in armed conflicts in terms of what they can do. In other words, the legality of the use of the use of certain weapons is because of their specific effects during conflicts. According to the Court, the threat or use of nuclear weapons is restricted by the rules and principles of international humanitarian law because of their effects on non-combatants and soldiers. The weapons are, in Professor Georges Abi Saab’s words; “indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction.”

But the court did not formally ban the use of nuclear weapons in conflicts – the final decision was tied seven and seven – because “it does not have sufficient elements to conclude with certainty that the use of nuclear weapons would necessarily be at variance with the principles and rules of law applicable in armed conflict in any circumstance.” Specifically, it recognized that every State has its right to self-defense when its survival is at stake. “In view of the current state of international law, and the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake,” it declared in the famous final sentence of Paragraph 2E. It is important to remember that Article 51 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter permits the use of force by States “in the exercise of this right of self-defence.”***

Kissinger believed that the very survival of the United States could be a stake if the Soviet Union attacked, justifying the possible use of limited nuclear weapons. But Putin? What is his justification for the threat? Is the survival of the Russian Federation at stake? Is Russia being attacked? While Putin may fantasize that Ukraine is a part of the Russian Federation, it has long been accepted as an independent country, even by Russia. No country invaded or threatened the Russian Federation as it exists today.

Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov followed the State survival reasoning by equating State survival with an existential threat. “So, if it is an existential threat for our country, then it [nuclear weapon] can be used, in accordance with our concept,” Peskov proposed.

The Russians are invoking the glaring weakness of the Court’s ambiguous decision. By invoking State survival, the Court invited unlimited State actions in the name of survival, both in terms of its perception of its need to use force for self-defense and the type of force it can use once it decides that its survival is at stake.

Whatever the Russians present as the basis for their eventual use of tactical nuclear weapons in the name of their survival, it should be emphasized that there has been international condemnation of the use of nuclear weapons in any situation, even State survival. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 “for spreading authoritative information and by creating awareness of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war.” The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

While Clinton’s statement remains in the deepest background of potential actions by a U.S. president, Putin’s threat is more immediate and more problematic. Most importantly, it does not meet the criteria of State survival permitted by the Court. Putin’s justification of “existential threat” does not meet any legal standard of State survival. But then again, respecting international humanitarian law or international law in general is not high on the Russian government’s agenda today.

Notes.

*In terms of similar negatives, an extensive list of Kissinger’s sins can be found in Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Putin’s malfeasance is being investigated by various official and non-official bodies and awaits final listings since it is still unfolding.

**The book was a strategic studies best-seller, Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and launched Kissinger’s public career.

*** On the question of the legality of using nuclear weapons in the case of State survival, Judge Koroma wrote in his dissenting opinion; “This finding…would constitute an exception to the corpus of humanitarian law which applies in all armed conflicts and makes no exception for nuclear weapons.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

The post Henry Kissinger: A Warmonger’s Lying Continues appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

If for some inexplicable reason, you couldn’t come up with a reason to be ashamed of the U.S., I’ve got one for you: Henry Kissinger has been a widely revered thinker and statesman for six decades, and is the recipient of awards like the Nobel Peace Prize (1973); Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977); and Medal of Liberty (1986).

I may soon write a long article to document at least some of Kissinger’s heinous catalog of criminality. For now, I’d simply like to clarify his ongoing role as a Godfather of sorts to all the other miscreants that make up the top 1%.

I mean, the esteemed HK has his own damn page on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website and has been mentoring the notorious Klaus Schwab for decades. In the photo up top, Kissinger and Schwab openly plot for us to “have nothing” and “be happy.”

Kissinger’s interests have heavily influenced the parasites-in-charge (regardless of political party). As far back as 1974, he penned National Security Study Memorandum 200 on “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” In that document, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate muses about “technological innovations” that might reduce the globe’s human population.

Kissinger has also declared: “Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World, because the U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”

This brings us to Bill Gates — yet another psychopath who cavorts and contrives with the murderous Henry K and his WEF cronies. Gates might see himself as up to the task of providing Kissinger with the “technological innovations” that might reduce the globe’s human population:

Click here to see and hear Gates saying these words, in case you think it’s a misquote.

I’ve told you about deadly protocols imposed on U.S. hospitals that killed about one million people. I’ve been telling you about all the vaccine adverse events that are being ignored while countless suffer and die. The sociopaths-in-charge have left a clear, easy-to-find paper trail of their intentions. What are you gonna do about all this?

P.S. I know I said I’d save all the Kissinger evidence for its own article but I can’t resist offering one example of the kind of man who is awarded a peace prize in today’s society:

With a total population of nearly 30 million, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country and have often been used as geopolitical pawns. In 1975, in the midst of a border dispute between Iraq and the Shah of Iran (a U.S. ally), then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly channeled $16 million in military aid to Iraqi Kurds.

The Kurds, succumbing to the spin, believed Washington was finally supporting their right to self-determination. In reality, the United States was using the Kurdish rebels to sap the resources of the Iraqi regime and coerce them into a settlement.

That settlement came at the 1975 OPEC summit, at which time the United States promised Iraq that support for the Kurds would be immediately withdrawn. As Iraq wiped out the Kurdish rebels, Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani sent a message to Kissinger. It read in part:

“Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone. We feel, your excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.”

One can easily imagine Kissinger getting off on being called “your excellency,” while cringing at the concept of “moral responsibility,” but he did not directly reply to Barzani. Instead, he instructed a staff member: “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

When asked to explain America’s duplicity towards the Kurds, Kissinger delivered a one-liner that effectively sums up his beliefs and U.S. foreign policy: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

RFA: What was your involvement in the reestablishment of Sino-U.S. diplomatic ties?

Lord: I was very fortunate to be at the very center, along with President Nixon and Dr. [Henry] Kissinger, of the opening to China in the 1970s.

It began with a secret trip by Kissinger and myself and to others, in July '71, to see whether a presidential trip was possible. We then had another, public, trip. And then we went back to China with the president. I was assigned that responsibility of assembling all the briefing books for President Nixon. We gathered information from all the government agencies, and always [made] Kissinger a special assessment, not only to work on China, but on on other key issues that were related, namely, the Soviet Union.

So it was very exciting. I was returning to the land of the native land of my wife and ... uniting the Chinese and American people. So I was very fortunate, and it was very dramatic, both in personal and in professional diplomatic terms.

When [then Chinese premier] Zhou Enlai told President Nixon shortly after he arrived on Feb. 21 1972, that Chairman Mao wanted to meet Nixon, Nixon chose Kissinger ... and because of my background on this and other issues, [he] asked me to go along, both from my perspective, and to be a good note taker so that he could focus on the meeting.

Interestingly enough, at the end of the meeting, President Nixon asked Zhou Enlai, to have the Chinese keep my presence at the meeting secret. They asked them to cut me out of all photographs, and a communique, because they didn't want to embarrass the absent Secretary of State any further, who was not at the meeting. For the third person there to be a young person ... like myself was further humiliation. So the whole world did not know I was there.

A year later when we went back to China ... Zhou Enlai gave me a photograph of the meeting with me included to prove I had indeed attended this historic event ... This was one of the most exciting episodes in my life.

With the two countries cutting off relations in 1949, no American official had gone to China for 22 years. When Kissinger went [he went] on a Pakistani airplane ... in July 1971. We were going to be the first American officials into China after 22 years. But I was in the front of the plane.

Dr. Kissinger was in the back of the plane so I claim to be the first American. As we went into Chinese territory on the airplane, I was ahead of Dr. Kissinger. And so I said that I was the first one there. And he agrees ... he admits in his memoir that I beat him by 1,000,000th of a second.

When we went in July '71, it was to prepare for the presidential trip. And we knew we would be seeing Zhou Enlai, but that it was not appropriate to meet with the chairman: that would be reserved for the President's trip.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng.