Do yourself a favor and listen to at least one of the six part series that Behind The Bastards podcast[0] did on Kissinger. It will give you a background, with sources, on the "controversial" statesman that you'll read eulogies about over the next few days.
Also check out The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens. I think it was made into a documentary later. The man was worthy of the title of war criminal, but of course we don't prosecute our own and we certainly don't recommend to the ICC (we're the good guys, you see).
It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
Not only would we not recommend our war criminals to the ICC, we have on the books the authorization to be able to invade the Hague in case any US person was being held or tried. Hague Invasion Act / ASPA is wild.
The rest of the west is allied with the US because they’re the least evil guys, not because they’re the good guys.
I’m Dutch and knowing that the US has a constant threat of extreme violence against us written into their law scares the crap out of me. We’re supposed to be happy jolly NATO allies but srsly that shit is not cool.
> The rest of the west is allied with the US because they’re the least evil guys, not because they’re the good guys.
No, because the US controls the "free media" and politicians in those countries. It's funny how almost all Kissinger article today were positive in this country.
All countries of comparable power are murderous autocracies. By that metric. At least I cannot think of any that isn't, feel free to try to proof me wrong.
When you reply to a comment so deep down a thread you gotta take the full conversation into context. You reply to me as if I think the US kicks ass at rule of law and liberty. I’m merely saying they’re the least bad at it of the superpowers (despite monsters like Kissinger)
You are not an ally, you are a de facto vassal. Compared to other vassals in history you don't have to send much in the way of tribute.
Frankly, you have a pretty good deal. We provide your protection, you can do your Dutch things, and we don't bother you too much other than the occasional McDonalds garrison.
> we have on the books the authorization to be able to invade the Hague in case any US person was being held or tried. Hague Invasion Act / ASPA is wild.
That's more the reason to move the court to a country with nukes, say France, Strasbourg and put some retaliation Act in place if Americans put Strasbourg Invasion Act in place
Haven't listened to the podcast (yet) and don't know much about kissinger but the description "the Forest Gump of war crimes" made me laugh out loud, whether or not it's accurate.
Reading through the descriptions of the episodes of this podcast it seems a lot like they start with a conclusion and then confirmation bias themselves (and everyone else who already agrees with them). Maybe not the most objective source.
Asking half rethorically, how would these descriptions be different if they were fully objective and the guy was a really horrible person ?
In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
It's harsh to fault them for having an opinion on the subject they dug to the end, and a conclusion already made at the time they start recording the series.
>In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
This is false. Age of Napoleon is quite good at presenting the factual history of its topic and then weighing dual interpretations of events. He highlights that something is his opinion when he gives it. The result is a wildly engaging podcast.
Hell, he's an avowed Marxist, which is a belief system I find repugnant. However, other than one or two clearly labeled bonus interview episodes, his views are AFAICT, totally absent from his presentation of history. He strives very hard to not tell you what to think.
It is disheartening that you believe information must be presented with an agenda.
I never heard of the Age of Napoleon podcast, seems to be a series by a Texas resident revisiting Napoleon's history after getting fascinated by the subject.
There's a ton of distance between the author and the subject, it's about something they deeply enjoy and decided to dedicate more than a hundred episode to, and I'm not sure how much being Marxists matters here, when Marx started becoming famous after Napoleon died.
That's a lot different from discussing a politician of your own country who's still alive and untried at the time you do your podcast series.
Be that as it may -- and I haven't listened to the podcast -- but there's very compelling evidence of his responsibility, or at least complicity for war crimes throughout southeast Asia during the Nixon administration amounting to civilian deaths numbering in the tens of thousands, conservatively.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
You might listen to the podcasts. They are good and they are well researched. Listen: I met Kissinger a few times and spent a few decades of my life working with foriegn policy wonks. He was a monster beyond compare.
And I'll just add this in. When I was 24 I got a job at the New York Times working on the tech team that would launch nytimes.com. The "web editor" was one Bernard Gwertzman. Look him up. He was the foreign desk editor of the paper of record for decades. He made his name reporting on the Vietnam war. Would you like to know who his best friend was in 1996 when I met him? Henry Kissinger. He had lunch with him every wednesday at the Harvard Club. Having read Manufacturing Consent more than once I was flabbergasted. If Chomsky had known this... Anyway, he and I were the first ones to show up for a meeting one time and I asked him how he and Henry K had met. He leaned over and said (with a literal wink) "while I was reporting on Vietnam, but don't tell anyone!"... said the man who among many other things 1. reported that we were not bombing Cambodia, 2. Supported Pinochet and 3. didn't report on the East Timor genocide. All policies that were 100% Kissinger.
I do not know about Israel, but I can read both Russian and Ukrainian. And there is a pretty objective test: read a Russian president’s statement - see how it is reported, read a Ukrainian president’s statement - see how it is reported.
Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:
1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.
This was reported as a belligerent statement.
2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.
This was not reported at all.
Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?
Does it have to be objective? Also, perhaps the glowing eulogies are the biased ones--objective means a fact-based honest look at his terrible legacy, not erasing it.
Funny! But your question did get me thinking. I don't know anything about this podcast nor much about Kissenger, but a podcast dedicated to bad people could be objective, I think, if they were to pick their subjects based on objective criteria.
Their criteria is definitely “was this person/organization a bastard?” That said, the host does a lot of research and does attempt to provide as full a picture as possible about his subjects. There is some editorializing, and also there’s a healthy amount of “this is the best information that I could find”. A number of times I’ve heard him say things like “we don’t have a direct source for Thing X, so take this with a grain of salt”.
Well worth a listen imo, I ended up binging every episode over the course of a year or two.
I listened to it once based on some redditor's enthusiastic recommendation, and it was as bad (i.e. blatantly unapologetically biased) as you might expect.
The podcast, no. But if a comment is going to offer a link with the conceit of “consume this to fully understand who this person was” it would be good if the source were not something with the explicitly stated thesis of “hey, this guy’s a bastard”. I mean, you don’t even need to listen to it to know what the conclusion is going to be.
I don't know anything about the podcast beyond the name, but I could see a podcast called "Beyond the Bastards" not having a forgone conclusion about their subject, but being more about why someone is believed to be awful and then going "beyond" to see if that were fair. I'm going to give the podcast a chance.
Indeed, which is to say, it is possible the rational view here is the man who facilitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge by testing an entire country as collateral damage is, well, a bastard.
Maybe. Maybe the alternatives available at the time were believed to result in something 10x worse than the Khmer Rouge. Would he still be a bastard then? Or someone who had to make a hard choice among terrible options?
I don't know, for the record. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't sound like a reasoned consideration of the evidence taking into account the historical context. It sounds like someone who thought "I bet Henry Kissinger was a bastard", then found a book that says "Henry Kissinger was a bastard!" and then made a podcast saying "See? I knew it!"
He supported and enabled dictatorships in Latin America. Do tell us how that was defensible. This is very much part of public record, thanks to diplomatic cables declassified in 2016.
His point of view was that communism had to be stopped everywhere and that's what he went with. Clearly he knew that it meant aligning with bad folks in some cases. Hence why he's known as the "real politik" guy. You can disagree with his conclusions but it's not like it's helpful to assume that this man had zero moral compass and was pure evil. He might have been wrong (I'm not saying he was or wasn't), many of us are in our attempts at doing what seems necessary for the greater good.
> You can disagree with his conclusions but it's not like it's helpful to assume that this man had zero moral compass and was pure evil.
That analysis approach is useful for historian to understand human behaviors but should not be the bar one uses to evaluate a legacy. Hitler believed that the raising of the Third Reich was absolutely necessary for German survival. We can acknowledge that in understanding how a person becomes pure evil while also observing that, yes, he was pure evil.
Nobody is the villain of the story they've told themselves. We have the privilege and perspective to evaluate whether that story was awful and should never be repeated.
Which makes it such a shame that people throw them around like they are an authoritative source of anything. It’s literally just some guy who read a book and has a microphone. It’s as good as whatever book they read.
Podcasts, in general, are not made to cater to bonafide genius intellectuals.
Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere, but to expect an entire series of episodes to average out to anything close to that is too high of an expectation.
That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
Podcasts, like live news, radio talk shows, and other scheduled throughput based media, have to fill time with content. If there's nothing intelligent to say, they say stuff anyways.
The huge advantage of podcasts over most other forms of media is that they don't have to cut things down into tiny bite sized pieces. Many podcasts will get down into the nitty gritty details of things that the news never will. I think it's much closer to long form journalism than television news. Although, obviously, podcasts can take any form and some are geared toward that latter rather than former. But the ones I am most drawn to are those where actual experts pour over the data in great detail.
This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.
You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.
Nah.
Podcasts are one of the few mediums that don’t have set lengths. The one here goes to 6 parts because of the volume of material. And often I’ve heard podcasts do multiple episodes in one. There’s no time they’re trying to achieve as there’s no standard.
That's mostly true, except for the big ones that have signed deals, but even then a lot of filler sentences, filler talk, etc., happens regularly in the podcast episodes I've heard.
I mean, it’s not science, it’s politics. The podcast isn’t trying to present an argument, but rather convey facts to an already trusting audience. This feels off the mark
It’s co-hosted by the guys from The Dollop, who I’ve listened to quite a lot. They’re funny and entertaining, but they’re comedians not historians. Their whole schtick is just reading some book and incredulously saying “holy shit” about whatever it says, without any critical analysis.
Edit: and there’s nothing wrong with that! Just recognize when something is entertainment vs. trying to be objective.
'attempted objectivity' is better. It would include:
- narrator reveals his convictions at the start
- focuses on things that physically happened
- weigh dual/multiple interpretations and views of said events from relevant factions, attempting the greatest charity with the one(s) opposed to the initially revealed convictions.
I've listened to the podcast, but one Kissinger op I don't think was mentioned there that always stuck out to me was Operation Popeye. It was a real life attempt to extend the monsoon through cloud seeding so the Ho Chi Minh trail would get washed out and unusable. I think it might be the origin of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory. (Not quite as evil as randomly picking out grid squares and bombing them of course.)
Tl;dr version: Kissinger was an almost superhuman ass-kisser. He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
And he used that power to stay in the halls of power whoever was in charge.
The only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
>He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?
Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. They just wasted tons of lives for nothing. Same as with the recent Afghanistan campaign.
At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.
Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.
Japan's "amazing recovery" wasn't hampered by a legacy of UXB (unexploded bombs) that still kill and cripple children to this day.
America had total control of Japan following their surrender, and the time/power/resources to rebuild Japan as they saw fit (which was to become an eastern bulwark of capitalist freedom, against China and Russia).
Bombing Cambodia had the much more cynical purpose of convincing Ho Chi Min that Nixon was an unrestrained madman whose demands in peace talks had to be surrendered to, to avoid further mindless devastation for all involved. Yes, it was more complicated in the details, but pretty damn clear in the larger picture.
Diplomacy and "ass-kissing to stay in the halls of power forever" seem like they can have some nonempty intersection, but still are different concepts.
Diplomacy would further the needs of a state or at least a faction of people. Ass-kissing for personal gain seems like a different thing that may even hinder more genuine diplomatic efforts.
It depends on your evaluation of his outcomes, but the scholarly opinion of him is that the legacy of his that endures is the death toll, while the geopolitical outcomes were bad for the U.S. (losing Vietname/Cambodia/Laos), temporary advantages (Pinochet in Chile), or opinionated side-taking that has not been good for the U.S. or the world (Israel/Palestinians).
He was very effective at remaining in a position of power and influence. I don't think you'll find many who believe he was as consequentially good for America.
“ He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?”
Hahahahaha nope, he literally was just a leech on society that got into high enough positions that his vapid bullshitting didn’t just fool his bosses into paying him a good wage but directly contributed to the deaths of countless innocent humans… for absolutely zero good reason from any perspective other than kissingers. Seriously this isn’t serial killer level stuff, this is war criminal mass murderer levels off violence and he never ever faced any real consequences for it.
I am not religious but Kissinger makes me want to believe in hell just so I can fall asleep with the comforting thought that Kissinger is burning in hell forever. He deserves nothing less, rest in piss, Kissinger.
The crowd here might find it preposterous but Kissinger dated models and movie stars. One that I remember was the actress Jill St. John who was a Bond girl in the movie Diamonds are forever. The two dated for a couple of years. Miss St. John also dated Michael Caine, Sean Connery, David Frost and Tom Selleck.
Interestingly, the Behind the Bastards episodes on him point out that his relationships with women may have been one of the only non-bastard things about him. He was seen as “safe” compared to other men of the time!
This piques my curiosity. Does anyone have the mechanical specifics of how this worked, as in actual conversations when Kissinger was in his element that demonstrated this quality in action?
Teens today who have never experienced Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field normally don't believe my shorthand description of the RDF like the above encapsulated description of "superhuman ass-kisser". Fortunately, I can show them the historical records, giving them not just the video of his meticulously-rehearsed MacWorld presentations, but the context of the enormous stakes he was playing with, to change their minds. And to teach them that what seems extraordinary can be accomplished with extraordinary effort, if one is willing to relentlessly study and practice.
So whenever I hear about extraordinary abilities, I'm always curious to see how they worked up close, mechanically, in dissect-able action.
If you listen to Nixon’s tapes, there are many instances where Nixon makes outrageously antisemitic comments, and Kissinger (who was Jewish himself), ever the brown-noser, agrees and responds with an even more outlandish one.
The podcast also covers some more humoring of extreme antisemitism when he was negotiating in the middle east. It's not just that he tolerated it, he validated and played along with very clever quips about being a Jew.
I have read critique that the terms presented to Serbs were unreasonable. Maybe, maybe not, but let's keep in mind that Serbs had already committed genocide and kept aiming for it.
I suggest reading up on the subject now that enough time had passed that information is more readily available.
The KLA was designated as a terrorist organisation by (among others) Amnesty International and the FBI itself removed it from its terrorist list only months before the bombing started.
But even past that point, Rambouillet was not in good faith by any way you look at it, it was designed to be unacceptable and justify a military operation that did nothing to help the people out claimed to protect.
What "nuance and unbiased conversation". Forgive me for not giving an inch to someone who watched as millions were murdered by bombs. A factual retelling of the man's "achievements" should make any sane person cringe with disbelief that he lived to be a hundred and wasn't jailed. There's a time and place for multiple viewpoints and this is not it. Sometimes "the other side" really has no place
If you are not willing to engage with or understand the other side of the debate you will have no capacity to understand or debate the modern day Kissingers who are currently in government.
Why is the default response that I haven't "engaged or understood" the "other side of this debate"? What's the "other side" here? That I have sympathy for this man? Where is this whole thing going? Is doing research on what he's done and perpetrated and quotes by his own voice not enough? And how does that lead to me not understanding modern day Kissingers?
I refuse to give this any more headspace. This sage-like almost apathetical both-sidesing is more dangerous to me than taking a stand.
Please ask the people of Laos to "understand how it happened". A country where thousands have died after they were bombed to hell and back because of the unexploded bombs which still makes farming unviable. I don't need to understand the "how" because there is no "how" beyond imperialism which I understand perfectly well enough. There's no complex morality here
People here should really stop pretending that reading "both sides" of everything is some form of enlightenment. It is delusional
There is "understand the other side of the debate" and then there is knee jerk insistence to both side everything.
Nuance and unbiased conversation would actually allowed for conclusion that someone could do a lot more harm then good. If you insist that powerful people needs to be always talked about in good terms and discussion of bad stuff needs to contain "balancing" good stuff, you are neither unbiased nor nuanced.
How does that follow? Firstly, he likely understands the “other side of the debate”, but even if he didn’t, how does that preclude him from understanding modern Kissingers?
So what's the unbiased take going to be? "Yeah he caused a lot of damage and suffering, but sometimes he also progressed our (the US) interests without hurting anyone"?
Yes, basically. I disagree strongly with that Kissinger was anything of a balanced man, and I think it took too long for him to die, the world would have been a better place without him, and so on.
But I still think it's valuable for people who don't share that view, to make their own opinions public, as we all get richer by having multiple and sometimes opposing views out there.
Rhetoric can be used to craft any message, no matter how absurd. Eloquent defenses exist for all of the most heinous actions by men. We have to assess the viewpoint before we grant it legitimacy, not absorb it simply because it exists.
"The logical fallacy you're committing is called the Straw Man Fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone misrepresents or distorts an opponent's argument or position, creating a weaker or exaggerated version of it."
Americans bombed the people of Laos for sport killing tens of thousands and crippling many more. Kissinger directly enables and supported this. The man was a monster and should have died long ago.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
Not saying I agree with the charge but this also doesn’t refute it. I mean, for one thing the US believes the state department and military of the US is above international war crimes courts. (Thats the actual official position).
Not just "above"; US law explicitly gives the President the power to invade The Hague if they get their hands on American officials or military personnel.
> The Act gives the President power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
So what? Many countries do not recognize the ICC, not just the US. We don’t want a Global World Order; that’s a European fantasy Europe can keep. We don’t share all the same values or laws and never will.
Doesn't the Hague only do war crimes? It's not much of a Global World Order if they only process heinous stuff. Is this a slippery slope argument? Or do you disagree with how the Hague does things?
American money has "NEW WORLD ORDER" written in Latin on it. I'm sure that's where people might get the idea that America does want a Global World Order.
"International war crimes courts" do not prosecute treason.
And it isn't about the personnel being "above" anything. It's simply that the ICC is not a court and does not respect due process, so we do not subject American citizens to it (and indeed it would be an interesting Constitutional question as to whether that's even truly possible).
From a more pragmatic perspective, as long as Russia and China don't recognize the ICC's authority, it would be a major global strategic blunder to impose checks and balances only on the United States.
Were some of the comments up-thread edited or something? I don’t see any mention of treason in this specific chain until this post (but it is weird because hammock’s post, at this same level, also mentions treason).
Of course there are other threads that bring up the possibility of treason. But I don’t see why there’s a need to explain the (obvious, right?) fact that the ICC wouldn’t prosecute treason.
> “If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?”
Which, I guess I just meant, prosecuted by whom? He was the US government at the highest levels and there is no international body with jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem like nobody being able to press charges means a man is innocent.
This position is not unique to the US and stems from the potential for politically motivated prosecutions and the need to protect military personnel. Other countries (India, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, etc) are also cautious about subjecting their citizens to the jurisdiction of international courts.
If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
> If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
Except the optics and power that his party holds (politics), which is what keeps many congress critters in positions of power. The power that the US wields (economically and militarily) kept the other countries at bay.
People pretending, that the reasons are unclear, are being disingenuous.
The crazy thing about this is that the folks calling Kissinger out for war crimes and the folks like you pointing out the good things he enabled both have a valid point.
I'm not saying his legacy is positive or negative overall, but folks need to look at both sides of it. He's a great example of someone who had a major hand in a lot of major decisions and has a very very mixed legacy because of it.
Things are much blurrier than we make them out to be these days. Anyone who has a major impact often has significant positive and negative impacts. Kissinger was not a one sided character.
And with that said, I can't believe I just defended Henry Kissinger, but it's still worth saying...
> The crazy thing about this is that the folks calling Kissinger out for war crimes and the folks like you pointing out the good things he enabled both have a valid point.
The biggest problem is that what a lot of people know about Kissinger is "folk knowledge" they picked up from other people, and this gets passed down as a game of telephone until it's common knowledge, but no one has bothered to check if it's accurate or not. It doesn't help when there are articles like the Rolling Stones one that's been posted, which seem more interested in cherry-picking facts to fit the narrative then in actually looking at what happened with open eyes.
A few years ago, I thought to myself that since people talk about Kissinger so much, I should go and look at what he actually did. I was surprised to see that he didn't seem to be the driving force behind bad policy decisions in the Nixon White House. He was certainly involved as National Security Advisor, but most of the time it looked like Nixon would have made the same decisions without him. Yet for some reason, Kissinger is usually blamed much more than Nixon.
For instance, at least according to the State Department Historian[1] it was General Creighton Abrams that first suggested bombing enemy bases in Cambodia. Nixon agreed, and involved Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor. But the bombing is usually presented as Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. General Abrams isn't mentioned in the Rolling Stones article at all. Compare the Google results for "Creighton Abrams Cambodia" with "Henry Kissinger Cambodia" to see how slanted things are.
That's not even getting into the fact that blaming the Khmer Rouge on the bombing campaign is an extreme stretch. But that's how people approach the folk knowledge - they get told something is true, believe it to be true, then stitch together whatever facts they can find to support the narrative they've already set their mind on.
Part of this is that Nixon resigned in disgrace and Kissinger kept being an active part of American politics, so his influence was seen as something to fight against. Not that he was somehow more culpable than Nixon, but he was certainly more relevant than Nixon.
I mean, the Paris peace accords happened after the Nixon campaign convinced the south Vietnamese to walk out of earlier talks and crash the Johnson campaign. So it seems weird to praise those people for getting almost the same result after killing lots of anmerican and lots more Vietnamese, not to mention the noncombatants in laos and Cambodia Kissinger directed the bombing of. And after all that it was barely a different deal.
People are complicated. I'd be more tempted to see the good, if he had ever shown remorse or admitted to mistakes.
The Nobel prize is based on explosives. Most scientists 100 years ago were eugenicists. It's difficult to judge people's beliefs and decisions outside of their era. That doesn't mean that you can't build a moral or ethical system outside of it, but they're all based on assumptions of what is good.
It's not like there weren't people calling out Kissinger contemporaneously, or even Lincoln (for his handling of the Dakota). It's more weird when people obliviously deny recent history or create hagiography upon their death.
I don't think your examples are very convincing. To the extent that Nobel enabled bad things with explosives, the prizes were there to compensate and not celebrate them. And even though the word is very taboo today, eugenics are not inherently evil. They don't compete with Kissinger.
I'm not disputing his complicated legacy, but it seems strange and unjust to me that if he had committed some straight-forward crime, like murdering his wife, we probably wouldn't be talking about his complicated legacy. He would be a politician whose career ended in disgrace.
But we somehow feel compelled to weigh war crimes that lead to the death and suffering of millions against other positive accomplishments as if one justifies the other. We're basically conceding to Kissinger yet again by evaluating his legacy in terms of realpolitik.
> If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?
Kissinger himself said many times that relations between states aren't based on morality, so people who act in the name of states can't be bound by international laws. It's an idea that is the basis of the realist philosophy. A lot of people in the the foreign policy establishment share that view.
The USA for example supports the International criminal court, but not for its citizens, so Kissinger can never be prosecuted like Milošević. Those who say the ICC is just an instrument of power are not entirely wrong.
Especially since there is evidence the Nixon campaign prolonged the war by sabotaging Johnson’s peace talks, going directly to the south Vietnamese and promising them a better deal if they would make sure Johnson didn’t get to end the war.
[0] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-kissinger
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-two-kissinger
[2] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-three-kissing...
[3] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-four-kissinge...
[4] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-five-kissinge...
[5] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-six-kissinger