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.
