Today we celebrate the life of Henry Kissinger. A Gemini, chair of the 9/11 Commission, Harvard educated, a refugee who fled Nazi Germany in the 30s.
Having died today, on this day, that means Kissinger lived for 36,470 days.
An estimated 365,000 Vietnamese civilians died as a result of the war during the period of American involvement. That would mean almost precisely 10 people killed every day of Kissinger’s life.
With just under ten years as one of the major world diplomatic figureheads, Kissinger’s expansive diplomatic résumé includes involvement in the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, the Greek junta’s attempt in 1974 to assassinate Archbishop Makarios, acquiescing in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and so, so much more.
An anarchist icon? This man has no respect for international laws.
In 1969, Kissinger and his friends conspired with Suharto to illegally annexe West Papua, with US support at the UN, cementing Indonesian control of West Papua and ushering in more than forty years of genocidal policies. Current death tolls are reaching 500,000 West Papuans killed. That’s about 100 people killed per every week of Kissinger’s life.
Soon after his attention turned to Bangladesh, where a genocide of the local Bengali population was committed by the Pakistani military, supported and armed by the US, killing up to three million people. In doing so, Kissinger bravely believed he was protecting US interests in the Cold War, by using Pakistan to open up alliances with China. The people in Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan as per partition) had risen up against General Yahya Khan, in a secret meeting Kissinger and Nixon said they believed their ‘protege’ (Yahya Khan) would be able to “subdue the rebellion in East Pakistan with naked military might”. After this “naked military might” killed millions of Bengalis, Kissinger told Nixon, “congratulations, Mr President, you saved West Pakistan.”
In 1971, when warned about a likely incoming famine in Bangladesh, Kissinger decided to withhold 2.2 million tons of food aid and the famine killed over a million Bengalis. In meeting records now made public, you can hear him saying it’s not our problem, Bangladesh is a basket case. For the girlboss duo Kissinger and Nixon, they only saw a successful diplomatic shift towards their own relations with China. Sorry Bangladesh!
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27th 1923. He won a Nobel Peace Prize.
The Mỹ Lai massacre was the mass murder of up to 507 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops. Absolute civilians who happened to be in their way. This gang of soldiers went on a violent rampage. Kissinger decided to launch a special task force to conceal the massacre from the rest of the world.
In what he called a “game plan” to “figure out how best to control the problem”, Kissinger’s team set about discrediting witnesses, questioning the press and their political allegiances, and launched a PR offensive to create a false narrative of the situation to the general public.
Of the soldiers who committed the massacre, only one of them was convicted and given a life sentence, which President Nixon himself commuted down to three-and-a-half years under house arrest. That one, William Calley Jr., was found guilty of murdering 22 civilians. He is still alive and lives in Gainesville, Florida. Federal District Judge J. Robert Elliott of Columbus, who reversed Mr. Calley’s conviction in 1974, and Ronnie Thompson, a former Mayor of Macon. Ga., were among the several hundred wedding guests.
Oran Henderson was there too. He wasn’t charged with anything and he went on to work as head of Pennsylvania state government’s emergency management. It was their job to manage the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown. Samuel W. Koster was charged with attempting to cover up the massacre, but then all charges were dropped. He was simply demoted, then went to work as an executive vice president for the power transmission division of Koppers and Hanson Industries in Baltimore where he was responsible for the oversight of electricity plants in the United States and Canada. His official obituary ignores any of his involvement in the My Lai massacre.
Similarly, Commanding officer Ernest Medina’s obituary just says:
“He served in Vietnam where he was awarded our country’s third highest medal, a Silver Star, for bravery. Ernie and his family settled in Marinette Wisconsin where he became Vice President of Sales for Enstrom Helicopter Corporation.”
That’s all. Medina didn’t get the recognition he deserved for the part he played in the war. Sad. So it would be inappropriate to leave the Mỹ Lai massacre out of Kissinger’s obituary, wouldn’t it.
The same lethal combination of Nixon and Kissinger were also later revealed to have set a strategy of destabilisation, just simply “creating the conditions” for whatever would directly benefit US interests. Kissinger was again one of the masterminds behind the meddling foreign policy which had huge and lasting impacts on Chile. The incoming military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet brought years of forced disappearances, torture, surveillance, and executions.
In further revelations brought by later declassified texts, it has since been concluded that in East Timor, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave a green light to the invasion that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Despite being a huge investment and source of natural resources for the US, Indonesia and East Timor are hardly mentioned in Kissinger’s memoirs of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Lest we forget them today.
Over just a few years, Kissinger turned the world into his own murderous playground. We will never know the true extent of the misery he caused.
The fact that Kissinger had his blood-soaked imperialist fingers in so many pies may have ushered in subsequent decades of American leftists convinced that every bad thing that happens on this planet is the direct result of a CIA plot. Can we thank Kissinger for the insufferable psyche of American tankies? Not sure, probably not, tbh.
But we can be quite sure, Henry Kissinger was an absolute cunt.
Images: Efe Levent
