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Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger attends a ceremony in Berlin in January 2020 (AFP)<\/p><\/div>\n
Joseph Massad
\nMiddle East Eye<\/p>\n
Nothing notable distinguished the birth of Heinz Alfred\u00a0Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0on 27 May 1923 to a German Jewish family in Furth, a city in Bavaria, who died on Wednesday at the age of 100.<\/p>\n In 1938, when he was 15, he and his family fled Nazi Germany to New York before Kristallnacht. When the adolescent Heinz became Henry in the US, while retaining his heavy German accent, no one could have predicted that he would order the murder of hundreds of thousands of people as an adult, and become a millionaire as a result.<\/p>\n In 1943, at the age of 20,\u00a0Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0was drafted by the US Army. He became naturalised as a US citizen the same year. He served in the army intelligence division on account of his German fluency and was put in charge of a team in US-occupied Germany in charge of de-Nazification.<\/p>\n After the war, Kissinger attended\u00a0Harvard<\/a>, graduating with a BA in political science in 1950 and a PhD in 1954. While still at school in 1952, he worked for the US government\u2019s\u00a0Psychological Strategy Board<\/a>, formed by the White House in 1951 to propagandise against communism in support of the US and \u201cdemocracy\u201d. This was during the US invasion of Korea when US forces\u00a0killed millions<\/a>\u00a0of people.<\/p>\n As US Air Force commander Major-General Emmett\u00a0O\u2019Donnell<\/a>\u00a0put it at a Senate hearing at the time: \u201cEverything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name\u2026 there were no more targets in Korea [to bomb].\u201d US psychological warfare still refers to US genocidal crimes in the Korean peninsula as the \u201cKorean War\u201d.<\/p>\n Kissinger insisted that the legitimacy of the international order only required the agreement of the great powers. As for morality, he argued that it was irrelevant<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At the Harvard International Seminar, which he helped found as a summer programme that convened young future leaders from around the world, Kissinger volunteered to spy on\u00a0attendees<\/a>\u00a0for the FBI and on his\u00a0Harvard<\/a>\u00a0colleagues.<\/p>\n In his academic work, Kissinger insisted that the legitimacy of the international order only required the agreement of the great powers. As for morality, he argued that it was irrelevant. As Thomas\u00a0Meaney<\/a>\u00a0explains in the New Yorker, for Kissinger, \u201cmoral indeterminacy was a condition of human freedom\u201d.<\/p>\n In 1952, Kissinger\u00a0ran an article<\/a>\u00a0in the journal Confluence, which he edited, by Ernst von Salomon, a convicted murderer for his participation in the assassination of the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. German Jewish emigre contributors to the journal,\u00a0including Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr, were not pleased. Kissinger\u00a0joked<\/a>\u00a0with a friend that the article was considered \u201ca symptom of my totalitarian and even Nazi sympathies\u201d.<\/p>\n He was also study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1955-56, and published his book\u00a0Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy<\/i><\/a>\u00a0in 1957, arguing that the US should use tactical nuclear weapons on a regular basis in war to ensure victory. Critics would later parody him as \u201cDr Henry Killinger\u201d, as the cartoon show\u00a0Venture Bros<\/i><\/a>\u00a0did in the 2000s.<\/p>\n His right-wing authorised biographer, Niall\u00a0Ferguson<\/a>, states that the argument of Kissinger\u2019s book \u201cmight very easily be presented as evidence\u201d that he was \u201cthe inspiration for Stanley Kubrick\u2019s Dr. Strangelove\u201d.\u00a0Kissinger finally received\u00a0tenure<\/a>\u00a0at Harvard with the support of the dean, McGeorge Bundy, despite faculty objections that his book on nuclear weapons was not\u00a0scholarly<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read More \u00bb<\/a><\/div>\n He did not limit himself to academe, but became a consultant to politicians and presidential candidates, such as Nelson Rockefeller. When Bundy became President John\u00a0F Kennedy\u2019s national security adviser in 1961, Kissinger joined him as an adviser, a position he would retain under Lyndon Johnson.<\/p>\n Even though Kissinger believed in the futility of the US war in Vietnam, he conspired with Richard Nixon\u2019s electoral campaign in 1968 by\u00a0leaking<\/a>\u00a0information to it from the Paris Peace Talks to prolong the war, lest the Democrats win the elections. Once Nixon was elected, Kissinger came on board as national security adviser in January 1969, a position he occupied until 1975.<\/p>\n Nixon referred to him as \u201cJew boy<\/a>\u201d, but it seems right-wing antisemitism never bothered him, as he had been a lifelong conservative Republican. He also served as secretary of state from September 1973 until January 1977.<\/p>\n Determined to defeat the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front and North Vietnam, Kissinger decided to intensify the secret tactical bombing of Cambodia, which had started under Johnson in 1965, into a ruthless campaign of carpet bombing that continued until 1973.<\/p>\n In early March 1969, Kissinger told Nixon: \u201cHit<\/a>\u00a0them!\u201d By 1973, between 150,000 and half a million Cambodians were\u00a0killed<\/a>. Kissinger callously\u00a0described\u00a0<\/a>the excessive bombing by saying: \u201cWe would rather err on the side of doing too much.\u201d<\/p>\n Kissinger personally supervised the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes from one area to the other. He reportedly loved playing \u201cbombardier<\/a>\u201d. When he and Nixon started to bomb North Vietnam again, Kissinger was most excited at the \u201csize of the bomb\u00a0craters\u201d<\/a>. In keeping with his support for the use of nuclear weapons, he devised a plan to nuke North Vietnam in 1969 as part of an operation called\u00a0Duck Hook<\/a>.<\/p>\n While some in his social circles referred to him as \u201ccuddly Kissinger\u201d and he was described in women\u2019s\u00a0magazines<\/a>\u00a0as \u201calways friendly, particularly with women\u201d, his sweet-tongued persona seemed nowhere in sight when he spoke of those women he hated, such as former Indian Prime Minister Indira\u00a0Gandhi<\/a>, whom he called a \u201cbitch\u201d and a “witch”, while \u201cthe Indians\u201d were \u201cbastards\u201d.<\/p>\n Indeed, Christopher\u00a0Hitchens<\/a>\u00a0asserted, regarding Kissinger\u2019s popularity among the elite, that \u201cKissinger is not invited and feted because of his exquisite manners or his mordant wit (his manners are in any case rather gross, and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts)\u201d, but rather because he exuded raw power. Kissinger was less like Dr Strangelove and more like the fictional character Dr Evil in the\u00a0Austin Powers<\/i>\u00a0films, though with much less charm.<\/p>\n In 1971,\u00a0Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0backed former Pakistani President Yahya Khan\u2019s genocidal campaign against East Pakistan (Bangladesh), and in 1975, he endorsed the Indonesian dictator Suharto\u2019s genocidal war on the people of East Timor, in which a third of the population was killed. Suharto had come to power through a US-supported coup in 1965 that unleashed massacres against up to\u00a0one million<\/a>\u00a0Indonesians as suspected communists.\u00a0As for the 200,000 dead in East Timor,\u00a0Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0was unmoved: \u201cI think we\u2019ve heard enough about Timor.\u201d<\/p>\n When, in 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was popularly elected as president of Chile, Kissinger\u00a0commented<\/a>: \u201cI don\u2019t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.\u201d He\u00a0pushed<\/a>\u00a0Nixon to organise a violent coup against Allende, subjecting the country to fascist rule for the next decade and a half, with thousands killed by the US-supported military junta.<\/p>\n All the imperial murderous policies that Kissinger pursued did not deviate from US foreign policy before or after him<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It was also Kissinger who advocated the \u201ctar baby<\/a>\u201d option of strengthening US ties with the white supremacist settler-colonies in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.<\/p>\n As for the Middle East, aside from strengthening ties with the Zionist settler-colony of Israel, which became a major US ally during the Nixon and Ford years, Kissinger armed Israel to the teeth during the 1973 war in order \u201cto\u00a0prevent<\/a>\u00a0an Arab victory\u201d. His emergency military help to Israel during the war reversed the early victories of the Egyptian and Syrian armies and ensured that Israel won the war. He also ensured that no US relations could be established with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.<\/p>\n In September 1975, Kissinger signed a \u201cmemorandum of understanding\u201d with the Israelis committing the US not to recognise or negotiate with the PLO unless it recognised Israel\u2019s \u201cright to exist\u201d as a racist, Jewish-supremacist state. Former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat would finally do so in 1988 in Geneva, and again in 1993 with the signing of Oslo.<\/p>\n In effect,\u00a0Kissinger<\/a>\u00a0ensured the perpetuation of Israeli colonisation of Palestinian lands for decades to come. He was the architect of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat\u2019s surrender to Israel and selling out of Palestinian rights at Camp David, and designed the so-called American-sponsored \u201cpeace process\u201d, which has defined US policy towards Palestinians and Israel and has since brought about the ongoing calamities in much of the Arab world.<\/p>\n Amid all of Kissinger\u2019s war-mongering around the world, helping fascist dictators come to power and supporting white supremacy in settler-colonies in southern Africa and Palestine, he is also credited with pursuing detente with the Soviet Union and opening diplomatic relations with China. He even received the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating \u201cpeace\u201d with North Vietnam amid his savage bombing of Cambodia.<\/p>\n Read More \u00bb<\/a><\/div>\n Kissinger would go on to advise subsequent US presidents and support their wars, including Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. In 1982, he established his own consultancy firm,\u00a0Kissinger Associates<\/a>, with a highly secretive client list, to advise US and European imperial corporations and banks, Third World western-supported dictators, and white supremacist settler-colonies. His\u00a0last reported net worth was around $50m<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kissinger\u2019s horrifying record, however, has endeared him to many US liberal politicians. The Clintons loved him dearly and attended his birthday parties.\u00a0Hillary<\/a>\u00a0Clinton could not stop\u00a0praising<\/a>\u00a0him for the advice he had given her when she served as secretary of state, insisting that \u201cKissinger is a friend\u201d.<\/p>\n Former President Barack\u00a0Obama<\/a>\u00a0cited Kissinger as supporting his own views on Iran during the 2008 presidential campaign, but Kissinger rebuffed him. In 2010, Obama\u2019s\u00a0administration<\/a>\u00a0used Kissinger\u2019s murderous policies in Cambodia to justify Obama\u2019s own murderous drone killings of American citizens and non-Americans around the world.<\/p>\n In 2016,\u00a0Obama<\/a>\u2019s defence secretary gave the accused war criminal an award \u201chonouring Dr Henry A Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service\u201d. In the last few years, he has been invited by several liberal US\u00a0universities<\/a>, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,\u00a0Yale<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0New York University<\/a>, which marked the 45th anniversary of his receiving the Nobel prize. It was mostly\u00a0socialists<\/a>\u00a0who protested him.<\/p>\n In April 2018, Kissinger was a\u00a0guest<\/a>\u00a0at Trump\u2019s first state dinner at the White House, alongside Trump\u2019s billionaire friends.\u00a0He would even weigh in on the war in\u00a0Ukraine<\/a>, about which he changed his mind several times.<\/p>\n In his book about Kissinger,\u00a0Hitchens<\/a>\u00a0charged him with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and offences \u201cagainst common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture\u201d. Hitchens, however, did not seem to realise that Kissinger was no maverick, and each of those crimes should be levelled against the US government more generally.<\/p>\n Indeed, all the imperial murderous policies that Kissinger pursued did not deviate from US foreign policy before or after him. It is that which accounted for his popularity among the American business and intellectual elite, liberals and conservatives alike.<\/p>\n As\u00a0Meaney<\/a>\u00a0put it, blaming one man for\u00a0the country\u2019s sins serves everyone: \u201cKissinger\u2019s status as a world-historic figure is assured, and his critics can regard his foreign policy as the exception rather than the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n Kissinger\u2019s amoral, genocidal crimes are no more monstrous than the crimes of the US since its establishment. If anything, Kissinger was but a faithful representative of the criminal US elites whom he served all his life – and who guaranteed him a long life of fame, wealth and luxury.<\/p>\n Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut on 29 November 2023, the\u00a0International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People<\/a>.<\/p>\n The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\nNuclear policy<\/h3>\n
Ruthless Cambodia campaign<\/h3>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>Coups and white supremacy<\/h3>\n
Horrifying record<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nNo maverick<\/h3>\n
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