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.
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.
You're expecting a podcast titled "Behind the Bastards" to be an objective source?
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.
On some topics there is no such thing as a rational centrist view.
There is always a rational view, whether it falls as centrist on the political ideology spectrum of the times is immaterial.
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.
Maybe try listening before opining further; you are offering a purely uninformed opinion out of ignorance.
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.
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.
It's entertainment podcast first and history second but the sources are always listed and it's usually pretty well researched.
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.
in my experience, this is basically how all podcasts and documentaries seem to be made.
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.
Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere
Much like comments written on the internet.
That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
See above.
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.
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.
Or books, in this case. Multiple primary sources.
It’s an easy and entertaining consumption method and the sources are linked right there…
Try Age of Napoleon.
Mentioned the reasons in my last post.
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.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
"Only the good die young, only evil seems to live forever". Iron Maiden
I always joked that the devil wouldn't take him and he's not allowed in heaven.
TBH he's exactly the kind of guy the Old Testament God would like.
How so?
In his ruthlessness towards dogmatic ends without any consideration of humanism.
As the classical saying goes "Those whom the gods love die young".
Tom Lehrer retired when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, because he said satire was dead at that point[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...
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.
Rest in piss. Both of them.
Do you think the NYT's war coverage (Ukraine & Israel) is still so slanted, or have they improved?
Think how they reported Iraq and you have your answer.
Rest in piss indeed! Good riddance!
If Chomsky had known this...
Chomsky have denied genocide that Kissinger helped perpetrate, so he could have known.
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.
Try listening to it
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.
No, they are guests. They are not the people who did the research! Robert Evans is an excellent journalist.
What exactly would an “objective” source look like?
'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.
You're judging a book by its cover, more or less.
That’s why they put all those pictures and descriptions on book covers.
A podcast like this is not "spontaneous", they will have a rough script
Nobody is doing this kind of podcast "on the fly"
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.
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
I've already listened and it's excellent.
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.
Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all.
It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.
Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated.
It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.
It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.
Did you happen to forget that the United States occupied and reconstructed Japan from 1945-1952?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan
It helps to be familiar with history before making judgements about it.
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.
For context:
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.
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?
No.
“ 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 only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
That and being a total horn dog.
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.
Proving once again an ugly man can get the ladies if they have compensating traits.
Well, he did say that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."
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!
> ...was an almost superhuman ass-kisser.
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.
For some counter programming, here is an obituary written by someone more pro Kissinger:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissingers-century-01a1a9...
It was written by a man who already wrote the book: "Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist."
I'm sorry but not every person needs "counter programming". Kissinger was a war criminal and we don't need a "balanced take" of a monster
Nuanced and unbiased conversation is much needed in this world, and having multiple viewpoints from people with different biases helps us all.
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
This leads to a dangerous path.
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.
That I have sympathy for this man?
No. That you understand how it happened.
That I have sympathy for this man?
That’s fine. Stay away from geopolitical decision making. Most people shouldn’t have to weigh moral systems.
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?
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.
"We have to decide if we're going to have our prior beliefs and preferences reinforced before we grant it access to our ears and eyes."
"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."
My analogy is your straw man falacy.
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.
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.
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.
Least evil by what metric?
Liberty, rule of law etc. For all its shortcomings, the US-dominated part of the world has more of that than the rest.
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.
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'll... if letting yourself be occupied by Islamic colonists is a Dutch thing.
US centered NATO imperialism sometimes shows itself amongst all the Hollywood and the international PR indeed.
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.
It’s a light entertainment show. The host is an ex Cracked writer. It’s mean-spirited but very funny.
A villain that he was, even he called out the Rambouillet text [1]
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.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
Millions according to the Rolling Stone article.
National's geographic Kissinger also does a good job highlighting his "achievements".
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.)
From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting."
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
That last sentence is a massive step beyond common knowledge, if it's true... and I don't think it is, what can doctors do?
The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women. Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/#:~:tex....
But from the same paper:
One such theory is that health and longevity are related to differences in medical care. The present analysis provides limited support for this theory. Life expectancy for low income individuals was not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care provided, such as the fraction insured and measures of preventive care. The lack of a change in the mortality rates of individuals in the lowest income quartile (Figure 1) when they become eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of 65 years further supports the conclusion that a lack of access to care is not the primary reason that low-income individuals have shorter life expectancies.
There are also pretty significant differences in diet and substance use between different income quartile...
And stress. If I had to guess I would say stress matters more than both of those on average.
That's a very interesting study. I'm surprised the relationship is so linear through all the way through the income percentiles, aside from the very bottom few. I would have expected a relative plateau in the middle.
Unfortunate as that is it's not at all surprising. Comparing the median with the top 1% would be more interesting. The gap there is still quite significant:
(for 40 year old men, unadjusted by race): 100th inc. prct : ~ 88 years: 75th inc. prct : ~ 84 50th inc. prct : ~ 82.5 25th inc. prct : ~ 79 5th inc. prct : ~ 76 1st inc. prct : ~ 72.5 (had to infer the values visually from charts because I wasn't to find a table including all the groups...)
However (I assume the data is very limited though) there is almost no difference in life expectancy (for men or women) when your household income is above >$200k (back in 2014, so probably quite a bit higher now). So I don't think there are any efficient treatments available only for the ultra-rich, just being rich or upper-middle class should be enough to get access the best(ish) treatment there is.
For the bottom income quartile when comparing local areas: the % of people with not insurance, medicare spending per enrolled person and 30-day hospital mortality rate seem to have the highest correlation with life expectancy. Which all should be trivial to fix for a relatively extremely-rich country like the US...
Looking at the appendices one interesting point I noticed (assuming I understood it correctly) is that people at the 50th percentile are more likely to reach 77 years than those in the top 75th or 100th prcts. But after that point income seems to matter a whole lot more.
Another seemingly very weird correlation (page 43): higher inequality in local area seems to be correlated with lower life expectancy for all income quartiles except the bottom one (so basically poorer people tend to liver longer in high inequality areas even though the difference in years is not very big).
I really doubt a writer for the NYT is going to be in the bottom 1% of income or wealth.
Having bad health is a hell of a way to waste the time you could have wasted on making money instead.
That being true, I do doubt that a single obituary writer falls in the poorest 1% of individuals. If I were to take a guess, I think the average salary of a journalist who writes obituaries may fall in the top 25% of income. Does the gap in life expectancy continue to be that large if we compare the top 1% and the top 25%?
The other comment provided some support for the claim, but I want to add that I would consider this fairly common knowledge. It regularly comes up in discussions about socialized medicine, for example.
Perhaps worth noting that he lived 13 years past the time the obituary was penned.
13 years past how long a contributor to the obituary lived. The contributor may have started work on the obituary even earlier and probably did, as Kissinger was 87 and it probably would have made sense to pre-write the obituary sooner.
I wouldn't be surprised if a first draft of this one was written 50 years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if the first draft was written as soon as he gained fame (notoriety?) and then it was just periodically updated to keep up with the times.
The reasons have much more to do with much better diets, getting better sleep, not working stressful and physically demanding and dangerous jobs, etc.
I’m interested by the notion that the Secretary of State has a less stressful job than a guy writing obits. I mean, even if you’re only a cabinet officer for a couple years, that’s gotta take more off your clock than a lifetime of typing news articles with a deadline of “eventually the subject of the article will die.”
Turns out that being able to afford a better life leads to a longer life.
Common? Give us another example
See here for some recent obits written by Ronald Bergen, who died in 2020:
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
The guy died at a age of 100 dude...
They might have more money but there's no higher class.
In this case, Kaufman died at 71 of an incurable cancer though.
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful.
I'm continuously astonished how people pay 20$ per-month to be lectured like that. I guess I shouldn't be by now...
With good custom instructions, it almost never happens...
"Treat me as an expert in all subject matter."
"No moral lectures - discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious."
"If your content policy is an issue, provide the closest acceptable response and explain the issue."
"No need to disclose you're an AI."
"If the quality of your response has been substantially reduced due to my custom instructions, explain the issue."
Yeah, but you are paying 20$ per-month subscription _and also have to sweet-talk the stochastic parrot into giving you the result you want_ while it keeps lecturing you in condescending tone.
It's not human, why are you offended by how it talks to you? It's a tool. Many tools need some adjustment before they can be useful for what you do. You surely won't be viscerally upset if you pay $20 for a tool that occasionally spills oil on you if you hold it wrong. You'd still think the tool is crap because its designers made an UX decision you hate, but you surely would not throw away the tool out of principle, right?
I absolutely would refuse to buy tools from a manufacturer that makes user hostile UX decisions on purpose.
It's not precisely user hostility. You're talking about the difference between a hole hog and a DeWalt. ChatGPT is trying to be a DeWalt: It works while also trying to backstop unexpected bad interaction so you don't unexpectedly torque your wrist past its breaking point because you jammed the bit into the wrong piece of wood (to pull the analogy back around: You don't inadvertently get porn or gore or defamatory copy because you asked the wrong query).
Flipping the question on its head, there's going to be a category of user who's asking "Why am I paying 20 bucks a month so this thing can give me answers I can't publish?"
That rule seems like it would lock you out of pretty much all modern technology pretty quickly, to be honest. What do you use for daily computer/mobile use? What white goods manufacturers do you go for? A company will make user-hostile decisions the second it knows (or thinks) it can get away with it with a profit - fully featured, long lasting, sensibly built hardware is, sadly, not actually good for business.
It's the same frustration I'd have with other badly designed tools: "I shouldn't have to do this"
Not exactly. There's a "custom instructions" area in the Settings that allows you to give the bot permanent instructions that apply to all chats. So you do it once and never have to do it again.
And the new "My GPTs" things allows you to give super-lengthy and detailed instructions, and train the bot on custom works, which is even more powerful.
Not paying to be lectured, paying to speed up development times, proof read emails, provide documentation with working examples, write excel formulas, get lists of ideas, iterate ideas with evidence. I would wonder why you wouldn't pay the $20
I told it to he had passed away, it checked the internet
Are you sure it didn't just "believe" what you told it, the same way LLMs can be badgered into falsehoods?
it now uses bing to perform searches. so i think he is probably correct to assume that it did that. it would show up as „performing search with bing“ in the chat history.
By over a decade!
It's kind of nice to have some of your work outlive you, especially in such a transient medium.
I'm surprised at the extreme brevity of this obituary; were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100 and didn't have anything prepared? I would have expected at least an brief summary of his career, highlights, major points of controversy, etc. e.g. like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/29/henry-kissin... (and undoubtedly many others).
Also, this ruins my "Jimmy Carter v. Henry Kissinger in 2024"-joke.
were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100...?
I doubt it. The economy of Henry Kissinger Grim Reaper claw machine memes has been going strong for the last four years at least.
Four years? The Venture Brothers had a "Dr Killinger" character with his 'Magic Murder Bag' about 15-ish years ago. Kissinger's crimes have been known about for a loooong time... but the establishment didn't seem to care.
EDIT: Apologies if you meant "forty" years. That'd be about right for mainstream.
I was referring to a specific image template and heavily hedged with "at least", but you're right - anti-kissinget sentiment had been around for decades.
It's all good :)
I think they were referring to predictions of Kissinger's death, not of general recognition of his crimes.
I saw one that says "GOT HIM!"
That one might actually be new.
Seeing as he was 100, I doubt they were taken by surprise. These things are usually canned and updated once in a while for people of interest, especially past a certain age (or at least that's my understanding).
Yes exactly, so why doesn't the BBC have more than 3 lines on Kissinger?
Maybe they couldn't find anything nice to say about him?
I'm fairly certain that a large swath of society (rightly) thinks that he's not worth more than three lines.
I think it’ll come. Probably within fifteen minutes or so.
The BBC usually takes its time (sometimes to the point of absurdity — more than any other news outlet I can think of).
BBC are asleep.
Well, it is nearly 3 in the morning.
I’m really surprised to see such a glaring typo, I don’t think I ever seen one before from the BBC:
Born in Germany in 1973,
It is a side-effect of the learning cutoff date for the LLM they are using to write articles. </sarc>
If that was the only issue with BBC reporting, that'd be nothing...
I had a grandfather who was a boozing, gambling, cheating, abusive, no-good man who had a similarly short obit.
This is how it works. If you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all.
Your grandfather's obituary was written by his kin, right? But the beeb doesn't have to treat him like a relative. Seems like any controversies about them are very relevant to an article about their death.
There you go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19872410
The BBC tend to keep separate breaking news (which they usually keep short, or run a live feed) and more long term articles about the state of the world, obituaries, etc.
If you talk about the good things he did one group of people will get very mad, and if you talk about the bad things he did another group of people will get very mad. Much easier to just say nothing.
They omitted the war crimes out of "respect for the dead". That left the article fairly short.
We've changed the URL from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67574495 to the NYT piece which (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38469147) has obviously been in the works for...decades at this point.
I can understand why people despise Kissinger, but he’s a pretty interesting figure on the whole. Not the best diplomat or Secretary of State we’ve had, but certainly a seminal figure in American foreign policy.
Certainly, but lots of terrible people are also interesting. Kissinger strikes me as a prime example of Lord Acton's dictum at how power corrupts; by any reasonable standard he committed absolutely egregious acts, but because they inured to the USA's strategic benefit, there has never been any political will to hold him accountable. It's like how the US promotes the idea of a 'rules based international order' but habitually diminishes the UN, refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court and so on.
Theres a semi apocryphal story that one of Kissingers friends warned him before he started working under clearance, that once he had access to "Intelligence" that other people didn't have, he would lose his humanity to the spooks, and assume he was smarter than the people without clearance. Which seems to be sort of what happened.
assume he was smarter than the people without clearance
Idk, it's actually wild how HN is almost entirely "Kissinger is a war criminal" meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it. Meanwhile, if you read any Kissinger, you'd realize he understood history and the international relations better than 99% of these comments. Truly, word-for-word basis you will undoubtedly learn far more about history reading World Order than you will these HN comments. Personally, I have little hope in their uneducated decisions in a position of astronomical consequences and no 20/20 hindsight.
meme-ing with little actual specific policy substance behind it.
This is a good point. Can we really say for certain that “bombing noncombatant countries both during a war and after a treaty was signed” is a war crime, and even if it were would “coming up with the whole idea” even count as contributing to something like that? It is confusing stuff like this that has led to no person ever being convicted for war crimes — the concept is too nebulous and complex to nail down.
Surely if Kissinger were a war criminal he would have said so in the books that he wrote
See, this is what I'm talking about. You can read about Operation Menu for yourself.
"In 1966, Sihanouk made an agreement with Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China that would allow PAVN and VC forces to establish base areas in Cambodia and to use the port of Sihanoukville for the delivery of military material
Before the diplomatic amenities with Sihanouk [and the US] were even concluded, Nixon had decided to deal with the situation of PAVN/VC troops and supply bases in Cambodia.
On 30 January 1969, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Earle Wheeler suggested to the president that he authorize the bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries. He was seconded by General Creighton W. Abrams, who also submitted his proposal to bomb the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), the elusive headquarters of PAVN/VC southern operations, located somewhere in the Fishhook region of eastern Cambodia. Abrams claimed to Nixon that the regions of eastern Cambodia to be bombed were underpopulated and no civilian deaths would be caused."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
But instead, all any snarky layman hears from the grapevine is that Kissinger is coming up with the whole plan to bomb a random Commie country for zero reason. That you know Kissinger's name and not any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sec Def, or Sec State at the time involved in these decisions tells everything. People need an evil mastermind scapegoat, like McNamara was for Vietnam, because they can't comprehend the complexities involved in fog of war decision making, with no hindsight, and all the actors involved.
Thanks for the quotes! Here is a collection of primary sources
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cold-war-henry-kissi...
Good, got any that can illuminate how Kissinger was “coming up with the whole idea?"
Kissinger picked targets in Cambodia. He gave the instruction to bomb “anything that flies, anything that moves” [1] [2]
[1] https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
[2] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/3%20%20Kissinger...
You can be both a war criminal and an insightful writer.
Indeed - that's why I didn't deny above that Kissinger was interesting; he was a deep thinker, and I can see the motive behind many of his decisions, though I don't agree with it. Likewise I read Nixon and many other people whose politics I find disagreeable or even atrocious. What I dislike about Kissinger are both his extremely cynical strategic policies and that in the ~50 years since, he appears to have spent most of his time defending those policies and the ideas behind them, while making little or no effort to mitigate the negative outcomes.
Should a country overthrow the democratically elected government of another country because of non-life-threatening business losses? (Chile)
Should a country delay a peace process with an enemy nation for several years for the sake of optics over peace? (Vietnam)
Should a world leader meant to promote peace and de-escalation of armed conflict intentionally snub and antagonize their chief political rival with nukes, for the sake of optics? (USSR regarding wars in the mideast)
From my brief reading in the past few hours, it seems he decided a number of US policy positions that not only killed a large number of humans, but did so by expressly ignoring the stated principles of liberalism, self-determination and human decency and honor.
So I guess if people were to fully support him and his actions, I would at least ask them to be consistent and say "I do not believe in a rules-based world order and I do not believe the US has any obligation to advance human rights worldwide".
There are times the US has done things that were horrific, but were deemed absolutely essential to saving more lives than they cost - such as the bombing of Japan. Kissinger's difference is that none of the moves he endorsed seem to have been necessary to the survival of the "West" or the US, but it cost more lives than the bombings.
Now judge every US president and Secretary of State by the same criteria.
Kissinger might be worse than average but he certainly isn't exceptional.
LBJ may have had JFK assassinated, and he exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to kick off US forces in Vietnam.
Bush got us into Iraq, for what?
This doesn't mean Kissinger doesn't deserve criticism.
He also tried to intimidate India from intervening militarily in Bangladesh to stop the Pakistani Army’s genocide there, in collaboration with the British and the Chinese. Fortunately he failed, in no small part due to the Soviets, who were the good guys in this instance.
https://jacobin.com/2023/11/kissinger-in-bangladesh
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/when-russia-stunned-us...
Thanks for pointing this out, his book title Diplomacy was very enlightening.
One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).
I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.
I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.
Because "rules based international order" can only really be enforced by a hegemon, and obviously the hegemon can't really "be it" and "be in it" simultaneously
Of course they can. The police can't just arbitrarily kill people, either.
No offense, but I'm getting a lot of 'trust me bro' vibes from this post.
He is interesting in the way Hitler, Stalin, or Churchill are "interesting".
I am reminded of Hunter S Thompsons euology for Nixon. Good Riddance! Should have died in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
Wow. What a refreshing directness:
He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
You can't libel the dead
The dead have estates.
As an outsider, it seems like the lawyer population must be approaching 100% of Americans soon.
Is there anything or anyone Americans can't sue?
Does this like look a man who has had all he could eat?
That could have been me!
They're not saying there's no one to sue. It's that as libel and slander are legally defined, they don't apply to the dead. The estates have no standing for a suit.
Except in the Philippines, where it is a crime to commit libel/slander against a dead person (under Art. 353 of the Revised Penal Code). Although actual lawsuits from the family of a dead person are quite rare.
There's a little known law in the USA which states the following;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government, of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them.
What would stop the Atlantic from "getting sued into oblivion" is that the person that the article was about (Nixon) was dead when it was written, and the dead can't be defamed.
The 1st amendment only exists because it’s an ideal which many Americans value.
It doesn’t matter if “well it’s not technically illegal because it’s not the government”, people don’t like censorship either way.
If your only defense of [corp/group] is that “well technically their suppression isn’t against the law” you’re probably on the wrong side.
The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government
How would lawsuits work without the government being involved?
The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government, of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them.
It doesn’t prevent them from suing,
It does, within its scope, prevent the US or (because the same rule is incorporated against the states under the 14th) any state government from giving them a legal basis for winning a suit, though, which the target of a suit is free to point out to the court to get the case dismissed. This is why the scope if defamation is much narrower in the US then in the British law it inherited.
And, in some US jurisdictions, the target mught also be able to recover damages from the filer of the original suit under anti-SLAPP. laws.
The first amendment still applies because defamation wouldn't be illegal without the US government passing a law to make it illegal. That means that the US's defamation laws can only restrict speech within the very narrow exceptions to the first amendment that courts have allowed.
The bar is especially high for defamation of public figures like Nixon. For something to be defamation against a public figure, it not only has to be provably false; it has to be intentionally and maliciously false. They would have to prove that the author intentionally was spreading false information to hurt the subject. That is so difficult to do that defamation suits regarding public figures are almost never successful.
The judge who would give them punitive fines and forcing them to pay opposing party expenses.
Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
A. Different times. B. Hunter was a bit of a hack who was not taken seriously. His work is just a couple notches above mad magazine. It is entertaining satire that is obviously without connection to reality.
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.
The pro-Kissinger side will obviously have plenty of defense. Here's a good unrolling of the "piss on his grave" perspective for those who are confused (or angry but concerned they may not be showing enough consideration to a different perspective): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger [0]: “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 Milošević.”
And [1]: "Frequently, I’ve come to regret things I’ve said. This, from 2001, is not one of those times"
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
To quote Tom Lehrer: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Kissinger's legacy will be debated for a long time and I have personally only scratched the very surface. I do however intend to read Hitchen's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" [1] one day, if not just to enjoy the fire with which he could write.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
Do you have a source for the Lehrer quote? I've been told he didn't say that.
Good question. I have heard it referenced multiple times, but that does not make it true. Wikiquote cites The Sydney Morning Herald [1], but that is probably not a great source. I did a bit of digging online and also found The Guardian mentioning it too around the same time [2] (some twenty or so years ago). But I do not have a source that I would be willing to bet my life on.
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stop-cla...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/jul/31/artsfeatures...
This feels like a rabbit hole best left to proper quote investigators (and a timely one at that). Lehrer is alive though (unlike a certain someone...), so maybe one could even ask him?
Do you have a source questioning the authenticity? Not asking you to prove a negative here, just asking since I did not find one skimming a few pages on DuckDuckGo.
Excellent! Thank you! Right from the man himself: "I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize." So his objection is not to the quote itself, but rather the implication that he would have retired as a form of protest in relation to said quote.
Indeed, that must have been the source of my confusion.
That article is a gem; thanks for linking!
Lehrer said it, but the myth is that Lehrer stopped performing for that reason — the truth is, he had stopped performing long before that, simply because he was bored of it. From https://web.archive.org/web/20051025051240/https://avclub.co...
The Onion: I'd long heard that you stopped performing as a form of protest, because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tom Lehrer: I don't know how that got started. I've said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize. For one thing, I quit long before that happened, so historically it doesn't make any sense. I've heard that quoted back to me, but I've also heard it quoted that I was dead, so there you are. You can't believe anything you read. That was just an off-hand remark somebody picked up, and now it's been quoted and quoted, and therefore misquoted. I've heard that I stopped because Richard Nixon was elected, or because I got put away in an insane asylum, or whatever. It was just a remark about political satire, because it was true. Not literally, but everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it, I think. Years ago, it was much easier: We had Eisenhower to kick around. That was much funnier than Nixon.
The first article reads to me as totally absurd:
Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger.
I don't know how to take such a claim seriously. AFAICT the evidence for this claim is that Kissenger fed some info about the peace negotiations to the Nixon camp during the 1968 election campaign. That's it.
The claim isn’t just that he passed along some dry academic trivia but enough specific details for Nixon to successfully convince the Vietnamese government not to accept the deal on offer, claiming he’d make a better deal of he was elected. Nixon never did say who tipped him off that the peace talks were happening, although he acknowledged how unusual it was, but if true that entire chain of events started on Kissinger betraying the confidences placed in him so he could secure the job he wanted in the next administration.
Yes I still find this absurd. So, first of all, here's an article on the Nixon campaign's efforts to prevent a peace deal. [0] It doesn't mention Kissinger at all. If any single person should be 'blamed' for this, surely it's Nixon? But secondly, there's no evidence at all that these efforts actually had anything to do with the failure of the Johnson administration to reach a peace agreement:
Moreover, it cannot be said definitively whether a peace deal could have been reached without Nixon’s intervention or that it would have helped Mr. Humphrey. William P. Bundy, a foreign affairs adviser to Johnson and John F. Kennedy who was highly critical of Nixon, nonetheless concluded that prospects for the peace deal were slim anyway, so “probably no great chance was lost.”
Even if we do accept that this peace agreement would have happened and that Kissinger was the crucial linchpin in destroying it, U.S. involvement in the war continued for another 5 years, and then there were 2 further years of war without direct U.S. involvement. There were many decisions made by people in the U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments that kept the war going over these years, and they had wide support from their respective populaces. Continuing to fight the war until a peace that preserved South Vietnam could be secured was the orthodox position in the U.S. well into the 1970s. How can all of the moral blame for continuance of the war fall on one person?
Then, finally, assigning moral blame to someone for all the consequent downstream effects of their actions is anyway absurd. If Kissinger is a war criminal for 'causing' all the deaths in Vietnam from 1968 forward, then surely Johnson is a larger one, and Kennedy is still a larger one, since after all the war would have been over years earlier if not for them. Or we could go further and blame Napoleon III for invading Vietnam in the first place, he's surely responsible for every death in the consequent wars since then, right?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-t...
The claim is that Kissinger sabotaged peace talks thus extended the war in order for his guy to win the elections.
"some info" is an interesting phrase. The text of the Bible is "some info". The source code to Windows is "some info". The codes to arm United States nuclear missiles is "some info".
Every "some info" has some level of classification. In this case, the "some info" is information about ongoing diplomatic negotiations. I think it's safe to assume that such information is at least Confidential (as defined under US Executive Order 12356 or 13292).
And with that, I point you to https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2011/12/life-lessons-from-the-...: Maybe comment threads and trolls didn't exist during the time of the Vietnam War, but its message still applies.
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu, and didn't understand how Kissinger's actions caused Cambodian Civil War. Can you explain? (I assume it is the Civil War the he's blamed for?)
Parent did not claim that Kissinger caused the war. Try reading the link you posted again. And maybe following it to this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
Monty Python tribute to Henry Kissinger:
First thing that came to mind.
for me it was the great late Christopher Hitchens and his crusade against Kissinger
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christopher+hit...
This is incredible. This is the quality of discourse we have lost.
Hitch was one of the rare, great journalists and commentators that had the capacity to independently think for himself.
even the people calling him up on the call in section on the were more sane than what we get today.
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ant6tY-MOIk
YouTube seems to have made it unplayable (for now). You get a vague error when you try to play it.
This one now show the same error
That worked. I've seen a lot of MP videos, but I've not heard this. Very much their style, and funny in the most absurdist ways.
Thanks!
I went back to the original link and it still gives the same error. All good now though.
Works for me.
Strange. The alt link given to me in this thread worked. The original one says:
Video unavailable
This video is unavailable
Only after clicking it. The initial screen loads up as if it's going to play normally. Usually if there are geographical limits or whatever, it mentions that. But this error says the video simply isn't there.
or this one... https://youtu.be/V00Crn56wk0?si=W36uEA20Ce6BwaDr
is it tacky to dance on a war criminals grave? probably, but i'm not sure i care at the moment.
Between Kissinger and Wernher von Braun, it's a wonder where the US would be without Nazi Germany.
As a person from the third world and more specifically Africa, I cannot find myself to mourn his death or say any good thing about Kissinger. Good riddance actually. I would have loved to see him get his day in court when he was still alive.
What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.
I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.
I think many people from the Global South would agree with you and not just Africans. That was also exactly my thought when i read the headline, even though he did nothing against my native Kenya. Also, the phrase "Third World" isn't the most appropriate one to describe a good chunk of the world.
"Third World" is very much a Cold War term, with roots in French history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World#Etymology
While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.
I prefer to use "peripheral economies". It's even more pejorative but it shows the way and better describes the situation.
"Third world" actually seems like an euphemism to me. It makes me think of a race and gives you the false hope of improving in the future by just playing along the same game.
"Third world" actually seems like...
False hope for the downtrodden, if they just keep playing the game - that was an age-old feature of human society, back when they were stuck building pyramids for their dear departed betters.
OTOH, a number of nations which seemed hopelessly stuck at the bottom of the pyramid back in 1952 are now doing pretty well, some even by First World standards.
It might be some small consolation that I know a lot of Americans who are celebrating his death, rather than mourning it.
I definitely raised a glass to his newfound status as a corpse.
A lot of people in the US sadly have 0 knowledge about his crimes in Africa :( It doesn’t even get mentioned in pretty critical articles!
It's the Donald Trump/George Santos blizzard method: do so much crime it's impossible to keep track of it all!
It's disturbing the vast difference of opinion between ordinary citizens of the US who think he's a monster that inflicted an enormous amount of evil upon the world. Ever more worse because it was in our name. And how the political class in the US views him.
It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.
There are plenty of people all around the world who know what heinous things he did. He won’t ever be mourned, and hopefully we never see the likes of him again
I often think of an interesting quote found inside Samuel Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations” (which is pretty meh, IMHO):
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
He has a brother who came to America when he did. Recently, the brother was asked why he had no German accent but Henry did. “Because,” said the brother, “Henry never listens.”
https://jacobin.com/2012/08/gore-vidal-dead-and-yet-henry-ki...
Henry is such a strange name for a child. It just doesn't make sense to me. Henry is like an adult name :/
How about this one then, my grandmother is named Lillemor which is Swedish for "little mother". It was a fairly common name even. People out there naming their kids "little mother".
Do people ever call her Lill or Lilly (phonetically)?
Nah, no nicknames that I'm aware of. Sweden isn't too big on nicknames in general I'd say.
Is it true you stand a crazy wife distance apart when queueing or at bustops?
His birth name was "Heinz Alfred" but I don't know if that makes it any better.
Just makes me think of ketchup and alfredo
This is the most perplexing comment I've ever read.
Your handle sounds familiar. Have we crossed paths previously? Hmm
I remember that he visited his old football club in Germany a couple of years ago and spoke in German on the occasion.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1223820 The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
Probably as good a time as any to re-link the Mother Jones piece "Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge":
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
Linked on HN numerous times but largely only discussed here:
It's also a good reminder that public judgement isn't worth much for any personality who had access to lots of bonafide top secret information.
A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
Can you give any examples of somebody that was unjustly vilified by the public until top secret information was released that exonerated them?
Not necessarily 'unjustly vilified', but most of Edgar Hoover's biography were done before the extend on soviet spying in the US was declassified. It talked about a very interesting podcast on a previous comment [1].
For example, Harry Truman, and his sacking of MacArthur. Now that there's been more info released regarding Army biowarfare programs in the late 40s/early 50s, recruitment of the Japanese specialists immediately after WW2, etc...
That's all very fine but worthless for people voting today.
How is this relevant? The voter's estimation of worth barely influence Kissinger types at all.
Ellsberg had access to the information Kissinger had and still thought the Vietnam war was unjust and unwinnable.
It’s hard to imagine what Kissinger knew that would drastically change my perception on him.
The Vietnam war was unjust and unwinnable.
JRK got us into it, and Nixon got us out of it while navigating the complexities of China, the cold war, and a potential WW III if we appeared too weak.
JFK and Johnson deserve the blame for starting the war, by the end of Johnson’s term it was obvious the public wanted out of the war and he was negotiating the end of it. Nixon and Kissinger extended the war for political reasons. They met behind the American governments back with the south Vietnamese and convinced them to hold out for a better deal from the republicans, and they withdrew from talks and tanked Johnson’s peace deal. They eventually negotiated almost the same deal but worse after many American lives, and many more Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives were spent. By all appearances, for nothing more than electing Nixon.
Great link!
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
Non human life? Like cats?
He's the reason why the middle east has been in shambles since the 70s.
You may be surprised to learn it's been in shambles for a while longer than that.
Yeah, but it was meaningfully stabilizing before we fucked it again.
No, it wasn't. What part are you even talking about?
Israel was at war with all of its neighbors 5 years before Kissinger. The clerics were poised to take power in Iran since the 60s. same thing with the baaths in Iraq.
Europe was in chaos for centuries up until the end of WW2. Since WW2 western powers have worked to keep the middle east in chaos.
when was it ever stable?
A few thousand years of regular stabilization and destabilization would like a few words with you, lol
Religion is also an important reason.
Since the 70's? There's a Bible with stories about those shambles!
Many people have a positive view of Kissinger --https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissingers-century-01a1a9...
I think it's a generational thing. Kissinger should have stopped commenting on world affairs 20 decades ago. It became increasingly oblivious that the world was evolving in a direction he didn't understand or comprehend. He continued to attempt to apply his cold war era world view and solutions to current issues, when it was obvious to most that his ideas where nonsense.
An example: His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
Had he stepped back from the public 20 years ago, then may the majority of at least Americans would have remembered him as a great statesman, but he need to be heard and saying stupid shit has made people more aware of his past and his terrible actions.
His idea that Ukraine should give up territory to please Russia made it clear that he don't understand modern Russia or Putin. It's not a conflict in which he has no relevant experience or any deep insight, yet he felt the need to use his influence to present his poorly thought out idea.
And yet it is exactly this behind the scenes that Ukraine European backers are pushing Zelensky to do. When it is clear that the war is a quagmire and Ukraine is underperforming.
Which ones? You mean russian puppets like Orban and Fico?
From the rumors it's russian puppets like Macron and Sholtz
Americans maybe. Plenty of Cambodians, Chileans, Argentinians, and more, will spit on the grave.
He’s quite popular in China too.
It's hard to do that level of genocide and escape the Hague without a few admirers
Even those that did not escape the Hague have admirers.
Are we sure? I was beginning to wonder if the afterlife was going to be holding out on this one.
Poor taste jokes aside - is there anyone else as directly responsible for as much modern day suffering, who has "gotten away with it" more cleanly in the eyes of the public? I've always found the disconnect between history and legacy to be rather... jarring.
Churchill?
As a British person, I’m thankful to Churchill that I’m not typing this response in German.
It's possible for a human to have done both very good and very bad things, yes.
Bush is probably a contender.
Depends on perspective I suppose. Lots of people in Russia, for instance, feel this way about Gorbachev. Putin even denied him a state funeral.
The neocons? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kagans, Nuland, Bolton, et al.
In terms of stopping ongoing and future conflicts, this is the group we need to hold accountable. Not Kissinger, whom they hate(d), and hasn't been making policy for decades.
http://ishenrykissingerdead.com/ is lagging behind the news
They had one job!
God, I hope the person who made that site didn't die before they could make this update.
Henry's final victim?
What if Kissenger ran the site himself?
Domain creation Date: 2020-11-26T22:32:58Z
They've paid for 3 years of domain registration, and missed their big day
It’ll be right longer than it was wrong.
Kissinger gets a lot of flak for the bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam, but... I mean, it was awful when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and it was also awful when the Viet Cong took over Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge murdered 25% of the country! 2 million people!! https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian-genocide
The Viet Cong were also horrible (excepting, of course, their intervention in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge!) and devastated Vietnam, and the CPV rules it with an iron fist to this day.
Communism really is and was extremely, horribly bad.
In South Korea, the seemingly insane plan of the US (install a pro-Western dictator as a bulwark against Communism, and eventually transition to a liberal democracy) eventually worked. The Korean War pre-dates Kissinger's rise to power, but his overall principle of oppose-Communism-no-matter-what seems kind of reasonable, even in hindsight.
Anti-communist dictatorships and militias were often terrible, too, but it is really hard to be worse than Communists.
Can't say I'm surprised that this is my most downvoted post! HN, classy as ever.
Binary thinking will do that - you’re making a very sweeping claim without acknowledging that not everything fits cleanly into it. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that, say, the North Vietnamese government was terror on earth justifying any possible action against it, Allende wasn’t a Communist and nor were East Timor, Bangladesh, Cambodia, etc. so this is effectively arguing that you let someone be shot because you thought they might grow up to be a murderer.
I don't think there's any evidence that Allende was worse than the regime that took over. You might argue Allende wasn't a communist (which would be true), but the coup was of Kissinger's making. Cuba was communist, and was absolutely not the hell-hole that Cambodia was or North-Korea is.
It worked in South Korea and it failed everywhere else. Everything this man did was extremely short-sighted and had cause widespread mistrust of America in the majority of the world.
His own biographer credited Kissinger with killing 3 million people, those numbers make the Khmer Rouge blush, but your bias against communism makes you see Kissinger as some sort of hero? That's morally fascinating.
If you really want to understand the Kissenger era, the best raw source IMO is this:
"The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East is a 2011 book by Andrew Scott Cooper"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Kings
"The book discusses Henry Kissinger, the 1970s oil embargo, and the Iranian Revolution. Cooper had stated that the story on how the U.S. became dependent on Saudi Arabia and how U.S. reliance on oil began was "Less well known" compared to the general understanding of U.S. reliance on oil."
Henry Kissenger along with his British and Gulf Arab partners seem to have invented the concept of petrodollar recycling which has buoyed up the value of the US dollar since about 1975 or so. Balance of payments was a problem and Kissenger said to the Gulf Arabs, "we'll maintain your medieval system of government and the special priviledges of the House of Saud just so long as you keep investing the bulk of those profits back into the US economy (see Saud investments in Uber, today)."
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
I mean Steve Jobs didn't do a lot of invention either, but he was still quite the character and bent the course of history
Well yes, right up there with Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin, I guess. Which circle of Dante's Inferno do you think these characters end up in?
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
Have you actually read 'The Prince'? It's hopelessly naive, and doesn't have much to do with real politics (or real life in general). So I doubt you could learn everything there is to know about Henry Kissinger in there.
(To explain more: 'The Prince' is willing to say some things that shocked contemporaries, and might even shock some people today. But it's still rather naive in its reasoning, and believes in simple 'one weird tricks'.)
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince"
I don't think think we can read 1 book and understood modern politics lol. It's also very funny to say that book to would be the prince.
Guy was a crook and had no remorse for killing millions of civilians and cozying up with dictators. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...
The world needs less people like him.
No one should ever be complicit in carpet bombing. It's inhumane.
We in the US ought to hold the govt accountable everytime they drop bombs from the sky on civilians.
We're currently helping Israel do that in Gaza with our tax dollars. Hospitals and Schools getting air bombed. That is not who we are.
Hospitals and schools that are used by Hamas.
While I agree to an extent, this begs an obvious question: How far do we take this line of thinking?
Is an attack like 9/11 justified since even the twin towers were used by the US government indirectly, owing to nearly everyone within paying taxes that supported US wars and expeditionary-ism?
Likewise, I'd want to keep in mind things like relative size and options on the table. WW2 incendiary and atomic bombing is one thing in the context of the ferocity and consumption of that war. Yet in the case of a small territory under varying degrees of military occupation and without full self determination, is there really no capability to take any action but bombing such places? (And no moral imperative to try to cause less collateral if it's realistically possible?)
That is not who we are.
No, that is not who you would like us to be/have been. Very evidently, that is who we are.
helping israel
not who we are
It is absolutely who we are. We unconditionally support israel no matter what they do. They are our greatest ally!
I can’t remember if it was Kissinger or Nixon that Hunter S. Thompson claimed required screws to affix their pants to their crooked bodies.
Whatever the case, it was incisive and memorable prose.
It was Nixon. The joke doesn't apply to Kissinger because he wasn't a crook.
You're right. Kissinger was way worse.
The whole point of the joke is that Nixon famously said "People have gotta know whether or not their president is a crook. Well I am not a crook".
Posting a gibe that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon after Kissinger died is just stupid. At least post what he wrote about Kissinger:
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Yup, War criminal, traitor…
He wrote a fair amount of books for the interested
I'm suddenly interested in books for the disinterested.
Right, I would like to stick my head in the sand and not understand people who influenced modern history as well. Or maybe you would like to read about anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism of which there are plenty of books, get your fill. Most direct criticisms are poorly written and sprinkled with conspiratiorial delusions, such as A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson if you truly want a recommendation, which certainly attempts to go for the jugular but not well at all.
I found Diplomacy by him to be surprisingly good. I came into it with a negative perception of him presumably from being around threads like this one and found a cogent framework to think about foreign relations well articulated.
I've read that book
It's well articulated, in the same sense that lebensraum can be well-articulated. If you don't believe in the rule of law, but do believe in might makes right, it's entirely coherent.
It also puts you on a similar moral ground, and value to civilized society that being, say, a mob boss, or some other violent, dangerous psychopath does.
Hey have you ever thought about the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential:
"Kissinger then defines what the U.S. wants overall, agreed broadly in the group: Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
Sounds nuts, right? Reputable source I guess:
https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/blog/israeli-nuclear-pro...
Kissenger was a remarkable character, his legacy is worth examining with a fine-tooth comb... isn't it?
"Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal is dangerous, but public knowledge is also dangerous, given that it could lead to a Soviet-Arab nuclear guarantee. Thus, at a minimum, the U.S. should keep it secret."
explain what is nuts about that in the middle of the cold war. The US has intelligence that Israel has the bomb, and Kissinger thinks we shouldn't broadcast it?
the role Henry Kissenger played in the development of the Israeli nuclear weapons program? It's not inconsequential
what role is that in the development of Israel's weapon? (If there is one weapon you aren't going to keep the Jewish state from developing, I'd think it would be one based on 20th century physics...)
Other than "oooh Kissinger bad", I don't get what you are saying.
(*fine-toothed comb)
The fact that nuclear weapons are about deterrence means you don't want them to be secret. A secret nuclear weapon's primary use would be a revenge weapon. Or to blow up a city in a surprise attack. Neither of which is particularly "defensive".
There's a reason why we have arms treaties and try to be transparent about our nuclear capabilities. I know it's a movie but Dr. Strangelove is a great example of the thinking behind this.
I get that the point is to keep the balance of power in the favor of the US, but the practical outcome was letting Israel secretly develop a revenge/offensive nuclear bomb. If it got used potentially millions would die, and you can't even make the argument that it acts as a stabilizer via MAD.
the issue cited is that the Soviet Union would need to respond. The face-saving open secret could easily be the better option.
I have a feeling that people who hate him were on the receiving end of his work, or associate him as one of those bogeyman characters that their in-group is expected to hate, or whom it's popular and fashionable to hate.
He seems to have been quite good at what he did, and this made his opponents hate him particularly vehemently. If you bother to read what he wrote, he had a pretty humble but accurate view of things in their moment, and also contrarian ideas that might have proven out to be correct despite the horror they imply.
It isn't only his opponents who hated him, it's the countless families and friends of the innocent bystanders who got caught in Kissinger's crossfire.
The victims "were on the receiving end of his work", like I said. The man served the US and the US first and wasn't shy about sacrificing left and right for his perceived greater good. In the trolley problem, he was clear eyed. You may disagree with his trolley problem solution, but then would you have one, or would you stall and do nothing in the face of this problem?
You may disagree with his trolley problem solution
Many more correctly disagree with his championing of a specific Trolley Problem framing that likely didn't exist outside a hobgoblin of tiny minds frightened of reds under the bed.
Kissenger loved that Domino Theory: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/27/archives/skepticism-on-do...
That judgment, however, is not shared by Administration foreign policy specialists, the American intelligence community or many foreign diplomats.
“The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, 'Why not us?'”
In foreign policy you have to walk a line between moralism and realism. Kissinger was too much a realist. But moralism has its dangers too, as we saw with the Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan) and Obama (Libya) administrations.
At any rate, it's hard to think of anyone who is more responsible for the continued post-war global dominance of the US than Henry Kissinger.
FDR, Eisenhower, Truman. Hell even Clinton is more responsible for post war global dominance than Kissinger.
Any number of Fed chairs. Whoever started DARPA.
America's global dominance, and China's challenge to it, depends far more on economic heft than the machinations of diplomats, even ones as ruthless as Kissenger.
I just can’t help think how much wider the global support for the west (incl eg ukraine) would be today if Kissinger’s “we can do war crimes and install dictators all we like cause we’re the good guys” doctrine hadn’t made it to the forefront of US policy. Even from a hardcore neorealist perspective, the harm has by now well outlasted the benefit.
Realpoliticans are always playing for the autoritarian team, as it flattens the playing field, giving up the moral high ground, one of the reasons russian bots desperatly push it as the "default" mindset. Got to turn everyone a psychopathic maniac out for themselves, to justify being one.
Kissinger is on record (from WEF/Davos of all places) as having criticized the West's position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. The only reason he swum against the tide was because he was 98 at the time and probably doesn't give a shit what anybody thinks of him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOZw0zGFvzI
He's a monster and I'm glad he's dead but he was spot on about the inevitable outcome in Ukraine and how sanctions and enmity have pushed Russia even further into china's loving embrace.
It’s really inappropriate how many people are glad he’s dead.
Now is not the time or place to have a hate fest. He’s dead. He had family. He’s a real person who died today.
I don’t know what this has to do with Hacker News ethos.
And using someone’s death as occasion to talk ill about them just isn’t appropriate.
Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands people. They had families. They were real people who died. Death doesn´t absolve someone from committing crimes against humanity. To claim that people should only talk about the good things person did is a serious case of decorum poisoning. Nobody celebrates serial killers.
He was partially responsible for the deaths of thousands of people around the world, and was responsible for some of the darkest chapters of us foreign policy during the 20th century. When do you think is an appropriate time to have these conversations? He's dead. Criticizing his impact on the world can hardly affect him now. The people in Cambodia he helped murder had families too. Are hackers not supposed to care about ethics or humanity? Why wouldn't Kissinger's death be an inappropriate time to discuss his legacy?
Don't even know this is a thing. Thank you kind stranger.
Born in Germany in 1973, Kissinger first came to the US in 1938
He had a time machine ? :) I think there was a typo in the article, they many 1923 I would say.
Anyway, may he Rest in Peace.
EDIT: the date is now fixed
Anyway, may he Rest in Peace.
you must be joking. may he absolutely not
I hope his rest ISN'T peaceful.
On a practical side of things, how did he manage to make it to 100? Did he maintain a nutrition plan, was he physically active?
Fun fact: Henry Kissinger was elected an international member of Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016.
Some people just live longer.
My grandmother made it to 98, she rode horses when she was a younger woman (in Australia during the war, she was able to follow my grandfather who was an RAF mechanic out there on the last passenger ship through the Suez).
She used to enjoy a tipple, never smoked though, but in her later years never really exercised.
My grandma lived to 93 and smoked her whole life. Didn’t die of any lung related illness either. Obviously don’t recommend
Before Henry Kissinger, there were walls in the world - just as there are now. The difference was those walls - by-and-large - were designed to keep people _in_. A very subtle but meaningful difference. The people who built _those walls_ wanted you inside with them. That was their dream - and they were quite frank about it. Just something to ponder.
Are you suggesting there aren’t today? You’ve never heard of North Korea? Xinjiang?
If you’re referring to the USSR - Jimmy Carter is the first president to arm the Mujahideen (for better and worse), without the help of Kissinger.
Those places exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule in 2023. I'm not offering a full-throated apology of Kissinger (or, by extension, Nixon) just pointing out that a lot of the people jumping out to proclaim what a terrible human he is a few hours after his death was announced might consider that they would be demonstrably worse off if the forces Kissinger worked to keep at bay had prevailed.
Kissinger is way over hyped. What I find more interesting is the total deflection of the blame of everything that happened to his person. I believe that Kissinger is talented but far from being the person who orchestrated a world order. He was a tool. A very nice and charismatic persona who took the fall when events went south. He was paid for it and protected up until his death.
His value was similar to the value of consulting companies to a CEO.
When a CEO decides he wants to do a layoff, he can either show up one morning and say he has decided to fire 7% of the workers, or he can hire a consulting company to prepare a thorough and very expensive report which the CEO knows will contain advice to layoff precisely 7% of the workers.
Firing people is sometimes necessary in a budgeting process, and bombing people is sometimes necessary in a war, but it's better if it looks like it is someone else's decision, even when the responsibility obviously rests with the executive.
"very nice and charismatic persona"
Not sure I've ever heard anyone refer to Henry Kissinger as "a very nice and charismatic person".
Even if he was just "the face" of US Policy at the time, and not an actual implementer, he was instrumental in furthering the suffereing of millions around the world through meddling in foreign governments/civil unrest.
If I make $10 dollars off of your suffering in perpetuity, and let it continue as the public face of your suffering, am I less evil than the actual person implementing your suffering?
I was riding an elevator to my hotel room when it stops on another floor and in gets Henry Kissinger in the company of beautiful young blonde. So I say "Hey! Aren't you Kissinger?" Henry replies "no I'm Fsckinger."
(The last time I can tell a 50 year old joke)
Damn, he was cooking here
That's not how Kissinger is pronounced. It's a soft g. Sorry to spoil your joke, but as you say it's reached the end of its natural life anyway.
RIP Henry Kissinger. I am as far apart on the political spectrum from Kissinger as can be imagined, but it is useless to imagine a counterfactual, somehow better, history where he did not make his mark.
We often think powerful people have the power to command the course of history, and therefore is somehow more culpable than the cheering onlooker. But we are all vessels on the tides of history.
Applying criminal law to state leaders, spearheads of broad sectors of society is therefore fraught with peril bordering on a misuse of the judiciary, unless they broke some law that is also applicable to anyone else, like theft, willful deceit or bodily harm to others (in their vicinity).
Kissinger's book "Diplomacy”(1994) is incredibly good and well-written Must read for anyone interested in international politics.
To understand Kissinger, you must understand his worldview. He had an acute sense of tragedy, and understanding that things can go wrong in an instant. For him the job of foreign policy was very modest: to keep the most horrible disasters away by using power against power. By preventing the worst from happening, others had the opportunity to better the humanity. Cynical realpolitik was necessary to prevent everything from going to hell.
In the last 30 years Kissinger was not very consistent or well thought in his opinions in public. He just wanted to get included and consulted in the highest level, so his opinions were often grafted to be accepted. For example, the plan to invade Iraq was fundamentally against Kissinger's realpolitik world view. Neoconservative foreign policy is idealistic (spread democracy trough military strength) but Kissinger rationalized the invasion for neocons.
God this motherfucker was due for a while, great news!
Ah and OF COURSE I get downvoted. I know it. This fucking site is filled with braindead morons, almost as bad as Reddit. But also some people with brains who point out who he really was. A disgusting war criminal and nothing less.
But you gonna honor a war criminal because the MSMBS media brainwashed you into praising him as a good man and great advisor or whatever the fuck they tell you to believe. He was the personification of evil foreign policy, typical elitist with no empathy and only one goal to expand the US empire by all brutal means possible. Seeing millions of lives just to be sacrificed for his great chess game.
Not only was he a war criminal, but he was a major player on the Theranos board who brought in multiple investors and raked in over a half million a year between his board position and "consulting."
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/elizabeth-holmes-trial-ther...
I revised my opinion of Elizabeth Holmes somewhat for the better when I found out how much of Henry Kissinger's money she ran off with. Mixed with her fraud, a genuine public service!
Man, too bad, I really wanted to see what Kissinger thought of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
RIP Mister. You were a great intellectual.
For anyone else who might care I found yesterday a great take on that conflict by Lawrence Freedman.
[1] https://samf.substack.com/p/why-not-losing-is-not-tantamount
Not a second too soon. He's responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths around the world. Do not celebrate him.
Celebrate his death, may he and any other neocon burn in hell for eternity
I think his book on World Orders is interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Order-Henry-Kissinger/dp/014312...
He was a very influential political operator. It’s true what they say though, at least in this case. Only the good die young.
The fact that he lived 100 years is a proof that there is no god.
About time
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
Rolling Stone said it best
He was responsible for the genocide of millions of Bengali Hindus, he supplied weapons and arms meant to kill us, knowing fully-well what its sole purpose was.
The only thing he was great at doing, was spilling innocent blood across the world.
[1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide)
[Nixon-Kissinger](https://youtu.be/bEytw5Zv0wc?si=P_tbwHcvsm1N8amP)
Good! Lets start the clock for Nuland then.
When people like this guy die, I always wish that hell is actually real place because he has by all accounts earned a seat at that table.
Rest in piss.
Add the division of Cyprus to his accomplishments
To have Hitch alive right now to comment, the Rollingstone article was pretty on point but his would have been special.
Finally
Kissinger saw combat with the [84th Infantry Division] and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.
Thank you for your military service Mr. Secretary. Fighting real Nazis earns my gratitude.
I always go back to this quote from Bourdain when it comes to Kissinger:
“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 Milošević.”
Referenced many places, but I got it from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/anthony-bourdain...
The DeathList website finally gets to mark him off their list, after nominating him for likely death in the next year 10 times previously (and I believe he first made the list back in 1993).
How can an obit about a 100 year old man garner 328 comments in 5 hours on HN? This is Nixon era stuff. I would have assumed most HN reader’s parents weren’t born when Kissinger was actually relevant. The HN demographic is way older than I imagined.
My thoughts to the people whose family still reel from his actions
Does this mean the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have been resolved? If so, he probably died of boredom.
The good ones die so young...
About 100 years too late
Will we ever get to see the Coens' biopic, "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go"?
Shoot the body to make absolutely sure.
Great News for the peace of the world.
A shadowy character. For all his public appearances brokering Peace Deals, he engineered military coups all over Latin America in the 70s (Allendes government for one) and helped set up “School of the Americas” in Panama, where the US trained military juntas how to fight leftist “insurgency”(or civilian opposition, depending who you ask). A lot of the torturing and dirty wars that crippled Latam for 15 years is his doing.
While I recognize a number of good deeds he pulled, I get upset when his shadowy part gets untold.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
- Clarence Darrow
Not the only war criminal to ever win a Nobel Peace Prize, but he's surely in the running for the one with the most blood on his hands.
Ah yes, the real life Varys.
Go to the hell
Eternal hellfire
I wonder who won the tontine: https://henrykissinger.rip
I read Kissinger The Adventures of Super-Kraut [1] when it came out in 1972. It was a fun read at the time.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Adventures-Super-Kraut-Char...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki...
"Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100."
I know this kind of comment violates HN’s decorum, but RIP to this bozo. My only regret is that we didn’t get to see him live long enough to get bamboozled by the next Theranos-level scam
“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 Milošević.”
― Anthony Bourdain
Good night, sweet prince.
“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 Milošević.”
— Anthony Bourdain
No newspaper obituary will say it like this, so I feel obliged to say it.
One of the world's most notorious war criminals, a man with millions of people's blood on his hands, a man directly responsible for the rise of anti-liberal regimes across the world from Russia to Iran, died today.
He brought misery to the world and set the course of human progress back by decades.
People only think of the likes of Stalin or Pol Pot when they think of "evil". But the name Henry Kissinger belongs right up there.
He died a long time ago.
The article is just the headline
A war criminal.
He saw mass murder and genocide along with the rape of tens of thousands of women in East Pakistan in 1970 and not only did nothing he said nothing should be done at all because Pakistan was an US ally.
He did it all full on record and on paper.
There's nothing "alleged". He is a war criminal. Plain and simple. And I abhor this man.
RIP bozo!
Here's a good writeup of his war crimes: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/henry-kissinger-dies_n_637693...
Kissinger wrote an interesting book "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822", actually found it online:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012330695&se...
i think he had his moment here with the 1975 Helsinki accord. That one is often overlooked, but it gave dissidents in communist countries a basis to press their case, where their own government signed a document that on paper obliged them to respect human rights.
Kissinger was a truly awful and hypocritical human being. Despite being a refugee from a murderous regime, he sat around and cracked jokes with a dictator whose body counts was in the multiples of the dictator he fled from. The "rapprochement" (read: appeasement) with the PRC that he spearheaded benefited China immensely while it was nothing but damaging to US interests. The damage he did to the long term peace in the Taiwan strait can still be felt to this day.
He would remain a close friend of that regime until his dying days - I believe he met Xi this year.
Good riddance.
Henry Kissinger, how I'm missing you, and wishing you were here. He's got better legs than Hitler, and nicer tits than Cher!
This may be the only time I will say this about someone passing.
Good.
Finally, I have been waiting for this moment a very long time.
“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” - Henry Kissinger
Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands
All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.
Rest in peace patriot.
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.
[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