Socialite War Criminal Henry Kissinger is dead
The moral bankruptcy of elites is never more on display than when one of their own shuffles the mortal coil.
The moral bankruptcy of elites is never more on display than when one of their own shuffles the mortal coil. This is, I suppose, understandable, considering that worldly success — and remembrance — is all that that tribe craves.
Henry Kissinger, at 100, has passed and, quite frankly, good riddance. The lowball estimate of those killed globally by his policies are in the low single digit millions — basically, megadeaths. “At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake,” is how Ben Rhodes eulogized Kissinger, in the journal of record, the New York Times. “Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not.”
The butcher’s bill for Kissinger has come due with his death. Christopher Hitchens wrote one of the more damning indictments of him. David Corn, for Mother Jones, chronicles his “wet work” in Chile:
Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. This included Kissinger supervising clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile and triggering a military coup. This scheming yielded the assassination of Chile’s commander-in-chief of the Army. Eventually, a military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, and implemented a dictatorship. Following the coup, Kissinger backed Pinochet to the hilt. During a private conversation with the Chilean tyrant in 1976, he told Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”
As a young intern at The Nation in 1995, it was not uncommon to hear conversations among serious foreign policy thinkers about the lothesome things that Kissinger did around the world when he was in power. But it seemed then that the world was getting smaller for Kissinger, that courts were coming around to holding him accountable for his brutality and his excesses as America’s foreign minister during the early part of the Cold war. By the 90s, the Cold War was over; declassified documents were damning of him.
In 1975 Kissinger — along with then-President Ford— in a pique of almost otherworldly hauteur, essentially greenlit the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. On December 6, Kissinger and Ford, back from a trip to Beijing, stopped by Jakarta to see President Suharto. They would not object to an invasion of East Timor, they just had questions about the use of American-made weapons and the speed of the invasion. Ford and Kissinger did not want to be in Jakarta when the shit went down. From Jacobin:
In fact, the Indonesian attack came only a few hours after Kissinger and President Ford left Jakarta, where they had met with Suharto. According to transcripts, Ford had told the general: “[We] will not press on the issue [of East Timor]. We understand… the intentions you have.” Kissinger explained that “the use of US-made arms could create problems.” About 90 percent of Indonesian military equipment at the time came from the United States, under the terms of a 1958 treaty. Indonesia assured the US that these weapons would be used “solely for legitimate national self-defense.”
Kissinger also expressed his understanding of Indonesia’s “need to move quickly.” Thinking along with his hosts regarding the use of US weapons, he suggested, “it depends on how we construe it, whether it is self-defense or as a foreign operation.” Regarding the actual attack, Kissinger remarked “it would be better if it were done after we [Kissinger and Ford] returned,” and concluded: “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.”
200,000 East Timorese were killed. But, hey, they had all brown skin so no foul. We won’t even mention Cambodia, Bangladesh or even Argentina. The 70s were a hell of a drug.
Kissinger once seriously contemplated running for Governor of NY. Buckley advised against it on the grounds that going from Secretary of State to dealing with the State Assembly in Albany would be — how does one put it politely? — a massive comedown. Vintage Buckley, who once uttered the populist line “I would sooner be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty at Harvard.” He later walked that pronouncement back to Conde Nast’s luxurious, white-supremacist, M magazine, saying, that those feelings didn’t, of course, extend to his preferred company at a dinner party. Charmed, I’m sure.
After much consideration, Kissinger decided not to run for Governor. Thereafter he devoted his life to geopolitical consulting and café society. Like Buckley, Kissinger’s preferred company was the vacuous tribe of Nan Kempner and Bill Blass — names all but forgotten, thank goodness, by the young. My point here being that Kissinger was profoundly unelectable. Can you imagine him eating rubbery chicken at an Italian-American dinner? Looking out for the Eerie County vote? Making sure the snow is hovelled in Buffalo? He was Harvard faculty and National Security State during the Cold War. He was absolutely and in every sense a courtier, more at home in the pages of Baldasare Castiglione than in Democracy in America.
As far as his consulting went, Kissinger worked with China, Disney and many other clients with massive overflows of money. That was his consolation to no longer having power over large swaths of the planet. The sweet consolation of an ill-gained fortune. Who knows how much money he made, trading in his infamous skills as a negotiator as well as his contacts gained as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, as a go-between with multinational corporations and tyrannies. It is a little bit astonishing — though not much — that no one, no newspaper or cabler or elected official ever brought up the great ethical concerns with what Kissinger was doing at the time. But — it was a white man’s world back then.
Kissinger also became something of a “Putin Whisperer.” In 2005 I blogged, “The Corsair is still reeling after the news of this weekend's tete-a-tete between the massively evil Henry Kissinger, and corrupt pseudo-despot, Vladimir Putin. How does one unwind with that much evil in the room? The diabolical laughter over the blinis and vodka alone would break even the most earnest waif of an Amnesty International pamphleteer.” Subsequently, Kissinger would go on Charlie Rose and explain to the Establishment how Putin viewed himself as the successor to Peter the Great. Good times, those.
The pendulum swings. The mighty have fallen. Kissinger belongs to an age long passed. Even Teen Vogue disdains him. Kissinger could not possibly thrive in our present age of a thousand channels and online news vehicles and that is some consolation. The diversity of outlets provide an immunity against individual charm. His outsized and unnatural ambition, paired with a calculated Teutonic elan worked on the gatekeepers — because there were far, far fewer of those in the 70s. It worked once, but no longer. The previous age was easily seduced by his foreign accent and his unlawful references to Metternich. The soulless, bloodless climbing, from Harvard’s Government faculty to the National Security State to the sanguinary state in which he left the world would demand answers that the obsequious press of the 70s could not bother to do.
In the end, Kissinger and all the names he ran with will be forgotten. They will only exist as boldfaces in bound copies of old newspapers in libraries, if even thosphysical structures survive. I used to call him in the era of blogs a “socialite war criminal.” Kissinger left the world worse than it was given to him and he didn’t care awhit. Power was a waystation to money in his estimation. The conversation surrounding him will probably not even outlast the process of his chemical decomposition into his constituent parts into the earth. The America Government graduates of the future that read his largely irrelevant and laughably vague books on Diplomacy will be farther and fewer in between. Soon the name Henry Kissinger will be the answer to trivia questions. The Global South that he terrorized in the 1970s is rising, further proof that the age of Kissinger was being laid to rest even as he still walked the earth.