It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
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.
Maybe you should read about Kissinger and his relation with the above.
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.
No, because the US controls the "free media" and politicians in those countries. It's funny how almost all Kissinger article today were positive in this country.
That's more the reason to move the court to a country with nukes, say France, Strasbourg and put some retaliation Act in place if Americans put Strasbourg Invasion Act in place
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
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...
"Only the good die young, only evil seems to live forever". Iron Maiden
Well worth a listen imo, I ended up binging every episode over the course of a year or two.
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!"
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 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.
Much like comments written on the internet.
> That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.
See above.
This Week in Virology was my go to during the pandemic, hosted by a virologist, and immunologist, and an infectious disease doctor.
You'll notice that many if not most of the loudest "expert" voices during the pandemic were speaking outside their area of expertise. With the exception of Fauci, of course.
Mentioned the reasons in my last post.
Nobody is doing this kind of podcast "on the fly"
Edit: and there’s nothing wrong with that! Just recognize when something is entertainment vs. trying to be objective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:
1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.
This was reported as a belligerent statement.
2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.
This was not reported at all.
Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?
Chomsky have denied genocide that Kissinger helped perpetrate, so he could have known.
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.
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?
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.
No.
At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That and being a total horn dog.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
> The Act gives the President power to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court".
I’m glad for The Hague Invasion Act.
am not well educated on it, for context
If you're going to propagate conspiracy theories, at least try to do so in such fashion as avoids making you look as if you can't be bothered to read.
And it isn't about the personnel being "above" anything. It's simply that the ICC is not a court and does not respect due process, so we do not subject American citizens to it (and indeed it would be an interesting Constitutional question as to whether that's even truly possible).
From a more pragmatic perspective, as long as Russia and China don't recognize the ICC's authority, it would be a major global strategic blunder to impose checks and balances only on the United States.
Of course there are other threads that bring up the possibility of treason. But I don’t see why there’s a need to explain the (obvious, right?) fact that the ICC wouldn’t prosecute treason.
> “If he was a "war criminal" as many here claim, why wasn't he ever prosecuted or convicted?”
Which, I guess I just meant, prosecuted by whom? He was the US government at the highest levels and there is no international body with jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem like nobody being able to press charges means a man is innocent.
If Kissinger committed treason, there was nothing stopping the US government from pursuing charges
Except the optics and power that his party holds (politics), which is what keeps many congress critters in positions of power. The power that the US wields (economically and militarily) kept the other countries at bay.
People pretending, that the reasons are unclear, are being disingenuous.
I'm not saying his legacy is positive or negative overall, but folks need to look at both sides of it. He's a great example of someone who had a major hand in a lot of major decisions and has a very very mixed legacy because of it.
Things are much blurrier than we make them out to be these days. Anyone who has a major impact often has significant positive and negative impacts. Kissinger was not a one sided character.
And with that said, I can't believe I just defended Henry Kissinger, but it's still worth saying...
The biggest problem is that what a lot of people know about Kissinger is "folk knowledge" they picked up from other people, and this gets passed down as a game of telephone until it's common knowledge, but no one has bothered to check if it's accurate or not. It doesn't help when there are articles like the Rolling Stones one that's been posted, which seem more interested in cherry-picking facts to fit the narrative then in actually looking at what happened with open eyes.
A few years ago, I thought to myself that since people talk about Kissinger so much, I should go and look at what he actually did. I was surprised to see that he didn't seem to be the driving force behind bad policy decisions in the Nixon White House. He was certainly involved as National Security Advisor, but most of the time it looked like Nixon would have made the same decisions without him. Yet for some reason, Kissinger is usually blamed much more than Nixon.
For instance, at least according to the State Department Historian[1] it was General Creighton Abrams that first suggested bombing enemy bases in Cambodia. Nixon agreed, and involved Kissinger, who was the National Security Advisor. But the bombing is usually presented as Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. General Abrams isn't mentioned in the Rolling Stones article at all. Compare the Google results for "Creighton Abrams Cambodia" with "Henry Kissinger Cambodia" to see how slanted things are.
That's not even getting into the fact that blaming the Khmer Rouge on the bombing campaign is an extreme stretch. But that's how people approach the folk knowledge - they get told something is true, believe it to be true, then stitch together whatever facts they can find to support the narrative they've already set their mind on.
[1] https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/vi/64033.htm
The Nobel prize is based on explosives. Most scientists 100 years ago were eugenicists. It's difficult to judge people's beliefs and decisions outside of their era. That doesn't mean that you can't build a moral or ethical system outside of it, but they're all based on assumptions of what is good.
It's not like there weren't people calling out Kissinger contemporaneously, or even Lincoln (for his handling of the Dakota). It's more weird when people obliviously deny recent history or create hagiography upon their death.
But we somehow feel compelled to weigh war crimes that lead to the death and suffering of millions against other positive accomplishments as if one justifies the other. We're basically conceding to Kissinger yet again by evaluating his legacy in terms of realpolitik.
Kissinger himself said many times that relations between states aren't based on morality, so people who act in the name of states can't be bound by international laws. It's an idea that is the basis of the realist philosophy. A lot of people in the the foreign policy establishment share that view.
The USA for example supports the International criminal court, but not for its citizens, so Kissinger can never be prosecuted like Milošević. Those who say the ICC is just an instrument of power are not entirely wrong.
I’d say exactly the same if I were a war criminal
Kissinger is directly responsible for feeding South Vietnam to communists, and delivering its 20 million people into slavery.
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."
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.
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.
I refuse to give this any more headspace. This sage-like almost apathetical both-sidesing is more dangerous to me than taking a stand.
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.
People here should really stop pretending that reading "both sides" of everything is some form of enlightenment. It is delusional
Nobody is doing that. They’re distinguish immoral and even illegal acts from the violation of a particular statute.
> imperialism
Another word you don’t understand. Hint: spoils. Iraq was imperialist. Laos was not.
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.
[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