Q&A is Sunday Dec. 3, 8-9pmET; Kissinger the Democracy Destroyer
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On the occasion of the death of Henry Kissinger, here is my May 2023 post that discusses his role in destroying democracy in Chile by backing and enabling the 1973 coup. I often think of how Kissinger fled Nazi Germany as a young man, only to help millions lose their freedoms and their lives.
To encourage Nixon to step up his involvement in Chile, Kissinger claimed that Chilean President Salvador Allende, a non-aligned Socialist, was another Hitler who intended to establish a “one-party state.” Thus the Chilean coup could be justified as defeating not just Communism but Fascism as well.
When today’s despots say they are acting in service to freedom (Putin recently depicted himself as a freedom fighter, and Trump and the GOP argue that Jan. 6 was a attempt to save American liberty) they echo a long tradition of authoritarian propaganda which Kissinger helped to shape.
Kissinger's legacy, if ever honestly evaluated, will show that yes, he opened China to the US, but at the same time he is responsible for the deaths of close to 4M people. Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, the Middle East (yes, let's not forget he got a 1973 peace proposal quashed). The list is long. The war crimes are clear. And yet the US FP establishment, and too many US senior politicians, loved him. I, for one, never saw what he had done to deserve the acclaim. What I only saw was a Nixon accomplice who kept the Vietnam War going to get Nixon elected in 1968 and re-elected in 1972. And the guy who wanted to be friends with the Khmer Rouge, and turned a blind eye to repression of Jews in the Soviet Union.
Hi Ruth, thank you for the reminder that Kissinger encouraged Nixon to overthrow Allende in Chile and install a real dictator, Pinochet, instead. I believe Kissinger also encouraged the carpet bombing of Cambodia that massacred thousands, I imagine. I think too many of us have accepted that rulers will be rulers, so to speak, and the violence they perpetrate upon one another in the domination game is just something the rest of us have to tolerate. Ever since World War I and the advent of the airplane in warfare, greater proportions of civilians have been massacred in each successive war. Now, in Putin's war on Ukrainians and Hamas's atrocities on Israelis, civilians are the purposeful targets. It's time to delegitimize warfare altogether, in the public's mind. We don't have to tolerate continued subjugation to the grandiose ambitions of violence-prone men who talk a good game but care only about their own aggrandizement.