September 4, 2001
I Wonder Who's Kissinger Now?
By Carl Estabrook
When I was an undergraduate, a mediocre
academic named Henry Kissinger taught a seminar that was attended
by my late friend Perry Bullard, a fellow of infinite jest, who
delighted in reciting for us at dinner Kissinger's pomposities
and ponderous platitudes on politics. Perry particularly enjoyed
the graduate assistant who aped Henry's mannerisms -- black suit,
black attache-case, and black horn-rimmed glasses -- and followed
him about, the two of them looking Perry said like a small family
of penguins. But he also said, altering Shelley a bit, "I
met Murder, as it were: / He had a mask like Kissinger."
(Perry, after exiting the military
to which he was indentured by a Naval ROTC scholarship -- and
in which he "rigged" Russian ships in Haiphong harbor,
by flying as close as possible to their superstructures -- remained
a scornful critic of the activities of the Kissingers of the
world. He was for many years a liberal gadfly in the Michigan
legislature, representing Ann Arbor. During the war, he sent
me a saffron-robed Buddhist monk from Vietnam; but that, as they
say, is another story.)
As national security adviser
and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations
(1969-77), Kissinger oversaw a murderous American foreign policy,
particularly in Latin America and in southern Asia, from Israel
to Vietnam and Indonesia. "Foreign policy is not missionary
work," he is reported to have said as he delivered up a
no longer useful population (in this particular case, Kurds)
to be slaughtered.
Kissinger still enjoys the
media's fawning regard as a "foreign policy expert":
he wrote complacently at the outset of his government "service"
that an expert was someone who articulated the consensus of the
powerful. Such an expert in power is a minion of dominant social
groups and commits crimes in their name. Kissinger's crimes
are cataloged in the recent book, _The Trial of Henry Kissinger_
by Christopher Hitchens, who finds him "expert in all those
paltry skills of the courtier."
*In Vietnam, after the US was
compelled by business and popular pressure in 1968 to negotiate
and end the regular bombing of North Vietnam, Kissinger and Nixon
shifted the bombardment to Laos and Cambodia and extended the
war throughout the Nixon administration.
*In the Middle East, Kissinger
undermined the international consensus for a settlement in the
early 1970s by supporting Israel's intransigence, the result
being the 1973 war and the wretched situation that continues
to this day.
*In Chile, Kissinger engineered
the overthrow an elected government in 1973 and installed the
dictatorial Pinochet regime. (During the coup, the CIA turned
over to Pinochet's torturers a classmate of Perry's and mine,
Charles Horman, a independent journalist who knew about US involvement;
he was in fact tortured and killed, as were thousands of others.)
Kissinger defended these enormities by announcing that the "contagious
example" of a social democratic Chile would "infect"
not only Latin America but even Europe: Chileans had to be murdered
to teach Italian voters that democratic social reform wouldn't
be allowed.
*In Indonesia, Kissinger presided
over a massacre of Timorese from 1974 on that was proportionally
more devastating than Pol Pot's contemporaneous murders in Cambodia.
Today, for a new generation,
the ideological disciplines -- principally the worst joke amongst
them, "political science" -- programmatically misrepresent
the politics of Kissinger's time. A fatuous new book by an academic
called Larry Berman -- _No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger,
and Betrayal in Vietnam_ -- argues that if Kissinger had only
had more resolve, the US could have kept its Latin American-style
dictatorship in South Vietnam. (He doesn't seem to realize that
the US war was always against the people of South Vietnam: three-quarters
of the firepower the US used in the Vietnam War was expended
on the South, an amount equal to twice what the US used in all
of World War II -- because the South Vietnamese refused to accept
the government we'd picked out for them.)
It is necessary to examine
the historical record accurately and recognize the Kissingers
and the Pinochets, the Kennedys and the Reagans, as the war criminals
they were. It has been rightly said that if the principles of
the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945-6 had been enforced in
the US, every President since then would have been hanged.
But there is more evil in the
world than can be accounted for by private malice. If that were
not so, evil would be much easier to deal with: we could identify
the evil people, line them up, and shoot them. But that's been
tried, with at best indifferent success, showing that the theory
is wrong: in fact, we're all in this together. There are, unfortunately,
two, three, many Kissingers in Washington today, and only the
better angels of our nature can successfully oppose them, by
refusing to accept the murderous policies pursued by both political
parties, to please their corporate masters. CP
|