The Fact that Henry Kissinger Died a Free Man is Nothing to Celebrate
The former Secretary of State, a sociopathic war criminal beloved by the political and media establishment, never received the justice he deserved. I'm not sure why we're celebrating his death.
In the United States, we are shielded from the realities of our government’s “foreign policy,” a polite term for the constant horrors we inflict on others. How and why this kind of false innocence is manufactured are separate topics from what I want to address here. As some of you may have heard by now, Henry Kissinger died at 100-years old on November 30th, 2023. Today, most of his crimes, in aggregate and abstraction, have been brought to light. But, these sixty years after his admission into the halls of the White House, the very visceral, personal, human effects of his crimes have been little investigated. Thankfully, one journalist in particular, Nick Turse, has done incredible work in uncovering the human stories of those most directly harmed by Kissinger and his ilk. I will share some of those stories here.
More to the point of this article, I do not share in the seemingly broad leftwing/progressive celebrations of Kissinger’s death. The current sort of online, meme-ified expressions of joy over a war criminal’s death strike me as yet another sad example of ostensible leftists grasping at the tiniest of straws in want of any real victories. It’s like some kid who just got the shit kicked out of them muttering some half-assed zingers under their breath as they limp away from the charming and still admired bully. It’s embarrassing. Kissinger won, guys. And we lost, again. The case against Kissinger as an indictable war criminal has been amply demonstrated for decades. And yet he died a free, comfortable, and highly lauded man in the West. He should have died by the hangman’s noose. The fact that his millions of victims were robbed of this justice is yet another crime against humanity. The fact that we in the West did not bring Kissinger to this justice is a source of forever, unwashable shame. We do not deserve forgiveness. I’m not sure what exactly can be celebrated here.
One cannot understand what unifies the crimes that Kissinger initiated and carried out without understanding the guiding anti-Communist ideology of the U.S. during the Cold War and its attendant goal of global economic and military preeminence. The world that each and every one of us lives in today was forged in the fires of the Cold War. But what was a “cold” war for the United States was, in fact, an unbearably hot war for the Third World. “The wreckage spread far and wide, in toppled governments, loathsome dictators, squalid little wars and, here and there, massacres so immense that entire populations were nearly destroyed,” writes reporter Dexter Filkins for The New York Times. Those massacres in the Third World, given at least tacit endorsement by the U.S. foreign policy establishment when not outright orchestrated and aided by it, suited U.S. interests quite well, and as such were deemed necessary by Kissinger and his associates.
“The United States won. Here in Indonesia, you got what you wanted, and around the world, you got what you wanted,” said an Indonesian man named Winarso to journalist Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method. In 1965, Indonesia experienced an orgy of anti-communist blood letting where approximately 1 million people were murdered by the U.S.-backed military regime. Members of the U.S. State Department, as well as U.S. corporations, supplied lists of names of communist party members and labor leaders to facilitate their eradication. “The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won,” Winarso told Bevins. “Moreover, we all got the US-centered capitalism that Washington wanted to spread. Just look around you.” Bevins then asked him, how did the West win? “Winarso stopped fidgeting. ‘You killed us.’ Answers like that were very common.”
This tactic of supporting murderous right-wing forces around the world in order to suppress movements for socialism was used frequently by the U.S throughout the 20th century. The so-called Domino Theory, the idea that if one country “fell” to Communism then others would inevitably follow, was the guiding gospel for U.S. officials during the Cold War. One whiff of anti-Western sentiment coming from a Third World leader, even whether that sentiment was explicitly communist or not, was seen as a very real challenge to U.S. power and therefore intolerable. Kissinger made this rationale explicit in 1973 when he argued to President Nixon to covertly overthrow Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. Kissinger wrote: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, …the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it."
Kissinger’s brand of foreign policy has been dubbed “realpolitik.” It is the modern name for Machiavellian. Kissinger was never apologetic about the decisions he made and regarded his critics as moralistic crybabies unfit to participate in the great strategic game of geopolitics. Kissinger once said the idea that “foreign policy has to be conducted entirely on abstract, theoretical, and, maybe, moral and philosophical grounds” is nothing more than an “American nostalgia.”
People such as Kissinger have the privilege of orchestrating such a cynical foreign policy because they are insulated from its costs. They are not the ones who are bombed, shot at, or have their national sovereignty stolen from them. And the attendant benefits of power consolidation from such policies mainly redound to them, not to the common citizenry. “As for the victors of the anticommunist crusade,” Bevins writes, “it’s clear that as a nation-state, the United States has done enormously well since 1945. It is an extremely rich and powerful country. But if we look at individual Americans, or break down the analysis along class and race lines, it’s clear that the spoils of that global ascendance were shared extremely unequally. More and more of the flows coming in from other nations have accumulated at the very top, while some US citizens live in poverty comparable to life in the former Third World.” It should also be noted that the reactionary terrorist violence directed against the West for our violent meddling in other countries has chiefly victimized innocent civilians, not our guilty leaders such as Kissinger.
Kissinger lived a life of American royalty, flaunting himself alongside starlets, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (for a peace process in Vietnam which he himself helped sabotage — more on that later), vetted by the media, and sought out for his counsel like some wizened sage. He was a chief beneficiary of the American hegemony he secured with blood. But Kissinger did not see or hear the effects of the bombing campaigns that he authorized against impoverished Cambodian villagers. Kissinger was not standing on a Washington D.C. street corner in 1976 to witness the car bombing of a Chilean expatriate and his 25-year old American assistant, a bombing which Kissinger likely knew about beforehand and stifled attempts to call it off. The list goes on and on.
Here I will give an overview summation of Kissinger’s worst crimes, by no means an exhaustive accounting.
Vietnam
In 1968, Kissinger was partly responsible for secretly derailing the Vietnam peace talks being conducted by the Johnson administration. Kissinger, as foreign policy advisor to the Johnson administration, was intimately involved with the ongoing peace talks in Paris. Wanting to curry favor with then presidential candidate Richard Nixon, Kissinger leaked to the Nixon campaign that the peace talks had a “better than even” chance in resulting in a cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. In order to ensure that he could run his campaign on the promise of ending the war, Nixon ordered his connections in the South Vietnamese government to tell them to hold on the peace talks until he came into office. President Johnson got word of this “monkeywrenching,” in Nixon’s own words, and called it “treason.” After Nixon was elected on the promise of peace, and appointed Kissinger as his national security advisor, they instead expanded the war even further, conducting intense bombing campaigns beyond the borders of Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia, a clear act of aggression, and a war crime.
Journalist Nick Turse has spent years documenting the eyewitness testimonies of many Vietnamese and Cambodians who survived massacres at American hands. The case of a woman named Ho Thi A, who was only 8-years old when American planes bombed her hamlet and American soldiers then slaughtered 15 of her fellow villagers, including shooting her grandmother right before her eyes, was particularly troubling for Turse. He writes:
I know the discomfort of reducing people to tears and picking at emotional scabs that took years to form. But I’ve rarely experienced anything like I did when interviewing Ho Thi A.
The irony is that, as far as massacre interviews go, I thought this one had been proceeding along fine. There weren’t even any tears – up to a point. Then the floodgates broke. This wasn’t tearing up. Or crying. Or even sobbing. She began inconsolably bawling.
At the five-minute mark, it was past uncomfortable.
At 10 minutes, I wondered if she would ever stop.
At 15 minutes, I was at a loss of what to do.
If you’ve never reduced a stranger to such a state, it’s hard to explain what it’s like to sit across from a woman you’ve only just met and have just plunged into an acute emotional crisis, while being incapable of speaking her language and – because of professional and cultural reasons – are unable to do so much as reach out and hold her hand.
The American war in Vietnam, which Kissinger helped to prolong, is arguably, by virtue of body count alone, our nation’s greatest crime. Estimates of Vietnamese killed in that war range from 4-5 million, a number of killings so large in comparison to the 58,000 American deaths, and which were facilitated by vicious dehumanization and racist rhetoric, that it can only be called genocide. This immense number does not include the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Cambodian and Laotian villagers who were caught in the maelstrom.
In his book, Kill Anything That Moves, Turse, backed up by unassailable eyewitness accounts and long-buried U.S. government documents, argues that the entire American war in Vietnam was one long atrocity. “I’ve worked to demonstrate that it’s simply incorrect to begin and end the discussion of U.S. atrocities with My Lai, as most U.S. histories of the war tend to do,” Turse writes.
I’ve tried to demonstrate how pervasive the civilian suffering was – but this trip again drove home to me that the scale of the carnage is still almost beyond my grasp.
No one will ever know how many U.S.-perpetrated massacres took place in Vietnam. Nor how many hamlets were decimated by bombings. Nor the number of villages laid to waste by artillery strikes. Nor will there ever be an accurate count of the people psychologically injured, maimed or killed. Le Bac is just one horrific footnote in a hidden history of the Vietnam War that few Americans can truly comprehend – if they even wish to do so.
Though it may be (too charitably) said that Kissinger merely took up the already ongoing responsibility of prosecuting the war in Vietnam, his actions against Cambodia were wholly under his purview.
Cambodia — “Anything that flies on anything that moves.”
“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 Miloševic.” — Anthony Bourdain
Starting in 1969, Kissinger began secretly approving bombing campaigns over the border of Vietnam into Cambodia. In a call to his assistant, Alexander Haig, Kissinger said that President Nixon “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order. It’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” Greg Grandin, in his book Kissinger’s Shadow, writes that Kissinger “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970 as well as the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers.” Flight documents were forged to show that bombing runs carried out over Cambodia were instead carried out over Vietnam. Pilots en route to targets over Vietnam were diverted midflight to their secret targets in Cambodia. This secrecy wasn’t just to avoid the ire of antiwar protestors. Besides being devastating to the civilians on the ground, the bombing was highly illegal, since the Oval Office had no congressional authorization to wage war against Cambodia. The public outrage once the bombings were made known was widespread, and led to the murder of four students at Kent State by National Guard troops during a protest.
This type of secret, unauthorized bombing, Grandin argues, paved the way for the global military engagements that we see today. The War on Terror, drone strikes, secret commando units operating in countries we are not formally at war with, all of this can be traced to precedents that Kissinger set. Grandin writes that Kissinger had a hand “in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course.”
Approximately 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by the American bombing campaign. It perhaps is not surprising that, until recently, few if any of the survivors’ stories have been documented. Thanks to Turse, some of them have come to light. “The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims,” he writes. “In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.”
As in Vietnam, the American violence in Cambodia was so widespread and devastating that it nearly defies comprehension. Using little known government documents, Turse searched out tiny hamlets that were listed as being bombed. “As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited,” Turse writes, “focusing on a lone attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given that they had endured many airstrikes over many years.”
In one case, U.S. Army soldiers with helicopter support and accompanied by South Vietnamese troops raided a small village, killing seven civilians. One soldier tried to get a wounded girl evacuated for medical treatment. However, the highest ranking soldier present, Captain Arnold Brooks, denied the evac request because the helicopter was already carrying a motorcycle he stole from the village as a gift for his commanding officer. In a later investigation, Turse writes, the “Army concluded that the wounded girl, left behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.”
Villagers recounted to Turse about “helicopters firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any time.” In the village of Por, one woman lost 17 members of her family in a bombing. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,” she told Turse. “It was so terrible. Everything was completely destroyed.”
The mass death being caused in Cambodia opened up an avenue for the Khmer Rouge to take power. Even after rumors leaked of the purges and mass starvation the new regime was carrying out, Kissinger was prepared to do business with the Khmer Rouge. He told Thailand’s Foreign Minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”
The memories of America’s crimes in Cambodia are fast becoming out of reach. “When I conducted my interviews, in 2010,” Turse writes, “the life expectancy in Cambodia was about 66 years. Many of the people I spoke with…are likely dead.” Without documenters like Turse, we would never have known the little that we do now. “Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S. military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without additional reviews or follow-up investigations.”
Chile:
In 1970, democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. Kissinger and Nixon immediately began planning Allende’s destruction. Nixon and Kissinger ordered a covert campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and economic warfare against the Allende government. Nixon ordered the CIA director to “make the economy scream.” Chilean officials were bribed and American corporations boycotted the country.
Following the successful example of the mass murder campaign in Indonesia, the U.S. again supported a right-wing reactionary military to overthrow and liquidate Chilean leftists. As Bevins notes: “Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement… or even that Allende would harm US interests. What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.”
In 1973, the Chilean military under Augusto Pinochet carried out a successful coup d'état. Following the coup, Kissinger made his position explicit to Pinochet, telling him: “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.”
The Pinochet regime began a reign of terror, torturing tens of thousands and leaving thousands more dead and disappeared. Many Chileans who worked in the Allende administration or who were known leftists fled the country. Still deemed threats even in exile, Pinochet, along with other Latin American dictatorships supported by the CIA, began an international terror campaign called Operation Condor to target these expatriates. In Condor’s most brazen act of terror, Bevins writes, “US citizen, known CIA contact, and Condor operative Michael Townley” murdered Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Foreign Minister, “in the heart of Washington D.C. A car bomb placed on Embassy Row blew Letelier’s legs off, killing him instantly; his twenty-five-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, staggered from the car and slowly drowned in her own blood. (Her husband was also in the car and survived.) Townley is now in FBI witness protection.”
Journalist James Risen argues that Kissinger may have known beforehand that Letelier’s assassination was going to take place and prevented moves to stop it. Risen writes:
After the U.S. found out about Operation Condor, State Department officials wanted to notify the Pinochet regime and the governments of Argentina and Uruguay not to conduct assassinations. But on September 16, 1976, Kissinger blocked the State Department’s plans. Kissinger ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter” by the State Department, effectively blocking any effort to curb Pinochet’s bloody plans. Letelier was assassinated in Washington five days later.
In an earlier meeting with Pinochet, Kissinger made clear that he supported the general’s murderous regime. “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger said. “I think that the previous government was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well.” Kissinger also told Pinochet, “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.”
Kissinger also brushed aside the misgivings of his own staff who were worried about human rights abuses by the Pinochet regime. In a meeting with Chilean foreign minister Admiral Patricio Carvajal, “Kissinger opened the meeting by disparaging his own staff for putting the issue of human rights on the agenda,” writes Robert Reich. “I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights,” Kissinger said. “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”
Though hounded by the legal system in his later years for his murderous crimes as president, Pinochet died a free and un-convicted man at the age of 91-years old, unapologetic to the end.
Argentina:
Two quotes can sum up Kissinger’s actions on Argentina. From Nick Turse:
In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.
From Mother Jones:
Kissinger was concerned about new human rights laws passed by the Congress requiring the White House to certify a government was not violating human rights before providing US aid. He was hoping the Argentine generals could wrap up their murderous eradication of the left before the law took effect.
East Timor:
In a 1975 meeting in Jakarta, the anti-Communist government of Indonesia informed the visiting Kissinger and President Ford that they intended to invade East Timor, which was worryingly going too far to the left. Kissinger approved of the invasion, saying only that it should wait until he and Ford were back in the U.S. so that they could better control public opinion on the issue. Indonesia would be using U.S.-supplied arms for the war of aggression — a war crime. As noted by the National Security Archive, Kissinger was aware “that the invasion of East Timor involved the illegal use of U.S.-supplied military equipment because it was not used in self-defense as required by law.” Nevertheless, Kissinger approved continued arms transfers to Indonesia throughout the war, illegally. Approximately 200,000 East Timorese were killed in the invasion.
The Kurds:
In 1972, the Shah of Iran, then an ally of the U.S., asked Kissinger and president Nixon to help fuel a Kurdish insurgency against Iran’s neighboring enemy, Iraq. Kissinger acceded to the shah’s request and began supplying the Kurds with weapons. “For three years the Kurds fought the Iraqi forces, sustaining thousands of casualties,” writes journalist Daniel Schorr for the Washington Post. “Through the CIA, the U.S. government discouraged the Kurds from negotiating a measure of autonomy with the Iraqi central government but also restrained them from undertaking an all-out offensive.”
Instead of genuinely supporting any real goals of the Kurdish fighters, Kissinger merely used them as convenient pawns. A congressional report on the conflict noted that Kissinger’s policy was to have “the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally's neighboring country."
As soon as Iran and Iraq settled their tensions, all aid to the Kurds stopped. The CIA knew beforehand that a settlement would take place but “the agency was ordered not to inform the Kurdish command and to keep the Kurds fighting,” Schorr writes. As noted in the Congressional report: "Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise." The report goes on:
The [Kurdish] insurgents were clearly taken by surprise. Their adversaries, knowing of the impending aid cut-off, launched an all-out search-and-destroy campaign the day after the agreement was signed. The autonomy movement was over and our former clients scattered before the central government's superior forces.
Schorr writes that the Congressional report quotes a "high U.S. official" as having remarked to the committee's staff, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." Given his other disparaging comments about the State Department being filled with people who have a passion for ministry, I’m fairly confidant who that “high U.S. official” was.
Bangladesh / Pakistan / India
In 1971, Kissinger supported the invasion of then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by West Pakistan, a military government and client state of the U.S.
Using U.S.-supplied arms, the Pakistani invasion caused the deaths of at least 300,000 people, with Bangladesh now officially claiming a total of 3 million killed. 10 million people fled the region into India. Mass rapes were carried out. “When Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Dhaka by the United Nations to assist with late-term abortions of raped women, at the end of the war, he believed the estimated figure for the number of Bengali women who were raped—200,000 to 400,000—was probably too low,” writes Lorraine Boissoneault for the Smithsonian Magazine. For disturbing accounts of the violence perpetrated in East Pakistan, The Cold War’s Killing Fields by historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin is a good place to start.
Kissinger rejected warnings by his own State Department staff that the U.S. was actively facilitating genocide of the Bangladeshis. Dexter Filkins, in his review of The Blood Telegram by historian Gary J. Bass, writes:
Nixon and Kissinger spurned the cables, written by their own diplomats in Dacca (the capital of East Pakistan), that said West Pakistan was guilty of carrying out widespread massacres. Archer Blood, the counsel general in Dacca, sent an angry cable that detailed the atrocities and used the word “genocide.” The men in the White House, however, not only refused to condemn [Pakistani leader] Yahya — in public or private — but they also declined to withhold American arms, ammunition and spare parts that kept Pakistan’s military machine humming.
Blood was later fired from his post for daring to send such a strongly worded cable.
As India entered the conflict to prevent further killings and more refugees entering its borders, Kissinger ramped up military support for the Pakistani regime. Despite an American arms ban on Pakistan, Kissinger sent military equipment, including aircraft provided through Iran and Jordan, to fuel the conflict. Kissinger did this despite multiple warnings from the State Department and the Pentagon that such action was illegal given the arms ban.
Where is the Justice?
We should be reminded here that so many of the deaths facilitated by Kissinger were done because of his rabid anti-leftist ideology. Movements for socialism, for a better world, for a world not dominated by American bullying, had to be destroyed. All over the world, with rare exception, the U.S. and its clients succeeded in that destruction. Millions of people in the Third World today are living in the ashes of their former movements for liberation. Bevins paints a heartbreaking picture of this reality:
They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice. … It might have been one thing if their government had committed horrible atrocities, but recognized the mistake, and built a just, powerful society. That did not happen. They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.
It was a crime for them to want something different. A crime punishable by death.
The scars from this worldwide campaign of terror are fresh and deep. I try to remind people that, for now at least, WWII is still within living memory. Even after the death of that conflict’s last witness, its generational effects will still be with us for a long time. The more recent Cold War conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, for which Kissinger bears ample responsibility in stoking, remain an open, festering wound. We, as Americans, share in that responsibility. We have failed to bring our war criminals to justice. We have failed to keep the fact of these atrocities from being thrown into the memory hole. Turse writes, “I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S. military documents…asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.”
Our complicity in these immense crimes mortifies our souls in the same way we mortified the flesh of those we tortured in nightmare dungeons such as the P.O.W. camps in Saigon, Abu Ghraib prison, and, to this day, Guantanamo Bay.
The United State’s protection of Kissinger, among other of its war criminals, through its refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and its refusal to prosecute its war criminals domestically — as the U.S. is obligated to do under its agreements with the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, and the legal precedents set forth under the Nuremberg Trials — is but one of many examples of how the U.S. flaunts the rule of law, scoffs at international treaties, and protects its powerful elite citizens from legal accountability. And yet the U.S. insists on strict adherence to the rule of law for its officially designated foreign adversaries and for its own powerless and impoverished citizens. The U.S. makes a mockery of the rule of law. Its blatant hypocrisy is a mortal danger for democracy, for civil liberties, and for our own security. Men like Kissinger, with their horrific “realpolitik,” do not keep us safe. So long as Western crimes are inflicted upon the peoples of the world, the West will remain a target of reactionary violence. They are right to hate us.
“As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for — you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!!” wrote Osama bin Laden in his “Letter to America,” making explicit the dangers of U.S. hypocrisy in a globalized world. “However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape.”
It’s one thing to be a killer. It’s another thing to be a self-righteous hypocrite about it. “On September 11, 2001, I happened to be working with a friend from Chile when I learned the shocking and terrible news about the planes slamming into the World Trade Center,” wrote anti-war activist Peter De Mott, “My friend commented, ‘You reap what you sow.’ He was remembering September 11, 1973, when a US-backed coup in Chile killed its democratically elected president; bombed the presidential residence; tortured, raped, and murdered thousands; and sent many (including my friend) into exile.” American hypocrisy goes on and on.
The fact that people like Kissinger, monsters who treat human beings in far away lands as little more than tiny pests to be controlled or eradicated, are allowed to walk around, hobnob, be treated as august sages, and die free in our country — while these same people hound to death foreigners who they deem war criminals, terrorists, and collateral damage — is precisely why we are so hated. It is precisely why we are so endangered. It is precisely why every day that the U.S. empire continues to exist is an irreversibly tragic day for mankind.
When the powerful aren’t expected to follow the law or to be punished for their transgressions against it, let alone for their lack of basic morality, why should the rest of us have to fall in line? Why should the rest of the world respect us? We must hold the elites of this country to account, by force. Kissinger walked on this earth as a free man while he had the blood of millions on his hands. This is proof that the only justice in this world is the justice we actually fight for. The barbarians are not at our gates — they are running the empire. It is far past time they got their just rewards.
I ask again, with the death of Henry Kissinger, absent of any real justice, what are we even celebrating here?
And when I saw the white blazes
raining down
covering over the rice fields
of Mekong and Kratie,
when the flaming figures
danced with each other
and fell down in the grass
razor sharp and tall,
I knew then that they would not return,
“there was so much suffering.”
we are little people compared to the big men of history.
it was all a game.
pieces on Westmoreland’s chess board.
numbers in McNamara’s spreadsheet.
high level handshakes and late-night, drunken phone calls
to decide tomorrow’s kill count.
sitting on finely upholstered furniture —
supplied by the taxpayers —
in the gilded halls of consequence.
these are mediocre people with mediocre minds with
the power to do evil at an incomprehensible scale
who can afford the polite veneer as others do their dirty work,
the gilded now don’t pretend,
sucking on bones,
killers keep killer friends from killing alone.
does Kissinger know what is happening under his thumb?
have the Carnegie structures finally all succumbed,
burned to the ground?
who eats in the garden?
who washes with lye?
who will care for you dear?
they fed us to cannons,
tore open the fields and blistered the valleys
as the earth cried and forbade,
maybe our ghosts ride home at night —
bugs on their headlights,
maybe the rice paddies
will never cough up their secrets
no matter how much we dig.
they will not return,
the many millions cast into the breach,
into the boundless anonymity of time,
wrenched from the little fingers of their children,
the warming arms of their beloveds,
they will not return to the hamlets
of My Lai or Doun Rath or Tralok Bek,
to gay scenes both real and imagined,
to dresses fashioned and a whip made tight,
to scouting and swimming and chewing betel nut
through the night
from the charnel house of the Se San Valley
blue flowers sprouted and reached up
to passing sky vultures,
the flaming figures now grass,
the earth scarred but closed,
big men prettying themselves in halls far away,
reddening their cheeks with the blood of
Ho Thi A and kin.