Anyone how writes something positive about Kissinger, hasnt been to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Amount of destruction and suffering that he caused cannot be described by words.
Any attempt to whitewash immense crimes he comited is for the lack of better word "disgusting". If anything, Kissinger is father of American neoliberal policy's "b…
Anyone how writes something positive about Kissinger, hasnt been to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Amount of destruction and suffering that he caused cannot be described by words.
Any attempt to whitewash immense crimes he comited is for the lack of better word "disgusting". If anything, Kissinger is father of American neoliberal policy's "bomb them now, what happens after is not our problem". His actions have created so much damage to the image of US abroad, that it will take decades (if ever) to fix.
Wait, Kissinger established a Marxist regime in Cambodia that killed 2-3M human beings? I thought that was Pol Pot. Thank for the history lesson, Raziel!
I do not disagree and I would add the sacrifice of too many American lives whether in combat or the aftermath. But I have a different take. IMO the things you lay at Kissinger's feet could not have happened with a functioning Congress. As much as we as citizens bemoan this or that President, administration or members thereof, the lack of a functioning Congress is the root of the evil.
That is a low-ball cheap shot showing your ignorance of an extremely complicated time in our history. The Viet Nam war began shortly after WWII. JFK brought our involvement to to a level that got the world's attention. LBJ escalated it and in 1967 a majority of American were in favor of the war as a means to stop the advance of communism. There was a real fear that Asia would fall like the dominos in eastern Europe did to the Soviet Union.
It wasn't until 1968, after TET and LBJ outright lying to us about invading Cambodia, a move he thought necessary, that sentiment sharply reversed. To blame a war we chose not to win on any one man is ridiculous. Why not label Johnson, or Nixon the war criminal? It would be just as foolish to name Obama a war criminal for not ending the war in Afghanistan.
I tire of idiots trying to simplify very complex situations by assigning blame.
You made some important counterpoints but maybe don't assume OP is an idiot. When I read his post the first thing that struck me was he might be a vet who fought in those places, or is related to someone who did. If so, his perspective would be very personal and not academic, and also understandable.
You're right. That may have been a little harsh, but the war spanned the administrations of five presidents, beginning with Truman, ending with Nixon. Blaming any one man for VietNam? That's also a bit harsh.
My apologies to Raziel if I touched something sensitive.
I am trying to write less, but am going to choose not to resist the impulse to make a few obvious comments.
1. Ho Chi Minh helped found the French Communist Party around 1920. He was a Communist aligned with the Soviet Union from its earliest existence.
2. He had what amounted to his henchman, General Giap, focus his efforts not on the Japanese when they were occupied in the Forties, but upon rival National leaders, many of whom were assassinated.
3. One of the first things he did when he got control of the North in the 1954-55-56 was murder a percentage of each village and town in the areas under his control. Bernard Fall, if memory serves, documented this.
4. The Vietnam War was ALWAYS an effort by the United States to help the South resist an invasion by the North. Most of the so-called Vietcong were men conscripted against their will by NVA terrorists in their villages, who would rape their wives and daughters, kill their sons and brothers, steal everything they owned, and generally make their lives hell whether they fought or not.
5. The bombing of North Vietnam was always so half hearted and militarily idiotic that it made little military difference. But when we DID bomb the North seriously, it took WEEKS to bring the war to an end. That happened around 1972, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed.
6. The reason we remember the Vietnam War as lost, despite the FACT that we had a peace treaty signed on favorable terms to us and the South, is that Democrats in Congress, under the thrall of skillful Communist lies (lying being the one thing they are good at in addition to amoral violence) basically retreated from a victory the deaths of nearly 60,000 American soldiers had honorably won.
7. If Barry Goldwater had won in 1964 we would have no more memory of the "war in Vietnam" than we have the war on the Barbary Pirates under Jefferson. It would not have been a big deal, would not have lasted long, and would not have divided our nation. He either would have withdrawn our advisors, or made the North hurt so bad they stopped sending their troops across the internationally recognized border.
Kissingers legacy is complicated, more complicated in my world than any of you can imagine, but the real crime with regard to Vietnam is that we turned a nation that had actually undergone significant land reform and genuine liberalization over to bloodthirsty psychopaths, who murdered hundreds of thousands of people immediately, broke apart millions of families, destroyed all traditional villages and their cultures, kidnapped hundreds of thousands of kids from their parents to be brainwashed, and impoverished and immiserated an entire nation for NOTHING. Nothing good happened. The war against America merely became a war against Difference and Diversity. Now, they are locked into 1975, just as Cuba is locked into the early 1960's.
While I generally agree with your comment, Vietnam, while repressive like China and other communist countries, is not as stagnant as Cuba or North Korea. According to Wikipedia: "Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies of the 21st century. Vietnam has high levels of corruption, censorship, environmental issues and a poor human rights record; the country ranks among the lowest in international measurements of civil liberties, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion and ethnic minorities." There is also a reasonable amount of American tourism. I was in Vietnam in 1970-71 and, while my tour wasn't nearly as bad as most (i.e., not infantry), I have no desire to return.
I will add: what do you think is better for business for arms suppliers and the bankers who fund everything? A short war, fought skillfully with a minimum loss of American lives, or a long term war, fought stupidly with maximal inefficiency, and concluded poorly with much loss of equipment? Johnson did their work. Nixon ended it, and paid for it with his job and reputation. Such seems plausible, in any event.
I might note that the man who warned of the rise of a "Military-Industrial Complex" was one of the few five star Generals we have had.
I couldn't pass that up. In any event, I didn't. I won't get started on JFK's asssassination, other than to note both that a Secret Service man on his detail recently offered testimony making the "Magic Bullet" idea impossible--necessitating at least one more shooter; and the team of ER doctors who were the first to see JFK's body testified that the fatal bullet seemed obviously to have entered from the front, and that the body shown in the official autopsy seemed to have been altered with plastic surgery so that it no longer looked like what they had seen, which of course many "conspiracy" theorists have long claimed.
These two items were in mainstream news.
I think my problem is that I have never been OK with going along to get along. I understand that there is a Narrative, and that my life is easier if I just pretend it makes sense to me. But I know there are a lot of sick and stupid people out there, and that although I don't know their percentages relative to the overall population, it seems obvious that they are highly represented in government and media, and that they do little but lie to cover up egregious crimes committed for money, sex and power.
The first piece, on "the paranoid style", amounts to integration propaganda that could easily have been authored in Langley or the Albert Embankment. Nothing to see here, says a seemingly erudite and well intentioned man of honor and integrity.
I don’t know if we will ever know what happened that day in Dallas. But I do know the Warren Commission Report is not it. Thank you for pointing out the inconsistency regarding the president’s head wounds. The autopsy does not reflect what was seen by those at Parkland. And 60 years later, both Trump and Biden have refused to release the remaining documents. What does this all mean? I’m not sure. But Mr. Tinline’s attitude is no different than what we see today in the attempts to control what can be said/heard. I’m sure Mr. Tinline is an avid supporter of “combating disinformation”.
Ask anyone of the street today if they know who Henry Kissinger was and you will get blank stares. An accomplished man, Kissinger was none the less a confidant to a number of presidents.
An obituary usually soft peddles a person's faults while enhancing the accomplishments.
Or to point out that what is ACTUALLY meant by that is "dead Jews from the river to the sea".
It's odd to observe that Hitler was bad because he committed genocide, but the same people who like to call everyone Nazis ALSO advocate genocide against the same Jews. This allies them with Hitler, pretty obviously, and in my view undeniably.
I doubt if, in 2010, 1 in 10 Americans could have differentiated Iran and Iraq--on a map or culturally--if they had not served over there.
I am very pro-military. I count many veterans as friends. But on balance I don't anyone can honestly argue that our governments since Korea--which should have resulted in a unified non-Communist peninsula--have supported our troops with integrity.
If you look at, say, Afghanistan, it's become hard for me to believe that many of our wars are not just some horrifying for-profit game.
Last I checked, was he president? All the people ringing their hands about Kissinger, he wasn't president. Nixon was. It was government policy during war. Some things work, some things don't work. It's the same people who are whining about all the Palestinians getting killed after they start a war. Everybody wants things to be sweetness and light, but the world is not that way. And anybody that wants to have it that way, should have no proximity to power. Good point. Have a great weekend
Johnson was by no means a war monger. He hated the war, it was a distraction from the Great Society he wanted to build as FDR's successor. But he felt bound by the commitments Kennedy had made. So he went forward with the war in a half-hearted way, always trying to restrict its cost and hoping for some negotiations to bring it to an end. Had Johnson been a war monger, the U.S. would have won the war in less than a year.
Given that The Obama used “complicit” in such a horrid - but entirely for him predictable - way, I recommend avoiding that word in any context.
Vietnam, the Soviet threat, the Kennedy assassinations, and more are so much of our past and are at least partially obscured by shadows, lies, and preferred Narratives that truth, particularly, political truth are hard to find. Particularly if one engages in presentism. Events happen in their own times.
That's not true. Nixon orchestrated the Paris Peace Accords but felt the office of president was too high to take a visible role. He sent Kissinger to do his bidding, knowing North VietNam would not honor the agreement while we bailed on our partners in the South.
Nixon ran the policies....Kissinger had to do the heavy lifting.
Anyone how writes something positive about Kissinger, hasnt been to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Amount of destruction and suffering that he caused cannot be described by words.
Any attempt to whitewash immense crimes he comited is for the lack of better word "disgusting". If anything, Kissinger is father of American neoliberal policy's "bomb them now, what happens after is not our problem". His actions have created so much damage to the image of US abroad, that it will take decades (if ever) to fix.
Wait, Kissinger established a Marxist regime in Cambodia that killed 2-3M human beings? I thought that was Pol Pot. Thank for the history lesson, Raziel!
I do not disagree and I would add the sacrifice of too many American lives whether in combat or the aftermath. But I have a different take. IMO the things you lay at Kissinger's feet could not have happened with a functioning Congress. As much as we as citizens bemoan this or that President, administration or members thereof, the lack of a functioning Congress is the root of the evil.
That is a low-ball cheap shot showing your ignorance of an extremely complicated time in our history. The Viet Nam war began shortly after WWII. JFK brought our involvement to to a level that got the world's attention. LBJ escalated it and in 1967 a majority of American were in favor of the war as a means to stop the advance of communism. There was a real fear that Asia would fall like the dominos in eastern Europe did to the Soviet Union.
It wasn't until 1968, after TET and LBJ outright lying to us about invading Cambodia, a move he thought necessary, that sentiment sharply reversed. To blame a war we chose not to win on any one man is ridiculous. Why not label Johnson, or Nixon the war criminal? It would be just as foolish to name Obama a war criminal for not ending the war in Afghanistan.
I tire of idiots trying to simplify very complex situations by assigning blame.
You made some important counterpoints but maybe don't assume OP is an idiot. When I read his post the first thing that struck me was he might be a vet who fought in those places, or is related to someone who did. If so, his perspective would be very personal and not academic, and also understandable.
Same may well be true of 234.
You're right. That may have been a little harsh, but the war spanned the administrations of five presidents, beginning with Truman, ending with Nixon. Blaming any one man for VietNam? That's also a bit harsh.
My apologies to Raziel if I touched something sensitive.
I am trying to write less, but am going to choose not to resist the impulse to make a few obvious comments.
1. Ho Chi Minh helped found the French Communist Party around 1920. He was a Communist aligned with the Soviet Union from its earliest existence.
2. He had what amounted to his henchman, General Giap, focus his efforts not on the Japanese when they were occupied in the Forties, but upon rival National leaders, many of whom were assassinated.
3. One of the first things he did when he got control of the North in the 1954-55-56 was murder a percentage of each village and town in the areas under his control. Bernard Fall, if memory serves, documented this.
4. The Vietnam War was ALWAYS an effort by the United States to help the South resist an invasion by the North. Most of the so-called Vietcong were men conscripted against their will by NVA terrorists in their villages, who would rape their wives and daughters, kill their sons and brothers, steal everything they owned, and generally make their lives hell whether they fought or not.
5. The bombing of North Vietnam was always so half hearted and militarily idiotic that it made little military difference. But when we DID bomb the North seriously, it took WEEKS to bring the war to an end. That happened around 1972, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed.
6. The reason we remember the Vietnam War as lost, despite the FACT that we had a peace treaty signed on favorable terms to us and the South, is that Democrats in Congress, under the thrall of skillful Communist lies (lying being the one thing they are good at in addition to amoral violence) basically retreated from a victory the deaths of nearly 60,000 American soldiers had honorably won.
7. If Barry Goldwater had won in 1964 we would have no more memory of the "war in Vietnam" than we have the war on the Barbary Pirates under Jefferson. It would not have been a big deal, would not have lasted long, and would not have divided our nation. He either would have withdrawn our advisors, or made the North hurt so bad they stopped sending their troops across the internationally recognized border.
Kissingers legacy is complicated, more complicated in my world than any of you can imagine, but the real crime with regard to Vietnam is that we turned a nation that had actually undergone significant land reform and genuine liberalization over to bloodthirsty psychopaths, who murdered hundreds of thousands of people immediately, broke apart millions of families, destroyed all traditional villages and their cultures, kidnapped hundreds of thousands of kids from their parents to be brainwashed, and impoverished and immiserated an entire nation for NOTHING. Nothing good happened. The war against America merely became a war against Difference and Diversity. Now, they are locked into 1975, just as Cuba is locked into the early 1960's.
While I generally agree with your comment, Vietnam, while repressive like China and other communist countries, is not as stagnant as Cuba or North Korea. According to Wikipedia: "Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies of the 21st century. Vietnam has high levels of corruption, censorship, environmental issues and a poor human rights record; the country ranks among the lowest in international measurements of civil liberties, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion and ethnic minorities." There is also a reasonable amount of American tourism. I was in Vietnam in 1970-71 and, while my tour wasn't nearly as bad as most (i.e., not infantry), I have no desire to return.
Wow
I will add: what do you think is better for business for arms suppliers and the bankers who fund everything? A short war, fought skillfully with a minimum loss of American lives, or a long term war, fought stupidly with maximal inefficiency, and concluded poorly with much loss of equipment? Johnson did their work. Nixon ended it, and paid for it with his job and reputation. Such seems plausible, in any event.
I might note that the man who warned of the rise of a "Military-Industrial Complex" was one of the few five star Generals we have had.
I couldn't pass that up. In any event, I didn't. I won't get started on JFK's asssassination, other than to note both that a Secret Service man on his detail recently offered testimony making the "Magic Bullet" idea impossible--necessitating at least one more shooter; and the team of ER doctors who were the first to see JFK's body testified that the fatal bullet seemed obviously to have entered from the front, and that the body shown in the official autopsy seemed to have been altered with plastic surgery so that it no longer looked like what they had seen, which of course many "conspiracy" theorists have long claimed.
These two items were in mainstream news.
I think my problem is that I have never been OK with going along to get along. I understand that there is a Narrative, and that my life is easier if I just pretend it makes sense to me. But I know there are a lot of sick and stupid people out there, and that although I don't know their percentages relative to the overall population, it seems obvious that they are highly represented in government and media, and that they do little but lie to cover up egregious crimes committed for money, sex and power.
The first piece, on "the paranoid style", amounts to integration propaganda that could easily have been authored in Langley or the Albert Embankment. Nothing to see here, says a seemingly erudite and well intentioned man of honor and integrity.
Well said. Both comments. As I said to Raziel much of this could not occur with the ease it does if there were a functioning Congress.
I don’t know if we will ever know what happened that day in Dallas. But I do know the Warren Commission Report is not it. Thank you for pointing out the inconsistency regarding the president’s head wounds. The autopsy does not reflect what was seen by those at Parkland. And 60 years later, both Trump and Biden have refused to release the remaining documents. What does this all mean? I’m not sure. But Mr. Tinline’s attitude is no different than what we see today in the attempts to control what can be said/heard. I’m sure Mr. Tinline is an avid supporter of “combating disinformation”.
Mr. Tinline is comfortably ensconced on.his "centrist" perch looking down his nose at us plebes in the trenches.
Ask anyone of the street today if they know who Henry Kissinger was and you will get blank stares. An accomplished man, Kissinger was none the less a confidant to a number of presidents.
An obituary usually soft peddles a person's faults while enhancing the accomplishments.
“ An obituary usually soft peddles a person's faults while enhancing the accomplishments.”
Same as it ever was.
Most people on the street can't find France on a map, or tell you who our first two Presidents were.
Wouldn't you love to quiz the protestors chanting "from the river to the sea" to ask them the names of the river and the sea?
Or to point out that what is ACTUALLY meant by that is "dead Jews from the river to the sea".
It's odd to observe that Hitler was bad because he committed genocide, but the same people who like to call everyone Nazis ALSO advocate genocide against the same Jews. This allies them with Hitler, pretty obviously, and in my view undeniably.
I had a recommendation recently. If we want to go to war, 50% of random Americans have to find the country on a map.
I doubt if, in 2010, 1 in 10 Americans could have differentiated Iran and Iraq--on a map or culturally--if they had not served over there.
I am very pro-military. I count many veterans as friends. But on balance I don't anyone can honestly argue that our governments since Korea--which should have resulted in a unified non-Communist peninsula--have supported our troops with integrity.
If you look at, say, Afghanistan, it's become hard for me to believe that many of our wars are not just some horrifying for-profit game.
You will likely get blank stares asking about anyone other than a rap or pop star or movie star. Sad
Or athlete.
Last I checked, was he president? All the people ringing their hands about Kissinger, he wasn't president. Nixon was. It was government policy during war. Some things work, some things don't work. It's the same people who are whining about all the Palestinians getting killed after they start a war. Everybody wants things to be sweetness and light, but the world is not that way. And anybody that wants to have it that way, should have no proximity to power. Good point. Have a great weekend
It was President Johnson who escalated the Vietnam War. He was a war monger.
Johnson was by no means a war monger. He hated the war, it was a distraction from the Great Society he wanted to build as FDR's successor. But he felt bound by the commitments Kennedy had made. So he went forward with the war in a half-hearted way, always trying to restrict its cost and hoping for some negotiations to bring it to an end. Had Johnson been a war monger, the U.S. would have won the war in less than a year.
Another cheap shot blaming one man for a very complicated situation.
Before TET and invading Cambodia, late '60's after LBJ resigned, public sentiment was in favor of stopping the advance of communism in Asia.
Not a cheap shot. Is it a cheap shot to blame everything on Kissinger? They were all complicit.
Given that The Obama used “complicit” in such a horrid - but entirely for him predictable - way, I recommend avoiding that word in any context.
Vietnam, the Soviet threat, the Kennedy assassinations, and more are so much of our past and are at least partially obscured by shadows, lies, and preferred Narratives that truth, particularly, political truth are hard to find. Particularly if one engages in presentism. Events happen in their own times.
Unfortunately we don't seem to ever get the truth including with current events.
Nixon was the face -- Kissinger ran the policies.
That's not true. Nixon orchestrated the Paris Peace Accords but felt the office of president was too high to take a visible role. He sent Kissinger to do his bidding, knowing North VietNam would not honor the agreement while we bailed on our partners in the South.
Nixon ran the policies....Kissinger had to do the heavy lifting.
I was saying the same thing. How can the FP actually say something positive about Kissinger....?
How? How can they post ANYTHING if controversial people are banned from being examined? He was a controversial and complicated man.
Here's an excellent documentary on Kissinger back in 2009:
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/meet-henry-kissinger-2009