Re: Party Time!
Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2023 3:51 pm
I don't think that's the consensus. The consensus would be what most people believe, and based on headlines, that doesn't seem to be the case.Admin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 9:21 amI think the consensus, and cerftainly my opinion, is that he ranks as the 4th-worst war criminal in all history, only being surpassed by Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
Without Kissinger, there was no Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge, no Peron, no Pakistan/Bangladeshi genocide.
The best obituary I've seen is from Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234804748/
I read the Rolling Stone article, and it seems to me that they do a fairly good job of portraying him as an overrrated bungler, but they say that he's a war criminal. Their case is, putting it generously, undocumented. Here's a quote from it:
"Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger"
I think that a case could be made for that, but "because of" isn't the same as doing it. An awful lot of people think that Neville Chamberlain could have prevented the Second World War, or at least changed the course of the war through more effective preparation, and a case could be made for that, but whatever else Chamberlain was, he certainly was not a war criminal.
Kissinger's bungling may very well have enabled Pol Pot to come to power, but Kissinger didn't set up the murders himself.
Kissinger seems to me to be sort of the last vestige of colonialism. After the war, owning other countries went out of fashion and places like Britain and France, and even the United States, started shedding overseas colonies. However, the United States and the Soviet Union did the next best thing, setting up puppet states and playing them off against each other with no regard for the people themselves, and often with disastrous consequences. Nevertheless, when it comes to the murders by the Pol Pot regime, I will blame Pol Pot, even if Henry Kissinger was an enabler.
