",
likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government,
corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit!
That trademark insouciance! That naughtiness! It is unlikely, however,
that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina,
and Americans of conscience appalled by his murder of non-Americans,
will share in the amusement. For his illegal and unconstitutional
actions had real-world consequences: the ruined lives of millions of
Indochinese innocents in a new form of secret, automated, amoral U.S.
Executive warfare which haunts the world until today.
And his
conduct raises even more fundamental questions: to what extent can
leaders who act secretly ,illegally and unconstitutionally, lying to
their citizenry and legislature as a matter of course, legitimately
claim to represent their people? How much allegiance do citizens owe
such leaders? And what does it say about America's elites that they have
honored a man with so much innocent blood on his hands for the past 40
years?
Mr. Kissinger's most significant historical act was
executing Richard Nixon's orders to conduct the most massive bombing
campaign, largely of civilian targets, in world history. He dropped 3.7
million tons of bombs** between January 1969 and January 1973 - nearly
twice the two million dropped on all of Europe and the Pacific in World
War II. He secretly and illegally devastated villages throughout areas
of Cambodia inhabited by a U.S. Embassy-estimated two million
people; quadrupled the bombing of Laos and laid waste to the 700-year
old civilization on the Plain of Jars; and struck civilian targets
throughout North Vietnam - Haiphong harbor, dikes, cities, Bach Mai
Hospital - which even Lyndon Johnson had avoided. His aerial slaughter
helped kill, wound or make homeless an officially-estimated six million
human beings**, mostly civilians who posed no threat whatsoever to U.S.
national security and had committed no offense against it.
There
is a word for the aerial mass murder that Henry Kissinger committed in
Indochina, and that word is "evil". The figure most identified with this
word today is Adolph Hitler, and his evil was so unspeakable that the
term is by now identified with him. But that is precisely why it is
important to understand the new face of evil and moral depravity that
Henry Kissinger represents. For evil not only comes in the form of
madmen dreaming of 1000 year Reichs. In fact, in our day, it is more
likely to be committed by sane, genial and ordinary careerists waging
invisible automated war in far-off lands against people whose screams we
never hear, whose faces we never see, and whose deaths go unrecorded
and unnoticed. It is critical to understand this new face of evil, for
it threatens not only countless foreigners but Americans in coming
years. And no one has embodied it more than Henry Kissinger.
The
planes he dispatched came by day. They came by night. Remorseless.
Pitiless. Relentless. Day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. Most of the people below had no idea where the bombers
came from, why their lives had been turned into a living hell. The
movie "War of the Worlds", in which Americans are
incomprehensibly slaughtered by machines is the closest depiction of
what the innocent rice-farmers of Indochina experienced.
Hundreds
of thousands of innocent human beings in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam
were forced to live in holes and caves, like animals. Many tens of
thousands were burned alive by the bombs, slowly dying in agony. Others
were buried alive, as they gradually suffocated to death when a 500
pound bomb exploded nearby. Most were victims of antipersonnel bombs
designed primarily to maim not kill, many of the survivors carrying the
metal, jagged or plastic pellets in their bodies for the rest of their
lives.
Fathers like 38-year old Thao Vong were suddenly blinded or
crippled for life as they lost an arm or leg, made helpless, unable to
support their families, becoming dependent on others just to stay
alive. Children were struck, lying out in the open, screaming, villagers
unable to come to their aid for fear of being killed themselves. No one
was spared - neither sweet, loving grandmothers nor lovely young women,
neither laughing, innocent children nor nursing or pregnant mothers,
not water buffalo needed to farm not the shrines where people had for
centuries honored their ancestors and hoped one day to be honored
themselves.
A farmer on the Plain of Jars in northern Laos wrote
of being bombed by the U.S. in 1969 that "every day and every night the
planes came to drop bombs on us. We lived in holes to protect our lives.
I saw my cousin die in the field of death. My heart was most disturbed
and my voice called out loudly as I ran to the houses. Thus, I saw life
and death for the people on account of the war of many airplanes in the
region of the Plain of Jars. Until there were no houses at all. And the
cows and buffalo were dead. Until everything was leveled and you could
see only the red, red ground."
A 30-year old mother wrote
that "at that time, our lives became like those of animals desperately
trying to escape their hunters. Our lives were confided to the Lord
Buddha. No matter when, all we did was to pray to the Lord to save our
lives."
A 39 year old rice-farmer wrote of the aftermath of a
bombing raid: "The other villagers and I got together to consider this
thing. We hadn't done anything, nor harmed anyone. We had raised our
crops, celebrated the festivals and maintained our homes for many years.
Why did the planes drop bombs on us, impoverishing us this way?"
Mr. Kissinger exulted to President Nixon over this bombing,
telling him
that "it's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52
and they dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have
had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ...
each plane can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could
carry."
Although Mr. Kissinger claimed he was only bombing enemy
troops, guerrilla soldiers were largely undetectable from the air.
Investigating the bombing of northern Laos, the U.S. Senate Refugee
Subcommittee concluded that "the United States has undertaken a
large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social
infra -structure in Pathet Lao (i.e., guerrilla) areas. Throughout all
this there has been a policy of secrecy. The bombing has taken and is
taking a heavy toll among civilians." These words apply to Mr.
Kissinger's bombing throughout Indochina. The villagers of Indochina
were not "collateral damage". They were the target.
Those who
praise Mr. Kissinger for the opening to China but ignore his mass murder
in Indochina shame human decency itself. By honoring Mr. Kissinger they
dishonor themselves. And they are also blind to the careerist
"Executive Branch mentality" he embodied, which poses a clear and
present a danger to foreigners and Americans alike today. Adolph Hitler
dreamed of conquering and Stalin of communizing the world. Mr. Kissinger
destroyed millions of lives primarily to further his career by
preventing a communist takeover while he held office. And it is this
kind of institutional, bureaucratic mentality, combined with new
machines of secret war, which threatens the humanity today far more
than the crazed ideologies of the past.
In the end Mr. Kissinger
failed, as the communists took over Indochina in the spring of 1975. The
Thieu, Lon Nol and Royal Lao government regimes, which Mr. Kissinger
propped up with so many tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars,
evaporated. The genocidal Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, which
would not have occurred had Mr. Kissinger supported the neutralist
Sihanouk and not illegally invaded Cambodia. But though Mr. Kissinger
failed miserably in Indochina, he did in the end succeed in his
principal goal. He emerged from the wreckage of Indochina with his
reputation intact.
Even critics of Mr. Kissinger tend to use
euphemisms about his actions for fear of losing their "credibility." But
facts are facts. The truth is the truth, and euphemisms obscure it. It
is a matter of fact not rhetoric that Mr. Kissinger bears a major
responsibility for murdering masses of people in Indochina. He is a mass
murderer.
What is most important about his mass murder, however, was not only that his order to Alexander Haig to
undertake "a
massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything
that moves" was clear evidence of criminal intent to avoid the laws of
war protecting civilians, and that he would have been executed had the
Nuremberg Judgment been applied to his blanket bombing of civilian
targets.
It was that he conducted a new form of automated, secret
and amoral warfare previously only imagined by George Orwell
in 1984 when he described war as fought by machines waged by "very small
numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists (waging war) on
the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess
at." When Richard Nixon decided, and Henry Kissinger executed, a plan
to withdraw U.S. ground troops but seek to win by escalating war from
the air, they brought into being a new age of automated war that
inevitably, and cold-bloodedly, wound up killing large numbers of
civilians.
Previous war-makers fomented hatred against the "Jewish
scum", "gooks", or "Huns" they massacred. But neither Mr. Kissinger nor
his subordinates had anything against the countless Lao, Cambodian and
Vietnamese civilians they slaughtered. They simply did not regard them
as human beings. They had no more significance for them than cockroaches
or ants. It was not immorality but amorality, the murder of countless
"non-people" whose existence as human beings was simply ignored. Though
the people of the Plain of Jars wanted nothing from America except to be
left alone, even this simple wish was denied them, as they were
extinguished like flies out of indifference not malice.
An August, 1945 editorial in the
London Observer eerily
foreshadowed what Mr. Kissinger represented, and what such successors
as David Petraeus and John Brennan embody today: "Albert Speer
symbolizes a type which is becoming increasingly important in all
belligerent countries: the pure technician, the classless, bright young
man, without background, with no other original aim than to make his way
in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial
ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast and the
ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational
machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far
nowadays. This is their age. The Hitlers and Himmlers we may get rid of,
but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular special man, will
long be with us."
Although Mr. Kissinger failed so miserably in
Indochina, he did indeed display great ability in handling the
"organizational machinery" of the U.S. Executive Branch -- so much
ability in fact that his actions have become the template for most U.S.
war-making today. This war-making is:
--
Undemocratic: Mr.
Kissinger not only failed to obtain permission from Congress to bomb
Laos and Cambodia, he did not even inform it he was doing so. The
incredible fact is that a handful of U.S. leaders unilaterally dropped
3.7 million tons of bombs on Indochina entirely on their own initiative -
as have U.S. officials today assassinated thousands of unarmed suspects
throughout the Muslim world.
--
Unconstitutional:
The very foundation of the Constitution is the principle that leaders
may only legitimately rule with the "informed consent" of the people.
But Mr. Kissinger not only failed to inform the American people or
Congress about his bombing of Indochina. He has lied about it from the
day he took office until today. Between January 1969 and March 1970, as
he leveled the Plain of Jars, Mr. Kissinger's State Department denied it
was even bombing Laos. And when reports from refugees made it
impossible to deny the bombing, Mr. Kissinger's and his representatives
continued to lie, denying that they bombed civilian targets. William
Sullivan, close Kissinger ally and the former U.S. Ambassador to Laos,
testified to Senator Edward Kennedy on April 22, 1971 "the policy of the
U.S. is deliberately to avoid hitting inhabited villages."
--
Illegal: By
failing to even notify Congress of his massive bombing, Mr. Kissinger
broke domestic law. By systematically bombing civilian targets and
refusing to observe laws seeking to protect civilians during wartime,
he violated international law. Both conditions are true for U.S. drone
and ground assassinations today.
--
Secret: The
bombing of Laos and Cambodia, like that in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
today, was conducted in secret. Even as U.S. officials first denied
they were doing any bombing at all, and then that they were only bombing
legitimate military targets, they refused to allow journalists to go
out on bombing runs. The information about the bombing of civilian
targets was classified and kept out of the hands of Congress, the media,
and the American people.
--
Amoral: Like Mr.
Kissinger, President Obama lied when he recently described his drone
assassination program as "a targeted, focused effort at people who are
on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm
Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on ". In
fact, U.S. officials have admitted that most of their victims are
unarmed suspects killed in "signature strikes" against people who names
are not known. And the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has
documented that hundreds of those killed by U.S. drone strikes are
civilians. The victims of drone strikes are simply labeled "militants",
denied their humanity as well as their lives.
What is most
troubling to anyone with a conscience about Mr. Kissinger's new form of
warfare is that, from a bureaucratic perspective, it worked. By keeping
the human consequences of their war-making secret from Congress and
the American people, the Kissingers, Petraeuses and Brennans have had a
free hand to kill, torture, imprison and maim anyone they wish. They
not only need not fear punishment for their illegal acts. Like Mr.
Kissinger, who has grown wealthy on the blood of the innocents of
Indochina, they can even look forward to being rewarded for them. We are
taught as children that crime does not pay. Mr. Kissinger, who has
earned tens of millions since the war ended on the blood of innocent
Indochinese, is living proof that this is untrue.
The big
question for Americans today is the degree to which this "Executive
Mentality" will be directed against American citizens in the future.
The prospects are not promising.
The U.S. Executive today has not
only obtained permission from Congress to kill or imprison any American
citizens they wish without due process. They have done so - murdering
not only Anwar al-Awlaki but his 16 year son, also a U.S. citizen, while
sitting in a café. The Executive under President Obama has undertaken
unprecedented prosecution of U.S. whistle-blowers and journalists alike
for revealing information officials have arbitrarily classified. Never
before has the U.S. had an Executive Branch "Department of Homeland
Security", which routinely spies on millions of Americans, and is
working to paramilitarize police departments around the nation.
On
a human level it is possible, even appropriate, to sympathize with
Henry Kissinger. German Jew Heinz Alfred Kissinger was only 9 when
Hitler took office, and only escaped at age 16 shortly before
Kristallnacht, One can only guess at the multiple traumas and
psychological damage he suffered. It is entirely understandable that he
would develop a cynical view of the world and devote himself solely to
gaining and holding power devoid of moral or ethical concerns.
But Mr. Kissinger is more than an individual. He is also a political and historical figure.
Future
historians, public intellectuals and journalists who have nothing to
gain by flattering Mr. Kissinger and ignoring his crimes against
humanity will likely have a very different view of his legacy than
today's opinion-makers.
They will likely see the U.S. opening to
China as inevitable and pay relatively little attention to Mr.
Kissinger's role in it. As the historian Gareth Porter has
documented in
detail, they will also see clearly that the terms of the Paris Peace
Agreement he signed in 1973 were no different than what he could have
obtained in 1969 - thus saving tens of thousands of American, and
countless Indochinese, lives. And his winning the Nobel Peace Prize
will be seen less as an honor he deserved than an indelible stain on
those who awarded it to him.
No, what Mr. Kissinger will be most
remembered for is cold-bloodedly ushering in a new age of undemocratic,
unconstitutional, secret, criminal and amoral automated warfare, by a
U.S. Executive Branch constrained neither by law nor elemental human
decency.
After the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara made a good-faith effort to understand what he did in Vietnam,
issuing a mea culpa of sorts in his
book In Retrospect. By contrast PBS Journalist Steve Talbot
reported the
following when he interviewed Mr. Kissinger: "I told him I had just
interviewed Robert McNamara in Washington. That got his attention. He
stopped badgering me, and then he did an extraordinary thing. He began
to cry. But no, not real tears. Before my eyes, Henry Kissinger
was acting. "Boohoo, boohoo,' Kissinger said, pretending to cry and rub
his eyes. "He's still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.'
He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for
emphasis." As the Khmer Rouge were conducting genocide in Cambodia, Mr.
Kissinger
told the
Thai Foreign Minister on November 26, 1975 that "how many people did
(Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary) kill? Tens of thousands " you
should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are
murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in the way. We are prepared
to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don't
tell them what I said before."
Future historians will not only
marvel at the depth of his pathology, but ask a basic question: what
does it say about America and its elites that they honor such a man?
They
will likely not have much interest in the man himself who was indeed,
after all, little more than the man foresaw by the London Observer,
a "classless, bright young man ... with no other original aim than to
make his way in the world"characterized both by a "lack of psychological
and spiritual ballast" and a skill in handling "the terrifying
technical and organizational machinery of our age."
Kissinger the
man will likely be remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the fellow
best described by the novelist Joseph Heller in Good As Gold:
"It
was disgraceful and so discouraging " that this base figure charged
with infamies too horrendous to measure and too numerous for listing
should be gadding about gaily in chauffeured cars, instead of walking at
Spandau with Rudolf Hess ... Asked about his role in the Cambodian war,
in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died, he'd said: "I
may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue
involved.' Whereas another State Department official, William C.
Sullivan, had testified: "The justification for the war is the
reelection of the President.' Not once " had Kissinger raised a voice in
protest against the fascistic use of police power to quell public
opposition to the war in Southeast Asia.
"In Gold's conservative
opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck,
Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious shlumpf who made war
gladly."
But what this insignificant man symbolized
for future war-making will be of great significance to future
historians. For, as the London Observer also correctly predicted
Mr. Kissinger did indeed go far -- taking America on a dark journey of
war-making characterized by mass murder by machine, secrecy, lying,
manipulation, betrayal of democracy and the U.S. Constitution,
international criminality, overthrowing democratically elected
governments and support for some of the world's most brutal and savage
dictators. Yes, as he joked, he was skilled at engaging
in "illegal" and "unconstitutional" activities. But the rest of
humanity, and this nation, will be paying the price for this skill for
generations to come.
** "Dollars and Deaths," The Congressional Record, May 14, 1975, p. 14262.
TOP TEN KISSINGER QUOTES
1. Soviet Jews:"The
emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of
American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the
Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian
concern." (
link)
2. Bombing Cambodia: "[Nixon]
wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear
anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on
anything that moves." (
link) (Emphasis added)
3. Bombing Vietnam: "It's
wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they
dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have had more
planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ... each plane
can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could carry." (
link)
4. Khmer Rouge:"How
many people did (Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary) kill? Tens of
thousands? You should tell the Cambodians (i.e., Khmer Rouge) that we
will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let
that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.
Tell them the latter part, but don't tell them what I said
before." (from November 26, 1975
Meeting With Thai Foreign Minister.)
5. Dan Ellsberg:
"Because that son-of-a-b*tch--First of all, I would expect--I know him
well--I am sure he has some more information---I would bet that he has
more information that he's saving for the trial. Examples of American
war crimes that triggered him into it"It's the way he'd operate".Because
he is a despicable bastard." (Oval Office tape, July 27, 1971)
6. Robert McNamara: "Boohoo, boohoo " He's still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty. " (
Pretending to cry, rubbing his eyes.)
7. Assassination: "It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination." (
Statement at a National Security Council meeting , 1975)
8. Chile: "I
don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due
to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important
for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." (
link)
9. Illegality-Unconstitutionality: "The
illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little
longer." (from March 10, 1975 Meeting With Turkish Foreign Minister
Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey)
10. Himself: "Americans
like the cowboy " who rides all alone into the town, the village, with
his horse and nothing else " This amazing, romantic character suits me
precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if
you like, my technique." (November 1972 Interview with Oriana Fallaci)
Originally
published at AlterNet
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