Henry Kissinger

[Pigeon]

What's going on with people celebrating Henry Kissinger's death?

So, to understand why people are celebrating Kissinger’s death, you have to understand who Henry Kissinger was.

So Kissinger was born just before the rise of the Nazis. He lived in a fairly liberal town, hung out with the non-Jewish population, and lived a decent live. Then the Nazis started to kick up some shit and Kissinger’s family moved out of Germany after Kissinger suffered a number of brutal attacks by Nazi street gangs. He joined the military and became a college professor, but there was a noted tendency to alway side with the biggest power. Eventually Kissinger wrote a famous article stating how we should start using more nukes “tactically” against enemies that didn’t have them. This cumulated in Kissinger being brought in to several political campaigns; especially one Richard Nixon.

Kissinger became Nixon’s national security director and eventually his State Department head. In this position Kissinger oversaw a lot of shit. First, while he was working for LBJ, he illegally negotiated with the South Vietnamese government to stall out peace talks and extend the war a number of years. Anyone who died after 1969 can directly blame Kissinger for this. Furthermore Kissinger demanded that strategic bombing campaigns would be directed by him alone; this means every bomb launched by a B-52 was directed by Kissinger personally. Many many civilian casualties resulted from these bombings.

To move forward, Kissinger illegally moved the bombing campaign to Laos and Cambodia. This had the knock-on effect that the Kingdom of Cambodia fell to Khmer Rouge due to the huge destabilizing effect the bombing campaign had. However, Kissinger was okay with it and provided material support to Khmer Rouge to fight the North Vietnamese even after Khmer Rouge fell during Vietnam’s liberation of Cambodia. From this, Kissinger wanted to open up relations with China but had no avenue to do so. This mean he secretly went to Romania and Pakistan and supported their brutal regimes in order to affect relations with China. During this time, Pakistan airdropped paratroopers with US material and began to slaughter the population of East Pakistan. Millions died in the slaughter and India stepped in to prevent the massacre from spilling into India. This lead to Kissinger providing more material support to Pakistan in order to defeat the Indian military; it was completely hopeless and Pakistan lost. But, the war was lost after Nixon got to China, so Kissinger succeeded.

Next Kissinger wanted to deal with the communist rebels in South America. So how did he accomplish it? By propping up brutal dictators with US Aid like Pinochet, the Argentine Junta, the Guatemalan Junta, and a brutal regime in Panama that held the School of the Americas.

Oh and did I mention he also wanted peace in the Middle East? Yes! So Kissinger backed the Shah of Iran and his also extremely brutal regime, back Saudi Arabia’s expansionism, and turned a blind eye to Qatar’s slavery. The last thing he did was also “broker” peace during the Yom Kuppur War; which saw the dramatic shrinking of Palestinian land and support for the Likud Party. Something which absolutely has no effect on today! s

But wait! There’s more! After Kissinger left office he still did a lot of ahitfy stuff. Like help with the Iran-Contra Affair, help sell chemical weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and royally fuck up the State Department by being the go-to man for organizing the department; even up to Trump’s time in office!

[Pigeon]

In addition to the other answers, and to provide a bit of geopolitical context that help explain (although by no means justify) Kissinger's evil actions (rather than just make him look like a 2-bit Disney villain): He was active during the Vietnam War, where the USSR was supporting North Vietnam, while already being somewhat antagonistic to China and Maoism (ever since Stalin's death). In order to further America's goals, Nixon and Kissinger pandered to Mao, China, and other Maoist groups, in an effort to further drive a wedge between China and the USSR/North Vietnam. This is despite these groups, at the time, comitting crimes far more brutal and numerous than the USSR or Viet Cong have been. The worst example was Cambodia, where a pseudo-Maoist regime known as Khmer Rouge started a full-blown genocide that killed millions. The US's actions enabled Khmer Rouge to gain power and start their genocide, and the US then turned a blind eye to it.

In the end, it didn't even matter. North Vietnam won the Vietnam war, won a 2nd war against China (which invaded Vietnam shortly after the Vietnam war was over), and toppled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. This cemented Vietnam, for all their faults, as being on the right side of history, and the US (with Kissinger as one of its key leaders) firmly on the wrong one, both directly and indirectly responsible for countless civilian deaths in the region.

In the WW2 years, we all knew Stalin did some very bad things, but we correctly identified Nazi Germany as both morally and pragmatically worse and more dangerous, and picked the lesser evil to ally with, in order to defeat the greater one. Kissinger did the exact opposite: pick the greater evil over the lesser one, become part of the greater evil, and not even have anything to show for it, having decisively lost the war.

And to add insult to injury, Nixon's (and Kissinger's, and their successors' like Reagan's) pandering to China didn't stop at Vietnam, but continued well throughout and even after the Cold War, going as far as outsourcing a lot of our industry to China in order to enrich corporations, which has now become our primary geopolitical opponent, and one we have almost no leverage over, since we depend on so much of what they produce. China's military and political power around the world today, the harm they cause both locals and the Western world, and contemporary Western problems like the erosion of the middle class and wage stagnation, can be traced all the way back to Kissinger's actions in the 70s. Kissinger's vile legacy will continue impacting us for many generations to come.

[Pigeon]

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

On of his many accomplishments

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. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.