The topics I have written about seem to have gotten darker and darker over the course of the semester. It’s been a rough few weeks. War, misery and general ineptitude from various governing institutions both domestically and internationally have led to a lot of the subjects I write about being sad ones.
Given that this is my final column of the semester, I wanted to take a break from the bleakness of what I write about and focus on something a little more positive. Luckily for me, my hopes of a positive story were answered emphatically last week. So with that being said, let’s talk about the death of one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century.
Last Thursday, Henry Kissinger died. Few men in American history rose to the echelons of power that Kissinger was able to rise to over his life. He is the only person in history to be the White House national security advisor and secretary of state at the same time. From this position, he was able to elevate himself to become one of the most prominent American diplomats in history.
In his own words, his foreign policy goals were simple: Kissinger wanted to establish “a culture of peace, a set of conditions that could reduce the prospect of nuclear war.” When looking at his career and the policies he himself supported, it was clear that he was committed to peace no matter how many innocent men, women and children he had to kill to get it.
There is no greater example of his psychopathic view of peace than the American military actions towards the end of the Vietnam War. Even before he was in elected office, Kissinger was meddling in the war. In a shrewd attempt to win election he deliberately sabotaged peace talks between the United States and Vietnam. While he was advising President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Paris Peace Talks of 1968, he gave confidential intelligence to the South Vietnamese government.
The U.S. was at war with Vietnam, but the neighboring country of Cambodia was on Kissinger’s mind. Their fear was the ability of the northern Vietnamese to resupply their army across the Ho Chi Minh Trail — which cut across eastern Cambodia.
With this reality, Kissinger and President Nixon came to the only reasonable conclusion: enact a brutal bombing campaign over all of Cambodia. Kissinger was the architect of Operation Menu, a secret bombing campaign that saw over 500,000 tons of bombs dropped over 113,716 different targets over a four year span. It’s unclear the exact amount of people who were killed in this campaign but experts agree it ranges from anywhere to as few as 24,000 to as many as a million.
These bombing campaigns also had another consequence. Kissinger’s destabilization of Cambodia created a power vacuum. This vacuum led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal regime that inflicted unspeakable horrors over its reign. Pol Pot’s regime killed between 1.6 and 3 million people through executions, forced labor and starvation – a quarter of the country’s then population.
There are a lot of horrible Kissinger policies that I can talk about. The lowlights include the American support of a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende and led to the rise of a brutal dictatorship that killed thousands over a 17 year span, His support of Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor, greenlighting Pakistan’s brutality in Bangladesh and starting the long held American tradition of using, and then abandoning the Kurds.
But here’s the thing about Kissinger. As evil and deplorable as he was and his policies were, he was not some lone actor. His actions were encouraged – and routinely awarded by not only the American elite political establishment – but by international institutions as well.
Despite all the violence he inflicted on Vietnam and Cambodia, Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Despite the fact that the Nobel panel knew that his agreed-upon ceasefire was unlikely to bring peace to Vietnam, they still gave it to him anyway.
Kissinger’s crimes have been known for decades; yet despite this, he was able to get in the ear of every single presidential administration after he served Nixon and Ford in one capacity or another. The first administration that did not invite him back to the White House was the Biden administration.
Despite his brutality, despite the millions of lives he has ruined, that didn’t stop the bipartisan heaping of effusive praise for him in his death. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “He was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice. Few people were better students of history. Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger.”
Here is what is the most depressing fact when analyzing Kissinger: As evil as he was, he won. He ascended to levels of power and influence that most of us will never reach in our lives. Despite the countless fields of bodies he created, he was able to enjoy celebrity status.
He approved horror over countless regions in the world and was never meaningfully held accountable for those actions. This is a man who should’ve spent the last five decades of his life in a cell. Yet, he got to die peacefully being surrounded by his family, after living a long full life. How many victims of his policies can say the same?