By Atilio A. Boron on December 2, 2023
photo: efe
The delayed death of Henry Kissinger (“bad people live longer,” says a well-known aphorism in the United States), undoubtedly one of the greatest war criminals of the second half of the twentieth century, has highlighted the ethical duplicity of the empire, both of the hegemon and its vassals, and of the Western press that have exalted him as a great statesman and a consummate geostrategist.
The former is not true because he who cannot, or does not want to, discern between good and evil or between law and crime does not deserve to be called a statesman. The word is too big for him. He may be a very powerful personage, he may lead, from the shadows or in broad daylight, a state, but he will never deserve to be exalted to the status of statesman at least among those of us who, inspired by the teachings of classical Athenian political philosophy, continue to postulate for the indispensable unity between power, knowledge and morality.
But as an analyst and protagonist of the arts of geopolitics Kissinger was a consummate “realist” in the always slippery terrain of international relations. That is to say, he had an ability to read the tensions that were present but also the opportunities that presented themselves in the most diverse scenarios of struggle, to all of which he added an uncommon sensitivity to perceive the influence of the deep historical currents on which the conflicts of the present were mounted. Of course, this “realism” was invariably placed at the service of a supreme and non-negotiable objective: to consolidate and, if possible, increase the domination of the United States over a world order that was essentially unjust, destructive of the environment and in violation of human rights and democracy on a massive scale. That is why we said in a brief post yesterday that when this type of person died, what Mario Benedetti advised was an “obituary with cheers”.
Kissinger was, as we said at the beginning of this brief note, one of the greatest war criminals, in spite of which in 1973 he was awarded no less than the now discredited Nobel Peace Prize for his role in achieving …. the prolongation of the Vietnam War for two more years, condemning hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to pay with their lives for the insatiable will to dominate of the then Secretary of State of the rogue Richard Nixon Administration. Not to mention his role in the previous four years when he encouraged the intensification of U.S. bombing to crush Vietnamese resistance, even appealing to the use of chemical weapons, Agent Orange, napalm and whatever atrocities were necessary not only in Vietnam but in neighboring Cambodia as well.
Despite his sinister antecedents, as soon as his death occurred, the major media in the United States and the West rushed to exalt his figure. In its digital page, the Washington Post wrote that: “Henry Kissinger dies at 100. The prominent statesman and scholar had unprecedented power over foreign policy”. Statesman and academic, nothing to do with the crimes he promoted or condoned for many years, before and after being Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford! In turn, the front page of the New York Times described Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered America’s opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake U.S. power relations with the Soviet Union in the Cold War era, sometimes trampling democratic values to do so.” In this case, the New York newspaper had the honesty to point out that Kissinger did not hesitate for an instant to trample democratic values whenever they got in the way of the grand design of U.S. foreign policy. In Latin America, we are well aware of the support he gave to the nefarious dictatorships of the Southern Cone and to the torture, disappearances and mass murders of the Condor Plan concocted by Washington with Kissinger’s explicit blessing. His obsession for power, a potent aphrodisiac as he mentioned on more than one occasion, led him to propose nothing less than “crushing Castro” according to declassified documents from the U.S. National Security Archive.
The reason for this renewed animosity was the military aid that Cuba provided to Angola, in 1975 and at the request of this government, to contain and finally defeat the destabilizing forces of Agostinho Neto’s socialist government that responded to the orders of the racist South African regime and the White House. Kisinger’s proposal to Ford called for a full-spectrum invasion and attack against Cuba; aerial bombing, mobilization of all reserves at the Guantanamo base as well as terrorist attacks and finally a Marine invasion. The plan was aborted by Jimmy Carter’s unexpected victory in the 1976 presidential election. But Kissinger’s initiative ratifies for the umpteenth time his status as an unscrupulous protagonist on the world geopolitical chessboard. A man who left this world enjoying total impunity and surrounded by undeserved honors despite the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of deaths caused by his expert advice to successive US governments.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English