As the title says, who is Henry Kissinger?
I read this from Wikipedia:
“Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated an opening of relations with China, engaged in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. He has also been associated with controversial policies, such as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a “green light” to Argentina’s military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan.”
It sounds like he was a bad guy, but I know there’s more to the story than that with the collective hate I see for him here on Lemmy.
He was involved in…
… Sabotaging peace talks that extended the Vietnam War by years. (This was literally treason and he knew it.) He did this to help Nixon win election.
… Carpet-bombing Cambodia (who weren’t even involved) which gave rise to the Khmer Rouge (who killed a fucking lot of people).
… Using the Kurds as part of a proxy war and throwing them under the bus the instant he didn’t need them any more (leaving them vulnerable to another genocide).
… Fucking Watergate. As in, he was in that shit deeper than Nixon himself and got off basically clean.
… Training and equipping the Mujahideen (as part of yet another proxy war with Russia) back when we liked Afghanistan (because they hated Russia too). They later became the Taliban. Lots of people say Bush did 9/11, and, while he isn’t blameless, in a very real way Nixon and Kissinger did 9/11.
… Botching a kidnapping attempt (that was itself an attempt to prevent a progressive candidate from being elected in Chile) which ended up getting a famous general assassinated instead.
That’s just what I remember off the top of my head.
It goes deeper.
Maybe as deep as his ass is in hell now.
Short version - war criminal that a lot of rich and powerful people love because he got them what they wanted.
Long version - Do you have 8 hours? Here’s behind the bastards podcast. It’s 6 episodes, 1:20 each. https://youtu.be/hPPW9eQnOCc
I see you too are a person of culture.
Came here to post the BTB link
He was a bad guy.
Who lived to be 100. Can’t forget that part.
Without any justice or plain old simple punishment done on him.
Negotiated the end of the vietnam war is a fucking TAKE
As in he negotiated that the war TAKE a lot longer and kill a lot more people.
PBS does a pretty good job of being objective and fact-based. Here’s a PBS article on Kissinger that touches on some of his more controversial policies and activities.
@Eric_Pollock yeah I can get that it could be confusing.
Most of the mainstream media an political establishment are acting like they lost an okay guy, meanwhile we are acting like we finally lost the second coming of Hitler. Except Kissinger is responsible for more deaths than Hitler iirc.
His in-group protected him for so long, there’s a massive disconnect between the mainstream boomer narrative and what most reasonable people think. He was involved in multiple genocides.
Have a read of the Rolling Stone obituary that’s doing the rounds, it’s a fairly good write-up, though it doesn’t go into all of it.
involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a “green light” to Argentina’s military junta for their Dirty War,
but I know there’s more to the story than that with the collective hate I see for him here on Lemmy.
Both sides bad, right? Sometimes things are just the way they look on the surface.
If you all think we collectively hate the guy when he actually was a good father, good employer and genius genocide orchestrator, why are you asking Lemmy?
Was the post edited? It seems like op provided the context that they had, and then asked what more they might understand about the topic given how strongly folks feel about it… That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable way to learn more about a topic you don’t know much about, when all you have to go on is some blurbs from Wikipedia
I don’t think so. My point still stands that OP wants deeper learning while blaming other people that memes aren’t teaching them? I guess you often have to read past Wikipedia. I mean every single outlet published an obituary on him. It’s not like he has to wait for the local community college to run a new Kissinger course in the fall.
Well sure, but the whole point of the community is to fill people in? Thats the only reason c/OutOfTheLoop exists.
Sure they could also go learn about him somewhere else, but like, they could also learn about him here… It’s a space for learning about stuff
I’m not sure where op blamed others for memes not teaching them, but its possible I missed it in the thread, or that I just read the original post differently
Edit: added the last section, cause thats fair if I missed that or interpreted their post differently
Then just ask without the pretension that were all a bunch of biased ideologues.
From reading back over their post and the one reply they had in the thread, I don’t think op was trying to convey that everyone here is a biased ideologue. I honestly think they were just trying to acknowledge that the platform collectively has a shared perspective on Kissenger, since thats relevant context when asking about where that shared perspective comes from
They may have explained that a little awkwardly (its kind of an awkward thing to find good words and sentence structure for 🤷) but I don’t think there’s any malice from op, just a sense that they’re out of the loop on why everyone else thinks what they think
It’s still intellectually lazy. If the assumption is that everyone is wrong, go research for yourself.
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I didn’t mean to undermine him in any way, I just opened up Lemmy and noticed a lot of posts that were negative about him. I wanted to understand why, and what better way to figure that out than asking directly?
The guys on the Dollop podcast summarise him well.
“He’s the Forrest Gump of war-crimes”
Without all the editorializing here, I think the important part is he was extremely influential in American foreign policy for decades. I checked the Wikipedia article and presumably it’s accurate but that understates now influential he was and for how long
He was great, meaning effective at what he did. My summary of all the rest posted here is that he never seemed to let morals get in the way of serving his goals or that of his president or country. He may have driven a lot of these atrocities, but we all hopped in the car and rode along
I too had never heard of him before today.
I wish I still hadn’t.
Johnny Harris released a video today about him on YouTube. I found that pretty informative, I didn’t know much about Kissing either.
I know it’s just autocorrect but you still gave me a lol
Uthe Monty Python did a song on him, you can look that up.
