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Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi
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thanks for the copypasta, it was an entertaining read, although a bit deranged and riddled with inconsistencies.
still, it made some good points , and it sent me in search of other critiques from the left, because they are well deserved after all. so i found a great one in "the nation"
check it out:
https://www.thenation.com/article/wo...nger-obituary/
early on it says this:
Kissinger has many devotees, and many of his obituaries will no doubt urge balance. Transgressions, they’ll say, need to be weighed against accomplishments: détente and subsequent arms treaties with the Soviet Union, opening up Communist China, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s at this moment that the consequences of many of Kissinger’s policies will be redefined as “controversies” and consigned to opinion rather than to fact. In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, with the world convulsed by new wars of conquest, Kissinger’s “sober” statesmanship is, several commentators have recently claimed, needed more than ever.
hahaha, it's true of course. he uses the meta-obituary approach repeatedly in the piece to bring up the current mainstream take on kissinger. then he makes some really great analysis of all those points, and after much excellent arguing it all ends with this:
Kissinger is, of course, not singularly responsible for the evolution of the US national security state into the perpetual motion machine that it today has become. That history, starting with the 1947 National Security Act and running through the Cold War and now the War on Terror, comprises many different episodes and is populated by many different individuals. But Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line, shedding spectral light on the road that has brought us to where we are now, from the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf to deadlock in Ukraine to moral bankruptcy in Gaza.
At the very least, we can learn from Kissinger, who unhesitatingly supported Gulf War One and Gulf War Two, and every war between and since, that the two defining concepts of United States foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren’t necessarily opposing values; rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into the quagmire of the moment; realism keeps us there while promising to get us out; and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round. So it goes.
that's a great conclusion, and it suprised me. and everything before and between those paragraphs is well worth reading though. 100% recommended reading
anyway there is a link from that article with another earlier one by the same author, with a similar headline to the rolling stone article:
"Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100"
https://www.thenation.com/article/wo...mes-watergate/
goddamit, i fucking love "the nation".
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eta: there is an article on chile memos that might interest you. unfortunately i can't access right now