This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1474737
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1474737
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"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." – Henry Kissinger
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From the start, Kissinger provided a point of orientation for those who specialized in the study of foreign policy. He clearly articulated a vision of Realpolitik in U.S. policy discussions. Anybody studying the subject from about 1970 on had to take his ideas into account. His scholarship was sufficiently well argued that it forced those of us that didn’t agree with his ruthless outlook to clarify our own positions.
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If only there were some reference in the Constitution to Congress having the power to declare war, not the President…
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David Corn said it like it was:
Kissinger expressed few, if any, regrets about the cruel and deadly results of his moves on the global chessboard. When Ted Koppel in an interview this year gently nudged him about the secret bombing in Cambodia, Kissinger took enormous umbrage and shot back: “This program you’re doing because I’m going to be 100 years old. And you are picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago? You have to know it was a necessary step.” As for those who still protest him for that and other acts, he huffed, “Now the younger generation feels if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think.”
There were no apologies from Kissinger. But the rest of us will owe history—and the thousands dead because of his diplomatic scheming—an apology, if we do not consider the man in full. Whatever his accomplishments, his legacy includes an enormous pile of corpses.
May Kissinger be housed in the 18th circle of hell forever, tortured contantly, unless he finds a soul within his self, and returns to the cycle of life again, as a scummy cockroach.
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Fruit of a thousand ‘think tanks’ founded by the rich and for the express convenience and ascendancy of same.
Kissinger was just another in a long line of toadies willing to say the unsayable, while the rich - who cannot say - pay their paltry salary and fart a miasma of insipid flattery about them.
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Haven’t read all the headlines, but it appears Huff Post was the only media outlet having the guts to call Kissinger what he was - a war criminal. Sometimes they get it right.
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Not only was Kissinger’s approach amoral, it was often counterproductive.
“I was always taught never to say anything about the dead unless it’s good. He’s dead. Good!” – Jackie “Moms” Mabley
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The pictures on TV as they discuss him (may his memory be a caution and a curse) have him grinning and sparkling for the camera. The aphrodisiac was for him, he got his jollies with the corpses piling up.
On the bright side, perhaps Andrea Mitchell will be more comfortable at him and might consider a retirement. (ETA: WHoops is married to Alan Greenspan, not henry K. Can’t keep the old creeps separate, sadz.)
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“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” Not Mark Twain, but a paraphrase of something Clarence Darrow wrote in 1932.
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realpolitik [is] primarily centered on maximizing the economic and military power of the United States
power- and transactionalist-oriented approach to foreign policy
This sounds very much like TRUMP’s pitch, the obv difference being that (whatever his other faults), Kissinger was competent and pursued this strategy with zeal and organizational savvy.
produced a series of destructive outcomes
major policy decisions that were generally detrimental to the United States’ standing in the world
Kissinger’s bloody and damaging legacy is what TRUMP says he aspires to. But he has no hope of accomplishing even that.
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Kissinger’s record reveals the problems with the narrow conception of national interest devoid of values
Seems reminiscent of Carl Icahn, and the transformative effect he had on American business with his philosophy that every public company must aggressively maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all else.
This kind of myopia has the virtue of being easy to understand and straightforward to pursue, and those ergonomics help it attract new adherents.
Same with Libertarianism: it’s wrong, and stupid, but you can fit the entire philosophy on a postage stamp, and, like Newtonian gravity, it seems to yield the right answers in some everyday contexts, so it spreads.
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NPR had a bunch of great quotes. One of my favorites was this: “As we celebrate his death, we must not forget to mourn his life.”
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So what was the benefit from supporting Pakistan exactly?
Was it just to expedite reducing the population in the area?
Strengthening our military power to the exclusion of making the world better and safer and more prosperous for many seems like a stupid idea.
And when you think about it, when you think about the damage climate change is causing for every living thing on this planet, when you ponder what air and water and food and land the Koch’s and Mercer’s and the Kushner’s, not to mention everyone else, are going to use when everything goes to shit in about 30 years, you have to think the whole entirety of his sort of thinking is monumentally stupid.
When I heard he was dead I said “good” but 60 years too late.
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It’s days like this I wish I wasn’t an atheist. I would love to imagine this bloated piece of shit roasting in hell for all eternity, being tortured by the screaming of the millions of innocent men, women and children he merrily murdered because of his “realpolitik.” The world is a brighter place today that this evil motherfucker is gone.
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Hah! Timely, as I just listed to Mrs. Alan Greenspan ( something…Mitchell ) [i have somehow repressed the reporter’s name] opine on the death of her friend, the War Criminal de jour. Currently on his way to a hellish afterlife, if you believe in hell and reincarnation. I guess it takes 47 days to find the right quarters that fit his crimes. Torture seems to fit him well.
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I think Mother Jones and Rolling Stone did a pretty good job, too.
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What is it with that woman who cannot quite be named or placed in history… (Mitchell) ?
Thank God that Donnie’s a Fuck Up.
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