I try to not speak ill of the dead, but my first thought was, “Took long enough.”
To which slime no doubt replied “Hey, leave me out of this!”
Not a thread I like so far.
Superpower statesmen sometimes find themselves having to choose between different evils.
Barack Obama understands this:
Barack Obama could easily be quoted criticizing various Kissinger decisions in future years. But I’m sure Obama won’t speak about Kissinger the way I’m seeing here — certainly not in the next week or two — knowing he also had to choose between bad options.
Same with Biden and Blinken.
So, vampires can die eventually, even when they’ve spilled a lot of blood.
I’m curious. Did Obama ever arrange for the killing of a democratically elected leader and their replacement by a military dictatorship? Or help military dictatorships with the technical difficulties of making dissidents “disappear”?
Because if not, I’m not following the “bothsideism” here.
Cites, please.
And at any rate, Kissinger’s massive influence never had to be appealed to the American voter. That in and of itself is bad.
I’m not going to defend Obama’s expansion of the drone assassination campaign, but he’s an amateur compared to the level of shit-fuckery that Kissinger engaged in and counseled political leaders on for decades.
Stranger
There was a thread on Kissinger recently. I posted a bit there.
In a few hours, there will be plenty of appropriate comments on his death, coming from past and current U.S. presidents, and secretaries of state, in news reports. Those can be googled tomorrow.
I don’t generally like a moralistic approach to understanding the actions of historical figures, even if they didn’t just die today.
So did Obama order the killing of democratically elected leaders and their replacement by military dictatorships, or not? And did he provide technical support to military dictatorships making political dissidents “disappear”, or not?
You’re the one who equated Obama to Kissinger. Please provide cites to back that up.
I think there is a real danger in judging historical figures only through the prism of modern values. People who did worthy things while holding popular, contemporaneous values should be looked at holistically including both their achievements and flaws, which can both sometimes be used to educate and elucidate. Sometimes there are no good choices and tough decisions are required.
However, I do not much include Kissinger in this schema. His actions did not occur in the distant mists of history. He certainly deserves full consideration of his accomplishments, which were considerable… as well as areas where his influence and decisions suggest a seeming lack of humanity, a strong degree of hubris, significant morbidity and consequence, and a reluctance to apologize or even acknowledge certain misdeeds.
Only in the sense that they both had to choose between evils, and knew it. The situations and choices were quite different.
We recently had a Kissinger debate thread. Before he died.
I didn’t want to totally and completely ignore direct questions here, but because of the timing, I am mostly doing so.
Obama on Kissinger:
President Barack Obama, who was 8 years old when Mr. Kissinger first took office, was less enamored of him. Mr. Obama noted toward the end of his presidency that he had spent much of his tenure trying to repair the world that Mr. Kissinger left. He saw Mr. Kissinger’s failures as a cautionary tale.
“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”
Mr. Obama noted that while in office he was still trying to help countries “remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.”
“In what way did that strategy promote our interests?” he said.
Odd to think such a major player of a certain time lived so far beyond most of the others. And from what I read he remained quite active for his age until very late, even if not highly visible to the public at large.
Not a legacy the readers here liked so far either. So maybe it evens out.
And for sure, the others who have sat in the same table will be circumspect at this point – and you’d expect them to be. Their time for mutual critique was another, as mentioned in Dr_Paprika’s post, not now. But the people in this thread are not them, and this is not a memorial thread so…
The Terrible Decisions rulers and their counsel make, if they’re sensible persons, should still pain them no matter the necessity… and the people out there want to see that it hurt. They will let you get away with standing by your decision as long as they perceive that you paid some kind of price. That even if you believe you made the right call, you wish you didn’t have to. In his case, there is a perception that many of the Terrible Decisions he influenced were so by choice, not necessity, and that if the Great Game meant death and suffering by the tens or hundreds of thousands, well, too damn bad.
I enjoyed Rolling Stone’s take:
I agree with both these points, and think that they emphasise why Kissinger was so terrible.
Kissinger’s family fled from Nazi Germany, a totalitarian regime, and sought refuge in the United States, which was to become the arsenal of democracy, defeating the Nazis.
And when he rose to a position of power, he supported military totalitarian regimes, helping them to suppress democracy.
Just like the Papens and other supporters of the Nazis, he thought that opposing communism was worth giving up on democracy, and in fact actively working to suppress democracy.
Condemning him for those actions is not presentism, or reading back modern values. He lived through the battle of the great democracies against Nazism and fascism, and personally took shelter in one of those democracies. But he was quite comfortable in supporting fascists in their efforts to suppress democracy, in the name of anti-communism.
Well, I hate to find a moment of delight in all of this, but this is fucking great.
https://x.com/hillplaceblog/status/1730079024137806150?s=61&t=7zPHcBzjb1UW-wh6DrDc3g
Too bad.
Only one of them secretly dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on more than 113,000 sites in Cambodia.
It’s also pretty fucked up he gladly accepted the Nobel Peace Prise that his North Vietnamese counterpart Lê Đức Thọ had the dignity to refuse.
If there were a hell, Kissinger can burn in it.
The apologia for his record is sickening.
Tina Louise is the only still-living member of the “Gilligan’s Island” cast.
Heaven didn’t want Kissinger, and hell was afraid he’d take over.
After your second million victims or so you loose any rights of not being spoken ill of when you croak.
Good riddance.