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henry kissinger
This 2024 Election Is Like an X-Ray Image of the Metastatic Entrails of America
Hooray! We have free will and free choice: you get to live happily ever after in the stupor of our surrealistic dystopia, or you can (if you wish) bang your head against the padded walls of the insane asylum that is America.
Jul 13, 2024
It is as if we all synchronized our nightmares—or, rather, in a world of neoliberal austerity, we have run out of night-time horror tales and need to all share the same moth-eaten, unraveling, tedious bad dream. We have a tsunami of infected shit pouring mightily through our paper mache sea wall—a fierce, eternal heat wave, wars and genocides, fires, storms, poisons, plastics, and perverts oh my, and to make matters worse, our so called Democratic party has just discovered that the refrigerator went down in a blackout and the carton of milk turned as dank, sour, and foul as raw sewage. I am talking about Joe "I-supply-weapons-for-genocide" Biden, who just yesterday was as vibrant and clever as, uh... a normal person... and now, in a snap of the fingers, stares blankly into eternity like the two knotholes in your attic wall.
This sour milk emergency has provoked the Democratic Party big wigs—the people who could not possibly have known that Joe Biden's wits had taken the uptown A-Train to oblivion without so much as leaving a note—to run in every direction at once in a frantic search for a warm, corporate friendly body to stuff into the empty ballot. I swear that if Curly of Three Stooges fame had gotten Ilse Koch pregnant, she might have given birth to the Democratic Party. The admixture of evil and slapstick ineptitude defies imagination. How do you not fucking know that your standard bearer, your champion of freedom and apple pie, has been stumbling into walls and wandering naked in the woods at night?
We have stopped wars and kicked scoundrels out of office. But those were simpler times.
It appears as though the Democrats will finally put the gong show hook around grandpa's waist, and call Kamala, or Pete Buttigieg, or Ronald MacDonald out of the storage bin to save our democracy. Fortunately, we live in the greatest country ever created and have so much freedom that we can't figure out what to do with it all. We are free to vote for the Democratic clown car ticket, or the alternative, Night-of-the-Living-Dead party that just nominated Darth Vader and Heinrich Himmler as their candidates. Forgive me for my metaphoric extravagance—not the Vader/Himmler ticket, but Donald Trump and whatever evil fuckwit he bites in the throat to be his VP.
And the beautiful thing about a Donald Trump/Joseph Goebbels ticket is that your vote automatically brings forth Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Stephen Miller, and Ted Bundy... oops, I mean Ted Cruz.
That is the lovely thing about democratic freedom and your choice to be yourself and vote for whomever the fuck you want, so long as it is a Democrat or Republican. We get to vote Clown Car or Nazi wannabe in a free and fair election. You get to "drill baby drill" or bomb Gaza into the sea of Armageddon.
We have free will and free choice: you get to live happily ever after in the stupor of our surrealistic dystopia, or you can (if you wish) bang your head against the padded walls of the insane asylum that is America. If this was some other country, some other planet, some other dimension of being, we might be out in the streets shutting it all down, but there are Amazon orders to wait for, and Tik-Tok videos to watch. We live in our perfectly ordered reality where nothing can shake us up. If a giant lobster from Andromeda landed in Wyoming wielding inter-galactic death rays in either pincer—so what?
The U.S. has an honorable history of mass protest. We all recall that Abbie Hoffman nominated a pig for president in 1968 Chicago, and that the mighty U.S. army turned tail in Vietnam and left Henry Kissinger with a mouthful of blood and guts looking for new outlets for his cannibalism. We have stopped wars and kicked scoundrels out of office. But those were simpler times. A mere four years ago we had millions in the streets over the police murder of George Floyd. How did that fizzle out and leave us all washed up—a nation of beached whales? The big question is this: how passively can we watch the planet burn to a crisp and remain as fatalistic about our political perpetrators as we all appear to be?
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Genocidal General Declares Victory in Indonesian Election
Prabowo Subianto "is the most notorious massacre general in Indonesia, and he's also the general who was closest to the U.S. as he was carrying out his mass killings," said journalist Allan Nairn.
Feb 14, 2024
Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto—a former U.S.-trained general in an army unit implicated in genocidal violence—declared victory Wednesday after polls closed in the archipelago nation's presidential election, although no winner has officially been announced.
Unofficial results showed Prabowo, of the right-wing populist Gerindra party, with nearly 60% of the vote. His two rivals—former Jakarta Gov. Anies Baswedan of the Coalition of Change for Unity and Ganjar Pranowo of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—have not yet conceded defeat. In order to avert a runoff, Prabowo needs more than 50% of all votes and at least 20% in each of the nation's 38 provinces.
"We should not be arrogant. We should not be proud. We should not be euphoric. We still have to be humble," Prabowo told jubilant supporters in a packed Jakarta stadium Wednesday. "This victory must be a victory for all Indonesian people."
U.S. journalist Allan Nairn explained in a Tuesday interview with Democracy Now! how Prabowo ran a "two-pronged" campaign that involved "pressuring and coercing the poor with threats to their well-being" as well as a "PR campaign that portrays the general as a cuddly cartoon character."
Nairn added that "none of it would be possible" without the support of popular incumbent PDI-P President Joko Widodo, whose son Gibran Rakabuming Raka is Prabowo's running mate.
In addition to concerns about potential democratic backsliding, critics noted Prabowo's bloody past.
"Gen. Prabowo is the most notorious massacre general in Indonesia, and he's also the general who was closest to the U.S. as he was carrying out his mass killings, abductions of activists, and systematic tortures," said Nairn. "He was also the son-in-law of the former dictator of Indonesia, Gen. Suharto."
Prabowo, who trained at Fort Benning in Georgia, joined the elite Kopassus commando unit in 1976, shortly after then-U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger greenlighted the genocidal Indonesian invasion of East Timor after the former Portuguese colony declared independence.
Over the following two decades, around 200,000 people—approximately a quarter of East Timor's population—were killed or died from starvation or disease.
"He is the general, most importantly, who led many of the massacres in East Timor after the Indonesian army invaded," Nairn said of Prabowo. "In one case, in the village of Kraras, Prabowo and his forces killed hundreds of fleeing civilians. He later was involved in other massacres and directing assassinations of political activists in Aceh and West Papua."
Nairn and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman witnessed and survived a 1991 massacre of hundreds of East Timorese pro-independence demonstrators in Dili. Nairn was also briefly jailed by Indonesia's military in 1999 and subsequently deported.
Prabowo also allegedly orchestrated the worst atrocity of the period immediately preceding Suharto's 1998 fall from power. Kopassus troops under Prabowo's command led the mass rape and murder of at least 160 Chinese-Indonesian women and girls—many of whom were reportedly burned to death after being sexually assaulted—and the slaughter of hundreds of other Indonesians of Chinese origin.
The Clinton administration cut ties with Kopassus in 1999 and banned Prabowo from entering the United States the following year. However, in 2010 the Obama administration, citing the unit's improved human rights record under a democratic Indonesian government, resumed cooperation. This, despite reports that Kopassus was still committing atrocities against Christians in independence-minded West Papua.
In 2020, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Mike Esper invited Prabowo to the Pentagon as the Trump administration sought to bolster ties with Indonesia to counter the rise of China.
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The Real Harvard Scandal: A Henry A. Kissinger Professorship of Statecraft and World Order
Beyond the war crimes that impacted untold millions, perhaps Kissinger’s most abiding legacy was this: the failure of accountability.
Feb 06, 2024
As conservative pundits cry crocodile tears over the alleged decline of excellence and integrity at Harvard, symbolized by former University President Claudine Gay, there’s a more significant scandal worth addressing. Recently announced by the University is the Henry A. Kissinger Professorship of Statecraft and World Order.
As specified in the job description, a successful candidate “will be a distinguished analyst of diplomacy, strategy and statecraft,” and have an “excellent record of academic achievement and of contributing to public policy debate on how to build a stable international order.” The presumption is that the late Henry Kissinger exemplified these virtues.
Over the past five decades, the evidence has steadily accumulated that Kissinger was a secretive, fiercely competitive, habitually dishonest, ruthless promoter of American dominance in the world, irrespective of the cost to tens of millions of people. His policy recommendations regarding Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were as destabilizing, as they were cruel. Some of these human rights calamities must surely be known by the authorities at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Yet at Harvard—as for numerous U.S. institutions and mainstream media—Kissinger’s crimes and failed policies were of no consequence. Certainly not a reason to preclude a named chair, an honored spot-on TV news, a special column for the Washington Post, or invitations to the White House and State Department.
No matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with it.
Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in a surprisingly long list of international tragedies. However, it is worth remembering that in none of these cases, did he act alone. Most of his recommendations were offered in tandem with Presidents Nixon and Ford, and were for the most part in line, with the preferences of people in the “national security” bureaucracies, notably the CIA and military.
Most unusual was Kissinger’s public face during the time he held public office and afterward. In the early Nixon presidency, he lost no opportunity to be in front of a camera, and after the Nixon White House became shadowed by Watergate, Kissinger’s media omnipresence was an administration asset.
In the decades that followed, Kissinger remained prominent, writing thousands of pages of self-justification, offering theories of international relations, and often dispensing unwise advice—notably his vocal support for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Vietnam War was of course the “original sin.” Although Kissinger readily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to negotiate the 1973 Paris Peace agreement, he knew it to be fraudulent: once all U.S. military forces departed Vietnam, the fighting would resume, with Hanoi the likely victor.
So long as government records remained classified, it was possible to imagine that Kissinger was the author of “Vietnamization”—Nixon’s policy of removing large increments of U.S. troops, while handing over greater responsibility for the fighting to the South Vietnamese. Yet ironically, this was the one Nixon policy, which Kissinger opposed. His disdain for the South Vietnamese government and its army (ARVN) was ongoing. And by contrast to Nixon, and some other administration colleagues he was undeterred by the sacrifice of American soldiers. His advice was habitually in the service of escalation when it came to Cambodia, Laos, the bombing of North Vietnamese cities, and the more aggressive use of U.S. air power in the South.
This blood-stained history returns us to Harvard’s morally obtuse decision to create a Chair in his honor. Indeed, this perhaps is Kissinger’s most abiding legacy: the failure of accountability. No matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with it.
This personal story exemplifies the more far-reaching phenomenon: the failure of the United States to ever take responsibility for the human suffering it has caused in other nations, or to affect the institutional changes which might prevent this. Here we are once again: giving billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as its military massacres thousands of defenseless Palestinian women and children. Many young Americans find this incomprehensible.
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