Concepts like Hell never resonate with me.
Afterlife is a gamble at best.
Maybe there is reward or retribution, maybe there is nothing.
In the case of Henry Kissinger, who died this week at the remarkable age of 100, I sincerely hope there is an infinite anguish awaiting his blackened soul and that in this neo-Christian netherworld his torture reaches the levels of misery and death he spent a lifetime inflicting on the latter stages of the American Century. His like is a rare plague that exists merely to remind us of our failed and damaged humanity.
Henry Kissinger was a monster and a murderer, an epic liar whose contemptible resume rids us of all notions of a merciful god or one that might ignore his most heinous crimes, as we did continuously until he was expunged from this planet.
Kissinger orchestrated some of the most unconscionably vicious assaults on innocent life to promote his ego and get him laid. His celebrity and influence were unquestioned for his time – every president treated him as an honored stateman – and he used it to inflict wounds on the body politic and slaughter millions worldwide. He helped set in motion a myriad of war crimes in his wake that slithered through the halls of governance and used his heinous methods to wreak global havoc that stood in the place of something called “foreign policy.” His legacy is carnage for photo ops and hatred disguised as American Exceptionalism. He was scum and a villain of the highest order.
Before he ever came to power – eventually given the reigns of Secretary of State by the wretched and disgraced Richard M. Nixon in 1968, the bloodiest year of the greatest of American crimes, the Viet Nam War that ended up taking nearly 60,000 American lives and over 1.3 million for no reason – he orchestrated the skuttling of possible peace talks that would have ended the conflict and essentially Nixon’s chance at the presidency. Accepting, as I do, the immoral senseless Cold War ideology that was later exposed by the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon/Kissinger cabal not only conned the electorate into a “secret plan to end the war,” but coordinated its horrific escalation over the next eight years. Ironically, this mayhem led to the downfall of the Nixon presidency due to Kissinger’s pushing for “a White House Plumbers” unit to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg – the Pentagon Papers leaker – leading to a series of federal crimes called Watergate, which stood as the worst attack on the U.S. Constitution until the Donald Trump coup to overthrow an American election in late 2020 into 2021.
Watergate was a black-ops plan cooked up by Kissinger who played Nixon’s inept paranoia like a Stradivarius and made a mockery of the law, while simultaneously leaking anti-Nixon rhetoric to his friends at the New York Times and Washington Post, further heightening his boss’s perchance for unchecked vengeance. This, of course, pales in comparison to his “Madman Theory” that turned the Viet Nam War into America’s genocide of the neutral countries of Laos and Cambodia. They endured years of carpet-bombing as Kissinger played a public relations game with human life that had him standing as a “hero” of the failed war when the finality of our escape was in its death throes in 1974. To this day, Loas is still the most bombed nation in civilization. This cause célèbre scheme of creating destruction to later come in and claim “peacemaker” served Kissinger well, as in 1971 when he surreptitiously worked with Nixon and the CIA to squash the move to independence for Bangladesh, installing tyrants to rape, pillage and kill over 300.000 of its citizens, so Nixon could open U.S. relations with China. But Kissinger was only warming up.
His most lasting and puzzling maneuver was the placing of the genocidal maniac Augusto Pinochet as de facto head of state soon after Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Flipping “free and fair elections” was normal duty for the Central Intelligence Agency after WWII, but, under Kissinger’s machinations, became ambitious intervention routines that destroyed nations. According to the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission) and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech Commission), the number of direct victims of human rights violations in Chile under Pinochet from 1973 to 1990 accounted for around 30,000 people: 27,255 tortured and 2,279 executed. In addition, some 200,000 people suffered exile and an unknown number went through clandestine centers and illegal detention.
Throughout most of the 1970s under Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford, Kissinger oversaw the implementation of a half-dozen “Dirty Wars” from Pakistan to Argentina, overthrowing governments and installing fascist murderers backed with U.S. intelligence and money. This was a culture of muscle tactics that came to define American policies that claimed millions of innocent lives under the guise of anti-communist munitions that rivaled the systemic massacres of Hitler and Stalin before him. This is not hyperbole; it is history.
In a piece I wrote in this space during the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I recalled a morning in 1997 when I awoke from a long night of debauchery in Boston to Kissinger prophesizing the endless wars to come on CNN and quoted it: “What troubles me the most about the United States current standing in the Middle East in regards to Arab countries is the delicate balance between our alliance with Israel set against the tenuous financial dealings with OPEC. And right now no one knows how the fallout of the Gulf War will affect those invisible, radical factions who fall through the cracks of that balance.”
Kissinger echoed the lies that led us into pointless and inept wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, concurrently outing our failures (much of it espoused by him for decades) and destabilizing the region further, which led to whatever the hell is going on there now.
This is only a snippet of Henry Kissinger’s perversions of the American ideal and the desecration of the rule of law, as he roamed the halls of power and the influential elite – frequenting Hollywood parties to extravagant celebrity circle-jerks. He flaunted his evil and we celebrated it. Everyone in his presence was stained by his legacy, which, sadly, is ours. Coming to grips with the evils of men like Henry Kissinger to cleanse our own national soul may not be enough to do so, but it is a start.
