From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting."
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
> He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
There's a little known law in the USA which states the following;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
A. Different times.
B. Hunter was a bit of a hack who was not taken seriously. His work is just a couple notches above mad magazine. It is entertaining satire that is obviously without connection to reality.
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.
Remember when Hamas said Israel air bombed a hospital killing hundreds and everyone believed them and it turned out they were lying and it was actually a PIJ misfire.
While I agree to an extent, this begs an obvious question:
How far do we take this line of thinking?
Is an attack like 9/11 justified since even the twin towers were used by the US government indirectly, owing to nearly everyone within paying taxes that supported US wars and expeditionary-ism?
Likewise, I'd want to keep in mind things like relative size and options on the table. WW2 incendiary and atomic bombing is one thing in the context of the ferocity and consumption of that war. Yet in the case of a small territory under varying degrees of military occupation and without full self determination, is there really no capability to take any action but bombing such places? (And no moral imperative to try to cause less collateral if it's realistically possible?)
There is zero evidence that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes.
Unless you are saying that people use schools to get education and hospitals to get medical treatment, well then yes.
Couldn’t find the original link, but here’s news coverage for a game called September 12th.
> In this Serious Game you need to kill terrorists shooting missiles. The action uses first person perspective in order to enhance immersion. The problem is that terrorists are surrounded by civilians and it is almost impossible to attack terrorists without killing civilians too. The dead are mourned and the rage of the survivors turns them into terrorists. You just have to play for a couple of minutes to realize that the only way to avoid ‘collateral damage’ is not to play.
This nicely completes the loop back to Kissinger’s choices in life.
JRK got us into it, and Nixon got us out of it while navigating the complexities of China, the cold war, and a potential WW III if we appeared too weak.
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
It's also a good reminder that public judgement isn't worth much for any personality who had access to lots of bonafide top secret information.
A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
Do yourself a favor and listen to at least one of the six part series that Behind The Bastards podcast[0] did on Kissinger. It will give you a background, with sources, on the "controversial" statesman that you'll read eulogies about over the next few days.
Also check out The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens. I think it was made into a documentary later. The man was worthy of the title of war criminal, but of course we don't prosecute our own and we certainly don't recommend to the ICC (we're the good guys, you see).
It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
Not only would we not recommend our war criminals to the ICC, we have on the books the authorization to be able to invade the Hague in case any US person was being held or tried. Hague Invasion Act / ASPA is wild.
Haven't listened to the podcast (yet) and don't know much about kissinger but the description "the Forest Gump of war crimes" made me laugh out loud, whether or not it's accurate.
Reading through the descriptions of the episodes of this podcast it seems a lot like they start with a conclusion and then confirmation bias themselves (and everyone else who already agrees with them). Maybe not the most objective source.
Asking half rethorically, how would these descriptions be different if they were fully objective and the guy was a really horrible person ?
In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
It's harsh to fault them for having an opinion on the subject they dug to the end, and a conclusion already made at the time they start recording the series.
Be that as it may -- and I haven't listened to the podcast -- but there's very compelling evidence of his responsibility, or at least complicity for war crimes throughout southeast Asia during the Nixon administration amounting to civilian deaths numbering in the tens of thousands, conservatively.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
You might listen to the podcasts. They are good and they are well researched. Listen: I met Kissinger a few times and spent a few decades of my life working with foriegn policy wonks. He was a monster beyond compare.
And I'll just add this in. When I was 24 I got a job at the New York Times working on the tech team that would launch nytimes.com. The "web editor" was one Bernard Gwertzman. Look him up. He was the foreign desk editor of the paper of record for decades. He made his name reporting on the Vietnam war. Would you like to know who his best friend was in 1996 when I met him? Henry Kissinger. He had lunch with him every wednesday at the Harvard Club. Having read Manufacturing Consent more than once I was flabbergasted. If Chomsky had known this... Anyway, he and I were the first ones to show up for a meeting one time and I asked him how he and Henry K had met. He leaned over and said (with a literal wink) "while I was reporting on Vietnam, but don't tell anyone!"... said the man who among many other things 1. reported that we were not bombing Cambodia, 2. Supported Pinochet and 3. didn't report on the East Timor genocide. All policies that were 100% Kissinger.
Does it have to be objective? Also, perhaps the glowing eulogies are the biased ones--objective means a fact-based honest look at his terrible legacy, not erasing it.
I mean, it’s not science, it’s politics. The podcast isn’t trying to present an argument, but rather convey facts to an already trusting audience. This feels off the mark
I've listened to the podcast, but one Kissinger op I don't think was mentioned there that always stuck out to me was Operation Popeye. It was a real life attempt to extend the monsoon through cloud seeding so the Ho Chi Minh trail would get washed out and unusable. I think it might be the origin of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory. (Not quite as evil as randomly picking out grid squares and bombing them of course.)
Tl;dr version: Kissinger was an almost superhuman ass-kisser. He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
And he used that power to stay in the halls of power whoever was in charge.
The only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
>He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?
This piques my curiosity. Does anyone have the mechanical specifics of how this worked, as in actual conversations when Kissinger was in his element that demonstrated this quality in action?
Teens today who have never experienced Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field normally don't believe my shorthand description of the RDF like the above encapsulated description of "superhuman ass-kisser". Fortunately, I can show them the historical records, giving them not just the video of his meticulously-rehearsed MacWorld presentations, but the context of the enormous stakes he was playing with, to change their minds. And to teach them that what seems extraordinary can be accomplished with extraordinary effort, if one is willing to relentlessly study and practice.
So whenever I hear about extraordinary abilities, I'm always curious to see how they worked up close, mechanically, in dissect-able action.
I have read critique that the terms presented to Serbs were unreasonable. Maybe, maybe not, but let's keep in mind that Serbs had already committed genocide and kept aiming for it.
Americans bombed the people of Laos for sport killing tens of thousands and crippling many more. Kissinger directly enables and supported this. The man was a monster and should have died long ago.
Yes seriously - there’s a strong argument the Kissinger committed actual treason several times. He’s responsible for the deaths (hundreds?) of thousands.
As a person from the third world and more specifically Africa, I cannot find myself to mourn his death or say any good thing about Kissinger. Good riddance actually. I would have loved to see him get his day in court when he was still alive.
What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.
I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.
I think many people from the Global South would agree with you and not just Africans. That was also exactly my thought when i read the headline, even though he did nothing against my native Kenya. Also, the phrase "Third World" isn't the most appropriate one to describe a good chunk of the world.
While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.
There are plenty of people all around the world who know what heinous things he did. He won’t ever be mourned, and hopefully we never see the likes of him again
It's disturbing the vast difference of opinion between ordinary citizens of the US who think he's a monster that inflicted an enormous amount of evil upon the world. Ever more worse because it was in our name. And how the political class in the US views him.
It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.
I often think of an interesting quote found inside Samuel Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations” (which is pretty meh, IMHO):
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
Readit News
So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
I'm continuously astonished how people pay 20$ per-month to be lectured like that. I guess I shouldn't be by now...
Are you sure it didn't just "believe" what you told it, the same way LLMs can be badgered into falsehoods?
> He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
Deleted Comment
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.
The world needs less people like him.
No one should ever be complicit in carpet bombing. It's inhumane.
We in the US ought to hold the govt accountable everytime they drop bombs from the sky on civilians.
We're currently helping Israel do that in Gaza with our tax dollars. Hospitals and Schools getting air bombed. That is not who we are.
No, that is not who you would like us to be/have been. Very evidently, that is who we are.
Deleted Comment
Is an attack like 9/11 justified since even the twin towers were used by the US government indirectly, owing to nearly everyone within paying taxes that supported US wars and expeditionary-ism?
Likewise, I'd want to keep in mind things like relative size and options on the table. WW2 incendiary and atomic bombing is one thing in the context of the ferocity and consumption of that war. Yet in the case of a small territory under varying degrees of military occupation and without full self determination, is there really no capability to take any action but bombing such places? (And no moral imperative to try to cause less collateral if it's realistically possible?)
> In this Serious Game you need to kill terrorists shooting missiles. The action uses first person perspective in order to enhance immersion. The problem is that terrorists are surrounded by civilians and it is almost impossible to attack terrorists without killing civilians too. The dead are mourned and the rage of the survivors turns them into terrorists. You just have to play for a couple of minutes to realize that the only way to avoid ‘collateral damage’ is not to play.
This nicely completes the loop back to Kissinger’s choices in life.
https://www.onseriousgames.com/september-12th-a-toy-world-ne...
>not who we are
It is absolutely who we are. We unconditionally support israel no matter what they do. They are our greatest ally!
Dead Comment
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
Linked on HN numerous times but largely only discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691
It’s hard to imagine what Kissinger knew that would drastically change my perception on him.
JRK got us into it, and Nixon got us out of it while navigating the complexities of China, the cold war, and a potential WW III if we appeared too weak.
I wonder whether we look at this with new eyes in light of the recent discussions in Congress around UAP.
I think it illuminates the profound insight of Ellsberg’s commentary if, even for the sake of argument, you entertain the idea of non-human life being amongst that information and then, as he describes, imagine sitting and being briefed on any number of topics from any number of perspectives knowing that you know there to be non-human life, that they don’t, and that if they did they would see the world very differently as you have come to.
Of course I think Ellsberg’s perspective holds regardless of what that significant unknown information is (so long as it is significant) - true might of adversaries, how close we’ve come to various failure scenarios, what tech we’ve actually developed, who shot Kennedy etc.
Dead Comment
A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
[0] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-kissinger
[1] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-two-kissinger
[2] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-three-kissing...
[3] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-four-kissinge...
[4] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-five-kissinge...
[5] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-six-kissinger
It will be interested to see what obituaries settle on this week though.
In general a podcast series will be started after the hosts have researched the subject, and decided they have an angle to present it to their public. Following them while doing their research could be interesting at small doses, but the number of absolute non stories or boring conclusions would be staggering and they'd need to be crazy entertaining by themselves to keep a whole podcast going on that pace.
It's harsh to fault them for having an opinion on the subject they dug to the end, and a conclusion already made at the time they start recording the series.
The greatest irony here is that he managed to make it to 100.
And I'll just add this in. When I was 24 I got a job at the New York Times working on the tech team that would launch nytimes.com. The "web editor" was one Bernard Gwertzman. Look him up. He was the foreign desk editor of the paper of record for decades. He made his name reporting on the Vietnam war. Would you like to know who his best friend was in 1996 when I met him? Henry Kissinger. He had lunch with him every wednesday at the Harvard Club. Having read Manufacturing Consent more than once I was flabbergasted. If Chomsky had known this... Anyway, he and I were the first ones to show up for a meeting one time and I asked him how he and Henry K had met. He leaned over and said (with a literal wink) "while I was reporting on Vietnam, but don't tell anyone!"... said the man who among many other things 1. reported that we were not bombing Cambodia, 2. Supported Pinochet and 3. didn't report on the East Timor genocide. All policies that were 100% Kissinger.
Rest in piss. Both of them.
Nobody is doing this kind of podcast "on the fly"
Deleted Comment
Tl;dr version: Kissinger was an almost superhuman ass-kisser. He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent.
And he used that power to stay in the halls of power whoever was in charge.
The only thing that seemed his own idea was personally planning and picking bombing targets to murder hell out of everybody in Cambodia.
You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he also further the interests of the US more effectively than most could?
That and being a total horn dog.
This piques my curiosity. Does anyone have the mechanical specifics of how this worked, as in actual conversations when Kissinger was in his element that demonstrated this quality in action?
Teens today who have never experienced Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field normally don't believe my shorthand description of the RDF like the above encapsulated description of "superhuman ass-kisser". Fortunately, I can show them the historical records, giving them not just the video of his meticulously-rehearsed MacWorld presentations, but the context of the enormous stakes he was playing with, to change their minds. And to teach them that what seems extraordinary can be accomplished with extraordinary effort, if one is willing to relentlessly study and practice.
So whenever I hear about extraordinary abilities, I'm always curious to see how they worked up close, mechanically, in dissect-able action.
Deleted Comment
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambouillet_Agreement
https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissingers-century-01a1a9...
It was written by a man who already wrote the book: "Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist."
Dead Comment
What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.
I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World#Etymology
While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
Dead Comment
https://youtu.be/ABeGhyAD_DM?si=6eAeatEaB7U_znd7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVGV6lvNTR4
(Edit : added another)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En7bhLPso2Y
is it tacky to dance on a war criminals grave? probably, but i'm not sure i care at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christopher+hit...