Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, died at the age of 100 on November 29th, 2023. While his death is being lamented by many of his surviving elitist friends around the world, Kissinger’s legacy and remembrance is certainly stained in the blood of millions of innocents, and was instrumental in the U.S. terrorizing the world, toppling governments, and helped to get the Unites States off of the gold standard and establish the petrodollar under Richard Nixon.
On the day of his death, Nick Turse of The Intercept put together a concise piece on his tumultuous career when he was officially in politics, which is as follows (including some additional pieces of evidence from me):
Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.
There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.
Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.
As national security adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.
In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”
“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.
Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”
North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.
As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.
In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup.
“You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans.
In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti:
If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.
The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.
Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin,
Left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.
Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.
“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Never Lose: Nixon, Kissinger and the Illusion of National Security,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations.
He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that. He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.
She told The Intercept.
Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments.
A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking. It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.
Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023.
Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.
In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.
Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.
Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state? Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.
Asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others.
Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.
Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.
To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades.
“There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.
When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry.
“Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”
“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”
“Come on now.”
“No, no, no, were particularly —”
“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”
When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”
Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.
You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present. The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.
Said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.”
Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.
It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad.
Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.
Brody told The Intercept.
Another major part of Kissinger’s legacy is he was very instrumental in getting the United States off of a sound monetary system, officially detaching from the gold-backed system, and replacing it with the petrodollar.
Sandstone Asset Management Inc. gives a brief overview of that important move:
The dollar was pegged at $35 an ounce, and freely exchangeable into gold at that rate. However, by 1971, convertibility into gold was no longer viable as America’s gold resources drained away. Instead, the dollar became a pure fiat currency (decoupled from any physical store of value), until the Petrodollar Agreement was concluded by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973.
The essence of the deal was that the U.S. would agree to military sales and defence of Saudi Arabia in return for all oil trade being denominated in U.S. Dollars. A secondary option to this agreement is the purchase of U.S. debt securities with surplus oil proceeds. By 1975, all OPEC nations agreed to price their oil supplies exclusively in U.S. Dollars and to hold their oil proceeds in U.S. government debt securities.
As a result of this agreement, the U.S. Dollar then became the only medium in which energy exchange could be transacted. This underpinned its reserve currency status through the need for foreign governments to hold U.S. Dollars; recirculate the dollar cost of oil back into the U.S. financial system and make the dollar effectively convertible into barrels of oil. Moreover, the U.S. Dollar was moved from a gold standard onto a crude oil standard.
Since 1973, countries had to hold U.S. currency to purchase commodities (i.e. oil). This encouraged the purchase of U.S. debt securities with U.S. cash reserves – a strategic system which created a continuous demand for the U.S. Dollar.
- The Saudis agreed to price all of their oil sales in U.S. Dollars only.
- The Saudis would invest their surplus oil proceeds in U.S. debt securities.
- The U.S would provide arms and a security guarantee to Saudi Arabia.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
Luke 16:23
Kissinger was a very evil, bloodthirsty monster; and though the politically correct thing is not to judge him, and all this other nonsense, I’ll state the obvious: he’s in hell burning right now.
These crimes are well-documented, and yet it seems he was seen as a deity in Washington, as the crime lords and bureaucrats ran to him for advice and counsel; even Trump, who, I was told, was there “draining the swamp” and sticking it to the globalists? I guess that was him playing 4-D chess, right? (I’m being sarcastic).
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Kissinger once said
Since his death, all the maniacs in charge are praising this man. Take the current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who wrote in a post on X:
Henry Kissinger’s contributions to U.S. foreign policy and global diplomacy are immeasurable.
A refugee of Nazi Germany, WWII veteran, and Nobel recipient—his life was one of a kind. As a confidant to multiple presidents, he was one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century.
Kissinger was a statesman who devoted his life in service to the United States, and should be remembered for his efforts to ensure global peace and freedom abroad. We send our respect and prayers to the Kissinger family as they lay to rest a giant of a man.
Fathom and digest what our current Speaker said of Kissinger, knowing what we just read about him… And this is the same Johnson, who, after he was selected to Speaker last month, got on Sean Hannity’s show and said to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it — that’s my worldview.”
Johnson is just one of the menaces to society praising him, as both camps, the Dumbos and the Hee-Haws, loved him like a brother. And yet is it any wonder why the rest of the world absolutes loathes the United States, for everything we stand for and everything we’ve done? Oh, but this is the way it’s supposed to be, says our deluded and maniacal generation of Boomers – “We’re America: land of the free, home of the brave,” and all this other Yankee Doodle Dandy crap!
Last month China’s Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, spokesperson Wu Qian, said during a press event:
The U.S. are war addicts. The country has existed for 240 years, and only 16 years it did not go to war. The U.S. has established over 800 overseas military bases in more than 80 countries and regions, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Syria to Libya.
Wherever the US military goes, people die everywhere.
Facts have proved that the US is the fundamental source of international disorder and the biggest disrupter of regional peace and stability.
They are not wrong.
[6] Blessings are upon the head of the just: but violence covereth the mouth of the wicked. [7] The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rot. Proverbs 10:6-7
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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Thank you Lord Jesus for cutting down that worker of iniquity and destroyer of lives and nations!
When I read that he died two days ago I leaped for joy and praised the Lord! I rejoice that this evil wicked creature is burning in hell right now!
Amen infinity, David!
That bloodthirsty child of Satan is no more! He is definitely burning in hell right now as we speak!
Yep, praise the Lord that monster is in hell!!!!
answered prayer!
Yes it is an answered prayer, right you are!
That ghoul has destroyed and ravaged dozens of innocent nations that were smaller and weaker and was one of the big brains at empowering and emboldening America’s imperialist way of life and pseudo-toughness.
Henry Kissinger has the blood of millions of men, women, and children and animals as well on his hands, and now he’s burning like a box of matches in a fire pit! Praise the Lord!
Well I hope they wrapped him in his super thick fireproof onesie cause he’s gonna need it where he is. But seriously, I wonder what he’s thinking now, as in, WOW, I sure messed up in my lifetime and now I get no more chances to make it right.
Yep, you’re right, HK. You are ashes now and you had 100 years to turn your life around and seek the Lord. I think that’s pretty fair on God’s part. Pretty sad for you.