Wow, I'm so impressed by your righteous attack on people dissing Kissinger.... :-)
Look, Kissinger was National Security Advisor during the Vietnam war, including the massive bombing campaigns against, well, pretty much everyone in the area. We bombed Cambodia (not an actual combatant), North Vietnam, and even South Vietnamese villages that had been declared free fire zones. Many millions of people died pretty much for nothing, and a lot of those deaths were in the service of Kissinger's policies.
His policies were failures: millions died as a direct result, and millions more if you count destabilizing Cambodia enough to put the Khmer Rouge in power. And in the end Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were all communist (Vietnam still is).
A petrodollar isn't petrol or energy, it's a financial tool designed to externalise the risks of fossil fuel use, making it far cheaper and more ubiquitous than it should be: Fundamentally trading a US dollar (something that only has value because we 'believe' it has value) for millions of years worth of stored sunlight energy (and, potentially, billions of future suffering lives)
I 100% buy into to idea that the Anthony Bourdain quote did more than any high school teacher can dream of in carving out space in the minds of Millenials and Zoomers about who Kissinger was. It's a well written quote, and very shareable. Plays well into to lefty disdain of American foreign policy and gives it more stakes than a textbook can dream. If someone accuses you of being a dork for being a 35 year old who claims to care about Kissinger, despite the fact that he had little to no political sway throughout your whole lifetime, you can just whip out a quote by a certified cool guy and you are back on the trendy train.
I really like this substack but this post would have been more effective hadn't it been written in a way that makes it sound like what you were actually trying to say is that, in fact, you are the cool kid. One of the risks of a comedic approach to political writing I guess.
Also, Kissinger WAS a war criminal and no cringey Gen Z activist post on social media can change that fact. May he rot in hell.
Nah, I got it alright. Jeff's post is not meant as a defense of Kissinger. He is criticizing most of all the aesthetics of people calling him out. I then criticized the aesthetics of Jeff's post in return. Because I think its shortcomings make it read like it's ridiculing criticism of Kissinger in a more general way than intended. Jeff is a good writer but this was not good writing. Hence it sounds like a defense of the man and hence my second paragraph. Also, I think putting down just criticism for aesthetic reasons is kinda dumb, at least in this context.
Great writing. Kissinger was a brilliant, brilliant mind. He was not the incarnation of evil, he was simply part of the establishment that was at war with an existential threat. Hindsight gets lots of people on their high horses - which is nice for them but unrevealing abut the complexity of global politics at any time.
Kissinger was explicitly attacked from the right for *refusing* to view the communist bloc as an existential threat. His famous program of thawing relations with communist China in order to contain the Soviet Union was conceptually possible *only* if the capitalist West could coexist with communism.
His was not a relentless crusade to purge the world of socialist authoritarianism, nor a desperate last stand where every moral code must be erased just to stay alive, but a cynical, amoral exercise in power for the sake of power. Anything that opens up options for the American war machine, no matter how heinous or cruel, was to be pursued; anything that closed off options for the American war machine, no matter how just or idealistic, must be destroyed.
Kissinger very clearly sneered at the idea that the American war machine was to be deployed in support of anything in particular, least of all the concept of human rights or democracy or even the benefit of actual Americans.
C'mon, have some pity. This is like Christmas come at last to mediocre lefty Twitter comedians. They've probably all had those zingers sitting under a heat lamp like slices at a sketchy pizzeria for near enough a decade now.
(Full disclosure: the lame one-liner I've been using on the topic about something finally happening to his phylactery is no exception.)
“Kissinger struck a deal with the devil in 1968- for every southeast Asian child burned alive, one minute would be added to his natural lifespan. The devil had no idea that he was getting hustled.”
As someone who had been around as long as Kissinger had been in power (and the NYT obituary says he was still a powerful man even now), yes, he was evil. He did some good, but I think the bad he did outweighs it. I haven’t posted on this, because frankly I don’t care enough, but I think it’s good that people recognize what he was and the influence he’s had on what the U.S. has done in the past, and hopefully will do less of in the future (though I doubt it).
As someone who's only been alive since Kissinger had no power (and I don't think giving random interviews and photo ops count as real power), I find it mighty weird that more people in my generation are posting about Kissinger's death and using more colorful language and quotes than they did when Rumsfeld died. Rumsfeld was the archietch behind the lies that led to the Iraq War and he actually got my generation caught up in those wars.
But somehow, Kissinger and his status as an alive person (until recently) became a more important cultural flagstone for lefty millenials on Twitter. It's fundamentally weird. This is not an excuse of the bad or criminal things that Kissinger did. But it is a solid critique on a culture of millenial poasting that some powerless old ghoul occupied more mindspace than a similar ghoul that sent our peers to die in a half baked war.
Kissinger was very esteemed, more than most others, in particular kinds of mainstream fora and real and apparent corridors of power that cause the most intense steaming of ears among leftists of a certain bent: those who consider themselves brave anti-establishment knowers and truth tellers, anti-imperialist, implicitly see America and maybe Israel and maybe sorta sometimes Western Europe as the only entities with agency on the world stage, etc. Also, he had an iconic air about him, seemed like the distant button pushing brainy anti-empathetic sort... a bit of a perfect storm for an excellent foil.
You just haven’t lived long enough to feel what the knowledge of what Kissinger not only represented but caused to happen in real time. Probably didn’t know soldiers who went into Cambodia and did things that ripped their own lives apart, or watched as American jets were ordered to shoot down Greek Air Force planes heading to Cyprus to turn back Turkish forces in the early 70s, or had blood in the draftees in the 1960s.
That's exactly what he said - his generation has more disdain for Kissinger, someone they don't have that knowledge of, than someone that played a similar role in their own lives. That says more about the millennial critics than it says about Kissinger himself.
If I misread his implications mea culpa. That said anyone reacting to the establishing or the defending generational superiority leaves me fucking exhausted.
I'm not trying to establish or defend any generational superiority. But I'm a millenial and in real life I'm in normie spaces where very few people know who Kissinger is. But when I log into reddit or Twitter or whatever, I see people my age with very very hot takes on a guy that I have legitimately never seen outside of a history book or Wikipedia page. The guy never gave a press conference that affected anyone since I was born.
So why when I log in online, people have very very strong opinions on him? It's weird. Just odd to me. If you were a Gen xer or a boomer, yeah they guy screwed you over. Same if you lived in a country still feeling the aftershocks of his bombing foreign policy. But millenials in the US and UK don't really have that experience, but they have all the vitrol like they do. Vitrol that wasn't there in nearly the same quantity with rumsfeld. A guy, who in my lifetime, held a press conference that sent my peers to war. One that was filled with lies about WMDs.
I don't think millenials are bad per se. Every generation has its own struggles and culture that is born out of it. Millenial poasting culture is part of it and this Kissinger is an example of how weird and detached it can all be. The article is a pretty good critique of it in my opinikn because it cuts towards what's really going on. Millenials online posting their anti establishment edgy lefty cred by repeating the same jokes about the death of an old ghoul that had very little power in their lifetime
Appreciate this. And I see what you’re saying. I misunderstood at first. You’re not wrong at all.
The shame of ignorance of our history is that without it the failure to grasp the reverberation of draconian policy is guaranteed. On every level. And it pleases the minority who welcome ignorance on the part of the majority.
I dislike the generation posting too, but in this case it's relevant because millennial and Gen Z commenters, by definition, did not have first hand experience of Kissinger in a position of direct power. If someone born in 1992 has more arguments about Kissinger than Rumsfeld's their views could be the result of aesthetics and social groups, rather than some sort of well thought out ideology. I'd feel similarly about a boomer that had strong feelings about Harding administration, but less interest about administrations they lived through.
Obviously, this characterization of some of Kissinger's vocal critics is orthogonal to how Kissinger himself should be evaluated.
My impression is that Rumsfeld was adjacent to but not as vicious as Kissinger. It could be argued that Kissinger had more lethal adversaries internationally, but have not studied Rumsfeld. Oddly your use of orthogonal has taken me into a deeper dive on Kissinger. A monster perhaps dealing with other monsters. But I remain in the camp that despises him.
Not gonna lie, I’m a Gen X who has very strong negative opinions on the Woodrow Wilson administration, but then again, I’m a history geek who actually reads books on the period.
Kissinger’s influence went way beyond his years in office. His influence and that of his “Kissinger Associates” went all the way through Trump. His “realpolitik”’is still the way foreign policy is done today.
Best post of the thread. Then again, if Kissinger hadn’t sold out the Kurds in 1974 or so, maybe the Saddam Hussein regime would have had a different course and Rumsfeld’s machinations would never have taken place. Butterfly effect and whatnot…
Some of us are old enough to remember wings of F-4's and KC-135's taking off from Hickam AFB to be stationed in Guam or Da Nang ready to bomb the shit out of Cambodia (I was a student at UH Manoa at the time).
Also have a friend (still an FB friend) who was among the troops dropped into Cambodia having been ordered to remove all identifying flashes on his uniform. I do get to say 'Yes, he did some bad stuff'. Maybe I never came under fire but that stuff was done in my name, and I think it was bad and he was at least partly responsible.
"For crimes against humanity, we sentence you to 5,000 dancing crab gifs upon your death"
This sort of self-important justification is what is getting mocked in this article. Believing that a gleeful pile-on by ignorant people is something to mete out against the powerful after they've committed war crimes?
He deserves worse of course. But that's no reason to deprive people of their fun! Who does it hurt? And then people get to make fun of *them,* so win-win
Among the offended in these comments, what's most amusing-annoying is the self-important solemnity. Like you would - in all likelihood - hold other similarly bad people to account if it wasn't, yes, the cool thing to do because of what Kissinger represents in our memeverse. And like the ritual right-view-alignment noises make a lick of difference in foreign policy and to the living, impactful dastardly actors of various flavors of dastardliness that infuse geopolitics.
The Zoomers parroting Bourdain could just as easily be swayed to love Kissinger, if only there was an attractive person on TikTok acting as his hype man. "Yeah, dude was evil, but gotta admit, that yid had rizz. He didn't just open China, he opened a lotta vagina!"
Actually i did just what Jeff is mocking - felt the need to post my view on Kissinger. I missed the point - think what you like but posting is more about you than Kissinger.
Wow, I'm so impressed by your righteous attack on people dissing Kissinger.... :-)
Look, Kissinger was National Security Advisor during the Vietnam war, including the massive bombing campaigns against, well, pretty much everyone in the area. We bombed Cambodia (not an actual combatant), North Vietnam, and even South Vietnamese villages that had been declared free fire zones. Many millions of people died pretty much for nothing, and a lot of those deaths were in the service of Kissinger's policies.
His policies were failures: millions died as a direct result, and millions more if you count destabilizing Cambodia enough to put the Khmer Rouge in power. And in the end Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were all communist (Vietnam still is).
...Let's not forget he was also largely responsible for the petrodollar, which continues to finance turning half the planet unlivable
Sorry, I obviously don't like Kissinger, but blaming him for the world's use of petroleum is ridiculous.
A petrodollar isn't petrol or energy, it's a financial tool designed to externalise the risks of fossil fuel use, making it far cheaper and more ubiquitous than it should be: Fundamentally trading a US dollar (something that only has value because we 'believe' it has value) for millions of years worth of stored sunlight energy (and, potentially, billions of future suffering lives)
Very well put.
This
I 100% buy into to idea that the Anthony Bourdain quote did more than any high school teacher can dream of in carving out space in the minds of Millenials and Zoomers about who Kissinger was. It's a well written quote, and very shareable. Plays well into to lefty disdain of American foreign policy and gives it more stakes than a textbook can dream. If someone accuses you of being a dork for being a 35 year old who claims to care about Kissinger, despite the fact that he had little to no political sway throughout your whole lifetime, you can just whip out a quote by a certified cool guy and you are back on the trendy train.
I really like this substack but this post would have been more effective hadn't it been written in a way that makes it sound like what you were actually trying to say is that, in fact, you are the cool kid. One of the risks of a comedic approach to political writing I guess.
Also, Kissinger WAS a war criminal and no cringey Gen Z activist post on social media can change that fact. May he rot in hell.
You're missing the point.
Nah, I got it alright. Jeff's post is not meant as a defense of Kissinger. He is criticizing most of all the aesthetics of people calling him out. I then criticized the aesthetics of Jeff's post in return. Because I think its shortcomings make it read like it's ridiculing criticism of Kissinger in a more general way than intended. Jeff is a good writer but this was not good writing. Hence it sounds like a defense of the man and hence my second paragraph. Also, I think putting down just criticism for aesthetic reasons is kinda dumb, at least in this context.
Just shocked at how many people here take this to be an implicit defense of Kissinger
Great writing. Kissinger was a brilliant, brilliant mind. He was not the incarnation of evil, he was simply part of the establishment that was at war with an existential threat. Hindsight gets lots of people on their high horses - which is nice for them but unrevealing abut the complexity of global politics at any time.
Kissinger was explicitly attacked from the right for *refusing* to view the communist bloc as an existential threat. His famous program of thawing relations with communist China in order to contain the Soviet Union was conceptually possible *only* if the capitalist West could coexist with communism.
His was not a relentless crusade to purge the world of socialist authoritarianism, nor a desperate last stand where every moral code must be erased just to stay alive, but a cynical, amoral exercise in power for the sake of power. Anything that opens up options for the American war machine, no matter how heinous or cruel, was to be pursued; anything that closed off options for the American war machine, no matter how just or idealistic, must be destroyed.
Kissinger very clearly sneered at the idea that the American war machine was to be deployed in support of anything in particular, least of all the concept of human rights or democracy or even the benefit of actual Americans.
C'mon, have some pity. This is like Christmas come at last to mediocre lefty Twitter comedians. They've probably all had those zingers sitting under a heat lamp like slices at a sketchy pizzeria for near enough a decade now.
(Full disclosure: the lame one-liner I've been using on the topic about something finally happening to his phylactery is no exception.)
“Kissinger struck a deal with the devil in 1968- for every southeast Asian child burned alive, one minute would be added to his natural lifespan. The devil had no idea that he was getting hustled.”
As someone who had been around as long as Kissinger had been in power (and the NYT obituary says he was still a powerful man even now), yes, he was evil. He did some good, but I think the bad he did outweighs it. I haven’t posted on this, because frankly I don’t care enough, but I think it’s good that people recognize what he was and the influence he’s had on what the U.S. has done in the past, and hopefully will do less of in the future (though I doubt it).
As someone who's only been alive since Kissinger had no power (and I don't think giving random interviews and photo ops count as real power), I find it mighty weird that more people in my generation are posting about Kissinger's death and using more colorful language and quotes than they did when Rumsfeld died. Rumsfeld was the archietch behind the lies that led to the Iraq War and he actually got my generation caught up in those wars.
But somehow, Kissinger and his status as an alive person (until recently) became a more important cultural flagstone for lefty millenials on Twitter. It's fundamentally weird. This is not an excuse of the bad or criminal things that Kissinger did. But it is a solid critique on a culture of millenial poasting that some powerless old ghoul occupied more mindspace than a similar ghoul that sent our peers to die in a half baked war.
Kissinger was very esteemed, more than most others, in particular kinds of mainstream fora and real and apparent corridors of power that cause the most intense steaming of ears among leftists of a certain bent: those who consider themselves brave anti-establishment knowers and truth tellers, anti-imperialist, implicitly see America and maybe Israel and maybe sorta sometimes Western Europe as the only entities with agency on the world stage, etc. Also, he had an iconic air about him, seemed like the distant button pushing brainy anti-empathetic sort... a bit of a perfect storm for an excellent foil.
You just haven’t lived long enough to feel what the knowledge of what Kissinger not only represented but caused to happen in real time. Probably didn’t know soldiers who went into Cambodia and did things that ripped their own lives apart, or watched as American jets were ordered to shoot down Greek Air Force planes heading to Cyprus to turn back Turkish forces in the early 70s, or had blood in the draftees in the 1960s.
That's exactly what he said - his generation has more disdain for Kissinger, someone they don't have that knowledge of, than someone that played a similar role in their own lives. That says more about the millennial critics than it says about Kissinger himself.
If I misread his implications mea culpa. That said anyone reacting to the establishing or the defending generational superiority leaves me fucking exhausted.
I'm not trying to establish or defend any generational superiority. But I'm a millenial and in real life I'm in normie spaces where very few people know who Kissinger is. But when I log into reddit or Twitter or whatever, I see people my age with very very hot takes on a guy that I have legitimately never seen outside of a history book or Wikipedia page. The guy never gave a press conference that affected anyone since I was born.
So why when I log in online, people have very very strong opinions on him? It's weird. Just odd to me. If you were a Gen xer or a boomer, yeah they guy screwed you over. Same if you lived in a country still feeling the aftershocks of his bombing foreign policy. But millenials in the US and UK don't really have that experience, but they have all the vitrol like they do. Vitrol that wasn't there in nearly the same quantity with rumsfeld. A guy, who in my lifetime, held a press conference that sent my peers to war. One that was filled with lies about WMDs.
I don't think millenials are bad per se. Every generation has its own struggles and culture that is born out of it. Millenial poasting culture is part of it and this Kissinger is an example of how weird and detached it can all be. The article is a pretty good critique of it in my opinikn because it cuts towards what's really going on. Millenials online posting their anti establishment edgy lefty cred by repeating the same jokes about the death of an old ghoul that had very little power in their lifetime
Appreciate this. And I see what you’re saying. I misunderstood at first. You’re not wrong at all.
The shame of ignorance of our history is that without it the failure to grasp the reverberation of draconian policy is guaranteed. On every level. And it pleases the minority who welcome ignorance on the part of the majority.
I hope you’re a teacher, CJ.
I dislike the generation posting too, but in this case it's relevant because millennial and Gen Z commenters, by definition, did not have first hand experience of Kissinger in a position of direct power. If someone born in 1992 has more arguments about Kissinger than Rumsfeld's their views could be the result of aesthetics and social groups, rather than some sort of well thought out ideology. I'd feel similarly about a boomer that had strong feelings about Harding administration, but less interest about administrations they lived through.
Obviously, this characterization of some of Kissinger's vocal critics is orthogonal to how Kissinger himself should be evaluated.
My impression is that Rumsfeld was adjacent to but not as vicious as Kissinger. It could be argued that Kissinger had more lethal adversaries internationally, but have not studied Rumsfeld. Oddly your use of orthogonal has taken me into a deeper dive on Kissinger. A monster perhaps dealing with other monsters. But I remain in the camp that despises him.
Not gonna lie, I’m a Gen X who has very strong negative opinions on the Woodrow Wilson administration, but then again, I’m a history geek who actually reads books on the period.
Also my motorcycle guy had a beard and smoked nonfilters. Check yourself on “cool”.
Kissinger’s influence went way beyond his years in office. His influence and that of his “Kissinger Associates” went all the way through Trump. His “realpolitik”’is still the way foreign policy is done today.
Best post of the thread. Then again, if Kissinger hadn’t sold out the Kurds in 1974 or so, maybe the Saddam Hussein regime would have had a different course and Rumsfeld’s machinations would never have taken place. Butterfly effect and whatnot…
Damn! You must smoke tobacco cigarettes!
Some of us are old enough to remember wings of F-4's and KC-135's taking off from Hickam AFB to be stationed in Guam or Da Nang ready to bomb the shit out of Cambodia (I was a student at UH Manoa at the time).
Also have a friend (still an FB friend) who was among the troops dropped into Cambodia having been ordered to remove all identifying flashes on his uniform. I do get to say 'Yes, he did some bad stuff'. Maybe I never came under fire but that stuff was done in my name, and I think it was bad and he was at least partly responsible.
OMG this is soooo good.
Damn Jeff. 💯
If anyone deserved a gleeful pile-on by people who know little or nothing about him, this is the guy
"For crimes against humanity, we sentence you to 5,000 dancing crab gifs upon your death"
This sort of self-important justification is what is getting mocked in this article. Believing that a gleeful pile-on by ignorant people is something to mete out against the powerful after they've committed war crimes?
He deserves worse of course. But that's no reason to deprive people of their fun! Who does it hurt? And then people get to make fun of *them,* so win-win
I assume you mean Bono, and I agree.
Among the offended in these comments, what's most amusing-annoying is the self-important solemnity. Like you would - in all likelihood - hold other similarly bad people to account if it wasn't, yes, the cool thing to do because of what Kissinger represents in our memeverse. And like the ritual right-view-alignment noises make a lick of difference in foreign policy and to the living, impactful dastardly actors of various flavors of dastardliness that infuse geopolitics.
If only the people you're talking to could hear and comprehend your words (and sarcasm), that would be super cool!
On the upside, my Twitter feed is no longer 95% impassioned takes on Israel/Gaza.
The Zoomers parroting Bourdain could just as easily be swayed to love Kissinger, if only there was an attractive person on TikTok acting as his hype man. "Yeah, dude was evil, but gotta admit, that yid had rizz. He didn't just open China, he opened a lotta vagina!"
Watch it happen. Apparently some CCP-aligned outlets have been praising him. What’s a tankie to do?
Dick be dickin'
Actually i did just what Jeff is mocking - felt the need to post my view on Kissinger. I missed the point - think what you like but posting is more about you than Kissinger.