Unsurprisingly, LGM is worth reading: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/11/kissinger-is-dead-finally-something-good-has-happened-in-2023
Kissinger committed massive crimes against humanity, even if you only consider his actions in Chile. First, Kissinger neither knew anything about Latin America nor cared. He thought the region utterly irrelevant. He once rejected the offer of a childhood friend who became an official at the Inter-American Development Bank to provide information about the region by responding, "If I need any information on Latin America, I'll look it up in the Almanac." He later stated, "Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance."
And the most consequential event of career would be the OPEC embargo, born in...Venezuela.
Spencer's article is great. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/
I'm going to miss the Grim Reaper claw machine. Denying us that clearly ranks below the illegal bombing campaign of Cambodia but above green-lighting the Indonesian annexation of East Timor in Henry Kissinger's long, long list of crimes.
Man, the feed last night was epic. So celebration. Such memes. And not just from one contingent: as far as I could tell, from everyone I follow still active on Twitter. Not quite as frenetic but still strong on Bluesky.
The final quote in 1 is especially wild considering he said this to the face of the foreign minister of Chile:
"I said," Valdes recalls, "Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South." "No," Kissinger answered, "and I don't care." At that point, Valdes, astonished and insulted, told Kissinger: "You are a German Wagnerian. You are a very arrogant man."
Ganz:
Kissinger represented something fundamentally old world: a pre-ideological, pre-democratic orientation to politics, he was the foreign minister to the monarch, he dealt in reasons and arcana of state, policy was a chess game, he was a courtier, flattering his way to the top. To a democratic people, this could never really be an attractive set of pretensions, except to those who also fancied themselves aristocrats, but in the world of napalm and the atomic bomb, such amorality loses its naughty charm, it becomes something obscene, grinning, perverse.
One bites one's lip to keep from marking the death of a centenarian as a savory example of the effectiveness of Christopher Hitchens, Generation X and online political fads.
3: Spencer does not hold back, and I am here for it. I may need a cigarette afterward, and I don't even smoke.
Joseph Heller wrote a novel in the '70s, Good as Gold, that was a book-length diatribe against Kissinger. I guess it's pretty much been forgotten, but it's very funny and very serious-minded at the same time.
It's a paradoxical account of a professor, Bruce Gold, who seeks high appointive office in the fashion of Kissinger. But Gold hates Kissinger and plans to one-up him by writing a biography that improves on Kissinger's own memoirs through Gold's "objective antipathy."
Gold was prepared to develop the thesis that Kissinger was not a Jew in a book of Kissinger "memoirs" he was positive would excite attention and hoped [would] earn him at least a discernible fraction of the parnusseh Kissinger was raking in from his own memoirs.... In Gold's conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious shlump who made war gladly and did not often exude much of that legendary sympathy for weakness and suffering with which Jews regularly were credited.
And:
"[Kissinger] in all but the most confining definitions of cultural anthropology or bigotry, was no more Jewish, let's say, than Nelson Rockefeller, the prismatic apogee in a succession of patrons Kissinger had always managed to secure at pivotal moments in his career"
Last week or so I hard a familiar chant on TV news:
Benyamin
You can't hide
We charge you with genocide.
My first thought was, you're doing it wrong! The first line is "Henry K"!* Chanted at the first campus protest I personally experienced, around 1980, shortly after the atrocities in Cambodia had become generally known. Henry K. was speaking on campus. I hadn't planned to be at a protest, but did join in the chant for a round or two. Good times . . .
Also, one of Henry K's children was in my college class. He was an art major, completely non-political, and allegedly would walk out of dorm parties if people started talking politics. Can't blame him for that, but did blame him for his poor choice o parent.
*Possibly there was an earlier version starting with LBJ? Not sure.
Ok, hear me out: a new production of the Golden Girls, but cast and set in hell.
Rush Limbaugh is Blanch, Donald Rumsfeld is Rose, Antonin Scalia is Dorthy, and now Henry Kissinger has arrived to play Sofia.
Josh M just put up a good post about how Kissinger remained in the left-leaning public's active disdain for so long. He attributes a range of things: (1) the memorable books and other materials generated about him at the time; (2) through the rest of his life he kept being a prominent figure, by choice; (3) his longevity of course, harder to hate on Nixon as saliently when he died in 1994; and (4) Hitchens and Bourdain keeping the fires going in recent decades.
In short, Kissinger's life of wealth and respect was simply too jarring a contrast with his detractors' account of the chaos, suffering and death he left in his wake. He lived long enough for making the case against him to remain relevant for decade after decade. As they did that bill of particulars against Kissinger took hold in the popular culture in a way that would be unthinkable for any other diplomat or government official because Kissinger had placed himself there, unlike any in history, right at the beginning of the story.
9: "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today" is the chant that everyone should know.
He used to stick his head out of the limo and shout an answer.
Josh M just put up a good post about how Kissinger remained in the left-leaning public's active disdain for so long.
There's also just something distinctive and memorable about him. Eric Idle wrote a Henry Kissinger song, and I don't think he wrote about many US political figures.
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're the Doctor of my dreams
With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare
And your machiavellian schemes
I know they say that you are very vain
And short and fat and pushy but at least you're not insane
Henry Kissinger
14: You left out a key pair of lines --
But you've got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher
16 was me and I was wrong, as youtube will confirm. The lines in 15 are in the second verse.
Yes, I just posted the opening of the song. But, I think it does speak to Kissinger's unusual pop-culture presence that two people immediately remembered the song.
I too remember the song, but I always felt there was a joke in 15 I wasn't getting. But maybe it was just silly naughtiness for its own sake (and vinyl-grade censorship rather than TV-grade).
14, 18: Part of what JMM discusses in the post is how Kissinger deliberately inserted himself into pop culture early in his career in a way that was weird then and still is for someone in his line of work.
I always felt there was a joke in 15 I wasn't getting
It's a silly way to make fun of him for being a fat Nazi.
Lots of people wanted to date Ann Margaret.
I for one did not remember his turn as the voice of a duck in an episode of Happily Ever After, "an animated series reimagining classic fairy tales for (then-) modern kids."
In addition to Kissinger, that episode feature the voices of Sharon Stone, Jessie Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, Geraldine Ferraro, Johnnie Cochran and Alan Dershowitz!
21: Sure, but how do legs come into it?
9: Not to apolitical to celebrate toast Dad's life work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/25/henry-kissinger-100th-birthday-appreciation/
Biden's statement is pretty cold- very much "he was certainly a person with views and maybe his family liked him."
I'11 never forget the first time I met Dr. Kissinger. I was a young Senator; and he was Secretary of State-giving a briefing on the state of the world. Throughout our careers, we often disagreed. And often strongly. But from that first briefing -- his fierce intellect and profound strategic focus was evident. Long after retiring from government, he continued to offer his views and ideas to the most important policy discussion across multiple generations. Jill and I send our condolences to his wife Nancy, his children Elizabeth and David, his grandchildren, and all those who loved him.
24: In the interests of science and because my granddaughter was visiting, we watched it. Fairly lane on all levels. I think most of the famous folks were supposed to sort of look like themselves and Kissinger's duck was the one most clearly themself. There was an election involved with Mary Hart running against Alan Dershowitz. Most bizarre were Geraldine Ferraro and Rudy G as two squirrels (dropped an acorn on reporter (Henny Penney) Sharon Stone's head that started the whole panic.
27: Also, "and he wouldn't shut the fuck up."
Biden's statement is cracking me up. I guess "Rest in piss" wouldn't be presidential so this is the next best thing.
27, 30: Wasn't Biden the first president since Carter not to invite Kissinger to the White House?
Shorter Joe Biden Statement: I was there, Henry. I was there 3,000 years ago ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q63_FxegFsQ
30: The great thing about being President is that you get writers who are masters of the form.
Yesterday I learned Kissinger was involved in the Bhopal disaster: both helping to get the chemical plant approved and funded when he was SecState, and later as a consultant he worked to keep Union Carbide's payments low. He wasn't just awful, he was awful frequently and in varied ways.
Kissinger and Hillary Clinton seemed to be best buds.
According to his memoir, when Biden first met Kissinger he was the 31-year-old Youngest Senator coming in late and spilling documents like the new kid at school. Kissinger first thought he was staff, then when corrected called him Senator Bidden and he responded by calling him Secretary Dulles.
Tim's former employer is a German multinational. The CEO of the Health care division is this Spanish chain-smoking eomsn (who flagrantly violated the US sites rules on smoking) Ayn Randian caricature. Yesterday, she posted a picture of herself on Twitter with Kissinger saying what a great guy he was.
If you google "eomsn" you get results for "woman."
NMM to Sandra Day O'Connor, or the congressional tenure of George Santos.
That was a "I didn't know she was still alive" moment for me.
41: So, some lost opportunities I guess.
And not just from one contingent: as far as I could tell, from everyone I follow still active on Twitter. Not quite as frenetic but still strong on Bluesky.
Interestingly (?), Bluesky was wall-to-wall for me, but Twitter not nearly so much. I think most of the politically engaged people I followed on Twitter are gone, and what's left is a random assortment of people I followed for "that seems interesting" reasons, and not many were exultant.
I did not see a single first-hand example of "that's inappropriate".
the effectiveness of Christopher Hitchens
I saw 50 citations of Bourdain, zero of Hitch.
Kissinger deliberately inserted himself into pop culture early in his career in a way that was weird then and still is
Only Nixon could go to Laugh-In.
from everyone I follow still active on Twitter. Not quite as frenetic but still strong on Bluesky
Both of my mastodon feeds (I have two accounts) had lots of celebration.
The host of my weekly pub trivia offered a toast to the death of Dr. K.