When war erupted in South Asia in 1971, Henry Kissinger called Indians “bastards,” and Richard Nixon said they needed “a mass famine.” For both men, US interests were worth killing hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis and displacing millions more.
In Vietnam, Henry Kissinger had no principles whatsoever. There’s nothing to suggest that he had qualms about people dying or suffering.
Henry Kissinger once said that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in East Timor would have occurred no matter what he did. He was too modest.
Ask anyone over the age of 50 in Cyprus who is to blame for the island’s ongoing divisions, and the answer will be almost unanimous: Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger was fond of telling Congress that he was in the business of real estate, not social work. Real estate, much like empire, is suited only to thugs and tyrants — as Kissinger’s decades of meddling in the Persian Gulf make clear.
Why would Henry Kissinger plan a covert operation in Angola? Because he wanted to exorcize the ghost of Vietnam — and he thought the war would provide a cheap boost to American prestige.
Western Sahara, the largest non-self-governing territory in the world, is today bisected by a 1,700-mile-long sand wall and millions of land mines. Henry Kissinger and the Ford administration were undoubtedly proud of their hard work in the region.
With US policy in war-torn southern Africa perpetually on the verge of capsizing, Henry Kissinger’s desire for stability put him in conflict with the ascendant New Right, which was firmly committed to white minority rule.
With Central America in flames, Henry Kissinger’s challenge was to portray local revolutionary movements as foreign conspiracies more alien than the United States’ own violent interventions. Where democracy failed, capitalism flourished.
By the time Chile’s workers rose up to rally around Salvador Allende, Latin America had become a key arena in US planners’ “mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future world.” Henry Kissinger was obsessed with toppling the socialist president.
In the mid-1970s, fanatical dictatorships viewed South America as the forefront of a third world war in the fight against communism. Henry Kissinger endorsed this crusading spirit — and unlike in Vietnam, he accomplished his objectives there.
“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Henry Kissinger advised the Argentine regime. In the first three years of the dictatorship, thousands of labor, student, and community activists were killed or disappeared.