Jared goes solo on Henry Kissinger's poisonous legacy as one of the most destructive and despicable human beings of the 20th century and then answers some listener questions. To gain access to the full episode and support the show, head over to Patreon and become a patron of the Muckrake Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| What you are about to listen to is a free preview of the Patreon-exclusive Weekender Edition of the MuttGregg podcast. | |
| You're going to want to listen to this one today. | |
| This is my take on the torturous legacy of Henry Kissinger. | |
| And I got a lot to say. | |
| I'll just leave it at that. | |
| Also tonight, I'm recording this on Thursday, November 30th, we are doing a live post-debate analysis of the debate between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis. | |
| So if you want to gain access to that and a lot of these exclusive things that we are doing over on the Patreon, go over to patreon.com slash muckrikepodcast, support the show, join in on the fun, all that good stuff. | |
| Anyway, yeah, let's get to it. | |
| All right. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to a special Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| Nick Halseman is not here right now, and this will be a little bit of a truncated episode as we prepare for tonight's live coverage of the Gavin Newsom-Ron DeSantis Fox News debate, which I remain Fascinated by. | |
| So I'm recording this on Thursday, November 30th, the night of the debate, which means that you'll be receiving this weekender edition and also have access to our post-debate analysis. | |
| So again, this episode will be a little truncated. | |
| If you want to listen to the whole thing, if you also want to gain access to the post-debate analysis show, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| I'm going to be discussing the death of Henry Kissinger and also answering a couple of listener questions and then bringing this broadcast to a close so I can get ready for the debate. | |
| And it'll be interesting to see what that debate brings us. | |
| We talked about that on Tuesday's episode. | |
| But to the matter at hand, Henry Kissinger yesterday died at the age of 100 in his home in Connecticut. | |
| We will be discussing his legacy, relevant history and context, as well as the world that he helped create. | |
| It has been estimated that Henry Kissinger, as a National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford after him, contributed to the death of three to four million human beings. | |
| I'll say that again. | |
| Three to four million people died as a result of Henry Kissinger's brutalities and war crimes. | |
| That figure is almost impossible to wrap your head around that a person, one single person, could have played such a role in so much devastation. | |
| The real problem is that we will probably never fully comprehend or know how many people were killed, how many people were brutalized, how many people traumatized, how many people suffered because of not just Henry Kissinger. | |
| But also the institutions that he helped create and bolster, the people he inspired, and the environment of Realpolitik, which we'll discuss later, that he just continually spouted as if it were a twisted gospel of power. | |
| We'll never know how many people were killed because of him. | |
| I want to start with the most relevant things, which are of course a list, an incomplete list, because we will never know fully what all Henry Kissinger did in his 100 years to set humanity back, but an incomplete list of his crimes. | |
| In helping Richard Nixon get elected to the presidency in one of the more despicable acts of treason that we've seen, Kissinger helped lengthen the Vietnam War unnecessarily so that Nixon could become president. | |
| When in power, he pushed for the illegal bombing of Cambodia, which killed over 50,000 people. | |
| He supported genocide in Bangladesh. | |
| No idea really how many people were killed there. | |
| Estimates put it over 300,000. | |
| God knows how many coups he contributed to, including the coup in Chile, which saw the overthrow of a democratically elected government in favor of a dictatorship. | |
| That eventually would lead to the birth of neoliberalism and the scourge of intentional precarity and weaponized destruction. | |
| And who even knows? | |
| The birth of our modern authoritarian crisis. | |
| It is not hyperbole to say that Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in bringing us to this point. | |
| I think it's important to point out, after listing his crimes, that most of the obituaries in the papers of Record, the magazines of Record, the media outlets of Record, they spend most of their time, you know, they'll mention the war crimes. | |
| They'll use a lot of inventive language. | |
| saying controversial or some believe or some held that papering over those crimes but those moments of dealing with the blatant war crimes of Henry Kissinger, those are just background material. | |
| The majority of these obituaries, they begin with Kissinger's role in opening up China with Richard Nixon, which of course was helped and facilitated in part by some of these war crimes. | |
| They also want to go ahead and point towards the detente with Russia. | |
| Of course, it's important to point out that Henry Kissinger has played a massive role in a lot of non-democratic institutions that would eventually lead to the not only deconstruction of the Soviet Union, but eventually the Putinization of Russia. | |
| They also want to go ahead and point out all of the speeches he gave to all these corporations and institutions. | |
| They want to point out how many books he wrote that were completely dedicated to laundering his own legacy and also contributing to a further communication of his wretched beliefs to the future so that a lot of other ambitious young men and women could read them and think, you know what? | |
| Realpolitik is the way to go and who really cares about regular people? | |
| Disgustingly, a lot of these papers of record, magazines of record, media outlets of record are pointing to the fact that he dated actresses and starlets and models and talking about how power was the ultimate naphrodisiac, as if saying that out loud, which was one of Kissinger's favorite, favorite sayings, as if it wasn't some sort of disgusting poison that it was. | |
| The message in all of this is clear. | |
| In these liberal circles, supposedly liberal circles, it is what you're supposed to do. | |
| You're supposed to take a monster like Henry Kissinger and you're supposed to laud his achievements and downplay his crimes. | |
| And the reason is this. | |
| Realpolitik And the ideology that Kissinger carried out, which wasn't just Kissinger alone. | |
| It was the institutional understanding from which he came, which we'll discuss in a second, but also the consensus reality of not just the Republican Party, but also the Democratic Party, not just conservatives, but also liberals. | |
| That the political, geopolitical fortunes of the United States and the corporations that it represented, of course, were so much more important than the lives of these millions upon millions of people. | |
| That's the ugliness of realpolitik when you really get down to it. | |
| Henry Kissinger was more than happy to put to voice that ugly truth of what he believed. | |
| He was the man in the room with a lot of these politicians, a lot of these power brokers, a lot of these decision makers and stakeholders, and he was more than fine to say the ugly, quiet part out loud. | |
| And because he did that, and because he carried with him all of these great accreditations, because he carried with him all of the public laudatory newspaper articles and magazine articles and portraits, they believed it was okay. | |
| Can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, actually. | |
| And so the institutions, these newspapers, magazines, media platforms of note, they also have to launder it the same way a lot of politicians who are more than happy to appear with Henry Kissinger in public, to pose for pictures shaking his hand with their arms around him, that these people have to pretend that he was anything except for a monster. | |
| Biographically, Kissinger was born in Germany. | |
| His family fled Nazi Germany to get away from the persecution there. | |
| He came to the United States. | |
| He served in the army. | |
| He eventually moved on to the Ivy League. | |
| And for those who don't understand this, the Ivy League is largely an incubator for the servants of power. | |
| Doesn't mean that everybody who goes to Harvard is necessarily a villain, but it does mean that these things are deeply connected to these institutions of power, including the government, including our judicial system, including the military-industrial complex. | |
| He got trained at Harvard and then, like a lot of the other ambitious young men just like him, he moved on to a lot of these institutions of power. | |
| These sort of supporting institutions, like the Rand Corporation, where people would go and study the problems of the day, come up with new ideas, new strategies on how to win the Cold War. | |
| These institutes and think tanks that largely guide a lot of our politics and a lot of history. | |
| Kissinger's contribution came at a time where the Cold War seemed like at any moment it could go nuclear hot. | |
| Like his contemporaries Herm and Kahn, Kissinger told the powerful what they wanted to believe, which was that a nuclear war was winnable. | |
| And not only could it be won, the only real strategy to be had was to prepare at any moment to have what he called a quote-unquote limited nuclear exchange. | |
| The only way to win a nuclear war was to be ready to fight a nuclear war, to be ready to set off any amount of weapons that could destroy the human race and the earth as we know it. | |
| He was a bright young mind who knew how to talk to people within power, how to flatter them, how to manipulate them, how to play upon their fears, their insecurities. | |
| He knew exactly how to manipulate people and so he climbed the ladder like any bright young mind would. | |
| Eventually, he got to the point of being a national security advisor, a secretary of state to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford. | |
| And then, because this is how things work, he became an indispensable personality in the post-government industrial corporate space. | |
| He served with one corporation after another, one non-democratic body and organization after another, He remained in the halls of power. | |
| God knows how much he got paid to speak to corporations, institutions, think tanks, non-democratic bodies. | |
| He continued to facilitate his realpolitik strategies. | |
| One place after another, and every door that he knocked on opened themselves to him without a moment's pause. | |
| A bloodied war criminal who made good copy in the papers and who told the powerful what they wanted to hear. | |
| This realpolitik That Henry Kissinger gifted the administrative-military-industrial complex. | |
| At every turn, telling them, oh, don't worry about the people you're going to kill. | |
| Don't worry about the democracies you're going to topple. | |
| All you have to worry about is playing in the great game. | |
| Your game matters more than any life, except for the elites, of course, because there was a group of people who lived like Henry Kissinger, who deserved life and dignity, as opposed to the other people who were made to suffer and choke on their own blood in the name of democracy and the great game. | |
| This Realpolitik was an idea that cynicism and pessimism and opportunistic nihilism, that these were all arrows in the quiver of the great game. | |
| He would go into these halls of power and he would convince the powerful to give in to their absolute worst instincts. | |
| If you hear any of his recordings with Nixon, this ranges from racism to sexism to anti-Semitism, because that's what happens when you're in these rooms. | |
| You show that you can trust each other by being disgusting and by showing that you are more than happy to pluck innocent people from this mortal coil. | |
| His hero, who he wrote about, studied, before he entered into these halls of power, was Clemens von Metternich, the Australian diplomat, who was one of the main controllers of the European Congress before World War I. | |
| I had only heard about Metternich a little bit before I really delved into his legacy writing The Midnight Kingdom. | |
| And I can tell you, it is undeniable that Metternich's oppressive, reactionary regime that tried to control the world, that stifled democracy and put people under his never-relenting thumb was exactly what Henry Kissinger wanted and desired in the world. | |
| Metternich saw the people as dangerous. | |
| He saw democracy as just absolutely, like, it was the worst possible idea that the people could rule themselves. | |
| They weren't capable. | |
| They were incredibly dangerous and they needed to be controlled. | |
| Metternich completely stifled culture and information in the most despotic way possible while going ahead and doing away with elections entirely and or rigging them because people couldn't be allowed to vote for this stuff. | |
| Him and the other ambitious young minds of that generation in the post-Napoleon era created what they believed would be a permanent state of order. | |
| The wealthy, the powerful, the elite could control it forever. | |
| It would never end. | |
| My God, how could it ever come to an end? | |
| They were the best and the brightest. | |
| They had the money. | |
| They had the power. | |
| Like, obviously, the meritocracy was real. | |
| They would create a permanent state in which nothing bad would ever happen again. | |
| Nothing would move forward. | |
| Nothing would move backward. | |
| It would remain in a stasis of their choosing. | |
| I don't know how to tell you this, but early in the 20th century, when World War I broke out, their attempted stasis exploded into a fireball that engulfed the world. | |
| This is what happens when people like Henry Kissinger are given the control that they seek. | |
| They believe that they are the smartest people. | |
| They believe they are the most competent people because they've been given the keys to power. | |
| But guess what? | |
| Wealth and power do not denote competence. | |
| Time and time again, Kissinger, Metternich, and people like them continually create what will eventually destroy the order that they created. | |
| Or what seemed to be order. | |
| They make mistakes. | |
| Like, I don't know, how Israel and Palestine was put into motion because of colonial powers. | |
| Or how Iraq was put into motion because of colonial powers. | |
| These things that these people continue to try and control inevitably blow up in their faces. | |
| They are shown to be wrong. | |
| Henry Kissinger has been wrong way more than he was ever right. | |
| It would be almost possible to find the places where he was right. | |
| But I'll tell you what, we live in a world in which he was wrong. | |
| He helped create another stasis that he believed would last forever. | |
| And guess what? | |
| It makes me so damn happy. | |
| And I'll be honest with you, like a lot of people, I hated the fact that he lived a long life. | |
| I think that that shows a great tragedy that we lose so many people so early and a Henry Kissinger can live to a hundred. | |
| But I'll tell you what. | |
| I'm glad that he lived to a hundred years old and could see the unraveling of the global world order that he helped create through blood and tragedy. | |
| I hope it kept him up at night. | |
| I hope in between going to fancy dinners, driving in the back of fancy cars, meeting dignitaries and having people kiss his war criminal ass, I hope sometimes he lay awake at night thinking about the fact that his entire legacy was coming apart at the seams before he even had a chance to shuffle off the mortal coil. | |
| Because these people are not the most competent people and they keep creating orders that will evaporate in front of their eyes. |