On November 29, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who NPR calls “one of the country's most important foreign policy thinkers for more than half a century,” died at 100. Kissinger was responsible for an estimated 3 to 4 million deaths, according to one historian, and millions of human rights violations across a long list of nations. Yale historian Greg Grandin listed them in his obituary of Kissinger for The Nation: “Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places.”
In May, Grandin wrote another story for the same magazine about Kissinger making it to age 100, outliving his contemporaries who share some of the blame, like Richard Nixon. That month, MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan “celebrated” Kissinger’s birthday by recalling “some of the many, many people around the world who didn’t get to live till 100, or even 60, 70 or 80, because of Henry Kissinger, because of his support for brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars, and war crimes.”
Kissinger’s life story began with his family escaping Nazi Germany for the US in 1938. After serving in the Army and attending Harvard, his political career launched by steering US foreign policy through the Vietnam and Cold Wars, using, as Grandin put it, “bombs as an instrument of diplomacy” — an approach which, HuffPost’s obituary observed, “has become a hallmark of US foreign policy.”
In the 1970s, Kissinger was partially responsible for right-wing coup d’etats and government overthrows in Latin America, including Chile and Argentina. In Chile, after the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the coup by Augusto Pinochet, at least 3,000 dissidents were killed, and some 40,000 tortured. In Argentina, some estimates put the number of those “disappeared” by the government as high as 30,000 people.
The Intercept’s obituary said Kissinger “stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa,” as well as leaving the Middle East “in chaos,” per Grandin. For Kissinger, the protection of US economic and foreign policy interests took precedence over human life.
Upon news of Kissinger's death, the internet celebrated possibly more than it did after the last elderly imperial death, but that celebration has been darkened by the basis for it. Joshua Hill posted a video from the 2010s of Kissinger being “unrepentant” about the deaths of Cambodians, where Kissinger’s personally approved carpet-bombing campaign still wounds and takes lives from cluster bombs left there more than 50 years later. (The US provided the same sort of bombs to Ukraine this year.) C-SPAN posted footage from 2016 of Kissinger defending his role in Vietnam. A biting missive from the late Anthony Bourdain — painful enough given that Kissinger got almost twice as long on this Earth than Tony — got posted over and over again.
Within 10 minutes of seeing the news, I started seeing the headlines: “America’s Most Notorious War Criminal” dead, a Teen Vogue classic; “Controversial Diplomat;” and some spicier ones, such as “Finally” at the leftist Tribune. Publishers Verso and Jacobin had a book fully prepared and ready for a print run for the occasion. It’s hard to exaggerate how long the media had to get ready for this moment. A contributor to the New York Times’s obituary died in 2010.
Apparently, the preparedness to dance on Kissinger's grave went hand-in-hand with an assumption, proven right, that those currently in power wouldn’t hesitate to eulogize a war criminal. Eric Adams and George W. Bush are among those publicly mourning. In life, Kissinger was a friend to Hillary Clinton, an advisor to Trump, and feted by the Obama administration in 2016 — at the same time that Obama acknowledged the US’s role in Argentina’s “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists.
Kissinger has advised or been celebrated by every presidency since he joined Nixon’s cabinet, though less so with President Biden. However, current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, whose name has been sprawled across coverage of America’s 2023 involvement in overseas wars, attended Kissinger’s 100th-birthday party at the New York Public Library, leading the State Department to “awkwardly” sidestep calls for Blinken to justify his attendance.
New York City’s social strata was a respite for Kissinger, according to New York magazine’s Choire Sicha, who noted that from 1977 onward — when, even then, “in all the world there were fewer names more hated than his” — he left his academic and diplomatic careers behind to attend socialite parties after his campaign of death.
“Historical memory is short, and US politicians from both parties have a habit of bestowing accolades and kind words on officials who deserve nothing of the sort,” wrote Azadeh Shahshahani for Teen Vogue in 2021 following the death of fellow war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, calling for accountability for both Rumsfeld and Kissinger. Shahshahani pointed out that, in 1971, in Bangladesh alone, Kissinger had enabled the deaths of between 300,000 and 3 million people by providing arms to the Pakistani Army.
Ultimately, there’s little to celebrate about a war criminal who lived without regret to 100 years old, comfortably admired by the political class that created and supported him, with millions of deaths in his tracks. I’m reminded of a lyric: “Not everybody gets the chance to live/A life that isn't dangerous.”
Our tech overlords, modern-day robber barons with hubris and unchecked power, aspire to never age, never die, to outlive us on other planets rather than save ours. There’s not much dignity left in the “lesser evil” that is folks gladly burning our planet to the ground in favor of supposed American business interests. Things are dark right now. But, as writer Edward Ongweso Jr. tweeted, “At least one less literal demon walks among us.”
While death tolls keep rising over the world at the hands or arms of the US empire, to outlive one of its proudest, prolifically murderous foots soldiers offers some small karmic comfort.
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