Yep. He was an absolute monster. This quote by Anthony Bourdain always comes to mind when he gets brought up:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
Everyone I know who is my age knows about it. If you have heard of “Manufacturing Consent” that’s one of the things Noam Chomsky writes about in that book.
The carpet bombing of Laos and covert support of Pol Pot is also one of the many reasons we all celebrated when Henry Kissinger died.
I think Americans probably know less about it than people outside the US. The US does a lot of awful stuff. We do care, it’s just the US is so powerful there’s nothing the rest of us can do about any of it.
One of the most outrageous things I learned was that when the communist Vietnamese government learned of what the Khmer Rouge has been doing, they swept in and deposed them from power over Cambodia. The Carter administration was one of I think like two governments that insisted on recognizing the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the UN after the Vietnamese kicked them out. IIRC, we were fully aware of what had been happening in Cambodia by that point.
This is true. The full horror of the Killing Fields and the Cambodian Genocide was reported in 1989.
For the next 14 years the US insisted that the genocidal Khmer Rouge and their allies were the “legitimate” rulers of Cambodia and the rest of the world had to witness the actual Cambodian government shut out of the United Nations while the Khmer Rouge occupied their seat there. This went on until 1993.
Pol Pot was never held to account for his crimes against humanity and died a free man.
It’s hard to put into words how angry all this made everyone I knew. Newspapers were running photos of piles of skulls and talking about the tree they used to kill babies in S21. And the perps were attending the UN, bolstered by US support.
America secretly carpet bombed Laos when Laos wasn’t even at war.
They dropped 2 MILLION tons of bombs onto it and somehow kept it a secret from the American people for multiple years. One of Henry Kissingers ideas.
Yep. He was an absolute monster. This quote by Anthony Bourdain always comes to mind when he gets brought up:
Instead he got given a Nobel Peace Prize and went on to help more people commit genocides in other countries. An incredibly evil person.
The fact that Bourdain died young and Kissinger lived to be 100 proves that the world is not a just place.
That’s so crazy, the US did all this dark stuff and no one knows or really cares.
I don’t blame people for not caring as there is so much, “US is the shining beacon of freedom and justice in the world” propaganda.
But it’s just crazy how these things happen and a few years later the world acts like it didn’t.
Everyone I know who is my age knows about it. If you have heard of “Manufacturing Consent” that’s one of the things Noam Chomsky writes about in that book.
The carpet bombing of Laos and covert support of Pol Pot is also one of the many reasons we all celebrated when Henry Kissinger died.
I think Americans probably know less about it than people outside the US. The US does a lot of awful stuff. We do care, it’s just the US is so powerful there’s nothing the rest of us can do about any of it.
One of the most outrageous things I learned was that when the communist Vietnamese government learned of what the Khmer Rouge has been doing, they swept in and deposed them from power over Cambodia. The Carter administration was one of I think like two governments that insisted on recognizing the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the UN after the Vietnamese kicked them out. IIRC, we were fully aware of what had been happening in Cambodia by that point.
This is true. The full horror of the Killing Fields and the Cambodian Genocide was reported in 1989.
For the next 14 years the US insisted that the genocidal Khmer Rouge and their allies were the “legitimate” rulers of Cambodia and the rest of the world had to witness the actual Cambodian government shut out of the United Nations while the Khmer Rouge occupied their seat there. This went on until 1993.
Pol Pot was never held to account for his crimes against humanity and died a free man.
It’s hard to put into words how angry all this made everyone I knew. Newspapers were running photos of piles of skulls and talking about the tree they used to kill babies in S21. And the perps were attending the UN, bolstered by US support.