The infamy of Nixon’s foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history’s worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him

  • Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001.

    McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger…

    author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s …meant the end of between three and four million people.

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    Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and – shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and the New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped – newsrooms.

    Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.

    It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

    As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.

    Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt.

    The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors…that led him to disaster.”


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