A Case Study on Evil: Henry Kissinger

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Kissinger

I really do believe true evil exists. Perhaps not in the blatant way depicted in movies, like a dark lord of evil such as a Voldemort or a Sauron. No, I think evil exists more subtly. It seeks to control, to influence, to corrupt, and to spread. As such, evil is always seeking out positions of power, lurking quietly, until it reaches a role influential enough to exert maximum carnage and destabilization on the people now found under its thumb. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the track record of Henry Kissinger, the infamous former Secretary of State for Richard Nixon who finally died this past week.

Headlines have swirled ad nauseum about this man since his passing on November 29. If you are in my generation or younger, you may be wondering who the hell Henry Kissinger was, and why there is so much collective vitriol aimed at him (minus the Yankees, who for some reason posted in remembrance about him)

I’m here to try and sum up the man who embodied what can only be described as living evil. His list of transgressions is long, but important to see and understand as they still have lasting impact in many of the countries he helped raze. Including our own. Here are just two:

Cambodia

Of all of Kissinger’s acts of moral wretchedness, none encapsulate this man’s evil as much as his direct role in the US carpet bombing campaigns in Cambodia between 1969 and 1973.

While serving under Nixon during the Vietnam War, Kissinger secretly ordered nearly 4000 carpet bombing missions in Cambodia, alleging Vietnamese communist strongholds existed in the country. It was an operation that lay hidden from the public eye called Operation Menu.

Over several years, an estimated 500,000 bombs were dropped on heavily civilian populations, leading to the death of 150,000 innocent people. Kissinger is quoted directly as saying “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”

While ending the lives of 150,000 civilians is an atrocity itself, the bombings in Cambodia also drove the the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, who murdered an estimated 2 million Cambodians over four years between 1975-1979. Millions of people in Cambodia are today still living through the trauma of surviving these bombing campaigns, and the ensuing Cambodian genocide and economic collapse.

Latin America

In Central and South America, Kissinger’s interventionist policies throttled democratic elections, and enabled the rise of several autocratic leaders whom Kissinger viewed as more beneficial to the US. You see, Kissinger viewed Latin America as the US’s own “backyard”. Kissinger believed that in order for America to maintain its superpower status, it must control its own sphere of influence (our side of the globe).

Kissinger not only helped quash elections, but also led coups to install military dictators he viewed as favorable to US supremacy.

In Chile, Kissinger helped orchestrate a 1973 coup that led to the death of a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and the installation of a dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, and his military regime.

In a separate instance, Kissinger pushed another coup in Argentina by urging “the Argentinian military regime to act before the US Congress resumed session”. This led to the Argentinian “dirty war”, resulting in 30,000 deaths.

Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive (NSA) in Washington DC , which pressured the US government into declassifying Kissinger’s records, is quoted as saying:

“Henry Kissinger did not believe in the sanctity of self-determination. He didn’t believe in the sanctity of sovereignty for Latin American nations or the smaller nations of the third word … he didn’t believe in the sanctity of human rights either, which led him to embrace repressive authoritarian regimes as strategic chess pieces in the global chessboard of the cold war.”

“Might is right” was Kissinger’s belief. His own ends always justified the death and chaos it took to get there.

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The reason Kissinger so encapsulates evil to me is because he is the perfect case study of how evil spreads. Kissinger’s policy decisions emphasized destabilization. Chaos. Trauma. Kissinger was born in chaos after all, as a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany. He fled the horrors of the Holocaust during his youth, only to actively enable genocide as an adult.

In Cambodia, Kissinger’s decisions created generational trauma and poverty that set the country back decades. In Latin America, Kissinger’s policies focused on destabilization as a means of maintaining American economic supremacy, at the expense of the self-determination of the people who lived there.

In these examples you can see clearly how evil spreads and grows.

But it is also celebrated by those who envy the influence it holds. The guest list for Kissinger’s 100th birthday party this year was truly a “whose who” of American elites, ranging from billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft, to New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Kissinger is a reminder of what we are up against. I write a lot about greed and influence because I see clearly how the political and billionaire class make selfish decisions to preserve power at the expense of human life and well-being. Kissinger did this over and over again to secure his position as an influential statesman, and he is celebrated by his peers for his atrocities. That’s what we should remember.

I’ll close with Anthony Bourdain, who eloquently summed up Kissinger’s legacy better than anyone else ever has:

“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 Milosevic,”