Kiss Off

Henry Kissinger is dead and he does NOT belong in Heaven. Sure, I don’t actually believe in shit like Heaven and Hell, but when your top concern is if the paparazzi will notice the movie star you’re dining with in a swanky Manhattan restaurant after a long day of bombing children, you’re not going to Heaven.

While a lot of politicians and dignitaries considered Kissinger an elder statesman and expert on foreign policy, many others consider him a war criminal. And ya know, you hear that about some people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and a lot of times, it’s hyperbole but with Kissinger, yeah. He’s a war criminal.

Henry Kissinger died yesterday at 100. He outlived Betty White, who missed living to 100 by 17 days, which proves there is not a God or a Heaven.

Kissinger was Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. He was the only person to ever hold both titles simultaneously (in case you’re a Trumper, “simultaneously” means at the same time). He was also Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. He’s considered the most powerful Secretary of State in U.S. history. He advised 12 presidents starting with Kennedy and ending with Biden. It was President Obama who was the most skeptical.

Kissinger was responsible for opening a relationship with Red China. But it wasn’t done as much for peace as it was a Cold-War tactic to isolate the Soviet Union. That was probably his greatest achievement though you can’t see much the success from it today, what with China taking back their pandas. Couldn’t we have just kept the pandas and had sent them Kissinger instead?

He negotiated the peace accords that ended the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but these accords didn’t end the war and he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives. Kissinger didn’t care about lives or human rights. The U.S. remained in Vietnam for two more years and only left after a humiliating defeat. Remember those photos of helicopters on rooftops evacuating during the fall of Saigon? Thank Kissinger for that.

Kissinger saw smaller nations as pawns and gave up on Vietnam when he felt it wasn’t a strategic interest to the United States anymore. He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende. He authorized the secret carpet-bombing of neutral natoin Cambodia in 1969-70, which was a neutral nation, killing over 50,000 civilians.

He told our military “to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves.” How did a Secretary of State have so much power? Hillary Clinton couldn’t even authorize a uranium sale to Russia by herself.

When Pakistan’s U.S.-backed military was committing genocide in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, he and Nixon ignored pleas from the American consulate in East Pakistan to stop the massacre and instead, approved weapons shipments to Pakistan, including the illegal transfer of 10 fighter-bombers from Jordan. At least 300,000 people were killed in East Pakistan and 10 million refugees were driven into India. Kissinger didn’t care. He got to have dinner with Actress Jill St. John.

The fun didn’t stop after Nixon resigned. Kissinger and Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor by Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death. Kissinger told the leaders of Indonesia to “do it quickly.”

When Kissinger was criticized for these moves, he’d attempt to respond with heartless sarcasm, saying more than once, “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” That’s knee-slapping hilarious stuff right there. He must have been fun at parties.

President Obama said he had spent much of his presidency trying to repair the world Kissinger left. In 2016, Obama said in an interview, “We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

Obama noted that while in office he was still trying to help countries “remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.” President Obama asked, “In what way did that strategy promote our interests?”

Kissinger was vain, conspiratorial, arrogant, obnoxious, and short-tempered. He would praise an aide as indispensable while ordering the FBI to illegally tap his home phones to see if he was leaking to the press…and then Kissinger would leak to the press. He would have outbursts that would challenge Donald Trump’s ketchup tantrums.

In 1969, Kissinger was so enraged by the leaks behind The New York Times report on the Cambodia bombing that he ordered the FBI to tap the phones of more than a dozen White House aides, including members of his own staff. The recordings never turned up a culprit. And who knew a Secretary of State could order the FBI to install illegal wiretaps? Republicans in Congess got upset in 2017 over the FBI getting WARRANTS to follow Russian spies in the Trump Campaign. They’re still upset over the pee-pee-tape story.

After the Times and Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, the classified documents chronicling the government’s war policies and planning in Vietnam, Kissinger was furious once again. He considered leaking them a threat to his hidden diplomacy. His complaints helped create the White House burglary team, the leak-plugging Plumbers unit that would later break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building. From there, he even had a hand in making Watergate happen.

I’m looking forward very much to my right-wing colleagues to draw obtuse cartoons praising and mourning Kissinger. I’m not one of them.

Creative notes: I was thinking this cartoon wouldn’t do very well on social media as a lot of readers may be too young to remember Kissinger, but the shares and reactions are surprising me. It was taking off after just a few minutes of it being published. I also had two other ideas of him in Hell but decided that was too obvious and in fact, I’ve already seen one cartoon like that in the past hour. There will be more.

Also, I know Kissinger didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell, but it’s a cartoon. Don’t take eveything so literal.

Music note: I listened to Cheap Trick.

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