‘no legal notice was more gratifying than the one CounterPunch received when Ken Silverstein published these photos of Henry Kissinger picking his nose during a press conference on Brazil. As Ken noted, “Kissinger was OK having his picture taken with murderers like Pinochet but upset when outed as a snot eater‘ (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German silent horror film)
+ Gore Vidal used to tell the story of visiting the Sistine Chapel with a friend, where they encountered Henry Kissinger, staring intently at Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Vidal turned to his friend and said, “Look, he’s apartment hunting.” (See Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest for the full story.)
+ CounterPunch has been threatened with lawsuits from oil executives and oil kingdom sheiks, a timber baron, a homicidal governor of South Dakota, former CIA officers, a corrupt CEO of a major environmental group, killer cops, a prison warden, and numerous politicians of greater or lesser notoriety. But no legal notice was more gratifying than the one CounterPunch received when Ken Silverstein published these photos of Henry Kissinger picking his nose during a press conference on Brazil. As Ken noted at the time, “Kissinger was OK having his picture taken with murderers like Pinochet but upset when outed as a snot eater. A fucking monster.” When the photos were reprinted in Silverstein and Cockburn’s book, Washington Babylon, the caption read: “Henry the K.: a nose in every pie, a finger in every nose.”
+ Kissinger’s greatest triumph–and perhaps his only real talent– was to seduce three generations of American political and media elites into believing that his diplomatic genius could be measured by the Himalayan heights of the body count he left in his wake.
+ Kissinger, a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from Vietnam to Cambodia and Bangladesh, East Timor to Chile and Argentina, got a prime slot in major newspapers to shape and warp public opinion whenever he wanted it, often, no doubt, in favor of his dark roster of clients at Kissinger & Associates. Over his career, he wrote more than 200 op-eds for the Washington Post.
+ Kissinger guarded the identities of the clients of Kissinger and Associates that he resigned as head of the 9/11 Commission rather than unmask them, citing “conflicts of interest.” How many were Saudis? Realbizness trumps Realpolitik.
+ Like Robert McNamara, who went from supervising the Vietnam War to inflicting global misery at the World Bank, Henry Kissinger may have killed as many people in his five decades out of office as a globetrotting “consultant” as in his 8 years in office. Unlike McNamara, he never even feigned repentance.
+ When asked about the forced displacement of Micronesians from the Marshall Island so that the US could detonate nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, Kissinger quipped: “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”
+ In his memoir, Kissinger claimed to be “deeply upset” by the Kent State massacre. But HR Haldeman’s diaries revealed that Kissinger was all for “clobbering the students,” who were protesting his illegal and murderous war on Cambodia. (P=Nixon, E=Ehrlichman, K=HK)… “K wants to just let the students go for couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them. E wants to communicate, especially symbolically … K very concerned that we not appear to give in any way. Thinks P can really clobber them if we just wait for Cambodian success.”
+ Despite the misogyny that drips from nearly every conversation recorded in the Nixon White House tapes, a whole generation of women diplomats–HRC, Condi Rice, Samantha Power–were drawn by Kissinger’s blood stench like the vampire wives to Dracula…
+ One of the lessons HK taught his acolytes like Samantha Power is that when you fashion yourself as a humanitarian realist, your license to kill never expires.
+ In a June 1976 meeting with the Argentina Junta, Kissinger, fearing the Republicans would lose the upcoming presidential elections, advised the generals, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” (Deaths during Argentina’s Dirty War: 30,000.)
+ Often suspicious and jealous of each, Nixon and Kissinger found common ground in their bigotry, which was crude and rancid. A few examples:
Here’s RN to HK on Indians: “To me, they turn me off. How the hell do they turn other people on, Henry? Tell me…I don’t know how they reproduce!”
Kissinger to Nixon: “The Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure.”
After a phone call with India’s PM Indira Gandhi…
Nixon: “This is the point where’s she’s (Indira Gandhi) a bitch.” Kissinger: “Yeah. The Indians are bastards anyway.” Nixon: “We really slobbered over the old witch.”
During a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, Kissinger said, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic. Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”
From the same profile in The Forward: “During a Vietnam War-era chat from October 1973 with Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Kissinger found American Jews and Israelis ‘as obnoxious as the Vietnamese.’”
Kissinger in 1973: “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” (That ‘maybe’ gives insight into the moral void that was Henry Kissinger, where every life–indeed, millions of lives–could be reasoned away for his own advancement, assuming he took the time to think of them at all.)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/01/the-dr-caligari-of-american-empire/
***********************************************
Biden Is the Latest President To Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History
Henry Kissinger was the definition of elite impunity
How the trauma of the Vietnam War led to the age of “alternative facts”
Seymour Hersh on Witnessing American War Crimes in Vietnam
‘I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer’
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
After the truth-shower 