Crescent International
Henry Kissinger, dubbed evil genius, died on November 29, at age 100.
He inflicted great hardships, death and destruction on millions of people in Southeast Asia and South America.
While the American establishment projected him as a statesman, his victims can hardly be faulted for viewing him very differently.
His death at age 100—many have been muttering not too softly, ‘about time’—has rid the world of the biggest mass murderer of the last 60 years.
The exaggerators of Kissinger’s Machiavellian skills often present him as one of the political catalysts for China to conduct its much-needed economic reforms.
The reality is very different.
He represented western and in particular American evil at it worsts.
He may have been born a Jew but his mindset reflected that of Nazi Germany, the place of his birth.
He was extremely cruel and totally indifferent to human suffering.
The coups that he orchestrated in South America, the most well-known of which was in Chile against the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in September 1973, resulted in decades of brutal military rule.
General Augusto Pinochet who took over Chile for the Americans, unleashed death squads murdering tens of thousands.
Many more thousands simply disappeared.
Kissinger’s opening to China has been greatly exaggerated.
As current American politicians constantly whine about how China is slowly reducing US’s global economic influence, what many of them do not realize is that Kissinger is partly responsible for it.
Those who exaggerate Kissinger’s politicking, whether in favorable or critical terms, all have a contemporary blind spot.
That blind spot is China.
While Kissinger did use the split between the two major communist regimes, that of the USSR and China, Kissinger’s arrogance, typical of many American politicians, inadvertently contributed to making China what it is today.
The brutal regimes Kissinger served, assumed that China will always remain the west’s consumer goods producing plant.
How presumptuous they have turned out to be.
China used America’s desperation to outdo the Soviet Union and utilized Washington’s obsession with outperforming the USSR to outmaneuver the US and the Soviets.
China’s statesmen, with their 5,000 history, outwitted Kissinger in the long run.
In the twilight years of his life, Kissinger’s frequent readjustment of his analysis of the situation in Ukraine did not only peel away his evil genius aura, but also showed that the Kissingerian dynamics and framework are outdated and have little practical use in the multipolar world.
Kissinger’s approach to global politics which various US regimes tried to maintain, is rooted in hard-power and it frames the soft-power pushback against US imperialism within the Cold War era parameters.
As today’s world is greatly intertwined and US soft power is almost totally depleted, the Kissinger model fails to take these crucial realities into account.
The reason is that it is rooted in so-called American exceptionalism, which no longer applies.
The Kissingerian approach fails to understand that there are now others with significant soft-power appeal of their own who view Americanism with great distaste.
In a sense American idealization of the Kissinger era is setting up Washington for mega failure in the near future.
Contemporary American politicians mistake Kissinger’s abilities of political manipulation for classical diplomacy through which Washington can co-opt and coerce others into “alliances” under complete American control.
This is a phenomenon that others have realized to be an illusion.
Many western politicians, however, chose to idealize a bureaucrat intoxicated with power and with a very faulty moral compass.
