Thursday, November 30, 2023
In bed at 9, awake at 4:30 with a bad dream of trying to settle a case for Mrs. Grant, one of my St. Francis church bus friends and my companion at the funeral of Terry Pitts, up at 4;55. Let Lilly out, 35°, high of 43°, cloudy but Venus is high in the SE sky. AQI=54(PM). Wind is SW at 13 mph, 6-15/31, SC of 26°. Sunrise at 7:02, sunset at 4:18, 9+15.
Treadmill; pain. Woke up with some BP. soon had CPP. 21:42 & 0.50 at 11 a.m. watching Dana Bash.
Geri's on day 11 of Covid with the most notable symptoms being coughing and fatigue.
I'm grateful for the countless trees that surround us. They are beautiful in shape, consume carbon dioxide and breathe oxygen. They ask little of us and give much. They change with the seasons, more than we do. They shed their leaves when the days grow short and produce new ones as they lengthen. They provide shade in the heat and protection from strong winds. They live long lives and then they weaken and die, as we do.
Henry Kissinger has died at 100, reminding me of the old adage and Billy Joel song, "Only the good die young." From Rolling Stone:
"The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds." . . . .
Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told [Seymour] Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory.
From The Intercept:
Kissinger helped to prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.
There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.
AS NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.
Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.
“A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”
In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.
Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”
From this morning's The Atlantic:
Yet for all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are noteworthy for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?
Kissinger, his dead hands dripping with the blood of innocents, will be lauded by many. It will interesting to see who attends his funeral, where it will be held, who will deliver eulogies, and what they will say, all of it reminding me of Oriana Fallaci: "No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruelest, the least generous who win." Or will the funeral be private, out of, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."
Robert Kagan's "The Trump Dictatorship" in this morning's WaPo is terrifying, and very probably accurate. It's the scariest thing I have read since Trump followed Melania down the escalator in 2015. I couldn't finish it.
Mindfulness & Meditation chat led by Lou and Mary in Green Bay every Thursday at 10 a.m. . My second participation. It's not instructional but encouraging, supportive, and probably helpful, with 5 or 6 veterans on the call in addition to Lou and Mary.
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