To some people who excessively accumulate money or power, their most abject admirers come to attribute unheard-of qualities to them. Some of his courtiers and cobists said of Henry Kissinger that he was not only a masterful strategist in international affairs and a scholar of profound knowledge in the history of diplomacy, but that, when approached closely, he had an excellent sense of humor. Some evidence has come to us documentary evidence. In New York or Washington, at the high society parties to which he was so fond, he would sometimes say, with a radiant smile of impudence and cunning, when he was introduced to a stranger: “Do you also think that I am a criminal? war?”. Small and chubby, with his nerdy face and glasses, he delighted in showing off on the arm of actresses always taller than him, and repeated the same explanation of his seductive abilities: “Power is the great aphrodisiac.”
But his alleged humor did not diminish when he spoke of some of those slaughtering tyrants to whom he always guaranteed the support of the United States. One of the cruelest, and one of the least remembered now, was General Yahya Khan, who in 1971, as president of Pakistan, led a massacre of more than 300,000 people, men, women and children, in what is now Bangladesh. and caused an exodus to India of some 10 million, with the full knowledge and support of President Nixon and Kissinger himself, National Security Advisor. Neither of them heeded the warnings of their own diplomats stationed in Pakistan. They even clandestinely facilitated the dispatch of American warplanes that accelerated the destruction and slaughter. General Yahya Khan was of inestimable value to them in that he was serving as an intermediary in the secret preparations for Nixon’s trip to China a year later. Because the Pakistani dictator was seen to be so proud of his abilities as a mediator, Kissinger said of him, as recorded in one of the White House recordings: “Khan enjoys doing this even more than massacring Hindus.”
In polls in 1973 and 1974, Kissinger was the most popular political figure in the United States. In a drawing on the magazine cover Newsweek He appeared flying with Superman’s cape and blue tights and with a headline that proclaimed: “IT’S SUPER K!” In the 1950s, he was a Harvard professor who became famous overnight by publishing a book in which he argued for the United States to take the lead in a “limited nuclear war.” He was one of those fearsome university professors who, when they achieve political power, succumb to a euphoria in which the intellectual insolence that until then was confined to offices and classrooms can overflow. As he grew old, and then very old, in his physical presence the gradually monstrous deformations induced by the prolonged exercise of influence and wealth became more noticeable: his body bloated and enlarged by large meals and by long meetings and hearings in offices; his neck gradually sunk between his shoulders, from sitting so much in very deep leather armchairs, with his arms very high, during confidential discussions in the rooms of those exclusive clubs, with fireplaces and somber wood paneling, where the presence of women continues to be a rarity and in which rumors of voices predominate that confidentially settle the future of the world and dictate life or death sentences on millions of people.
Someone who treated him in his final years tells me that, on the verge of turning a century, Kissinger kept his head clear, but he was already so fat and so clumsy that it took two people to move him. He was as if embalmed in life in an extreme tortoise old age, protected by the shell of a reverential celebrity – even Hillary Clinton called him “my teacher” – and also, without the slightest doubt, of a moral coldness as absolute as human indifference. of the. Having escaped from Nazi Germany in his early adolescence and losing a large part of his family in the crematorium ovens does not seem to have left him the slightest trace of sensitivity towards the sufferings of the persecuted nor a trace of displeasure towards the criminality of a power without limits. That the citizens of Chile had committed the irresponsibility of electing a socialist president in 1970 produced the same indignant confusion as the obstinacy of North Vietnam and the Vietcong guerrillas in not capitulating no matter how much the bombings of the flying fortresses B- 52 will destroy the country.
There was another joke that he liked to repeat, underlining it with a laugh: “We do illegal things very quickly; unconstitutional ones take longer.” Illegally, without even notifying Congress, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided in 1969 that to stop the supply channels from North Vietnam to the guerrillas in the South, they had to bomb Cambodia, a neighboring country that had remained at peace. Until then, Cambodia was a peaceful land, with prosperous agriculture and immense natural wealth, with an area that is slightly less than half of Spain. Between 1969 and 1970, American aviation, under the direct orders of Nixon and Kissinger, dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany in all of World War II. The smiling strategist would look with his nearsighted glasses for the small signs of the bombings on the color map of a country so small that it was difficult to distinguish it on the globe. The death toll and scale of destruction were incalculable. The disorder and disorder caused by the bombings later led to the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge, who in two years, and in the face of international indifference, imposed a regime of hallucinated communist fanaticism that cost two million lives, between a fifth and a third of the population, according to Amnesty International calculations.
Nixon, stained by the shame of Watergate, left the presidency in 1974, but Kissinger, without losing either his prestige or his smile, continued as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State with Gerald Ford, so he had time to encourage another massacre. , also already forgotten, in another place difficult to distinguish on the maps. In 1975, with his express authorization, the Indonesian military regime invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, with the well-known pretext that a communist revolution was imminent there, and with an approximate toll of one hundred thousand dead, many of them by hunger, most of them executed in cold blood.
Power, without a doubt, is the greatest aphrodisiac. It also provides the great benefits of impunity and amnesia. Men of a certain age who dress very similar, have similar hobbies and have known each other for a long time, talk in low voices and even say things in each other’s ears, and on the other side of the world an entire country is devastated by bombs, and men and women Innocents are put to the sword or tortured to death in clandestine prisons. Heads of government and presidents of corporations sneaked into old Henry Kissinger’s private office and paid him millions in exchange for advice on his international maneuvers, murmured like oracles in the German accent that he never lost.
If they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize, it will not be unlikely that one day they will also give it to Benjamin Netanyahu.
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