341–350 of 673 posts
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Perhaps worth noting that he lived 13 years past the time the obituary was penned.
13 years past how long a contributor to the obituary lived. The contributor may have started work on the obituary even earlier and probably did, as Kissinger was 87 and it probably would have made sense to pre-write the obituary sooner.
The pro-Kissinger side will obviously have plenty of defense. Here's a good unrolling of the "piss on his grave" perspective for those who are confused (or angry but concerned they may not be showing enough consideration to a different perspective): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-ki... Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger [0]: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry…
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu , and didn't understand how Kissinger's actions caused Cambodian Civil War. Can you explain? (I assume it is the Civil War the he's blamed for?)
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>He had an incredible knack for playing along with whatever insane idea somebody had and made everybody in the room feel goddamned brilliant. The richest, most powerful, and most beautiful people in the world just loved being around him because he consistently sounded interesting and made them feel intelligent. You call that ass-kissing, others may call it diplomacy. He may have furthered his own interests but did he…
Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. They just wasted tons of lives for nothing. Same as with the recent Afghanistan campaign. At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.
Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated.
It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.
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> one of the few publications with the integrity to publish those words And a symptom of the term being neutered into meaninglessness. A critical element of war criminality is command. If you don’t command armed forces, it’s difficult to commit war crimes, legally speaking. You can have condoned or collaborated or contributed to them.
> In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By summer 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger – who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command – was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. R…
Probably as good a time as any to re-link the Mother Jones piece "Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge": https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe... Linked on HN numerous times but largely only discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691
It's also a good reminder that public judgement isn't worth much for any personality who had access to lots of bonafide top secret information. A lot of sensitive diplomatic and military records from even the 60s are yet to be declassified, so the final verdict of future historians will likely rest on much different information then we can access today.
Now is not the time or place to have a hate fest. He’s dead. He had family. He’s a real person who died today.
I don’t know what this has to do with Hacker News ethos.
And using someone’s death as occasion to talk ill about them just isn’t appropriate.
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That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
That last sentence is a massive step beyond common knowledge, if it's true... and I don't think it is, what can doctors do?
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> The person receiving the order could—and in many cases, should—have refused.
To execute it. Kissinger didn’t execute. He relayed. It’s a subtle, frustrating but—I think—necessary distinction to preserve the sanctity of the term required to prosecute heads of state, a novel concept in its own right.
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Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. They just wasted tons of lives for nothing. Same as with the recent Afghanistan campaign. At least the military industrial complex got even richer of it. That's the only reason.
> Those wars in Cambodia and Vietnam didn't further the interests of the US at all. It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery. Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated. It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.
Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II.
Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.