He was involved in...

... Sabotaging peace talks that extended the Vietnam War by years. (This was literally treason and he knew it.) He did this to help Nixon win election.

... Carpet-bombing Cambodia (who weren't even involved) which gave rise to the Khmer Rouge (who killed a fucking lot of people).

... Using the Kurds as part of a proxy war and throwing them under the bus the instant he didn't need them any more (leaving them vulnerable to another genocide).

... Fucking Watergate. As in, he was in that shit deeper than Nixon himself and got off basically clean.

... Training and equipping the Mujahideen (as part of yet another proxy war with Russia) back when we liked Afghanistan (because they hated Russia too). They later became the Taliban. Lots of people say Bush did 9/11, and, while he isn't blameless, in a very real way Nixon and Kissinger did 9/11.

... Botching a kidnapping attempt (that was itself an attempt to prevent a progressive candidate from being elected in Chile) which ended up getting a famous general assassinated instead.

That's just what I remember off the top of my head.

It goes deeper.

Maybe as deep as his ass is in hell now.

Short version - war criminal that a lot of rich and powerful people love because he got them what they wanted.

Long version - Do you have 8 hours? Here's behind the bastards podcast. It's 6 episodes, 1:20 each. https://youtu.be/hPPW9eQnOCc

He was a bad guy.

Negotiated the end of the vietnam war is a fucking TAKE

PBS does a pretty good job of being objective and fact-based. Here's a PBS article on Kissinger that touches on some of his more controversial policies and activities.

@Eric_Pollock yeah I can get that it could be confusing.

Most of the mainstream media an political establishment are acting like they lost an okay guy, meanwhile we are acting like we finally lost the second coming of Hitler. Except Kissinger is responsible for more deaths than Hitler iirc.

His in-group protected him for so long, there's a massive disconnect between the mainstream boomer narrative and what most reasonable people think. He was involved in multiple genocides.

Have a read of the Rolling Stone obituary that's doing the rounds, it's a fairly good write-up, though it doesn't go into all of it.

involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a “green light” to Argentina’s military junta for their Dirty War,

but I know there’s more to the story than that with the collective hate I see for him here on Lemmy.

Both sides bad, right? Sometimes things are just the way they look on the surface.

If you all think we collectively hate the guy when he actually was a good father, good employer and genius genocide orchestrator, why are you asking Lemmy?

Without all the editorializing here, I think the important part is he was extremely influential in American foreign policy for decades. I checked the Wikipedia article and presumably it’s accurate but that understates now influential he was and for how long

He was great, meaning effective at what he did. My summary of all the rest posted here is that he never seemed to let morals get in the way of serving his goals or that of his president or country. He may have driven a lot of these atrocities, but we all hopped in the car and rode along

The guys on the Dollop podcast summarise him well.

"He's the Forrest Gump of war-crimes"

I too had never heard of him before today.

I wish I still hadn't.

• Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War
• Henry Kissinger, History’s Bloodiest Social Climber
• How Henry Kissinger Paved the Way for Orlando Letelier’s Assassination
• On Top of Everything Else, Henry Kissinger Prevented Peace in the Middle East

Johnny Harris released a video today about him on YouTube. I found that pretty informative, I didn't know much about Kissing either.

https://lemmy.world/post/8975932

Uthe Monty Python did a song on him, you can look that up.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!

• literally every member of c/noncredibledefense