Solzhenitsyn Re-Affirms My Low Opinion of Henry Kissinger

My low regard for Henry Kissinger began when I was waking up to what was happening in the world in my later youth. Kissinger was an insider in the Nixon White House, end of story. I was biased, no doubt influenced by a strong feeling that Vietnam was an injustice, and that Nixon corruption was real.

Still, I knew little of the depth of Kissinger's badness. The movie Missing--Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek--gives a glimpse of the dark side of our State Department in Central and South America during the 50s and 60s. Kissinger was a major player in the Chile debacle.

Years later, reading Sy Hersh's autobiography Reporter added new dimensions to the kind of malodorous influence Kissinger was. The press seemed to love him, seduced perhaps by his sonorous accent. Yes, he projected something, much like our fascination with British accents and Irish brogue.

The manner in which Hersh was ambushed by Ted Koppel when his book on Kissinger, was released is eye-opening. The establishment, and mainstream media, still loved the guy, decades after the Nixon-Ford era. It's pretty revealing that neither Koppel nor either of the guests who lacerated Hersh in front of a national audience had read Hersh's The Price of Power, the topic of discussion. Hersh had dared to criticize this iconic figure and had to be publicly flogged for it.

More recently I found myself absorbed by Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields and who should come up again repeatedly as a scoundrel? Yes, Henry K. When Bangladesh was suffering after a devastating cyclone, and West Pakistan did nothing, Kissinger advised that Nixon and the U.S. do nothing to alleviate the suffering because it would "make the Pakistan government look bad."

And because their government did nothing to help the traumatized East Pakistanis after the monsoons and flooding that caused so much death and destruction, the East Pakistani people voted for the opposition party in nearly every voting district. This pissed off the ruling party, so they sent in the army and slaughtered the masses using U.S. supplied armaments. Millions died and many more millions fled to India.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Kissinger's response to the behavior of West Pakistan toward its Bengali brethren.

Kissinger sneered at people who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis" and ignored the first telegram from the United States consul general in East Pakistan, Archer K. Blood, and 20 members of his staff, which informed the US that their allies West Pakistan were undertaking, in Blood's words, "a selective genocide" targeting the Bengali intelligentsia, supporters of independence for East Pakistan, and the Hindu minority. In the second, more famous, Blood Telegram the word genocide was again used to describe the events, and further that with its continuing support for West Pakistan the US government had "evidenced [...] moral bankruptcy".

Makes one ill to think about it, but Kissinger was the influencer who again moved the hand of power.

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And so... As I was last night reading the Writings of Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, edited by Michael Loyd Chadwick, I once again came across some barb comments regarding this man. A chapter titled Henry Kissinger begins on page 75. It's not pretty, and only confirms what I have previously only sensed.

The style of this book is somewhat different. Solzhenitsyn divides each thought into a headline and then a little text, like a news story with more details. I am going to share here only the headlines from this four page article.

Failure of U.S. Judicial Authorities to Uncover the       Real Assassins of Kennedy*

Need to Speak Bluntly about the Activities of               Kissinger

Kissinger's Policy of Unending Concessions to World Communism Demonstrate That He Is Anything But a Diplomat
Kissinger Attempts to Put Diplomacy at Its Lowest Level
The Art of Diplomacy Has a Wide Spectrum of Possibilities
The Great Diplomats of the Past
Kissinger's Endless Obscuring of Facts
Kissinger's Opponents Are Always Winning and He Is Always Yielding
Should the U.S. Surrender Its Position to the World?
Kissinger Does Not Possess the High Diplomatic Intellect Ascribed to Him
It Is Not Diplomacy to Negotiate Continual Concessions
The Vietnam Peace Agreement Prepared the Way for the Quiet Surrender                      of Three Countries in Indo-China

Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize Was the Ultimate in Political Pornography
Disregard By Israeli Leaders of Kissinger's Shuttle Diplomacy in the Middle East
The Real Goal of Future Convergence of the U.S with the USSR Is Kept Hidden          from the American People

Surrender of the West Approaches an Avalanche Stage
The U.S. Government Will have No Emergency Exit
Genocide In Cambodia And Vietnamese Prison Camps Is Not Peace
The Peace Aimed At by Kissinger and His Associates Has No Moral Loftiness

In short, Solzhenitsyn had a pretty low opinion of this "Golden Boy" who loved the spotlight in his time, and the Nobel laureate doesn't mince words.

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The title of this book of Solzhenitsyn's writing is World Communism: A Critical Review. It begins with an intro by Michael Loyd Chadwick, who edited this volume.

In 1975, a year after Solzhenitsyn had been exiled from the Soviet Union, the author had been invited to Washington D.C. to speak to the AFL-CIO. There became a grave problem for then sitting president Gerald Ford. Shouldn't this great advocate for freedom be invited to the White House? Should we not welcome the man who put his life on the line to reveal to all the cold brutality of Soviet totalitarianism?

But no, Henry Kissinger stepped in and beseeched President Ford to not do such a thing. Why? Because befriending Solzhenitsyn would be bad for detente, and evidently Detente was Kissinger's life force.

Not only did Kissinger interfere with (ultimately blocking) the White House visit, he also said it would be "diplomatically inadvisable" for the president to attend the banquet at which Solzhenitsyn was speaking. Members of the State Department and NSC whom had been invited were quietly pulled away and did not attend either.

Much more can be said, but I think you get the picture. It's only a small section of the book but when I entered into it, the story leaped off the page.

Related Links
George Harrison & Friends: The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh 
Reporter by Seymour Hersh is a Must Read for all young journalists
*Murder Most Foul: Dylan Dishes Up a New Meal with a Feast of References
Solzhenitsyn Indictment of the West Still Stands

The Cold War

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." ~H.G. Wells

I remember a statement by C.S. Lewis that said in effect that he did not read newspapers because the things that are really happening in the world won't be written about till six months from now. To some extent he is right, and often it is much later still than six months. Some truths only come to light after decades of being kept under wraps, and for this reason we do not always fully understand the very times we live in.

This week I just finished reading Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War, a fascinating read because so much of it formed a backdrop for all who grew up as part of the baby boom generation of which I have been a part. It was a strange kind of war. For the first time in history, two superpowers had weapons that they were afraid to use.

Gaddis has written a half dozen books on this topic beginning with his 1972 volume on the origins of the Cold War. It's a compelling read with inside stories about things I'd only half understood.

His coverage of the Sixties was especially captivating for me, as I think many of us are still trying to understand the experience we went through while coming of age in that tumultuous time. I remember when Nixon resumed bombing of Cambodia in the early Seventies when I was at Ohio U and the protests it generated. I specifically remember when Harry Reasoner came and spoke to a packed house in the M.I.A., an auditorium on the college green. He had to use veiled language to tell us there was much to be concerned about things going on in the then-current Nixon administration. It seemed like he had so much he wanted to say but could not.

Gaddis does say it. Two months after taking office, in his very first year, Nixon began the illegal bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country in Southeast Asia. But Nixon did not tell the truth about this activity. Instead, when the N.Y. Times stated that we were bombing a neutral country, he told the people it was not true. The Cambodians knew we were bombing. The North Vietnamese knew were were bombing. China and the Soviet Union knew we were bombing. But American citizens were being kept in the dark. Why?

The result was an ever widening credibility gap between the American people and their leaders.

The Cold War is not only about the American experience, and this is its greatest strength. We also meet each of the Soviet dictators with their strengths and flaws, from Stalin to Gorbachev. How the Berlin Wall came to be erected, how the Soviet Union maintained control of the Eastern Bloc, how Mao came to power and how China evolved to the power it is today, and how the Wall came down.... it's all discussed in a vivid manner that bring new gems to light.

There were many insights I had not heard before. How Nixon and Kissinger were able to open up trade relations with Mao's China was fascinating. Mao made an interesting comment that he liked (American) conservatives because even though he did not agree with them, they said what they meant, whereas our liberals said one thing and did another.

What was especially interesting is how the dictators of many smaller powers used the Cold War to their own advantage by playing one power off against the other. "Help me or I will join their side." In this manner many dictators were able to consolidate their power within a defined sphere.

The development of thermonuclear weapons brought the world into a pretty scary place. To think that mutual assured destruction could be a legitimate peace-keeping strategy seems almost insane, yet it worked. It's hard to say what our future holds since many of these weapons remain, but the rules have changed. Let's hope and pray that wisdom prevails.