Henry Kissinger has died at age 100, his consulting firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2072·
    10 months ago

    Rolling Stone first out of the gate with the true elbow-drop of a headline this news deserves, and a beefy polemic to back it up.

    This article, along with every other news site’s, has been sitting there primed and ready to release for years and years, needing nothing but a minor edit to add the relevant details of his passing and the date. Someone at Rolling Stone is delighted today to have finally hit “Publish” .

    And too right they should. It’s a great day.

  • Jakdracula@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1202·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with: Henry Kissinger, war criminal and complete piece of shit, has finally died. The world is a better place now.

    • intrepid@lemmy.caEnglish
      32·
      10 months ago

      The world would have been a better place if somebody had made a better decision 101 years ago.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        10 months ago

        Whilst I would love to think that all that it would have taken for the World to be a much better place since the later part of the XX century was but one coitus interruptus, I’m almost certain that in the US there was and always has been a long line of sociopaths willint to advise the for the deaths of millions of others for personal upside maximization whilst calling it just realpolitik, any of which would’ve taken the place of this one has his daddy chosen to pull out at the last minute.

        Had Kissinger raised to be the consiglieri of power in, say, Canada, he would’ve had quite a different impact in the World.

        • Land_Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          What gets me is this actually. This news of death of Henry Kissinger is nothing but a circlejerk of American’s absolving all their guilty conscious of the warmongering and general malevolent meddling in other people’s businesses and resources. As if they did anything until this asshole reached a very very generous age of 100, all while living in luxury.

          The public had done nothing about these unjust warmongering and coups and insurgencies and such, maybe except the hippy times during vietnam war, and their presidents will do nothing to change the American international affairs (while having fairly different internal policies). Both the presidents and the population will keep blaming figureheads like Kissinger, possibly Blinken in the next decade and such names, while complicit in enjoying the benefits of resources acquired at the expense of 3rd world nations and their populations.

          Hell after seeing how he lived till 100 in luxury despite the fact that he is such a piece of shit to a global degree, I would recommend aspiring to be such a piece of shit for luxury and power over billions of people.

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            At the same time, this is one of the great tragedies of Democracy. More than half (when you don’t have an electoral college) need to agree on something for it to be done. If 50.1% didn’t want to prosecute him as a war criminal but 49.9% did, he goes scot free, and there’s no real recourse unless you break the law.

            This doesn’t suddenly absolve Americans. A majority still stopped justice from being done. I wouldn’t be so harsh on Americans today though for that 50.1% in the past, they didn’t have any choice in the matter.

            Be mad at us instead for what’s happening in the present with Israel. The current generation of Americans has plenty to criticize with just our actions than needing to go back in history. And it’s more poignant imo of an indictment.

            Generally speaking though I do agree, the West unfairly enriched itself, and plenty of people are content to clutch our pearls at the history but not to make any material amends.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
    891·
    10 months ago

    This is well known, but I think it suits this thread well

    Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. […] Witness what Henry did in Cambodia- the fruits of his genius for statesmanship- and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remake at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, under-mined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.

    Anthony Bourdain

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      God damn it, why couldn’t it have been Kissinger who killed himself?

      I guess because Bourdain had a soul and Kissinger didn’t.

      • ManOMorphos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        10 months ago

        The wrong people tend to kill themselves in general. Those who commit the worst acts usually have supremely high self-confidence and self-assurance.

    • 32b99410_da5b@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      10 months ago

      RIP my hero… Maybe now you’ll get your chance to introduce Kissinger’s afterlife to your knuckles.

        • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
          6·
          10 months ago

          Or maybe they are, just to ensure that Bourdain can choke and beat Kissinger every day onwards. Hopefully with the help of all the victims of that fucking “statesman”

          • whofearsthenight@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            I mean, Kissinger can have a layover on his way to hell to get his ass beat by Bourdain. This sounds like heaven to me.

  • MindSkipperBro12@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    10 months ago

    Saddest part is that he gets to die living a long, comfortable life after making his mark upon the world, meaning he gets to die happy.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      14·
      10 months ago

      The world order that he helped to create has spent the last few decades crumbling, so perhaps he wasn’t as happy as you might think. I can only hope.

      • interceder270@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, probably the most upsetting thing for people like him is China’s dominance.

        They really envisioned a world where the United States’ ruling class says ‘jump’ and everyone else asks ‘how high?’

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      72·
      10 months ago

      Or if you take a Buddhist view he died the most miserable and painful death because he finally realized what an evil shit he was.

      • intrepid@lemmy.caEnglish
        121·
        10 months ago

        I don’t think you understand the psychology of sociopaths like him. They care neither for anyone’s suffering nor for anyone’s opinion about them. They care only for the pleasure they derive from the pain they inflict. He probably spent his last waking hours reminiscing over the glory days of the massacres he started.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          10 months ago

          It’s not about the pain and and misery they inflict - that’s just the Hollywood portrayal of sociopathy and psychopathy, which is really just the literary Badie who is evil for the sake of being evil - which isn’t real except in some exceptionally unusual cases who have other problems and are way too ill adjusted to stay out of jail long.

          No, the usual psychopath and sociopath (and apparently they add up to around 3% of peole), including all of the so-called “well adjusted” ones (which Kissinger definitelly was) couldn’t care less about how others feel, either way, as they have no empathy and thus will not feel inside themselves through empathy what others are feeling, be that joy or pain.

          (Actually, they do “care”, intellectually: for a “well adjusted” sociopath making others feel positive or negative emotions is nothing more than a tool for manipulating them, whose effects they intellectually understand whilst themselves being unaffected by it, hence why it’s so common for them to be highly manipulative)

          And if you read the article you’ll see inklings of that about Kissinger - such as his obsequiousness to those in power and quite different treatment of those not in power - which is actually a pretty standard display of multiple faces towards different people of those whose relation to others is entirelly an intellectual construct because they have no empathy and hence not emotional-level reception of the feelings of others.

          Kissinger did what he thought was better for himself with no care at all for the impact of his actions on those who couldn’t hurt him back for that (as you can see from how he climbed into the top circle of power through advice that prollonged the Vietnam was for years and killed hundreds of thousands more than would otherwise have died) and hence why in his own experience as he felt it, he had a wonderful long life as he pretty much got all that he wanted and didn’t care about the loathing of those who couldn’t negativelly impact his interests.

  • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    711·
    10 months ago

    Anthony Bourdain, a well spoken man who reached his boiling point with existence a fair bit to soon, always had a lot to say about Kissinger. An excerpt from a book he wrote “about” culinary tourism from, if anyone wasn’t aware…

  • mvilain@kbin.social
    443·
    10 months ago

    My great Aunt had a terrific joke about Henry:

    Nixon is walking outside the Whitehouse near an area of freshly fallen snow.

    He sees NIXON SUCKS in yellow snow and asks the Secret Service (and the FBI) to investigate who did it.

    A couple days go by and someone from the FBI Forensics Lab comes into the Oval Office to report.

    “Well?” Nixon asked.

    “You’re not gonna like this.”

    “Just tell me.”

    “It’s Henry’s.”

    “I knew it!”

    “Ah. That’s not all Mr. President.”

    “What else?”

    “It’s Pat’s handwriting.”

    • theJWPHTER88@kbin.social
      113·
      10 months ago

      And, about time for some listening to this one banger Free Money! rip on Youtube as a sort of ironic celebration.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    After reading the article, I’m left with the impression that, if he wasn’t jew, he’d be right at home with the german nazi govt. Not necessarily because of racial bias, but because of his anticommunism and also for being able to direct the military against unsuspecting targets for the sole purpose of solidifying power.

  • pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    173·
    10 months ago

    So are we all just going to wait for the ruling class to die off like he did or are we going to stand for justice and do something about the other evil motherfuckers in the elite still living?

    • mcc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      65·
      10 months ago

      What are you talking about, we are going to breed our generation of evil motherfuckers.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    154·
    10 months ago

    I heard Henry Kissinger ran into a tree and all his money fell out of his pockets and the teens called him Sonic the Bitchhog while he tried to get at least one coin so he could go on.

  • margaritox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    10 months ago

    Can someone please explain what he did to be labeled a war criminal?

    Genuine question, because I only know this guy as an asshole who suggested Ukraine should give up it’s occupied territories.