The Devil Claims One Of His Own

On 29 November, the devil got to meet, face to face, one of his very own: Henry Kissinger.

When I was growing up, the piece of human flotsam was revered in my household–and dear old dad didn’t mind that he was a Jew. And daddy-o was right; Kissinger was born in Bavaria between world wars. But his ancestors were in fact Jewish. How’d he know that? First and foremost, even above his incestuous ways, my father was a pure-of-heart bigot, unashamedly hateful and determined not to have his children grow up to be simpering “___”, or “______” lovers.

For my part, I couldn’t understand a word that shithead, Kissinger, said. Of course, it didn’t make much of a difference to me because I was concerned with more immediate issues, like how to stay out of father’s way, avoiding beatings with that razor-like belt, outrunning bullies, girlfriends or potential girlfriends who, save for Barbara Shannahan, would never in a million years have given me the time of day, and finding bra ads in the Sunday paper to beat off to so I would be limp when mommy and daddy came to my room to teach me everything I would ever need to know about sex.

Now that last bit I have written about, so if this statement unsettled you, scroll through my archives to see what I mean.

They justified this “hands-on teaching” by misquoted Bible verses, and the dizzyingly stupid predication that when I got married I’d be able to keep my wife satisfied and avoid a divorce.

It did not work.

Of course, they could not see what they were doing to me (and my brothers and sisters) was really turning me into an asshole; therefore when I was caught doing irrational and destructive shit, they thought I was mentally “retarded”, and threatened to send me off to one of two psychiatric hospitals in the nearby areas.

They never knew that what I was doing was watching them, listening when I couldn’t be seen, learning, though what I learned wasn’t clear to me at the time.

When it came to watching the evening news, Walter Cronkite would reach out of the TV set and never phase dad, who usually sat through the news alone, the other kids being very happy to stay well clear of him. But what I heard and saw is a thing I didn’t understand. It was too far away. I couldn’t walk out on the porch and hear a firefight in the distance. I saw bombers fly overhead, and one I saw early on bore a latticed cockpit canopy and was propeller powered. But for the most part, I saw only Hueys overhead. The choppers could be heard a mile away as it approached. The twin-blade main rotor was near the speed of sound, and projected what someone described to me as small “Sonic booms”. Once it passed overhead and receded, it was almost silent.

I saw those on the TV news. To me, always the same, soldiers jumping from them into tall grass and stretchers being loaded in their place. I would be eligible for enlistment or the draft only after the war was over. I bore survivor’s guilt for that; guys had died there, while I was playing with my Johnny Lightning track or with plastic Army men.

I felt scared as I grew to understand the war without anyone being decent enough to explain it, and then I felt shame for being scared that one day I would be there, too.

And I did have a rough grasp on what we were doing in Laos and Cambodia. I came to realize that the war had spread to other countries. All I knew was that it was all bad news. Night after night, same shit, except worse.

I would not know how terrible it really got until much later.

But then, that was true of most Americans because news back then was unreliable. The government held a ton of things classified until Daniel Ellsworth released the Pentagon Papers, and that the Johnson administration had secretly expanded the war from Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos. You can see the reasoning behind it; supplies getting to NVA troops, and the NVA soldiers themselves were coming through both countries via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This treacherous route was subject to mudslides during the monsoon season and was often cratared by the bombing, but when the news hit, not during the Johnson administration but instead the Nixon administration, the shit hit the fan. Already outraged by the surprise of the tet offensive and the endless coffins bringing dead soldiers back home, Americans weren’t about to put up with any more of this senseless carnage.

By then, the Nixon White House had Henry Kissinger either as the NSA or SoS. In both jobs, Kissinger excelled in brain-fucking the paranoid Nixon and his equally paranoid aides.

Although Ellsworth had nothing to tell about the Nixon Era, naming Johnson and McNamara as the key culprits, Nixon did the unthinkable: sent operatives to break into the office of Ellsworth’s psychiatrist. The job was to replace the whistle blower’s file with another that made him look like a nut job. In reality,  the man had clearly broken some laws, but was morally outraged at what he had discovered and the fact that it was all covered up.

Nixon tried to discredit someone who had revealed that his predecessor, a Democrat, had illegally escalated the war. That was a strange mistake to make, but it would not be the last or the most bizarre of his “dirty tricks”, which earned him the nickname “Tricky Dick”.

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger was consolidating his power, and he had none of the morals that Ellsworth did. I mean, he had none. A notorious womanizer and hedonist, today he is remembered for audacious political moves that some take as beneficial to the United States, but by others as the man responsible for the Khmer Rouge, which seized power in Cambodia and which was responsible for millions of deaths of Cambodians. Call it genocide or a purge, whichever you prefer. But it was a mess with plenty of outside interference. China, under Zedong, backed them. The Soviets not so much. If you research carefully, you might very well be confused.

This is politics, the dregs of which were in full play. You’ll see that the United States (allegedly) backed the communist Khmer players. It’s more than alleged, however. And if it all began before the second World War with all three countries comprising French Indochina, and that following the war the French wanted their territory back but ultimately got their asses kicked, then it becomes an inescapable question: just what possessed five US presidents to go to the area and engage the communist forces, or to maintain operations they inherited on taking office?

He was also responsible for alienating a number of allies, India among them. This was a tactical, strategic and humanitarian blunder.

There’s no blaming Kissinger for what was done before his rise to power. But in the Nixon years, we know a lot more.

He wasn’t above advising whole governments to be destabilized and toppled. He had no morals, but no intelligence, either, failing utterly to see where his actions would take us. A prime example is that of Iran-Iraq, toys for him to play with. He backed the Shah of Iran, leading not to the fall of Saddam Hussain, but the revolution that saw the shah exiled and the Iranian government being overtaken and overthrown. To this day, though Saddam is gone, the destabilized region is a melting pot of chaos and religion-based enmity and the threat of nuclear war. I warned in 2008 that we should never have invaded Iraq. I predicted total destabilization and that Iran would eventually annex Iraq. This can still happen; the only thing lacking is the action itself. The ingredients are there. In fact, Iran, as it is, has considerable power and influence in the entire Middle East, but most tend to ignore this or keep discussion out of the public eye. That is unfortunate and unwise. When things happen, they will affect the United States directly. If you think this is not so, remember 9-11-2001. Anything can happen.

I’ve been to New York City. Only saw the Twin Towers at a distance from Brooklyn. But they were magnificent. Something absolutely wondrous to behold; stunning.

In the entire time of their existence, only one motion picture was shot there. Only one, a masterpiece spy thriller starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow and Cliff Robertson. The film had a CIA office in one of the towers, where Cliff Robertson and John Houseman’s characters worked. There are beauty shots of the towers from ground level, never enough to give you an idea of their sheer mass and beauty. Filmed in 1974, released in 1975, Three Days of the Condor remains a classic thriller, worthy of a spot on your shelf right beside North by Nortwest.

Only when the towers were brought down in 2001 did we learn that the CIA really did have offices at The World Trade Center. Only it was WTC Building 7, the one everyone points to the most when defending horseshit conspiracy theories. Not immediately revealed was the fact that the attack was effective in more than just traumatizing Americans. Later we would learn that the CIA as an organization suffered chaos and severe disruption in intelligence gathering. The further consequences are not known. In one day, what took years to build was all gone save for a smoldering heap of steel, concrete, broken glass and human body parts.

But had not this scenario been predicted?

Yes. More than once. In a notable example, the Tom Clancy novel Debt of Honor had a JAL 747 crash into the US Capitol, killing most of congress, the POTUS among them.

Not only that, but think tanks had arrived at the conclusion already that the failed underground attack at WTC almost a decade earlier would be a lesson to terrorists: next time, aim higher.

If it is difficult to imagine that Henry Kissinger had a part in laying the groundwork for the horrors of our time, then do not try to. Some will always regard him as brilliant and an adept statesman. Perhaps reading more will persuade you to reassess your view.

Henry Kissinger met his maker with blood on his hands. He bore a soiled soul laden with the deaths of innocent people and his body count ever climbs.

For every good thing he may have done, there is an ever growing cancelation of each by the horrors set in motion by a man with no morals, no dignity and no concept of what it’s like for a mother, bleeding and in shock, to hear her baby crying from a place she cannot reach.

Because Henry Kissinger had no heart. No empathy. Nothing but power-lust and a sexual libido that even the likes of Marlo Thomas, Liv Ullman, Raquel Welch, Candice Bergen, Jill St. John and Liza Minelli could not quench. And he almost certainly snared underage starlets, as his tastes showed to others.

This bucket of puke leaves behind a legacy. Exactly how bad it is remains unclear, but I pray his kind will not come this way again.