New Kissinger Bio Shows Banality of Dr. Evil
November 2, 2015
Todd Gitlin, a 60's Leftie and Journalism Professor, reviews the first volume
of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, the CEO of the NWO.
The book, written by Rothschild chronicler Niall Ferguson, portrays
Kissinger in conventional terms, a young man in a hurry. Nothing to see here folks.
There's no clue that Kissinger is a Soviet/Illuminati agent.
Gitlin thinks Ferguson's book is hagiography.
Here are some short excerpts from Gitlin's review:
"Kissinger was not original; he was, for the most part, conventional. Virtually everything he wrote during his surprising climb to fame in the 1950s was either a) the taken-for-granted wisdom of his time (the Russians, a revolutionary power, were always coming), or b) nonsense..."
"The Sputnik scare helped by pumping up American panic. It was as if a casting call went out for a gravel-voiced, heavily accented German-Jewish sage..."
by Todd Gitlin
(Excerpts by henrymakow.com)
Kissinger was not only an accomplished stylist but an intellectual hack when he was not a raving hysteric. Much of what Ferguson credits as "brilliance" reads as the sheerest banality, yet it leaves the biographer breathless....
Kissinger went about working his way up the greasy influence pole. As rubber-jointed sage he could go ponderous or he could go witty. He cultivated, among many others who might be of use, Harvard's McGeorge Bundy, dean of the faculty and later national security adviser and leading war hawk under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Bundy got Kissinger a job at the Council for Foreign Relations, which led, in turn, to years of service at the side of--or elsewhere near the anatomy of--New York Gov. and putative Republican front-runner Nelson Rockefeller. Kissinger proved a virtuoso of sycophancy...
How, apart from his gravitas-bearing accent, did Kissinger pull off this feat? Part of the explanation was that Kissinger was not original; he was, for the most part, conventional. Virtually everything he wrote during his surprising climb to fame in the 1950s was either a) the taken-for-granted wisdom of his time (the Russians, a revolutionary power, were always coming), or b) nonsense (a passage from his diary: "Spiritual force, multiplied by economic force, multiplied by military force, is roughly equal to security"); or--and here is where some originality crept in--c) wild-eyed hysteria in the face of the USSR's conventional military might and its accumulating nuclear bombs....
The Sputnik scare helped by pumping up American panic. It was as if a casting call went out for a gravel-voiced, heavily accented German-Jewish sage, heavy with tragic aura, to intone that the world was complicated and therefore it was necessary to prepare to fight a limited nuclear war in Central Europe.
Mind you, such a war, Kissinger proposed, should obey rules. One was this: "a 500-kiloton maximum"--that is, the launching of "battlefield nuclear weapons" equivalent, in sum, to 25 Hiroshimas. After Central Europe was to be rendered a smoking radioactive ruin, the United States would pause to chat with the Kremlin about what would happen next.
Kissinger had long patented, as if original, the boilerplate notion that "it was an inherently moral act to make a choice between lesser and greater evils."
He brandished such self-justifications so often, it was as if he thought he was making a grand contribution to moral philosophy. In truth, the limited nuclear war fantasy was sheer lunacy. Indeed, three years later, Ferguson tells us, Kissinger had "repudiated" the thesis that had established him as the nation's Big-Thinker-in-Chief, noting that "since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable." Oh.
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To speak of his power lust is a decided understatement. When it came to power, Kissinger had an urgent zipper problem. When the time came for the Richard Nixon he "loathed" to come calling, Kissinger could adapt. He was ever-ready. His wartime mentor Fritz Kraemer warned him that "the trap is in your own character."
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Kissinger has been a quintessential 1950s U.S. Cold War intellectual. He was not particularly original or bold, once we scratch away from his writings the deliberately opaque and convoluted prose he often used, possibly to try to render more original thoughts and reflections that were in reality fairly conventional.... What the archival record has so far revealed is that Kissinger was often simplistic, binary and even uninformed....His often broadcasted realism notwithstanding, he tended to adhere to a dogmatic, zero-sum-game of the international game.
In short, he wasn't a war criminal, he wasn't a very deep or sophisticated thinker, he rarely challenged the intellectual vogues of the time (even because it would have meant to challenge those in power, something he always was--and still is--reluctant to do), and once in government he displayed a certain intellectual laziness vis-Ã -vis the intricacies and complexities of a world that he still tended to see in black-and-white.
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In 25 small-print pages in a 1987 Appendix to Sideshow, [William] Shawcross amply demonstrated that Kissinger was a serial liar. He lied in 1970 about the Cambodia bombing. When, in 1979, the interviewer David Frost, working for NBC, and Kissinger, looking angry, admitted to making a public statement then that was "not correct," Kissinger moved "heaven and earth" to convince NBC executives to eliminate this exchange from the broadcast. He called them "dozens of times," Shawcross wrote. He lied, and covered up, and lied about lying and about covering up. Examples are legion; see, for example, accounts by Nick Thimmesch, Bob Woodward, Walter Isaacson, Seymour Hersh, Rep. Joshua Eilberg, and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others. This is a man who does not stint at self-taxidermy or taking evasive action. An authorized rebuttal published under the name of Kissinger's amanuensis, Peter Rodman, smeared Shawcross for "political apologetics" and called it "obscene." Pot, meet kettle.
Shawcross noted that the final 894 pages of Kissinger's first memoir, White House Years, included no mention at all of the horrors that the American bombing and the consequent Khmer Rouge takeover (itself inconceivable without the American bombing) brought to Cambodia.
"Indeed," as Shawcross wrote, "White House Years demonstrates more forcefully and more conclusively than any of his critics could do that for Kissinger Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations." It will be interesting to see how Ferguson deals with the horrors of Cambodia, and Kissinger's dissembling about how they came to pass, in his second volume.
One also looks forward to seeing how Ferguson will deal, for example, with a 2001 book by Kissinger called Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (Spoiler alert: Yes, it does; and guess who can supply it.) There, Kissinger wrote that America's allies held themselves "aloof" from the Vietnam war--Aloof! In truth, France's Charles de Gaulle and Great Britain's Harold Wilson both tried mightily to dissuade the Americans from their nightmare course. Before, during, and after Kissinger served Nixon, it never dawned on him that what actually threatened the Western alliance was the American insistence on defying sound advice against the nation's deep dive into the wicked and doomed Vietnam war.
We shall see if the Ferguson of Vol. II agrees with Kissinger's congratulating Nixon for what he called "negotiated extrication from Vietnam." With extrication like that, who needed war? It will be interesting, too, to see how Ferguson deals with such items as Kissinger's memorandum of his 1976 conversation with Chile's dictator Agosto Pinochet, in which, by his own account, Kissinger told the murderous Pinochet: "My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist."
Where Henry Kissinger is concerned, so many smoking guns are still smoking, it will take superhuman strength for the biographer to hold his nose as the stench reaches high heaven.
Pedro said (November 3, 2015):
Whether you believe it or not, Brice (Sharon) Taylor (Sue Ford) in her Thanks for the Memories claims that she was used by Kissinger as a human filing cabinet. Her tortured MKUltra'd dissociated DID'd mind gave her amazing abilities in this regard and gave Kissinger a cutting edge. , which he took full credit for.