Archive for the 'Gregg Grandin' Category

02
Sep
15

Kissinger – Provocateur?


Kissinger's Shadow

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR

What unearthly plan gives any woman or man
The right to be untouchable, to have immunity,
To gain the heralded, enviable title of Statesman;
Yet be provocateur to unbridled devastation with impunity?

The ability of such monsters, hands awash in blood,
To gain centre stage in the course of human history;
Emotionally void, eclipsing the constitution of love;
Rivalling the true definition of imposed suffering and misery.

Yet this kind of Being flourishes with unrestrained momentum
As tool to the ambitious powers-that-be to achieve their devious goals;
Only through death will truth held by their inner sanctum
Speak of the brutishness and countless deaths unfold.

Human history is blemished by countless presence of this ilk
Gaining stature of importance and celebrated aggrandizement;
Rewarded for their cunning yet, ignoring the cost of blood spilled;
A testament to the ignorance of humankind and, its willing appeasement.

Reference: Kissinger’s Shadow – the long reach of America’s most controversial Statesman
By Gregg Grandin

Excerpts:

`America’s exceptional sense of itself depends on a similarly ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America’s unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism. Yet history is also denied, or at least what is denied is an understanding of the past as a series of causal relationships. That is, the blowback from any given action—arming anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan, for example, or supplying Saddam Hussein with the sarin gas he used on Iran—is rinsed clean of its source and given a new origin story, blamed on generalized chaos that exists beyond our borders.’

This evasion has been on full display of late, as the politicians who drove us into Iraq in 2003 tell us that decisions made at the time that facilitated the rise of Islamic State militants shouldn’t hinder America from taking bold action in the future to destroy Islamic State militants. “If we spend our time debating what happened eleven or twelve years ago,” former vice president Dick Cheney today says, “we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.18 The United States, Cheney insists, needs to do “what it takes, for as long as it takes.”

Kissinger perfected this type of dodge.[emphasis is mine] He was a master of advancing the proposition that the policies of the United States and the world’s violence and disorder are entirely unrelated, especially when it came to accounting for the consequences of his own actions. Cambodia? “It was Hanoi,” Kissinger writes, pointing to the North Vietnamese to justify his four-year bombing campaign of that neutral nation. Chile? That country, he says in defense of his coup-plotting against Salvador Allende, “was ‘destabilized’ not by our actions but by Chile’s constitutional President.” The Kurds? “A tragedy,” says the man who served them up to Saddam Hussein, hoping to turn Iraq away from the Soviets. East Timor? “I think we’ve heard enough about Timor.19″




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