Henry Kissinger did not invent some novel doctrine of foreign-policy-by-barbarous-atrocity, he simply continued the family tradition.

Henry Kissinger straddled US foreign policy across two presidencies from 1969-1977. Notable in the current moment is the framing that Kissinger was somehow uniquely evil–and that he shifted US policy in this direction.

Christopher Hitchens described Kissinger as a “one-man rolling crime wave”, and his actions as “the wickedest thing ever done in American political history”. But is this correct?

Kissinger had his fingerprints over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Argentina, Bangladesh, Cyprus, greenlighting genocidal atrocities. But these actions were not uniquely Kissingerian. They had already been templated by previous US policies.

Gaza With Snow

In Korea, one fifth of the population was killed. What had been done tactically to cities was strategy for Korea, with 635,000 tons of bombs dropped.

Take the unimaginable, atrocious barbarity of the bombing of Northern Gaza, and then double the intensity of that bombing, magnify the theatre of bombing 800 fold, then add snow.

Those scholars who critique Kissinger’s genocidal bombing of Cambodia as sui generis would do well to take a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Kissinger was not a criminal outlier inventing wicked new tools of US foreign policy while corrupting its institutions, he was reapplying well-rehearsed practices and........

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