Kissinger Interview
Posted on:: December 5th, 2002
Stephen Talbot writes an astonishing piece about an interview he conducted with Henry Kissinger. (It’s in Salon’s for-subscribers section. Pay ’em the money already!)
Here’s the jaw-dropping ending:
As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question. Something I really wanted to know. “What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?”
“Wouldn’t have mattered very much,” Kissinger muttered. Lights off. No camera recording what he was saying. “If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss.”
Talbot writes vividly about this disgraceful, banal man.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
The following revealing item on Henry Kissinger is extracted from an article from the ‘New World Order Intelligence Update’ [http://www.nwointelligence.com/NEWWORLD.HTM]:
‘And, fellow-Canadians, as a faint echo of the freedoms we have now lost in this once great Dominion, here’s a robust exercise of free speech, fresh from the Mother Country, which is now impossible to imagine in modern Canada!
[Henry Kissinger walks out on Paxman radio program in the U.K. after being asked, among other things, if he felt “like a fraud.” Exchange below, as reported by THE GUARDIAN, 29th June, 1999]
Jeremy Paxman: “It’s been 17 years since the last volume of your memoirs. You said you wanted to let the dust settle but [didn’t you] need the distance in order to rewrite history?”
Dr Kissinger: “No I based these memoirs on documents which were as valid then as they are now.”
Paxman: [describes Kissinger’s claim that he ended the cold war as “farfetched”] “What bothers a lot of people is you seem to ignore the human rights of people within regimes with which you’re trying to establish a balance of power.”
Kissinger: “That’s not correct either.”
Paxman: question about supporting General Pinochet and undermining President Allende in Chile.
Kissinger: “We did not support Pinochet. In what way did we support Pinochet?”
Paxman: “You supported the military regime.”
Kissinger: “After the coup we preferred Pinochet to Allende.”
Paxman: “It doesn’t stop there… You’re on record justifying the [behaviour of the] Chinese government in Tiananmen Square.”
Kissinger:… “I have never supported what the Chinese did in Tiananmen Square.”
Paxman: “Did you feel a fraud for accepting the Nobel Prize [for the Indo-China agreement]?”
Kissinger: “I wonder what you do when you do a hostile interview?”
Paxman: [accuses Kissinger of a “wilful misreading of history”]
Kissinger: “It may be a misreading but it wasn’t wilful.”
Paxman: question about the “hundreds of thousands of people killed in the bombing of Cambodia”.
Kissinger: “That’s absolutely untrue. We have no evidence that hundreds of thousands of people were killed… I think this is an absolute outrage, it’s nonsense.”
Paxman: “You don’t deny [the bombing of Cambodia] was secret though?… This was a secret operation against a neutral country…”
Kissinger: “Come on now, Mr Paxman, this was 15 years ago, and you at least have the ability to educate yourself about a lie on your own programme… ”
Paxman: “What’s factually inaccurate?”
Kissinger: “… That’s outrageous… ” [Kissinger abruptly leaves: Paxman calls out, “‘Bye, Dr. Kissinger”!]’
You’ll also find a superb archive of articles on the New World Order [which is impacting and changing us all increasingly] from the ‘New World Order Intelligence Update’, at http://www.rarehistorybooks.com/NWOCONSP.HTM. They are also mirrored at http://www.survivalistskills.com/NWODICT.HTM and at http://www.torontochristianbooks.com/NWOGOV.HTM. Well worth reading!
You always find the funniest stuff in the web. Just do a “Henry Kissinger” Google search. I did a “‘Henry Kissinger’ interview” search today, and see what I found. One more webpage with witty remarks about Kissinger’s alleged war crimes and his sardonic evil. Intersting the stuff about Paxman too. You can always count on Paxman to go for the right-winger throat. Now some pieces of the truth. And don’t trust me. Go to the sources yourself, as I’ve done (I’m talking about books now, by the way – those things that like bounded printed sheets):
Crap: “As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question… “What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?”… “Wouldn’t have mattered very much,” Kissinger muttered… “If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss.”
Truth: HK says as much in Diplomacy, which has been in print for a very long time now. And he says so many times over. One of the reasons is – neither HK nor Nixon started the Vietnam War. it was North Vietnam. And it was the Johnson (Democratic) administration that concocted the Tonkin Gulf incident (1964), dispatched troops to the country (1965), fucked-up big time with wasteful and pointless search-and-destroy operations (1966-67) and finally defeated the long-awaited guerrilla offensive during the Tet festival (1968). But then every journalist took that as a Vietcong victory, and so did Johnson, who didn’t run for reelection and gave Nixon the chance to run a war neither he nor HK wanted or needed, from 1969 to the US withdrawal in 1972. That’s why HK finds such questioning so amusing. It’s always a pleasure to hit your political opponents with their own weaponry.
Diplomacy is a bulky book, I can understand that the interviewer didn’t read it.
Crap: “hundreds of thousands of people killed in the bombing of Cambodia”.
Truth: We don’t know. Nobody knows. Maybe hundreds of thousands were killed in the jungle, in a country that had then about 5 million inhabitants. But nobody saw hundreds of thousands of bodies, not even thousands. The results of military bombing are normally exagerated in all reports (example: the Kosovo campaing left the Yugoslav army virtually untouched, despite the heavy tonnage involved.) It’s a groundless accusation, with no other evidence than hearsay. People died, because people die in wars. Numbers? Take your pick, but it’s hard to justify that US tactical bombing was so unefficient against the Vietcong and then killed… a 5%-10% of the Cambodian civilian population? Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence.
Crap: “This was a secret operation against a neutral country…”
Truth: The Cambodian bombings were mostly given the green light by the Cambodian anti-communist government in 1970-71, since it was itself unable to deal with the Vietcong. But it didn’t matter: the Geneva convention forces neutrals to ensure that their territory is not used to attack countries at war. In case of non-compliance, it authorizes the country subjected to attack to retaliate against the enemy using neutral territory to stage attacks, whatever the neutral government thinks about it. That is exactly what happened (and what happens almost every month in southern Lebanon). Nixon said it many times, nobody bothered to read the convention. That’s because most pundits use it as a flag or as an unwritten law, not as the written CONVENTION that it is.