RIP Henry Kissinger

not really

RIP satire

i came as soon as i heard, obv

sorry for your loss

lmao

we'll always have the memories

clickbait, ILX style

These 12 tricks will let you know if Kissinger is dead!

salivating to write this obit

we're gonna bury him alive, w/ Shakey

What's so criminal about war, anyway?

^^ best Elvis Costello song imo

There has now been an entire century of Henry Kissinger being not-dead.

And I had such hopes when I clicked on this.

I hope Tom Lehrer outlives him.

Happy bday to the big guy!!

fuck off

cruel revive

https://i.imgur.com/ElU837m.png

This thread should be locked until the happy day imo, too disappointing

fuck off
― your original display name is still visible (Left)

You tell him. I'm quite sure those were heartfelt birthday wishes from z_tbd.

i figure left was telling the big guy to fuck off

i also want him to die

If you're right, apologies for my post.

I hope Tom Lehrer outlives him.

― Dan Worsley, Sunday, 28 May 2023 06:41 (thirteen hours ago) link

I want him alive to face trial.

His death is a certainty we can all look forward to. A trial for war crimes? A fond wish never to be fulfilled.

America's captain tom

the only real justice would be reincarnation in some sort of hell realm where he has to endure the suffering and death of every one of his victims for as long as it takes to balance out the universe

but we can and should give every one of his friends and admirers as much hell as possible while they're still on earth

also I'm not saying we should carpet bomb his funeral, but theoretically someone could do such a thing

It will be interesting to see who shows up at his funeral

I would say depressing more than interesting but no one there will actually be a surprise.

There are 5 or so people left aliv3 from the Ford Administration and two of them are Hank and Cheney

lets not wait for natural death
public hanging

Ted Koppel gets the Chotiner treatment.

Samantha Power, who wrote in her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” that Henry Kissinger “had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation,” attends Kissinger’s closed press 100th birthday party at the New York Public Library. https://t.co/so2QWi0y7K

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 6, 2023

itt: soft power

still time for sam to salvage her wrecked rep imo (gom jabbar)

Sunstein just back from his celebrated keynote speech at this weekend’s Dylan conference in Tulsa.

Power and Sunstein are exhibits A and B for the existence of lizard people

Absolute Samantha Power Corrupts Absolutely

It will be interesting to see who shows up at his funeral

Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer...

The "If Books Could Kill" podcast did a two-part episode on Sunstein's book "Nudge" and how it infected the Obama administration

Those episodes made me lose a little respect for Power simply for having married Sunstein.

What is there to celebrate about Henry Kissinger?

That's what I just asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken outside of his predecessor's 100th birthday at the New York Public Library.

No comment. pic.twitter.com/R76WRwa2Oh

— Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) June 6, 2023

The "If Books Could Kill" podcast did a two-part episode on Sunstein's book "Nudge" and how it infected the Obama administration

Koppel: "when he was a young professor at Harvard, he was the first to point out that in the event of a major threat to the interests of the United States, the only available option to us was something that would effectively lead to the destruction of mankind. And it wasn’t until he raised that issue that policy with regard to the use of nuclear weapons changed."

Ted Koppel seems to think Kissinger came up with the idea of mutual assured destruction, which he did not, although Kissinger often encouraged others to think that he did. Kissinger's book he wrote while at Harvard was in favor of using tactical nuclear weapons in all wars.

nudge is the bible of obamaism it's why you still don't have healthcare

Those episodes of If Books Could Kill are a must-listen -- here is a link if you have never heard of the book. You will know more than you ever wanted to know after listening. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0J5g0lRlWheZW6ogmi9Vne?si=cb98f79ee35a4ca0

I love IBCK. Everything Michael Hobbes does is great.

lol the one thing i dislike abt IBCK is that hobbes leaves me feeling very muddleheaded and not nearly ruthless or rigorous enough as an editor when vetting my various authors' arguments

(admittedly i work on books abt e.g. the bee gees where the argument is "they rule!")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BBkOUA37g

i don't know the experience of other Gen Xers but when i was growing up the whole image of kissinger was as this avuncular pop culture figure who was famous for being famous, he was just a guy who'd show up everywhere, whose past was a bit murky to us kids, but he was presented as this harmless owl-like kind of wry comic figure. kind of like the ben stein of geopolitics (growing up as i did not knowing that ben stein himself was the ben stein of geopolitics in some ways.)

but that pop culture stuff felt over for eons, so one thing that soured me on stephen colbert was when he did a comedy sketch w/HK a decade or so back, long after his legacy was more widely disseminated among the casual public.

His public image was definitely shinier back in the 70s. Most of his crimes were classified or ignored. He got credit for ending the Vietnam War (lol) and keeping drunk Nixon from blowing up the world. He was a witty dinner guest, which is all that matters in corridors of power.

As a millennial I had no idea who he was really until I started reading abt the Vietnam War in high school. At that point, my teens, the consensus seemed very much to be "fuck this piece of shit." But I have a very liberal family.

I shudder to think how in retrospect at least Nixon muttered about peace while Kissinger loudly gossiped about dinner guests.

The first time I heard of him is when I was in third or fourth grade and drew a picture of my dad that he complained made him look like Henry Kissinger.

My intro to Nixon and Kissinger (and the ‘70s in general) came from Doonesbury collections I’d read in the back room at my mom’s job.

I should have spent more time with Bloom County.

Oh my God

kissinger yankees commercial oh my god (watch to the end) pic.twitter.com/sG66sxwaEU

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas2) November 30, 2023

i used to have a tape dub of "monty python's contractual obligation album", which i think was my first impression of kissinger. later, i knew of him as a regular attendee at studio 54. these days i mostly just think of the Blood Telegram, which turns out to be called that because it was written by a guy named Blood. henry kissinger: too evil for Etrigan

Welp here we go ...

Statement from President Biden on the Passing of Henry Kissinger
I’ll never forget the first time I met Dr. Kissinger. I was a young Senator, and he was Secretary of State—giving a briefing on the state of the world. Throughout our careers, we often disagreed. And often strongly. But from that first briefing -- his fierce intellect and profound strategic focus was evident. Long after retiring from government, he continued to offer his views and ideas to the most important policy discussion across multiple generations. Jill and I send our condolences to his wife Nancy, his children Elizabeth and David, his grandchildren, and all those who loved him.

The fury about Kissinger is more broadly a repudiation of the idea that public figures should be civically revered in a non-partisan fashion because they are old and were once important irrespective of what they actually did. It is a repudiation of Washington.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) November 30, 2023

Pretty non-committal from Biden (e.g. "...he continued to offer his views..."). No way was the official statement going to be a wholesale condemnation of K's war crimes, but in this case non-committal works well enough in terms of 'damning with faint praise'.

Yeah, that's very "We knew him, of course we knew him, and he kept hanging around for decades." I mean, the phrase "he continued to offer his views" is plenty damning if you speak Washington.

"he talked us to death at the holiday party"

the idea that if you belong to the circle of power you simply have to acknowledge the humanity of a Kissinger is just another way of demonstrating your cowardice and your contempt for all the people he actually murdered. to play the game, even with mealy-mouthed caution, is still a moral choice. i don't think Biden gets points for that, and fuck Biden and everybody else who's played that game

Otm, very much “wow the sassy Queen is owning the Tories by the colour of her hat as she reads out their policy agenda about starving the poor 🥰🥰🥰”

He didn't have to say anything

yeah, i think that would've been a bit less contemptible

Has Trump made a statement?

They love to use phrases like "fierce intellect", just absolutely value-neutral nothingness, because one can't praise him on his humanity.

Anyone who invested in Theranos forfeits any “fierce intellect” accolades forever.

it’d be extremely weird for the president not to say something that that’s probably as close as we’ll get to “fuck that guy, guess he had a family and they feel bad”we’ll get short of Trump’s statements

I am pleased to learn that Tom Lehrer survived Kissinger. But if he has a social media presence I haven't found it.

He has a website via which he released all his songs into the public domain a few years ago

https://tomlehrersongs.com

also Kissinger’s body should lie in state indefinitely behind a little curtain, so people can shit on it

But think of the smell. Lock his sycophants in with it.

OK, I just saw Biden's statement re Kissinger juxtaposed with his statement on the death of Jimmy Buffett, and now I'm laughing really hard. Hope the image embeds work:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:mivey63nzylfflvmmjoqcf6u/bafkreic3zcvey4pq4rrtrzjacytys6vmqxbz6zbxnr6tbohgc2n7dgklv4@jpeg

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:mivey63nzylfflvmmjoqcf6u/bafkreif2ij6sxqfb3dxiwlqbpibwptvebh3vf6ehnpnzgnjyn3updkuh2u@jpeg

He should've kept the Kissinger statement to that last sentence and nothing more.

Buffett's is fine.

Everybody hates this guy.

Tfw you’re an epic anti imperialist leftist who works for *checks notes* John Fetterman https://t.co/YEjRAQLwK7 pic.twitter.com/yzzBSeKx7k

— Gaza blog in bio (@comrade_sweezy) November 30, 2023

I still do like the Bourdain quote but not the arsehole who is tweeting it. Bourdain really did hate him, he said on his travels he saw Kissinger's deadly legacy first hand. There are still millions of unexploded bombs in Laos and they are still killing people.

Yeah it's a great quote. That was just about the guy using it with a lol at that picture.

total dork trying to look cool!

you can cosplay as a radical when you for pro-genocide senator - but ppl will take the piss!

*work*

why is he dressed like an extra from Panic In Needle Park

The club bids farewell to a dear Juventus friend and a true Italian football fan, Henry Kissinger. pic.twitter.com/N0emHrQYSD

— JuventusFC 🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@juventusfcen) December 1, 2023

Strange, would have thought Lazio.

Nah, it would have to be Juventus, everybody else hates them in Italy.

I think the wanker just liked being schmoozed by any big club who'd throw freebie corporate box tickets at him. But can he cut it as the celebrity war criminal guest on a rainy night in Stoke?

Deputy of the French assembly showing the correct way to eulogize Kissinger

http://x.com/Deputee_Obono/status/1730125343254593793?s=20

https://x.com/Deputee_Obono/status/1730125343254593793?s=20

sorry for doublepost

Rest In Piss, Henry Pissinger

he would enjoy that too much I expect

Henry Kissinger liberated my grandfather’s concentration camp. He went on to oversee the mass murder of innocent civilians himself. His life was proof that firsthand experience of human atrocity does not lead one to eschew it. https://t.co/bd1StkW7fo

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) December 1, 2023

Leave it to Chotiner

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-washington-couldnt-quit-kissinger

Richard Haas, a frequent "Morning Joe" guest, is the most abysmal sort of person.

It Could Happen Here celebrate his death but also get into why Chinese leadership is expressing such sorrow. The episode winds up being an interesting history of the Communist Party of Party and the details of the Sino/Soviet split, which is where things opened up to the Nixon Administration.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/the-henry-kissinger-is-dead-episode-132090388/

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/persona-grata

The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism. (‘American idealism… had defeated itself with its own weapons’ is the sentiment repeated ad infinitum in his books and memoirs). The ironies here were multiple. The first was that a country led by hard-nosed statesmen running from Teddy Roosevelt to Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon was somehow beholden to pussy-footing idealists in need of a dose of German Realpolitik, as if America’s ruling class had never not been perfectly ruthless in pursuit of its interests. It was, in fact, widely admired for this in the alleged ‘realist’ heartland. ‘We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery’, the New Republic editor Walter Weyl recalled being told by a Berlin professor during the First World War. ‘You Americans understand it far too well to talk about it’. ‘As a German making remarks about American imperialism’, Carl Schmitt gushed, ‘I can only feel like a beggar in rags speaking about the riches and treasures of foreigners’. As Baudrillard once said of French Theory, German Realpolitik was like the Statue of Liberty: a gift from the Old Continent that the Americans neither wanted nor needed.... It may be a while before Kissinger is seen in proportion: an unusually good student of the moods, and faithful servant of the interests, of his country’s elite.

(In some rare contrast, Biden’s words of condolence to Kissinger’s family read like the Beltwayese for ‘fuck off’.)

if only

Still dead, but also cooking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTtZ12XtQpg