Ask Lemmy

He made the ruling class a ton of money. Here's just a few things he did...

Kissinger sabotaged peace talks in Vietnam: He leaked information to Nixon’s campaign in 1968 to prevent a deal between Johnson and Hanoi, prolonging the war for four more years and killing millions of people.

Kissinger orchestrated the coup in Chile: He supported the overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, and backed the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and killed thousands of dissidents and implemented neoliberal policies that harmed the majority of Chileans.

Kissinger enabled genocide and repression: He ignored or encouraged the atrocities committed by U.S. allies in Bangladesh, East Timor, Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere, and participated in Operation Condor, a campaign of assassinations of left-wing activists across Latin America.

Kissinger expanded U.S. bombing and intervention: He secretly bombed Cambodia and Laos, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide. He also set the precedent for U.S. presidents to bomb countries without congressional or public oversight, as seen in the War on Terror.

Kissinger was celebrated by the U.S. elite: He received praise and awards from presidents, politicians, journalists, and academics, who admired his geopolitical strategy and ignored or justified his crimes. He was also an informal adviser to several administrations, including Bush and Obama

On one hand, Kissinger was undoubtedly effective at achieving America's foreign policy goals and was undoubtedly one of the most influential Secretaries of State in US history. Unfortunately on the other hand, his brand of "realpolitik"--working pragmatically towards concrete policy objectives without concern for ethics or ideology--meant doing things that prolonged and worsened wars, knowingly propped up autocrats and dictators, etc.

Objectively speaking, Kissinger was a powerful diplomat who accomplished a lot of what he set out to do. At the same time, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and a lot of us can only look back and judge him harshly for the long term effects of his decisions. Kissinger is the perfect example of a person who is highly intelligent and objectively effective at what they do, but because he had so little concern for simple human concepts like right and wrong, it's hard to look back at any of his "achievements" today with anything other than harsh judgement and disdain for the soulless husk of a man.

He made the ruling class richer at the cost of normal people's lives

There’s a very good podcast called Behind the Bastards that did an extremely expansive profile on him covering (iirc) his childhood to his retirement.

I imagine the guys selling bombs and guns must've loved a fella who wanted to make use of them, for one obvious group.

Tl; dr: a number of people who achieved power owed that power to Kissinger. Power and money.

His use was that by his nature of wanting to create as much misery and mayham around the world as one person could possibly do, he created a lot of wealth for a lot of people attached to the military industrial complex.

While his later years were definitely marked with controversy and dumb to the point of evil decisions, he made decisions in earlier presidencies that without a doubt were helpful. You gotta understand this time period was what bought him the credence he used to get people to trust his later decisions.

Decisions we now universally regret.

It was useful for the American Empire, which isn't there to serve the American people, but their oligarchs instead: the people that own the oil companies and suppliers to the military. Whenever a country decided they wanted to control their own natural resources, a coup would happen.

I don’t even know who that is, and I was surprised to see so many posts seemingly celebrating someone’s death

Beau talked about this in his latest video