A Quick Word on the Death of Henry Kissinger
RIP to the 20th century's most important, complex figure.
Henry Kissinger has died at 100 years old. His death, among a certain cohort of the terminally online, was an event waiting to be celebrated (despite those cheering not having been affected by his actions or even alive when he was at his peak of power).
Kissinger was an uncharged war criminal; a man who used the United States as a weapon to defeat ideological foes, and felt that an obscenely high level of civilian casualty was tolerable as, if their foes won, the cost would be even higher. He committed evil acts.
In the hindsight of history, his actions were not simply excessive but utterly unnecessary. Communism was not a global force, threatening to tear down the world, but a loose coalition of troubled states, destined to implode, whose reputations were inflated by Jane Foster and assorted other hippies.
But we only know this in hindsight.
At the time, it was difficult to say whether this was true, and even if communism was destined to collapse, what it would take with it. Kissinger only had the information in front of him, and just as we ignore that Churchill acted on information that the Nazis were most likely going to win the war, and thus made decisions we wouldn’t sanction, we can dismiss the threat of global communism because, to us, it was always going to lose. Kissinger didn’t know that; and his life was shaped by those who said not to worry about rising forces that soon almost destroyed the world.
His father did not fear the rise of the Nazis. Sure, they said stuff about Jews, but the Kissingers were proud Germans, part of their local community, and this brief rage would fizzle. They would be fine. Most of his Jewish neighbours, relatives, and friends felt the same way; and they were massacred for their naïve optimism. After the war, as a private in the US Army intelligence service — where he would hunt down surviving Gestapo — he would visit concentration camps and see where and how he would have died. It was his mother’s decisive cynicism that saved him; and shaped him.
Many will ignore this; say that you are humanizing a villain; say that this is unnecessary prologue and you just have to judge the man on his actions. But judge his actions with the information and experience he had available, and they’re harder to wrestle with than the simple version put out on social media.
Kissinger made many evil choices, treating the Kurds like pawns, viewing democracy as a weak door to fascism, and treating civilian casualties as an unavoidable tragic necessity of defence.
But he was not an evil man. He was a genius in diplomacy, a brilliant thinker (who was insightful inside and outside of his direct experience, co-writing a great book last year, titled ‘The Age of AI’), and motivated by a defence of the freedoms and values we all hold dear. The difference is that he viewed them as ends to defend, not values to guide actions; and he did so because he’d seen that liberal values are ultimately crushed when put against fascist boots.
Properly understood, Kissinger should not be loathed or loved, but learned from. If you want to do so, Niall Ferguson and Walter Isaacson have great biographies on him, but one of my favourite books of all time is Barry Gewen’s The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World.
It is one of the core books that have shaped the way I think, along with Ordinary Men, Strangers Drowning, and Against Empathy.
The tragedy of Henry Kissinger is that, given the same background, faced with the same decisions, I do not believe a better man would have acted any differently. I do not believe a better person would have made better decisions that he did.
Rest in Peace.