Thursday Open Thread

8 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. Ding Dong the witch is dead. Kissinger Still Dead at 100.

   To dance on the cynic's grave (cynical means he KNOWS he's lying, but does it on purpose.):

   I remember the "secret" bombing of Laos. Well, it wasn't secret from the people being bombed, it was secret from the American people.

   I also remember September 11, 1973 and Kissinger's support for the terrorist military dictatorship of Chile. "I'm not going to stand by while a country elects a socialist out of the stupidity of its own people".

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   1. Many still consider Kissinger a war criminal, based solely on his body count.

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      1. 

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   2. A Tortured and Deadly Legacy; Henry Kissinger & Realpolitik. Jarrod Hayes via TPM and ProPublica

      Here is a less polemical but no less critical discussion of Henry Kissinger's legacy.

      Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023, at age 100, exercised more than 50 years of influence on American foreign policy.

      I am a scholar of American foreign policy who has written on Kissinger’s service from 1969 to 1977 as national security adviser and secretary of state under the Nixon and Ford administrations. I have seen how his foreign policy views and actions played out for good and, mostly, for ill.

      When Kissinger entered government as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, he espoused a narrow perspective of the national interest, known as “realpolitik,” primarily centered on maximizing the economic and military power of the United States.

      This power- and transactionalist-oriented approach to foreign policy produced a series of destructive outcomes. They ranged from fomenting coups that put in place murderous dictatorships, as in Chile, to killing unarmed civilians, as in Cambodia, and alienating potential allies, as in India.

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      1. Kissinger was no more of a war criminal than any other US president or national level advisor since FDR and World War II. Yes, the record is mixed. But there was a strong sense of fear of “communism” and “socialism” beginning in the 1930s. Few people today know that the US ran guns and other kit to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh during 1943-45. FDR and Truman then made the mistake of allowing the French to return to Indochina, followed by war for independence. Eisenhower sent the first US military advisors to “Nam,” with Kennedy susequently adding more. Ya’ll know the rest of the story.

         Kissinger’s biggest mistake, I think, was his suspicion of the socialist led Portuguese revolution and then de-colonization in 1974-5. Vietnam was still fresh in the national memory. Indonesia had “purged itself” of Communists in 1965. The US and Australia gave a quiet “nod” to Indonesia to take over East Timor from a growing, but mostly peaceful, nationalist movement there. Portugal, pre-occupied with the independence of its 5 African colonies, didn’t have enough military in Timor to keep the Indonesians out. The Timor native colonial soldiers, well trained by Portugal, bled the Indonesians for several years against overwhelming odds. Eventually they were wiped out and around 100,000 Timorese died for various reasons during the 24 years of Indonesian occupation.  

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2. I think it has already been reported, but login status appears to depend on which thread you are on. From my iPad, it wouldn’t let me login from the homepage. It accepted my login credentials, and then just sat there with the login button greyed out.

   However, moving to reply to another’s comment I was prompted to login, which I did successfully. I decided not to reply, and cancelled my reply, which also logged me out. FYI, indentation of replies work in Chrome on my Windows PC, but not on the iPad with Safari.

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   1. I got it working on my iPhone by dragging down the browser screen to reveal the refresh. (I use Chrome)

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3. I lived in Chile 1965-66 as a child and in 1973 lost many friends, father was a spanish and portuguese professor and we housed a fellow professsor to protect him from being a statistic. 

   Kissinger executed what Nixon allowed and murdered innocents and deposed a democratically elected socialist who was NOT a communist and unwrapped the Nazi’s who were hiding until then in Argentina and Chile. 

   Burn in hell you creepy opportunist who escaped Hitler and pulled up the ladder in the 70’s. 

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