[/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
THE REAL HARVARD SCANDAL: A HENRY A. KISSINGER PROFESSORSHIP OF
STATECRAFT AND WORLD ORDER
[[link removed]]
Carolyn Eisenberg
February 6, 2024
Common Dreams
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ Beyond the war crimes that impacted untold millions, perhaps
Kissinger’s most abiding legacy was this: the failure of
accountability. _
Former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger attends the American
Academy's award ceremony at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, Germany,
January 21, 2020. , Reuters-Yonhap
As conservative pundits cry crocodile tears over the alleged decline
of excellence and integrity at Harvard, symbolized by former
University President Claudine Gay, there’s a more significant
scandal worth addressing. Recently announced by the University is the
Henry A. Kissinger Professorship of Statecraft and World Order
[[link removed]].
As specified in the job description, a successful candidate “will be
a distinguished analyst of diplomacy, strategy and statecraft,” and
have an “excellent record of academic achievement and of
contributing to public policy debate on how to build a stable
international order.” The presumption is that the late Henry
Kissinger exemplified these virtues.
Over the past five decades, the evidence has steadily accumulated that
Kissinger was a secretive, fiercely competitive, habitually dishonest,
ruthless promoter of American dominance in the world, irrespective of
the cost to tens of millions of people. His policy recommendations
regarding Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia were as destabilizing, as they were cruel. Some of these
human rights calamities must surely be known by the authorities at
Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Yet at Harvard—as for numerous U.S. institutions and mainstream
media—Kissinger’s crimes and failed policies were of no
consequence. Certainly not a reason to preclude a named chair, an
honored spot-on TV news, a special column for the _Washington Post_,
or invitations to the White House and State Department.
No matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended
policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American
hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with
it.
Henry Kissinger played an instrumental role in a surprisingly long
list of international tragedies. However, it is worth remembering that
in none of these cases, did he act alone. Most of his recommendations
were offered in tandem with Presidents Nixon and Ford, and were for
the most part in line, with the preferences of people in the
“national security” bureaucracies, notably the CIA and military.
Most unusual was Kissinger’s public face during the time he held
public office and afterward. In the early Nixon presidency, he lost no
opportunity to be in front of a camera, and after the Nixon White
House became shadowed by Watergate, Kissinger’s media omnipresence
was an administration asset.
In the decades that followed, Kissinger remained prominent, writing
thousands of pages of self-justification, offering theories of
international relations, and often dispensing unwise advice—notably
his vocal support for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in
2003.
The Vietnam War was of course the “original sin.” Although
Kissinger readily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to
negotiate the 1973 Paris Peace agreement, he knew it to be fraudulent:
once all U.S. military forces departed Vietnam, the fighting would
resume, with Hanoi the likely victor.
So long as government records remained classified, it was possible to
imagine that Kissinger was the author of
“Vietnamization”—Nixon’s policy of removing large increments
of U.S. troops, while handing over greater responsibility for the
fighting to the South Vietnamese. Yet ironically, this was the one
Nixon policy, which Kissinger opposed. His disdain for the South
Vietnamese government and its army (ARVN) was ongoing. And by contrast
to Nixon, and some other administration colleagues he was undeterred
by the sacrifice of American soldiers. His advice was habitually in
the service of escalation when it came to Cambodia, Laos, the bombing
of North Vietnamese cities, and the more aggressive use of U.S. air
power in the South.
This blood-stained history returns us to Harvard’s morally obtuse
decision to create a Chair in his honor. Indeed, this perhaps is
Kissinger’s most abiding legacy: _the failure of accountability. _No
matter how much harm you cause, or how unwise your recommended
policies, if you inhabit a certain stratum in the American
hierarchy—and have made yourself a celebrity—you can get away with
it.
This personal story exemplifies the more far-reaching phenomenon: the
failure of the United States to ever take responsibility for the human
suffering it has caused in other nations, or to affect the
institutional changes which might prevent this. Here we are once
again: giving billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as its
military massacres thousands of defenseless Palestinian women and
children. Many young Americans find this incomprehensible.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.
Carolyn Eisenberg
[[link removed]]
Carolyn Eisenberg is a professor of U.S. history and american foreign
policy at Hofstra University. She is the author of the recently
published Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast
Asia.(Oxford University Press). She is a Co-Founder of Brooklyn for
Peace.
Full Bio > [[link removed]]
* Henry Kissinger; Harvard University; Vietnam;
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web
[/contact/submit_to_xxxxxx?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [/faq?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Manage subscription [/subscribe?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Visit xxxxxx.org [/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=]
Twitter [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
[link removed]
To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
