The Trial of Henry Kissinger Book

A long essay that seeks to do precisely what the title suggests: build a legal case for crimes against humanity against Henry Kissinger. Those expecting the literary ornamentation that Hitchens is known for will be mostly disappointed. This is more like a hard-nosed legal brief. The book points to a lot of smoke in Kissinger's individual behavior, though in my view the only chapters that definitively uncover fire are the ones on Indochina and East Timor. This is a whirlwind tour of bad acts around the world and presumes a high degree of prior knowledge.

Although Hitchens effectively makes the case that Kissinger was a bad guy, the book actually made me wonder why he alone should be singled out as prime villain. Kissinger was part of a long-running enterprise of state terrorism of which he was only one bombastic, arrogant and thoughtless player. This is really a condemnation of an empire and a ruling class that thinks nothing of smashing the lives of a few hundred thousand of people if some short-term benefit can (maybe) be gleaned form it. That is what Kissinger did, but I don't find him to be such an exceptional outlier among American statesman. He probably falls somewhere below the median of morality for his class, but he didn't ' couldn't ' exist in a vacuum. Kissinger was the product of a system that allowed him to get away with the murders of people in Laos and Cambodia, even the needless expenditure of U.S. servicemen, because they were deemed unimportant. Maybe this makes the United States no worse than other states or empires, but it also belies its insistent emotional claims to being better.

One important point Hitchens makes is that Kissinger was guilty by the United States own standards that it set during the World War II-era Tokyo War Crimes trials. Nevertheless he is somehow still alive and free after all these years. Kissinger is by no means unwelcome in Washington DC today. That should tell you some hard truths about the ruling class of which he is a part. It should also suggest something about what that they have been up to in the world since he exited the stage.