If you haven’t received the text yet, rest assured that Henry Kissinger—Nixon-era Secretary of State and war criminal—is finally dead at 100. In Rolling Stone’s clear-eyed obituary, writer Spencer Akerman correctly assesses Kissinger’s contribution to the global Cold War death toll as massive, needless, and unfathomably cruel.
“The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow,” writes Akerman, “estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people.”
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With this in mind, queer people aren’t sad to see the centenarian go. Today on social media, queer historians are remembering the worst of Kissinger’s behavior: something we should remember before trying to gloss over it in favor of protecting the presumed respectability of someone who caused unprecedented amounts of pain and suffering in Indonesia, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Chile.
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Let’s start with some bad behavior, i.e. the time Kissinger, questioned about his sexuality, attempted to choke a woman to death.
It’s also important to remember that Kissinger, a Jewish man, was self-hating and ashamed of his heritage, and even went so far as to blame Jewish people for their own historic persecution.
He wasn’t even respectful of his own soldiers…
He was a war criminal, plain and simple.
Perhaps the late Anthony Bourdain said it best.
We have every reason to rejoice…and we will!
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