Posted on 12/01/2023 5:17:47 AM PST by FarCenter
While leaders around the world remember Henry Kissinger fondly and praise him as a brilliant, hard-driving US statesman, the silence from Latin America is deafening. "A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his moral wretchedness," Chile's ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X, the former Twitter. The envoy posted his acerbic remark after the death Wednesday of Kissinger, who greenlighted the 1973 coup that brought down Chile's elected socialist president and installed the rightwing dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet. Chilean President Gabriel Boric quietly reposted that X message, and the foreign minister said nothing at all about the man who dominated post-World War II US foreign policy and is often associated with "realpolitik" -- diplomacy driven by raw power and a country's self-interest. Kissinger, first as national security adviser and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977), was instrumental in the establishment of ties between the United States and China and in expanding the war in Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos. But he also approved the putsch in which Pinochet overthrew president Salvador Allende, and was key in backing other authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as in Brazil and Nicaragua. For in-depth analysis and a deeper perspective on the life and legacy of Henry Kissinger, FRANCE 24's François Picard is joined by Dr. Jeremi Suri, Historian, Author of "Henry Kissinger and the American Century", Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs and Professor of Public Affairs and History at The University of Texas at Austin's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
Pinochet was one of the few things Kissinger got right.
He was a foolhardy amoral Utopian. He would have fit in perfectly during the French Revolution. And he would have been beheaded.
Chile became a first world country under Pinochet and his conservative successors. It is a model for what Argentina can and should become. As far as Cambodia and Laos goes, the Reds had used them as protected sanctuaries while LBJ was in office. Dr. K and Nixon decided to put qn end to it much to the dismay of the international and domestic left and many of our so-called NATO “allies”.
GMTA
Henry Kissinger represented everything that has been wrong with America in my lifetime. He passed away at the age of 100. Did he ever have a real job in his life?
Lucky you, hahaha. Coulda been a bad situation.
Maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe you’re being watched.
Day and night.
Every single day and night.
J/K
It’s easy to second guess Cold War decisions, but it wasn’t — and isn’t — clear what the right decisions would have been. Follow a hard line and there were negative consequences. Pursue a soft line and there were negative consequences — maybe even more.
Kissinger was a transition between the hard line of Acheson and Dulles and the more mixed and muddled policies of later Secretaries of State, a transition too between the days of America’s global supremacy as World War II’s big winner and the more muddled world of today, when we no longer have that kind of power and confidence. He was bound to make mistakes. Everybody did and does.
The communists were defeated in Chile, and they became the most free and prosperous country in Latin America. Pinochet took on the task of saving the country, and then voluntarily stepped aside.
But current politicians will never admit the debt they owe him, and by extension, to Kissinger. Chile is not Venezuela thanks to them.
“ Pinochet was one of the few things Kissinger got right.”
It was before he was totally corrupted by Chicom money.
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