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Henry Kissinger Celebrates 100th Anniversary Expanding a Broken Myth

  • May 28, 2023
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From intellectual, statesman, brilliant negotiator and Nobel Peace Prize winner to cynical, arrogant, selfish and war criminal. Or maybe all at once. Henry Kissinger, the man who was

Henry Kissinger Celebrates 100th Anniversary Expanding a Broken Myth

From intellectual, statesman, brilliant negotiator and Nobel Peace Prize winner to cynical, arrogant, selfish and war criminal. Or maybe all at once. Henry Kissinger, the man who was almost everything in the United States, turns 100 on Saturday, expanding on his own myth, though it is increasingly being questioned.

Decades ago, the former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977) holds no public office, but the long shadow of the most famous diplomat of the 20th century continues to this day.

Whether it’s the war in Ukraine or artificial intelligence, the centennial Kissinger continues to speak his mind with enviable clarity because many ask him to, because he loves to be in the spotlight and perhaps also clean up a legacy full of chiaroscuro.

And the fact is that he is haunted by the notoriety that he promoted a foreign policy that was so pragmatic that it did not take into account moral considerations.

“50 years ago, on his fiftieth birthday, he was celebrated as one of the most revered Americans,” Professor Thomas Schwartz reminds EFE. “But this is no longer the case, history and historians were not entirely kind to him,” the author of the biography also adds.Henry Kissinger and American power.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger He was born on May 27, 1923 in Fürth, Germany, to a Jewish family that had come to New York to escape Nazism when he was still a teenager.

With a thick German accent and speaking English, this Harvard graduate has always denied that a traumatic childhood left a mark on him for life, but many disagree.

University of Texas professor Jeremy Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, believes that “to be Jewish refugeeHe was always very concerned about chaos and wanted to bring order to the world.”

“He also believes that the United States is a superior nation that should play a special role,” Suri said in a statement to EFE.

Kissinger, who, according to his acquaintances, is not distinguished by modesty, wants to be remembered as an architect détente policy towards the Soviet Union who changed the course of the Cold War, as an architect of normalization of relations with China, and as an intellectual who stopped the spread of nuclear weapons.

He wants to go down in history as a great middle east mediatorand the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Vietnam War.

But he doesn’t want to be reminded or to be reminded that, unlike him, his award-winning Vietnamese partner Le Duc Tho returned the Nobel Prize because conflict continued in his country after the Paris Accords.

I would also like him to support dictatorships such as those in Argentina and Spain, his role in Operation Condor to crush left-wing Latin American opponents, or for many his hands to be bloodied for his support. coup against Salvador Allende. “We cannot let Chile go down the drain,” he declared in 1970.

“Kissinger didn’t care about dictatorships. In fact, he liked them if they sided with the United States and kept communism outside of Latin America,” explains Mario Del Pero, historian at Sciences Po Paris and author of the biography The Eccentric Realist.

“In a country that has lost its political and moral north due to Vietnam WarKissinger delivered a clear and unambiguous message: morality is not made for international relationshipshe adds.

Even a “best-selling” journalist Christopher Hitchens in 2001 accused him of war crimes for his actions in Cambodia, East Timor or Chile; unthinkable criticism in the 70s when Kissinger was the most popular man in the country.

EFE

Source: Aristegui Noticias

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