The Henry Kissinger is Dead Episode

Jewish statesmen. So yeah, Henry Kissinger was a towering intellect, diplomat and practitioner who, not without controversy, he helped shape American foreign policy with a lasting impact worldwide. A refugee from Nazi Germany and the first Jewish Secretary of State, he was unapologetic about his heritage and his embrace of the importance of American global power and democratic values. Which I like that they call him a practitioner, just a funny thing to say.

Like there is some hateful ship on x dot com and sadly it's in my replies.

country is China. And on the country, not only is China not celebrating the death of Henry Kissinger, China is quite possibly the most popular American in the history of China to this day. Like right now, if you went and pulled like the favorability rating of like every famous American you can think of, the person with the highest

rating is almost certainly going to be Henry Kissinger. And you know, I mean, and this is this is and this is not just a sort of like a popular thing, although again he is enormously popular among ordinary Chinese people. This is a thing that goes from the state down Xi Jinping. He's actually, weirdly one of the last world leaders to talk to Kissinger. So Kissinger went to visit China in July, and him and Jijinping have this like

great heartfelt reunion. They have a time. Chijinping says, quote, the Chinese people never forget their old friends, and Sino US relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger. In the wake of Kissinger's death, the Chinese government said, from Reuter's quote, Kissinger made historic contributions to the normalization of China US relations, and Chinese people will forever remember him for his quote sincere devotion and important contributions,

Wang added. The Chinese Premier and the Foreign Minister also sent messages of condolences to Kissinger's family and to Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln. So he is getting like he is getting as good a reception in China as any American has ever gotten. And if you can understand how this came to be, how like every other country in the region fucking hates Kissinger like everyone else despises him.

And if you can understand why China, why he is like the most popular American in Chinese history, you can understand the entire arc of the twentieth century and how we ended up with the horror that we all live in today. But first, speaking of the horrors that we all live in today, is.

the Soviets basically rebuilt the Nationalist Party from the ground up. Yeah, the Nationalists have turned into a juggernaut they have there, they have swept aside like every warlord army. They face their marching triophant across the country, and ahead of their advance, a massive uprising led by the communists finally drives the warlords out of Shanghai. The Chinese working class stands victorious. They and they alone stand triumphant over the greatest city

in China. It is the last time they will control this city for forty years. The new leader of the Nationalist Party is shan Kai shak Our proto fastist drug lord who the Soviets for some inexplicable reason thought was going to work for them and was going to like build a socialist state at China. Deeply unclear why they thought this. I don't know. Don't have Stalin running your foreign policy.

Chinese workers and peasants. Basically like the entire you know, like like basically the entire urban Chinese left dies in this like like the in this slaughter, and with them dies basically the entire internationalist wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

Because the internationalist wing, the wing that had you know, very close connections to Moscow, were all like in Shanghai, and they were all but they were most importantly not that they were all literally in Shanghai, but they were all part of the urban Communist Party and they get just completely wiped out. And this is the part of the Shanghai o Rising that for our purposes is important because it's the first moment where the rift between the

Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party begins to form. Now, in the wake of the Shanghai massacre, Stalin sends the CCP instructions that are just nonsense, like he's telling them to stay aligned with the Nationalist Party, but to oppose Shang Kai Sheck. Like literally there's descriptions of the meeting when like this this telegram comes in, the CCP leaders

are like sitting around this thing is radio. They're sitting around this radio and they get the they like they get the instructions and they're just like these people are just burying their hands in their face because like this is nothing, it is nonsense, and you know, and this is sort of this is that's like the last gasp of the old Communist Party leadership. Those people are just gone, and in their place rises Mao. Now Mao is not

from the urban wing of the party. He is from like he's Mao is a peasant organizer, right, He's from the whirl wing, and his wing of the party tends to be more nationalists and less sort of like subservient to Moscow than the urban wing of the party. And with Stalin basically getting the entire urban Communist Party and like every other urban leftist in the country killed, you know, the people that are left are Mao and the sort of peasant organizations who have a distrust of the Soviets

that they're going to maintain for basically their entire lives. Now, obviously relations between the CCP and Stalin improve as like World War two happens, but there's a basically the moment the war ends, there's a series of incidents that sort of strained relations. One is that this is less an incident. But Stalin seems to not have thought that the CCP was gonna win the war, like he seems to have

thought that the nationalists are going to beat them. And one of the things that he does is basically de industrializes Japan's giant industrial belt and occupied Ventchuria. This is a completely intact industrial belt. It is one of the largest like intact industrial belts in the world, and Stalin, like in classic Soviet fashion, takes the factories, takes them apart, puts them on trains, and ships them across the sorry to rebuild the Soviet economy.

continuous fighting and the after the war. China's industrial base in this is nineteen forty nine, right, their industrial base is smaller than Russia's in nineteen seventeen, which is just nuts, it is and this is small, yeah, and this is the conditions that the everything, the entire course of twenty century Chinese history are defined by these conditions, right, and these specific conditions are this is basically a production bottleneck, right,

And I've talked about this on the show before. This is one of the sort of most important things in twentieth century Chinese political economy is that, you know, the CCP is trying to simultaneously expand its agricultural production to feed people and also expand its industrial capacity. It's mostly

trying to expand it to its industrial capacity. The problem is they can't expand their industrial capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity, and they can't expand their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity. And their attempt just blow through this by like mass use of human labor is the

great lead board. It's a complete catastrophe. Right, This is just gonna fuck Like whatever like intentions like the Chinese Revolution had, this is just going to fuck them because the combination of this and their ideology is just going to doom the entire project. And you know this and so the other thing about this period, the Soviets are really really patronizing, like they talk about like constantly and like diplomatic things, like they talk about the Soviet like

the Chinese is like their younger brothers. There's like this weird like thing going on. This isn't enough to substantially threaten their alliance, but the relationship between the USSR and China is never as it's never quite as firm as people think it is. Now the thing that really like kickstarts the break between the USSR and China is Khrushchev's

secret speech denouncing Stalin. So this gets like leaked. Krushchev makes the speech for he was like, wow, Stalin did some fucked up stuff they called the personality was bad actually, and this pisses off an enormous number of peoples. Mau Forever like problems malhas with Stalin. He takes a very hard line on this where he's like, no, I'm like this. The Soviets are now revisionists. They have abandoned the path of Marcus Leninism. I am now the only anti revisionist

in the world. And you know, and this whole thing like results in these worstening relations between China and the Soviet Union, with the CCP basically calling the Soviets like weak neck bureaucratic social imperialists and the Soviets looking at like the great leap forward and being like, what are these maniacs doing? And this tension escalates to the sixties is both sides start massing troops on the Chinese Soviet border.

Now meanwhile, so so okay, the sixties goes on and control of the Soviet Union has fallen to Leoned Breshnev, who is an absolute maniac, deeply weird, deeply not very good guy, and he, in response to the Council Communist uprising in Prague nineteen sixty eight, Breshnev rolls tanks in kills everyone and then declares the Breshnev Doctrine, in which Breshnev claims the right to overthrow any socialist government who the Soviets decided we're trying to become capitalists, which I mean,

this is the Soviet's right like that that what that actually means is that they don't align with USSR. So Breshnev means this to be about Eastern Europe, right, Mao looks at this and goes, oh shit, Breshnev is going to try to overthrow me. And this does not go well. So and you know, I know that thing he's looking at it, he's looking at like the Soviet troops massing on the border, and he's like, oh shit. And this

is where things get absolutely wild. In nineteen sixty nine, there are a giant series of border skirmishes between this between Soviet and Chinese troops. People are killing each other across this enormous This is like continent side border. People are like like like companies of Chinese and Soviet troops are like firing artillery at each other. Everyone is completely

losing their minds. And this is actually like one of the reasons why like every once in a while you'll get these things from the Himalayas and China's border with India, where everyone's like hitting each other with sticks. And the reason you're hitting each other with sticks is that like the Chinese were like, wait, hold on, it's actually a bad idea to have guys with guns on the border of a nuclear power.

trained in guerrilla warfare. And there's second problem is that the Chinese population is to disperse for them to all be killed by the Soviet nuclear weapons. And the CCP makes the same assessment, and it's like, Okay, if we fight this war, like the human wave attacks are just going to eventually are going to crush them. We're going to use force numbers that can't kill us all with nukes.

So the Soviets plan for this is they are like drawing up plans to line the border with China with nuclear land mines to stop the chese.

the nuke. The other side, it's everyone is everyone is completely losing their minds, and you know, so at this point, like both sides kind of back down because both of them realized that, like, fighting this war is the stupidest thing that anything could possibly do, because there's there's like there is there was a little tiny shred of sanity left in both sides. That's like, do we like actually

what to have a nuclear war? And they're like no, okay, But this marks the permanent solidification of what's called the Sino Soviet split. And do you know what else is it is? It is a Sino Soviet split. It's the split between the part of the episode that's ads and the part of the episode that's episode.

ten grand. Know all, if you spend one thousand dollars and in ten years you could be getting ten grand from Pit Cabbage, And that sounds like that sounds like a great deal.

of China. But you know, if and this is this is the origin of one of Kissinger's most famous crimes, which is Operation search Light, which is Pakistan's genocide and Bangladesh. They kill about three million people. If you want to really detailed account of this, go listen to the Behind

the Baskets episodes. The short version of this is that Pakistan has been a Chinese ally for a while for a lot of reasons, one of which is China's antagonism with India, which peaked in nineteen sixty two when China just straight up invaded and He's beeded border region, conquered it and then like handed Nehru his ass in the process of what became known as a Sino Indian war.

And this is an incredible betrayal. By the way, like Nehru, who was the Prime Minister of India, Nehru had turned down a permanent seat on the UN Security Council because because he was being given the seat as a way to make sure China didn't get it, and he turned it.

He turned down that seat to get China onto the Security Council like out of out of like not I'm out of geopolitical like this was basically a pure like ideological I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do thing, and Mao returns him by fucking invading India. So because of this and because of like you know, India Pakistan don't like each other. This is this is known. The Pakistani government is very close with China. Pakistani troops

are trained by the Chinese army. They are armed with Chinese weapons and with Kissinger's blessings, so he could use the Pakistani government as an intermediary to negotiate with China. The Pakistani government seeds to kill three million Bangladeshis. It is yeah, this is it is among the worst crimes the twentieth century. It is a crime that it is broadly forgotten. China's complicity in it is forgotten. The American's complicity in it is barely remembered, basically only when people

talk about Kissinger. But this was one of the worst things that happened in like one of the worst centuries in human history. But you know, for Kissinger, this is an enormous success, right He gets everything that he fucking wants out of it, doesn't give a shit about bankwadeesh She's then. You know, this is a tradition that has like echoed through the like the eons of the oliberals ever since the US successfully opens diplomatic channels with China.

And soon Kissinger and Nixon are going to meet Mao in China, and I'm going to read from Mao talking to Kissinger, so you can understand who these people are. The tree between on two countries at present is very pitiful, is gradually increasing. You know, China is a poor country. We don't have very much. What we have in excess is women, Kissinger. There are no quotas or terrible for those, Chairman Mao. So if you want so, if you want them, we can give you a few of those some tens

of thousands. Prime Minister cho of course, on a voluntary basis. Chairman, Mao, let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. Laughter. Sometime later, Mao, do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million laughter, says the Chairman is improving his offer bow. By doing this, we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interest in our country. We have too many women, and they have a way

of doing things. They give birth the children, and our children are too many.

class system and end imperialism? Is this fucking guy polling it up with fucking Henry fucking Kissinger like it's terrible, Like.

it never made it. Lots of tragedies unfolding. One of them is that you know this whole thing of like like Kissinger bantering with Maw like this, it works like the US and China established empthomatic relations and this is a this is a seismic shift in sort of Chinese popular culture and media and consciousness because from the Korean War until like the seventies, right, the way people think about America and the way they're portrayed in Chinese media

is like as the great imperialist enemy. Right, Like the last time there was contact between the US and China, it is a bunch of Chinese troops doing bayonet charges, like wearing sandals in the fucking snow, doing bayonet chargers through their own artillery broads to kill American troops like that. That is like like the amount of hatred like there is unbelievable, and you know it's funny because like the US like really forgot that war, but like China did not, right,

and suddenly like America is China's friend. And the human face of this absolutely Parkle shift in basically the entire ideological system of Chinese communism. The face of this shift in in the just the image of what America is, which is like it doesn't it's not quite mapping on, but it's like like America, like it's it's kind of like how Baptists think about the devil, right like that that that is the role that America has in Chinese like popular sort of culture, like up until this point,

and then suddenly it's completely pivoted on its head. And the face of this shift is Kissinger. And you know, and this, uh, this is ping pong Eurasia is what you're doing right now. This happened due to this all happened due to table tennis. And I won't hear any other way. Oh god, I was I specifically did it include that the table tennis diplomacy at this because I was like, I hate the ship.

to understand this pivot, is how isolated China was. Right Like the US through this entire period is pretending that the nationalists in Taiwan or the legitimate government of all of China, they have blocked off effectively all trade with China. They've blocked off basically all trade from the US. They've blocked off a huge amount of international trade and and you know, and this, this, this is something that really

really cripples the Chinese economy. Like you know, you can't quite blame it for like the famines because like I mean, for example, like the CCP was exporting grain to the USSR while greatly before what was happening, right like, but I mean it didn't fucking help that. And one of the other big consequence of this is that it is almost impossible for Chinese people to go to China like you, you basically can't do it. And this is an enormous deal because there are tens of millions of Chinese people

across the world who can't go back to China. These people can't see their families, they can't see their friends, they can't go to the graves of their ancestors, they can't they can't go home. And this happened with my family, Like my grandpa didn't see his brothers and sisters for forty years after the war. Forty years just did not

see his family. And you know, and it's only when Kissinger, and this is the way that it's seen in China, it's only when Kissinger re establishes relationship, which Kissinger goes out there and advocates, And the way they see it is he's advocating for China in the US, which is kind of true. But the way they see this is only when Kissinger re establishes diplomatic relations that's when it becomes possible for you to see your family again. And you know, like I cannot emphasize enough how big of

a deal this is in China. In the diaspora, Like if you are in the diaspora, you can't get fucking messages in you Like a lot of people don't know whether their family is still alive because the last time they saw them was the war or and when I say though war, like that could be World War two, that could be the Revolution, that could be people living

before that. And you know, this is a huge deal in the diaspora too, to the point where like a lot of the people who had been like in the in the Asian American movements in sixty eight, like people who had been like Yellow Peril, yellow power, people who are like ally with black panthers, Like these people are trying to get jobs in the Nixon State departments because they want to be there to like help reopen diplomatic

relations with China. It is it is like, this is like it is one of the sort of apocaum moments of the second half of the twentieth century. Is this this these diplomatic relations opening up again. And in the Chinese media, they don't really want Nixon to be the face of it because now they're.

their technology. Like sorry, let me say that again. This is one of the factors that makes it's one of the incredibly underrated factors that makes their industrialization program work. And there's a lot of places where people try similar industrialization programs to what China is going to pull off, like Venezuela, for example, tries this and Venezuela's program completely fails because they don't have access to the technology that the US got from basically sucking up or that China

got from sucking up to the US. And and Kissinger is directly responsible for a lot of like a lot of these technology transfers. And for this, Kissinger is labeled as as like as a friend of the Chinese people like this. This is literally the way that it's talked about in the Chinese media, and even sort of beyond just him being labeled like a friend of the Chinese people like he is, like okay, So there's like one or two other Americans who you can sort of like

publicly express admiration for. Who are people who like effectively defected the China or just move to China and like we're there for the revolution. But those aren't like major figures, right, Like they're like communist journalists or stuff like that, or like anthropologists, like they're not. This is the first like actual public American figure that you were allowed and you are encouraged to be like yay, this guy fucking rules.

And in a very short amount of time, Kissinger becomes enormously popular as the man who you know, he's the guy who restored Chinese American relations. He's the guy who allowed all these people to see their families and ended the saction to terror regime. I mean he'sn't actually end them, but he's helping people work around them, and the sanctions eventually sort of come down. But you know, all of

us comes with the price. And this brings us to another Kissinger crime, which is a Kissinger in the coup against Chile's democratically elected president Salvaduryende. So this coup is fully green lit by the US, like Kissinger is involved with it. Pinochet is going to murder forty thousand Chilans. We've talked about this on the show a few times before, but what we haven't really talked about much is that after this, after the coup, Chile is like completely diplomatically isolated.

No one wants anything to do with them because this just met like maybe like absolute maniac massive murderer has just deposed like a sovereign government, like even like the even the UK like won't like refuses to like talk to them, right like like and when when like the Brits won't talk to you because you've done too many crimes. Yeah, yeah, you've really fucked it there, like the guys who who's

prime minister's son made a living doing coups. Yeah, but there is one country other than the US that will do that, will that will do that, will make deals with Pinochet, and that country is China. And China funny funnels millions of dollars like to some literally to Pinochet directly and to the Chilean government. And this is a time where China is not rich, and this is millions

of dollars like in in like nineteen seventies money. It's it's a lot of money, and and China is absolutely broke, and they're fucking sending it to and they're sending it to fucking Pinochet and like and like to get a sense of how weird this stuff is in China, right, Like a lot of people in China think that Pinochet is a socialist because he's being portrayed positively in the

Chinese media, so they assume that he's a socialist. Like, this is the kind of shit that's like just the absolute brain worms that are happening in China at this point because they're their connection to the outside world is really really tenuous, and the Chinese media is suddenly gassing up all of these just like horrific right wing dictators. Now as as Kissinger Star sends in China, the CCP

begins pulling its own Kissingers. So this is this is a a kind of a story we only learned about pretty recently, I think, in like the last two years. Benjaping was the first like Chinese communist leader to visit the US, and so he got he's in Washington, DC, and he takes time out of his schedule to have a secret meeting with the CIA where he goes to the CIA office to set up like list to set up CIA listening posts in China to spy on the USSR.

And one of the products of this, you know, so that's that's the sort of low level stuff that Chine's gett involved with. The high level stuff is in nineteen seventy nine, China invades Vietnam. They killed tens of thousands of people, They devastate both the Chinese and music economy. And this is one of the things that you know, this is a decisive thing in the Cold War, right,

China has like donnic They've invaded fucking They've invaded Vietnam. Yeah, and you know, and one of the one of the sort of modern iterations of this right has been you know, there's there's a long period of sort of like China's alignment with the US, and one of the other things that happens that China like becomes increasingly tied to Israel.

And this is one of the things that that's like true of China to this day is like there are a bunch of surveillance cameras in the West Bank that are that are that the Israelis used to surveil Palestinians that are built in China, right, the same the same cameras that are being used in shing Juan. A lot of like Chinese uh what's it called, Chinese police sometimes

special forces units like trained with Israeli like trainers. There's a lot of like they do like count like quote unquote counter terrorism exchanges and and the other big aspect of this is that a huge part of the Israeli tech industry and a huge part of UH like they're sort of like defense complex is fueled directly by Chinese resources and by Chinese raw materials, and also by things

like transistors that they're importing from China. And this is this is the product of the sort of long arc of Kissinger's work in China, and Kissinger's work sort of peeling off Egypt UH from the Palestinian like Soviet camp And this ultimately is the price of opening relations with the US. It's not a price that's paid by the

Chinese ruling class. Instead, what happens is that every dissident in China, every fucking child in CAMPODI, every teenager and he's Teamwar, and every veteran in Vietnam Mao sells them the fuck out, Dingha Ping sells them out, Kuchinito sells them out, Xijinping sells them out. They take American money, they take American technology, They shake hands with Kissinger, and they let Bangladesh burn. And for this, Kissinger would remain

a steadfast ally the Chinese capitalist classes entire life. When the CCP butchered the last gas of the Chinese working class at Tienemen, Kissinger stood by the CCP and basically is one of the few Americans straight out doing pr for them. He does it again when China's tried to enter the World Trade Organization. He like, this is the last thing he was doing before he fucking died was going It was going to China and allying himself for the Chinese ruling class. And you know, he meets Xi

Jinping and is greeted as an old friend. And this is how you get to the thing that's been happening today, which is like all of these Chinese, like the Chinese Foreign Ministry and a bunch of timehmaking Chinese government officials like releasing these statements about how doctor Kissinger is a good friend of the Chinese people, and this ultimately is what Kissinger represents the prospect of the alliance between the American and Chinese capitalist class built on the blood of

the working class of five confidents. It is a world in which there is peace and prosperity for the bourgeoisie, where there was starvation and death for everyone else. And this still to this day, is the regime that rules the US, it is the regime that rules China. And they are being united for one final time in their life of one Henry Kissinger. And yeah, that's basically all

I've got. I guess the last thing I can say is one of the things that I think I hope people will understand about this is that the way that the American left thinks about China, like the that it the way that it's politics function, are completely illegible in China,

like there are no like in the US. It is very common to have someone who is like pro Palestine, who is like socialist, who is like pro LGBTQ like rights, who like you know, who considers hissel as nanty imperialists, who is also pro CCP and also fucking hates Kissinger. And this is not a position that exists in China. There is nobody like this, Nobody, fucking like, no one at all believes this because it's just it's not a

coherent political position. Is it is an American projection of politics on the China because again, meanwhile, like the actual thing that's happened in China is because of the way the media has covered Kissinger. The thing they covered is the normalization of US China relations and not all of the fucking genocides that he did. And so they have the same fucking whitewashed view of Kissinger that like right wing Americans do and that the American ruling class does.