This week's classic episode is of particular importance to us and arguably the world. On November twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, America is Darth Vader. Henry Kissinger passed away.
It's true, and I mean, I think it's kind of been an ongoing joke simply because the guy seemed like his blood was flowing with sith Lord energy and that he was never going to die. So Ben quite often gauged like time against his kissing you're still with.
Us, And then we literally made that joke. I think the day that he passed away, and I.
Think I was like, we did this and this was us. No, I don't think we have No, we didn't. It was a hundred years old crazy. We were literally waiting on the clock with him. Yeah, And it is strange to if you look at the reporting that's come out anywhere in mainstream, it's always Henry Kissinger, like this very important figure right in the world, who also did a lot of bad things. And we're going to list a lot of those things out in this.
Only up to twenty nineteen, right when we recorded the episode. Now, I didn't mention it on this episode, but as you guys know, I had a different life before podcasting, and as a result of that, I actually saw Henry Kissinger speak in eight when he was up at Athens, Georgia at Uga. Very very intelligent man, which we also point out in this episode. But being intelligent does not necessarily make you a good person.
Yeah, and this is when you were a paperboy, right, this is when I was a paper.
Okay, okay, exactly, Yeah, yeah, no, I mean it's funny too. We talked about even it came up in the are the life extension episode or the very least the sort of I guess grief technology episode where it's like, what if someone figured out how to make an AI synthetic version of Henry Kissinger's brain and use that to consult on like war tactics, No, thank you.
Yeah, I mean he'd have some interesting thoughts hot takes.
Ye.
Yeah, and they you know, the technology would probably arrive at conclusions that would be close to that of Kissinger Prime. But this, this person is incredibly important to the state of the world as we understand it today. He is responsible, is responsible in one way or another for millions of deaths, right.
And decisions that went that turned into actions, right or at least so as a voice in a room a bunch of times that advised this, sird, Yeah, that ended up killing millions.
And you gotta wonder if a guy like that even makes that connection, like I did this, you know, I killed these people? Or is it more of a matter of it's just the cost of doing business. And I certainly didn't directly do anything. It's sort of the gun versus the person shooting kind of arguments.
You know, he's a big proponent of the greater good, by far, one of the most wintral secretaries of State in US history, to the point where he may have been steering the ship the way that typically a US president or Congress would have or a Dick Cheney or a Dick Cheney, right. You know what if there was some kind of New American century, what if we made that a project or maybe something in twenty twenty five. Anyhow, anyhow,
Kissinger did not live to see this stuff. If you are interested in learning much more about Kissinger as well after our episode, please check out the six part series from our friends Behind the Bastards on Kissinger. As you could tell from the title, they may have a little bit of bias, but We went into this objectively, and so what you are hearing in this episode from twenty nineteen is factual and terrifying.
Yeah, let's jump.
In from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Noel is not here, but we'll be returning soon. They called me Ben. We were joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know this. We've been doing this check in at the beginning of the show. We hope that you check in as well when you before you dive into the strange, bizarre, and sometimes terrifying things we explore here.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so Matt, Yeah good, Yes, thumbs down, two thumbs up. You just released a show.
Oh yeah, I did, Yes, I didn't. I assisted in the production slash creation of a show called Noble Blood that is now available. It's number three on the charts right now in iTunes.
Congratulations, Yeah, it's all.
It's Aaron Mankey and Dana Schwartz's and Trevor Young.
Congratulations, Paul, how you doing out there? Got a thumbs up thumbs up at a stylish answer from Mission Control.
I want to bring this up before we get too deep into this. I just finished Mister Robot season three finally, and you know, we have a bit of a history with that show. We did a couple episodes surrounding season two, I.
Believe, and we have masks we do show.
I have one sitting in my room and when I watched the show, I always put it on, which is I don't know, is that too weird?
No, that's awesome, that's great, Okay, cool.
I just had to bring that up. I was just excited that the next one is supposedly coming out this year.
Yes, I had heard. I had heard. No, they'll still have Robny Malick. I imagine, I certainly hope. So what we're going to talk about maybe a sensitive subject to some people who find themselves politically partisan, right at least in the Western sense, And we want to hear your opinion. So, as always, if there's something that you want to tell us and you're not near a keyboard at the moment, just pause this episode. We'll wait for you and call us directly.
Yes, call our number. It is one h three to three st d W I t K.
What I love about this conversation with mister Robot is that we're we're kind of foreshadowing something that'll come into play later, right.
Yeah, without fully saying it right right. And there's there's a character within the universe. There are a couple, but there's one in particular in the universe of mister Robot that I find that maybe you will too, has some similarities to our guest of honor, our person of interest.
There we go, There we go our POI. Today, Miss Robot concerns shadowy forces working in secret, conspiring right the power behind the throne. And it's often said in fiction and nonfiction alike that the true power of a nation, a kingdom, or an empire isn't usually the face. It's often not the person on the throne. It's the people behind that person. The folks you see standing silently behind a king, a prime minister, or president as they deliver
a speech they probably did not write. Today's episode is about one such character. One of the most influential people in the history of modern US politics Henry Kissinger.
So let's go to the beginning. Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May twenty seventh, nineteen twenty three, in a place called Firth, Germany. He was one of two sons born to Paula Stern Kissinger and Lewis Kissinger. Now, his father was a teacher, and you know, there was this group of people that came to power called the Nazis, and when that occurred, he lost his job in his
entire career. You know, the Nazis, of course were carrying out the orders of mister Adolph Hitler, and they of course began prosecuting Jewish people throughout Germany and countries all surrounding Germany. And the Kissingers were in fact Jewish, and their family, I guess the larger family saw the effects of this firsthand. Now, of course, Henry was just a little boy at the time, and he seemed to be a better student, at least to his parents and to
the people around him. They knows he's a better student than perhaps an athlete or you know, someone who is going to pursue some kind of physical career. And you know, as the anti Semitism was increasing there in Germany where they were living, the whole family decided, we have to get out of here, and in nineteen thirty eight they ended up going to England, and then not long after that they ended up going to the United States.
Which was a pressing to move for any student of history. The family. Once they reached the US, they ended up settling in New York City, which you may remember from several Saucy commercials. Kissinger completed high school there and began taking night classes at City College with the intention of becoming an accountant a CPA. Oh on what small things does history hinge? You know what I mean?
It could have gone a very different way.
Can you imagine him as a CPA. We'll see. I want to hear what you think about that, folks. Yeah, So he worked his way through college. He went to a factory during the day and then he would go to class. During World War Two, he joined the military and served in Germany. He was working in army intelligence.
It is a bit odd, right because he's from Germany, but he went to the United States and now he's going back to Germany to fight for the Americans.
Or with you know, as an American, Well that that is you know, it seems counterintuitive, but it happens a lot. So I've got a couple of friends whose families were originally from Iran and they live in the US, but because they spoke Farsi, they got jobs as translators.
And yeah, they ended up you know, going back to the Middle East.
I'm assuming I believe that they are US based, but I understood.
Just yeah, no, of course, we can't say anymore. Understand understand that well, and this is a it's a big deal here. So even though he was very young at the time when his family left, or you know, somewhat young when when the family left Germany, he still experienced what was occurring in his home country. And then to leave and then get to go back and serve in the military for a country that's going to essentially attempt to liberate the country from which you've fled, that's a big deal.
Oh, the biggest, are you kidding? Yes, he also is something you and I mentioned off airman. He also didn't sit idly by during his time in the service, right, he actually saw combat.
Yeah, he got to experience the Battle of the Bulge firsthand. And if you don't know much about that, we won't go into it, but I would say look it up. It was a German offensive that occurred in the West, and history describes it as quote the deadliest and most desperate battle of the war in the West. It involved three armies, three German armies that essentially we're attacking over
the course of quite a while. And again there's his historian, his biographer, Ferguson niall Ferguson I believe is his name. He describes it as Henry Kissinger experienced heavy shelling firsthand. And again these are big experiences for a growing person, you know, someone who's coming into their own having this kind of thing occurred to him. And that's not all that happened during.
The war, right. He also had the stark and terrifying, heartbreaking revelation that all of his family members that stayed in Germany were dead. He witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust. He was present during the liberation of a concentration camp, and following the war he remained in Europe as an instructor at a place called the European Command Intelligence School, also in Germany, and.
Then in nineteen forty seven, he returns to the US. He goes to Harvard and enrolls there and he graduated in the class of nineteen fifty and he had a degree in government. Pretty interesting stuff there, right, So he's changing course quite a bit from those original aspirations of becoming an accountant again, with these experiences that are changing him. He continued his studies as a graduate student and ended up earning a master's degree in nineteen fifty two and
then eventually his PhD in fifty four. And he was also teaching at the Harvard University.
And here's an important note. So we always have to be very careful when attempting to ascribe personal motives to an individual. And we know that something happened, something fundamentally changed his life during his experiences in World War Two. He became someone with a mission. We like the historians research have conjectured here on what his revelatory moments were, and those are pretty good guesses. But regardless of what
specific instance it was that was the big change. Post war, he is no longer interested in accounting, or perhaps, if we want to wax a bit poetic, he is concerned with a different sort of accounting Oh, yes, he is concerned with what he sees as moral accounting, right, preventing, oddly enough, the horrors of World War Two, fighting for what he and he's alive today, fighting for what he would see as a greater good. And this brings him to his career in academia. Right. So, as you mentioned,
he earned his PhD in nineteen fifty four. Between nineteen fifty two and nineteen sixty nine, he directed the Harvard International Seminar. This was a study organization in which the advanced students, along with a professor, conduct research and contribute to discussions. It's sort of a nascent think tank, which happens a lot in grad.
Schools, and in this kind of environment and position lets him start making relationships that he would eventually use later on in his career.
Right right. And it may surprise some of us to learn just how much policy here in the United States is written by professors in academic roles. You know, it starts with proposals, it starts with research, right and studies, or it starts with something like ALEC wherein that's that's capital A capital L, capital E, capital C. It's a process through which corporations dictate policy for better or worse.
I'm just saying, yeah, it doesn't. Because a politician is a fan of something doesn't mean they actually wrote it anymore than a prime minister or president giving a speech means they actually wrote it.
Ultimately, we're going to learn here that power, many times and in many ways is developed through personal relationships more than a lot of other ways.
Right, absolutely, absolutely, which is a failure of the human species because it lessens the impact of meritocracy. But that's a whole other thing. It's a whole other bag of badgers here. The point is for this part, this is where Kissinger gets his taste of being a power behind the throne. He's visited by tons of international figures that, as you said, Matt, he'll later deal with in a
governmental capacity. He joins the Council on Foreign Relations, and he publishes something called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and this gets him some bonafide, some street cred. He is now seen as a leading expert on international relations and national defense policy. And then he gets involved with the Rockefellers.
Oh yeah, he has eighteen months of working with this thing called the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He actually directed it in nineteen fifty six, and it had this Special Studies project. Okay, now just listen to this. It's a program developed to investigate possible domestic and international problems. Okay, I hear what you're saying to me, investigate possible domestic and international problems. In nineteen fifty seven, he became a lecturer at Harvard.
He's talking to the students like he's changing or perhaps influencing the way students are thinking. And eventually he gets promoted to a professor in nineteen sixty two, and again he's able to teach others some of the things that he's learning and the ways he's viewing the world already.
Right. And also during this time he joins other international and domestic organizations and think tanks. He's at the National Security Council, the Arms Controlled Disarmament Agency, and the RAND Corporation.
While, dude, you just got to jump in all the things we've mentioned thus far, that he's joining up Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation. We've talked about.
A lot of these, right, Yes, they are the source of what could plausibly be called a lot of real conspiracies, not theories. So we'll just laundry list real quick. The rest of the broad strokes of his career, so he's working full time at Harvard from sixty two to sixty five, and sixty five he becomes a consultant to the State Department. He's their Vietnam consultant from sixty five to nineteen sixty seven.
He visits Vietnam several times. Most of nineteen sixty eight he was working as a campaign guru for then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was running for the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Against Richard Nixon.
Yep, yep, against Richie Nix himself, and despite the fact that Nixon did defeat Rockefeller, Rockefeller contacted Nixon and was like, Hey, we don't know exactly what they said. There was something along the lines like, hey, good game, bro. By the way, you know you had some real hustle out there. I want to give a shout out to my boy h K. Put him on the team, get him off the bench. And that's how Kissinger ended up heading the National Security Council.
Kissinger already had a plan laid out. He did not like the US foreign policy toward the USSR the Soviet Union. He thought that they had been too nice. Essentially, they have been kid gloves. They had not been consistent, and as we know, consistency is a huge deal in any international relationship. So he said, look, let's be honest. The Soviet Union, they are the big batties, they are main rival, there are main opponents. But you gotta respect him, you know what I mean. That's what he was kind of
the same way. He said, look, take him seriously. It's dangerous to nuclear power. And one of his big early successes was the institution of detante, which is easing relationships, easing tensions, saying, look, we both know the lay of the chessboard here. We're probably never going to be friends, but we should communicate and we should do our best not to blow up the world while we fight with our nuclear weapons.
Some would say that's pretty smart. That's a good way to to look at things. Let's not blow each other up. We get it, we know who we are. I can I understand that.
Yeah, And that's that's a very clear cut thing, right, and it's and it's a powerful thing, even even in a microcosmic level. Some of us may have had that occur in our personal lives.
Yeah, certainly, but it is far more nuanced than that, right in order like that, if that's the ideal or that's the baseline goal, let's not blow each other up. We understand who we are underneath. That is just oh wasps, just a swarm of wasps for some reason.
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things he does is the successful agreement on something called SALT or Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty. So Union and the US say, okay, we're gonna limit the number of nuclear weapons we have. We're not going to get rid of them ever, because we both know who we are, but you know, we promise not to have millions of them, because that's just egregious.
And when they signed this agreement, he was seen as someone again working for the greater good, and the greater good being avoiding nuclear annihilation or a nuclear war. And now you will hear people argue whether he is a hero or a villain. He used to speak about once a year here in Georgia, and I believe he hasn't done that for a number of years. But you could go visit him here and speak at different places, and he is treated very much as an elder statesman, a
policy emperor, you know, a king behind the throne. But regardless of what you might think of his work, there is no arguing that he's been anything other than massively successful in his personal life. Between January twenty seventeen and January twenty eighteen, he pulled in an estimated fifty eight million dollars. This makes him, by far one of the highest paid politicians in the world, accepting you know, dictators or Putin type figures.
Yeah, people who set that number themselves, essentially by the state or whatever the state pays then right.
His estimated net worth is said to be one hundred and eighty five million, according to the publication People with Money. Some folks regard him as a hero. They say he's a man who helped secure the US position as the hedgemon, as the premier global superpower. Others, however, consider him an irredeemable villain.
Why we'll talk about that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. I get. While opinions on Kissinger may differ over the course of his career, he has been implicated in numerous activities that could be called at the very least illegal. He's also been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. Let's just laundry list some of the illegal actions that he was directly involved in.
Absolutely. Let's jump to nineteen sixty nine and seventy in Cambodia. Now, Henry Kissinger is considered, i guessed, one of the one of the main architects of the secret bombing that occurred
there in Cambodia. And this bombing itself played a really important role in bringing about the Khmer Rouge that we've discussed before on this show, certainly on YouTube as well, bringing them about as a power there in Cambodia, as basically an unintended side effect of taking out the power that already exist in that.
Country, attempting to eliminate the communist threat that they saw.
Yeah, and let's just go ahead and say this at the top here. Many times we've seen over the history of the United States that there is a major enemy that we will identify and attempt to eliminate or even if it's just ideological, and then by militarily or through a coup eliminating that. There are these unintended consequences that come about because of the vacuum of power that exists in whatever that place is where some group or despot or person will come through and just grasp that power.
And that's what we see happening in Cambodia in nineteen sixty nine to seventy.
Yep, YEP. At least forty thousand people died as a result of this.
The bombing itself that he was the architect of right and.
He entered into the ceasefire negotiations with North Vietnam. He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for this, and his critics find that ironic, and reportedly even Kissinger himself was like, I don't deserve this.
Yeah, well, especially when you think about the Khmune rousion and what happened afterwards because because of them, millions of people were slaughtered.
Yes, absolutely, let's go to October nineteen sixty nine. He had this thing called Madman theory, and Madman Theory, now with the benefit of retrospect, is weird and hilarious. It was essentially a pr branding campaign whereby Kissinger wanted to make leaders of communist nations think that Richard Nixon was insane, like scare them basically, yeah, like larger in life kind of crazy person. You don't know, is he going left, is he going right? Is he launching a nuke? This?
Does it remind you of something?
Maybe? Maybe, But in this case it's an act. So the I mean, in this case, it is a calculated thing. And it was of great benefit to in backdoor diplomatic conversations, because one thing a lot of diplomats do is they say, look, we're like each other. We're just we happen to be on different sides of a conversation, just.
Trying to do the best for the people we represent.
And you know, I get it, Like I work directly with Nixon and he is nuts, So I don't know what he's gonna do. I feel like it's best for us to work this out between us and quickly before he gets I mean, he might have a bad day.
He's got that football thing that has the codes in it. It's crazy.
So yeah, So it's kind of like building rapport, Like you're as a diplomat, you're sort of distancing yourself from the policy and saying like, I'm here to help you, buddy. So so this is effective. He has something called Operation
Giant Lance Nixon again. Nixon sends eighteen B fifty two bombers with nuclear warheads to the border of the Soviet Union, the eastern border, and they're hoping that this madman theory is believable enough that the Soviet government will panic and say and pressure it's proxy North Vietnam to accept US peace demands. And could you say this is a brilliant sigh up? Could you say, it's just it's ugly. It's
a bully tactic. But bully tactics kind of par for the course in a lot of these things, especially if you're playing real politic.
And you know, and you're playing with nukes, and you're.
Playing with nukes, that's the problem.
Yeah, And then in the end North Vietnam is victorious, and you know in the Paris peace accords occur anyway.
Right, So nineteen seventy one, at least in the case of I want to note, at least in the case of Giant Lance, thousands and thousands of people did not die. In nineteen seventy one, he support Pakistan as it massacred over a million people during what was called the Bangladesh Liberation War. He also joked about the massacre of Bengali Hindus and he sneered at Americans who quote bleed for the dying Bengalis. That's according to professor Gary Bass, who
was writing in Political magazine about this. Bass also says that Kissinger's policy was again oriented towards what he saw as the greater good. Pakistan, he might say, has some imperfections, including you know, massacring millions of people, but it's also not communists, and it's good to have that chess piece in play to prevent the spread of communism.
Now, remember he's working closely with Richard Nixon during a lot of this stuff, and he ends up being one of the primary reasons that Nixon begins wiretapping everybody and recording everybody, and he ends up being a part of Watergate, or he's involved at least, but we can leave that for perhaps another episode. You should just know that he was involved in Watergate and wiretapping.
Yes, yeah, that definitely happened. He also aided Indonesia under the brutal dictatorship of Suharto in terms of financial aid and military funding. In seventy three, he overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Ayinde and Chile, installing the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Yeah, and remember he didn't do it with his bare hands like that. But man, that guy made it happen through you know, I guess engineering is a good way to put it in. He made it occur with his voice.
Right, He puppeteered it. Yes, So he also supported Operation Condor. Operation Condor was a campaign designed to get the secret police of fascist dictators in South America to work together, supporting coups on non fascist countries and facilitating drug dealing in the region.
As a way to provide funds for these kinds of activities.
He was a fan of Pinochet because he was not a communist, and he was also a fan of the Junta in Argentina at the time. We also found, according to documents that were released in twenty fourteen, that he signaled in the nineteen seventies to Argentina's right wing military leaders something along the lines of, Hey, you know, dissent is just a real pill, isn't it. Guys? If you need to crack down on those commies and those pinkos and those hippies, you know, we don't really have a
problem with that. We just want you to know we don't have a problem with it, and that became implicit support of what is called the Dirty War. The dirty war resulted in the deaths of more than thirty thousand people.
And one of the craziest things about those documents that you mentioned, Ben, that were released in twenty fourteen is that there are accounts from several people, one of whom was Robert Hill, who was the ambassador to Argentina, and it's this conversation that Kissinger had with a foreign minister there named Gazetti. And Okay, so apparently this foreign minister was really afraid that if they were doing this dirty war, they were going to carry this stuff out and they
were going to continue doing it. They were afraid that the United States would end up cracking down on their activities and their government in general as a way of fighting against these human rights violations that were occurring. Right, and then Kissinger says to him, I mean, this is paraphrasing, but you don't need to worry about that. That's not going to happen.
Right. So it is maybe a little bit hyperbolic, but it was a breakfast that resulted in the death of thirty thousand people, But it wasn't really they were going to They were probably going to make the dirty war happen anyway, Kissinger in this case knew about it and did not stop it and gave them sort of an atta boy. Yeah, and let's go to one more example. In December of nineteen seventy five, he approved the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, resulting in one hundred thousand to
one hundred and eighty deaths conflict related deaths. And conflict related death could be anything from starvation or disease related to the horrors of war. What we're saying is it doesn't have to be an actual you know, gunshot to the head or death by bombing. War brings death in many forms. Let's put that in perspective. So we said one hundred to one hundred and eighty thousand people died in conflict related deaths. One hundred thousand people were forced
to relocate. Maybe not the biggest number until you consider the total population of the country at the time.
Yeah, only six hundred and eighty two thousand human beings. So that's over half of the people were relocated. And add on to that the number of people who died. That's a that's a rough move there.
This taally of massive death that has been indirectly attributed to Kissinger. Seems it seems like quite a tab to add up over time, you know what I mean. Yeah, and again, there are a lot of people who would say, now hold on and we'll get to them after a word from our sponsor.
Now hold on, It's fair to say, hey, government's a big and we need to avoid the lazy fallacy of blame in all these events on a single man. He might have had his hands tied, he might have not been aware that this was all happening at all. Right, right, you know it is true. We have been pretty rough on Kissinger already, saying that he engineered all these things, basically blaming him for all these deaths. I don't know, maybe that really isn't all that fair.
I mean, maybe here's the problem, Matt. Experts, including people who applaud Kissinger's actions, disagree with the idea that he was unaware of these things. Christopher Hitchens, he was recognized for a number of other things. He's polemical, he was at his time a huge proponent of atheism and so on. Right, that may be one of the ways he's best known today.
Sure, I'm quite hilarious in his digs of other people. Yeah, cantankerous, Yeah, and also hated or loved essentially.
Yeah. Absolutely, he had no chill. There you go, Chris for Hitchens had no chill one way or the other. He wrote a book called The Trial of Hydry Kissinger, and in this book he says the degree of micromanagement revealed in Kissinger's memoirs forbids the idea that anything of importance took place without his knowledge or permission of nothing. Is this more true than his own individual involvement in the bombing of Neutral Cambodia. And then so that's one
of the many arguments in full disclosure. Hitchins is not a fan of Kissinger, and it's pretty it's pretty obvious in the way he writes about him. But even people who are like, you know, got to break a few eggs and sow jill political outlets work, even they will say that Kissinger did this. It didn't just happen when
he was off on vacation on a Friday. According to a guy named Greg Grandon, who's a professor of history at New York University, this means that quote a back of the envelope count would attribute Tree maybe four million deaths to Kissinger's actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims.
Yikes. Yeah, that's a history a history professor at New York University saying that you should probably attribute three or four million deaths to this man.
And this doesn't even touch on the conspiracy theories.
Oh no, my god. Again, when you are a part of all of these different organizations, when you're essentially the power behind a government, or at least you know, if it's a Disney movie, he's who are I forget all the main like ja'far type characters, but the counselor that sits next to the king, that whispers dark things into the king or queen's ear. I mean, that's essentially that's that's really whittling it down. But that's a lot of what he ends up doing, whispering to other people in
power who make the decisions. I think when you have that position, you are going to be at least targeted by people who see conspiracies, if not actually taking part in conspiracies.
Absolutely, well well said and well put. So as as you mentioned, this is due to his membership in these enormously influential bodies. He's a member of the Bohemian Growth, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Builderberg Group, a member of the Aspen Institute, a participant in the Trilateral Commission. We have episodes on pretty much all of those, except, I believe, the Aspen Institute. We also need to mention that the racist and anti
Semitic conspiracy theories come into play here too. They harp on Kissinger due to his Jewish background, and then you'll read these sorts of things saying that he is a key player in some sort of secretive Jewish cabal. This gets tied into those allegations of international banking cartels and so on. But while the Jewish conspiracy clap trap has been thoroughly and thing thankfully debunked, there is bad news here.
The bad news is that banking cartel conspiracies do have sand Some of them are very very, very true, and it is highly likely that Henry Kissinger ran into something like banking led conspiracies during his career.
I mean, he did want to be an accountant.
Oh wow, I didn't even think about that. I didn't think we would have one that goes into one that hinges on his accounting past. I mean, that's a very good point. Met So he has been both a participant in genuine conspiracies and subject to speculation on other conspiracy theories. Right, And for a lot of people, the big question is, at what point do these policies become war crimes, the
conspiracies that he created and enacted. At what point do they go beyond being secretive for the purpose of national security and become something that you should prosecute someone for?
And what really is the difference between those two things?
Right? Where is the line? Where is the line? There's a guy named Mario del Pero, a professor of international history and author of the Eccentric Realist Henry Kissinger in the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, he reacts in a different way. He throws a little cold water on this.
He says, I am afraid that, by the standards some of his critics have applied to Kissinger, numerous post nineteen forty five US statesmen could be accused of crimes against humanity, and that applies perhaps to the vast majority of the leader's modern great powers. Very good point, right, Like, at some point, if you're in charge of a country, are you responsible for every bad thing that country does.
Oh gosh, it's true. That's kind of a tough truth. I guess we have to face a little bit.
Here, right, Absolutely, we have to face he said head on. Let's also let's also continue just a little bit, because del Pero doesn't believe that Henry Kissinger was very good at his job. To be honest, he says, he's not some sort of arch manipulator. He says Kissinger was simplistic, binary even uninformed. During his tenure. He was dogmatic, he adhered to the zero sum game of international politics. And then del Pero says, in short, he wasn't a war criminal.
He wasn't a very deep or sophisticated thinker. He rarely challenged the intellectual vogues or fads of the time, and once in government, he displayed a certain intellectual laziness.
Wow, that's interesting.
It's an interesting take, right, that's saying, that's saying. Look, the argument here is almost like if he's a war criminal, everyone else is. And also the hype's not real. He wasn't that good at what he did.
Yeah, he wasn't as big a part of any of this. It's I wonder about the motivation there because it's certainly not a view that is or it's not a view of Kissinger that you see very often. Right again, we kind of laid it out at the top there. He's a lot of times seen as this war criminal or you know, a hero and just being a lazy government guy that's just sitting around not doing much, being uninformed. Yeah, you don't hear that very often. I was thinking about
the twenty sixteen Democratic debates, just really quick off side here. Yeah, it was when oh, I hope I'm not getting this wrong. I believe it was Hillary Clinton. And at least it was a discussion between the moderator, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and they were discussing Henry Kissinger, okay, and Hillary Clinton was a supporter of Kissinger, and at some point it's brought up that yes, she said, yes, I will take
the advice essentially or the counsel of Henry Kissinger. You know, I believe him to be very informed in you know, his opinion I value essentially. And then Bernie Sanders said the opposite, like no, absolutely, and laid out some of the war crimes things, at least in very very brief ways, and just said no, I absolutely won't take advice from this person. And they had a really fairly, fairly brief but interesting exchange about him on the stage at a debate like that.
Yeah, Kissinger is seen as a tutor of Henry Clinton. Yeah, which I think would surprise some people who are more on the conservative side. Yeah, because you know you as so, politics suffers from that false dichotomy here in the US, and people would say, Okay, this guy did a bunch of stuff under the Richard Nixon administration, So why is he advising why is he a counselor to Hillary Clinton? And this is a point where you know, you have to ask yourself fingers on a hand, right, Yeah.
Well, and Hillary Clinton also makes a very rational point here, which is this, this man has such a wealth of experience in dealing with foreign powers as well as the United States as a power. Why would you not listen to him? Just from an experience perspective?
I mean, that does seem like a rational point. The question then becomes one of not just experience, but of accomplishment success or lack thereof.
Short and alignment, and like, are you going to align yourselves with that kind of power? I guess if you're running for something like the office or president anyway, just wanted to throw that out there.
Sure right now, regardless again of what we may or may not think about Henry Kissinger as individuals. Judges from Argentina, Chile, France, and Spain are still seeking his testimony regarding crimes committed by US client regimes in South America in the nineteen seventies. Those US backed dictatorships were mentioned earlier. When he was in London in April of two thousand and one, British activists sought his arrest on charges related to the Vietnam War.
Even in the US, he was the subject of a civil suit, but by the family of a Chilean military chief murdered in the seventies as part of the US attempt to block the election of Salvadora. In day now, some people doubtlessly see the criticism of Henry Kissinger as unfounded or even offensive, and calling somewhat a war criminal
is a very heavy charge. It's a term that's actually rarely used today in political discourse because hauling someone a war criminal automatically implies that they have killed massive amounts of people through either their direct actions or their policy decisions.
Well, yeah, because then it becomes an argument of is that a war crime? Even though they killed all these people, is that a war crime? Did they do it in a way that would constitute.
That right exactly? And we have tons of international law on that very subject. However, it is true that Kissinger simply cannot travel to certain countries for fear of arrest, and this is also something in which he is not unique amongst various former politicians and bureaucrats. As we record today's episode, Henry Kissinger is alive. He is ninety seven
years old. He will likely never be prosecuted for his actions, and some argue that he should not be, as the US is historically opposed to any sort of international legal action against serving or former US politicians. Where this is where something called the American Service Members Protection Act of two thousand and two comes into play. It Essentially, it's a law that might be hilarious or terrifying to some
of us listening outside of the US. It's a law in the United States that authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a US allied country being held in the International Criminal Court that's located in the Hague. This has been called the Hague invasion clause. People in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, obviously hate this idea. The law provides for the withdrawal of US military assistants from countries that agree with the ICC treaty.
It restricts US participation in UN peacekeeping unless the US is immune from prosecution. And there's a provision that says the President can change his or her mind on this whenever due to national interest.
Wow wow.
So, if, for instance, Paul's dodgy international past catches up with him and he is arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court, the US has law in the books that says this country can send an invasion force to physically rescue him and extricate him from Europe.
Wow. Well, Paul, whatever you did, you know, I'm sure it's a much more three dimensional thing that occurred. There are reasons behind it, the reasons you did it. But you know, in the end, we're gonna get you back, buddy.
And that also is a terrible example, because Paul is a hero. He is, and he is known as a gem domestically and abroad. But one thing is for sure, Henry Kissinger did conspire to do numerous things that were at the very very least unethical dirty pool. He actively proved, created and participated in a number of conspiracies to advance what he saw as the greater good for the US on a global stage. That is true. It's not a theory,
that's not a person's opinion. That is a fact. The big question is was it all worth it?
Well, we were gonna, I guess, figure that out in the next hundred years, just really looking back at it, I think, and generally when someone passes, I think the the harsh realities of a person's life can be viewed I guess more fully at least by society, by history, and we can actually talk about it in a way
that we couldn't when they were still living. So I have a feeling, you know, unfortunately for Henry Kissinger, probably pretty soon he won't be with us, and maybe we'll get a little more light shed on exactly what happened.
Perhaps perhaps perhaps.
Or it'll go to the grave with him, maybe.
Or it will go to the grave. We want to know what you think. Is it true that these sorts of things occur and do serve a greater good? Or is that an oversimplification, you know what I mean. Was Kissinger making the best, if harsh political decisions for the time, or was he blinded by ideology or something else? Let us know. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter.
We especially enjoy shouting out Here's where it Gets Crazy, which is run by some of the best mods in the business. We also, by the way, oh someone a happy birthday, pretty related by a Happy birthday Cat. Happy birthday Cat, Happy birthday Cat. Your birthday was a little while ago, but we god round to getting the shout out there sort of better late than ever.
Yes, happy birthday to you, Kat. And if you want to call in, you might get on the show. If you have a suggestion, anything, you want to tell us a comment about this episode or another, you can give us a call. We are one eight three three std WYTK. You got three minutes. You'll hear Ben. You'll feel safe. Oh well, maybe maybe you'll feel safe.
I don't know.
It's a little it's a little creepy, but it's just the way we roll here.
That's just the way we roll. And if you do not care for phones, if you are averse to social media, but you still have some insight, something awigh in on, or a suggestion for topic you believe your fellow listeners will enjoy. We'd still love to hear from you. We have good news. You can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.