Kiss My Ass, Kissinger

Some of the most disturbing news in a disturbing week: transcripts of some of Henry Kissinger's secret talks with China's Premier, Zhou Enlai, in 1972 have been released. Have you seen this story?

Calvin Woodward, in a syndicated story published by the Associated Press on May 27, 2006 says the recently declassified documents show Kissinger told Zhou that with a "decent interval" for U.S. troops to clear out, we weren't averse to having a communist takeover in Vietnam.

Quoting the story, "Kissinger's comments appear to lend credence to the 'decent interval' theory posed by some historians who say the United States was prepared to see communists take over Saigon as long as that happened long enough after a U.S. troop departure to save face."

Going on with the story, Woodward says, "Almost 2,000 more Americans would be killed in action before the last U.S. combat death in January, 1973, the month the Paris Peace Accords officially halted U.S. action, left North Vietnamese in the South and preserved the Saigon government until it fell in April 1975." That doesn't mention the thousands of South Vietnamese killed, or the panic or human misery caused by the fall of Saigon in 1975.

This is what really galls me--and helps feed my paranoia--about government. I'm not even specifically blaming Kissinger, although he was the one who approached the Chinese with the idea; I'm sure every administration has a story or two they wouldn't want told about backroom negotiations that led to the deaths of Americans in order to obtain something we wanted.

If I had been to that war, if I knew someone or had a loved one killed in that war after Kissinger's meeting with Zhou Enlai on June 22, 1972 I'd be calling for the guy's head on a pike. This to me is the most cynical action any government can engage in, selling out their own armed forces, their own countrymen, to save face.

This is a story about powerful men using other people as pawns in a huge chess game for their own purposes. About a government supposed to take care of its people sacrificing them instead.

I couldn't say it any better than John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, who is quoted as writing, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."

Fuck you, Henry. And fuck Nixon, too. While I'm at it, fuck Bush for his war! Throw in Rumsfeld, Cheney and their gangsta pals...might as well fuck 'em all. They sure fucked us!

Ciao for now, El Postino