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Overview

Henry Kissinger is a former US politician who’s still very influential in today’s society. He was the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Nixon, and he has also appeared on The Simpsons.

Henry Kissinger is still known as one of the greatest US diplomats and representatives of realpolitik. He established diplomatic relationships with communist China and negotiated peace deals in Vietnam. For this, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

Despite his fame, Henry Kissinger has committed and ordered several gross human rights violations.

You’ll find out why Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam War, where in the world he supported genocide, and how he profits from his nefarious activities to this very day.

Big Idea #1: Kissinger may have sabotaged peace talks designed to end the Vietnam War for his personal gain.

In 1968, the United States was tired of fighting in Vietnam after a decade-long war. There were riots and protests against its involvement, as well as harsh criticism from the president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Johnson, therefore, tried to negotiate an agreement with the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese so that the war could be ended. The deal was hammered out in Paris at peace talks.

If the talks had been successful, the war could have ended. However, it is very likely that one man was trying to make them fail—Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger was working for Johnson’s team, but he also worked with Nixon’s team. He fed information to Nixon about the progress of the talks and hoped that if they failed, Nixon would have a better chance of winning the next election.

Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace talks in 1968 because he thought he could get a better job with Nixon. He told Johnson that the deal wasn’t good enough, and then told Nixon about it. This information helped sway the election for Nixon, who appointed Henry Kissinger as his National Security Advisor.

Kissinger wanted to benefit personally from his involvement in the Vietnam War, so he prolonged it for seven years. During that time, hundreds of thousands more people died.

Big Idea #2: Kissinger was involved in operations around Vietnam that led to the deaths of thousands of civilians.

We’ve just seen how Henry Kissinger sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks. Now we’ll see how he increased the overall slaughter in Vietnam after that. In his role as National Security Advisor, Kissinger was heavily involved in two military strategies: Operation Speedy Express and Operation Menu – both of which can be described as war crimes. First of all, Operation Speedy Express deliberately targeted civilians. This mission used the army and air force to clear out the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam of enemy troops. It found 748 weapons afterward but killed 11,000 Vietnamese during its operation.

The fact that the 15 enemy soldiers were all carrying the same rifle makes it unlikely that they killed one another. Therefore, we must assume that many of the people dead were civilians who weren’t armed with guns. Some have even argued that this was done deliberately to boost the body count and “subdue” their enemies in order to gain more power over them.

Operation Menu was a military operation conducted by the United States during the Vietnam War. It involved dropping bombs on Cambodia and Laos, two countries that had nothing to do with the war. This attack violated international law because neither of these states were at war with America. Moreover, carpet bombing could not avoid civilian casualties because it is difficult to determine whether targets are military or civilian when flying so high in an airplane. As a result, about 350,000 civilians died from this sustained bombing campaign in Laos and 600,000 died from it in Cambodia.