Tag: Henry Kissinger

What’s Noble About It!

By Amit Sengupta

Mahatma Gandhi was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize – in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and again in 1948, the year he was assassinated, reports Al Jazeera. He was killed on January 30 after a prayer meeting in Delhi by a Hindutva fanatic – Nathuram Godse. Given the organized polarization in India since the summer of 2014, Godse is these days eulogized by certain extremists, often publicly.

Significantly, the Nobel Committee did not declare an award in 1948. They said that there was “no suitable living candidate”. This was widely interpreted as a tacit admission of guilt for having ignored Gandhi all these years.

So, why did they choose to do that?

The Nobel Prizes are named after Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), a Swedish businessman and chemist. He is famous for inventing dynamite, which might have done wonders for the colonial empires in colonised countries, and capitalists into mining and construction, but the explosive has also led to thousands of deaths in war zones. Besides, mining and mindless construction (in sensitive eco-systems) has often led to mass displacement of ancient, indigenous communities, especially in mineral-rich forest and tribal land, and universal destruction of local ecology.

Nobel left millions to fund this annual event, so as to recognise those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to human kind”.

French philosopher, existentialist and novelist, Jean Paul Sartre, rejected the prize in literature in 1964. He said that he did not want to be ‘institutionalised’, had no desire for ‘official honours’, because it would cage him and his writing. He and his life-long comrade, Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote the path-breaking book, The Second Sex, were iconic figures in the non-dogmatic Left-progressive struggles in France, and across the globe, and ardent admirers of the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Simone de Beauvoir never got the award, despite being nominated several times.

Nelson Mandela, after spending 27 years condemned in prison, led the anti-apartheid struggle, which became a global symbol against organised racism and cruelty, with most countries in the world boycotting the White apartheid regime backed by the US, UK, and their western allies, who have been now supporting the on-going genocide in Gaza. It was Britain which sowed the seeds of this bloody conflict, siding with the formation of a “national home for the Jewish State of Israel” in Palestine, since the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, along with an undeserving FW de Klerk, who presided over the end of the apartheid era in South Africa. Till this day, the people of South Africa bond with the people of Palestine, because of their shared liberation struggle. It was South Africa which led the campaign against Benjamin Netanyahu’s mass murder regime in the International Court of Justice, invoking the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Among the most controversial awards was the one conferred on Barack Obama in 2009, weeks after winning his first term. He arrived as a refreshing departure after George Bush, who devastated Iraq with NATO and his lackey, Tony Blair. Thousands were killed. They claimed that Iraq had WMDs, which were never found, in what was clearly a ‘blood for oil’ war.

Obama’s wonderful rhetoric and good intentions seemed short and sweet. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, waged war on Libya, and the ghastly mob-lynching of Muammar Gaddafi as a public spectacle is etched in the minds of most Americans who voted against her in 2016.

The destruction of Syria was the next feather in the cap for Obama. His legacy will be remembered as a powerful and popular president who could turn the tide, but, in the end, got sucked in by the status quo, of which he was an integral part. Did you hear anything from him during the last two years of genocide in Gaza?

ALSO READ: Kissinger’s Attempts To Airbrush Nixon Fallacies

Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho were given a joint Noble prize in 1973, for the Vietnam Peace Accord. Le Duc Tho declined the award, arguing that the ceasefire was not working.

Earlier, the Americans had waged a 20-year long devastating war on this small peasant country, killing thousands, including in the infamous My Lai massacre in a village whereby 500 unarmed women, children and men, were murdered. The horrifying picture of a little naked girl running from a napalm bomb, which would burn through the skin and flesh, became a stark reminder of American brutality.

The BBC reports (December 3, 2023) on his death at the age of 100, in a piece titled, ‘Henry Kissinger’s Cambodia legacy of bombs and chaos’: “During the Vietnam War, Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon ordered clandestine bombing raids on neutral Cambodia, in an effort to flush out Viet Cong forces in the east of country… Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University and a leading scholar on Cambodia, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of US bombs were dropped on Cambodia between 1969-1973…”

It reports: “After his death, George W Bush said the US had “lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs”. Tony Blair said that Kissinger was an artist of diplomacy, who was motivated by “a genuine love of the free world and the need to protect it”.

(Blair is bad news. He is tipped to be a big player, nominated by Trump, in post-ceasefire Gaza. For all you know, he too might be fishing for a Nobel Prize for peace).

The BBC further reports: “Vorng Chhut, 76, had never heard the name Henry Kissinger when bombs started dropping down on his village in Svay Rieng province, near the Vietnamese border… Nothing was left, not even the bamboo trees. People escaped, while those who stayed in the village died, he said. ‘A lot of people died, I can’t count all their names. The bodies were swollen and when it became quiet, people would come and bury the bodies’.”

A Pentagon report released in 1973 stated that “Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970” as well as “the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers”. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?” Kissinger told a deputy in 1970, according to declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations. The number of people killed by those bombs is not known, but estimates range from 50,000 to upwards of 150,000, the BBC report said.

Maria Corina Machado has won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. For many, it is an outrage. She is widely reported as an ardent supporter of Israel, Trump and his politics, big business and privatization unleashed, and is branded as an American agent by her critics.

Media reports point out that Machado had asked Benjamin Netanyahu, to help “liberate” Venezuela. That she helped the 2002 coup in Venezuela that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, the hugely popular Hugo Chavez; and that she was backed by Washington, as is its legacy, for instance, in Chile.

In Chile, the US was reported to be behind the coup which led to the ouster and murder of a democratically elected Salvador Allende, close friend of great poet, Pablo Neruda. Then they propped up notorious dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who jailed and murdered thousands of dissenters, including famous musician and activist Victor Jara.

Machado has reportedly said that if she wins, she will open an embassy in Jerusalem, thereby whole-heartedly backing the apartheid occupation of Palestine. Her party, Vente Venezuela, is known to have signed a cooperation deal with the right-wing Likud, the ruling party in Tel Aviv, on “political, ideological and social issues… strategy, geopolitics and security.”

Machado posted on X: “We are on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve freedom and democracy. I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!” She is currently in hiding.

However, for those who were pitching for Francesca Albanese, Greta Thunberg, and the children, doctors, paramedics, nurses and journalists in Gaza, dead and alive, the Nobel Peace Prize might be a typical case of eyes-wide-shut. Remember the case of Mahatma Gandhi?

And, of course, Henry Kissinger?

Kissinger’s Attempt To Airbrush Nixon’s Fallacies

By Kunal Bose

The scholar, diplomat and public intellectual that the 99-year old Henry Kissinger is, has unwittingly done himself an injustice by including the disgraced US President Richard Nixon on more than one count in his recently released 528-page tome Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy. Nixon and Donald Trump will remain engaged in a competition as to who was the worst President in modern history of the United States of America. If featuring Nixon in a select group of world leaders is not a bad judgement in itself, the exacerbation of the scholar diplomat becomes complete by giving the besmirched President under whose charge happened the break-in at the Democratic Party’s National Committee headquarters a lot more space in the book than the other five leaders.

Ahead of his becoming national security adviser to President Nixon in 1969 (followed by many other assignments under Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan), Kissinger graduated summa cum laude from Harvard where he was also a faculty member. Perhaps he didn’t care, but Kissinger has never been liked by liberal Harvard professors and woke students there for his political views.

At the same time, Kissinger will not be unaware that many in the Republican Party agree with the late British author and journalist Christopher Hitchens’ description of Nixon as “duplicitous, gloating, insecure”… and “a small man who claimed to be for the little guy, but was at the service of the fat cats.” But that doesn’t stop him from confirming himself as a hagiographer as he gloats over Nixon’s “wealth of foreign policy experience,”… “his enormous appetite for information”… and his “long view.”

Such is his deference to Nixon – is it because the President’s foreign policy ideas were a mirror image of his own espousal – that Kissinger will staunchly argue to exonerate the President, on occasions going to the extent of putting the blame on his underlings, for all the wrong doings. Let’s take Watergate where the President was found complicit in break-ins in a rival party’s headquarters and all the transgressions that followed. Kissinger would say all these deserved “censure; they did not require removal from office.” Never mind, there would never be a buyer for such arguments.

Using his unique argumentative skills, Kissinger makes attempts in the book and also in a long interview with his biographer Niall Ferguson in Sunday Times to make the President appear like a victim in the Watergate case. You have Kissinger quoting Brycle Harlow, Nixon’s liaison man with Congress, in the book: “Some damn fool got into the Oval Office and did as he was told.” Developing on the point, Kissinger says: “As a general proposition, assistants owe their principals in politics not to be held to emotional statements (about) things you know they wouldn’t do on further reflection.”

Ferguson was given to understand there would be times, in the heat of the moment, or to impress present company, Nixon would give “intemperate verbal orders. But Kissinger learnt quickly not to act every time Nixon ordered him to ‘bomb the hell’ out of someone.” Kissinger’s apologia for shenanigans during Nixon Administration will be no exoneration for the President, for he alone was finally responsible for the doings of his underlings.

ALSO READ: Nixon To Trump – India’s Long Journey

The unravelling of Watergate put paid to the foreign policy ambition of Nixon-Kissinger to bring to an end the conflict in Vietnam on honourable terms, give the Atlantic alliance a new strategic direction, avoid a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union through arms control policy and highly innovatively bring the US closer to China and Russia than they were to each other. Domestic standing of the national leader will underpin foreign policy success of a government. Ferguson writes that “the Nixon that emerges from Kissinger’s Leadership” is nothing less than a “tragic figure.”

Watergate “destroyed not only his presidency but also doomed South Vietnam to destruction… It was defeat in Vietnam… that set the US on a downward spiral of political polarisation.” At this stage, it will only be pertinent to ask if a President who invited charges of perfidy should find a place in a book on role model national leaders of the last century. More appropriately, as Ferguson asks: “Isn’t he (President Nixon) a case study in how not to lead?”

Whatever that is, there has always been an intense dislike for Nixon in India for his role in the 1971 India-Pakistan war that led to the creation of Bangladesh and all the bad words he mouthed in the presence of Kissinger against prime minister Indira Gandhi, unable to withstand her regal dignity and independence. But to be fair to Kissinger, he wrote about Gandhi long after the Nixon-Gandhi frosty encounter that “Mrs Gandhi was a strong personality relentlessly pursuing India’s national interest with single-mindedness and finesse. I respected her strength even when her policies were hurtful to our national interest.” Why only India, during his Presidency, Nixon courted the wrath of liberals all over the world for his brutish foreign policies in respect of Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.

The other five global leaders who walked tall in the second half of last century to find places in the book are: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher. The world is aware of the heroic role played by Adenauer and de Gaulle in reconstructing Germany and France, respectively, from the Second World War rubbles. Sadat, on his part, performed the task of erasing the humiliation that Egypt suffered in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel. The mighty city state Singapore is the result of Lee’s vision. The spell that Thatcher cast upon Britain didn’t wear thin even when Tony Blair’s New Labour government was elected in 1997, seven years after Thatcher had to quit rather ingloriously. Both Blair and his successor Gordon Brown hosted Thatcher to tea at 10 Downing Street. In the UK, a former PM could not ask for anything more. It is well known that Kissinger and Thatcher formed a mutual admiration group well before she became PM for the first time in 1979 that ended only at her passing in April 2013.

Kissinger writes: “For Thatcher, there were no sacred cows, much less insurmountable obstacles. Every policy was up for scrutiny. It was not sufficient, she argued, for conservatives to sand down the rough edges of socialism; they had to roll back the state before Britain’s economy collapsed in catastrophic fashion… Thatcher’s economic reforms changed Britain irrevocably.” In his estimate, nothing would confirm Thatcher revolution “more than Blair’s program.” This left Thatcher immensely happy for she told her friend: “I think your analysis is the correct one, but to make one’s political opponent electable and then elected was not quite the strategy I had in mind.” No denying the fact that Thatcher lifted the British economy from morass and gave it an altogether new direction.

At the same time, she gave little space to the opposition and trade unions remained an anathema to her. No wonder intellectuals treading the middle path left of centre across the democratic world never had any love lost for the US’ most gilded diplomat and they will, therefore, have reasons to demur that Kissinger is recommending Thatcher and Lee, who would never tolerate dissent within his own party and outside as role models for the present and future leaders. Democracy prospers in an environment of healthy debate and where people in power will have no hesitation in listening to saner words of the opposition. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru would make it a point to be present in Parliament when stalwarts from the opposition would speak. He also loved to host them over a meal.

Kissinger rightly says: “Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first between the past and the future; the second between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead. They must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp and direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down strategy.” The tragedy, however, is Kissinger could not drive home this message to President Nixon.