Tag: Kissinger

Flaubert on Kissinger/Nixon

Speaking of Kissinger/Nixon, less flat-footed defenders of the Dynamic Duo like to take a tack that goes like this: “Yes, yes, massive violence at the periphery—Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere—but what about their more prosaic and peaceful achievements at the center: detente, the treaties with the Soviet Union, opening relations with China, and so on?” Flaubert had their number many decades ago: “Be regular and orderly in your life,” he is supposed to have to said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama

Today is the anniversary of two 9/11’s. The one everyone in the US talks about, and the one not everyone in the US talks about. Greg Grandin, who’s got a new book out on Kissinger that everyone should read, writes in The Nation today about Pinochet’s violent coup against Allende—fully backed by Kissinger and Nixon—and how Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is completing the work that Kissinger, Nixon, and Pinochet began. Forty-three years ago today. The TPP includes one provision that will, if activated, complete the 1973 coup against Allende: its Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. ISDS allows corporations and investors to “sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any […]

Kissinger: Allende More Dangerous Than Castro

By coincidence, Greg Grandin has a piece on Allende and Chile in the new issue of the London Review of Books.  It sets out very clearly why so many on the right saw Allende as such a profound threat. And then came Allende, horn-rimmed, jowly and looking a little too well lived to be a revolutionary. An avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat, he was at odds with Kissinger’s bipolar world. He was neither raw nor cooked. ‘I don’t think anybody in the government understood how ideological Kissinger was about Chile,’ an aide at the National Security Council once said. ‘I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat […]