Kissinger Kisses Goodbye
“In short, the end justifies the means” — Kissinger
Kissinger has been busy lately. Having died at the ripe age of 100, he’s making rounds in every media outlet across the globe. Some praise him, while others vilify him. But I’m surprised that NatGeo hasn’t yet deployed their group of scientists to examine his secrets to longevity. Did he expect to see a 100 when he fled Nazi Germany as a helpless 15-year-old Jew? He wasn’t just another centenarian. He was perhaps the most powerful bureaucrat for over two decades, shaping the course of history and controlling countless lives across the world. Unlike the life of such suits, he navigated among celebrities, partied hard, and slept very little. Yet he remained influential and lucid right until he climbed that UFO and took off to netherworld.
Kissinger enters an Indian’s political lexicon with his colorful references to Indira Gandhi, India’s only female prime minister, and a badass one at that, from the 1970s. Was Kissinger aware of the wiretaps when he called her a bitch privately to Nixon?
During the my-way-or-the-highway polarity of Cold War politics, India had famously pioneered a third way. It had decided to be non-aligned. India’s non-alignment occasionally blushed red, and it wasn’t invited to the US’s rave parties. Instead, the US invited Pakistan, India’s troublesome newly partitioned neighbor. Within 20 years since their independence, India and Pakistan had fought each other twice already and were headed to a third one.
Back then, Pakistan punched the torso of India from both sides — Urdu-speaking on the west (present-day Pakistan) and Bengali-speaking on the east (present-day Bangladesh). So when trouble brewed between the two languages, and refugees started pouring into India from east Pakistan, Indira Gandhi sharpened her bow to kill two birds at once — Cork the flow of refugees, and cut India’s enemy in half.
The military dictatorship in Pakistan had flouted the election results in East Pakistan and amped up its crackdown on the sovereignty movements resulting in a humanitarian crisis. A genocide was in progress in one of the most densely populated regions on earth. In the words of General Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan — “Kill 3 million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.”
India was impoverished and didn’t have the resources to deal with the never-ending throngs of refugees. India also had the added benefit of cutting the enemy in half. So the independence fighters (as per India and Bangladesh) or the secessionists (as per Pakistan and the US) received Indira Gandhi’s whole-hearted support. Kissinger didn’t like the smell of it, and he hated her guts.
“(But), Mr.President, even though she was a b**ch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.”
Like any others during the Cold War, this story is incomplete without the involvement of the US. The US wasn’t unaware of the genocide in Bangladesh. There were several communications through diplomatic and dissident channels informing the POTUS and his coterie of the genocide and atrocities in the region. The US decided to send its friendship band and a shipload of armaments to Pakistan. Of course, all that came to naught when Bangladesh won the war and the recognition of the international community.
Unlike the US involvement in Latin America, the Bangladeshi liberation war wasn’t a red scare, nor was it in the US backyard. In a war between two newly independent and poor countries, Kissinger put his thumb on the scale and let the Pakistani military have free reign in atrocities.
Serving as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under multiple administrations, Kissinger represents the US actions of that era; its good, bad, and the ugly. The ends justified the means for him. It didn’t matter how many lives were tortured, disappeared, or lost. This was his crusade, and no end was justified unless it assured US supremacy.
From the prolonged bleeding in the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, from humanitarian excesses by the Argentinian junta to the Chilean dictatorship, from diplomatic successes in the Yom-Kippur War and US-China relations, Kissinger left his fat fingerprints everywhere. In Kissinger’s words, ‘Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract’. Yet, he seems to have fostered a world, with a great deal of order and very little justice, exactly like the one he abhorred. Perhaps Kissinger might have left a different impression had he lived in a different era than the turbulent 70s. But it is that turbulence that puts one’s moral scruples to test.
Paying homage to a man who wrecked the lives of so many humans across the world, I travel South America through these movies below on the theme of Operation Condor. Blessed and aided by 3 US administrations, Operation Condor was a system in the mid-1970s to coordinate repression among the usual right-wing suspects in Latin America — Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Their toolkit comprised kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and murder. And none in these countries, regardless of whether you were a peasant or a priest, a nun or a nurse, was beyond suspicion.
With no regard for the law or basic human rights, the US and its satellite states controlled every aspect of people’s lives for a decade. Without an explicit blessing from Kissinger and money from the US, these dictatorships couldn’t have established such a terror machine. From actively funding the toppling of the democratically elected government in Chile to giving the green light for the clandestine repressions and concentration camps in all Condor countries, Kissinger was involved in all of these. With great power comes great responsibility. And the responsibility for these lost lives is at Kissinger’s doorstep. The irony of this world is such that Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
From the constitutional crisis in Chile to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement in Argentina, the ripples of those events are felt to this day.
Rise of everyday terror — Chile ‘76
A lot has already been said about Salvador Allende’s close victory in the 1970 election, Pinochet’s US-backed coup in 1973, and the reign of terror that followed. But we never truly understand what that terror feels like on a normal day and the weight of a careless moment on such a day.
The movie is set in a small coastal town outside Santiago, perhaps even Valparaiso, 3yrs after Pinochet’s coup. The story follows Carmen, an upper-class middle-aged woman, who gets sucked into military surveillance when she offers to nurse Elias, a wounded resistance fighter. Through Carmen’s idyllic life, Elias’s missing comrades who lived in slums, curfews, checkpoints, and the movie shows what life under Pinochet was like. But more than all that, the movie shows how carelessness and trust is a luxury not afforded in a surveillance state. One’s carelessness sometimes wrecks not one’s own life but that of others.
It’s a quiet, understated movie in which no significant event happens. But it is through the terrifyingly quiet moments that you live the lives of Pinochet’s slaughtered lambs.
Peak of political repression — A Twelve-year night
The world now celebrates the philosopher president, one of the humblest living politicians — Jose Mujica, Uruguay’s ex-president. Living austerely on his farm instead of the presidential Palace, donating 90% of his salary to charity, and riding his 60-year-old bicycle to work, Mujica had drawn worldwide attention to his non-material ways of life. But before there was the Mujica that the world admires, there was a Mujica that the military dictatorship tortured as a guerilla or leftist sympathizer.
The movie shows those 12 years of torture when Mujica and two of his comrades were arrested and confined in solitary cells. Cells without basic amenities or sanitation, with no access to the outside world even as written correspondence, the movie gives us a tiny glimpse into the terrifying realities of that era.
With 26 years in prison, I had considered Nelson Mandela as the most graceful sufferer in our recent history. But Mujica outrun Mandela by miles.
Justice delayed, not entirely denied — Argentina, 1985
Finally, it’s time for justice. Argentina, 1985 is the trial of the military junta by the civilian court after the country adopted democracy in 1985.
As per official investigations, no less than 9000 people had disappeared under the military dictatorship. Sometimes, pregnant women and entire families disappeared. As attested by one witness in the movie, they tortured the pregnant woman right until her water broke and resumed the torture immediately after the baby was out.
The movie shows us the fears, threats, and challenges faced by the court and prosecutor when investigating the military, and the outcome of the ordeal. With no evidence right off the bat, the prosecutor and team visit various regions of the country to meet the families of the victims and build a case against the junta. The result is a colosseum of evidence on the kidnapping, torture, disappearances, and murder.
Several of Kissinger’s pawns in South America faced trial. Pinochet was arrested, even if it was just for a brief duration, in the UK. As part of the 1985 civil trials, the top brass of the Argentinian junta got a life sentence. Uruguayan military managed to secure amnesty for their brutal acts. But what about Kissinger?
As one of the sharpest political minds of the 20th century and a practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger continued to unofficially advise all US presidents until 2020, except Barack Obama. As if Americans hadn’t experienced enough bloodletting from the Vietnam War, Kissinger advised Bush.Jr to continue the Iraq war until victory — “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
As the world reminisces about the turbulence of the Kissingerian era, I wonder if we have learned anything from it. What world are we tolerating if innocent lives have to be sacrificed without scruples for victory over imaginary ideals? Should we as a society let ends justify the means? Can anything abstract be a worthy enough goal to demand a sacrifice of the specific?
