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Issue Number 18 - November 28, 2002
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The Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld crowd got drunk one night and decided to play a mad joke on the world. The public had demanded, and the U.S. Congress mumbled in assent, that a commission be selected to investigate the whos, hows and whys of September 11, the secrets behind the mad bombings.
So they picked the Mad, Secret Bomber, himself: Dr. Henry Kissinger. "I have bombed many times in my career," said the man who inspired the book and movie, Dr. Strangelove, accepting chairmanship of the 9-11 commission. "In all humility, I am a genius about dees things. I believe dat der Fuhrer... urr, der President has made a vize choice," said the old genocidist, looking and sounding like a Budweiser frog in a suit. "I have bombed whole countries in secret. I know the vayz of secret terror."
Among his innumerable crimes, Kissinger was the German-accented Rasputin behind President Nixon's illegal bombing of Cambodia, beginning in 1969. For 14 months, vast stretches of the countryside were carpeted with explosives. The National Security Advisor - later Secretary of State - and his boss never informed or asked the permission of the U.S Congress, although the B-52 missions were common knowledge among the military and much of the pliant press.
Finally, in the spring of 1970, U.S. infantry units were ordered across the Vietnam-Cambodia border. The conspiracy of silence was over. At campuses across the nation, hundreds of thousands of students protested the invasion and secret bombing. On May 4, National Guardsmen killed four demonstrators at Kent State University, Ohio, reinvigorating an anti-war movement that had been losing steam as U.S. troop strength in Vietnam declined.
As organizers prepared to mount a new wave of demonstrations, local and state police assaulted a dormitory at Jackson State University, in Mississippi, killing two students and wounding 12. The May 14 - 15 siege of the Black campus was occasioned by unrest over rumors that the Black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi and his wife had been shot. But in the massive protests that rocked streets and campuses across the width and breadth of the country that grim and furious month, placards memorialized the martyrs of Kent and Jackson State, and the three Black students killed by police in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February of 1968. The anti-war movement had been presented with a multi-racial cast of martyrs, and for a time spoke with a more truly American voice.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference roused itself from its post-King assassination torpor to stage a hugely effective, 130-mile march from Perry, Georgia to Atlanta, keyed to the killings at Jackson, Orangeburg and Kent State. Kissinger's secret war and brazen invasion had fired up the Black side of the movement, too.
Noam Chomsky argues credibly that Kissinger's secret and public bombing of Cambodia literally drove Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge peasant soldiers insane, leading them to seek vengeance, first among the city dwellers who had escaped the rain of death, and then to general slaughter. The human impact of Kissinger's predations is unknowable. He emerges as if from a bottomless pit.
Kissinger set in motion the wars that killed millions in Angola and Mozambique. An indictment the thickness of phone books would be required to list the capital offenses committed by this, the Master Criminal of recent times. As foreign policy guru to Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger has probably killed more people and overthrown more governments, covertly and publicly, with bombs large and small, weapons of all calibers and types, than any living human being. By any measurement of evil, he overwhelms Osama bin Laden.
Readers of a younger age may view our reaction to The Terminator's Return as less than relevant to today's predicament. Consider, however, that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and most of their clique are also baby-boomers, that their political views were formed during those same days of body bags, massacres and incipient revolt. These are the men who still talk of putting to rest the so-called "post-Vietnam War syndrome" - and yet they cannot resist giving the finger to their old enemies of the Left. Like drunken frat boys, they flaunt the symbolism of Henry the K, and inflict him upon us, once again. Somewhere in Kissinger's appointment as 9-11 commission chairman, they find Victory.
They have lost their minds. Old bones that have not stirred in many years will rise up at the specter of Dr. Strangelove, and march again. Let George Bush savor his infantile prank. He has done the resistance a favor.
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