The Joy of a Fine Mind’s Products — Belen Fernandez Smartly Reviewed — Insightful Greg Grandin’s Book — about Quasi-Nihilist (Former National Security Advisor) Henry Kissinger

© 2015 Peter Free

 

26 August 2015

 

 

Ordinarily, for most people, philosophy is boring . . .

 

But apparently not when contained in Greg Grandin’s dissection of former National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger.

 

 

A zinger-containing book review

 

Belen Fernandez juxtaposed two of historian Greg Grandin’s thoughts, thereby effectively summarizing his rich level of insight into one of the United States’ arguably immoral monsters, Henry Kissinger:

 

 

In 1950, Henry Kissinger - who would go on to serve as an inordinately powerful US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - wrote that "life is suffering, birth involves death".

 

As historian Greg Grandin documents in his just-released book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman", the man's "existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies".

 

In Kissinger's view, Grandin explains, life's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".

 

Of course, the victims of Kissinger-sanctioned military escapades and other forms of inflicted suffering might beg to differ.

 

Among the countless casualties are the dead and maimed of the Vietnam War - a disaster Kissinger fought to prolong despite recognising that it was unwinnable - and the secret US war that was launched on neutral Cambodia in 1969.

 

© 2015 Belen Fernandez, Kissinger Forever, Al Jazeera English (24 August 2015) (extracts)

 

Not bad for a book-buying hook, huh?

 

 

Notice Grandin’s key sentence and Fernandez’ acuity in spotting its importance

 

[L]ife's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".

 

This is an astonishingly permissive foundation upon which to pursue whatever one wants, in whichever manner appeals.

 

In Fernandez’ partially paraphrased book excerpt, our minds are freed to hypothetically track Evil’s Chain of Causation. If whatever I do does not matter, with regard to adding to Humanity’s Overall Miasma of Misery, the comparatively few more folks that I toss into the Pit do not matter either.

 

Believing this, I free myself to benefit myself — or whichever entity conveniently catches my favoring eye — without regard to the harms that my chosen path or strategy out-fling.

 

 

There is deliciously more

 

Ms. Fernandez links her review to an enticing “name the source of that quotation” list, which Grandin constructed for his Kissinger study:

 

 

Greg Grandin, Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…?, The Nation (09 June 2015)

 

Even if one is philosophically knowledgeable, I pretty much guarantee that some of the quotation sources will surprise.

 

Those that are attached to Henry Kissinger explain a great deal about the power of one’s personal (often abstruse) philosophy to motivate and simultaneously excuse hidden, but significant moral wrong-doing.

 

To see how this works, at least in brief, consider this excerpt from Grandin’s The Nation article:

 

 

Kissinger, out of public office since 1977, has cheered on the United States every step of the way as it plunged into the Persian Gulf.

 

Here he is in 1996, telling Bill Clinton to increase the number of cruise missiles he was sending into Baghdad:

 

The issue in Iraq is not the hiding of biological weapons . . . the issue is, do we have a strategy for breaking the back of somebody we don’t want to negotiate with?

And if we’re not able to do that, how can we then avoid negotiating with him?

If we are not able to destroy and we are not able to isolate him, we’re only going to demonstrate our impotence.

 

That, Kissinger said—trying to establish the domestic will to break the back of adversaries—was what he and Nixon tried to accomplish in Vietnam.

 

“Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.”

 

It’s not that remarkable a statement. At least it is honest: What matters is the effect that the will to bomb (or, if possible, actual bombing) has on us, providing a sense of purpose so we can bomb some more.

 

Kissinger, despite his reputation, isn’t a realist—or at least he doesn’t believe that policymakers have access to reality.

 

Rather, perception of reality has to be created by resolved, circular action: The projection of power creates our understanding of purpose and an understanding of purpose allows us to project power.

 

© 2015 Greg Grandin, Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…?, The Nation (09 June 2015) (paragraphs split and reformatted)

 

 

In other words

 

We kill people to be powerful, and being powerful motivates us to kill still more people to be more powerful.

 

This formulation runs counter to the ethical lessons contained in direct and historically acquired memories of the Holocaust. Henry Kissinger, however, remains apparently unabashed:

 

 

There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.

 

© 2015 Greg Grandin, Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…?, The Nation (09 June 2015) (paragraphs split) (quoting Henry Kissinger)

 

If Kissinger’s precept about Reality’s completely malleable nature does not chill the soul, one is both an intellectual and a moral idiot.

 

 

The moral? — Great writing and thinking are difficult to find — when they show up, feel blessed

 

Without reading Greg Grandin’s book, we cannot know the merit of Fernandez’ one sentence summary of what might have been ethically wrong with the former National Security Advisor.

 

Yet, surely, her Grandin quote is a book-buying motivator for those of us who do wonder how some people turned into the life-hacking monsters that they became.

 

Dick Cheney, incidentally, would be an interesting subject for the same treatment. Though I doubt that the former Vice President displayed the same philosophical thoughtfulness that Henry Kissinger did. Some people, it seems, are just born arguably soul-twisted.