A series of events this month marks the 100th anniversary of a war criminal in the United States. Henry Kissinger will die with impunity and be celebrated by politicians, journalists and foreign policy think tanks.
Aside from the precaution of not entering certain countries to avoid the risk of arrest, as boasted until last year of Chilean Augusto Pinochet, former national security adviser and former secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has been in the past halfcentury of invited every President to visit the White House.
All except for now Joe Biden have sought advice from the man responsible for the indiscriminate bombings in Southeast Asia that have killed nearly a million civilians in Cambodia and Laos, not to mention supporting Pinochet’s coup, the Pakistani military in the brutal suppression of Bangladesh’s independence and gave the green light to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, killing more than 100,000 Timorese.
In less than a decade, during the Vietnam War whose peace talks sabotaged Kissinger and Nixon under Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Americans dumped 4.7 billion liters of pesticide the most famous of which was the infamous Agent Orange, in an area where this does not reach half of the state of Alagoas. The campaign to defoliate the region’s dense rainforests, destroy food crops, and contaminate the soil for decades is unprecedented in American military history.
A newly published book picks up on the legacy of the Vietnam War’s environmental degradation, peacetime deaths and birth defects and is unlikely to be read by the elite of New York and Washington wishing the grotesque perpetrator of crimes against humanity a happy birthday will sing. humanity on the 27th
The author of The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace and Redemption in Vietnam is veteran journalist George Black. As the title suggests, the British author divides the book into three parts, but in the third part he defies the happyending narrative of American efforts to repair and clean up environmental damage, initiatives launched during decades of refusal to acknowledge the destruction , avoided were caused. Much of the environmental legacy of the war has been studied with forensic precision by the Vietnamese themselves.
Black explains, “The truth about wars is that they never end.” The comment also applies to the rejected American veterans of defeat “the United States doesn’t know how to lose wars,” the author recalls who die as a result of exposure Agent Orange continue to die from multiple cancers and other diseases.
Black also points out that the Vietnamese, a population mostly born after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, typically welcome US military veterans with open arms without showing resentment. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that soldiers from both countries were forced to enlist in combat. But how to explain the greeting that so many Americans continue to extend to the monstrous Henry Kissinger?