from Hacker News

Henry Kissinger Dies at 100

by Paul_S on 11/30/23, 12:44 PM with 4 comments

• by mintaka5 on 11/30/23, 12:54 PM

  "From 1969 to 1973, as secretary of state and national security adviser under President Richard M. Nixon, Kissinger ordered the carpet bombing of large swaths of Cambodia that U.S. officials at the time claimed were sanctuaries for communist insurgents from South Vietnam as well as North Vietnamese soldiers. Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University and a leading scholar on the U.S. legacy in Cambodia, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this period and that these indiscriminate attacks killed as many as 150,000 civilians.

  The scale of this bombing campaign, internally called Operation Menu, was kept secret from the American public for many decades, though leaked and declassified records have revealed that Kissinger personally “approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids.” In 1970, according to declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations, Kissinger spoke to Nixon about the situation in Cambodia before relaying the following order to his deputy Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that? ”"

  Washington Post Nov. 30, 2023 "Henry Kissinger’s central role in the U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia"

  Kissinger is no peacekeeper. He is a loathsome war monger, and a war criminal who got away with too much slaughter of innocent civilians throughout the world. He even made money from it!!!

• by thehucklecat on 11/30/23, 1:40 PM

  I enjoyed reading https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-myth-of-he...

  I really like these new yorker articles that compare 2, or in this case 3 biographies with different perspectives. Feels like I get a much more balanced perspective really quickly.

• by Paul_S on 11/30/23, 12:47 PM

  Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/FFhmA