Kissinger lives on in Biden’s embrace of genocide, but so does a mass movement putting American Empire on the defensive

Kissinger's strategy of ruthless use of power eventually backfired. Are we seeing a repeat decades later as a militant movement has exploded against U.S. backing for Israeli genocide?

Kissinger lives on in Biden’s embrace of genocide, but so does a new generation of mass protests that is once again putting American Empire on the defensive

A joke currently making the rounds says Kissinger died of a broken heart from the temporary ceasefire in Gaza. As with any good joke, there is an element of truth to it. As one of the most notorious war criminals of the 20th century, Kissinger would have been displeased at Israel pausing its war on Gaza. 

Kissinger was an architect of the “Christmas bombings” in 1972, which saw U.S. bombers unleash nearly 2,000 tons of explosives a day on North Vietnamese cities in 11 days killing 1,600 civilians. His black heart was undoubtedly warmed in his incontinent last days by Israel bashing Gaza with nearly 1,000 tons of bombs a day for weeks, killing more than 15,000 civilians. 

Whatever sulfurous pit he is roasting in, Kissinger is smiling now that Israel has resumed its one-sided war, killing nearly 200 Palestinians in one day. It was different for Kissinger. He had to hide his genocidal campaigns such as the “secret” bombing of Cambodia that led to perhaps 2 million deaths. No more. Kissinger left behind a world where openly genuflecting at the altar of genocide is the price of admission for the ruling class. 

Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow, says, “Kissinger himself is gone, Kissingerism will live on.” Grandin explains:

“Many of the political arguments [Kissinger] made in the late 1960s to justify his illegal and covert wars in Cambodia, considered at the time way beyond mainstream thinking, are now an unquestioned, very public part of American policymaking. This was especially true of the notion that Washington has the right to violate the sovereignty of a neutral country to destroy enemy ‘sanctuaries.’ ‘If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,’ Barack Obama has said, offering Kissinger his retroactive absolution.”

Biden’s embrace of Israeli atrocities prove Kissingerism lives on. Anthony Blinken’s latest tour of the Mideast was filled with talk of Israel agreeing to a “clear plan for averting civilian deaths” and “protecting civilians.” Within a day, Israeli bombings killed nearly 200 Palestinians.

But to leave the story at “Kissingerism lives on” is a grave injustice. The Nixon administration sold the Christmas bombings as a success in forcing North Vietnam back to the negotiating table where they conceded to U.S. demands. The bombing campaign is considered vindication of Kissinger’s doctrine that Great Powers can ruthlessly do as they please. 

That is fake history. The peace deal that Washington and Hanoi signed in January 1973 was virtually the same one that had been on the table months earlier. Hanoi conceded nothing. The bombings were for show, a bloody show. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for the deal, along with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. The awarding of the prize to Kissinger was a travesty. Two of the five members of the Nobel committee who awarded the prize resigned in protest, Tho declined his award, and decades later it was revealed that the Nobel committee knew the peace deal was unlikely to hold, and it quickly fell apart. 

By 1974 Nixon had resigned from the White House in disgrace, undone to a significant degree by his paranoia over the antiwar movement. By 1975 North Vietnam trounced the American puppet state in the South, liberating Vietnam from colonialism as the remaining U.S. forces scurried like rats off a sinking ship. The American defeat in Vietnam opened the door to revelations like the Church Committee that shone a congressional spotlight on criminal CIA tactics from coups to assassinations, as well as former CIA agents like Philip Agee writing tell-all books that exposed the dirty tricks of the Agency. 

Kissinger and Nixon did expand and prolong the Vietnam War killing millions, argues Greg Grandin. But it came at the cost of the breakdown of the U.S. military machine with soldier revolts and disobedience spreading through the various services. Sailors sabotaged U.S. Navy warships, G.I.’s protested, held sit-down strikes in the field in Vietnam, and most infamously “fragged” hundreds of non-commissioned and superior officers with deadly grenade attacks.

There is also evidence that the most elite warriors in the U.S. military, Air Force officers, revolted against the Christmas bombings. The North Vietnamese shot down fifteen B-52s, a huge loss in such a short period. Air Force personnel were furious at the idea they could die or become a prisoner for a war that everyone knew America had lost.

Kissinger cut a bloody swath from Chile and East Timor to Vietnam and Bangladesh. But rather than strengthening U.S. power, his genocidal chess games diminished that power and stoked social discontent and economic turmoil at home and internationally.

Fast forward 50 years and today’s Kissingerism, Biden’s backing of Israel’s genocidal war, is sparking a huge backlash domestically and internationally. In mere weeks, one of the most militant, principled, and strategic U.S.-based mass movements in decades has coalesced into an inspiring anti-war campaign. Led by left-wing Palestinian, Muslim, Jewish, and student activists, peaceful protests and civil disobedience have spread around the country and put Biden and his ghoulish administration on the defensive.

There have been disruptions of Congress, mass walkouts of high-school and college students, shut-downs of bridges and roads, blocking arms shipments to Israel, staging high-profile actions during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, in Grand Central station, and at an Israeli military fundraiser in New York City.

There has been a vicious backlash as well. With people who dared to openly affirm the humanity of Palestinians met with death threats, doxxing, firings, and events canceled. Others have been shot, and a child killed. But these racist attacks also show the movement against Israel’s genocidal war is making a real impact.

While this new movement is being ignored by the corporate media, and unfortunately by many in the left media apart from Democracy Now, it combines a militancy and strategic focus that was missing from 25 years of horizontalist protests, going back to the 1999 Seattle uprising against the World Trade Organization.

It’s also noteworthy that the movement in defense of Palestinians is coming nearly three years into the Biden administration. It is nearly the same exact point that Occupy Wall Street erupted in the Obama administration, September 17, 2011.

It shows there is an ocean of anger and discontent among Americans against the horrors and depredations of the ruling class. It just needed a spark to ignite it, and Israel’s war on Gaza provided it. But its character as a left-wing movement that is militant and mass-based is the result of creative, principled organizing sustaining it. And it looks to have evolved beyond both the timid and trite antiwar protests during the Iraq War and the juvenile and self-defeating leaderless organizing of the last two decades.

There remains one difficult lesson to learn. The youth and student revolts in 1968 that swept the world helped Nixon squeak into power because many young Americans were so disgusted by rightfully the Democrats and sat out the election. Vietnam was a Democratic Party war, just as the Gaza genocide is now. 

But Kissinger and Nixon made the Vietnam War far worse. That’s not to say Hubert Humphrey, the losing Democratic Party nominee in 1968, would have ended the war overnight. But the antiwar movement would have had far more influence over Humphrey than over Nixon. While Nixon was ultimately done in by overreach and criminality, it came at a grave cost to the dozens of countries he and Kissinger ravaged in their years in office. 

The same is true today. The antiwar movement has forced Biden to dial back his backing of Israel. If Trump gets into power next year, he will be Nixon on steroids. Kissinger spoke admiringly of Trump because he exercised the ultimate talent in the dead war criminal’s eyes: creating his own reality.

Believing the organizing landscape would be better under a Trump dictatorship — the U.S. military occupying American cities, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, vigilantism — is not so much accelerationism as nihilism. 

Defeating the American war machine, the most powerful military in human history, is no small task. But there is little doubt the path will be significantly easier under a second term by an imperialist Biden than a open-ended regime under a fascist Trump.