GUEST BLOG: Maire Leadbeater – Reflecting on Henry Kissinger

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Henry Kissinger died as the war on Gaza was building to apocalyptic heights.
Did he ever regret his own role in Middle East power politics and his
diplomatic efforts which cemented in Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank? In 1967 UN Security Council resolution 242 called for Israel’s
withdrawal from ‘territories occupied in the recent conflict’ but the peace
plans based on this resolution all failed largely because Kissinger’s Cold
War determination to give Israel maximum latitude.  In his memoirs he
reflects on his time as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor with
surprising frankness. He made sure that peace proposals went off to the
‘overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes.’

Henry Kissinger’s malevolent role in Southeast Asia, included the secret
carpet bombing of Cambodia in the early 70s when he talked of hitting
‘anything that flies or anything that moves’.  He master-minded the 1973
overthrow of President Salvadore Allende in Chile: ‘I don’t see why we need
to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of
its own people,’ and he greenlighted the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East
Timor, asking only that it should not happen while he and President Ford
were in Jakarta.

Less well known is his role in West Papua.  In 1962, The US was intent on
winning Indonesia to its side of the Cold War divide and West Papua was a
bargaining chip. The US backed negotiations between the colonial Dutch and
Indonesia that led to the ‘New York Agreement’.  A temporary UN
administration was set up as a precursor to an Indonesian administration.
West Papuans were excluded from the discussions despite the fact they were
already making good progress towards decolonisation and independence.
While the New York Agreement bound Indonesia to conduct an act of
self-determination, the   so-called ‘Act of Free Choice’ which took place in
1969 was a sham referendum.      A handpicked group of just over 1,000
Papuans ‘voted’ under conditions of extreme duress to stay with Indonesia.
Any who dared to express a contrary opinion met with military force and the
severe repression has never let up.

Kissinger played an important back-room role as Nixon’s National Security
Advisor strongly supporting Indonesia’s plans. Kissinger prepared President
Nixon for his visit to Indonesia during the referendum assemblies which took
place over several months.  In a recently declassified memo from this time,
Kissinger  said that a direct election  ‘would be almost meaningless among the stone age cultures.’
Tragically, the poorly resourced UN team appointed to oversee the process
failed to protect the rights of the indigenous Papuans , compounding their
betrayal.

Other declassified memos show that the U.S. was initially concerned that the
UN might sound the alarm about the flawed process, but Ortiz Sanz the UN
Representative accepted the ‘political realities’ ensuring the ‘preordained’
outcome. Declassified New Zealand documents tell a similar story.  New
Zealand’s Ambassador to Indonesia visited West Papua and commented on ‘the
questionable morality of the whole process.’

The gold and copper treasure at Grasberg near Puncak Jaya mountain must have
played a part in Kissinger’s thinking.  Indonesia signed a contract with the
US firm Freeport McMoran to mine the minerals two years before the ‘Act of
Free/No Choice’ was held.    Freeport was able to dictate its own favourable
terms which included the right to take land and timber and to resettle the
tribal people who had no right of refusal.  In 1988 Henry Kissinger joined
the Freeport board.  Today Freeport is the third largest gold mine in the
world, now with majority Indonesian ownership it remains a
multi-billion-dollar contributor to the Indonesian government and a source
of environmental and social devastation to the indigenous people.

Indonesia’s repressive strategy is founded on tight military and
intelligence control aided indirectly by western military training and arms
supplies. Israel has helped with Cellebrite surveillance technology and New
Zealand trains Indonesian officers. The conflict in West Papua has remained
largely under the media radar, thanks to the exclusion of international
journalists.

Kissinger’s immoral ‘US interests first’ policies did not die with him.
Isolated against most of the world, the US cannot even support the UN call
for a ceasefire as Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza continues.  However,
the unremitting horror has mobilised unprecedented numbers in the US and
every western country, including Germany where pro-Palestine demonstrations
were initially banned.   These terrible times are exposing the hypocrisy of
the US and its allies and their talk of a ‘rules-based order’.   A
re-examination of Kissinger and his global role should form part of this
reassessment.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

 

Maire Leadbeater – Human rights activist and author of ‘See No Evil: New Zealand’s betrayal of the people of West Papua, OUP 2018

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

17 COMMENTS

  2. I can remember as a child (1960s-1970s) hearing missionaries talk about how bad the Indonesians were in West Papua so they have obviously taken a massive financial boost from their occupation while either killing or punishing the West Papuan people, the money talks rule applies again as those making decisions in the western nations would rather take the money than stand up for the rights of the native people.

  3. Thank you Maire, it is not enough as educated, intelligent humans to enable us sufficiently to take in he malicious thinking, plotting and power-accumulating in one or a few people so destructive and callous they can summon the doom of amoral gods. A relatively few individuals stop in their scurrying and open their minds and try to counteract this but the balance of power is so eccentric in all its meanings that they shout into wind.

    I think that the Holocaust was a pivotal point in human societal development when our ability to morally control ourselves was ‘rent asunder’ and set others on the downward path: the nuclear bombs over Japan when they were near to giving up anyway, body torture under the aegis of scientific study, the bomb testing n the Pacific, the Cambodian tragedy, the Katyn Massacre, the Lidice Massacre (Czech) and so on. And when individuals are concerned, rather than mass events ….

    Kissinger knew about prejudice and discrimination and violence. Noted in Wikipedia bio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
    Excerpt – Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated an opening of relations with China, engaged in “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. For his role in negotiating the end of the Vietnam War, he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.[5] A practitioner of a pragmatic approach to politics called Realpolitik, he has been widely considered by scholars to be an effective secretary of state.[6]

    Kissinger has also been associated with controversial U.S. policies, including its bombing of Cambodia, involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, support for Argentina’s military junta in its Dirty War, support for Indonesia in its invasion of East Timor, and support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War and Bangladesh genocide.

  4. Kissinger was the ultimate example of justifying any means to get the end result. His absolute amorality was stunning, real politik at its extreme. Because you and I couldn’t operate that way you’d have to conclude he was a sociopath. That said the same modus operandi gave us Salt and probably saved us from nuclear war.

  7. RE “Kissinger”

    Kissinger was a mega war criminal who’s responsible for millions of deaths ((https://williamblum.org/books/rogue-state & https://theintercept.com/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-death) who walked around freely and never got jailed, and who got regularly invited to speak at criminal mainstream “ivy league” universities (which should tell you what they are all about and their members). And he’s but one war criminal as virtually every president of the genocidal US regime has been a war criminal… and NONE ever went to jail.

    What does that point to? What is the OBVIOUS reality behind these facts?

    That a mafia network of manipulating PSYCHOPATHS (like Kissinger) are, and always have been, governing big businesses (eg official medicine, big tech, big banks, big religions), nations and the world — the evidence is very solid in front of everyone’s “awake” nose: see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room”… https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html

    And psychopaths are typically NOT how Hollywood propaganda movies have showcased them. And therefore one better RE-learns what a psychopath REALLY is. You’ll then know why they exploit/harm everyone, why they want to control everyone and have been creating a new world order/global dictatorship, and many other formerly puzzling things will become very clear.

    The official narrative is… “trust official science” and “trust the authorities” but as with these and all other “official narratives” they want you to trust and believe …

    “We’ll know our Disinformation Program is complete when everything the American public [and global public] believes is false.” —William Casey, a former CIA director=a leading psychopathic criminal of the genocidal US regime

    If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned, then verify what batch number you were injected with at https://tinyurl.com/ytthwrwm

    “… doctors and scientists are now on the same lever of public confidence as the scum living in the swamp.” — Unknown in 2022

    “… normal and healthy discontent .. is being termed extremist.” — Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968, Civil Rights Activist

  8. It’s always tragic when a demon as evil as Kissinger dies without being punished.

    But when we win, we can always try his corpse. There is no reason that monsters like these should be allowed to remain in the ground.

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