#Greg Grandin

[xtruss]

Republican Presidential Nominee Former President Donald Trump Leaves the Stage After a Campaign Rally at Grand Sierra Resort and Casino in Reno, Nevada, Friday, October 11, 2024. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong (Left). After Winning Presidential Election He Declared Himself As a King (Right)

Latin America’s New Right Ushers In Pan-American Trumpism! The Last Right-Wing American President Before Trump Galvanized A Resurgent Latin American Left. Where Will The Region Go Now?

— Greg Grandin | March 2, 2025 | The Intercept

DONALD TRUMP IS a wild card in Latin America. Who will he galvanize more? His natural allies, including leaders who share many of his culture-war obsessions? Or politicians and activists who see in Trump the long history of U.S. conquest made flesh, who bristle at his threats to seize the Panama Canal and bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico?

In trying to answer these questions, it’s helpful to take a moment to recall that Latin America, not too long ago, defied another controversial U.S. president on matters related to war and trade: George W. Bush.

By the time the Bush administration was gearing up for its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Latin America was beginning a remarkable run of elections. Leftists were coming to power in nearly every country south of Panama, many with ambitious agendas and outsized personalities. Among them were Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

For a region that had long been under the sway of Washington, a run of dissent to Bush — dated, say, from Lula’s first election to presidency in 2002 to Chávez’s death from intestinal cancer in 2013 — was extraordinary and, for a time, extraordinarily successful. In Latin America, diplomats talked about a new “Polycentric World,” while Beltway think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations Pronounced the Monroe Doctrine “Obsolete.”

“A New Generation of Reactionaries Draw Energy From The Tactics That Animate Trumpism In The U.S.”

The tide eventually turned. Where more traditional conservatives had found it hard to compete at the polls against politicians like Lula and Chávez, a new generation of reactionaries began to find their footing, drawing energy from the tactics and issues that animate Trumpism in the U.S. — an obsession with gender orthodoxy, a defense of patriarchy and Christian supremacy, and a love of cryptocurrency. Latin America’s New Right stands opposed to “Wokeismo,” used, as it is in the U.S., as a catchall for a range of social policies aimed at lessening class, gender, and racial inequality.

By examining this rollercoaster of a Latin American quarter-century, we might gain some insight into what to expect from Donald Trump’s second term, in Latin America and beyond.

The Rise And Fall of Left Dissent

Latin America’s leftist leaders of the aughts were resolute in their rejection of War Criminal Bush’s Fake “Global War on Terror,” refusing to let their security forces participate in the CIA’s transnational program of rendition and black-site torture. Brazil rebuffed U.S. demands to revise its legal code to make it easier to convict on terrorism charges; the governing Workers Party feared that such a move could be used, as one U.S. diplomat noted, to target “Legitimate Social Movements Fighting For a More Just Society.”

In 2005, Lula, Kirchner, and Chávez killed the much-anticipated Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, while Kirchner’s take-it-or-leave-it negotiating strategy for restructuring of Argentina’s national debt was held up as a model for lessening the debt burden of poor countries. Lula also worked to fortify the BRICS alliance as a counter to the World Trade Organization and resisted efforts to drive a wedge between Brazil and Venezuela.

Latin American nations pushed for an end to economic sanctions on Cuba, denounced Washington’s support of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and complained that the prison camp the U.S. set up in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a mockery of international law. Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina ignored Washington’s sanctions on Iran. Bolivia expelled the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 and USAID in 2014. Ecuador shut down a U.S. Air Force base. Most Latin American nations opposed NATO’s 2011 bombing of Libya, which resulted in Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall and execution.

Beyond any single dissent, Brazil advocated for a “Bolivarian” interpretation of international law, organizing nations around alleviating poverty, global warming, food insecurity, and the ills of the drug war. Brazil, Lula’s foreign minister said, has “No Enemies” — notable, considering that Bush’s neocons had marked out the entire globe as a battlefield. Venezuela reinforced Brazil’s position, as Caracas worked with Cuba and Nicaragua to build an explicitly anti-imperialist bloc. High commodity prices, including for Chilean Copper and Venezuelan Oil, allowed governments to pursue ambitious social welfare programs, lifting millions out of poverty.

Brazil waged a multifront campaign in the United Nations, WTO, and World Health Organization to break the monopoly on intellectual property held by pharmaceutical companies, insisting on its right to produce generic HIV/AIDS drugs and other “essential medicines.” Brazil won that fight, changing global norms and widening access to lifesaving treatment.

Latin America’s progressives began to lose their advantage, however, with the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Where Bush’s braggadocio hardened hemispheric opposition, Obama’s diplomats played a patient long game that brought the region back into the fold.

Obama stepped up domestic oil drilling and gas fracking, while encouraging Canada to increase its fuel and electricity exports into the United States. This was all done to greatly lower the cost of energy and to “Constrain” Chávez, which it did.

Coups in Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 ousted moderate social democrats. Washington didn’t orchestrate the overthrows, but Hillary Clinton’s State Department did legitimate them and armed the men who carried them out.

Those two small countries were low-hanging fruit. Brazil, with Venezuela contained, was the whole game.

There, Obama’s Justice Department provided critical assistance to corrupt investigators leading a legal witch hunt against the governing Workers Party, resulting in Lula’s imprisonment and the impeachment of his successor Dilma Rousseff. This “Lawfare” campaign ultimately set the stage for the rise of the hard-right Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally in style and substance, who was elected president in 2018.

Then, a federal judge in New York ruled that Kirchner’s debt deal was invalid, obligating Argentina to pay its external debt in full. The judgment set loose the bond vultures on the country, sending its Politics into a Tailspin. Eventually, the pressure contributed to the 2023 election of Javier Milei, a self-declared anarcho-capitalist who never tires of shouting “Viva la libertad, carajo” — Which Roughly Translates As “Liberty, Mother Fucker.”

The New Right

Bolsonaro and Milei, along with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, represent Trump’s potential base of support in Latin America.

Daniel Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, wouldn’t have had a shot at Ecuador’s presidency in, say, 2006, when Noboa’s father ran and lost to Rafael Correa, a left economist. But the culture wars have given the oligarchy a new luster. Young Noboa has Adopted a Trump-like Persona, Skilled at Social Media, Selling Himself as simultaneously Pro-business and Anti-establishment, Pro-Illegal Isra-hell and Anti-woke. Having plastered the country with posters of his image alongside those of Trump, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk, Noboa is running close behind the leftist Luisa González in a presidential election that will go to a runoff in April.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sits next to Donald Trump during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 7, 2020. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Musk is a culture hero to men like Noboa, Milei, and Bukele; his fight against Brazil’s efforts to regulate social media — carried out through legislation aimed at muting disinformation and limiting right-wing extremism — became a rallying cause for the region’s conservatives. (Brazil so far has held Musk off, though Rumble and Trump’s Truth Social have just filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court alleging illegal censorship.

In El Salvador, Bukele, a hip, baseball cap-wearing self-styled libertarian, presides over Dantesque displays of dehumanization: assemblies of hundreds of supposed gang members, their heads shaved, massed together naked and shackled. Held up as a model for not just for conservatives in Latin America, but up north, too, Bukele dispensed with due process, sparking the highest rate of incarceration in the Americas, higher even than the U.S. itself.

Psychological campaigns to destabilize elected leftist and centrist governments by amplifying lies and manipulating the institutions of democracy — the press, the ballot box, and the law — are nothing new in Latin America. The CIA ran dozens of such operations in the region. What is novel about the New Right is the appearance of grassrootedness, the sense that pressure is building spontaneously from a multitude of sources, that the right represents not a defense of the status hierarchy but a desire for anti-systemic change.

“What Is Novel About The New Right Is The Appearance of Grassrootedness.”

The ties binding Latin America’s New Right and its American counterparts are thickening, the result not of viral memes and social media posts but the organizing efforts of billionaire funders, conservative church leaders, libertarian activists, right-wing influencers like Steve Bannon, and political parties, such as Spain’s Vox. Anti-vaccine predators target poor communities in Mexico the way they target poor communities in the U.S. Libertarians make common cause with anti-abortion and Anti-trans Activists, Ultraorthodox Catholics, Evangelical Dominionists, Christian Zionists, and the Latin American Branch of New Apostolic Reformation — recently highlighted as key to understanding Christian Support For Trump.

Trump’s Regional Incoherence

Trump Could Run The Table In Latin America.

With Former Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state and hard-liner Mauricio Claver-Carone his “Special Envoy” to Latin America, one could imagine a scenario where the U.S. takes Nicolás Maduro out; Squeezes Cuba Until it Breaks; Ousts Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; keeps the Argentine Peso Artificially Inflated to Help Milei win congressional elections in October; and drives a deeper wedge between an already split left in Boliva, finally bringing about a rightist restoration in that lithium-rich nation. Both Chile and Colombia are Governed by Leftists with bad poll numbers. Who knows what conversations are being had to influence their upcoming elections.

Then there is Brazil, where the charges against Lula have been thrown out, the investigation that led to his conviction shown to have been corrupt and politically motivated. Released from prison, Lula ran against and beat Bolsonaro in 2022, winning a third term as president. Bolsonaro responded to defeat by encouraging a putsch that would have kept him in power, including a plot to poison Lula. He’s currently banned from running in Brazil’s next presidential election, though his supporters have been lobbying Rubio to Pressure Lula to find a way to to Lift the Ban and to let Nazis and Antisemites Post on Brazilian X.

This scenario — which includes not just a rollback of the left but a nurturing of a Pan-American Trumpism — assumes coherence and patience that might be beyond Trump’s capacity. Trump hasn’t yet appointed ambassadors to Brazil and Colombia, nor an assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. And the freezing of foreign aid to the region, including money earmarked for the security forces, limits Washington’s room to maneuver.

Trump will most likely, at least at first, pursue spasmodic action in the hemisphere. He’s already flip-flopped twice on Venezuela. First Trump said Maduro had to go. Then it appeared that his administration made a deal where he could stay, and let Chevron pump oil. Most recently, however, he surprised Chevron by announcing he was revoking the company’s waiver to work in Venezuela, apparently as part of a deal to keep Republican members of Congress in line during budget negotiations.

As his presidency moves ahead, Trump will pick — according to his own impulses — fights with Latin America over China, migration, tariffs, deportation flights, and drug policy, and as he does, he’ll blow the chance of building a unified hemispheric movement in his image. His repeated threats that he’ll coerce Canada into becoming part of the U.S. has alienated him from Canadian conservatives. Colombians, according to one poll, mostly like Trump — but not if his continuing threats against Panama, which once was a Colombian province until the U.S. split it off in 1903 to build the canal.

Trump’s fickleness prevents him from putting forth a coherent foreign policy and building a durable international coalition. Yet this disadvantage is offset by the fragility of the Latin American left.

For now, activists continue to mobilize a wide variety of social movements aimed at making a fairer world and progressives continue to win elections. A rough regional count has more than 470,000,000 people, out of a total population of about 620,000,000, living in countries governed by presidents who call themselves socialists or social democrats.

Yet left politicians tread treacherous ground, unable to command the kind of rhetorical hegemony their comrades did two decades ago. Where Chávez energized the hemisphere’s left, his hard-to-defend successor, Maduro, exhausts it, forcing Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to waste energy debating what to do about Venezuela.

“The Unity That Existed When The Region Pushed Back Against Bush No Longer Exists.”

The unity that existed when the region pushed back against Bush no longer exists. Each center-left country seems an island unto itself, their governments unable to pass their reform agenda and incapable of building stabilizing coalitions. Lula still works with the BRICS on efforts to find a currency other than the dollar to do business. “Trump’s tariff threats won’t stop our determination,” he said recently, to find a way to do business that “doesn’t depend on the dollar.”

He is, however, boxed in at home, his popularity still frustratingly just a point or two above Bolsonaro, despite all of the latter’s crimes. Lula may have to run again in 2026. If he does, it will be a sign of the center-left’s weakness, not strength — an indication of Bolsonarismo’s vitality and of its opponents’ failure to offer an alternative, other than turning again to Lula, who Will Be 80 Years Old. Over the last few decades, a humane pope, raised in Peronist Argentina, has renewed progressive Christianity. The 88-Year-Old Pope Francis, though, is ill and weak, and ascendent Catholic reactionaries are giddy thinking he might not be long for the world.

Only Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum Operates From a Position of Authority. Her expansion of the welfare state is enormously popular with Mexicans, with polls showing that a vast majority of the Country Backs Her in Her Contretemps Against Trump. Even as she delicately handles the U.S., She Remains Bold in putting forth a post Neoliberal Vision of Social Citizenship.

Elon Musk shake hands with Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Another Fascist, after getting a chainsaw from him at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP

The Fragile Imbalance

Elections are fought on a Knife’s Edge, for the votes of Citizens Tired of Crime, Corruption, and Inflation. In their weariness, the allure of being called to a fight is tempting. But it’s mostly the New Right doing the Mustering, Filling the Void created by the left’s disorientation with politicized meaning. Left-wing Hegemony has given way to an Expansive Right-wing Conspiricism, a project of Crypto-Worldmaking ever More Baroque in its details.

As in the U.S., Latin America’s New Right composes its own demonology as it grows: Globalists, Judith Butler, George Soros, Climate Scientists, Reporters, Government Workers, especially Teachers and Public University Professors, Migrants, and Imagined Pedophiles. “Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas” — “Don’t Mess With My Kids” — is the name of a Peruvian Movement that has gained influence in the government, which last May decreed that intersex and transgender people were “Mentally ILL.” The phrase “Gender Equality” has been struck from Peru’s school textbooks.

Fascist Milei’s support for the Illegal Regime of the God’s Fucked-up, Genocidal, Fascist and the War Criminal Isra-Hell is as “Unwavering” as is his backing of Trump, even if, for Milei, Trump’s tariff policy poses a greater moral dilemma than War Criminal 🐖 Isra-hell’s Genocide in Gaza.

The Argentine president’s defense of “Freedom” — by which he means Market Freedom — requires constant mobilization in support of causes at odds, at least in principle, with libertarianism, including laws restricting abortion; the persecution of transgender people; collective mass incarceration; and attacks on free speech, the right to protest and assembly, journalism, public education, and teachers. The point is to dominate public discussion, Milei says, to constantly expand the conservative imagination. Otherwise, the advantage will slip back to “Social Justice” activists.

Milei, beloved by the editors of The Economist, has been recently implicated in cryptocurrency swindle. Argentine prosecutors have launched an investigation into the scam, and the evidence seems damning. The Organizers of the Con — Apparently the Same People Who Ran Melania Trump’s Coin Sale — had Channeled Money to Milei’s Chief of Staff, His Sister Karina Milei. “I Control That N****,” one of the accused in the scam texted, referring to the President. “I Send $$ to His Sister and He Signs Whatever I Say and Does What I Want.”

The fragile imbalance between right and left power manifests in Latin America’s stance toward Europe: As he did with Bush’s earlier militarism, Lula has criticized the U.S. backing of Ukraine in its defense against Russia, insisting that only diplomacy can resolve a conflict decades in the making. For his part, Milei, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, pledged his undying support to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “I was the first to defend Ukraine against Russia,” he said; “You will always find me on the right side of history.” 😂😂😂 (Everyone needs to watch the video of Thug and War Criminal Zelensky with Trump. February 28, 2025).

Milei even announced that Argentina intended to join NATO, extending the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO), military alliance, to the South Atlantic, but then history changed sides. Now, courting Trump and needing Washington to approve a loan from the International Monetary Fund, Argentina has backed away from Zelenskyy, with Milei instructing his ambassador to the United Nations to abstain in a vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Milei seems unfazed by his faithlessness, holding himself up as a model for his own followers: “Everyday I Relentlessly Wage the Culture War.”

Viva la libertad, carajo! (¡Viva la libertad, carajo!, Sometimes Shortened to "VLLC," is the Catchphrase of Javier Milei, President of Argentina since 2023. The phrase Translates into English as "Long Live Freedom, Damn It!" or "Long Live Freedom, Goddamnit!") OR “Viva la libertad, carajo” — Which Roughly Translates As “Liberty, Mother Fucker.”

[quotent-potables]

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the lack of camels in the Koran proves its Middle Eastern provenance; only a native author, he explained, could have so taken the animal for granted as not to mention it.

— Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin

[preheville]

In all seriousness, here are a few resources I think are helpful with regards to understanding just how thoroughly Henry Kissinger screwed the world over:

Kissinger by Behind the Bastards. This is a 6 part series done by the podcast Behind the Bastards, with the hosts of The Dollop on as guests. It's super funny and a very accessible foothold into understanding the scope of Kissinger's vast career.

Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin. This book provides an in-depth analysis of Kissinger's tenure in the White House, covering both how he got into office, the changes he made in office, the policies he put forth, and their repercussions on the world.

ETAN's category on Kissinger. The East Timor and Indonesia Action Network has long been an outspoken critic of Kissinger's, and they've aggregated a lot of helpful articles here.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchins. While Grandin's book focuses less on the specificities of Kissinger's crimes, Hitchins has no such qualms and details each of them in depth.

I truly think understanding Kissinger, the way he thought, and the things that he did, are all indispensable when it comes to understanding the modern political climate and how foreign policy works in America and therefore, by necessity, in the world at large. The sheer amount of damage he was responsible for should never be underestimated.

[steveyockey]

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose 4-year old McVeigh killed.

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.

No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times’ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.

Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national-security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman.

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

[sataniccapitalist]

Henry Kissinger and the Moral Bankruptcy of U.S. Elites

Henry Kissinger is dead at the age of 100. The former U.S. statesman served as national security adviser and secretary of state at the height of the Cold War and wielded influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades afterward. His actions led to massacres, coups and and even genocide, leaving a bloody legacy in Latin America, Southeast Asia and beyond. Once out of office, Kissinger continued until his death to advise U.S. presidents and other top officials who celebrate him as a visionary diplomat. Yale historian Greg Grandin says those glowing obituaries only reveal "the moral bankruptcy of the political establishment" that ignores how Kissinger's actions may have led to the deaths of at least 3 million people across the globe. Grandin is author of "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman."

[nearmidnightannex]

Rolling Stone goes IN on Kissinger

Their coverage is strikingly different from almost all of the rest of the US and most western media.

Whoever wrote the Daily Mail eulogy linked in the second Rolling Stone article is on the shiny shiny drugs. Also, the recommended tags that popped up for this were ... amusing, let's say.

Presented without further comment.

GOOD RIDDANCE Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies (rollingstone.com) The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him BY SPENCER ACKERMAN NOVEMBER 29, 2023

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. [...]

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds....

ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY Media, Conservatives Team Up to Lionize War Criminal Henry Kissinger The notorious U.S. diplomat responsible for millions of deaths died on Wednesday at the age of 100 BY CHARISMA MADARANG NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Henry Kissinger, a national security adviser and former secretary of state under two presidents, has evaded accountability, even after death. On Wednesday, the notorious war criminal responsible for the deaths of millions, died at the age of 100.

During his lifetime, Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam war and expanded it to Cambodia and Laos; green-lit Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor, Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh, and supported military coups in Chile and Argentina. According to Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, the estimated death toll for foreign policy policies tied to Kissinger is between 3 million and 4 million.

Yet the headlines following his death have been astonishingly void of accountability, but not surprising. Publications from both the left and right lionized the war criminal. The Wall Street Journal credited Kissinger as the man who “Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars,” while BBC called him the “Divisive diplomat who towered over world affairs.” In a loaded headline, Daily Mail lauded the him as a “Nobel Prize winner who stared down the Soviets,” while also labeling Kissinger as a “VERY unlikely sex symbol.” [...]

[protoslacker]

Kissinger is, of course, not singularly responsible for the evolution of the US national security state into the perpetual motion machine that it today has become. That history, starting with the 1947 National Security Act and running through the Cold War and now the War on Terror, comprises many different episodes and is populated by many different individuals. But Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line, shedding spectral light on the road that has brought us to where we are now, from the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf to deadlock in Ukraine to moral bankruptcy in Gaza.

Greg Grandin in The Nation. A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.

I am a nobody, but at 68 years old now Grandin's "bright red line" in re Kissinger rings so true. Since the time I began noticing , i have understood that I bear some guilt for American militarism and the misery it's wreaked.

Bernie Sanders in a debate with Hillary Clinton said, "“I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.” 

Amen to that.

[azspot]

And thinking about him as a war criminal kind of dumbs us down. It doesn’t allow us to think with Kissinger’s — use Kissinger’s life to think with, to think about how the United States — for example, Kissinger started off as a Rockefeller Republican, you know, a liberal Republican, an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller who thought Nixon was far out of the mainstream and a dangerous sociopath, I think, as he put it. And yet, when Nixon won — and he actually helped him win by scuttling a peace deal with North Vietnam — he made his peace with Nixon, and then went on, you know, into public office. And he thought Reagan was too extreme, and yet he made his peace with Reagan. Then he thought the neocons were too extreme, and he made his peace with the neocons. Then he even made his peace with Donald Trump. He called Donald — he celebrated Donald Trump almost as a kind of embodiment of his theory of a great statesman and being able to craft reality as they want to through their will. So, you see Kissinger — as the country moves right, you see Kissinger moving with it. So, just that trajectory is very useful to think with.

Greg Grandin

[gideonthefirst]

January Books

bolded is favorites, [x] is least favorites

fiction

Caribou Island by David Vann

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories by Leonard Cohen

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Harrow by Joy Williams

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

nonfiction

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Megan O'Rourke

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 by Ernesto Che Guevara

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel [x]

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse

Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 by Richard Thompson

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English [x]

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy [x]

other

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraqib

[preheville]

fav kissinger or nixon books? i've only read atpm

hi!! prefacing this by saying i mostly read articles/watch documentaries on the subject BUT here's a quick rundown (barring atpm):

kissinger's shadow: the long reach of america's most controversial statesman by greg grandin — super expansive, gives you a really good scope of kissinger's career. my go-to recommendation tbh

kissinger: the idealist by niall ferguson — this is part one of probably a two-part series? but he hasn't released the second book yet. this book covers the first part of kissinger's life, so his childhood, his schooling, his military service... i'm chipping away at it and i really like it so far, it's very in-depth but it is fairly massive

the fall of a president by woodward & bernstein but containing collected authors — a series of essays/thinkpieces/etc compiled by woodward and bernstein that kind of gives differing perspectives on nixon/watergate

king richard - nixon and watergate: an american tragedy by michael dobbs — super interesting retelling! frames nixon as this almost shakespearean figure, and follows the weeks leading up to watergate

^ these are the ones i've read/am reading! here's a few i haven't read yet but look promising:

kissinger - a biography by walter isaacson

the blood telegram: nixon, kissinger, and a forgotten genocide by gary j. bass

the trial of henry kissinger by christopher hitchens

the good die young: the verdict on henry kissinger by rojas, sunkara, walter

henry kissinger and american power: a political biography by thomas a. schwartz

note that some of these were written by people who did to some extent laud kissinger—the isaacson biography stands out in my memory, but i might be misremembering—but i think that that's also important to read in supplement!

[underthewingsofthblackeagle]

Kissinger at 100: New War Crimes Revealed in Secret Cambodia Bombing That Set Stage for Forever Wars

         A bombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/5/2...

[txttletale]

@lessthanthreelalli

vladimir lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

william blum, killing hope

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

ed. aijaz ahmad, che on socialism and internationalism

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

ruy mauro marini, dialectics of dependency

regis tove, imagining the other: the representation of the papua new guinean subject

[coolerdracula]

tagged by @sawcleaver ty <3 ^-^!

last song you listened to: Asphalt Lady by S. Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe

last movie you watched: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid .. I think...

currently watching: Doctor Who as well

other things you’ve watched this year: ADVENTURE TIME, the new Puss in Boots movie, They Cloned Tyrone ... there's more but those stand out

currently reading: Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin (very slowly)

currently listening to: Security by Peter Gabriel

currently working on: surviving my last few finals; doing research for my RE video essay that I will make at some point in my life; sculpting a thing for a white elephant gift thing next Wednesday at roller derby practice

current obsession: Doctor Who & Resident Evil. teehee

tagging: @roseforrest @lemonsweet @stoprockvideo @greaterhorrors @bigfishthemusical @aretarers @raymend @fecto @cohnal @planetary and Ummmm whoever else sees this and wants to do it (& say I tagged you ^-^) bc I'm getting shy putting so many URLs. love you

[npdclaraoswald]

4, 11, and 14 for the book asks (if they haven't been asked already!) :D

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

I haven't found any new ones that I'd immediately call auto-buy authors after just one book, but I read AM McLemore and RF Kuang for the first time this year and have several other books from both of them on my tbr. And it's a bit more difficult to get a feel on comic writers right away since it is such a collaborative medium, but I really like what I've seen from Chris Claremont, Eve Ewing, G Willow Williams, and Emily Kim

11. What was your favorite book that's been out for a while, but that you just now read?

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer translated by Shaun Whiteside is oldest 5 star read I've had this year, having come out in 1963, but I also loved The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982), and all of the Discworld books I read this year, the most recent of which was published posthumously in 2015.

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

Well the only thing I have that I've started so far is Frankenstein, but my tbr for the rest of December includes Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa (picking this one up from the library today); Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa; The Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas; When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb; You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat; Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin; Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke; You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Justina Matthewson; Green Arrow/Black Canary vol 3: A League of Their Own by Judd Winick, Wayne Faucher, Mike Norton, Robin Riggs, and Diego Barreto; Sideways vol 1: Steppin' Out by Justin Jordan, Dan Didio, and Kenneth Rocafort; Batman and the Outsiders vol 2: The Snare by Chuck Dixon, Carlos Rodriguez, Julián López, and Ryan Benjamin; and Static Shock vol 1: Supercharged by Scott McDaniel, John Rozum, and Marc Bernardin

Book asks