#Greg Grandin

[deadpresidents]

Tangentially presidential, but do you have recommendations for biographies of Clarence Thomas and/or Henry Kissinger?

I don't have any suggestions for books about Thomas, but I can recommend a bunch on Kissinger. I think it's especially important to read different books about Kissinger to get a more balanced viewpoint because many books about him tend to be slanted in one direction or the other -- more so than most historical figures, in my opinion. He just tends to inspire particularly strong opinions, so here are a few books on him that I've found interesting:

•The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (BOOK | KINDLE) by Barry Gewen •Kissinger (BOOK | KINDLE) by Walter Isaacson •Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (BOOK | KINDLE) by Niall Ferguson •Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (BOOK | KINDLE) by Martin Indyk •Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman (BOOK | KINDLE) by Greg Grandin

There are also some really good dual biographies about Kissinger and Nixon and their foreign policy: •Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (BOOK | KINDLE) by Robert Dallek •The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (BOOK | KINDLE) by Gary J. Bass •The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (BOOK | KINDLE) by Seymour M. Hersh •Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross

And I want to also mention these two books, which are heavier reads but really important studies about the international impact of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy (and a helpful reminder about American complicity in the overthrow and death of democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende) : •Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (BOOK | KINDLE) by Lubna Z. Qureshi •Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (BOOK | KINDLE) by Roham Alvandi

[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

[folkdances]

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

[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...

[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

[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

[garudabluffs]

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.

LISTEN READ MORE Transcript https://www.democracynow.org/2023/5/24/intercept_kissinger_cambodia_killing_fields