"Until the most recent release of the Nixon/Kissinger tapes, what were
the permitted justifications for saying in advance that the slaughter
of Jews in gas chambers by a hostile foreign dictatorship would not
be "an American
concern"? Let's agree that we do not know. It didn't seem all that
probable that the question would come up. Or, at least, not all that
likely that the statement would turn out to have been made, and
calmly received, in the Oval Office. I was present at Madison Square
Garden in 1985 when Louis Farrakhan warned the Jews to remember that
"when [God] puts you in the ovens, you're there forever," but
condemnation was swift and universal, and, in any case, Farrakhan's
tenure in the demented fringe was already a given.
Now, however, it seems we do know the excuses and the
rationalizations. Here's one, from David Harris of the American
Jewish Committee: "Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to
go the extra mile to prove to the
president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay." And
here's another, from Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League:
"The anti-Jewish prejudice which permeated the Nixon presidency and
White House undoubtedly created an environment of intimidation for
those who did not share the president's bigotry. Dr. Kissinger was
clearly not immune to that intimidation." Want more? Under the
heading, "A Defense of Kissinger, From Prominent Jews," Mortimer
Zuckerman, Kenneth Bialkin, and James Tisch wrote to the New York
Times to say that "Mr. Kissinger consistently played a constructive
role vis-a-vis Israel both as national security adviser and secretary
of state, especially when the United States extended dramatic
assistance to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War." They asked that
"the fuller Kissinger record should be remembered" and, for good
measure, that "the critics of Mr. Kissinger should remember the
context of his entire life." Finally, Kissinger himself has favored
us with the following: At that time in 1973, he reminds us, the Nixon
administration was being pressed by Sens. Jacob Javits and Henry
Jackson to link Soviet trade privileges to emigration rights for
Russian Jews. "The conversation at issue arose not as a policy
statement by me but in response to a request by the president that I
should appeal to Sens. Javits and Jackson and explain why we thought
their approach unwise."
But Kissinger didn't say something cold and Metternichian to the
effect that Jewish interest should come second to dÈtente. He
deliberately said gas chambers! If we are going to lower our whole
standard of condemnation for such talk (and it seems that we have
somehow agreed to do so), then it cannot and must not be in response
to contemptible pseudo-reasonings like these.
Let us take the statements in order. Harris and Foxman at least
assume what we know for many other reasons to be true: Richard Nixon
was a psychopathic anti-Semite. Is Kissinger so base as to accept
their defense that he was cringing before a Jew-baiter? Surely this,
too, is "hurtful" to him (the revealing term he employs for reading
criticism of his words rather than for their utterance)? He declines
even to discuss the subject, though it has come up on countless
previous Nixon tapes. The difference on this occasion is stark: The
other recordings have Nixon giving vent to his dirty obsession while
Kissinger makes fawning responses. This time, it is Kissinger who
goes as far as any pick-nose anti-Semite can go. And Nixon doesn't
bother to grunt his approval. Not even he demanded so much of his
eager toady. Of the Zuckerman-Bialkin-Tisch school of realpolitik,
nothing much needs to be said. They refer to the "shock and dismay of
some in the Jewish community", as if only that community was entitled
to shock or dismay, while quite omitting even the usual formality of
expressing any disapproval of their own. To them, pre-approval of
genocide, offered freely to a racist crook, is forgivable if the
speaker is otherwise more or less uncritically pro-Israel. Add to
this the other excuses of Jewish officialdom, that the pre-approval
is also excusable when used to appease the evil mood swings of a
criminal president, and you have the thesaurus of apologetics more or
less complete. Kissinger's own defense, that pre-approval of gas
chambers was his thinking-aloud dress rehearsal for an "appeal to
Sens. Javits and Jackson", is of course unique to him.
So our culture has once again suffered a degradation by the need to
explain away the career of this disgusting individual. And what if we
did, indeed, accept the invitation to "remember the context of his
entire life"? Here's
what we would find: the secret and illegal bombing of Indochina,
explicitly timed and prolonged to suit the career prospects of Nixon
and Kissinger. The pair's open support for the Pakistani army's 1971
genocide in Bangladesh, of the architect of which, Gen. Yahya Khan,
Kissinger was able to say: "Yahya hasn't had so much fun since the
last Hindu massacre." Kissinger's long and warm personal relationship
with the managers of other human abattoirs in Chile and Argentina, as
well as his role in bringing them to power by the covert use of
violence. The support and permission for the mass murder in East
Timor, again personally guaranteed by Kissinger to his Indonesian
clients. His public endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party's
sanguinary
decision to clear Tiananmen Square in 1989. His advice to President
Gerald Ford to refuse Alexander Solzhenitsyn an invitation to the
White House (another favor, as with spitting on Soviet Jewry, to his
friend Leonid Brezhnev). His decision to allow Saddam Hussein to
slaughter the Kurds after promising them American support. His
backing for a fascist coup in Cyprus in 1974 and then his defense of
the brutal Turkish invasion of the island. His advice to the
Israelis, at the beginning of the first intifada, to throw the press
out of the West Bank and go for all-out repression. His view that
ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia was something about which
nothing could be done. Forget the criminal aspect here (or forget it
if you can). All those policies were also political and diplomatic
disasters.
We possess a remarkably complete record of all this, in and out of
office, most of it based solidly on U.S. government documents. (The
gloating over Bangladesh comes from July 19, 1971.) And it's horribly
interesting to note how often the cables and minutes show him
displaying a definite relish for the business of murder and
dictatorship, a heavy and nasty jokiness (foreign policy is not "a
missionary activity") that was by no means always directed, bad as
that would have been, at gratifying his diseased and disordered boss.
Every time American career diplomats in the field became sickened at
the policy, which was not seldom, Kissinger was there to shower them
with contempt or to have them silenced. The gas-chamber counselor is
consistent with every other version of him that we have.
To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be
to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the
unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out
to be not even a
Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral
limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to
ourselves that we observe one".
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