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Pittsburgh Mike's avatar

Wow, I'm so impressed by your righteous attack on people dissing Kissinger.... :-)

Look, Kissinger was National Security Advisor during the Vietnam war, including the massive bombing campaigns against, well, pretty much everyone in the area. We bombed Cambodia (not an actual combatant), North Vietnam, and even South Vietnamese villages that had been declared free fire zones. Many millions of people died pretty much for nothing, and a lot of those deaths were in the service of Kissinger's policies.

His policies were failures: millions died as a direct result, and millions more if you count destabilizing Cambodia enough to put the Khmer Rouge in power. And in the end Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were all communist (Vietnam still is).

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CJ's avatar

I 100% buy into to idea that the Anthony Bourdain quote did more than any high school teacher can dream of in carving out space in the minds of Millenials and Zoomers about who Kissinger was. It's a well written quote, and very shareable. Plays well into to lefty disdain of American foreign policy and gives it more stakes than a textbook can dream. If someone accuses you of being a dork for being a 35 year old who claims to care about Kissinger, despite the fact that he had little to no political sway throughout your whole lifetime, you can just whip out a quote by a certified cool guy and you are back on the trendy train.

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