Countercurrent – December 1, 2023

Unravelling the Disinformation Machine: How the Hamas-Israel War
Became a Tool for Pre-Election Fear-Mongering?

by Mohd Ziyaullah Khan

Overview 

In the realm of contemporary politics, the utilisation of disinformation has become a potent tool for shaping narratives, influencing public opinion, and, in some cases, instigating fear. As India gears up for elections, the party in power has been accused of deploying a disinformation strategy that exploits the ongoing situation in Gaza for pre-election fear-mongering. This article aims to unravel the tactics employed by the BJP’s alleged disinformation machine and the implications of using international crises as political leverage.

The Role of Disinformation in Politics

Disinformation, defined as the deliberate spread of false or misleading information, has become a pervasive force in global politics. In the age of social media and instant communication, political actors often leverage disinformation to manipulate public sentiment, create divisive narratives, and gain a strategic advantage. The BJP, as India’s ruling party, has not been immune to these tactics.

Gaza as a Convenient Tool

The ongoing conflict in Gaza has been a persistent flashpoint in international affairs. The humanitarian crisis and geopolitical complexities surrounding the region make it a sensitive and emotionally charged topic. The BJP, it is alleged, has seized upon the situation in Gaza as a convenient tool for fear-mongering in the run-up to elections.

Fear-Mongering for Political Gains

The right wing’s disinformation machine is accused of exploiting the emotions attached to the Gaza conflict to stoke fear among the electorate. By framing the situation in a way that emphasises potential threats and insecurities, the party seeks to position itself as a guardian against external dangers. This fear-based strategy aims to consolidate support by presenting the ruling party as the only force capable of ensuring national security.

Social Media Amplification

The proliferation of social media has become a fertile ground for the dissemination of disinformation. The BJP’s alleged disinformation campaign is said to be amplified through various social media platforms. The rapid spread of misleading narratives, images, and videos can have a profound impact on public perception, shaping attitudes toward the ruling party and its competitors.

Exploiting Nationalistic Sentiments

The disinformation campaign is accused of tapping into nationalistic sentiments, portraying the BJP as the party that can safeguard India against external threats. By drawing parallels between the Gaza conflict and potential security risks in India, the party aims to evoke a sense of urgency and position itself as the only reliable option for voters concerned about the nation’s safety.

Impact on Public Discourse

The utilisation of Gaza for fear-mongering not only impacts electoral dynamics but also influences public discourse. By injecting a contentious international issue into domestic politics, the BJP’s disinformation machine shapes the narrative in a way that diverts attention from critical domestic challenges and focuses on perceived external threats.

Challenges to Fact-Checking

Fact-checking becomes a critical tool in countering disinformation, but the challenges are immense. The rapid and decentralised nature of social media makes it difficult to trace the origins of false information, and by the time fact-checking efforts are underway, the disinformation may have already permeated public consciousness.

Global Implications

The alleged disinformation campaign by the right wing has broader implications on India’s global standing. By using an international crisis for domestic political gains, the party risks damaging diplomatic relationships and contributing to a narrative that ties India’s internal politics to international conflicts.

Calls for Ethical Campaigning

As accusations of disinformation swirl, there are growing calls for ethical campaigning and responsible use of information. Political actors are urged to prioritise transparency, accuracy, and integrity in their communication strategies, fostering a political environment that values informed decision-making among voters.

Conclusion

The alleged use of the Gaza conflict by the right wing’s disinformation machine for pre-election fear-mongering raises profound questions about the intersection of global crises and domestic politics. As technology continues to shape the landscape of information dissemination, the responsibility of political actors to uphold ethical standards becomes increasingly crucial. Unravelling the tactics employed by the BJP sheds light on the complex dynamics at play in the realm of disinformation, emphasising the need for vigilant media literacy, fact-checking mechanisms, and ethical campaigning practices to safeguard the democratic process.

Mohd Ziyauallah Khan is a freelance content writer based in Nagpur. He is also an activist and social entrepreneur, co-founder of the group TruthScape, a team of digital activists fighting disinformation on social media.”

https://countercurrents.org/2023/12/unravelling-the-disinformation-machine-how-the-hamas-israel-war-became-a-tool-for-pre-election-fear-mongering/

World Socialist Web Site – November 30, 2023

World’s media conceal the brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails

By Jean Shaoul

Amid their rejoicing over the release of some of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the international and Israeli media have for the most part remained silent over the Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel and the appalling conditions of their arrest and detention.

To do otherwise would confirm that Israel is the aggressor in this one-sided conflict and that its mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Gaza builds on a record of unparalleled brutality against the Palestinians of a fascistic character.

The demand for the release of Palestinian prisoners was central to the al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7. Almost every Palestinian family in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has had a relative imprisoned by Israel. Their only crime was resisting an illegal occupation maintained through savage repression.

As of Thursday evening, Israel had released 240 Palestinian prisoners in return for 99 civilian hostages, including 24 foreign nationals, bringing to 104 the number of civilians released (a further five had been freed earlier). A four-day truce was extended Monday for two days, and again Thursday for a further day.

Of the Palestinians released, all but a handful are women and children who have been kept in indefinitely renewable administrative detention, without charge, due process or trial, in breach of their human rights. Many were held in prisons inside Israel, not in the occupied West Bank, a war crime under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute and in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Those released included:

• 22-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose 2017 confrontation with Israeli soldiers made her a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Israel’s national security minister, the fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir, had personally ordered her arrest over a social media post that her family denies she had anything to do with. She had been held for three weeks in an Israeli prison, without charge or trial, under administrative detention order.
• Fatima Shahin had spent seven months in prison. Initially accused of attempting to murder an Israeli, she was never charged with any crime. She said she was denied access to a lawyer while in detention and to her family while she recovered from life-changing injuries caused by her arrest. She told CNN, “They accused me of carrying out a stabbing. It’s not true. They opened fire [at] me. I was hit in the spine with two bullets… I have partial paralysis. I cannot feel my legs or stand up.”
• 24-year-old Marah Bakeer was shot in 2015 twelve times by Israeli soldiers who alleged she had stabbed a soldier, an accusation she denied. She was left with permanent injuries and sentenced to eight years. She was due to be released in four months’ time.
• Shorouk Dwayatt was sentenced to 16 years for stabbing an Israeli and attempting to stab another in East Jerusalem in 2015 after one of the men accosted her and tried to pull off her headscarf before shooting her.
• 59-year-old Hanan Saleh al-Bargouthi, the oldest female prisoner to be released, was in indefinite Israeli custody without any charge.
• The freed are on a list of 300 Palestinians published by Israel. All are branded “terrorists” when fewer than a quarter have been convicted of any crime and the vast majority are held on remand pending trial. The overwhelming majority are under 18, mostly teenage boys, although there is one teenage girl and 32 women. Five are as young as 14. Most are relatively new prisoners arrested in the last year or two.
• As crowds went to Ofer prison near Ramallah in the West Bank to welcome the prisoners, the Israeli military warned them to keep back and then launched tear-gas canisters into the crowd. At the Beituniya checkpoint near Ramallah, where the Israeli authorities released a group of 24 women and 15 teenage boys, soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas.
• Ben-Gvir ordered a crackdown on celebrations. “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy,” he said. “Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis.”
• Apprehension stalks the celebrations, with many fearful of rearrest. Following the 2011 Israel-Hamas agreement to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, many were later rearrested and had their sentences reinstated.
• B’tselem, the human rights group, says that in September, Israel was holding 4,764 Palestinians in prison on “security” grounds, including 176 from the Gaza Strip. Of these, 2,222 were serving a prison sentence; 1,117 had not yet been convicted in court; 1,310 were being held under administrative detention; and 115 were simply listed as “detainees.”
• Israel was holding a further 932 Palestinians, eight from the Gaza Strip, for being in Israel illegally. Of these, 534 were serving a sentence while 398 were listed as “detainees.”
• Many of these youths are seized in mass arrest operations in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they did not commit. Some are as young as 10. One child was so young his hands were too small for handcuffing, while another, the youngest, was too small for the prison uniforms.
• In 2012, British legal experts concluded that the conditions the Palestinian children are subjected to amount to torture. In 2013, the United Nations agency for children UNICEF deplored “the ill treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system, [which] appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” Earlier this year, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for an end to “all forms of physical or psychological abuse of children during arrest, transit and waiting periods, and during interrogations.”
• After October 7, the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails soared to more than 10,000 as part of Israel’s campaign of intimidation and terror aimed at driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank. The security forces swept up around 4,000 Palestinian labourers from Gaza with permits to work in Israel. They were detained in degrading and inhuman conditions for several weeks before being released back into Gaza to face bombardment, the loss of their families and homes and enforced shortages of food, fuel, electricity, water and sanitation.
• Israel has also arrested 3,290 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Mostly detained in dawn raids on their homes for social media posts, the majority are being held in administrative detention. The “humanitarian pause” that started on Friday has seen no letup in the arrests, with Israel detaining nearly as many Palestinians as were released.
• Prisons are full to overflowing and many must sleep on the floor without mattresses. Conditions have declined still further after October 7. Videos circulating on social media show Israeli soldiers beating, stepping on, abusing and humiliating Palestinian prisoners who are blindfolded, cuffed and stripped partially or entirely.
• According to legal rights groups, the prison authorities also halted medical care for at least a week. They have stopped family and lawyer visits; slashed exercise time in the yard to less than an hour a day; restricted access to electricity and hot water; shut down the canteen where prisoners could buy basic supplies; conducted cell searches and removed electrical devices. They have suspended visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the prisons where members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force are being held.
• Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military courts and are routinely denied counsel. They face language barriers and poor translations, while mistreatment, abuse and even torture during detention ensure that most prisoners plead guilty under a plea bargain, leading to a conviction rate of 95 to 99 percent. Appeals are rarely allowed. This is in stark contrast to the 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in their midst, who are free to attack the homes and property of Palestinians and even murder them.
• Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said earlier this month, “Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians… Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions.”
• In 2012, a European parliamentary report described administrative detention as a tactic employed “principally to constrain Palestinian political activism.” In 2020, the then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories Michael Lynk called on Israel to abolish the practice.
• Israel can get away with this because it enjoys the support of all the imperialist powers that are now themselves slashing democratic rights and freedom of speech to suppress opposition to their domestic and foreign policies.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/30/jyml-n30.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

World Socialist Web Site - December 1, 2023

Modi government bans all expressions of solidarity
with Palestine in Indian-held Kashmir

By Kranti Kkumara

India’s US-aligned, Narendra Modi-led, far-right government is using violence and intimidation to prevent any and all expressions of support for the Palestinians of Gaza in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

India’s only Muslim-majority state until the Modi government illegally stripped it of its semi-autonomous status and reduced it to a central-government controlled Union Territory, Indian-held Kashmir has for decades suffered under brutal state repression enforced by half-a-million security forces.

Throughout Israel’s now seven-week long genocidal assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government have gone to great lengths to demonstrate their staunch support for Netanyahu’s far-right regime and the Israel Defence Forces. This includes joining with the imperialist powers in voting against a ceasefire at the UN General Assembly.

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protests within India have repeatedly been subject to violent police attack and vilified by BJP spokesmen and their fascistic Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) allies.

In Indian-held Kashmir this repression is, however, of a qualitatively different kind. All expressions of opposition to the imperialist-backed genocidal assault, including demonstrations, meetings and vigils, are subject to a de facto ban. This blanket ban has also been extended to religious gatherings, with Friday prayers at Srinigar’s Grand Mosque suspended by government order for fear the question of Palestine could be raised. Elsewhere, as the Associated Press reported last month, government officials have privately warned Kashmir’s Imams (the preachers who lead Friday prayers) to make no mention in their sermons of the slaughter of the Palestinians of Gaza.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained, the Indian government and ruling class’ alignment with Israel in its war on the Palestinians is the outcome, first and foremost, of their reactionary “global strategic” alliance with US imperialism. Under the now decade-old Modi government, India has been transformed into a frontline state in Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China. India has thrown open its military bases and ports for use by the US military for resupply and repair, and vastly expanded its bilateral, trilateral, and quadrilateral strategic ties with the US and its principal Asia-Pacific treaty allies, Japan and Australia. In August, the Modi government let it be known that at Washington’s request it had instructed India’s military to determine what support New Delhi would provide the Pentagon if and when a US-China war erupts.

As part of its anti-China war alliance with Washington, India has also begun to cooperate more closely with Washington in the Middle East, including through the I2-U2 (India-Israel-United Arab Emirates-US) alliance.

Underscoring its readiness to ally with US imperialism in perpetrating the most monstrous crimes, the Modi government welcomed US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin—two of the key architects of Washington’s all-out military, diplomatic and economic support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—to New Delhi on November 9-10 for a 2+2 meeting with their Indian counterparts.

India long presented itself on the world stage as a leading supporter of the Palestinian people. In November 1947, it voted against the plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states (United Nations Resolution 181) and was the first non-Arab state to recognise the PLO.

Two further factors account for the Modi government’s very public repudiation of this stance. First, the close military-security ties New Delhi has forged with Jerusalem; and secondly, the political-ideological affinity between the BJP and its Hindu supremacist allies with the Zionist regime, including their common religious-exclusivism, animosity to Muslims and propensity for violence and criminality.

Modi was among the first world leaders to join Netanyahu to denounce the Oct. 7 uprising against the 17-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza and its ongoing dispossession and repression of the Palestinians of the West Bank as “terrorism.” Three days later, Modi took to the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to announce that the “People of India stand firmly with Israel in this difficult hour. India strongly and unequivocally condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.” 

Far from the “people of India standing firmly” with the Zionist regime in besieging, bombarding and slaughtering the Palestinians, there is deep-rooted sympathy and support for their struggle among India’s workers and toilers.

This is especially true in Kashmir, where some 13 million people have for decades lived under the iron heels of de facto military rule, with their movements controlled by 500,000 heavily armed Indian troops.

After the Indian government crudely rigged the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir state assembly elections and brutally suppressed the ensuing mass protests, an armed insurgency developed. New Delhi, citing arch-rival Pakistan’s support for the Islamist wing of the insurgency, responded by militarizing Kashmir.

Over the past three decades, Indian security forces have committed extra-judicial executions, torture, rape and other atrocities to intimidate the population at large and repress Kashmiris who have dared to challenge India’s rule. Many of the victims have come from those, like journalists and human rights activists, who have sought to expose Indian state criminality.

According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society at least 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed by the Indian security forces and over 8,000 have been “disappeared”.

In August 2019, the newly re-elected Modi government realized one of the longstanding ambitions of the Hindu right when it stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special status under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, a blatantly unconstitutional move, and dissolved the elected state government. India’s only Muslim-majority region is now under permanent central government rule.

At the time of Article 370’s abrogation, the Consul General of New York called for the adoption of the “Israeli model of governance”, i.e. unrestrained brutality, in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The Modi government has increasingly done just that, including by imposing collective punishments and giving security forces even freer rein. And not just in Kashmir. In BJP-governed states such as Uttar Pradesh, which is ruled over by the thuggish Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and Haryana, mass bulldozer demolitions of Muslim homes and businesses have been used to terrorize Muslims.

The brutish, authoritarian character of the Modi government was again on display this week, when seven university students in Kashmir were arrested on terrorism charges for celebrating Australia’s victory over India in the deciding World Cup cricket match. Under the catch-all Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), these students could be held indefinitely without charge.

The Modi government’s authoritarian ban on any expressions of sympathy in Kashmir for the Palestinians is clearly in flagrant violation of constitutionally protected fundamental rights. But India’s Supreme Court—which has countenanced one BJP government anti-democratic act and communal outrage after another, including the 2019 constitutional coup against Kashmir and the government’s building of a Hindu temple on the site of the razed Babri Masjid—is completely silent.

The Modi regime has assiduously cultivated close relations with the Zionist regime. In July 2017 Modi became the first Indian prime minister to make a state visit to Israel. Netanyahu rolled out the red carpet for this Hindu supremacist, who as Gujarat’s chief minister instigated and presided over the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. He described the burgeoning relations between Israel and India as a “marriage made in heaven.” The relationship was subsequently elevated by Modi and Netanyahu into a “strategic partnership.”

 Since 2015, one year after the Modi regime came to power, more than 40 percent of Israel’s total arms exports have been to India. The two regimes have also intensified their cooperation in fighting “terrorism” and in cybersecurity. The latter term is a code word for the widespread spying the Modi government has resorted to against any and all opponents of its vile Hindu-supremacist policies. It has used the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware to infect the cell phones of political activists, opposition politicians and journalists in order to monitor them.

The Modi government’s full-throated support for Israeli genocide has mobilized the Hindu-extremist groups the BJP depends upon to terrorize Muslims, Christians and other minorities and communally polarize impoverished populations. Members of these groups have churned out enormous volumes of anti-Palestinian online atrocity propaganda. Others, as was confirmed by Israel’s ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, have volunteered to fight for Israel.

In comments to Al Jazeera, Delhi University Professor Apoorvanand said he was not surprised by the enthusiastic support for Israel from the fascistic Hindu-extremist groups allied with the BJP. In the late 1930s, after the Nuremburg laws and the Kristallnacht pogrom, V.D. Savarkar, the principal ideologue of Hindutva and the leader of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha a precursor of the BJP, advocated that Hindus treat Muslims as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime treated the Jews.  

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/01/hnzt-d01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

 World Socialist Web Site - December 1, 2023

Henry Kissinger and the crimes of American imperialism

Patrick Martin

Henry Kissinger, the oldest unindicted war criminal on the planet, died Wednesday, November 29, at his home in Connecticut. While he lived to be 100 years old and advised 12 presidents, Kissinger is most hated by the people of the world for the crimes he perpetrated and oversaw from 1969 through 1975, in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when he controlled foreign policy as National Security Council director and then as secretary of state. For most of his tenure, he held both jobs, the only US government official to do so.

The WSWS will publish a further analysis of Kissinger’s career, but today we are reposting the perspective published May 29, 2023, when the mass murderer and imperialist strategist reached the age of 100 and was widely celebrated in the corporate media.

___

I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim
Seven bloodhounds followed him.
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

A commentary in the liberal Jewish publication Forward suggests that these lines from Shelley, directed against Lord Castlereagh, the reactionary British foreign minister of his time, would apply equally well to Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who turned 100 years old on Friday, May 27.

It is a more than justified comparison of two enemies of human freedom and social revolution. Castlereagh defended the British Empire and sought to suppress revolution in its colonies, especially Ireland, and destroy the legacy and influence of the French Revolution.

Kissinger has devoted his long life to the defense of American imperialism and the destruction of the legacy and influence of the Russian Revolution. He may have been born a German Jew and escaped the Holocaust when his family fled to America, but he allied himself with the very forces that had sponsored and cheered on Hitler, and which encouraged Hitler’s imitators in fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world.

As Kissinger once remarked—with the cynicism that became a trademark and passed for “wit” among his admirers in bourgeois political and media circles—“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an antisemite.”

At a meeting of top Turkish and US officials in Ankara in 1975, after Kissinger suggested that the Nixon administration could arrange to have allies provide critical military supplies to Turkey after a congressional vote banned US aid, the US ambassador blurted out, “That is illegal.” 

Kissinger replied, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [Laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The secret transcript of this meeting was only made available by WikiLeaks in 2011, 36 years later.

Kissinger’s crimes

Kissinger was directly in charge of US foreign policy as national security adviser and then as secretary of state from 1969 to 1976, a critical period of worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the working class and oppressed peoples. In every country where American imperialism intervened, either with military force or political subversion or propping up bloodstained dictatorships, he played a sinister role.

At least one million people died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the period of Kissinger’s direction of American policy, most of them killed by US bombs, incinerated by US napalm or poisoned by US chemicals like Agent Orange. Many were simply massacred by American troops even as Nixon and Kissinger voiced the usual lies about America defending “freedom” and “democracy” against communism.

The Nixon administration proclaimed a policy of “Vietnamization” and began the long-drawn-out process of negotiations with North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Throughout these seven years, American soldiers, nearly all draftees from the working class, continued to die, adding another 30,000 to the death toll.

The war crimes in Southeast Asia are innumerable, but the most important include the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia that set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, the major urban centers of North Vietnam.

In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the chief North Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris talks, Le Duc Tho. Kissinger did not go to Norway to collect his award, fearful of the likely mass protests. Le Duc Tho refused his award altogether.

In Latin America, Kissinger oversaw a wave of military coups and the imposition of dictatorships, most notably in Chile in September 1973, when Augusto Pinochet launched his CIA-backed military overthrow of the reformist regime of Salvador Allende. It ended in the death of Allende and the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Chilean workers and political activists.

It was about Chile that Kissinger made one his most notorious and oft-quoted remarks, telling a meeting of the top secret 40 Committee before the 1970 Chilean elections, won by Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He wrote later of the bloody 1973 coup, “The Chilean military had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime and the United States from an enemy.”

Similar coups followed in Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, and these dictators joined forces with military regimes of longer standing in Brazil and Paraguay to mount Operation Condor, a joint venture of the region’s secret police and the American CIA to hunt down and kill revolutionary exiles and leftists of all kinds.

There were equally reactionary events in other parts of the world in which Kissinger is implicated: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; the military slaughter in Bangladesh in 1971; US support and aid for dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Iran; US support for the ultra-right insurgencies against nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; US backing for the Canberra Coup, which ousted the elected Labor Party government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

In the Middle East, Kissinger helped stave off the military defeat of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, rushing huge volumes of military equipment to the Zionist state, and then bribed the Egyptian regime of Anwar Sadat to change sides in the Cold War and become an American rather than a Soviet client.

Kissinger’s legacy

In world geopolitics, Kissinger is most identified with the policy of taking advantage of the split between the Soviet Union and China, both under Stalinist rule, as these bureaucratic police states vied with each other for global influence, a reactionary nationalist conflict that even erupted into military clashes along the border between Chinese Manchuria and the Soviet Far East.

The central thrust of Kissinger’s simultaneous embrace of détente with Moscow and the ending of the decades-long US policy of non-recognition of Beijing was to enlist the aid of the Stalinists against revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. It is this policy which is the most celebrated in US imperialist circles and accounts for Kissinger’s ability to exert continued influence decades after he left office.

When the Nixon-Ford administration ended its eight years in office and Democrat Jimmy Carter entered the White House, he publicly pledged to make the defense of “human rights” the basis of US foreign policy. This was aimed at counteracting the stench of Kissinger’s crimes. However, nothing changed but the packaging. The crimes of American imperialism were now embellished with cynical references to the “humanitarian” concerns supposedly determining the actions of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department.

In later years, Kissinger’s accomplices in the Nixon-Ford administration constituted a who’s who of American war criminals. While Kissinger was secretary of state, George H. W. Bush, the future president, was CIA director. Donald Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff and then secretary of defense, returned to the Pentagon in 2001, where he oversaw US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff, and in 2001 was vice president to George W. Bush and the principal warmonger in that administration.

 

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head a bipartisan commission to investigate, with a Democratic vice chair, former Senator George Mitchell. The congressional Democrats approved this arrangement, but public protests threatened to discredit the commission even before it could begin, and Kissinger had to step down.

As the WSWS noted at the time, “Selecting Kissinger to head this body amounts to an admission that the US government has much to hide in relation to September 11, and that the Bush administration, working in tandem with the congressional Democrats and the media, is determined to bury the truth.”

We also pointed out the growing notoriety of Kissinger internationally:

Kissinger can no longer travel freely in Europe and Latin America. He had to cancel a trip to Brazil last year because of human rights protests. He was sought for questioning by French police during a visit to Paris, in a case involving a French citizen murdered by the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. He is the subject of lawsuits in Chile and the US for his role in the assassination of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean military commander whose elimination paved the way for the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Today this opprobrium is expressed on the internet, as the Washington Post noted in an article Sunday in its Style section, which cited the widespread social media preparation to celebrate Kissinger’s inevitable death and the overwhelming disgust and hatred for his crimes among millions of young people who were not even born when he headed the State Department.

For the most part, the media has been nervous about commenting on Kissinger’s 100 years, fearing the implications of any, even sanitized, review of his record. In a noteworthy and particularly guilty silence, the New York Times has not yet published an article on the subject.

It is a demonstration of how far to the right American foreign policy has moved that in recent years, Kissinger has been cited occasionally as a “moderate” critic of undue American aggressiveness, particularly in relation to China. (He is a fervent supporter of the war in Ukraine.) In his 2012 volume, On China, he warned that the US was adopting the same policy towards China as imperial Britain toward rising Germany in the period leading up to World War I, which made open military conflict inevitable.

There is no doubt, however, of the deeply reactionary character of his politics. In 1985, he publicly supported Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Waffen-SS military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where the US president laid a wreath.

In 1973, he made a revealing remark to Richard Nixon, after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pressed him on the question of permitting Soviet Jews to leave the USSR (with the hope they would settle in Israel). The tape, made public only in 2010, has Kissinger declaring, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

A much earlier work, Necessity for Choice, published in 1961 when he was an academic “expert” on foreign policy at Harvard, sums up his world view: “No more urgent task confronts the free world than to separate itself from nostalgia from the period of its invulnerability and to face the stark reality of a revolutionary period.”

It is this hatred and fear of revolution and determination to crush it that underlies every crime with which the centenarian Kissinger—and the myriad imperialist politicians who consulted him, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—is identified.

While Kissinger’s criminality was of a particularly overt character, it set a standard for ruthlessness which has continued and indeed deepened in the subsequent development of American imperialism. It is in some way fitting that his 100th year on earth coincides with an escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia that is bringing mankind to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

As for the present day representatives of American imperialism, they confront the “stark reality of a revolutionary period” ill equipped to do anything to contain it.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/01/jypv-d01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws 
 

 

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HEADLINES

 The Journal of America Team:

 Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott

Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab