Kissinger - a very bad guy

"Sometimes you have to choke the dog to get the medicine down its throat."

I remember hearing a Japanese official say that when defending Japan's invasion of Manchuria, way back when I was first acquainting myself with recent Japanese history, as I prepared for what would turn out to be twenty-four years of life in Japan.

A clear claim that the ends justify the means, that sometimes you have to do bad things to arrive at a good outcome.

I revisited that claim in my ethics seminars over the years, as we hauled out all the common "lesser evil" examples. "If you see a train about to run over twelve people and you have the chance to pull a switch which would divert the train and make it run over only three people instead, do you pull the switch?"

People who say yes are utilitarians - people who say we should aim for the greatest good for the greatest number of people - and people who say no are Kantians - people who argue we should be governed by principles - and the overriding principle here is that one should never engage in any activity that leads to treating other human beings as a means to an end.

I retain the conviction that there is such a thing as evil, and that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that we should align ourselves with the good guys and "fight the good fight" whether we believe we will win in the end or not. Probably I got that conviction in Sunday School. Or maybe from my grandmother, who had a marvelously practical worldview and refused to let people complicate things she saw as simple and clear.

People are complex. Most people, even the good ones, do bad things at times. And one should, I think, not reject anybody out of hand, all things being equal (even though they never are), because of the possibility that they might see the error of their ways and do good where they might once have been inclined to do harm. I like the Christian approach, in that regard, the notion that God forgives you and once he does he wipes away all your sins, the notion that plagued Hamlet and kept him from killing his uncle when he found him praying because his uncle might then go to heaven.

On the other hand, I part ways with the Christians - and other people who tell you that forgiveness is good for you because holding a grudge will only eat away at your soul in the long run. I don't believe in forgiving people if they don't ask for it and show some evidence that they have seen the light. I place a much greater weight on the Jewish valuation of justice. Bad things need to be put right. Forgiving somebody who doesn't seek it and doesn't deserve it merely prolongs the injustice and maybe even encourages the wrongdoer to do wrong again. No, I'm in favor of arresting criminals and locking them up - if we're talking legality here - and shunning them - if we're talking simple morality.

Mostly I'm in favor of spotting the bad guys and reminding ourselves constantly who they are, keeping an eye on them and preventing them if at all possible from doing more bad things.  Treating them kindly if that works to turn them around, yes. That excludes the really bad guys, of course, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and their ilk, who caused widespread misery and need to be remembered as evil and held accountable by history.

For reasons I've never fully understood, when I think of "really bad guys" it's not Hitler and Stalin that come to mind, but Augusto Pinochet. Probably because I've always had a fear of flying and there's little to match the horror in the marrow in my bones I felt when I first learned that dropping people from airplanes into the sea was a common practice by Pinochet and other dictators in Argentina and Brazil at a time when they were all competing for worst bad guy of South America.  

I once heard Jeane Kirkpatrick, coming out of a meeting with Pinochet, refer to him as "amable, muy amable." Never got those words out of my head. Never forgave her. Never forgave the U.S. for allowing the likes of her to become ambassador to the United Nations.

And now Pinochet's name is appearing in the news again in connection with his great American enabler, Henry Kissinger, now celebrating his 100th birthday. Surrounded and celebrated by the likes of even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Kissinger is the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of Laotian and Cambodian deaths, to say nothing of his Realpolitik decisions in supporting the war in Vietnam. A bad guy if ever there was a bad guy.

If there were justice in his case, he would be in jail as a serious war criminal. It is to America's never-ending shame that this man is treated like a hero.  One can argue that I'm being Kantian here when I should be utilitarian. But that's where I stand.

I will not say anything good about Henry Kissinger.

And, on that note, let me suggest you have a listen to Mehdi Hasan's take on the man.

And to Amy Goodman's report.