Christopher Hitchens
[back] Atheism

"He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him." ---George Orwell

[British and a Jew.]

[2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens

[1994] Robert Faurisson Letter to Christopher Hitchens

Book
The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

 Quotes
Here is the secret in plain words. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic "worked," in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the peace initiative on which the Democrats had based their campaign. In another way, it did not "work," because four years later the Nixon Administration tried to conclude the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that still surrounds the question is that in those intervening years some 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger. [2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens

This was what it took to promote Henry Kissinger. To promote him from a mediocre and opportunistic academic to an international potentate. The signature qualities were there from the inaugural moment: the sycophancy and the duplicity; the power worship and the absence of scruple; the empty trading of old non-friends for new non-friends. And the distinctive effects were also present: the uncounted and expendable corpses; the official and unofficial lying about the cost; the heavy and pompous pseudo-indignation when unwelcome questions were asked. Kissinger's global career started as it meant to go on. It debauched the American republic and American democracy, and it levied a hideous toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies. [2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens

Quite clearly, an Indonesian invasion that began a few hours after Kissinger had left the tarmac at Jakarta airport must have been planned and readied several days before he arrived. Such plans would have been known by any embassy military attaché and certainly by any visiting secretary of state. We have, in fact, the word of C. Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations officer in Indonesia, that:
    "Suharto was given the green light to do what he did. There was discussion in the embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. . .. Without continued heavy U.S. logistical military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off."
    The desire to appear to have been uninvolved may-if we are charitable arise in part from the fact that even Indonesia's foreign minister, Adam Malik, conceded in public a death toll of between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians in the first eighteen months of Indonesia's war of subjugation: in other words, on Kissinger's watch, and inflicted with weapons that he bent American laws to furnish to the killers. Now that a form of democracy has returned to Indonesia, which in its first post-dictatorial act renounced the annexation of East Timor and-after a bloody last pogrom by its auxiliaries -withdrew from the territory, we may be able to learn more exactly the extent of the quasi-genocide.
.........On November 9, 1979, lack Anderson's syndicated column published an interview with ex-President Ford on East Timor along with a number of classified U.S. intelligence documents relating to the 1975 aggression. One of the latter papers describes how Indonesia's generals were pressing Suharto "to authorize direct military intervention," while another informs Ford and Kissinger that Suharto would raise the East Timor issue at their December 1975 meeting and would "try and elicit a sympathetic attitude." The relatively guileless Ford was happy to tell Anderson that the American national interest "had to be on the side of Indonesia." He may or may not have been aware that he was thereby giving the lie to everything ever said by Kissinger on the subject.  [2001] The Case Against Henry Kissinger. The making of a war criminal by Christopher Hitchens