Kissinger is dead but his blood-soaked legacy endures
If the American
foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger
is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an
omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully
shepherding the American empire through successive rounds of growing
pains. For multiple generations of anti-war activists, Kissinger
personified the depravity of the American war machine.
The world Kissinger
wrought is the world we live in, where ideal investment conditions
are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and
United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military
ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an
end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the
twenty-first century. And breaking that cycle means placing the twin
evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs.
In this book,
Jacobin follows Kissinger’s fiery trajectory around the world —
not because he was evil incarnate, but because he, more than any
other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism,
empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that still
plagues us today.
