On one side of 50th St and Park Ave there was a line of 200 men entering a food shelter, on the other side of the block people were paying up to $100,000 for a table at the New York Historical Society as they honored war criminal Henry Kissinger.
Fellow kossack Danger Durden and I arrived at the NY Historical society around 5pm, and already a line of people grew on both sides of the front doors to greet attendees at the NY Historical Society with crimes of "SHAME!" and "Kissinger, mass murderer". Although Henry Kissinger committed his most heinous acts before I was even born that does not make those war crimes any less horrible. Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Chile, the lack of accountability that allows Kissinger to roam free is the same lack of accountability today that allows Condi Rice, that Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and other war criminals from the Bush/Cheney torture administration to go free today. Without accountability there is no rule of law.
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Aside from the horrors of Vietnam, I am particularly focused lately on the events of Chile when President Allende was thrown out of power by the Kissinger backed despot General Pinochet in the early 70's. Students of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" will know that Kissinger's backing of Pinochet was an act of economic war, wherein the free market ideologue Pinochet brought the wonders of austerity styled free market corporatism to Chile at the point of a gun. Soccer stadiums were filled Guantanamo style with labor leaders and others who would never see their families again. Rivers flowed red with the blood of resisters in Chile. This is the 'virtue' of free markets, an idea so unpopular because it so heavily favors the super rich over workers and multinational corporations over local business that it must be stuffed down the throats of the unwilling at gunpoint in the name of economic freedom. This is Kissinger's legacy, a man who overthrows Democracy in the name of Dictators and Free Markets and is celebrated with $1,000 plate dinners by the "re-writing history and ignoring the icky parts historical society" while his own countrymen starve in the streets.
I laugh when corrupt detractors of OccupyWallStreet call us hippies, because when you get down to it the hippies were right! Vietnam was a bullshit war, so was Iraq under Bush Jr. What do you call a man who is consistently wrong for 40 years? You call him a conservative.
As we shout "SHAME" at Kissinger almost 40 years later we should do the same with the war criminals of today. Better yet, we should bring them to justice in a court of law.
And yes, I am aware that President Clinton and Obama have both done things that could be called war crimes, such as summary executions and the sort. It makes me think of when Richard Nixon said "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." Well, I will gladly disagree with that! No President is above the law, whether Democrat or Republican.
So let us not forget that Henry Kissinger also sits on the board at American Express and is affiliated with Chase Bank. We should remind ourselves that behind the military/industrial complex there is always the wallstreet/oligarchy complex, they place bets on top of every other industry, including the war industry, and those bets are almost always profitable. War will only cease when it ceases to be profitable, but in the end, there truly is no war but class war.
Peace and love to one and all
War is a racket . . . .
You can follow me on Twitter @JesseLaGreca
