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It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global empire.

The ugliest truth about Henry Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster. (Adam Berry / Getty Images)

The late Anthony Bourdain wrote in 2001 that “once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

However many people might have wanted to do that over the decades, Kissinger remains with us. Today is his hundredth birthday. And he continues to be treated as a respected elder statesman. That should tell you everything you need to know about America’s global empire.

At Least He Likes Sports

Tributes have been flowing to Dr Kissinger all week. At CNN, foreign correspondent David Andelman enthuses that “at 100, Henry Kissinger is still teaching us the value of ‘Weltanschaüng.’” (Weltanschaüng roughly translates to “worldview,” and here it means something like “a comprehensive understanding of how the world works.”) On the website of the International Olympic Committee, IOC president Thomas Bach calls Kissinger a “great statesman” and “political genius” who is also a “great sports enthusiast” and has long been involved with the Olympics.

None cared to mention his various crimes.

As Richard Nixon’s national security advisor — and then secretary of state, a role he took on without giving up his original job — Kissinger personally oversaw a bombing campaign that killed 150,000 civilians in Cambodia. And among many other atrocities he abetted, he helped overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. Kissinger notoriously said that he didn’t see “why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”

The evidence for these crimes has never been in doubt. It’s all a matter of public record. So why hasn’t “Dr K” ever seen the inside of a jail cell?

The ugliest truth about Kissinger is that he isn’t a unique monster. He is an unusually plainspoken representative of a monstrous system of US global hegemony.

Kissinger and Nixon

Nixon didn’t live to see his own hundredth birthday. He died at the age of eighty-one in 1994. But a posthumous centennial birthday celebration was held for the disgraced former president in 2013. Kissinger spoke at that event, ending his remarks by proposing a toast to Nixon as a “patriot, president, and, above all, peacemaker.”

It’s true that Nixon was willing to pursue pragmatic détentes with America’s superpower rivals, China and the Soviet Union. But when I watched the clip of Kissinger’s “peacemaker” toast, all I could think about was an infamous snippet from the 1970 conversation between Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig in which Kissinger relays Nixon’s instructions for the bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger knew some members of the administration might have qualms about extending the war to a neutral country, but he made it clear that the commander in chief didn’t want to hear it.

K: Two, he wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?

H: (Couldn’t hear but sounded like Haig laughing.)

A few years later, Nixon and Kissinger would burnish their “peacemaker” credentials by finally throwing in the towel after several years of ratcheting up bloodshed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Perhaps this is the achievement Kissinger was fondly remembering when he toasted his old boss’s memory.

If so, Kissinger was conveniently forgetting that he and Nixon had been spurning essentially the same deal the whole time they’d been escalating the war. In fact, even before Nixon arrived at the White House, he’d worked to sabotage his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks — encouraging the South Vietnamese delegation to stonewall in the hopes of getting a better deal when Nixon assumed office.

That much no one bothers to deny. There is some controversy about the extent of Dr Kissinger’s role. In his CNN tribute, David Andelman defends Kissinger by arguing that while “some have suggested that it was Kissinger who sought to slow the process toward peace during Nixon’s presidential campaign,” the evidence from the White House tapes points to H. R. Haldeman as Nixon’s primary accomplice in “monkey wrenching” the talks. But even Adelman allows that Dr Kissinger “may well have tipped off Nixon’s campaign team to Johnson’s thinking.”

A small point, maybe, to hold against an Important Statesman who throws around words like Weltanschaüng.

A Story of Continuity

When Congress brought articles of impeachment against Nixon for corruption and obstruction of justice, Michigan Democratic representative John Conyers proposed including an article on the illegal bombing of Cambodia — which had initially been kept secret from the US public. The proposal was defeated 26 to 12. As Conyers reflected in an article later that year, this may have been because raising the issue of war crimes in Southeast Asia would have impugned “previous administrations” and Congress’s own failure to constrain presidential war-making power.

When Nixon left office, Kissinger stayed on, continuing to serve his highly unusual dual role as national security advisor and head of state for Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford. And every single president between Ford and Joe Biden — Democrats and Republican alike — has at some point extended an invitation to Dr K to come to the White House to discuss matters of war and diplomacy.

Some of those visits may have even afforded Kissinger a chance to catch up with old friends. That ghoul softly laughing on the other end of the line as Kissinger relayed Nixon’s instructions for the indiscriminate mass murder of Cambodian civilians, Alexander Haig? He served as commander of US European Command and NATO supreme allied commander for most of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Ronald Reagan made him secretary of state.

Kissinger Isn’t the Only Kissinger

Oddly, Kissinger hasn’t been to the Biden White House, or at least not yet. I’d like to believe that the current president is disturbed by Kissinger’s long history of involvement in prosecutable crimes against humanity. But Biden’s history suggests otherwise.

Does it bother Biden that Kissinger killed lots of civilians in Cambodia? Senator Biden showed no such qualms about the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq when he backed that war in 2003.

Does it bother Biden that Kissinger plotted coups against elected leftists in Latin America? Vice President Biden doesn’t seem to have uttered a peep of protest when President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton supported the coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

And while we’re on the subject of Hilary Clinton, it’s worth remembering that she touted her relationship with Henry Kissinger — whom she called a friend and trusted advisor — when she was running for president in 2016. When her primary challenger Bernie Sanders responded by bringing up Salvador Allende, the response from both Clinton and the moderator might as well have been, “Salvador who?”

Kissinger has never deigned to conceal his complicity in clear violations of US and international law that killed vast numbers of innocent people. The fact that he’s reached the age of one hundred as a free man isn’t an oversight; it’s a symptom of a much deeper pathology.

A willingness to bend the global rules — order an assassination here, massacre some villagers there, depose an elected leftist or two in countries that, come on, don’t really matter anyway — was integral to how the United States managed its spheres of influence around the world long before Henry Kissinger came on the scene.

It’s not like Dwight Eisenhower needed advice from Henry Kissinger, who was just about finishing up graduate school at the time, when he decided to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company by overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954. And Secretary Clinton may or may not have picked up a phone to consult with a very elderly Dr K about how to handle the crisis in Honduras.

I certainly won’t shed any tears when Dr Kissinger finally dies. And I’ll be ecstatic — if shocked — if he sees the inside of a courtroom before that happens. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that he’s unique. You don’t run a globe-spanning empire for this many decades, batting down geopolitical rivals, peasant revolutions, insurgencies in occupied countries, and inconvenient electorates in crucial client states, without a lot of people staffing your imperial apparatus who think like Henry Kissinger.

There may be something almost demonic in how unabashed Dr K is about his crimes. But when it comes to his basic willingness to disregard legal and moral obstacles to the United States working its will in the world?

It’s Kissingers all the way down.

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In an August 2000 letter to Philip Nel, a scholar of children’s books and comics, the cartoonist Syd Hoff recounted his history with the Left. Nel was working on a book about Crockett Johnson, the cartoonist behind the Barnaby comic and Harold and the Purple Crayon. In the 1930s, Johnson had been the art editor […]

The National Parks Service confirmed the tragic death of a 28-year-old woman at Glacier National Park.

The woman, Atheer Abdulrahman S. Alquahtani, a University of Kansas student from Saudi Arabia, had been visiting the park to celebrate completing her first year of her master’s degree.

On Monday, Alquahtani fell off a rocky overhang into Avalanche Creek and was swept into a gorge. Bystanders spotted her in the creek passing under the Trail of Cedars bridge, pulled her out, attempted CPR, and called 911. Unfortunately, Alquahtani was pronounced dead at the scene.

Park officials said that water-related incidents are the number one cause of death at Glacier National Park. They warned visitors to take extra care when approaching areas with water, especially during spring runoff.

Amid a brutal cost-of-living crisis after decades of austerity, popular support for progressive economic policy is the highest it’s been in years. Yet Keir Starmer’s Labour Party refuses to deliver — because it’s afraid of empowering workers.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaking during the British Chambers Commerce Annual Global conference in London on May 17, 2023. (Jordan Pettitt / PA Images via Getty Images)

There can be no denying that, over the last several years, there has emerged a broad economic consensus in favor of a fundamental transformation of the UK economy.

In 2019, a poll from the Institute for Public Policy Research and YouGov found that 60 percent of people wanted the government to introduce significant changes in how the economy is run. In 2020, a poll from Unite and Survation found that 60 percent of people believed that cuts to public services had had a negative impact, while 71 percent believed that taxing the wealthy would be preferable to renewed austerity. In 2022, Ipsos MORI found that 67 percent of people agreed that ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

This represents a shift from previous data. The British Social Attitudes Survey shows that a majority of UK adults favor increasing taxes and spending more ever since 2017, before which point more were in favor of keeping spending the same.

It’s not hard to see why such a consensus had emerged by the 2020s. My generation, which came of age around the financial crisis of 2008, had lived through an era of near-unprecedented crisis and stagnation.

Millennials joined the labor market in the wake of the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression and the worldwide recession that followed it. Graduates born a few years later didn’t have it much better, as they were forced to pay more than £9,000 per year for their university education.

Then came the great stagnation that followed the great recession. In the UK, wages and productivity stagnated for the longest time in more than a century. The Resolution Foundation found during this period that my generation would be the first in the history of modern capitalism likely to be worse off than their parents.

Then came the pandemic. COVID-19 did not only take hundreds of thousands of lives, it forced millions of people to stay trapped in their homes during what should have been their prime years of education or their first years in the labor force. It also forced hundreds of thousands of older people out of the labor market altogether due to the debilitating impact of long COVID.

And then came the cost-of-living crisis. By March 2023, UK workers had lived through fifteen successive months of lower-than-inflation pay increases, meaning households were getting poorer every month.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently released the astonishing statistic that wages by 2026 would be over 40 percent lower than what they would have been had precrisis trends continued. In other words, living standards have essentially remained flat in the fifteen years since the financial crisis of 2008. The Resolution Foundation called this period of stagnation “completely unprecedented.”

In this context, it is no longer radical to argue that the UK economy requires deep, structural transformation. With the power to set taxes, levels of public spending, wages in the public sector, and regulation in the private sector, the British state is the only institution capable of enacting such a transformation. It follows that the British electorate is in favor of a radical shift in economic policy.

So why is the Labour Party refusing to provide such a shift?

Keir Starmer is undoubtedly a timid and conservative leader who shies away from the kind of radicalism championed by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, making him a deeply inappropriate person to have at the helm at this time of unprecedented economic chaos.

Many of his former cheerleaders now recognize this problem — especially after some disappointing local election results — and are encouraging the Labour leader to come up with some interesting economic policy ideas.

But there are reasons to believe that Starmer’s reticence to back radical economic transformation is not simply the result of his cautious character.

The problem with state-led economic transformation is that it encourages people to believe that they have some control over the nature of the economy, rather than the economy having total control over them.

Most people are led to believe that “the economy” is some abstract entity that goes up and down based on psychological patterns and random exogenous shocks. They believe, in other words, that the economy is an external force that controls their lives — not unlike the way ancient societies treated the whims of their gods.

Pleasing “the economy,” like pleasing the ancient gods, often requires some form of sacrifice. This is why David Cameron’s argument that the age of excess had to give way to the age of austerity was so convincing in the postcrisis period. “The economy” had been disturbed, and now it had to be placated.

This ideology is what allows our elites to consistently get away with imposing policies that clearly have a negative impact on the vast majority of people. Without ever providing any evidence, policymakers will state that “the economy” requires tax cuts, or public spending cuts, or deregulation. Experts will nod along and, without the ability to challenge them, most people will simply accept their word as gospel.

And the policies these “experts” promote just so happen to privilege the interests of the already wealthy while eroding the power of the working classes.

But when the government acts to change the nature of the economy, this ideology is flipped on its head. Suddenly, it’s not “the economy” that is in charge of the people, it’s the people who are in charge of the economy.

This is both the meaning of economic populism and the reason for the entrenched bias against any form of progressive state intervention among the British establishment.

The promise of progressive economic policy makes it viable for working-class people to organize in order to demand economic policies that could promote their interests. What’s more, the increase in employment also associated with greater levels of government spending also makes it easier for workers to organize for better pay and conditions.

It’s not hard to see why such a specter would be scary to those who benefit from the status quo. If the state of the economy is something that we can shape with changes to economic policy, then what is to stop people from arguing for significant redistribution from the wealthy to the poor? What is to stop workers from organizing to demand wage increases in line with inflation? What is to stop them from organizing to demand the power to organize production itself?

My instinct is that Starmer simply does not think in such ideological terms. His expert advisers inform him, allegedly objectively, which kinds of policies would be good for “the economy,” and he rigidly adheres to their advice.

But Starmer’s expert advisers, not to mention those who fund him, will be deeply aware of the problems posed by the kind of economic populism that proved so popular during the Corbyn years, and their advice will be expressed accordingly.

For as long as economic policymaking is dominated by “experts” whose views are formed without reference to the needs of ordinary people, the UK’s economic crisis will continue to get worse. What we need is economic democracy — and that’s what terrifies the British establishment.

In Florida, Osceola County Deputy David Crawford has been charged with culpable negligence after videos surfaced of him firing a Taser at a man soaked in gasoline, resulting in a fireball that burned almost three-quarters of his body.

The incident occurred on February 27, 2022, at a Wawa gas station in Orange County. The victim’s lawyer remarked, “They’re supposed to be our protectors, not our ignitors.” He also told The Daily Beast that his client was “cooked alive” by police.

The bodycam footage showed Crawford tackling the suspect, Jean Barretto Baerga, who had reportedly been followed by officers responding to reports of reckless driving.

According to Sheriff Marcos López, on his motorcycle, Baerga had run red lights, ridden on the sidewalk and grass, and gone toward oncoming traffic before arriving at the gas station.

As the suspect lay in a pool of gasoline, Crawford yelled, “Kill the pump! Kill the pump! There’s gas!” At this time, another deputy, Christopher Koffinas, tased Baerga without incident. After this, Crawford was heard saying, “You’re gonna get tased again, dude!” before the Taser ignited an explosion.

State Attorney Monique Worrell stated that Crawford had “recklessly deployed a Taser,” leading to Baerga’s severe burns covering 75% of his body. Baerga’s medical costs are estimated to be around $7 million, and his lawyers plan to recoup this from the sheriff’s office.

Meanwhile, the other deputy involved, Christopher Koffinas, received a 40-hour unpaid suspension for firing his stun gun but is not facing criminal charges. The sheriff’s office stated that it is right to let the criminal justice system determine if Crawford’s actions constituted a criminal act.

The provocative actions of Ukraine and the involvement of NATO in the conflict can lead to a direct clash between Russia and the members of the alliance.

On Wednesday evening, Cameron Robbins, an 18-year-old from Louisiana who had recently graduated from University Laboratory School in Baton Rouge, was on a sunset dinner cruise in the Bahamas with a group of students from local high schools.

Witnesses report that at 9:40 p.m., Robbins, acting on a dare, jumped off the boat into the dark waters near Athol Island and was not seen again, as reported by WAFB.

The vessel, designed in the form of a pirate ship, stayed in the area for several hours to locate Robbins. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force and the US Coast Guard Southeast have been searching for Robbins from the sky.

On Friday night, Lt. Cmdr. Matt Spado, the Coast Guard liaison officer, announced that the search for Robbins has been suspended.

Robbins’ school director, Kevin George, stated that Robbins had attended the school for all 13 years of his education and was a pitcher on the school’s baseball team; his younger sister is currently a junior at the school. George also mentioned that they were all praying for Robbins’ safe return.

On Thursday, the parents of Robbins arrived in the Bahamas, where a prayer service was conducted at the resort where he was residing. Another prayer gathering for Robbins was held on the same day at his past school in Baton Rouge.

Ron DeSantis’s conservatism is by and for internet-addled right-wing media consumers so accustomed to having their eccentricities satiated and pleasure centers stimulated that they’ve become increasingly unmoored from the real world.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s Twitter profile page, May 24, 2023. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Aside from accidentally generating some schadenfreude, there is no conceivable metric by which Ron DeSantis’s presidential launch this week on Twitter could possibly be deemed a success. If a successful campaign event projects energy and confidence, the DeSantis fiasco had all the majesty of a dysfunctional Zoom meeting, replete with false starts, technical glitches, and unscripted background chatter. And throughout it all, the Florida governor ultimately rallied an audience smaller by orders of magnitude than Buzzfeed once got by blowing up a watermelon or Drake did by playing Fortnite.

It’s worth pondering what the hell DeSantis and his operatives were thinking. A less choppy version of the same event would still have lacked a cheering crowd and likely been absent many of the older, cable news–addicted voters who tend to play such a pivotal role in Republican primaries (they aren’t on Twitter). But notwithstanding these basic practical issues, there’s a deeper insight to be gleaned about the ossified strain of conservatism DeSantis represents in what will almost certainly be his doomed campaign against Donald Trump.

For a fleeting moment after last year’s midterms, Florida’s governor managed to look like he might actually be a viable opponent for the former president. The case for DeSantis, amplified ad nauseam by the Murdoch media and parts of the Republican apparatus eager to ditch Trump, was that he represented a competent and baggage-free version of the same thing. By anointing the governor of Florida — a man whose political style basically consists in serving right-wing activist constituencies an all-you-can-eat buffet of red meat — primary voters were informed that they could have something both more palatable and more electable.

But the promised ascent in the polls never came. Trump’s lead over DeSantis has increased since the beginning of 2023, and nothing has occurred so far to suggest that he will supplant the former president as the standard-bearer of America’s political right. Far from being Trump’s heir or successor, DeSantis now looks more like the second coming of Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush: an establishment figure elevated by the creaking machinery of orthodox movement conservatism who owes his standing to the usual constellation of think tanks, corporate donors, and plutocrat-financed magazines rather than broad populist appeal.

DeSantis-ism is less a harbinger of ideological renewal than a symptom of institutional conservatism’s decadence and exhaustion. Its essence, located in the reactive impulse to lean into whatever freakish cause célèbre is animating the Right’s culture warriors on a given day, ironically mirrors that of the very hyper-woke milieu its zealots claim to detest. It’s an -ism by and predominantly for internet-addled right-wing activists and media consumers so accustomed to having their eccentricities satiated and their pleasure centers stimulated that they’ve become increasingly unmoored from the real world.

Cruel and hateful, to be sure. But it’s also emblematic of a political project whose sense of discipline and purpose has been overpowered by its own machinery — whose activists increasingly speak an abstruse and impenetrable online jargon, strike maximalist poses by default, and obsess over causes that scarcely register outside the reactionary echo chamber. For that reason, it’s perfectly fitting that the DeSantis campaign would think it a great idea to launch itself by partnering with Twitter — a place that, under Elon Musk’s incompetent and reactive leadership, has come to be governed by many of the same impulses.

Whatever continuity Trumpism may have with the right-wing politics that came before it, it clearly represents something other than the old, bowtie-sporting conservatism of the American Enterprise Institute and the National Review. At the level of style, it’s more ambidextrous and rhetorically heterodox, less willing to compromise with institutions, and in many ways inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump himself. Even notwithstanding the poor execution, that DeSantis sought to inaugurate his campaign against Trump in an online medium at all is symbolic of how narrow the appeal of a “Trumpism without Trump” really is on today’s right.

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