The All Things Political Topic - A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt

[Gorth]

26 minutes ago, Lexx said:

Henry Kissinger is finally where he belongs. What a day.

Which sort of answers @BruceVC’s question too

 

edit: his legacy includes bringing Pol Pot to power, the Argentinian military junta and replaced Chiles democratically elected government with general Pinochet

[Lexx]

In hindsight, this isn't really a day to celebrate, because that dude should have died a long time ago. This is way too late.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Lexx

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, Gorth said:

Which sort of answers @BruceVC’s question too

 

edit: his legacy includes bringing Pol Pot to power, the Argentinian military junta and replaced Chiles democratically elected government with general Pinochet

I dont know, people who generally happy that someone died doesn't seem very....liberal   to me?

But I suppose  imagine the party we going to have  when Putin croaks 

[Pidesco]

1 hour ago, BruceVC said:

I dont know, people who generally happy that someone died doesn't seem very....liberal   to me?

But I suppose  imagine the party we going to have  when Putin croaks 

Being happy that the Forrest Gump of war crimes is dead is in fact a very liberal feeling.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, BruceVC said:

But I suppose  imagine the party we going to have  when Putin croaks 

Well, no. Putin is not a Saddam or a Hitler in that sense at all. Chances are that when Putin dies, nothing changes. He is the head of a certain kind of clan system (or whatever; someone else can almost certainly understand and elucidate it a lot better than I can) and not a dictator.

[BruceVC]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Well, no. Putin is not a Saddam or a Hitler in that sense at all. Chances are that when Putin dies, nothing changes. He is the head of a certain kind of clan system (or whatever; someone else can almost certainly understand and elucidate it a lot better than I can) and not a dictator.

Oh no,  Im  going to be very happy when he dies. Its not about change, we cant predict political change in Russia 

Its about justice for the blood on his hands. He is primarily  responsible for the war  in Ukraine and the long  list of atrocities  we have seen

It will be definitely be a good day for me 

 

 

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, Pidesco said:

Being happy that the Forrest Gump of war crimes is dead is in fact a very liberal feeling.

Thats fine,  remember I learn from   you guys about liberal  values.   Im  not an expert 

If its okay to celebrate people's deaths Im  fine with that 

Edited November 30, 2023 by BruceVC

[Keyrock]

4 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Thats fine,  remember I learn from   you guys about liberal  values.   Im  not an expert 

If its okay to celebrate people's deaths Im  fine with that 

These days I guess I would lean conservative if I had to be put on the highly reductive left/right spectrum but I share the hesitation to be jubilant about someone dying. That said, the someone in question had a hand in regime changes that led to some truly stomach-turning atrocities. Pol Pot often gets overlooked due to some of the 20th century's other great monsters being so famous, people like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Josef Mengele, Shiro Ishii, Idi Amin, and Margaret Thatcher. Pol Pot was just as evil as any of them and Kissinger helped him come to power. I will spit on his grave if I ever pass it.

[xzar_monty]

15 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Oh no,  Im  going to be very happy when he dies. Its not about change, we cant predict political change in Russia

Fine -- it just might have been better for you to have said this in the first place instead of talking about a party "we" would be having, regardless of how you intended the "we" to be defined.

[Malcador]

Media coverage of Kissinger is funny, just briefly mentioning negatives. 

[Pidesco]

The thing about Kissinger is that just mentioning Pol Pot doesn't quite get across how monstrous he really was. He really was involved in about every post ww2 war crime of the US. And there were a lot of those.

I mean Godwinning a discussion is usually seen as unhelpful or an exaggeration or whatever, but if someone came into the thread to say Kissinger was worse than Hitler, I'd be going like this:

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

10 minutes ago, Pidesco said:

The thing about Kissinger is that just mentioning Pol Pot doesn't quite get across how monstrous he really was. He really was involved in about every post ww2 war crime of the US. And there were a lot of those.

I mean Godwinning a discussion is usually seen as unhelpful or an exaggeration or whatever, but if someone came into the thread to say Kissinger was worse than Hitler, I'd be going like this:

 

If we're assigning a body count to Kissinger then we're looking at 3 million being a conservative estimate, to say nothing of the other horrors and lasting damage caused by his stratagems. Hitler would have had a much bigger body count than the Holocaust and WW2 had he been in power longer, all things considered the Nazis probably killed people at the absolute fastest rate and most directly. So I don't think any could beat out Hitler in terms of being evil....though I'm sure that some are trying.

For me the big difference is that while Hitler is recognized as history's greatest monster almost universally, Kissinger's punishment for his many crimes was getting to live a life of luxury and prestige with a curated legacy as a brilliant statesman, the mountain of bodies he left in his wake swept under the proverbial rug.

[Sarex]

But hey, he was on our side, so he can't be all bad. Right?

[Malcador]

49 minutes ago, Sarex said:

But hey, he was on our side, so he can't be all bad. Right?

Niall Ferguson is that you ?

[Gfted1]

Its interesting to me that people get upset about things that happen in foreign lands and/or before their birth. But now that I think about it, I still cant get right about that rat bastard Attila the Hun so I dont have room to talk.

[uuuhhii]

5 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Its interesting to me that people get upset about things that happen in foreign lands and/or before their birth. But now that I think about it, I still cant get right about that rat bastard Attila the Hun so I dont have room to talk.

isn't that also include ww2 for most people

a lot of people upset about it for a lot of reason

[Pidesco]

13 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Its interesting to me that people get upset about things that happen in foreign lands and/or before their birth. But now that I think about it, I still cant get right about that rat bastard Attila the Hun so I dont have room to talk.

The notion that what Kissinger did is something that happened in the past without lasting negative consequences that we live with to this day, and will continue to live with for the rest of our lives is, at best, deeply naive.

[Zoraptor]

People still use 'The Hun' occasionally as a pejorative for germans, and a lot more so 'vandal' for destructive people so we are at least still linguistically upset about people sacking Rome 1600ish years ago.

Pol Pot tends to get a 'pass' because he pretty much only killed his own countrymen, inside his own country, which is small and irrelevant. Similar to how Mao doesn't tend to get mentioned because he killed a lot of Chinese at a time when China was certainly not small but was pretty irrelevant. Obviously Kissinger tended to get a pass because... hey I mean George W Bush paints now and it was all so long ago so all is forgiven about Iraq, right guys? We do rather like randomly rehabilitating our leaders.

Funniest thing is hearing Kissinger constantly referred to as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Kind of a shame that Mussolini and Hitler didn't win the years they were nominated. Hitler in particular since the year was 1939.

[xzar_monty]

7 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

Funniest thing is hearing Kissinger constantly referred to as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The Nobel Peace Prize is extremely interesting in that although you can have bad or irrelevant choices in other fields (like, for instance, Hermann Hesse in literature; not sure if there have been any total misses in the sciences), extraordinarily bad choices in the Peace Prize somehow damage the entire idea of the Nobel.

I don't think there's ever been a worse choice than Kissinger, but then again, realistically there almost can't be.

Edited November 30, 2023 by xzar_monty

[Malcador]

 

[Hurlshort]

Attila the Hun doesn't actually have that crazy of a rap sheet. I mean, he was a bad guy and killed his brother for power, but he isn't really much worse than other military generals that were carving up Roman territories at the time. His name does benefit from a magnificent propaganda campaign by the early Catholic Church, however. He was the foil to Pope Leo the Great's majesty. 

[Gfted1]

12 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

isn't that also include ww2 for most people

a lot of people upset about it for a lot of reason

Maybe its a European thing? Past bogeymen never die? I dont know a single soul that was alive during WW2 and Im old as hell.

3 minutes ago, Pidesco said:

The notion that what Kissinger did is something that happened in the past without lasting negative consequences that we live with to this day, and will continue to live with for the rest of our lives is, at best, deeply naive.

Yeah, it sounds like the Cambodians are still all jacked up. 25% population loss due to murders, even more fleeing to Thailand or Vietnam. Tough to recover from that. I mean, not for me, because I dont live there, but tough nonetheless.

[Pidesco]

3 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Maybe its a European thing? Past bogeymen never die? I dont know a single soul that was alive during WW2 and Im old as hell.

Yeah, it sounds like the Cambodians are still all jacked up. 25% population loss due to murders, even more fleeing to Thailand or Vietnam. Tough to recover from that. I mean, not for me, because I dont live there, but tough nonetheless.

And Cambodia was just one of hundreds of things Kissinger had his hands in.

[Sarex]

53 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Niall Ferguson is that you ?

Idk, where does he stand on the Yugoslav civil war?

Joking aside don't know much about Kissinger, apart from his attitude regarding the wars in Yugoslavia. Saying that he doesn't seem much worse than the people who came before or after him in the US political scene.

 

[Malcador]

3 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Idk, where does he stand on the Yugoslav civil war?

Probably that they should have bombed Serbia harder.

"Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries – and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor – must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major western European powers?” The US won the cold war, and that means that the “burden of proof” is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”.

The Rules Based Order laid out neatly, I guess.