December 1, 2023
Ann Arbor
(Informed Comment) – Henry Kissinger’s death at 100 is an opportunity to
consider the ways in which his lawlessness helped undermine International
Humanitarian Law, the laws of war that responsible leaders attempted to erect
to prevent the horrors of WW II from recurring. In his single-minded
calculation of supposed “national” interest, which he imagined as identical to
the interests of the rich, he was entirely willing to mow down innocent
noncombatants in the hundreds of thousands. There is a direct line from his
advocacy of carpet-bombing Southeast Asian villagers to the Israeli
carpet-bombing of Gaza, which resumed early Friday morning.
