December
6, 2023
On
the occasion of his death at 100, praises and denunciations of Henry Kissinger
are being sung and spewed out in record numbers. Let me add to the “praises.”
More than anyone else, Henry, along with his boss, Richard Nixon, was
responsible for my transformation into an activist.
This
transition from being a free-floating intellectual into an activist took place
unexpectedly. It happened sometime in April 1970, when Kissinger and Nixon said
they were going to end the war in Vietnam by expanding it to Cambodia. I was
rushing along Prospect Road—where Princeton’s “eating clubs” or fraternities
were located—to attend class when I was attracted to a commotion at a building
housing the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA). A crowd of about 100
surrounded some 15 people who had sat down and linked arms to block the
entrance to the Institute, which was known to be doing contract work for the
Pentagon. I crossed the street to see things, more out of curiosity than
anything else. Then a phalanx of policemen arrived and shoved people aside in
order to clear a path to arrest those who were seated on the ground with arms
linked.
When
the police started to brutally cut the human chain and pull people into the
paddy wagon, something in me snapped and I leaped into the empty space opened
up by an arrest and found myself linking up with two people that I later
learned were Arno Mayer, a distinguished professor of diplomatic history, and
Stanley Stein, an equally prominent professor of Latin American history. All I
was conscious of as I joined them was: there goes my PhD. At that time, foreign
students who were arrested in political events could expect deportation
according to Immigration and Naturalization Service rules. In a split second, I
had given up my future as a sociologist.
As
we were processed after arrest at the Princeton police headquarters, I called
Madge, my wife, and told her what had happened but left unmentioned the
likelihood that we would be deported. I had made the leap, and, surprisingly, I
had no regrets since I felt I had found my place in life: being an activist, an
organizer for social change. Like the other participants in the IDA rally, I
was judged guilty of trespassing and resisting arrest and given a punishment of
community service, that is, cleaning the streets of Princeton on weekends for a
whole month.
I
waited for the deportation order. And waited. After a month of waiting, I began
to realize what was happening. The local government in Princeton was not
coordinating its work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as I had
been led to expect. That would not happen until after 9/11, under the aegis of
the newly established Department of Homeland Security, over 30 years later.
My
profession as a sociologist, for which I was being trained at Princeton, was
given a new lease on life. But I was no longer the same. The arrest had
transformed me.
At
that point, my priority during my stay at Princeton became stopping the war in
Vietnam, and when I was not deep into reading Marx and Marxists and
post-Marxists, much of my work was leading or participating in discussion
groups on how to organize more and more students into a critical mass on campus
against the war.
By
the time that Kissinger and Nixon invaded Laos early in 1971 to destroy the
traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, I had become part of the informal leadership
of the anti-war movement on campus. We called for a boycott of classes, but the
coup de main was the takeover and shutting down of what was then called the
Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton’s school of public administration that served
as a recruiting ground for the Central Intelligence Agency and the trained
bureaucrats of foreign governments allied with the United States. I led the
successful occupation of the School by hundreds of students, but at the price
of my incurring the perpetual enmity of one of its professors. The prominent
sociologist of modernization Marion Levy tried his best in the next few years
to worm his way onto my dissertation panel with the sole aim of torpedoing the
person he regarded as sullying his beloved Woodrow Wilson School.
I
went on to do my dissertation, a study of the counterrevolution in Salvador
Allende’s Chile from a Marxist perspective, and this was approved in 1975,
thanks partly to the successful effort of the department chairman, Marvin
Bressler, to keep the vengeful Marion Levy from getting onto my committee.
I
went on to do full-time underground work as a cadre of the Communist Party of
the Philippines for the next 15 years, incurring more arrests and jailing for
civil disobedience in protests in the United States against the dictator
Ferdinand Marcos. Later, as an international activist during the George W. Bush
era, I again gave full play to my anti-war addiction, participating in
mobilizations across the globe, from Baghdad to London to Beirut.
So,
here’s to you, you old devil, Henry, for saving me from what would surely have
been an unexciting academic life specializing in some godawful field such as
Marion Levy’s “modernization theory.”
Remembering
Kissinger’s Victims
December 6, 2023
Historian Greg Grandin, in his 2015
biography of Henry Kissinger, estimated that Kissinger’s policies were
responsible for 3-to-4 million deaths around the world — from Vietnam to
Pakistan, to Indonesia, to Chile, to southern Africa, to the Middle East.
Grandin’s damning indictment against
the former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state is powerful
and overwhelming.
But large numbers like 3 to 4
million mask the very real pain, terror and tragedy suffered by those
individuals and their families. Look at the cases of Charles Horman, Frank
Teruggi and Ronni Moffit.
All three were Americans killed by
the Chilean military junta backed by Kissinger and Nixon that overthrew the
democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Horman and Teruggi were journalists
in Chile in 1973 when the coup happened. They were taken to the infamous
National Stadium in Santiago where they were executed along with thousands of
Chileans. Their story was painfully yet meaningfully represented in the 1982
film Missing with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek.
Ronni Moffit was a researcher at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., who was riding in a car with
her husband Michael Moffit and the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in
Sheridan Circle, Washington, when their car exploded.
It was determined that a bomb was
planted by agents of the Chilean secret police most likely under orders from
junta leader General Augusto Pinochet.
The record indicates that Kissinger
told Pinochet in a phone conversation in June of 1976 that his regime was a
victim of leftist propaganda on human rights:
“In the United States as you know we are sympathetic with what you are
trying to do here. We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service
to the West in overthrowing Allende.”
A few months later, Moffit and
Letelier were murdered. Letelier’s lower torso was blown away and his legs were
severed. Moffit’s larynx and carotid artery were slashed by a piece of shrapnel
and she drowned in her own blood.
Most Americans today don’t know
about these murders or the names of the three victims mentioned above. After
all, it was almost 50 years ago and people have become inured to the many
atrocities committed at home and abroad since then.
The death of Henry Kissinger allows
us to remember that his 3 to 4 million victims are not just amorphous entities
but individuals who had names, families, lives, hopes and dreams. They did not
deserve to die miserable deaths.
My wish would be that anyone who
praises Kissinger or cites his “accomplishments” must also acknowledge his
victims and know some of their names.
In particular, American media
figures, politicians and prognosticators should know who Horman, Teruggi, and
Moffit were, how they died, and who was responsible for their deaths. Their
families, friends, and descendants certainly know and deserve to have their
pain and loss acknowledged.
Kissinger never had to answer for
his crimes or face his victims’ families. There is nothing we can do about this
now that he is dead. But we can at least ensure that his crimes and misdeeds
are never forgotten.
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