The left dances disgustingly on Kissinger’s grave because they hate the United States

For decades, Henry Kissinger has been the favorite punching bag of the American left.

In this Jewish immigrant with a thick accent and deliberate cadence, Democrats found their Dr. Strangelove. President Richard Nixon’s confidant.

War criminal.

Some of Kissinger’s sins were real; many of them were imagined.

However, the left detests him mainly for being an unrepentant enemy of communism and a Cold War warrior.

So it was no surprise that Kissinger, who died this week at age 100, was the target of widespread, lazy vitriol.

a predictable one rolling stone piece It carried the headline “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,” with a tag reading “Goodbye” at the top.

The HuffPost poster said “THE BUTCHER OF BELTWAY.”

To give you an idea of ​​the prevailing mood on left-wing social media, the phrase “IT FINALLY HAPPENED” was the kind of thing that trended on X after his death.

Amid applause, an old Anthony Bourdain quote also circulated on social media.

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia,” the late celebrity chef wrote more than 20 years ago, “you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

You would think that the people who visited Cambodia would be much more enraged by the communist Khmer Rouge’s genocide of perhaps 2 million people, or about a quarter of the country’s population, the same sort of thing the United States was trying to stop. stop in Asia.

But not. In leftist revisionism, Kissinger could be compared to Slobodan Milosevic, or perhaps Hitler, for his “secret bombing” of “neutral” Cambodia, a place infested with Viet Cong who were retreating to act against American troops and , ultimately bringing misery. to millions.

The left would also never forget Kissinger’s role – which was wildly exaggerated – in the 1973 coup that overthrew beloved socialist Salvador Allende in Chile.

But as history has repeatedly shown, “elected” socialists have a strong tendency to become unelected heads of communist regimes.

Chile, by the way, is now the richest country in South America. Venezuela and Bolivia, certainly, are not.

In The New York Times, former Obama official Ben Rhodes, a man who helped bolster Islamist tyrants who spread terrorism throughout the Middle East, accused Kissinger of practicing a “foreign policy enamored of the exercise of power and devoid of power.” of concern for the remaining human beings.” in its path.”

Anyone who has read any of his speeches and books or a good biography about him (books by Walter Isaacson and Niall Ferguson come to mind) understands that this is a cartoonishly simplistic interpretation of Kissinger’s Cold War legacy.

It is true that Kissinger’s realpolitik was not motivated primarily by immediate ideology.

Morally ambiguous and unpleasant decisions often have to be made in foreign policy.

But Kissinger knew that “we stand for something beyond” our “material achievements” and that our “purely pragmatic policy” is unrealistic and unsustainable.

Kissinger’s primary goal was to control and weaken some of the most brutal dictatorships the world had ever seen.

That’s why the contemporary American left has such disdain for this man.

To understand this moral confusion, one need only juxtapose the treatment of Kissinger with the upcoming coverage of Jimmy Carter, a man who spent his post-presidential life coddling and legitimizing tyrants and terrorists around the world.

Of course, Kissinger, who worked for both Nixon and Gerald Ford and was the only person to serve as national security adviser and White House secretary of state at the same time, made decisions that were debatable.

Was China’s opening ultimately beneficial?

Should Kissinger have pressured Israel to release the Egyptian army so Anwar Sadat could save face in 1973?

Even those who find that development unpleasant might grudgingly admit that it laid the groundwork for a peace agreement between the two countries later in the decade.

The American left can’t grudgingly admit that nothing Kissinger did was good, of course, because he’s a supervillain.

And Kissinger’s mythology allows them to feel that we were no better than our adversaries.

And this hate only makes me wonder if I haven’t given that man enough credit.

Rest in peace.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist.