This post originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/11/unconscionable-attitudes.html.
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I'm tempted to begin this by writing that I "always thought" US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Alfred Kissinger were bad people, but that's not true - not in the case of Kissinger, at least. I first came across Kissinger - as a kid - the papers were bleating about some accomplishment connected to peace in West Asia (which, in my ignorance at that time, I also referred to as "the Middle East", just as the papers did [and, for that matter, high school, which I was just beginning] ), and said something about "that's good" to (my adoptive) Dad - who explained there was more to the story than the papers were reporting.
It was an early lesson in critical thinking, the risk of newspapers being dupes, and that powerful figures may not be what they seem - and credit must go to my adoptive father for that lesson.
Now, as I continue to read "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, I have come across the following - which is about the genocidal events that led to Bangladesh's independence:
"Nixon
shared Kissinger’s frustration. “The people who bitch about Vietnam
bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war,”
he fumed. “Now some of those same bastards . . . want us to intervene
here — both civil wars.”"
This does not even comprehend that human rights exist and are valid and important - more so than power politics. The problem with intervening in Vietnam was only partly that it was interfering with the sovereignty of another nation, it was also about enabling acts of evil
- human rights abuses. The whingeing of these two monsters was about
being asked to act to stop a genocide - it was an early example of what
later became known as the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P (which has, unfortunately, been sabotaged by immoral power politics).
That was a conversation of utter blindness, self-importance, arrogance - and evil . . . by, as I have already described them, two monsters.
Their attitudes were - and are, in anyone who has them now - unconscionable.
