Speaking Out Against Kissinger’s Visit

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to campus in September, we were greeted with weeks of protest and discussion about whether Columbia should have even extended the invitation in the first place.

On the day he arrived, hundreds of protesters rightly spoke out against his obtuse and pernicious statements on the Holocaust and his crackdown on dissidents, homosexuals, and secularists in Iran. University President Lee Bollinger joined the chorus and opened his introduction of Ahmedinejad with a rhetorical salvo against the Iranian president’s policies. All good.

Except two weeks ago, Columbia University welcomed a speaker who is much worse than a Holocaust denier—a man who has been partly responsible for more than one holocaust. That man is Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford.

There was none of the publicity, none of the protests, none of the ire—he was given a warm and effusive welcome at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism as he answered questions about his experience at the hub of the United States. Conceivably, the lack of publicity was an effort to stop the protest movement that follows Kissinger around the world.

But at the end of his speech, dewy-eyed students took photos alongside him and one even hugged him passionately.

It is hard to know what is more worrisome—that a reputable journalism school invites someone like Kissinger every year, despite his past, or that the majority of students are completely oblivious to what the man has done.

In his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, the prominent journalist Christopher Hitchens catalogues with tragic specificity the carnage, death, and violence that Kissinger repeatedly unleashed around the world during his time at the center of power.

“Many if not most of Kissinger’s partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited,” he writes. “His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven.”

The first holocaust involved the country of East Timor in East Asia. It was invaded by neighboring Indonesia on the Dec. 7, 1975. That same day, President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded an official visit to Jakarta and flew to Hawaii.

Declassified files have revealed that Kissinger and Ford gave the “green light” to Suharto, the Indonesian dictator, to start the invasion. The East Timorese government was then run by Fretilin, or the Front for the Liberation of East Timor. The group’s leftist ideology put it on the wrong side of the Cold War divide, and it was put at the mercy of the Indonesian military.

What unfolded was nearly 25 years of mass slaughter, rape, torture, and the near-destruction of a nation. It is estimated that more than 100,000 East Timorese were killed during the resulting Indonesian occupation, a third of the population of the country. Proportionally, it remains one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, all backed by Kissinger and his boss.

The second holocaust Kissinger was partly responsible for took place in Cambodia under the genocidal maniac Pol Pot. During the Vietnam War, Kissinger had ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos, two desperately poor countries against which the U.S. was not officially at war. Between March 18, 1969 and May 1970, 3,630 bombing raids were flown over Cambodia. A Finnish government study estimates that 500,000 people died in this first phase, which also produced two million refugees. Many analysts also argue that this bombing campaign paved the way for the Pol Pot regime, which infamously murdered 25 percent of the Cambodian population.

His blood-soaked résumé includes events on other continents, too. In 1973, the democratically elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende was violently overthrown by the fascist leader of the military, General Augusto Pinochet. For the three previous years, Kissinger had been integral in trying to undermine the internationally recognized Allende government. The campaign to do so included a program to remove the coup-averse Chilean General René Schneider and replace him with a sharper-toothed coup-hungry operator.

After 1973 and the successful coup, 17 years of dictatorship were forced upon the Chilean people, while the economy was opened to Western speculators. Over 3,000 people were killed, and countless others “disappeared” or were tortured in unimaginably horrible ways.

So there you have it: a veritable war criminal and facilitator of mass slaughter (and the above is a heavily truncated list of his crimes). And all of this information is in the public domain, available to any student with an inquiring mind. I asked Kissinger how he sleeps at night. “Do you think you are morally superior to me?” he replied. “Yes, I do,” I answered confidently, stunned that he might equate me with a mass murderer.

All the while there were groans in the World Room, a startled disbelief that a journalist might actually confront a powerful politician rather than fondle his ego with the usual fatuous questions that masquerade as “courtesy.”

Despite this supine audience, it is to this day still assumed that Columbia University has the best journalism school in the country. Thinking about the pandering to and reverence for Kissinger shown by students and faculty, one has to wonder what is going on in the Ivory Tower 40 years after 1968.

The author is a student in the Graduate School of Journalism.