Where is the media outrage?

After spending an entire week banging on about Jeremy Corbyn laying a wreath four years ago in a Tunisian graveyard where none of the Munich terrorists are even actually buried, you would have thought that the mainstream media might have expressed at least a tiny bit of outrage at the Tory Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt meeting up with and fawning all over a bona fide war criminal. But somehow no.

Henry Kissinger was the architect of some of the United States' most disgusting and deadly foriegn policy interventions. Here are a few of his most notorious:

Cambodia and Laos

During the Vietnam War Kissinger was heavily involved in the secret and completely illegal bombing campaigns against the non-combatant states of Laos and Cambodia.

Over two million tons of bombs were dropped during these illegal bombing campaigns. That's more than the total tonnage that the United States dropped on Japan during the Second World War, and yet the US never actually declared war on either Laos or Cambodia!

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during these illegal US bombing raids, and people are still dying and being maimed today as a result of the thousands of tons of unexploded munitions, especially unexploded 'bomblets' from cluster bombs.

Latin America

Henry Kissinger was one of the chief architects of the US foreign policy of toppling stable democracies and replacing them with murderous right-wing military dictatorships.

In Chile the United States carried out a coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende that resulted in his death. Following on from the installation of the murderous Pinochet regime, Kissinger actively intervened to support Chilean political repression by cancelling a letter warning the Pinochet government not to carry out political assassinations.

In a grotesque letter to the Chilean dictator Kissenger actually portrayed the murderous coup-leading tyrant as a victim by saying "my evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist"!

In Argentina the United States turned a blind eye to an even more repressive right-wing dictatorship as they killed some 30,000 people (often by throwing them out of aircraft without parachutes). 

Thousands of others were detained in torture centres, and some 500 pregnant women had their babies stolen before being killed by the military junta. 

Documents declassified in 2016 revealed that Kissinger personally undermined the Carter administration's efforts to stop the killings.

The two most famous examples of US-backed Latin American military juntas were Argentina and Chile, but numerous other Latin American states were subjected to US-backed military take-overs during Kissinger's reign including Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay.

East Timor

In 1975 the brutal Suharto regime in Indonesia expressed their intention to annex the nascent state of East Timor. At a meeting in Jakarta Kissinger and the then US President Gerald Ford agreed to allow the annexation of East Timor with guarantees that US relations with the Suharto dictatorship would remain strong. Their only proviso was that the invasion be carried out after they'd Indonesian territory.

Suharto delayed the invasion by one day to allow time for Kissinger and Ford to leave, then invaded the territory. The death toll of the invasion and occupation was well over 100,000 (around one quarter of the Timorese population.

Bangladesh

When the US Consul in East Pakistan Archer Blood sent telegrams back to the US warning of "genocide" in the Bangladesh War of Liberation, Kissinger sneered at those who "bleed for the dying Bangladeshis". When Blood continued raising concerns he was stripped of his post.

During the period Kissinger also described the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a "bitch" and a "witch" and said "the Indians are bastards".

Russian Jews

During the flight of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel in the 1970s Kissinger said "if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern".

Recent times

It's hardly outlandish to call Kissinger a war criminal given that he's incredibly careful of where he travels to, for fear of being extradited to to face charges for his war crimes, and his support for murderous right-wing dictatorships.

Where is the outrage?

Kissinger's involvement with the grotesque war crimes in Cambodia and Laos are beyond question. His support for tyrannical military dictatorships across the world are a matter of public record. His contempt for the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union and his racist comments about Indians are also a matter of public record.

So how on earth does the Tory Foreign Secretary get away with fawning all over this absolute ghoul, and then actually bragging about it on Twitter?

The answer is twofold. The first reason is that the mainstream media is shockingly biased towards the Tory party, meaning they're loathe to draw attention to anything that might damage them. The second is that Kissinger is an American, and it doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands of people died in his illegal carpet bombing campaigns, or in the torture centres of the dictatorships he supported ... the professional scribes of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that Kissinger promoted will never hold him to account for his actions.

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