Supervillain, or just another pawn?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2024 (965 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To some, a former American secretary of state passing away might not seem noteworthy. But others have been waiting for this event with bated breath, and the internet is awash with memes on the subject.

I’d be the last person to suggest Kissinger leaving this world is not worthy of celebration. In one corner of the globe he gave unwavering support to brutal right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, including Augusto Pinochet, who was famous for throwing Chilean dissidents out of a helicopter. And in the other corner of the globe he executed a ruthless campaign of indiscriminate firebombing across southeast Asia, which by some estimates not only killed 150,000 people in itself, but also set the stage for the rise of famed genocidier Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said “after you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.” The only problem I have with this statement is that it is also true to varying degrees of almost everywhere Kissinger stuck his nose over his career. It was Kissinger’s guiding philosophy that any action is morally justifiable as long as it was a net-benefit for America (though really he just meant corporate America.) He believed that American hegemony was the global imperative against which all other concerns are secondary.

So naturally a lot of people around the world took some revelry in his death. Not that you would know it to read most mainstream media pieces that covered his passing, where the questionable word “controversial” was bandied about. Personally, I can’t imagine anyone finding positive balance in Kissinger’s life. But likewise, I am hard-pressed to find much victory in his death. This war criminal died at the ripe old age of 100, in his own home and presumably surrounded by loved ones, having never suffered any consequence for his actions worse than some people on the internet making scathing memes about him.

But even beyond how his life is a shining example of how society fails to hold bad actors accountable, I am also reluctant to frame Kissinger as a supervillain. Sure, he is a bad guy who did bad things. But had he suffered any consequences for his actions, or even if he had been removed from power early on in his career, would the world have been spared the atrocities he authored?

Unlikely. Perhaps things wouldn’t have played out exactly the same, but we can hardly contend that violent American hegemony was a policy unique to Kissinger. Indeed, the entire scaffolding of endless corporate growth on which American is built demands that the nation operate with gluttonous belligerence, no matter who is at the helm. This is why American foreign policy really doesn’t change all that much despite electing new political leadership. By design, it only attracts and adopts champions of American hegemony.

People are biologically hardwired to see threats in the immediate and the material. So we have a tendency to wrap up our social problems in the packaging of individual people, when more abstract analysis of entire systems is called for. This is the kind of thing that gives us conspiracy theories centered around shadowy individuals orchestrating world events like a Machiavellian symphony, when in fact most of the bad actors benefiting from our broken system are just bumbling fools whose inherited wealth and status makes it nearly impossible for them to fall from grace.

And this why all our institutions where power concentrates need to be decentralized, from the political to the economic. Because not only are we all too ready to focus our ire on individuals rather than systems, there are always individuals ready to serve as an avatar for this broken system and steer us onward in our skid towards collapse. Because this system is designed to saturate certain individuals with wealth and status, providing a facsimile of power, which is an irresistible intoxicant to any predisposed to seeking it. This not only provides a faulty focal point for our disdain, but also frames these people as strawman success stories, examples of how supposedly anyone could rise to such status, if only they pulled up their bootstraps hard enough.

But ultimately that largesse is a glamour, and it is not those people who are steering us. It is the underlying philosophy of our society. The one that demands endless growth and profits above all. The Henry Kissingers of the world are less architects of it than they are slavish zealots, sacrificing the global citizenry on an altar they scarcely comprehend. And you can count on the Kissingers to eventually die of old age, yet the sacrifices go on. Because this system that demands them will never pass on of natural causes, and waiting for it do so is a fool’s errand.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.