If you’re an ordinary person and you kill someone in America, you’re supposed to be charged with a crime and stand trial. If you do it over and over, you’re a serial killer and society agrees you’re twisted and need to be kept away from people. If you go into a school and murder ten or twenty or more people, you’re a mass murderer—and, again, you’re supposed to stand trial and, if found guilty, go to prison so that you cannot wreak such horror. 

But if you’re a servant of capitalism-imperialism and you are responsible for either directly ordering, or aiding and abetting in, the deaths of over a million people in the interests of that system and then, for years after, you advise those who come after you on how to do the same… well, that’s different. 

Then, instead of prison sentences, you get high honors and you may even get birthday parties at fancy institutions with high government officials, cardinals of the church, celebrities, and assorted bootlickers toasting you.

Such is the truly disgusting story of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, national security adviser, and presidential consultant who died last week. Kissinger could do a better job than most at identifying and articulating U.S. capitalist-imperialist interests, and he advised the last 10 U.S. presidents. But that made him nothing more than an unusually clever monster and an especially vicious “legit gangster,” in the phrase popularized by Bob Avakian. 

To give just a sense of what we mean by that, in his eight years in office Kissinger left a trail of over one million murders, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Cambodia to Bangladesh to Chile. To do this, he prosecuted and backed genocidal wars and engineered coups all over the world. (See the accompanying article for more detail on this.)

There Is a System Henry Kissinger Served, and That System Has a Name

But Kissinger was not a uniquely vicious man who somehow wormed his way into a powerful position. No. He served a system: capitalism-imperialism. What is capitalism-imperialism?

Bob Avakian has put it this way, in BAsics 1:6:

Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. Imperialism means war—war to put down the resistance and rebellion of the oppressed, and war between rival imperialist states—it means the leaders of these states can condemn humanity to unbelievable devastation, perhaps even total annihilation, with the push of a button.

Imperialism is capitalism at the stage where its basic contradictions have been raised to tremendously explosive levels. But imperialism also means that there will be revolution—the oppressed rising up to overthrow their exploiters and tormentors—and that this revolution will be a worldwide struggle to sweep away the global monster, imperialism.

That concept of imperialism is necessary to understanding Kissinger and why he worked for and/or was “consulted” by U.S. presidents from Kennedy to Biden. During the past week, there have been many valuable exposures of the depth and extent of Kissinger’s crimes—and that is important, extremely important, in a country where people are conditioned to turn away from the reality of what this country has done. 

But none of these commentators, so far as we have seen, have even pointed to the motive for the crimes: which was, again, the preservation of the economic and political system of capitalism-imperialism, and the advance of U.S. imperialist interests within that system. Without that understanding, you will remain locked within the confines of a system that continually produces thinkers and strategists like Kissinger and that continually generates new horrors—from Indochina and Chile during Kissinger’s heyday to Kyiv in Ukraine to Gaza City in occupied Palestine today.

Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times, and Willful Distortion

In another league altogether is the resident “leftist” at the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie, whose prominently displayed column this Sunday was headlined “Kissinger’s Dirty Work Abroad Hurt America At Home, Too.” Bouie argues that Kissinger’s blatant violations of the national sovereignty of other countries played a particularly harmful role in regard to “accountability, public opinion and the rule of law.” Bouie ignores the blatant outrages that came before Kissinger. This includes Democratic presidents like John F. Kennedy who ordered assassinations of both those deemed to be enemies of U.S. interests (including several attempts against Fidel Castro, all of which failed), as well as allies who had outlived their “usefulness” (for example, U.S. puppet Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, which was successful). Lyndon Johnson, who came after Kennedy, supported and paid close attention to the taped surveillance of Martin Luther King by the FBI and other COINTELPRO operations against both the civil rights struggle and the revolutionary Black liberation movement.¹ Under this program, leaders were targeted for assassination and imprisonment. Bouie misses—or he doesn’t want to see—that U.S. democracy has always, for as long as it’s existed, been willing to assert its very dictatorial fangs whenever it’s challenged. Kissinger carried that forward—he didn’t start it.

Bouie mentions “national interests” but once in his article—to dismissively put it in quote marks, without ever getting to the heart of the matter: the systemic character of the crimes of Kissinger and, for that matter, the Democratic presidents as well, and how they did in fact serve “larger” imperialist interests as they were understood at the time. Each and every one of them, Democrat or Republican, with all their very real differences: nothing but legit gangsters. 

To return to Kissinger: he had a particular insight into how “the game” is played and he piled up a particularly horrific and brutal body count. In those ways, he may have stood out. But what is most important, what must not be covered over, is that his butchery, like that of the others who have occupied his position, was carried out in the service of a system which requires the parasitic exploitation of billions of human beings. And that figure includes the 160 million children who toil their lives away in the Global South, or Third World, whose blood and tears are ground into the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the phones we talk on and scroll.

Obama's Real Difference... And Fundamental Unity With Kissinger

The fact that Kissinger’s crimes in particular are so notorious has caused some commentators in the capitalist-imperialist media, and earlier, even a former president like Obama, to try to put a certain distance between themselves and Kissinger. Obama in 2016, as he was leaving office, and under attack for supposedly not being “aggressive enough” in using military force, recalled the fact that after 20 years of fighting, and despite all the horror rained down on the masses there by America, the U.S. was ultimately defeated in Vietnam. Obama said that:

We dropped more ordnance [bombs] on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris [to negotiate a peace deal], and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments … In what way did that strategy promote our interests?

It is important to keep in mind that Obama faced a different world than Kissinger did over 40 years earlier, and the U.S. faced different challenges and had developed different strategies. But note well that last phrase from Obama: “promote our interests.” And ask yourselves, “Who is ‘our’?” Obama himself during his reign spread and/or supported no small amount of “chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments.” He carried forward the war in Afghanistan, where U.S.-led NATO forces regularly bombed wedding parties and carried out other atrocities. He sponsored a coup in Honduras. He sponsored another coup in Libya, one where the previous leader Qadaffi was murdered in a particularly brutal fashion—which elicited sick and gleeful jokes from Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.² He backed Israel in waging an earlier war on Gaza in 2014. And on top of all this, every Tuesday morning, Obama went through “kill lists” of people being targeted for assassination throughout Central Asia, people that Obama deemed to be threats to “our interests.”  

Again, nothing but “legit gangsters,” one and all. 

Their Interests… and Ours

Obama’s bland words “our interests” cover over the destruction and devastation of whole regions and peoples of the world.  Ask yourself: are you so blinded by the “perks” and trinkets of this system of worldwide plunder that you are willing to consign billions around the world, including hundreds of millions of children, and tens of millions in this country, to a living hell to keep that parasitical system going? Are those your interests—your most fundamental interests, as one of nearly eight billion human beings?

Or can you hear BA when he says that:

The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor the overwhelming majority of the people of the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way. (BAsics 3:8)

The chance to wrench that “different and better world” is actually significantly greater today than when BA wrote those words over 15 years ago. Like the illegitimate gangsters, the legit ones also have their clashes, even their fights to the finish—and one is certainly under way now, between the Trumpian fascists and the genocidal warmongers grouped around Biden. In some ways, the death of Kissinger is another marker of the end of the days of the “wise men” who could “bridge the divide” between different sections of the rulers. 

Those who have kept the world in such bloody chains now face tremendous challenges themselves … challenges that could lead to even worse horrors or—if we truly rise to the challenge—unprecedented opportunities to advance to emancipation. The same scientific method that reveals a system at the bottom of the Legit Gangsters who run things, reveals the source of potential within these clashes running from the top to the bottom of society. We urge you reading this to go here, here or here, or to read the accompanying excerpt from Building Up the Basis to Go for the Whole Thing, with a Real Chance to Win: Strategic Orientation and Practical Approach.

We should and must insist on the full truth about the murderers that this system produces and treat with contempt the honors the system bestows on them… but that must be on the foundation of doing everything possible to do away with a system that requires and gives backing to such criminals, and to make a giant leap to revolution and a whole new world.