Hacker News Reader

Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

As a person from the third world and more specifically Africa, I cannot find myself to mourn his death or say any good thing about Kissinger. Good riddance actually. I would have loved to see him get his day in court when he was still alive.

What he masterminded in Angola and several other African countries that ended up in civil wars because of him are some of the greatest atrocities to people of the third world.

I wish history would remember as such, but hey, we don't write the history, they did.

View on HN

A lot of people in the US sadly have 0 knowledge about his crimes in Africa :( It doesn’t even get mentioned in pretty critical articles!

It's the Donald Trump/George Santos blizzard method: do so much crime it's impossible to keep track of it all!

It's not.

https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/opinion/editori...

This doesn't discount the millions he caused the death of.

I think many people from the Global South would agree with you and not just Africans. That was also exactly my thought when i read the headline, even though he did nothing against my native Kenya. Also, the phrase "Third World" isn't the most appropriate one to describe a good chunk of the world.

"Third World" is very much a Cold War term, with roots in French history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World#Etymology

While often used in condescending or pejorative ways...do consider what happened to the French First Estate and Second Estate during the French Revolution.

I prefer to use "peripheral economies". It's even more pejorative but it shows the way and better describes the situation.

"Third world" actually seems like an euphemism to me. It makes me think of a race and gives you the false hope of improving in the future by just playing along the same game.

> "Third world" actually seems like...

False hope for the downtrodden, if they just keep playing the game - that was an age-old feature of human society, back when they were stuck building pyramids for their dear departed betters.

OTOH, a number of nations which seemed hopelessly stuck at the bottom of the pyramid back in 1952 are now doing pretty well, some even by First World standards.

There are plenty of people all around the world who know what heinous things he did. He won’t ever be mourned, and hopefully we never see the likes of him again

It might be some small consolation that I know a lot of Americans who are celebrating his death, rather than mourning it.

I definitely raised a glass to his newfound status as a corpse.

It's disturbing the vast difference of opinion between ordinary citizens of the US who think he's a monster that inflicted an enormous amount of evil upon the world. Ever more worse because it was in our name. And how the political class in the US views him.

It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.

I often think of an interesting quote found inside Samuel Huntington’s book “Clash of Civilizations” (which is pretty meh, IMHO):

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com