Remember what we put up yesterday.
"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy," Kissinger is heard saying in a March 1, 1973, conversation. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
Christopher Hitchens continues:
In the same period, the National Security Archive and others compelled Kissinger to return 50,000 pages of the public documents he had illegally abstracted when he left office and to have these returned to the scrutiny of scholars and historians (and victims).
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is an empirically safe bet that Kissinger did not seek to conceal or bury material that put him in a good light. We may therefore expect the coming years to be as full of appalling disclosure, of official crime and official lying on his part, as the last year has been. And there is just a chance that some of the victims may secure some justice on their own account, by means of American and other courts.
It seems to me deplorable, though, and even shameful, that those who have already suffered enough should have to volunteer for the performance of a task that properly lies on the shoulders of Congress and the Justice Department.
To leave a personal note to the very last, I had myself rather hoped to be engaged in litigation with Kissinger. Had he sued me over this book (as the London Literary Review said that he was in honor bound to do, if he valued his reputation) I had dreamed of producing witnesses, and subpoenaing documents, that would accelerate the process of discovery.
I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It was not to be: Kissinger's reticence remained his best counsel. I did, however, find myself threatening to sue him when he publicly accused me of being an anti-Semite and a denier of the Holocaust.
In very grudging and graceless terms, he did through his lawyers offer me a swift retraction. In other words, he admitted that he had no basis for this especially foul accusation, but had thought it worth trying.
Those who are curious to learn the background and to follow the correspondence may direct their trusty search engines and browsers.
[I reproduced Hitchens’ statement here.]
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Washington, DC, 15 February 2002
"If we wait for history to present us with freedom and other precious gifts, we risk waiting in vain. History is us - and there is no alternative but to shoulder the burden of what we so passionately desire and bear it out of the depths."
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble.
Preface
It will become clear, and may as well be stated at the outset, that this book is written by a political opponent of Henry Kissinger. Nonetheless, I have found myself continually amazed at how much hostile and discreditable material I have felt compelled to omit.
I am concerned only with those Kissingerian offenses that might or should form the basis of a legal prosecution: for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture.
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thus, in my capacity as a political opponent I might have mentioned Kissinger's recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged by him to take [like a US government employee tried recruiting me into the fake Q movement that later attacked Washington] up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1974–75, and who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran, and who were deliberately lied to as well as abandoned.
You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock...' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The conclusions of the report by Congressman Otis Pike still make shocking reading, and reveal on Kissinger's part a callous indifference to human life and human rights. But they fall into the category of depraved realpolitik, and do not seem to have violated any known law.
Support heroes, they are fighting for you.
In the same way, Kissinger's orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa and the South African destabilization of Angola, with its appalling consequences, presents us with a morally repulsive record.
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Again, though, one is looking at a sordid period of Cold War and imperial history, and an exercise of irresponsible power, rather than an episode of organized crime. Additionally, one must take into account the institutional nature of this policy, which might in outline have been followed under any administration, national security advisor or secretary of state. Similar reservations can be held about Kissinger's chairmanship of the Presidential Commission on Central America in the early 1980s, which was staffed by Oliver North and which whitewashed death squad activity in the isthmus.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Or about the political protection provided by Kissinger, while in office, for the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran and its machinery of torture and repression. The list, it is sobering to say, could be protracted very much further. But it will not do to blame the whole exorbitant cruelty and cynicism of decades on one man. (Occasionally one gets an intriguing glimpse, as when Kissinger urges President Ford not to receive the inconvenient Alexander Solzhenitsyn, while all the time he poses as Communism's most daring and principled foe.)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
No, I have confined myself to the identifiable crimes that can and should be placed on a proper bill of indictment, whether the actions taken were in line with general "policy" or not.
"You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
These include:
1. The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.
2. Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh.
3. The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation - Chile -with which the United States was not at war.
4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus.
5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor.
6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, DC.