“Yeah, so the point of my book is not to blame everything on Kissinger. You know, in some ways it’s a kind of counter-intuitive thing that I’m doing where I’m focusing intently on Kissinger to go beyond Kissinger.

You know Charles Beard, a great historian of the 1930s said that Americans tend to have a Devil’s theory of war. They want to blame war on one bad wicked person, or on one bad wicked group.

I don’t think that if you expunged; extracted Kissinger from American history we’d have a virtuous republic. I think there are deep structural issues at play in US militarism and expansionism. I think looking at Kissinger helps reveal those. Helps reveal; I think he is responsible for all of the reasons that we talked about. The other thing that’s useful about Kissinger is what we started the show with, the misrecognition of Kissinger; how he gets away with all of it, without any blame or consequence, I think again the point is not just to blame Kissinger, but to think about the memory hole that the US has, why we can’t; why there is something about America’s political culture that won’t allow it to acknowledge the fact of blowback; that actions that we took in the past might have consequences for today’s crisis, and that subsequently things that we do today might create new forms of blowback in the future. I think, the thing about Kissinger and the thing about that philosophy of history and that intense subjectivism that I talked about earlier is Kissinger explicitly rejects looking at history as cause and effect; he thinks that if you look at history as cause and effect; you can look at history as analogy, you can look at Neville Chamberlain in 1939 and talk about appeasement; you can look at Iraq and think, you know and analogize it to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, but that’s one way of looking about history and according to Kissinger that’s the only way we should look at history. If you look at History as blowback, as a series of causes and effects, then great statesmen will become paralyzed; they’ll become fearful; they won’t be able to act in the present.

So for instance when Dick Chaney does interviews and they say, Well don’t you bear some responsibility for ISIS and Syria and what’s going on now; and what you did in 2003; when Chaney says look, we can debate what we did in 2002, 2003, whether it’s right or wrong, but there’s a crisis today and we have to respond to it; that’s pure Kissingerism. I’m not saying that he read Kissinger and came up with that, but it taps into a deep kind of denialism. The central aspect of American exceptionalism is invoking history; that we are historically the world’s greatest country, AND a denial of history, especially history that is understood as cause and effect, and Kissinger throughout his career has explicitly denied and insisted that we shouldn’t look at history as cause and effect; as a chain of events that lead to the present, because that’s paralyzing. That will prevent us from, that will stop us from, you know become so fearful of yesterday’s catastrophe repeating itself, we won’t be able to take bold action today to confront the current crisis, even if the current crisis was caused by yesterday’s actions. So, that’s one of the reasons Kissinger is worth looking at.” – Greg Grandin

Tom Woods had Greg Grandin on his show recently. The topic at hand was to examine Henry Kissinger from an alternative perspective. Typically the mainstream narrative is that Kissinger is a great statesman, who has promoted American values, and served his country heroically. Well, the truth is, Kissinger and the foreign policy philosophy he represents have led to much of the blowback, war, death, destruction, regime change, overthrows, and terrorism that has taken place for the past few decades, and continues on today. The passage above is an excerpt from Tom’s talk with Grandin. (You can listen to the entire podcast here…Tom Woods Show Episode 514)

As Grandin mentions, Americans love to have a “Devil’s theory” of war. They like easy, simplistic answers to why wars have occurred. They’ll boil the civil war down to evil southerners, WWI down to the Kaiser, WWII down to Hitler, the cold war down to “Communists”, and so on, up to today, where they can easily, unthinkingly blame some Muslim or group of Muslims with a scary sounding name. By doing so, it is always much easier to create a national fervor to act, to do something, to go to war. This allows the western powers that be to never have to accept any blame or responsibility for what might be going wrong in the world. The cause of all our problems is always an evil boogeyman. As Grandin says, cause and effect gets downplayed, even ridiculed out of the mainstream narrative. They boil things down into easily digestible quotes and soundbites to then be endlessly repeated on the media; like “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”, “Assad is gassing his people”, and the tried and true, “They hate us for our freedoms.”

Henry Kissinger represents the pinnacle of western foreign policy that is all about command, control, influence, power, and manipulation. Grandin points out that to look at history more rationally, “great statesmen” might not be able to “take action”. You’ll find taking action always takes center stage in the news. Our “leaders” are always telling us we need to take action on this and that; everything always revolves around moving quickly, being “bold”, “decisive”, etc. Whether we’re talking about some drummed up health scare over measles or ebola, the economy, or the latest CIA-trained terrorist group; there is always a universal call from the powers that be to convince the public that the action they were eventually going to take anyway, regardless of public opinion, is good and right and necessary, and must be taken as soon as possible.

This is an important point to make. Governments, their cronies, the defense contractors, central banks, and others have big plans. Many of these plans are devised in advance, even years in advance, and it just comes down to slowly implementing their ideas, one small action at a time, to make it palatable to the general public. But to do this, they need catalyzing events, or a swift and sudden change in public opinion, so that what would not have been accepted yesterday by the people, all of a sudden is accepted the next day. This is why they created a story about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This is why they created stories about Iraqi atrocities in the early 90s. This is why in the late 90s; the Project for a New American Century was calling for a “new Pearl Harbor” to jump-start their plans. And so on and so forth. The examples abound. The point here is, Kissinger has been central to this philosophy and methodology, and he has had great influence out in the open on war and foreign policy, behind the scenes with covert operations, and even more hidden by his participation and influence in organizations like the Bilderberg group.

One more important point I want to discuss is the denial of history that Grandin mentioned. The idea of what people view as historical fact and how certain narratives are created over time is one of my favorite topics. This idea has multiple layers. First, we have to recognize how “history” is created. History is recorded by the victors. So, whoever controls a situation gets to lay the foundation for what gets passed on to future generations. In this way we receive historical narratives from the point of view of religious leaders, governments, “court historians” (favored by the powers that be for promoting the standard story), and of course, those victorious in war. Second; there is an orchestrated denial of certain historical facts. Some things are just too obvious to be hidden or covered up, so the way they deal with them is as Grandin mentions, to just shrug it off, make it sound unimportant, and make appeals to disregard the past, and focus on the action that must be taken in the present. So if certain obvious historical events don’t fit into the narrative they want to pervade society, these facts aren’t discussed, and then are silenced as much as possible. Some examples might include things like the decimating of North American native cultures, or the massacring and colonization of Africa by European nations, or the bombing of Cambodia by the US (orchestrated by Kissinger), or the US overthrow of the Iranian president in 1953. It could be dropping nuclear weapons on civilians, pointing out how Abraham Lincoln was a racist, or destroying the DNA of Iraq with depleted Uranium. These things might be bad, yes, but they don’t really mind if the truth is out, so rather than attempt to erase it from history, they just try to keep the focus off of these ideas, look to the future, and focus on the next crisis at hand. As Tom Woods mentioned in the podcast, government always calls their atrocities “mistakes”. They are never massacres or war crimes. They’re always innocent mistakes. This is that category; things that they can get away with calling “unfortunate mistakes”, create a bunch of excuses, and move on. Keep in mind, though, if the very same sorts of actions were taken by an unfavored government or some other entity, we would never hear the end of it.

Third, and finally, for events that they really don’t want to see the light of day, there is deliberate propaganda to twist, destroy, and create a new truth. These would be things that they know are bad enough that if it all becomes common knowledge, it would destabilize basic trust and belief in government institutions. These events would reveal the true motives and causes of world events. These sorts of things coming to light would enable people to start to put the pieces together and see that for hundreds of years, the power elite, government, and their cronies have been using us and manipulating domestic and world affairs to centralize power and achieve their own ends. It would show people that government has a lot more to do with the true definition of the verb “govern”, meaning “to rule over by right of authority,” than it has to do with the romantic notions of democracy, peace, and human rights. This is why people like Kissinger stress that we should see the world in simplistic terms, only in the present and that we should disregard any cause and effect or historical context. The best examples here are the numerous false flags and other such events throughout history. Another example could be the deliberate dumbing down of American education and culture, or the dividing of society, in order to create useful groups and encourage division within the population. Or this could be rigged elections, or the collusion between government and non-governmental organizations like the Bilderberg and the CFR, and their influence on what plays out on the political stage (making it known that our votes have much less power than we are told). In other words, these sorts of things, if widely known, would unsettle existing structures. It would make it plainer that there is a class of power-elites who rule and govern for more power and money, rather than the popular notion that government exists to serve the people and provide necessary services. People would start to see that most of the problems government and their cheerleaders tell us we must be protected from, they actually cause in the first place, domestically and internationally (often deliberately as a means to create a useful crisis.) Differentiated from the previous group, these things cannot be played off as mistakes. They are too obvious as lies and manipulations.

To achieve these sorts of cover-ups, they have two main tools. The first and most widely used is to call anything outside of the approved status quo view of the world, a “conspiracy theory”. This term is used constantly. Any view that doesn’t exactly fit in with the narrative you hear from the media or government gets the conspiracy theory label thrown at it. This works to delegitimize other angles, marginalize independent media sources, and generally just keep people focused on the approved story, since no one wants to be thought of as believing a conspiracy theory. Important note: The term was popularized and spread by the CIA, specifically to do what I just described.

Their second tool here is to label ideas about the past as “revisionist history”. So anytime thorough, independent research is done on an episode in history, and the conclusions don’t match up with that standard, approved view it is classified as incorrect, or bad, or serving some sinister motive. These sorts of people are marginalized, and we’re all told to ignore them for being radicals or extremists. Obviously I have to note, there is such a thing as the bad sort of revisionist history. There are fanatics who do try to tell a version of something that is clearly not the truth, in order to service their own ideas. And there’s the problem, because then anyone looking at history differently can get lumped in with those sorts of people. See our article, Factualizing History, for a quick intro to this idea, and see the links at the bottom of that article for more information.

It’s important to them to keep those things in the shadows, otherwise, if the thinking, intelligent people of the world realized “Hey, they were doing those things, and here is the documented evidence, what does that mean for all these other events throughout history? What does that mean for events today? What does that mean for really big events like 9/11? As I’ve mentioned before on the site, it’s like the crack in the facade, that once started, just keeps going, allowing one to break down their own preconceived notions once they see the truth of a few specific things. Soon the whole dam breaks loose. So it’s seen as a dangerous chain reaction to those in power; thinking, that is. To think, to examine, and to seek the truth is the greatest enemy of the state. And Henry Kissinger, we can say, represents the state, in all of its worst aspects.

Some related information:

Tom’s talk with Grandin reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the historian Ralph Raico. It reads as follows…

“The time is coming when the establishment view of the 20th century is going to be shaken very badly. You see people don’t just come up with crazy ideas…Yeah; I’m going to massacre all the Slavs. I’m going to massacre all the Jews. I’m going to massacre the bourgeois and so on. There is a cause and effect involved here. And the first great bloodletting and the first total destruction of rules of morality was the First World War. Here’s what one historian says. “The victimized youth of Germany of the first world war, the ones who survived the starvation, were to become the most radical adherents to Nazism. Understandable, they were almost starved to death as little kids.” – Ralph Raico

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