亨利-基辛格的人民讣告几十年来，基辛格让美国军国主义的巨轮不断向前旋转。
讣告 / 2023年11月29日
几十年来，基辛格让美国军国主义的巨轮不断向前旋转。
格雷格-格兰丁
OBITUARY / NOVEMBER 29, 2023
A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger
For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.
GREG GRANDIN
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国务卿亨利-基辛格在获得诺贝尔和平奖后在国务院简报室发表讲话。
国务卿亨利-基辛格获得诺贝尔和平奖后在国务院简报室发表讲话。
(Wally McNamee / Corbis / Getty Images）。
1923 年出生于德国魏玛的亨利-基辛格去世了。 在他生命的最后几年里，政治家、作家和名人都对他大加赞赏，仿佛他就是美国世纪的化身。 在某种程度上，他的确是。
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早些时候，在更危急的时刻，他曾被指责做了许多坏事。 现在他走了，批评他的人将有机会重提这些指控。 克里斯托弗-希钦斯（Christopher Hitchens）曾提出前国务卿应作为战犯受审，他本人已经去世。 但控方证人的名单很长：记者、历史学家和律师都渴望提供基辛格在柬埔寨、老挝、越南、东帝汶、孟加拉国、库尔德人、智利、阿根廷、乌拉圭和塞浦路斯等地的任何行动的背景资料。
多年来，出版了数十本关于基辛格的书籍，但未来的传记作者仍将以西摩-赫什 1983 年出版的《权力的代价》为首选。 赫什为我们塑造了基辛格的典型形象，他是一个自命不凡的偏执狂，在冷酷和奸佞之间徘徊，以推动自己的事业。 基辛格虚荣心强，动机卑劣，但在赫什的笔下，基辛格却是莎士比亚笔下的人物，因为他的小气被搬上了世界舞台，造成了史诗般的后果。
基辛格有许多忠实拥护者，他的许多讣告无疑会敦促人们保持平衡。 他们会说，越轨行为需要与成就相权衡：与苏联的缓和关系及其后的武器条约、开放共产主义中国以及他在中东的穿梭外交。 此时此刻，基辛格许多政策的后果将被重新定义为 "争议"，被归为观点而非事实。 在唐纳德-特朗普就任总统之后，世界被新的征服战争所震撼，基辛格 "冷静 "的政治家风范，正如几位评论家最近所称，比以往任何时候都更需要。
预计会有彩色评论、同事和熟人回忆起他的诙谐幽默，以及对阴谋、美食和高颧骨女人的喜爱。 我们会想起他曾与吉尔-圣约翰（Jill St. John）和玛洛-托马斯（Marlo Thomas）约会，与雪莉-麦克莱恩（Shirley MacLaine）是朋友，被亲切地称为 "超级K"、"阿拉伯的亨利 "和 "西翼的花花公子"。 基辛格才华横溢，脾气暴躁。 他很脆弱，这使他变得恶毒，他与理查德-尼克松的关系，正如记者埃文-托马斯所说，"非常奇怪"。 他们原本是死对头 基辛格当面奉承尼克松 背地里却对他恶语相向 "肉球头脑"，电话一接通，他就称自己的上司为 "酒鬼"。 "尼克松"，以赛亚-柏林这样称呼二人。
基辛格出生于德国菲尔特，1938 年全家为躲避纳粹来到美国。 尼克松称他为 "犹太男孩"。 基辛格的世界观通常被描述为重视稳定和国家利益的发展，而不是民主和人权等抽象的理想。 基辛格的传记作者沃尔特-艾萨克森（Walter Isaacson）写道："在思想上"，基辛格的 "思想仍带有欧洲色彩"。 另一位作家指出，基辛格的世界观是 "天生的美国人无法拥有的"。 随着年龄的增长，他的巴伐利亚口音也越来越重。
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但是，将基辛格解读为一个与美国例外论的和弦格格不入的异类，却忽略了他的本质。 事实上，他是典型的美国人，他的思想与他所处的地方和时代相适应。
年轻时，基辛格接受了最美国式的自负：自我创造，认为一个人的命运并不取决于他的条件--历史的重担可能会对自由施加限制，但在这些限制之内仍有回旋的余地。 基辛格并没有用美国式的语言表达这些思想。 相反，他倾向于用德国形而上学的厚重散文来表述他的哲学思想。 但思想大体相同："必然性"，他在 1950 年写道，"描述过去，但自由主宰未来"。
这句话出自基辛格在哈佛大学读大四时提交的毕业论文，这篇论文长达近 400 页，是对欧洲多位哲学家著作的梳理。 基辛格将这篇论文命名为《历史的意义》（The Meaning of History），其内容稠密、忧郁、夸张，很容易被认为是年轻人的产物。 但基辛格直到生命的最后一刻，还在以不同的形式重复着其中的许多前提和论点。 此外，到哈佛大学就读时，作者已拥有丰富的现实世界和战时经验，可以思考他的论文提出的问题，包括信息与智慧、物质世界与意识之间的关系，以及过去如何影响现在。 基辛格本人逃过了大屠杀，但至少有 12 名家庭成员没有逃过。 他于 1943 年应征入伍，在战争的最后一年回到了德国，在陆军情报部门一路晋升。 作为被占领的莱茵河畔城市克雷菲尔德的军事行政长官，他审讯盖世太保官员，将一些人变成了秘密线人，并因此获得了一枚铜星勋章。
换句话说，事实与真相之间的关系是基辛格论文的核心关注点，对他来说这不是一个抽象的问题。 基辛格的一位哈佛同学写道，基辛格后来的外交生涯是 "从思想世界到权力世界的虚拟移植"。
OBITUARY / NOVEMBER 29, 2023
A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger
For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.
GREG GRANDIN
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger make a statement in the State Department briefing room after receiving the Nobel Peace prize.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger make a statement in the State Department briefing room after receiving the Nobel Peace prize.
(Wally McNamee / Corbis / Getty Images)
Henry Kissinger, who was born in Weimar Germany in 1923, is dead. He made it to 100, and in the last years of his life, politicians, writers, and celebrities feted him as if he were the American Century incarnate. In a way, he was.
Earlier, during more critical times, he had been accused of many bad things. Now that he’s gone, his critics will get a chance to rehearse the charges. Christopher Hitchens, who made the case that the former secretary of state should be tried as a war criminal, is himself dead. But there’s a long list of witnesses for the prosecution: reporters, historians, and lawyers eager to provide background on any of Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places.
There have been scores of books published on the man over the years, but it is still Seymour Hersh’s 1983 The Price of Power that future biographers will have to top. Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage, with epic consequences.
Kissinger has many devotees, and many of his obituaries will no doubt urge balance. Transgressions, they’ll say, need to be weighed against accomplishments: détente and subsequent arms treaties with the Soviet Union, opening up Communist China, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s at this moment that the consequences of many of Kissinger’s policies will be redefined as “controversies” and consigned to opinion rather than to fact. In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, with the world convulsed by new wars of conquest, Kissinger’s “sober” statesmanship is, several commentators have recently claimed, needed more than ever.
Expect color commentary, colleagues and acquaintances who will reminisce that he had a wry sense of humor and a fondness for intrigue, good food, and high-cheeked women. We’ll be reminded that he dated Jill St. John and Marlo Thomas, was friends with Shirley MacLaine, and was affectionately known as Super K, Henry of Arabia, and the Playboy of the West Wing. Kissinger was brilliant and had a temper. He was vulnerable, which made him vicious, and his relationship with Richard Nixon was, as the journalist Evan Thomas put it, “deeply weird.” They were the original frenemies, with Kissinger flattering Nixon to his face and bitching about him behind his back. “The meatball mind,” he called his boss as soon as the phone was back on the hook, a “drunk.” “Nixonger,” Isaiah Berlin called the duo.
Born in Fürth, Germany, Kissinger came to the United States in 1938, his family in flight from the Nazis, and summaries of his life will stress his foreignness. Nixon called him “Jewboy.” Kissinger’s view of the world, conventionally described as valuing stability and the advance of national interests above abstract ideals like democracy and human rights, is often said to clash with America’s sense of itself as innately good, as an exceptional nation. “Intellectually,” his biographer Walter Isaacson writes, his “mind would retain its European cast.” Kissinger, notes another writer, had a worldview that a “born American could not have.” And his Bavarian accent did grow deeper as he grew older.
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But reading Kissinger as an alien out of tune with the chords of American Exceptionalism misses the point of the man. He was in fact the quintessential American, his cast of mind molded to his place and time.
As a young man, Kissinger embraced the most American of conceits: self-creation, the notion that one’s fate was not determined by one’s condition—that the weight of history might impose limits to freedom, but within those limits there was room to maneuver. Kissinger didn’t express these ideas in an American vernacular. Rather, he tended to phrase his philosophy in the heavy prose of German metaphysics. But the ideas were largely the same: “Necessity,” he wrote in 1950, “describes the past but freedom rules the future.”
That line is from a thesis that Kissinger submitted as a Harvard senior, a nearly 400-page-long journey through the writings of a number of European philosophers. The Meaning of History, as Kissinger titled it, is dense, melancholy, and overwrought, easy to dismiss as a product of youth. But Kissinger repeated many of its premises and arguments, in different forms, to the end of his life. Besides, by the time of his arrival at Harvard, the author had extensive real-world, wartime experience thinking about the questions his thesis raised, including the relationship between information and wisdom, the material world and consciousness, and the way the past presses on the present. Kissinger himself escaped the Holocaust, but at least 12 family members didn’t. Drafted in 1943, he spent the last year of the war back in Germany, working his way up the ranks of Army intelligence. As military administrator of the occupied Rhine River city of Krefeld, he interrogated Gestapo officers, turning some into confidential informants, winning a Bronze Star.
In other words, the relationship between fact and truth, a central preoccupation of his thesis, was not an abstract question for Kissinger. It was the stuff of life and death, and Kissinger’s subsequent diplomacy was, writes one of Kissinger’s Harvard classmates, a “virtual transplant from the world of thought into the world of power.”
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