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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Been working through the Kissinger biography by Seymour Hersh and it does sort of pull the wool from my eyes with regards to kissinger and his supposed intellect. There is obviously no doubt that the man was smart, but it seems that his supposed intellect was more that he was willing to backstab coworkers if he felt like he needed to, or just suspend any notions of how a government is supposed to work by setting up five different channels of communication for different needs, which meant that a load of people couldn't actually do their jobs since Kissinger was blocking them for spurrious reasons.
"Incredibly smart" often just means "was very good at exploiting the system for his own benefit." This is true for all sorts of things--not just government.
Exactly, most people notice loopholes and back doors to various things in life and take a moment to consider the ethics of taking advantage. Pricks like Kissinger see it and don't pause because they're incapable. Psychopathic people may "get things done", but they're so narrow sighted that they don't think of the costs, and if you point it out to them, they seem to believe the way out of it is to do another thing that causes a problem further down the road and doesn't solve the core issue. A lot of human history is taken up by normal people cleaning up after these dumbasses.
I mean, Kissinger did become one of the foremost experts on a whole bunch of things related to weapons proliferation and missile systems seemingly weeks faster than anyone else in that administration, so I don't know if I just want to put it down to "exploited the system". Obviously Kissinger used said expertise to further his own goals and do everything humanly possible to prevent other people from attaining theirs, so it's not an endorsement of his procedures when I refer to him as intelligent.
If I were to give Kissinger some type of credit, he didn't seem to consider black people / other minorities in America to be his direct enemies, unlike Nixon. But being slightly less racist than Richard Nixon isn't exactly a high bar to clear.
If you realize that nobody around you knows what the fuck is going on, all you need to do is confidently be wrong and like 80% of the people will just go along with it.