With My Bare Hands - Anthony Bourdain

I have always admired Anthony Bourdain, but never more than when he wrote in A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.

I felt the same way after my trips to S-21, the school/execution center in Phnom Penh and the haunting ghost hotel in Sihanoukville. The haunting ghosts of millions still roam the Killing Fields.

Our problems with Iran began when Kissinger convinced President Carter to admit the Shah of Iran into the USA for cancer treatment. The next week protestors storm the American Embassy in Tehran setting off forty years of animosity between the two nations.

Chile, Timor, the emigration of the Soviet Jews to Palestine, Nicaragua, his hand was deep in the mix of hundreds of unseen evils around the world. It's an outrage that no one in politics has the courage to call Kissinger out for what he was. A war criminal.

Not so Anthony Bourdain.

You we miss.

And I know nothing about him other than he had a good life.

Bien fait, chef.

As for Kissinger.

Non restem in pacem.

War Criminal # 1

Written Sep 28, 2016

When I first visited Cambodia in 1998, I arrived at Phnom Penh airport on a comfortable Bangkok Air flight from Bangkok. The previous year the Khmer Rouge ceased their guerilla war against the government forces and the country was deemed safe for tourism. up After landing the plane rolled across the tarmac to halt before the ancient terminal. My sunglasses offered little protection against the glaring sun, as I descended the stairs and stumbled toward the terminal seeking relief from the heat, then stopped as a small bus deboarded its troop of young passengers. All of them missing limbs. Some several, but everyone of the children were dressed in their best clothes. A flight attendant informed me that they were flying to Thailand to be fitted with prosthetic limbs. Hopeful smiles disguised their the agony of missing arms and legs as well as the nervous anticipation of a long journey away from family and friends.

Throughout my weeks long stay in Cambodia, I saw amputees were everywhere, for the landmines laid during that long conflict reaped new victims without a vacation. I never heard Cambodians expressing anger about Pol Pot, the mines, or the long war, almost as if it had happened to someone else or that talking about the horror might revive those years.

Not me, I’d be out for revenge and my #1 target would be Henry Kissinger, who was portrayed in William Shawcross’ book, SIDESHOW as the principal architect of Cambodia’s descent from a neutral monarchy to the Pentagon’s secret front of the Viet-Nam War.

Prince Sihanouk had kept his country out of the neighboring conflict by skillfully waltzing between the USA and Vietnamese combatants to maintain his dynasty's reign over Cambodia. By 1970 this non-combatant status was unacceptable to the Nixon regime and Kissinger condoned the secret bombing of suspected NVA bases in what was known as the Parrot’s Beak.

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people." Kissinger.

Armed incursions followed in 1970 as well as an invasion. Sihanouk was deposed and supported the Khmer Rouge against the Lon Nol dictatorship. This country of fertile rice paddies and vast flood plains joined Laos and Vietnam in the holocaust. As usual civilians paid the heaviest toll and the Nobel Institute disgraced itself forever by awarding Kissinger with the Peace Prize.

A little know fact is that Senator McCain’s father was the admiral directing the unauthorized bombing of Cambodia. He was offered his son’s release if the bombing stopped. It never did, because the USA doesn’t speak with terrorists, but worst than the bombs was what the Cambodian suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and as of yet none of them have gone on trial.

The Khmer Rouge numbered in the thousands. They lived amongst the people like fish in water as suggested by Mao. Calls for justice are muted by the quiet resignation that righting a wrong was for big people and not poor peasants. No one was asking Kissinger to appear before a judge or the Chinese or the Vietnamese. The frontiers of guilt died at a country’s borders.

Back in 1982 I was working in Hamburg, Germany. A reporter friend took me to the trial of a Nazi. The accused must have been eighty and my friend said, “The Polizei found him hiding in a nursing home.”

Despite the horrors portrayed in SIDESHOW, the Cambodians are a much more forgiving people than others who have suffered through a holocaust, mostly because they have to live with the perpetrators. They love Americans and only a few older people have any idea about what Kissinger or Nixon did to them. The rest live life as best they can without any help from the bombers of 1970.

Along the path to Angkot Wat’s Bayon Temple a quintet of amputees plays traditional music. A tourist stopped to take a photo and the leader of the troupe asked the visitor’s nationality. When the middle-aged voyager replied Texas, the band struck up YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS.

The tourist left a dollar and I left two.

Small reward for such forgiveness.

Forgetting is another matter saved for another time.

Thankfully Kissinger died yesterday, mourned by the Washington establishment and media as a great diplomat.

A war criminal finally brought to a long overdue death.

A pox on his grave.

A Wanted Man

George W. Bush cancelled a planned trip to address the United Israel Appeal in Switzerland in response to requests for his arrest on charges of torture. Amnesty International's Secretary General stated, “To date, we’ve seen a handful of military investigations into detentions and interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo. But none of these has had the independence and reach necessary to investigate high-level officials such as President Bush. Meanwhile, there has been virtually zero accountability for crimes committed in the CIA’s secret detention program, which was authorized by then-President Bush.” 147 nations condemn torture around the globe. The USA is not one of them. But none of them have bothered to arrest Obama or Tony Blair or Henry Kissinger as a war criminal either. Hypocrites.

Kent State 1970

Forty-three years ago John Filo snapped an iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot dead by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970.

I was 17.

Richard Nixon had been elected President in 1968, promising to end the Vietnam War.

"The war showed no signs of going away as the Pentagon instituted a draft lottery and American troops massacred My Lai. In Late-April of 1970 President Nixon gave to go-ahead to an invasion of Cambodia after staging a coup in that neutral country with the blessing of Henry Kissinger.

Thousands of protesters hit the streets across America and then it was hundreds of thousands.

My all-boys Catholic high school shut down, so that its students could demonstrate in Boston Commons.

Washington was under siege.

College campuses across the nation were closed by the protests.

At Kent State hundreds of students gathered to witness one student burn his draft card.

That evening after the closing of a bar bikers, students, and transient people broke the glass windows of a bank. Police confronted the mob and the town mayor ordered the closure of all the bars leading to an escalation of violence, but tear gas persuaded the mob to retreat into the campus.

The next day Governor Jim Rhodes ordered in the National Guard after hearing of threats to destroy the college and town. The protesters responded to the escalation by burning down the ROTC office and preventing firemen from saving the building.

Governor Rhodes was furious.

""We've seen here at the city of Kent especially, probably the most vicious form of campus oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups. They make definite plans of burning, destroying, and throwing rocks at police, and at the National Guard and the Highway Patrol. This is when we're going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem. We're not going to treat the symptoms. And these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Now I want to say this. They are not going to take over the campus. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

On May 4 the bloodshed of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos came home to America.

Companies A and C, 1/145th Infantry and Troop G of the 2/107th Armored Cavalry, Ohio National Guard lowered their M-1 rifles and shot into the rock-throwing crowd. Only 29 of the 79 discharged their weapons, but four students lay dead and nine were wounded.

The war continued another five years.

Even with four dead in Ohio.

Fuck Henry Kissinger.

Bring the war criminal to justice.

"To hear FOUR DEAD IN OHIO, please go to the following URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOoNM0U6oc