The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison

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Dean Rusk Also Missing, Feared Dead

When we left off our discussion of Niall finished making his case that Henry Kissinger is subject to a degree of criticism well beyond that encountered by other major political figures. As evidence, he noted that Kissinger had been described in disparaging terms by Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote about pretty much every major political figure in disparaging terms, and that he’d been denounced as a practicing Satanist by David Icke, who’s denounced pretty much every major political figure as a practicing Satanist; rather inexplicably, Ferguson himself even provided an incomplete list of over a dozen other prominent men and entire family dynasties against whom Icke has made this exact charge. It’s the first time I can recall having seen someone actually screw up anecdotal evidence, and I’ve read pretty much everything Martin Peretz used to write for the New Republic back when he still owned it and no one could stop him. Speaking of which, I certainly hope the New Republic is doing okay.

Having returned from his cherry picking expedition with a basket full of rocks, Ferguson told us of the structural violence to which Kissinger has been subject at the hands of “the conspiracy theorists of the left.” “In his People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn argues that Kissinger’s policies in Chile were intended at least in part to serve the economic interests of International Telephone and Telegraph,” Ferguson writes. As we saw last time, Zinn argued nothing of the sort — and neither did the section of the Senate committee report that Zinn had actually been closely paraphrasing, which merely provides examples of ITT’s involvement without making any suppositions about anyone’s motivations whatsoever. This didn’t stop Ferguson from rather weirdly going on to denounce Zinn’s dry restatement of the Church Committee’s findings as numbering among the “diatribes” in which Zinn and his ilk provide “gratuitous insults” against Kissinger “in place of evidence;” the “insult” in question turned out to have been made years later, in another book. Then he did some other odd and dishonest things as well, all in the space of a single paragraph. Go back and read the full account if you haven’t already; I’ll be sitting here worrying about the New Republic, for without TNR, where will our nation’s center-left hawks hammer out dynamic new solutions to the Arab Question?

But Ferguson, for one, is satisfied with his airtight case of self-contradictory selective evidence and demonstrably false necro-libel, so he invites us to share in his amazement that Kissinger, alone among men, has been insulted in the course of his public life even though anyone can see that he’s a special, special princess about whom no ill must be uttered; and that Kissinger, and only Kissinger, has been made to figure into various conspiracy theories even aside from the one that Ferguson fabricated and attributed to Howard Zinn. “All this vitriol is at first sight puzzling,” he writes. A bit later: “How, then, are we to explain the visceral hostility that the name Henry Kissinger arouses?”

In a comparatively extraordinary show of good faith, Ferguson now considers the possibility that there exist people who honestly disagree with some of the things that Kissinger did and some of the ways in which he did them. Just as remarkably, he engages on this point with Christopher Hitchens rather than David Icke or Lyndon LaRouche and refrains from lying about him even though he’s dead. Hitchens’ argument — which he put forth in detail in his 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and which has of course been made elsewhere many, many times — is that Kissinger oversaw and sometimes directly committed war crimes and other misdeeds in half a dozen countries. And it is not a case that can be easily dismissed on its merits. Ferguson seems to realize this and wisely refrains from making any direct refutation. Instead, he appeals to our sense of fairness:

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/09/barrett-brown-dean-rusk-also-missing-feared-dead/

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1. Me, I rhink Sandy Koufax is the most distinguished member of the Jewish Community...

... what can I say, I like baseball more than foreign affairs.

-- Mal

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2. I would not pick Kissinger.

I was just reading Ferguson critiquing Obama's doctrine, and warning of the dire consequences should Obama prove to have been too wishy-washy.

Not Mr. Brown's best effort, but one supposes he does the best he can with his situation.

[malthaussen]

3. I wonder if he knows about Baron Bowen on rain:

"The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella."

-- Mal

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4. Koufax was a nice guy.

And he sure had a fastball.


I'd pick DiMaggio myself, a real mensch, but that would be the wrong religion.