Twitter had a rare night of overwhelming joy Wednesday, as an event occurred that was able to bring everyone together to celebrate in beautiful unity: This was the night Henry Kissinger finally died.
Ever since Elon Musk bought and ruined Twitter/X, so many of us have found ourselves unable to fully leave the site that brings us misery. What were we still doing here, we ask ourselves. Why can’t we just leave? Well, now we have an answer. Clearly, we were all just hanging on to be able to celebrate one of the greatest nights in Twitter posting history.
Kissinger’s war crimes
Kissinger was a diplomat, political strategist, and war criminal responsible for the deaths of millions of people worldwide. Rolling Stone sums up his basics:
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
Celebrity chef and documentarian Anthony Bourdain has perhaps the definitive quote on Kissinger’s legacy of evil.
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands,” Bourdain wrote in his memoir, A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines. “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 [Serbia President Slobodan] Milošević.”
We’ve all been waiting for decades for Kissinger to die and he just refused to go. Apparently, pure evil is a hell of a life force. He finally f***ed off on Wednesday, November 29, 2023, at the age of 100.
Most major news outlets are working hard to be as laughably, infuriatingly neutral as possible in announcing the news of the death of a war criminal.
(Others are doing a much better job, to be fair.)
But on Twitter, things are different. Twitter is having a full-on party.
This is not a time for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is a time to revel.
We’re also so happy for the long-running “Is Henry Kissinger Dead Yet?” account, which has spent years waiting for this moment.
They finally got to post this Wednesday night:
(featured image: The CW, TMS)
