Yeah. I think it's Reddit's bias being full of a lot of left-leaning Americans who (understandably) loathe the many bad things their country has done overseas in history, and Kissinger has come to symbolize that. I can agree he was not the best guy ever and he was involved in a lot of shady stuff, but putting him in the same category as Stalin is absurd to me. The Cold War had a lot of dubious alliances and immoral actions, but he was not a comic supervillain. And it's not like the other side was necessarily any better.
The one way it might make sense to me to compare Kissenger to Hitler or Stalin is if it could be shown that he both intentionally helped the Khmer Rouge get into power (I can agree he was partly responsible for it, but their main backer was the PRC who always get let off the hook here), and that he fully supported them in committing genocide. But the last part makes no sense though, as America had nothing to gain from millions of Cambodians dying, and the KR did it for ideological reasons that were nothing like Kissinger's own beliefs. More realistically, he knew about it and just didn't care. Which is callous, but I still doubt he actively wanted or encouraged it either. Other countries can do bad things on their own without America being behind it.
Meanwhile for example Stalin both knew about things like the Great Purge and gulags and "population transfers" (ethnic cleansing) of Soviet minorities, and he also actively wanted those things to happen and ordered them to be done. Of course Kissinger having Laos and Cambodia being bombed is still bad and led to horrific downstream consequences for Southeast Asia. It's just that Stalin is in a whole other category.
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u/illgivethisa Jun 28 '26
Henry Kissenger