Elephant in the World
A few weeks back, I came across a video by Johnny Harris with the title “Was Henry Kissinger a War Criminal?“. When I read the title of the video I mistook Henry Kissinger for Harvey Weinstein(I know it is a pretty big miss).
A short introduction to Henry Kissinger from Wikipedia:-
Henry Alfred Kissinger was an American diplomat, political scientist, geopolitical consultant, and politician who served as the United States secretary of state and national security advisor in the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1969 and 1977.
His recent death made him the topic of countless videos and articles in that week. I started reading about him after seeing the video. Although he has carried out several atrocities in the name of national security, but one particular thing caught my eye, which is his involvement in the 1973 coup. He is associated with the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, which saw the use of military force to overthrow a publicly elected government and the death of their elected president Salvador Allende, and led to the power consolidation by Augusto Pinochet. Now Pinochet is not that kind of name that you read and forget like any other normal name(at least for the continent I have lived in). I recall reading about someone with this name in my ninth-grade political science textbook (if my social sciences teachers would come to know that I still remember something about Pinochet and Chile from the chapters they’d be shocked), and I looked it up online and eventually discovered it(click on the image for the chapter link).
What I find strange is that throughout the entire part, there is not a single mention of the USA, CIA, Nixon, Henry, or any other organisation that provided the support for the coup.Everything is explained in a very straightforward way. If you’ll read the whole section, it is a comparison study between two democracies, Chile and Poland.
My point is that, this comparison study between Chile and Poland presents a case of what seems like half-baked knowledge, designed to serve the purpose of the comparison to make a point which I think is useless, if all the facts are not presented properly. This selective presentation of information not only obscures the full extent of historical events but also undermines the credibility of the comparison being made.By neglecting key details, the comparison loses its validity and serves little purpose beyond reinforcing a predetermined narrative.