Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Kissinger

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Robert is joined again by Gareth Reynolds & Dave Anthony (The Dollop) for part four of our epic six part series on Henry Kissinger. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Man, yeah, yeah, yeah. How we all, this is behind the dollop bastards. Dollop the bastards. This is those dollop bastards. So I don't know, what do you guys think? Out of all of the characters you all have covered, who do you think Kissinger gets along with best? Oh my god. I mean, that's a tough one.

That judge in Texas with the bear? I mean, the judge in Texas with the bear he definitely gets along with. There's definitely guys like, you know, the guys who did the filibustering. Walker and those guys who just love to just take over other countries and kill many people. There's not, we've never experienced this level of casualty. No. Yeah, we haven't. This is quite a few.

This is, I mean, you know, like there are evil, it's the spray of your evil that is so remarkable about this. The ability to have your finger on this button with this level of darkness is, I don't know, it's a little, you know, I wouldn't say it's, you know, again, I mean, we've covered evil motherfuckers, but I don't think they've been able to scattershot in the way that, you know, Kissinger's. I mean, it's a rare talent at a rare time on a rare team. I would put Jan Peter Zun Cohen, who was the East, the Dutch colony guy in the East India. The Dutch colony guy, he did a lot of fucking killing. Yeah. And he definitely had the same sort of attitude, very casual about just killing people.

Yeah. The killing because we're white Americans. Yeah. Or just white people just, you know, for land has been, it's a theme. Andrew Jackson, I would put up there. Yeah. And he's at that level of like monstrous national leader who believes in a fucked up thing. Like in terms of his death toll, Andrew Jackson and his white supremacy, Hitler and his Hitler stuff, you know, Mao and some of the weird things he believed about crop rotation or like what not.

He's at that level of like death toll, but he doesn't believe in anything. Like he's not trained to do a thing. Right. He's not like attempting something. He's not a doctrine. There's not a society. Yeah. I guess that's the weirdest part of him because this sort of death count usually comes out of ideology.

Yes. That's exactly what I was trying to get at. Yeah. Imagine if his childhood affected him, what he would do. Yeah. That might have an impact, right? Imagine if that had actually impacted him in any way. Yeah.

And it, yeah, that's the, it's so fucked up that like. It's fucking crazy. We keep getting back to like Walter from the Big Lebowski logic, but like at least those other war criminals had an ethos. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Henry Kissinger, baby.

You could negotiate or talk down or at least there would be like an angle. At least like, oh, you are a, you are a person, like not to morally compare him negatively to Hitler because for the record folks, Hitler's worse, you know, than basically. Yeah. But there's at least, you can grasp onto a level of understanding with Hitler because it's like, well, I believe in things and I even believe in things that like, I think it would be okay to like use violence in order to, because of those things that I believe. I think there are situations that justify violence and those are based on things that

I believe about morality and Hitler had things that he believed about morality that he felt justified violence and so you can grapple at least with what must have been going on in the man's head when he did some of the terrible things he did. I cannot get into the head of a man who is willing to do this to keep a gig. Right. Yeah. It's for a gig. Yeah.

It's for a gig that he didn't even need. He didn't even need this job. No. He's almost as bad as Dr. Phil. Yeah. Oh, I mean, yes. That's a little bit hyperbolic, Dave. I don't think that's hyperbolic.

Dr. Philly in levels of evil. It's also just the dumb, the idea that 60 minutes like was like, take the keys, Hank. Have the keys, Hank. There you go. Yeah. You know your normal. Here you go, buddy. Yeah.

Just the renewal normalization. It's like. Now, yeah, when it comes to the folks who will defend Henry Kissinger or even call him a great statesman and those folks do exist, I have read some of their books. Um, when you get to those people, there are generally a couple of achievements that they will trumpet. It's like, well, you have to give him, you know, these things, right? Oh, God.

And they sound impressive on paper. In 1973, he and North Vietnam's Lee Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in the negotiations that became the Paris Peace Accords, right? Winning a Nobel Prize for stopping the Vietnam War, impressive sounding on paper. If you don't think about the fact that he extended the Vietnam War, like I helped to, you know, was a part of that. He did negotiate the First Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union.

Those are good things. Yeah, but, yeah, but he, the whole thing is he loved, he was like, nukes are great. It's like congratulating Sully Sullenberger if he threw the geese into the, yeah, if he had been breeding geese in that exact year and he was making bang noises to scare him into the plane when he landed it on the Hudson and they were like, wow, what an amazing achievement. Yeah. And yeah, it's one of those things like, yeah, he got, and part of like the arms reductions that he secured with the Soviet Union are less impressive than they sound.

I was just talking in the last episode about that documentary command and control and one of the points it makes is that like these Atlas II missiles, which nearly killed half of the people on the East Coast through radioactive fallout, were obsolete and not effective and recognized as not being useful, but they were kept in the arsenal not because we needed them, but because we were going to have a treaty with the Soviets soon and we wanted to have something we could give up that wouldn't actually cost us anything. Oh my God. Like that, like it's that kind of shit, like that's all of the fucking, yeah.

So he fucking got rid of spent fuel rods. Basically, yeah, yeah, and he does this, he helps negotiate reductions in nuclear arms after pushing the missile gap myth for the JFK administration, right? He did help pass an international convention against biological weapons, which is cool if you don't think too much about the defoliants that he ordered spread out across Southeast Asia. Jesus Christ. We need to stop people like Henry Kissinger.

We have to stop. I must be stopped. We must stop me. It is the only way to appease me. He had a role in the Helsinki Final Act, Article 10, which committed nations on both sides of the Cold War to quote, respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief for all without distinction of a two-racelift. Yeah.

Uh-huh. And then there's a guy who's in a room and he's like, we should kill everyone. And then he walks out and comes back in another door and goes, killing is bad. The killing must stop. Yeah. It's like when OJ was like... Someone must deal with me. OJ was like, well, I'm going to find the real killer.

Yes. Yes. We got to find this guy. He's still out there. Henry Kissinger doesn't go to D.C. anymore because he might run into the man who ordered the carpet bombing of Laos. That would be awkward. We are all trying to find the guy who did this.

We're not going to leave till we find out which son of a bitch is behind this. Now there is, however, one huge Titanic achievement that even the most hardened critics have to give Kissinger. He restored diplomatic relations between the United States and China. Now this is a huge deal no matter how you slice it. For a brief primer, China had them a big old civil war between the communists who won and the nationalists who we backed, who were called like Democrats, Republicans, whatever, like called democratic forces.

They had them a dictator as it always is. He was a dude named Chiang Kai-shek. Yeah. Mao wins in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek and his forces take all the gold they can carry and they flee to Taiwan. For the next 30 years, the United States refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Chinese state and deal with it directly. One of the most unhinged decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy, decades of

presidents, pretend Taiwan is the real China. Like Taiwan has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. That is China's seat. But Taiwan is, you can look on a map, it is somewhat smaller than actual China. It's like what we're doing with Venezuela. No, that guy's president. Yeah. Yeah.

That guy's the president. No, he's not. Right. Guido? Yeah. And it's one of those things like you don't have to be a fan of Mao to recognize this as stupid. Like Mao is in head of a government that is basically a whole continent and you're just

pretending he's not. And that's nuts. The emperor has no land. Yeah. It's craziness. It's stupid. Yeah. And in fairness, again, because we're about to talk about like Kissinger had nothing to

do with this, right? Kissinger is not why we refuse to recognize the existence of the Chinese government. This is a dumb thing that when he comes into power, he and Nixon are both very astutely recognized as a dumb thing, and they don't want this to continue. And it is hard to overstate how dangerous this state of affairs is. For one reason, after Stalin dies in 1953, relations between the USSR and Mao's China steadily decline. In 1964, the year China conducts their first successful nuclear tests, diplomatic relations

break down between both communist nations. So now you have three massive empires, all of whom are armed with nukes, none of whom are directly talking to each other. Oh, God. Like, this is a bad situation. And Kissinger does recognize how dangerous the status quo is. Now, in 1969, China and the Soviet Union have a series of border skirmishes. Their soldiers are shooting at each other.

Moscow threatens to start dropping nukes. And for a time, the Chinese government conducts its affairs from underground bunkers. So again, very reasonable that Nixon and Kissinger are like, well, we should probably have some way to fucking call these people on the goddamn phone, right? Like, this seems bad. Let's just get a phone. Let's get a fucking phone. You would think it would be that simple, Dave, but we're going to talk for about an hour

and 10 minutes about how it's not. So by the time 1971 comes around, Nixon and Kissinger were also both looking for a major diplomatic coup that could distract from the fact that they hadn't quite managed to end that whole Vietnam War thing and had, in fact, made it all very much worse. There's also some rational self-interest in here, you know, whatever else you can say about them. I don't think either of these men want to die and they recognize like, well, this could cause a nuclear war that ends all life on Earth, including us.

We should probably deal with this. Yeah, they finally realized that life is action that has purpose once it's there. Yeah. It's also one of those, this is getting a little off topic, but like, people talk about, you will see at least on the right, people say like, well, you know, if the nationalists had won the Chinese Civil War, a lot less people would have died. And it's like, well, the specific things Mao did that killed a lot of people wouldn't have been done.

But if Chiang Kai-shek is in charge of China, and like, while China is communist, they almost get in a nuclear fight with the USSR. Do you think Nash, like, right-wing Chiang Kai-shek led China is less likely to have a nuclear fight with the Soviet Union? What would the hard-nosed version be? Yeah, what is it like if they're not on the same ideological side? Yeah, people don't talk a lot about the fact that the USSR and communist China nearly nuked each other just like the US and the USSR.

And also, Mao killed landlords. So are those people? Well, fair. Yeah. Some of them were landlords. It's not the landlords we're complaining about. It's the, you know, the people who didn't have grain. But that's a story for a completely different set of days.

At this point in time, you've got two countries that should, three countries that should all be talking on the basis that they all individually have the ability to end all life on earth. And they're not. And Kissinger is like, you know what? I can get in here. You know? Yeah. I can make this work.

I can make this work. And also, it'll help us win an election. So it just so happens that 1971 is also a time in which China is willing to sit down with the United States. Mao once US helped negotiating with the Soviets, which is very strange and like the, does not make a lot of, yeah. I can't talk to these guys. I can't talk to these guys.

You know, I need someone who else can't talk to these guys. Nixon. Yeah. You love communists. Get in here. Yeah. You know, it's just, you've got like the way the Cold War is portrayed from the thousand yard view to people like watching the propaganda of whatever state.

And then you've got like Mao being like, hey, Nixon, I need your help to deal with these Soviets. I need a rational partner. Nixon being like. You're drunk. You know, you know, who's going to get me, went to cinch me Richard Milhouse, Nixon, the election in 72. Mao Zedong.

It is, it is weird politics and it's almost like there's only, there's only three people in the world. Yes. Yes. Um, so this is, uh, you know, and Nixon, yeah, once, once, Nixon's very much down to talk with China, but it is not that simple because since the diplomatic situation has been dumb for so very long, there aren't like US diplomats in China that we can like send a message through, right?

Like you literally don't have those ties. So the US does have ways of communicating with the Chinese government. They're through back channels though, because you can't admit publicly that you're doing it. Cause Taiwan is your ally and Taiwan doesn't want to acknowledge that the Chinese government is legitimate government. Very dumb. One of the back channels is through the leader of communist Romania, Nikolai Chichescu.

Oh boy. And the other. Great guy. Nikolai is not the bad guy of the story. I mean, what's that? What Chichescu is your hero? Things are not good. Not your hero, but let's call him a benign force in this specific instance.

When is your straight man? Yeah. The other is through the military dictator of Pakistan, General Agha Mohammed Yaya Khan. Now we should probably talk a little bit of history here. In 1947, the British gave up ruling over the Indian subcontinent. Finally, as a rule, whenever colonial powers leave their former possessions, they attempted to set up states based on their preexisting alliances and racial biases. This is why we have, for example, the entire modern map of the Middle East.

In this case of the Indian subcontinent, what had once been a colony was split into India and Pakistan. India is obviously Hindu majority and Pakistan is a Muslim majority nation. Now if you know your English colonialists, you know they're not very good at maps. So the Brits divvying up the subcontinent decide that Pakistan should include two huge chunks of land separated by more than a thousand miles of India. West Pakistan is the Pakistan we know and love today, right? Classic Pakistan.

Right. It's like the, yeah. East Pakistan is like the new Coke of Pakistan, except for now it's Bangladesh, right? But at the time, Bangladesh is each Pakistan, and there's just like a whole fuckload of India in between the two, which is, there's like a line that Pakistani people will say at the time that like East and West Pakistan are only united by religion, the English language and Pakistan Airlines. And by far Pakistan Airlines is the strongest of the three.

Cool of England once again, I mean, just really. Great plan, guys. Yeah, really nice. What do you say we put a blindfold on and then try to pin the tail on this junkie? And the fact that Indian partition, that England partitions India at all is a humanitarian crisis on an incomprehensible scale, as many as 2 million people died, often as the result of horrific racial or religious violence. And Henry Kissinger is hearing that like, hold on, I'm getting hard.

I can do better. That's nothing, baby. I can beat those rookie numbers. A week. Where do I send congratulations card? 10 to 20 million are displaced, but even though East and West Pakistan are supposed to be united by faith, there's like massive ethnic divides, right? Like they're not, the fact that they're all ostensibly Muslim does not mean anything,

it's like they're completely different parts of the world with completely different chucks of history, right? And at least America learns this lesson. Yes, thankfully, we get this right, you know? By the time we get into Pakistan, we're done with the stupid stuff, we're faking a vaccine drive in order to steal people's blood. That's right. As it should be.

The good guys. Yeah, the good guys are back. I know how to fix this, yeah. So yeah, here's the Smithsonian Magazine kind of laying out the relationship between East and West Pakistan by the time Kissinger and Nixon take office. With most of the ruling elite having immigrated westward from India, West Pakistan was chosen as the nation's political center. Between 1947 and 1970, East Pakistan had only 25% of the country's industrial investments

and 30% of its imports, despite producing 59% of the country's exports. West Pakistani elites saw their Eastern countrymen as culturally and ethnically inferior in an attempt to make Urdu the national language, less than 10% of the population of East Pakistan had a working knowledge of Urdu, was seen as further proof that East Pakistan's interests would be ignored by the government. Making matters worse, the powerful Bola cyclone hit East Bangladesh in November of 1970, killing 300,000 people. Despite having more resources at their disposal, West Pakistan offered a sluggish response

to the disaster. As French journalist Paul Dreyfus said of the situation, over the years, West Pakistan behaved like a poorly raised egotistical guest, devouring the best dishes and leaving nothing but scraps and leftovers for East Pakistan. It's not cool. It's not great. It's not great. Pakistan's military is what's in charge.

It's a military dictatorship. They run everything. They are hyper-focused on India, who is their primary geopolitical rival. In 1965, Pakistan attempts to invade Kashmir, sparking a vicious conflict. I'm not giving you the whole detail of the conflict between India and Pakistan. Please don't take this as me throwing all of the blame on one side or the other. This is just like the Barist Cliffs Notes, because we have a lot to cover in this episode. And the US, it's worth noting, had been selling arms to both countries in 1965.

What? Yeah, I know. Very disappointing. No. America? Yeah. Strange. Come on.

Gosh. Our history is so different. LBJ's administration was forced by public outcry as a result of this to issue an arms embargo on both nations. One saw the embargo as unfairly harming them, and as a result, there was bad blood among the high command towards the Democratic Johnson administration. By the time Kissinger and Nixon are in the White House, the president of Pakistan is again this guy, Yaya Khan.

We'll just call him Yaya, because it's fun to say. Yeah. It's Yaya. It's Yaya, fun to say. He took power in March of 1969 by forcing out another general in instituting martial law. Kissinger once wrote of him, Yaya is tough, direct, and with a good sense of humor. He talks in a very clipped way, is a splendid product of Sandhurst, and affects a sort of

social naivete, but is probably much more complicated than this. Now, Sandhurst is like the British Royal Military Academy. It's like, broadly speaking, British West Point. Okay. Yaya affected an English heir. He carried like a swagger stick. He dresses like he's a British officer. He acts like he's a British officer, right?

He is also a raging alcoholic. One Pakistani politician noted, he starts with cognac for breakfast and continues drinking throughout the day, night off and finding him in a sodden state. Nice. He's always on spring break. Just a drunk dude who always carries a stick for hitting horses. It's very good. I'm going to conwack him.

I mean, Churchill drank a fuck ton too, right? I mean, yes, absolutely. There is just something about it. JFK was on meth for a decent chunk of his early presidency. Wow. So great. It's where we're like, when we point out that a guy like Yaya is drunk, it is not to contrast him with Western leaders who are also some kind of fucked up.

I think, I think, um, um, what's his name? The guy who came after Nixon, but not right after Carter, probably pretty sober in the White House. Yeah. But his brother was making. His brother is making beer. Billy was like, I'll tell you what, I'll drink for Jim and no problem. Oh, Billy.

Billy Carter should have been the president and we would have gotten some shit done. Honestly. Yeah, we would have. It wouldn't have been good. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that different trajectory. Let's see how bad could it be, honestly. Fuck it.

Let's dance. Mm-hmm. In 1970, Yaya decides to hold an election, which is meant to be more for show than anything else, right? It's this thing you do because Pakistan is definitely, India is a neutral country. They're not on the side of the Soviet Union or the U.S. and the stupid Cold War thing. They're very intelligently like, well, what, what does it benefit us to pick one side of it?

Like fuck that stuff. But they also, because India's got much more of a socialist, especially early on is much more of a socialist government. There's a lot of distrust from them in the United States and Pakistan really leans on that to be buddy, buddy with the United States more. And one of the ways as part of like his attempts to get closer and closer to the U.S. because he wants arms, like everybody who gets buddy, buddy with the U.S., Yaya decides to hold an election because we love seeing people have elections.

We don't really care how they go, but we like seeing them, you know? Yeah, right. It's sport. It's sport, yeah. So he's allowed, he has a selection and his plan is to like basically rig it so that, you know, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't take any power away from the military. But Yaya's not good at anything. This is an important thing to know.

He's really bad at everything he does. Do you think that breakfast cognac had anything to do with this problem? I had my debate in the point. Okay, just a good question. So this election gets out of his hands immediately. East Pakistan is much larger than West Pakistan. And while West Pakistan's votes are split between parties, like there's a bunch of different conflicting political parties, nearly everyone in East Pakistan gets in line behind the same

party, the Awami League. Their big thing is they want autonomy from West Pakistan, you know? And they're very angry at like the fact that they're getting fucked over by the West. So the West, which is doing the fucking over, has a bunch of minor shit they're quabbling over. The East is just united behind, let's stop getting fucked over. And as a result, they get a shitload of people elected in this massive block. And they come to, it's enough that they will completely dominate like the parliament of

Pakistan because of like how well this election goes for them. Yaya does not like this. And rather than allowing the newly elected assembly to sit, he cancels their first meeting and declares martial law. Nice. Yeah. Right. It's FALLO.

The leader of the Awami League, a guy named Sheikh Mujbur Rahman, I apologize for what is surely a mispronunciation, declared a civil disobedience movement. It was into this volatile situation that Henry Kissinger stepped in the spring of 1971. Oh, God. Now, he and Nixon had pretty good relations with West Pakistan's government, which is at this point, you know, just Yaya. They were loath to trust India since it was nonaligned. Nixon also was very racist and hated the fact that India's democracy was popular among

Americans while the country maintained close ties with the USSR. He once told Yaya, quote, there is a psychosis in this country about India. Now, a big part of Nixon's hatred of India is that it's led by a woman, Indira Gandhi. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. We'll be talking more about that in a second. Yaya, on the other hand, is one of the few people on planet Earth that Richard Nixon comes to consider as a friend.

One of Nixon's... One of Kissinger's... Yeah, they're both drunk assholes. They don't remember the friendship, but God was important to the two. One of Kissinger's aides later said of the situation, they liked him. He was a soldier. He had style. He was kind of a jaunty guy. This aide, Hodgkinson, admits that Yaya was not very smart, but says that for Nixon and Kissinger, he was a man's man.

He wasn't some woman running a country. Right. It sounds like they're talking about... It's not how people talk about Yeltsin. Yeah, right. Yeah, he's a man's man as he sees the secret services tracking him down drunk in the middle of D.C. Yeah. That was Yeltsin, right?

He escaped. Yeah. Yeltsin, who was passed out on the plane, I forget he was supposed to meet, he was passed out on the plane and they were like, Boris, Boris, he's a good bug yourself. No, no, it's Boris. None. Look, if we had kept every world leader after that point to the standards of drunkenness that Yeltsin set, we wouldn't be having this war right now.

I'll tell you that much. Yeah. We might have had other wars. Well, Nixon would wake up in the middle of the night, too, and he'd be like, drop the nuke, you know, and they'd be like, oh, buddy. Like the next day, I'd be like, I don't remember what I said, they're like, thank God. Yeah, we need to institute a mandatory drink and minimum for all elected leaders in this country.

Yes. George W. Bush, Sobriety, did not help. If you can't force term limits, you can force liver cancer. Yes. That's right. You can force our way into getting him out of office after a year or two. Hey, you know who else can force liver cancer? Oh, well, we are sponsored by Stolich Neyavadka, which is now illegal in several states for

reasons that are difficult to explain. Robert, about V. What? It's remarkable. It's like, it's just... How are we so dumb? How are we so dumb? It's amazing that in this like deeply, ugly and complicated situation where large numbers

of people are suffering, Americans recognize that the right thing to do is destroy bottles of vodka not made in any of the countries involved in the conflict. They're taking Finnish vodka and just throwing it into the streets. That'll take you, Rooski. Great country. Here's some other ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Send to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Man. Man. Good times. That was a good set of ads. So this is not a Nixon miniseries, but in order to talk about the friendship, the deep

and abiding love that the two men had, there is an incredible paragraph from the book The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass that I'm going to read now. Despite all his global face time, Nixon was a solitary, awkward, reclusive man, Kissinger, who could not bring himself to say that he was fond of the president, once famously asked, Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him? Oh my God. That's coming from Kissinger. That's coming from Kissinger.

Oh. That's the saddest thing I can imagine, Henry Kissinger being like nobody really loved him. If only someone had loved this man. Have you ever met anyone who had the black and hard? Can you imagine? Nixon's only true friend was Bebe Roboso, a Florida banker. He said, It doesn't come natural to me to be a buddy buddy boy. Even H.R.

Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, worried that the boss was too much in his own head and once tried to find the president a friend, tracking down an oil man whom Nixon had reportedly liked in his Los Angeles days and installing him in a bogus White House chief. Okay. By the way, listen, listen, listen, listen, the movie needs to be written. It's like driving Miss Daisy, but with a body count. Yeah.

It's I love you. Yeah. It's I love you, man with war crimes. Yeah. Okay, so, so I'm James Franco with someone in this movie, so I'm going to, I'm going to work in the White House, but I can't act like I'm there to meet him, even though that's right. My whole thing is.

That's right. Yeah. So I'm just going to. So, so what? So I feel like try to get in just drink with him, just drink with him and eat pineapple and whatever he wants to do. Just do it. He's going to want to, he's going to want to put weird things in pineapple.

He's going to get really drunk and cry on your shoulder. He's going to bomb several Southeast Asian nations. What are you guys talking about? Sorry. I didn't mean to just. Nothing. Nothing, buddy. Okay.

Who's this fella? Oh, I like your face. Oh, my name. My name is Bobby and I. I love Bobby. Sorry. My, my pineapple and your wife and my for lunch, I have pineapple and cottage cheese every day.

And it's, it's, it just got out of the microwave. The best meal is absolutely the best lunch. Oh, you listen to. That's all I eat. Well, it's like, yeah. In between, in between just guzzling vodka. That's generally what I have. Am I on camera or something?

You guys fucking around. What are you talking about? I mean, I just, my heart is it, but I feel, um, I need to lay down. I'm sorry. Oh God, you're great. I, you're my favorite president. And I just want to say thank you for killing so many people. If you're H.R.

Haldeman, right? How do you. Recognize that you are trying to make play dates for a man bombing a legally multiple nation and not go democracy in all politics is a sham. I must go down in flames to take everyone out around me because that is the only justice that can be achieved is. Like Nixon belongs in the bubble that the good witch in the Wizard of Oz lives in. Yeah.

Like he's on that level of it's like, at some point you have to wake up and be like, okay, look, these guys are bombing the shit out of country. And my goal is to find the president a buddy. Yeah, yeah, I have to get him a friend. I'm looking. I'm trying to get him a friend. He might do something crazy. If he doesn't have anyone.

He might become unhinged. We're a little worried. Oh God. What a crazy. I just. It's great. It's just, it's just like you have a president who doesn't have a friend. Like that's what really.

President doesn't have a friend. And that's a big part of why when it comes to deciding who should be the US intermediary to talk with now. Yaya wins out over Chichescu. Oh my God. Because Nixon likes Yaya. You know, that's, that's a big part of it. Not the whole reason, but that's a big part of it.

Now. And again, let's just, let's remind everybody Chichescu was great. So I can't. Yeah. Flawless man. Also, by the way, great death. If we are going to talk about pretty good punishing death, pretty good punishing death. A lot more.

I'll go so far as to say most of the people we name in these episodes could have handled a Chichescu. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a bad way for him to go out. So when it comes to time to decide, yes, anyway, they go with Yaya. Now by 1971, again, spring of 71 is when all of this political stuff with East Pakistan is coming to head. These protests are happening.

You know, things are on the brink there of kind of like a civil conflict. Kissinger has been the center of US policy for three years at this point, right? US foreign policy. And folks in DC by 71 are amazed at the degree to which he has centralized power. His junior Southeast Asia aide, Sam Hoskinson, recalled, the power was there. He was gathering it up. You felt like you were at the political center of the universe. He and the president, that was where the decisions were made.

What a... Sounds like a democracy to me, baby. And you know what, instead of getting away from that, let's just replicate it forever. Yeah. Let's just do versions of this forever, but with people who are, well, yeah, let's just do versions of this forever. I'm not even going to try to quantify it. At age 48, Kissinger was new enough to power that he was noted at the time as being extremely

jealous of anyone who might be seen as a rival. He focused obsessively on pleasing Nixon. Henry himself had no particular biases against India or Indian politicians, at least not compared to Nixon, but when he saw how racist his boss was, he knuckled down and found his inner bigot. He was successful enough that Nixon said of him, Henry is my least pathological pro-India lover around here, good work, Henry. You did it, buddy.

You won. You won the worst thing. In late 1970, Kissinger and Yaya began to make plans for a brokered secret meeting between the United States and China. As a thank you for his help, in October of 1970, Yaya got to visit the White House in person, where Nixon agreed to sell weapons to his country again. Now, this is illegal because there's an arms embargo, which does not get lifted, but they decide we'll just do it.

It'll be a limited violation of the arms embargo. I believe that there was a loophole for BFFs. Yeah, there's BFFs. He got drunk with me. We're drag-borne in Kenya. Quote from the Blood Telegram. Yaya got a reward for his efforts in late October 1970, when he met Nixon in the Oval Office at the White House.

In their last meeting before the crisis erupted, Nixon began to sell weapons to Yaya again. And what was officially billed as a one-time exception to the U.S. arms embargo imposed on both India and Pakistan in 1965. It was the kind of exception that demolishes the rule. That embargo had already been eroding under Johnson, but now Yaya secured a moderately big haul, a harbinger of much larger ones likely to come. The promised weapons included six F-104 fighter planes, seven B-57 bombers, and 300 armored personnel carriers.

You want to guess what's going to be done with the weapons we send him? Nothing? Yep, that's right. It's like, episode's done, all right, we all had fun. In March of 1971, Mujibur, who is the guy, the East Pakistani political leader, who runs this party that wins the elections, he meets with Yaya and Dhaka, which is the capital of East Pakistan. In an attempt to reach an agreement over the elections, Yaya had just decided to ignore.

At first... I feel like an agreement was already going to break the electorate, but okay. Isn't that what the vote is? At first, Yaya's like, hey, we settled things. Great. Then the very next day, he has Mujibur arrested and sent 60,000 soldiers into East Pakistan. Actually, I say, since then, these guys had been slowly infiltrating the country for weeks by air, because you have to fly them in.

They can't just drive anywhere, because there's India in between the two. They embarked on an operation called Searchlight, and I'm going to quote now from an article in The New Yorker. Firing squads spread out across East Pakistan, sometimes assisted by local collaborators from Islamist groups that had been humiliated in the elections. In the countryside where the armed resistance was strongest, the Pakistani military burned in strafed villages, killing thousands and turning many more into refugees. Hindus, who composed more than 10% of the population, were targeted, their un-Muslim-ness

ascertained by a quick inspection underneath their clothing. Tens of thousands of women were raped in a campaign of terror. Bengalis also murdered and raped Urdu-speaking Muslims, whom they suspect of being fifth columnists for West Pakistan. Archer Blood, the U.S. Consul General in Dhaka, among others, reported the slaughter of professors and students at Dhaka University, an attempt to silence the intellectual class who had eloquently articulated Bengali grievances. So, Archer Blood in the Blood Telegram really goes into detail about this guy.

One of the very few cases of a State Department official with some power who's like a genuinely good person, blood works all over for the State Department as a diplomat. He's got such an evil name. He does have the worst rights. And he's like a good guy. He sounds like he should be doing Kissinger things. Archer Blood. Yeah.

He sounds like he should shoot fire arrows. He has opportunities to be in what are considered more prestigious postings, including Greece, but he doesn't want to be in Greece because it's a CIA-backed dictatorship at this point, and Bengal becomes Bangladesh is like, he feels like I can do something there, right? It's this place that has a lot of legitimate problems, but also there's this burgeoning democratic movement and people are taking, and he's renowned in the area for being incredibly social with Bengalis. His kids make friends with local children who live around, they invite them into their

home and have slumber parties. Just like a nice person. Right. And you're not going to rise to, yeah, who wants that guy? Blood sends a telegram to Nixon in Kissinger. Dave, when we tweeted about this, you asked, will there be blood? And I said there was going to be a blood telegram. Yeah.

This is what that is. In the blood telegram, Archer Blood attacks the Nixon administration for their deafening silence towards the violence in Bangladesh and moral bankruptcy in the face of what he termed a genocide, and this gets signed by every diplomatic official who's in Dhaka. This enrages Nixon, and Kissinger soothed his boss by saying, that consul in Dhaka doesn't have the strongest nerves, basically like, oh, he's just, he's just getting scared by a little massacre of all of the students and professors at a university. Good lord, this guy, huh?

Don't worry, Dick. I cannot believe his last name is blood. Let me rub your broken spine. Really would work better for my last name, you know? Yeah. So, why my last name is about Kissing, and he has blood, it's not backwards. He's the kissing guy. You know?

Kissing, I'm bloody. The use, Kissinger added, and this is him now talking about what Yaya is doing in East Pakistan, quote, the use of power against seeming odds pays off. He's very impressed by the fact that Yaya gains control of East Pakistan with just a few thousand soldiers, you know? He's really impressed. So, there's a bunch of people get angry, you know? One of the big people who's most vociferous in the U.S. government against what's happening

in East Pakistan is Ted Kennedy. He is like a really, like, takes this on as like a banner crusade. So, you know, once again, people get very angry at the administration for what's going on. Nixon tells Kissinger, quote, the people who bitch about Vietnam, bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war. Now, some of the same bastards want us to intervene here. Both civil wars.

He's being like, see how inconsistent they are? Yeah. You know? Oh, pick, pick, which one? Pick. What do you want? Do you think selling arms to one side in a civil war might be intervening? Yeah.

Is that is impossible? They want us to put a thumb on the scale. We're not going to do that. We have integrity. We're not going to do that. Oh, Yaya needs how many more missiles? Absolutely. We'll give him some missiles, absolutely.

So Kissinger writes up a policy paper in which he urges the U.S. to, quote, make a serious effort to help Yaya end the war he'd started. And again, this isn't even really a civil war. East Pakistan isn't like mobilizing a vast army to fight for their independence. They voted, and then Yaya sent soldiers to kill them all. Civil war, it does. There start to be guerrillas, and the Indian government starts sending weapons into guerrilla fighters in East Pakistan.

But the massacres start first. Well, and again, to what you're saying, he held an election. This would be like if David Cameron just had tanks the day after Brexit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God. That's not a bad idea. That's not a bad idea. I would have, I mean, marginally better, I guess.

Britain somehow colonizes the EU. Oh, my God. Britain finally colonizes itself. I say that. You work for us. Well, we already bloody work for you. Now you do. Now you do.

No, we already did. We're British. You work for the British now. Yeah. Because of their Santorist educations, Gareth, your same fake accent can work for Yaya. I'm lovely. His eye. Yaya, no.

So. Bit of cognac on the mind, I think. Nixon responds to Kissinger's policy paper with a handwritten note that he adds to the paper saying, don't squeeze Yaya at this time. Do you want to kill Yaya? Which is good advice under normal circumstances. In May, India. Test this to Richard.

And this is, you know, India, there's a degree of legitimate concern among Indian people for like the humanitarian crisis. There's also politically, there's tons of refugees, right? And so there's also this like very blunt political like, well, we can't let this be happening because refugees are a political problem for us, right? There's states, you know, nations don't make decisions ever because it's the right thing or the wrong thing to do. But India is broadly speaking on the right side of this one.

I think that's fair to say. So because they're watching what's happening, India starts massing troops on the border of East Pakistan in order to potentially intervene. But they don't do anything yet. Nixon tells Kissinger to cut off economic aid to India if they intervene in this genocide. And Kissinger responds, quote, the last thing we can afford to do now is to have the Pakistani government overthrown, given the other things that we are doing. This is a clear reference to their plans to meet with China, right?

He's very directly saying the reason we can't let anything happen to Yaya's government, even though they're carrying out a genocide, is because we need him to get to China. Now Kissinger follows this up with a sob to Nixon's racism, calling Indians, quote, the most aggressive goddamn people around there. Again, I mean, it's obviously like the projection is obviously insane. Nixon responds by telling Kissinger that what India needs is a mass famine. Kissinger does not disagree, and he follows up by saying India has no right to invade another country, quote, no matter what Pakistan does in its territory, real concerned about

national sovereignty, and you imagine someone doing something like that. Yeah, we can discuss, given the history of the United States as a whole, who gets to fairly complain about violations of national sovereignty, but definitely not Henry Kissinger. Yeah. Like, certainly not this guy, right? It's like the fucking dudes from the Bush administration yelling at, like, what Russia's doing in Ukraine. Yeah.

Not that Russian actions in Ukraine. No, it is. Like, no, not you. Not you. Not you. Not you. Yeah. There's a lot of people we don't want to hear from, but you're absolutely not you.

So, Kissinger assures his boss, besides the killing, has stopped. So it's fine. It had not. As a heads up. It had not. It has not. Yeah. Okay.

In April of 1970, which is, by the way, the, you know, Archer Blood, the State Department official who does everything possible to get the U.S. to act, Kissinger and Nixon fire him. Get him immediately out of there. Got to get that guy out of there, right? Yeah. Got to get that guy out of there. I agree.

He's terrible. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah. So in 1971, the same month as the Blood Telegram, and Nixon receives his official invitation from the Chinese, from the Chinese government, and it's, again, it's a secret invitation, right? You know, everything's, because they don't know that it's going to like work. You can't just have Nixon go to China first.

You have to send someone ahead of time to handle early negotiations and all that like it's a, it's a whole process. Right. Yeah. It's a pre-China. Yeah. It's a pre-China. You got to, yeah, you got to lube up your China before you get that dick.

Yeah. Before you get that dick in there, actually. That's right. Yeah. Instead of laughing. So- Here I come. Nixon, gleeful, tells Kissinger to go, Kissinger is the lube in this situation, tells Kissinger

to go in secretly and handle these early negotiations. He claims that this visit to China they're planning will be, quote, a great watershed in history, perhaps clearly the greatest since World War II, and that's what Nixon says. Kissinger, being a kiss ass, responds by saying, no, no, it'll be the greatest since the Civil War. My God, the idea that you're following that up with, no, no, better, better than World War II. Yeah.

So July came, and Kissinger set off for Southeast Asia on what was billed as a diplomatic tour of the region, but obviously is in reality a secret diplomatic mission codenamed, oh boy. Oh no. Operation Marco Polo. Oh, for fuck's sake. For fuck's sake. I mean, at least just get a better marketing person in the light.

It's like. Hey, Nixon, Nixon, listen to me, Marco Polo, fish on the water, Marco. So Nixon visits India, and then he flies to West Pakistan. And shortly after landing, the drinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, wait, what? Oh my God. He fakes a stomach bug. Oh, I thought he's going to get a stomach pumped. No, no, no.

So he's like, tell everybody I'm shitting. Yeah, tell everyone I'm pooping when I've got sex for two days. We need an excuse. Tell them I'm on the toilet shitting my brains out. So he cancels, Kissinger cancels a couple of days of planned meetings, and then while he's supposed to be sick, he boards in secret a special plane and flies from Islamabad to Beijing. Okay.

Now I'm going to quote from a write-up in The Daily Star, which was an Indian newspaper that summarizes what happens next. During Kissinger's China visit, both sides discussed a variety of issues. Kissinger found Zhao Enlai, who had studied in France and Germany from 1920 to 1923, to be a very articulate person who could converse even in German Kissinger's mother tongue with ease. Both leaders agreed on recognizing Communist China as the only China and allotting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council to Beijing instead of Taiwan.

The situation in the Indian subcontinent was discussed in detail, on which they had similar views, with both expressing their unwavering support to Pakistan. Zhao briefed Kissinger about the Indo-Chinese border skirmishes and blamed India for provocations. Both leaders had complete convergence of views on Yaya's stand on the Bangladesh issue. Kissinger flew back to Paris and reached Washington on July 13th. So. Okay. Good.

I mean, again, like, yes, they should be talking. Yes, this is fine. Yes, if you're going to have a security council, Beijing should probably sit on it rather than fucking Taiwan. So it's just a shame that it needs to come from mainly alcoholics, like that in order to make the right decisions, it needs to come on the back of genocides and blackouts. Yeah. And like, I feel like probably if the Nixon administration had just like announced publicly

through like the global media, we were wrong, the United States and our policy towards Taiwan. And we want to recognize China and establish relationships with them and put them on the you. If they just like said that in like a news thing, probably China would have been like, oh, okay, this all could have happened. But that also would have looked weak by the standards of like politics, right? It would have looked like begging. And so they're not going to do that.

They're going to do this instead because it looks strong. Also, for the base who, you know, just wanted Vietnamese and Cambodian people to be fucking massacred so they'd feel better, like, yeah, it's the base we're talking about. The base wanted blood and they fired him. That's right. So when he got back to DC and sat down with his boss, Kissinger excitedly relayed the story of the cloak and dagger exercise. That's he's very excited that he got to do with James Bond.

He tells Kissinger or Kissinger tells Nixon, quote, Yaya hasn't had such fun since the last Hindu massacre. Oh my fucking god. What in the fuck there needs you need to just like bring in another. I mean, blood would have been a good part. But there just needs to be a regular person like, hey, I'm sorry, we can't talk like that. Yeah.

You guys keep getting really comfy with this language. Really not okay. Yeah. Nobody says it. God did. There has to be like some motherfucker cleaning up Nixon's like puke in the corner and just a janitor who just like quietly shakes his head every time. Yeah.

To camera. Yeah. Yeah. There's a gym in there. Yeah. The bartender, the knowing bartender. Just imagine that coming out of your mouth. Yeah.

You're, you can't, it's not a joke when you say that while there's a genocide going on here. It hasn't had that much fun since the genocide. So that's sounds a lot about us, I guess. That's just you celebrating a guy killing people. You realize how cool you got to be to, I mean, look, I don't have a friend, but if I did. So on July 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon addressed the United States and told everyone that Henry Kissinger had just conducted a secret mission which had concluded with an agreement for

Nixon to travel to Beijing and negotiate. By this point, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi civilians were dead and more than a million had been made refugees. India was edging closer and closer to war over the whole matter and it was the considered opinion of the defense establishment that they would win fairly easily. India had started arming Bengali guerrilla fighters at this point and during one meeting on the matter, Nixon described Indians as, quote, a slippery treacherous people who would like nothing better than to use this tragedy to destroy Pakistan.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I mean, you can't even talk about it. I mean, it's like, you can't even say shit anymore. Yeah, it's just, it's just insane nonsense. Assault him. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so crazy how this, you know, this is imperialism, colonialist language.

It's just never faded. No. No. There's just always guys in power. They've been talking like this since the fucking 1500s, it's never stopped. It's the, I mean, this guy's not, you couldn't really call him in power, but it's that fucking journalist for whoever talking about like Ukraine and like this is the first war between civilized nations.

Oh yeah. What the fuck, dude? You know, it's quite different to see people who are white and European do it. That feels quite different. And the way he's carefully, that journalist you're talking about, the way he's carefully picking his language and he's like, you're like, wait, this is your thoughtful version? Yeah, this is your delicate statement? He cut the slurs out, you know?

Yeah. He was like, gotta be careful here. I'm going to say some dirty words. Because Nixon and they absolutely say some slurs, you know? Oh yeah. So the outcry domestically and internationally reaches a fever pitch at this point, kind of late summer, 1971. And in August, the escalating crisis pushes India to sign a formal treaty of friendship

with the Soviet Union. The communists, Nixon included, considered this a disaster, and as good as an end to India's neutrality. But condemning Yaya, or stopping the sale of US weapons to a country committing genocide, was not considered an option. Yaya had to be kept in power until the China trip was conclusively locked down. Jesus Christ. I'm going to quote again from the Blood Telegram.

A while after Kissinger returned from Beijing, he said, we cannot turn on Pakistan and I think it would have disastrous consequences with China, that after they gave us an airport, we massacre them. In this case, for Kissinger, massacre meant putting pressure on a government, not the actual massacres. I mean, they've done so many massacres that massacres aren't massacres anymore. Yeah. This is the only thing Henry Kissinger ever described as a massacre, is people being mean

to Nixon's drunk genocide. Yeah. Yeah. Nixon, meanwhile, was committing a genocide. Yeah. Oh, that's good. That's good. That, you know what?

Somebody make a Nixon-themed gin cocktail. The genocide. It should be red in color. Pineapple, cherries, a little bit of your own puke from the first sip. So also in August, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar organized a benefit concert in New York, supporting relief efforts in Bangladesh. Nixon brushed this off to Kissinger, saying, quote, Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan, they're

just a bunch of goddamn brown Muslims. Oh, for fucking sake. For fucking Christ. Yeah. Wait, we need to bomb the Beatles. Yeah. We have to nuke the Beatles. We have to kill the Beatles.

It doesn't mean we're recorded, right? The only one we could keep is Ringo. He seems like we could maybe shift him. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back. Again, I mean, it's like, you would expect, and again, I mean, at least in my head at some point, you would expect someone to just be like, guys, what the fuck? And even if it didn't even if it didn't really change anything, it would at least change the casual language and racism that is just kind of tossed around. Or someone would be like, hey, you shouldn't be recording all this. Yeah.

Yeah. Boy, you shouldn't be recording all this, Dick. Hey, I'm going to hit stop. That's why we have all this detail. I'm going to hit stop on this. Yeah. Nobody infiltrated the Nixon administration. Yeah.

Nixon did. Nixon was like, I think we got a mall and it might be drunk me. I think the blackout, he's recording us. We need to fight a war on night, Nixon. On October 25th, 1971, the People's Republic of China was admitted to the UN as a permanent member of the Security Council. Again, they're seated and occupied for Taiwan by years. Taiwan gets let out very unceremoniously.

China gets put in place. The People's Republic of China's representative celebrates with a vocal attack on, quote, American imperialists and their running dogs, but nobody took this seriously. It was generally referred to as firing by empty cannons. You know, you're trying to get, you got to throw out your attack on the US, but like, you know, everybody's getting along at this moment. By November of, again, we just talked about the guy who built that giant mountain-sized cannon for Saddam.

Not long after this, the CIA is like illegally helping that arms designers subvert international treaties to sell cannons to China because China's, you know, not on good terms with the USSR. It's all just like brinksmanship, political fucker. That doesn't match up with some of the history in this country. That's straight. So yeah, by November of 1971, more than 10 million people had been made refugees by the violence in Bangladesh.

Jeffrey Davis, a doctor who was brought into the country by the UN later to perform late-term abortions on rape victims. Again, this is like, so part of what happens is the systemic mass rape by Pakistani soldiers of Bangladeshi women, the UN brings a doctor in afterwards to like perform these abortions on these rape victims. The estimate before this doctor comes in is that between 200 and 400,000 Bengali women had been raped. And Jeffrey Davis says, oh, it's way more than that.

Oh my God. It's much more than that. The CIA estimates 200,000 civilians are murdered in this period. Given where the US stands on this issue, you might not want to trust the CIA's numbers. Now, the Soviet newspaper Pravda estimates some 3 million dead, which is also likely not entirely accurate, but is probably closer than the CIA's numbers. Credible low estimates of the death toll are over half a million. It is very likely that between one and two million Bengalis were murdered.

One and a half million is often what you will hear, probably pretty fair. Although any kind of exact count is obviously impossible. But this is a genocide on the Titanic scale, you know? In December, West Pakistan declared war on India. Remember, Yaya's not good at things. So I mean, again, breakfast cognac will do you some crazy shit. So their man declares war, again, Yaya declares war. That's right.

We're going to do the same. You bloody fools. You're messing the wrong Yaya. Nixon and Kissinger blame this on Indira Gandhi. Oh, but I'll tell you, this is why you can't have a woman in India. She said they're just asking to be attacked. Nixon tells Henry that it makes your heart sick to see Pakistan be done so by the Indians. God, the good guys.

And after we have warned the bitch. God, the good guys. The good guys. After we've warned the bitch. Oh, sorry. I cut you off. Yeah. And after we've warned the bitch.

I mean, again, it's like you're not in a tavern. This is the fucking White House. Mm hmm. Should we put that in an official press statement? Probably not, Richard. Let's talk about it in the morning. Oh, let's color a whore then. Let's just.

Yeah. All right. Yaya proved to be as bad at war as he was good at being friends with Dick Nixon. The Indian military curbstomps Pakistan. I cannot exaggerate the degree to which these guys get their asses handed to them. Within a week, it is clear that not only is West Pakistan going to lose the war, but Pakistan might not survive as a country as a result of how badly they're being beaten. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not good at anything. Yeah. I want to quote now from a write up by an Indian veteran. Oh, yeah. He's very good at drinking. He's pretty good at drinking.

That's right. What do you mean I started war with India? It was days ago. I said, I'm sorry. I can't know. It's probably my worst blackout. So I want to quote now from a write up by an Indian veteran of the conflict for Indie TV, which is another Indian news periodical.

On December 8th, as Pakistani defenses in East Pakistan were falling before the onslaught of the joint command of the Indian army and Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini liberation warriors, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were busy plotting ways to change the tide of war or arrest it. Henry Kissinger in a meeting with Richard Nixon and Attorney General Newton Mitchell, now to classified, said he has got a message for you from the Shah of Iran, which says he can send ammunition to a beleaguered Pakistan. What the fuck?

He is doing it now. What is going on? I mean, honestly. Who can help us here? The Shah of Iran. The level of war to stop war. Yeah. Who's another piece of shit we can bring in on this?

The brilliant diplomat also revealed that Iran will send fighter planes to protect Jordan from Israel, while Jordan will send jets to Pakistan for the war effort against India. What? What? Honestly. What? It's like, it's not like an NFL trade works. Yeah.

How could you have thought this would work? I mean. It's a drunk game of risk. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. He's just wasted playing risk. The US National Security Advisor also expressed fear that India would attack West Pakistan

in a major way after winning the war in the East. The Indian plan is now clear. This is Kissinger. They're going to move their forces from East Pakistan to the West. They will then smash the Pakistan land forces and air forces, annex the Pakistan occupied part of Kashmir, and then call it off, warned Henry Kissinger. When this has happened, the centrifugal forces in West Pakistan would be liberated. Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier will celebrate.

West Pakistan would become a sort of intricate Afghanistan. So this is Henry's Afghanistan. That's Henry's concern. So he insists this is enough of a disaster that the US has to send the seventh fleet into the Bay of Bengal in order to scare India. The seventh is headed by the USS Enterprise and is widely considered to be the most powerful naval force on Earth. This prompts the Russians to send a fleet in as well, and the world gets to live through

another period of, are we going to have a nuclear war? Jesus Christ. Kissinger, because he's real good at calming people down, encourages China to intervene against India. And in Nixon's words, quote, scare those goddamn Indians to death. China's like, maybe we should go back to the Taiwan thing. Maybe. That actually seemed to be.

This might be a little far. That was pretty good. Actually, that was working a little better, I think, for you guys. Welcome aboard. Now you're in hell. In the end, Kissinger's plan failed. India does not take his bait, and in late December, Pakistan surrenders to India. East Pakistan because of its own independent nation, Bangladesh.

Yaya is forced out of office and placed under house arrest where he suffers a stroke. So that's good. I'm genius. I've got an idea for a comeback, boys. It's called the comeback cognac, kid. Oh, you mean I can't leave? That'll be fine. So Kissinger claims this whole state of affairs, how this all resolves, is a victory for the

Nixon administration. Of course. He announced. Clearly. He announces this by saying, congratulations, Mr. President. You saved West Pakistan. I did. What time?

Was it last night? You saved West Pakistan. Amazing. Who's the hero? I mean, two months after the war, Nixon makes his big visit to China. The media eats it up, and suddenly Nixon's reelection campaign has something to hang their hats on beyond claims that peace in Vietnam is going to happen one of these days. We'll get around to it.

They taunt with the Soviets as announced soon after, right? They do. They're good. Obviously, it's good. This happens. Good things result from it. During a conversation later that year, Kissinger tells his boss, no one has yet understood what we did in India, Pakistan, and how we saved the China option, which we need for

the bloody Russians. Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh? Well, there you go. That says it all, right? Yeah. There it is. Nobody's congratulating us on how good of a job we did. Yeah.

I mean, in their opinion and their track record of foreign policy, it's all about egg breaking. For whatever version of omelet they insist they're serving. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, man, I agree, US, you know, Mao and fucking Kissinger or Mao and Nixon should have sat down and talked like all of these conversations had been happening, did taunt with Russia good, feel like you didn't need to back a genocide to make that happen. Feel like that wasn't a necessary ingredient.

It's easy to look back on a genocide and go, was this right or wrong? But when you're in the middle of a genocide, you're like, this seems pretty okay. I mean, I'm getting enough to talk to a guy. Which genocide are you on? How else can I talk to people? I'm having cognac with Ya Ya before flying to China. I keep in mind I'm pretty much blackout drunk for all this. So I'm pretty good for a guy who can't walk in a straight line.

Yeah. Anyway, that's how Henry Kissinger made peace between the nuclear powers. Jesus fucking Christ. No asterisks on that one. I mean, it is the most chaotic, insane fucking nonsense. It's just crazy. Now I really, it is on a level where, I mean, it's been hard to process the whole time. But now it's normalized and you're seeing the version when they're sort of, the training

wheels have been taken off. How much they are actually doing and getting away with, again, I mean, just to have an adult in the room. But I mean, you fire the adult, obviously, but it is absolutely fucking preposterous that this is not well known about, or even if it, even if it is well known, how the fuck Kissinger keeps showing up over and over again with all these people that people, that people are sick of fans for in our, in our politics. No, I can never, I can never get over the fact that Hillary Clinton was campaigning

with him. Yeah. Yeah. And the people were like, oh, look who's back, Shady. One of the things that so, this doesn't really like mark on like the moral list of things that he did wrong. But I just find it so shameful that like, again, you have all of these other people, like all of the folks we've talked about, like, yeah, yeah, like Nixon, who do horrible

things in there, but are like also getting to like exercising power and like the big men and like, you know, the dudes that the like, I don't know, they're not like sick of fans, whereas Henry is just sort of like sucking up to everyone around him in order to further war crimes, which again, yeah, it doesn't, isn't, doesn't rate discussing on a moral level compared to everything else. It just is like, that's the guy he is. Yeah. He's just like a power.

That's the guy he is. He's just like, he is not, I mean, and also, and I don't mean to keep beating this drum, but they're drunk. Yeah. Well, I don't think Kissinger is, but Nixon for sure. That's what I mean. Yeah. And Yaya is, yeah.

Yaya is, and Nixon is, and Kissinger is not. And he's still like, ah, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah. You know, it's be like, it'd be like if you're around like, like you're in a car ride to Florida with three drunk guys and they're just like, hey, well, what did we drink last night? The one guy's like, I have a drink, but let's go to Florida. Yeah.

Um, God, it's man. And the blatant racism as far as like who you're willing to sacrifice. I mean, you know, as usual with this country where, yeah, you just, you really do not give a fuck. They really just literally do not care about anybody who's not white. They just don't fucking care. Why would they? I mean, if you're them, there's no referee in this game.

So foul as much as you want to fucking, to fucking, you know, grow up with the Nazis right there and watch the Holocaust. And then Dave. Dave. To be able to disassociate. His childhood was not affected by this child. That's true. Sorry.

No impact on it. Going back to that. But that, again, we've, we've sort of knocked that domino down. That did not happen. Like it never occurred. It didn't happen. Clearly. Yeah.

You know, that's why, look, that's why he's fine with what's happening in Bangladesh. He knows it's not going to affect those kids, the ones who survive. Those who lived through history are doomed to repeat it. Because it was fine. Yeah. Because it was fine. It was completely fine. It was fine.

Why? Because I said so. Yeah. Oh. Anyway. I just, I just typed in Kissinger's name in to Google and the first thing that comes up is you. Pile of vomit.

Oh God. Fucking hell. Yeah. We don't need to. To settle the UK crisis start at the end. I don't even want to know. That was 2014. What the fuck?

Okay. Okay. Still nonsense. Like, of course, yes, it would be great to start at the point where there's not a war, but that's not really helpful in rate. Thanks Henry. Yeah. Oh.

Oh. Thanks buddy. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. He's on the same thing. Yeah. He's, he's doing Kissinger.

Like it doesn't matter. The point, things like the fucking nuclear disarmament were like, you can find moments in history where he's right. It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong about a specific issue because you've, we see what he actually does, which is whatever it takes to keep himself close to power. Like, he doesn't believe anything to the extent that he's ever right or a part of something good like arms reductions. Yeah.

It's because that's the thing that the people who he's sick of fans to want to do. And it doesn't matter that he supported the opposite thing for years, like because he doesn't care. Yeah. Because it's a parasite just looking for a host. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing.

Like I don't give him credit for anything. Like. Yeah. Well, it's funny. Yeah. It's funny you say that because all these articles about, about what he said about Ukraine in 2014. So people are going back to like, he said, and you're like, yeah, no, that guy's a fucking

war criminal. So he cares what he said. If only he'd thought to start at the end of the war. If only we'd thought of that. Henry. Great point, Henry. Solid. Thanks buddy.

We're going to start, we're going to start to go find me to get you bones. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, Lord. If he doesn't die immediately, obviously him dying immediately is my primary hope. But I hope if he doesn't die immediately, he lasts long enough to get sucked into one crypto scam. You know?

Just, just, just one good cryptocurrency scam. Can we get that at least? I wanted to start his own crypto called HankPank. Hank of America. I am now, I am now a block chain. You can buy a piece of my skin. Each NFT represents an individual time Richard Nixon vomited into my lap late at night. I've become an NFT.

Oh, God. All right. Well, well done. Well done again. Want anything here? I mean, again, it's getting harder. All right, we are the dollop and you can go to dolloppodcast.com for tour information. We will be all over Australia and America this summer.

And then you can go to my website, which is garethrentles.com for stand updates domestically and in Australia. And go to parasite.com, which is just pictures of Kissinger. Yeah. Yeah. Go to his parasite. Go to his parasite. I have a novel.

It's Google A.K. press after the revolution. It's for pre-order now. You can still get it signed. Every copy I will spit on Henry Kissinger's grave once when he dies. So make me die. You're going to need an IV. You're going to need an IV. Yeah.

Robert's getting woozy, everybody. Hurry. Look, like all politicians, I won't entirely keep my promises. Some of that spit's going to be piss. You know? Some of it's going to be piss. Here we go. Already breaking it.

Yeah. Yeah. Thought I knew you. Oh, God. Hi, everybody. Robert Evans here, and my novel after the revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org. Now if you go to akpress.org, you can find after the revolution. Just Google akpress.org after the revolution.

You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book. And if you pre-order now from either of these independent bookstores or from akpress, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool. You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please Google akpress after the revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it. You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.

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