Gaza on my Mind
Writing has been difficult. The war to obliterate Gaza on the western edge of Asia makes writing about Asia an upbeat place a mental chore. Insensitive to say the least. Obscene almost.
How can I write about quaint Chinese tea shops and early morning tai chi while Gazans are bombarded to near extinction?
Then Henry Kissinger died on 29 November at 100 years old. Since then, this centenarian who has irrevocably changed the face of Southeast Asia, nay the world, continues to spark debate about his legacy. Many consider his prolonged presence in global affairs long after he departed from the US State Department one of the darkest moments in geopolitical history.
The late British journalist Christopher Hitchens called him a “reeking piece of ordure.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, then a presidential contender in 2016, told an audience in Milwaukee during a debate with Hilary Clinton that “Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”
The Huffington Post headline on December 1 read: “Henry Kissinger, America’s Most Notorious War Criminal, dies at 100.”
Anthony Bourdain, the celebrated chef-cum-writer was more vitriolic in his book “A Cook’s Tour”:
In his final flourish, Anthony Bourdain roared in a resurfaced video: “I f--g hate him."
Kissinger’s post-humous legacy, laced with controversy, connects the then and now. It allows me to write with Gaza on my mind.
I grew up on Kissinger’s infamous domino theory doctrine. It was a doctrine that was as simplistic as it was (then) convincing. If one country came under the influence of communism, neighboring countries would be “infected” and hence, fall like dominoes. So, if Vietnam succumbed to Communism (which it did), other countries in Southeast Asia would follow the path of the fallen dominoes. Some countries did (Cambodia, Laos), while most others didn’t (Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Timor Leste).
That Cambodia and Laos were infected by the Vietnamese Communist bug was, at the very least, debatable. Mostly problematic. It was the US bombing of Cambodia, Bernie Sanders reminded us in 2016, that "Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some 3 million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world."
What the three countries shared was that they were the most heavily bombed countries in Southeast Asia causing massive destruction and many deaths. They continue to suffer the long-term effects of these bombing campaigns. All told the domino doctrine was invoked as a convenient excuse for American interventionism, not just in Southeast Asia but around the world. Henry Kissinger authored that excuse.
Growing up in a boarding school under the austere authority of French-educated Filipino nuns was a direct daily experience of Henry Kissinger’s domino doctrine in the 1960s, a mix of routine and bewilderment. Every morning, the chapel bells tolled, calling us to early morning Mass. That’s when the first formation of American fighter jets would arrive on their way back from Vietnam for a refueling stop at Clark Air Base in Pampanga province north of Manila.
The Americans kept their bases for more than five decades. It was one of America’s enduring outposts in the Pacific established at the turn of the 20th century. During the Vietnam War, the Philippine bases would provide strategic support for US soldiers and their aircraft.
As the jets flew overhead, the chapel glass windows reverberated nervously as if on the edge of cracking, their sound drowned out the girls' voices in mid-song as we prepared ourselves for Holy Communion to the tune of Pater Noster.
“The Mass is over, go in peace,” the priest blessed us at the end of the morning ritual just as the third formation of jets passed overhead. I looked up as I had done many mornings in the last four years. The familiar V formation of six planes darted across the morning sky. The planes were gone before I had removed my veil, their sounds fading away in the morning traffic.
We filed toward the refectory for breakfast. The last of the fighter jets caused our breakfast plates to shake. Cutlery clanged. Sometimes, the breadbasket would fall off the table. Bits of water spilled from our drinking glasses. Apart from getting suspended for smoking in the dormitory bathroom during my senior year, this morning routine was the only consequential memory I retained of high school. Vietnam left a deep imprint. Everything else was fluff.
“We should have a debate about this war,” my literature teacher, a smart slim graduate from an American liberal arts school who turned out modernized Filipinas like herself, proclaimed one morning when four sets of fighter jets returned at 4 a.m. rocking the skies and the earth with supersonic booms. They came at thirty-minute intervals, lasting almost two hours. The bombing raids into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos must have finished earlier than scheduled. She sported eyebags from lack of sleep and was visibly disturbed.
The debate took place. I adopted the anti-American position and got into a passionate, unreasonable, almost hysterical verbal match with my pro-American classmates. Henry Kissinger’s theory of the domino effect easily won the argument, while I had yet to master the self-determination counterargument. It was an unpopular, unwinnable position.
“So, you want to be a Communist! Go ahead, go to Red China!” screeched my pro-American classmate. Her supporters cheered loudly, declaring themselves the winner of the debate. Girlish cacophony drowned out my almost solitary voice. My literature teacher looked on sympathetically and nodded in my direction for my valiant stance while I vowed since then to sharpen my ability at analysis and debate.
If Henry Kissinger could be credited for anything, it was offering a convincing doctrine --- that we are all hapless, helpless dominoes in the great geopolitical game. If your fork twisted in your mouth while you chewed on your morning banana, or water spilled on your crisply ironed uniform while the overhead B52s shook up the refectory walls of the convent, well, you just sucked it up. Saving the world from the Communist bogeyman was worth all these petty inconveniences.
“The force of the greater argument,” Jurgen Habermas the German philosopher would teach me later on. Kissinger’s domino theory didn’t have force, moral or otherwise. Its only appeal is reductionism, which all too often finds its home in simplistic minds.
Filipinos in the 1960s didn’t live out their lives hungry for sovereignty. Nor did they question the value of the US-Philippine alliance. The American bases, universal public education, and the influx of “stateside” goods lulled us into pro-Americanism.
My literature teacher provided me with the only link to critical thought and an early desire to visit Vietnam and later on, Laos and Cambodia too. I did. The bomb craters are still there. Unexploded ordinances litter almost everywhere in Laos. Cambodia is still hobbling along on one leg, as Anthony Bourdain wrote in 2000. But that’s for another longer Asian story.
Back to Gaza: It’s interesting to think about how the quotidian details of our lives can be so similar to one another. Even in death, Henry Kissinger threads the two worlds together, sadly, through bombs: 3,875 bombing raids on Cambodia which Kissinger authorized according to declassified reports; 6,000 bombs dropped in Gaza in six days.
The bigger story here, Ben Rhodes wrote for The New York Times, is about Kissinger whom he called the “hypocrite” who "exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake. Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not."