Future video audios should be louder. Thank you so much for your consideration.

Is he ever going to publish volume 2?

Great clip of an early interview of Henry Kissinger from 1958 at 12:00mins. the context is the discussion of the neglect of history in post war education and the absence of historical thinking understanding among policy makers and their reasons. Kissinger draws a deep insightful and illuminating parallel and difference between so called Revolutionary Communism and Liberal Capitalism. He argues that Communism has really become ossified and so revolutionary only in name, while liberal capitalism is really an engine of revolutionary change. Indeed neo liberals did present liberalism this way as technologically transformative entrepreneurship as creative and imaginative. This was definitely an an intellectual view in the 1970s and was the to becomes the public presentation in the 1980s onwards. The original neo liberals in the US go back to their 1930's revolt from Trotsky and i think may have thought apply those ways of thinking of ideas to capitalism then. There is also the 19th century economic marginalist thinking within late 20th century liberalism, and the marginaists were definitely motivated to provide an alternative rational scientific basis to Marx. So neo liberalism even with its abduction to Adam Smith as a origin and tradition, is really not a sue generic or a spontaneous in itself Genesis, in its modern form it is always already a construction of a difference to Socialism and Marxism. The liberal revolutionary description is not mealy metaphor or poetics, capitalism is as anti tradition and destructive of tradition as materialistic Marxism. The difference is where the Marxists want revolutionary transformation now to equality and justice, and these form incremental criteria and an image of a target, revolutionary liberal wants transformation by the criteria of efficacy improvements through technology and Taylorism. functionally they seem equivalent with respect to sublating the past. Indeed both in different ways are driven to remove the private sphere and the family and community for higher goals and principles. both are really materialist Marxists will reduce everything human on the basis of a purely material metric, and the liberals from utilitarian subjectivity through Pareto and Arrow onwards view man as a subjective utility machine. it is not surprising or accidental that history would become a mere curiosity or nostalgia for liberals since the very notion of revolutionary change necessarily implies the irrelevance and in applicability of past states of affairs and events and people of being any use and help in contemporary interpretation and understanding. The post world war two scientism and naturalism philosophy of liberalism set themselves not in real opposition to both Hegelian laws of progress and Hampel's laws of history, their radical contextualism and ontology of self interest structured only by Carnap/Quine conventions (Kissinger's rules based order) and international law as Right viewed history as progressive. As well as the view of radical transformed contextualisms on why not to study history perhaps also a under the grip of modernist metaphor, myth of analogy would be: if i want to build a car to win the 1966 la Mans Race what possible use or insight could i get from studying early 17th century cartwheel designe. I think Whewell for example saw nothing of substantive interest in the history of science. called Whig history. The scientism technology legalism and pragmatism of the revolutionary liberal "World View more seriously ahs lost the ability necessarily to the historian of just seeing an historical event in its context without just pillaging the past for false legitimacies and origins. or worse to use the past as tactical a tool for some move in the present. Certainly the new left do just that. The neglect of history has allowed the left to take the ground in their own way of constructing retroactive histories by abstracting events out of their context and assembling hem arranging them as if a continuity of progress of some notion of Right. In this they have been successful they have been successful in putting together liberal rights and revolutionary Marxism. the former by a move from negative to positive rights and the later by a retroactive history of injustice and the need for reparations of one kind or another by a contemporised standard as anachronistic to past aesthetic possibilities and real potential actions by agents. On what to do my area of work is the history of philosophy and its relations to context difference and repetitions. i seek from the past partial origins traces in the present and to imagine moves now that engage simultaneously with a philosophical interpretation an historical one and a making explicit and diagnoses of inconsistency and contradictions of one kind or another that have being put in by conflations and so on. i cannot any more make sense of a abstract philosophical problem without its context, or of a view of historical or contemporary events that is not laden by philosophical positions explicit or implicit. indeed there was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when i thought of a historical philosophical problems but one of the discoveries that led me away from this was a left wing friend of mine lending me a copy of Kissinger's "Diplomacy" in about 1993ish (i hope it was published by then!) Given my physical science and philosophy of science background i think i was meant to disagree with it but it was transformative in me devoting more and more time over the years to the 30 Years War and Hobbes and Richelieu and Bismarck. The new cold war will be much more a battle of ideas and silencing and cancelling than the last one and should be more aware of the error of thinking a radical distinction between foreign and domestic public and private and so on. Like political versions of Kant's Concepts of Reflection. and heard many years ago that Kissinger did his PhD on Kant or at least had to read all of Kant's works as part of it. i heard a story that as starting PhD student he went to his supervisor who told him to read all of Kant's works and that this will take him there years so he should return in three years. its a story i heard from before the internet. Glad i didn't post this before listening on because at 16 mins in Niall Ferguson says this. I gotta get his book now, I've tried to get Kissinger's PhD but it not on open source at the Harvard Library. A great interview by Mary Sarotte. Many thanks

Hitchens was the ultimate polemicist. As far as I can tell, he never went to a source document in his career. He was fun and provocative but not to be taken seriously as a historian.

@helenachase5627

6 жыл бұрын

Doug Smith . I totally agree.

@claumeister1

2 жыл бұрын

Hitchens was the most overrated public thinker of the last 40 years, because he wasn’t a thinker at all. He was a highly irrational bomb thrower with the OxBridge gift of verbal fireworks, tilting at windmills like Mother Theresa (!) or the Clintons for very idiosyncratic personal reasons. The Clintons have plenty of faults, but he made them out to be the Borgias of our day. Wrong from the left on world socialism, dead wrong on Robert Mugabe, wrong from the right on the Iraq War; and witty but sophomoric in his critique of religion. All in all, an incredibly pompous and self-important blowhard, who made himself famous by appointing himself to the role of judge of those who had actually earned their fame. To wit, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. I’m no fan of HK, but to create an imaginary trial of a world figure so you can be his judge and jury is so fatuous, it’s embarrassing.

At 23:03 minutes "History" did not start in 1949. It was the USA which had made the SU its "default enemy" with the Truman Doctrine in 1946. Therefore "complaining" about the UdSSR not sticking to principles or agreements is hardly an argument.

Kissinger AKA Schnakeballs

Two thoughts come to mind when thinking of Henry. 1. The Law of Unintended Consequences. Hitler gave us Henry and sent Henry to America: the Land of Opportunity. Cheers Adolf! (Opportunist definition: A person who exploits circumstances to gain immediate advantage rather than being guided by consistent principles or plans.) Oh Boy, didn't he! 2. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. However, that's the only trick that Henry wasnt able to pull-off. However, the devil does have a sense of humour. Henry the academic was asked once why academia was frought with such bitter infighting. He replied: "Because the stakes are so small."

I note that even though JFK did more than any other person except Cardinal Spellman to get the USA into the war in Vietnam, Prof Ferguson blames LBJ for the war in Vietnam mess [at 48-49 minute mark]. As if JFK didn't leave a mess for LBJ. Course at the JFK School of Government that forgetfulness is understandable.

@kreek22

8 жыл бұрын

Wrong and wrong again.

Kissinger's history is a trail of intrigue leading to insurrection, then genocide. Where's the peace, genius?

@tuckerbugeater

2 жыл бұрын

If you think peace is worth gaining through murder, kissinger is your monster.