Henry Kissinger is dead, at long last, and the peace-loving people of the global south can sleep a bit easier knowing that he’s no longer around to plague them. He was an unrepentant monster, an avatar of the grossest excesses of U.S. imperialism, a murderous, gibbering dupe first for the Rockefellers and then for whoever else could afford his consulting fees. His greatest service to humanity was showing what a ridiculous farce the Nobel Peace Prize is; his second was shuffling off this mortal coil, albeit far too late to save the peoples of Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and who knows where else.

There are those who think that the individual personalities that run institutions like the State Department are irrelevant in the face of the tidal forces of capital and that if it hadn’t been Kissinger it would’ve been someone else. That may be true. But in this life, it was Kissinger, and just as he enjoyed the accolades of the shrieking carrion-birds of the foreign policy establishment in life, he deserves nothing but contempt and an unmarked grave in death. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson’s eulogy of Nixon, “If the right people were in charge of Kissinger’s funeral, his casket would be launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.”