Kissinger’s controversial legacy and the Greeks

Henry Kissinger was the most powerful American secretary of state and shaped US history during the Cold War, and his diplomatic legacy continues to influence Washington’s relations with Russia, China and the Middle East to this day.

Being one of the most complex and divisive characters on the global political scene, he still inspires both admiration and loathing even after his death in Connecticut at the age of 100.

Some of his fiercest critics wanted him indicted for war crimes and others considered him a master of realpolitik, a worthy successor to Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian statesman and minister of foreign affairs (1809-48), whom he studied.

He was a controversial figure to say the least for the Greeks and the Greek diaspora, as he was largely blamed for the attitude of the US and NATO toward the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

The invasion sparked a powerful surge of anti-Americanism, which the diaspora also vigorously voiced on the other side of the Atlantic.

Around 30,000 diaspora Greeks staged a protest outside the White House on August 18, 1974, with the slogan “Kill Kissinger.”

Kissinger believed that the Greek-American lobby’s clout would make it difficult to advance the policy he wanted.

According to him, the pressure from the diaspora led to the American Congress imposing an embargo on the shipment of weapons to Turkey.

He was also known in Greece for an infamous statement about the Greeks that was refuted by Kissinger himself but has passed into the realm of urban legend, and will no doubt survive after him.

The statement Kissinger allegedly made was in 1994 at an award ceremony at a Washington, DC hotel. Its source was an article in the Turkish Daily News and was published in 1997 by Nemesis magazine. Kissinger allegedly said that the “Greek people are anarchic and difficult to tame.”

“For this reason we must strike deep into their cultural roots: Perhaps then we can force them to conform. I mean, of course, to strike at their language, their religion, their cultural and historical reserves, so that we can neutralize their ability to develop, to distinguish themselves, or to prevail; thereby removing them as an obstacle to our strategically vital plans in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East,” he allegedly said.

This quote was republished, apart from Nemesis, in the Oikonomikos Tachydromos and in Avriani, supposedly as genuine.

Journalist Yannis Marinos of the Oikonomikos Tachydromos contacted Kissinger, who sent a letter of denial to the magazine as well as to the Turkish Daily News. Kissinger’s denial was also published in Politica Themata.

Since then, the statement has more or less taken the status of an urban legend, and it continues to be republished and circulated, especially on the internet, in forums and blogs, in order to support various positions or conspiracy theories. Indeed, the republications sometimes state that the alleged statement was made in 1974, not 1994.