Word: metternichs
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...Sorrow and the Pity represents the darkest side of human experience. It is not the self-aggrandizing view of the world to which Kissinger's biography of Metternich. The Meaning of History, lays claim. Nor does it depend on arrows sweeping across a map or countries drenched in different intensities of red. It does not depend on Great Men--Metternichs or Kissingers. It is people, collectively and as individual human beings. Their hopes. Their crimes. Their sorrows. The story of this one French town during this one particular nightmare pulses more deeply than the matter-of-fact recollections of pain...
...secondary footnotes on one he sets up a Kraft quote as a straw many the Harpers article like Landau's book, stressed the significance of Fritz Kraemer, an Army acquaintance and William Yandell Elliott, a Harvard professor in Kissinger's life. The Kraft article also discussed the impact of Metternich on Kissinger policy views...
DEVELOPING THE METTERNICH analogy. Landau is so eager to prove that Kissinger is living in the past that he ignores the real similarities between the worlds of the two diplomats. In perhaps his most fatuous statement. Landau writes that in the early nineteenth century, "the movements for popular sovereignty and self-determination had not yet reared their threatening heads." But of course, without such movements, there would have been no Metternich as we know him. The Austrian diplomat was fighting to contain just those "movements for popular sovereignty and self-determination" which the French Revolution had ignited. And interestingly enough...
Landau muddles the Metternich analogy (which Joseph Kraft first presented in the unacknowledged article) because he recognizes the importance of the historical example to Kissinger but fails to realize its actual relevance to the current situation. Landau is usually very good when he discusses the motivation behind Kissinger's policy directives. His knowledge of Vietnamese history helps him illuminate such ironies as a proposed American peace plan which reiterates the treacherous 1946 and 1954 agreements with the French that the Vietnamese accepted to their later regret. He appreciates the paradox of Kissinger's urge for personal, Congress of Vienna style...
...Like Metternich's Austria, Kissinger's America is attempting to squash national liberation movements in less powerful lands. Like Metternich's Austria Kissinger's America depends for different reasons on the success of its foreign policy to insure its own domestic stability. Austria feared rightfully that Hungarians, Slavs and other national groups would rise up at home if nationalist movements were not stopped abroad. America recognizes that its domestic stability and standard of living depend on a peaceful system of world domination. The irony, of course, is that Metternich failed, and that with historical hindsight, we can see that...