Henry Kissinger should emulate Old Marley's ghost, which "floated out upon the bleak, dark night" from the chambers of Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. It was a gentle, necessary departure from our world that allowed Scrooge to confront his past and contemplate his future. Although Kissinger remains alive, if that is the right word, at the age of 87, the ghosts of his past crimes resurface from the depths to haunt him and us. Crippled Tiny Tims from East Timor, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Chile deserve a rest from the "first statesman at State since Jefferson," as the press called him after Richard Nixon anointed him secretary of state in 1973.

The thing that could be always said in Kissinger's favor, apart from the fact he kept American troops out of Ireland, was that he had nothing to do with the Nazi Holocaust of Jews in mid-century. But now an old tape of a conversation has surfaced, and he might as well have lent his signature to the genocide of his fellow Jews just as he did with the genocide of his non-fellow East Timorese. This is Kissinger's statement to Richard Nixon in the White House on March 1, 1973, recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library:

"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

It caused a stir, with many of Kissinger's old dinner-party friends such as Abe Foxman and Mort Zuckerman - who would normally pounce on any such callous and obviously anti-Semitic statement - attempting to sanitize Henry's unsanitary aside. Kissinger's own defense is even more absurd, referring to "quotations ascribed to me in the transcript..." Ascribed? The deep, guttural tones on the tape are undeniably his.

Read the rest of this article in Taki's Magazine.