Gary J. Bass > Quotes

“While Pakistan plunged into civil war, Kissinger looked for massacres committed by Bengalis, to generate a moral equivalence that would exonerate Yahya. It would be convenient for Nixon and Kissinger to be able to say that both sides were equally rotten.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“I shall be perfectly frank with you,” which is how politicians in both Delhi and Washington preface a real whopper of a lie:”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram

“Nixon and Kissinger actually drove their South Asia policies with gusto and impressive creativity—but only when silencing dissenters in the ranks, like Blood, or pursuing their hostility toward India. They found no appeal in India, neither out of ideological admiration for India’s flawed but functioning democracy, nor from a geopolitical appreciation of the sheer size and importance of the Indian colossus. Instead, they denounced Indians individually and collectively, with an astonishingly personal and crude stream of vitriol. Alone in the Oval Office, these famous practitioners of dispassionate realpolitik were all too often propelled by emotion.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram

“Nixon bitterly said, “The Indians need—what they need really is a—” Kissinger interjected, “They’re such bastards.” Nixon finished his thought: “A mass famine.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“He admired his servants’ compassion and was not about to stop them. Blood later said: We were also harboring, all of us were harboring, Bengalis, mostly Hindu Bengalis, who were trying to flee mostly by taking refuge with our own servants. Our servants would give them refuge. All of us were doing this. I had a message from Washington saying that they had heard we were doing this and to knock it off. I told them we were doing it and would continue to do it. We could not turn these people away. They were not political refugees. They were just poor, very low-class people, mostly Hindus, who were very much afraid that they would be killed solely because they were Hindu.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram

“In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the brilliant White House national security advisor, were driven not just by such Cold War calculations, but a starkly personal and emotional dislike of India and Indians.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram

“Boastful as Truman could be in speeches about the aerial bombardment of cities, the ground-level reality jerked him into an apocalyptic frame of mind. “I hope for some kind of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.” He added, “We are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“Understanding clearly that what they were doing was illegal, Nixon and Kissinger did it anyway.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“This book is about how two of the world’s great democracies—the United States and India—faced up to one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. The slaughter in what is now Bangladesh stands as one of the cardinal moral challenges of recent history, although today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to Americans. It had a monumental impact on India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—almost a sixth of humanity in 1971. In the dark annals of modern cruelty, it ranks as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“On May 17, Webb announced in court that the defense’s jurisdiction motions were “dismissed for reasons to be given later”—an unsurprising outcome but with a shocking absence of any stated rationale.[70]”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“For four years after Pearl Harbor, it was China’s desperate, dogged resistance that made it possible for the Allies to advance on other European and Pacific fronts.[52]”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“a classic dialogue of the deaf.”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“In the end, the judges would only deliver those “reasons to be given later” as part of the court’s final verdict in November 1948. The entire Tokyo trial would be conducted without an explanation from the court of its own legitimacy.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“that the tribunal’s charter was nothing more than ex post facto law, belatedly declaring acts to be crimes which had not been criminal at the time they were committed”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“imposing four-engined heavy bomber of the kind which”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“fueling the war machines of its Axis partners.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“that it could only be upheld if “an enemy belligerent has no constitutional rights.”
― Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“(This, if anyone cared, was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which forbade combatants from faking civilian status.)”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

“alternating “between my personal Scylla of bright expectation and Charybdis of black despair.” He”
― Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram