Please use the below as a template to send a letter to the members of the Board of Trustees at the following address:

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

Dear Sirs and Madams:

    We write to request that you withdraw the name of Henry Kissinger as an honoree of the New York Historical Society at the event on November 7, 2011 at the Waldorf Astoria. He is the United States’ most notorious living war criminal, whose many crimes include the following:

• Direction and approval of mass bombing campaigns targeted at civilians in both North and South Vietnam, and the mass civilian targeted assassination campaigns known as the Phoenix Program;
• The military invasion of Cambodia, the direction and approval of mass bombing campaigns targeted at civilians, and the overthrow of the legitimate government of Cambodia, followed by diplomatic support for the Khmer Rouge regime;
• Direction and approval of mass bombing campaigns in Laos, reducing areas like the Plain of Jars to veritable moonscapes;
• Direction and approval of the  overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and unqualified support for brutal military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, and other countries in Latin America;
• Unwavering diplomatic and intelligence support to the apartheid regime in South Africa, including the provision of military support to the apartheid government’s military intervention in Angola – and then lying to the US Congress about it;
• Collusion with the mass murder and rape campaign of the “West” Pakistan military in Bangladesh;
• Authorization of the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975, and provision of US military aid to enable an occupation that killed between 25 and 33 percent of the population of that island.

     While this list can be considerably lengthened, the conclusion is inescapable: Dr. Kissinger is one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century. It is difficult to understand how the New York Historical Society can consider honoring such a man.

    This action on the part of the Society makes a statement that these crimes are of no importance to us as 21st-century New Yorkers, as Americans, as human beings. We raise these thirty-five-year-old crimes to your attention because as William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The failure to hold Dr. Kissinger to account for his myriad of crimes has allowed him to continue dispensing recommendations for new wars and foreign interventions. The failure to confront and rectify this record has facilitated the invasion of Iraq, the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the policy of rendition and the detentions at Guantanamo, and other the illegal actions of the “war on terror.”

As historians you are no doubt aware that Henry Kissinger is wanted for questioning in England, France, Spain, Chile and Argentina. Our culture is being poisoned by the failure to remember Kissinger’s and others’ crimes and to hold them to account. It is a terrible thing to participate in this process of enforced forgetting and impunity and also reflects very poorly on the United States in the international sphere.
Many other countries hold their criminal leaders accountable. It is time the U.S. did so as well. We protest this normalization of the worst kind of criminality and ask you to join us by rescinding this invitation.

Sincerely,