Read about another book on the list.The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary J. Bass
Created expressly to safeguard the Muslims of India, Pakistan disintegrated in 1971 – after committing the single-largest massacre of Muslims since the birth of Islam. Over nine months in what is today Bangladesh, up to three million people were slaughtered, more than 10 million displaced, and half a million Bengali women forced into brothels erected for the pleasure of Pakistani soldiers. It was an upheaval without parallel in South Asia’s history, and it happened in large measure with the support of President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Gary Bass’s title is a reference to the searing cables dispatched by Archer Blood, the American consul-general in Dhaka, in which he castigated his bosses back home for their complicity in the genocide unfolding before his eyes. Kissinger and Nixon, having recruited Pakistan as a conduit in their effort to broker relations with Mao’s China, continued to abet the dictatorship of Gen. Yahya Khan. Bass’s book is made indispensable by the mere fact of its existence. It will shame Americans. But will it prompt Pakistanis to ask why a country founded to protect Muslims oversaw their mass murder?
The Page 99 Test: The Blood Telegram.
--Marshal Zeringue
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