The Blood Telegram 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“(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