Once You've Been to Cambodia, You'll Never Stop Wanting to Beat Henry Kissinger to Death

Submission 994

Part of a series on Death of Henry Kissinger. [View Related Entries]

About

Once You've Been to Cambodia, You'll Never Stop Wanting to Beat Henry Kissinger to Death With Your Bare Hands refers to an image macro of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain captioned with his famous quote about the American diplomat and politician Henry Kissinger. Online, the quote has been used as a phrasal template and recaption meme format, typically adopted to reflect people's dislike for various politicians, celebrities and fictional characters for what they have done to a certain place.

Origin

In his 2001 book, _A Cook's Tour, celebrity chef and television host Anthony Bourdain makes a highly critical statement about the former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, writing the following passage:^[1]^[2]

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.

On February 18th, 2018, Bourdain posted a screenshot of his quote, commenting that he did not come to regret it. The post received over 32,000 reposts and 96,000 likes in six years.

Since January 2022, the first sentence of the quote has been spread online in the form of an image macro meme (shown below). While it is unknown who created the macro and where it was first posted, on January 8th, 2022, the Instagram^[3] page portertattoes made the earliest found repost of the image, which received over 390 likes in three years. On January 31st, Tumblr^[4] page valalaraptor reposted it, with the post garnering over 1,400 likes and reblogs in three years.

Spread

In 2022 and 2023, the macro was widely circulated online, going viral on November 30th, 2023, following the death of Henry Kissinger on the previous day.^[5]^[6]

On July 15th, 2024, X^[7] user @nixmao posted the earliest found meme based on the image macro, recaptioning it with a joke about shipping Henry Kissinger with Richard Nixon. The post (shown below) garnered over 20 reposts and 280 likes in three months.

In September 2024, the macro saw further spread as a meme format with users humorously recaptioning it with references to historical and fictional events. For example, on September 13th, 2024, Tumblr^[8] user pissvortex posted a meme that received over 1,000 reblogs and 2,600 likes in two months (shown below).

The format maintained popularity on X / Twitter in October 2024.