John McCain is only a “hero” in the settler-colonialist mind. By the letter of the law, he was a war criminal. We Americans may praise McCain for opposing Bush-era waterboarding, or for standing up to the bigot who called Obama a Muslim at a campaign rally, or for casting the deciding vote that saved millions of Americans’ health insurance [...]
“I hate the gooks,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) doubled down when asked on the 2000 presidential campaign trail about his continued use of the racist slur for Vietnamese people. “I will hate them as long as I live.”
In the mind of the settler-colonialist, the white invader is always the victim and the people he invades, occupies, expels or exterminates are always the aggressors, going all the way back to the Native American genocide. McCain was never able to understand that in Vietnam, as in just about everywhere else they went, Americans were the invaders, not the victims. Even as McCain deserves praise and perhaps even admiration for the manner in which he endured the unendurablewhile imprisoned in Vietnam, we conveniently forget what he was doing when he was shot down over Hanoi. That day, US warplanes were bombing and strafing a light bulb factory in the densely populated capital, where thousands of innocent men, women and children were being killedby relentless American aerial attacks.
One Man’s Terrorist…
Bombing civilian targets is a war crime. It was a war crime in Vietnam and it was a war crime in Serbia too, one of the at least 13 countriesMcCain wanted to bomb, bomb, bombover the course of his congressional career. As Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other NATO powers waged the 1999 air war against the Serbian people in order to preserve the alliance’s “credibility,” McCain supported the brutal bombing campaign, which targeted utilities, hospitals, apartment buildings, nursing homes, railways, bridges, marketplaces and media outlets. Here’s a little refresher on the Geneva Convention:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works.
McCain had previously backed bombing Iraq’s water purification plants during the first Gulf War, a war crime later provento be part of a US plan to cripple that country’s infrastructure through sanctions that killedhundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children. Many would call this an act of terrorism, but McCain was never one to shy away from supporting terror when he felt it necessary. He personally donated $400 to Nicaraguan Contra rebels while angrily declaring that “historians will look back and view the vote that cut off… aid to the Contras as a low point in United States history.” Congress banned such aid after widespread reports of horrific Contra atrocitieslike this one:
Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off. They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit.
Of course, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, or perhaps both at once. The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, better known by its Farsi acronym MEK, was a State Department-designated terrorist group that had previously assassinated half a dozen US officials back when it was fighting the Shah’s regime. After the Shah’s ouster, MEK waged a guerrilla terror war against the Islamic Republic, endearing it to US leaders including McCain who supported and arranged secret trainingfor its fighters in Nevada.
In 2009, McCain was part of a delegation of conservative senators who traveled to Libyato meet longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who briefly flirted with US rapprochement after agreeing to scrap his weapons of mass destruction program. McCain even promisedto help the Gaddafi regime acquire US weapons. But the Libyan love affair was short lived and by 2011 McCain was a leading voice for war against Libya, accusingGaddafi of having “American blood on his hands.” Then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton was more than willing to amplify McCain’s war call, pressing a reluctant Barack Obama to add Libya to the Bush-beatinglist of countries he bombed.
The Woman and the Ape
Iran was a longtime target of McCain’s threats, with the senator infamously channelinghis inner Beach Boys on the presidential campaign trail in 2007. McCain’s animus toward Iranians, a nation whose people are among the most America-loving in the world, bordered on pathological. Upon learning that $158 million worth of American cigarettes were exported to Iran in violation of US sanctions he quipped, “maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
Oh, McCain was a joker, all right. Here’s one of his greatest hits: during his initial run for Senate back in 1986, McCain asked a Washington, DC audience if they’d heard “the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die?” Ready for the knee-slapping punchline? “When she finally regained consciousness and tries to speak,” McCain continued, “her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, Where is that marvelous ape?’”
McCain’s periodic misogyny spared no one. During a 1992 campaign stop, his wife Cindy playfully noted that the then-56-year-old was losing his hair. “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt,” he lovingly retorted. It was more than just shocking words — when it came to issues of reproductive rights, equal pay, workplace discrimination and sexual harassment, McCain repeatedly demonstrated a disdain for women that’s been forgotten in all the lofty eulogizing.
No to MLK Day, Veterans and 9/11 First Responders
His relationship with black people was just as fraught with controversy. McCain vehemently opposedthe national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, a popular move in a state known for its racism but a shock to millions of Americans who watched McCain vote against the holiday even after President Ronald Reagan finally approved it. He also supported flying the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol and, more importantly, consistently pushed policies and actions that fueled racial economic disparities and the disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color.
What’s arguably most confounding about the recent media fawning over McCain is the myth-making surrounding his record on veterans’ issues. Lost amid all the gushing over McCain’s patriotic service is the fact that he voted dozens of timesagainst funding for veterans’ health care and other crucial services, claiming they were “too expensive.” Yet McCain had no problem waging and expanding the never-ending “War on Terror” that has cost more than a million livesand more than $5 trilliontaxpayer dollars. McCain’s reluctance to spend public funds to care for the men and women who put their lives on the line while fighting to advance the government’s agenda is indeed curious given it was the public who financed his own education at the United States Naval Academy.
Also too expensivefor McCain’s taste was the 9/11 first responders’ health care bill, which provided life-saving medical care for the thousands of police officers, firefighters, paramedics and others who selflessly rushed to the burning Twin Towers that fateful morning and who suffered from deadly cancers and other diseases years later. A watered-down version of the bill was ultimately passed after months of Republican objection.
Grading McCain
McCain surely gets an “A+” grade from the military-industrial complex, for endless war spending was always a top priority for McCain. Taking care of those who fight, and who are physically and mentally maimed by fighting, not so much. That’s likely why the nonpartisan Disabled American Veterans graded him a 2 out of 10for his poor record on veterans issues, and why Afghanistan Veterans of America gave him a “D” for, among other travesties, voting against additional body armor and PTSD funding for troops.
He also gets an “F” for peace. McCain seemed to deplore peacemakers. When activists interrupted a congressional appearance by Henry Kissinger, who promoted and protectedgenocide, illegal wars and invasions, military coups, terrorism and torture on every inhabited continent, McCain ordered Capitol police to remove the “low life scum.”Not Kissinger, mind you, but rather the protesters. Ask yourself, who are “low life scum,” those, like Kissinger and McCain with the blood of millions of innocent men, women and children on their hands, or those trying to stop such slaughter?
War Hero? War Criminal
John McCain is only a “hero” in the settler-colonialist mind. By the letter of the law, he was a war criminal. We Americans may praise McCain for opposing Bush-era waterboarding, or for standing up to the bigot who called Obama a Muslim at a campaign rally, or for casting the deciding vote that saved millions of Americans’ health insurance. Yet one is reminded of Chris Rock reality-checking a black man boasting about how he pays his child support and stays out of jail. “You’re supposed to pay your child support, you’re supposed to stay out of jail,” the comedian retorts. Well, you’re supposed to be against torture and racism and people dying because they can’t afford insurance. In a sane world, these things wouldn’t even be up for debate.
Alas, this is no sane world and so we see the surreal, Orwellian spectacle of a war criminal hailed as a war hero, of a warmonger praisedby purported peace-lovers like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of someone who staunchly opposed MLK being fondly rememberedby the NAACP and by America’s first black president. Americans have short, convenient memories. We also love lionizing monsters, from Columbus to Andrew Jackson to Henry Kissinger. In a nation built upon a foundation of genocide and slavery and maintained through global militarism, Olympic feats of mental gymnastics are regularly performed in service of empire. McCain faithfully served the empire and will be rewarded with a lofty place in the official narrative. But in the annals of truth, the John McCain story will read quite differently.
Originally published on 2018-08-29
About the author: Brett Wilkins is editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal. Based in San Francisco, his work covers issues of social justice, human rights and war and peace.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
No matter where you grew up in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Confederate flag. Perhaps on a bumper sticker or license plate, or hanging outside a home or government building. You may have seen it at school, like 15-year-old Aleah Crawford, when in 2019, she led a protest to ban the rebel flag as part of the dress code. If you haven’t seen it, and don’t know much about it, now is the time to be informed. That’s because this flag has a particularly controversial place in US history.“People find the flag offensive because they ...
CNN explained well “5 surprising lessons from Trump’s astonishing win”, and the historic crushing failure of traditional Presidential-year American politics, but it really boils down to one simple fact: In the battleground states, where most of the advertising dollars and get-out-the-vote money was being spent, the Trump organization made use of the Republican-Party organization in those portions of the campaign-operation that benefited from those established contacts and its tried-and-tested methods and techniques, but not in the portions of the campaign-operation that needed to be improved and to function better than in all prior U.S. Presidential elections.The simple fact is that ...
Israel has played an increasingly provocative role in the destructive conflict unfolding within and along Syria’s borders since 2011. To many observers, it appears Israeli policy borders between opportunistic and unilateral aggression. In reality, Israel’s role in the Syrian conflict fits a much larger and long-term pattern with Anglo-American plans not only for Syria but for the entire region.A more recent row between Israel and Syria was the reported incursion of Israeli warplanes into Syrian airspace, including attacks near the eastern Syrian city of Palmyra. Palmyra hosts an ongoing battle between Syrian forces and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) terrorist ...
In the current context, the US is threatening to wage a preemptive nuclear war against Russia, which possesses a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton has confirmed that “nukes are on the table” and she intends to use them if she becomes president. We need to defend ourselves against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. Her solution is to blow up the planet.World War II ended in Mushroom Clouds.If Hillary decides to wage a preemptive nuclear war on Russia, World War III would commence with mushroom clouds.How would World War III end. Would it have an ending?In the words ...
As will be shown here, the U.S. federal government, under President Donald Trump, is repeating the very same deception of the public, in regard to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, that it had perpetrated back in 2002, against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, under U.S. President George W. Bush. (By contrast, and for secret reasons, the U.S. federal government does everything possible to downplay the barbarisms, such as are occurring in Yemen, that are perpetrated by the fundamentalist Sunni Kings of Saudi Arabia, and Emirs of Qatar, even while exaggerating the barbarisms by the fundamentalist Shiite clerics who control Iran — a key ally ...
After the first ever cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights, Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on April 17, 2016 that the territory “will remain under Israel’s sovereignty permanently.” This elicited admonitions from some of Israel’s greatest allies, the United States and Germany, and renewed attention on the issue.The Golan Heights were opportunistically occupied by Israel after its victory in the 1967 six-day-war. A United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has monitored the region since 1974, when Israel and Syria signed a ceasefire agreement, and it has been considered an occupied territory of the UN and the ...
We bribed parties and politicians who have enticed hate between the nations. Our ultimate goal was to enslave you!WebTribune publishes their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for upcoming book “Secrets of the White House” last week.My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media.Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, has authored many books ...
What we are seeing today in the fight over birth control is a revival of a very old, and very dangerous kind of Catholicism. It is not one supported or practiced by most Rank and File Catholics. It is a kind of Catholicism which has done irreparable harm. It is a kind of Catholicism unfit for existence in the modern world.It was the underpinning of the regimes of Mussolini in Italy, The National Catholicism of Francisco Franco, in Spain; The Parti Rexiste in Belgium; The Irish Blueshirts; The Croatian Ustaše, the Nazi puppet government in Croatia, and ultimately, was the ...
So the moment we’ve been holding our breaths for a week finally came. In the end, I am mighty glad that this particular strike seems more like the impotent thrashing of the neocon snake that didn’t dare to attack places where Russian servicemen were likely to be killed, than it does the start of World War III. For the moment, at least, thank God.But the fact that it was a fairly limited strike — compared to what it might have been — in which the majority of missiles failed to hit their targets, having been eliminated by Soviet-era air defences, ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
As was expected, President Trump has decertified Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal or, to give it its full name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite the fact that he certified it twice before. As recently as 14 September 2017, Trump also waived certain sanctions against Iran as required under the terms of the deal. Yet, in an extremely belligerent and hostile speech, he put out his new policy towards Iran.The certification of the deal is not part of the agreement, but as anti-Iranian hawks in both parties wanted to undermine President Barrack Obama and create obstacles on ...
What constitutes water can be scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now what constitutes a nation-state is a far more organic question than it would seem. Each of us is very used to seeing maps with the same countries and lines on it throughout the years and take their existence as a given. But depending on where a map comes from its borders may actually look very different. One of these countries to some and non-countries to others is Kosovo which gradually continues to lose the support of the states that recognized it into existence. Furthermore, this sheds light on how ...
In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...
Veterans Day has passed. The annual ritual never changes. Politicians who didn’t serve in the armed services start unnecessary wars, killing military personnel whose sacrifices are then lauded. Officials say these heroes died defending our freedom. That is almost always a lie.Sometimes Washington must go to war. Not often, however. Despite the endless claims that we live in a dangerous world, America is amazingly safe. No other power could defeat, let alone conquer, the United States. Only Russia has a comparable nuclear arsenal, but it would be destroyed if Moscow targeted America. China and Russia trail U.S. conventional military strength ...
The negotiations on Brexit are attracting a lot of attention. In particular, the possible erosion of the rights of around three million EU-27 citizens living in Britain is a major cause for concern.The European Parliament resolution adopted on 3 October states that “the withdrawal agreement must incorporate the full set of rights citizens currently enjoy, such that there is no material change in their position”.The main author of this text, Mr Guy Verhofstadt, the EP Brexit Coordinator, argues that such an approach – not to lower the level of citizens’ rights – is “the goal of democracy”. But why was ...
It is now clear that on 14 April 2018, the three Governments of U.S., UK, and France, fired over a hundred missiles against Syria, on no more 'justification' than staged videos that had been done by those regimes' own proxy boots-on-the-ground fighters in Syria, who are trying to overthrow Syria's existing, non-sectarian Government and replace it by a Sharia-law regime that would be selected by agents of Saudi Arabia's ruling family. In other words: the fighters whom the U.S., UK, and France, had been arming and training, had themselves created this pretext of a faked 'gas attack' having been perpetrated ...
The overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 was one of the most important geostrategic occurrences during the past century, because it led to the breakaway from Ukraine of the two regions — Crimea and Donbass — that had been the most opposed to the overthrow, and that had voted over 75% for the President who had been overthrown. And those two breakaways from Ukraine were then presented in the U.S.-allied “The West” as having resulted from ‘Russian aggression’, which then became punished, first by economic sanctions against Russia, and then by massive NATO military buildups ...
George Szamuely. Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013 (Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by the University of Chicago Press). Paper. Pp. 611.In Bombs for Peace, George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University, has produced a revealing and sharply argued analysis of Western intervention in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The primary focus of the book is on Western diplomatic and military interventions, which played a crucial role in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the plunge into conflict. Continued intervention fueled deeper conflict, as ...
As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it, and then pushing on regardless, all came down to “credibility”: the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved ...
Since World War II most of the world’s conflicts have revolved around struggles for independence against Western and Japanese colonial/imperial regimes.Following formal independence, a new type of imperial domination was imposed – neo-colonial regimes, in which the US and its European allies imposed vassal rulers acting as proxies for economic exploitation. With the rise of US unipolar global domination, following the demise of the USSR (1990), the West established hegemony over the East European states. Some were subject to fragmentation and sub-divided into new NATO dominated statelets.The quest for a unipolar empire set in motion a series of wars and ...
In the mind of the settler-colonialist, the white invader is always the victim and the people he invades, occupies, expels or exterminates are always the aggressors, going all the way back to the Native American genocide. McCain was never able to understand that in Vietnam, as in just about everywhere else they went, Americans were the invaders, not the victims. Even as McCain deserves praise and perhaps even admiration for the manner in which he endured the unendurable while imprisoned in Vietnam, we conveniently forget what he was doing when he was shot down over Hanoi. That day, US warplanes were bombing and strafing a light bulb factory in the densely populated capital, where thousands of innocent men, women and children were being killed by relentless American aerial attacks. 
