John McCain and America’s Love For War Criminals

The United States hasn’t met a war criminal it didn’t like… Or inspire.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians 13

To go forward in this story, one must remember the past.

I remember the 2000 presidential election like it was yesterday. The drama, the conspiracy, and the failures… I remember them all. Despite losing, however, I remember John McCain’s presidential campaign and his race for the Republican Party nomination.

I used to like John McCain. I remember thinking that he was some sort of “maverick”. I echoed the sentiments regurgitated upon me by the pundits and talking heads on CNN and FOX News — like a good little centrist. I lauded the man for being basic. He showed a basic level of human decency and “home training” (as my grandparents would have called it) in interviews. Even then we liked him for nothing. We heaped undeserving praise on someone for doing what they were supposed to do: not being a complete jackass while running for office.

I was 18 and my standards were low. The affronts, false niceties, and quietly uncivil civilities would not pass muster with me today as the dawn of turning 40 approaches. I was also serving in the Army, so I was incredibly lost in the woods of American exceptionalism, imperialism, and a host of other -isms I’m embarrassed to admit.

“He’s the only Republican I’d vote for!”

Sound familiar? I echoed that sentiment — a sentiment manufactured in a manner that would make Edward Bernays smile — for many years until the second, most illegal, and recent Iraq War. I realized that John McCain was a bloodthirsty megalomaniac who beat the war drums knowing damn well invading Iraq had everything to do with capitalism, and nothing to do with democracy, or freedom for anyone, least of all the Iraqi people.

Yet, he still got invited to chop it up with liberal darlings like John Stewart on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Comfortably safe away from war and the suffering being heaped upon the Iraqi people, as a civilian, I excused McCain’s bloodthirstiness and his willingness to help coax and encourage jingoistic Americans into yet another war.

He was charismatic with Stewart; the kind of guy you wanted to grab a beer and shoot the shit with. That lulled us all into praising a hawk. Perhaps it was a sign of things to come, and how I would come to view the Democratic Party after 2016. A liberal fawning over a warmongering, racist conservative as toxic as John McCain highlights what’s wrong with liberalism in America today. They’re all center-right, some just step to the left once in awhile. This means nothing ever gets done except for the rich maximizing their profits while the working class bankrolls.

I understand why anyone would be quick to eulogize John McCain because propaganda, American exceptionalism, and the cult of personality are a toxic, cloying, and effective mix. It lulls you into a false sense of knowing someone. It turns some of the most reprehensible, insufferable people (Donald Trump, for example) into magnetic personalities, drawing people to them like moths to a flame.

You could present mountains of evidence to show how dastardly and wicked a man as wealthy, hawkish, and bellicose as John McCain was, and your character will be assassinated. You will be told that now is “not the time” to discuss decades of combativeness, racism, greed, and truculence by mewling, centrist liberals and vapid conservatives. You will be slandered for taking measure of a rich man’s life and casting the proper judgment upon him. Throw in racial politics, and things get even more sinister; uglier.

Americans have yet to meet an American war criminal they didn’t like or support.

When I joined the Army, I was sent to Fort Jackson in South Carolina for Basic Combat Training. I learned how to be a good tool for the American empire at an Army base named after president Andrew Jackson, a genocidal white supremacist whose hatred and racism against Native Americans and African-Americans is legendary. I live in a state named after first U.S. president George Washington, someone complicit in human trafficking via the transatlantic slave trade, who also had dentures made from the teeth of his slaves. He’s featured prominently on our state flag.

Adolf Hitler, who is most assuredly resting in piss, was inspired by America’s own dalliances with proto-fascism during its centuries long slavocracy/plantocracy. Didn’t the United States separate children from their mothers and subject men, women, children to inhumane executions? Didn’t they force Native Americans out of their rightful homes and into certain death or suffering in the desert? Did the United States not have a history of sanctioned pogroms, like the Chinese massacre of 1871, considered to be one of the largest mass lynchings in American history?

Thomas Jefferson raped Sally Hemmings, a child and one of his slaves, only to enslave their offspring. He’s featured prominently on American money and considered a founding father. Odd, I thought fathers were men we could look up to. Child predators are, and should always remain, unworthy of that distinction. In America, however, concessions are made if they are rich and white.

America has monuments to men who fought to keep others subjugated, and men who turned their backs on people fleeing for their lives from Nazi Germany. Stone Mountain features three treasonous confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee, and was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. We celebrate Thanksgiving, an actual day of mourning for many Native Americans

I’m living in a country that hates me utterly and completely, and they don’t even try to hide it. Americans commemorate and lionize men that would have most of us exterminated in the most inhumane ways. No matter how stunning and devastating the body of evidence showing a life replete with wickedness and warmongering, Americans will not go gently into the good night of reason without kicking and screaming. A nation and society this morally bankrupt is destined for certain disaster.

John McCain is in good company as he joins a pantheon of war criminals, rapists, human traffickers/slave owners, white supremacists, and ruling class pawns. Calling Vietnamese people “gooks” or meeting with despotic, fascist dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet makes John McCain the “maverick”; a man of “decency.” Fighting the Vietnamese working class on behalf of the western powers that subjected Vietnamese men, women, and children to atrocities too terrible to repeat makes John McCain a “war hero” and man of principle to an adulating American public.

I’ll pray for John McCain to rest in peace when his family can somehow conjure up all the people who died because of him, and erase all the harm done to those who survived in spite of his wretched existence. Until then, I’ll reflect on how amazing a man and comrade Ho Chi Minh was and pray for a world that celebrates the lives of people like Uncle Ho, Ida B. Wells, and Marsha P. Johnson.

Thanks for reading! If you’re so inclined to help a comrade out, donations are always welcome 🙏🏾 cash.me/$tankbae and check out @runthemeanspod on Twitter and Anchor.fm or wherever you play your favorite podcast! God bless!