War Criminal, Not War Hero

Photo Source AFGE | CC BY 2.0


“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 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.

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 countries McCain wanted to bomb, bomb, bomb over 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…

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