by Brett Wilkins, Counterpunch 29 Aug 2018 “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. " "John McCain helped orchestrate the devastation of several countries. Millions of deaths are on his bloody hands. The world is more peaceful with him gone from it. Why didn’t the 22 Yemeni children killed the day before cause the same amount of grief as McCain’s death? The U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen was backed by McCain as well. John McCain will be remembered as a war hero, but if I can paraphrase the merciless hawk Donald Trump, ‘Real heroes don’t go to war.’"