September 25-The racist war hawk is finally dead! The late Senator John McCain is being celebrated by the ruling class as a great “hero”—an elaborate display of self-serving hero-worship for their own benefit. But McCain was a determined enemy of the working class, in the U.S. and around the world – both as warmonger and lawmaker.
Never a hero, always a criminal
The son and grandson of admirals, McCain was a pilot in the U.S. war against the Vietnamese (from the 1960-70s). McCain was a dive bomber pilot, murdering indiscriminately from the sky, dropping bombs and napalm on the working class in Vietnam. He gained fame when his plane was shot down and he was captured, spending five years in a prisoners of war camp (POW).
While many Vietnam veterans came to understand the imperialist and racist nature of the war, McCain internalized U.S. imperialism’s racism. In spite of his captors fishing him out of a lake, treating his wounds and keeping him alive, long after the war. Yet McCain continued to call Vietnamese workers by racist terms, boasting that he would hate them his whole life.
Along with racism, the fable that U.S. wars defend U.S. workers, rather than capitalist profits, underlies the term “hero” as applied by the bosses to those who willingly slaughter our class sisters and brothers overseas. In that vein the ruling class hailed this murderer as a hero.
To the working class, the real heroes in Vietnam were the workers whose communist-led People’s War, defeated U.S. imperialism. As well as the tens of thousands of U.S. working-class soldiers who rebelled against the bosses war.
McCain parlayed his second wife’s wealth along with his military service into a long political career. With four years in the House and thirty-one years in the Senate, he was the Republican choice to oppose Barack Obama for president in 2008. During that campaign McCain raised warmongering in the Middle East to an art form, famously singing about bombing Iran, among other targets. He was among the first to push President George W. Bush for an invasion of Iraq following 9/11.
McCain’s undeserved reputation as a “maverick” obscured his consistent support for the general interests of our exploiters and oppressors. While he occasionally opposed President Trump publicly, he voted with him 80 percent of the time. Furthermore, like Trump, he was a consistent racist, keeping white supremacists on his payroll (Daily Kos 6/19/2008), voting against making Martin Luther King’s birthday a federal holiday, and opposing the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s Statehouse.
Never saw a war he didn’t like
In the 1980s McCain was a supporter of the Nicaraguan Contras, notorious for rape, torture, and murder. McCain’s unflagging support for U.S. wars included those against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and his backing of the current years-long Saudi bombing in Yemen that is still causing massive deaths, hunger, and disease. He advocated air strikes against North Korea, supported anti-semitic neo-Nazi Oleh Tyannybok, leader of the extreme right-wing Svoboda party in Ukraine, and pushed Trump to provide them with military aid to surround Russia with pro-U.S. fascist regimes (Business Insider 12/16/2013).
As Rolling Stone magazine described him “He never saw an invasion he didn’t support, and it’s sadly fitting that the last piece of legislation to bear his name was a massive military spending hike that scored the rare trifecta of support from mainstream Democrats, Republicans and Donald Trump.” (Rolling Stone 8/28)
Even politicians who pose as friends of the working class help to build the cult around McCain and praise him in death in order to further their own careers and promote the myth that bosses and workers in the U.S. have the same interests. (e.g., Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).
Never pretended to be pro-worker
McCain, however, never pretended he hadworking-class sympathies. He had a solid voting record against taxing big business, and he was always for increased imperialist military spending, and domestic surveillance of the working class. In addition he was a sexist who spoke in favor of overturning Roe vs Wade (which legalized abortions, ),and  rarely voted in favor of rights for immigrants , and unions. He also never voted for critical things like environmental protection or education funding (https://bit.ly/2x4SD1D).
Murderers like McCain will never serve the needs of our class. The politicians and pundits who have jumped to praise him are only exposing whose side they are really on. Our class’ future depends on liberating ourselves from the horrors of capitalism by fighting for a communist society.