EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

near his target. in one of the countries largest cities. basically a bronze star for almost certainly just bombing civilians

I always liked this take on it (excerpt from a deleted blog):

The underachieving scion of a family of US Navy admirals, McCain spent his short period of active service (about twenty hours' flight time) bombing civilians in North Vietnam in 1967. He flew over cities in a heavily armed warplane and dropped tons of high explosive on them, on one occasion hitting a fish factory and destroying a number of barrels. While the bombing raids were dangerous for him — as evidenced by his eventual shooting down — they were, it is safe to say, rather more dangerous for the people underneath, and you wouldn't necessarily call them heroes. Besides, it was McCain's job to fly these missions, and in that, he was only continuing the family business. If he is a hero for doing that, then so is my local butcher.

It can't be said, either, that getting shot down and ejecting from your plane is a particularly heroic act — at the very least, I think you will agree, a heroic act should be voluntary. Perhaps the Vietnamese guy who rescued him from drowning in a lake was being heroic, but I, like McCain's many hagiographers, will ignore this person.

After his rescue, McCain was kept for five years as a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, where he was routinely subjected to torture. Torture is no doubt a brutal, harrowing, mentally and physically shattering experience, but enduring it is not heroic. The unfortunate inmates of Guantanamo Bay are not heroes, and neither were the subjects of those well-publicised images from Abu Ghraib. Being tortured does not make one a hero, but a victim. A torture victim is not admirable; a torture victim is pathetic.

There is no indication that McCain behaved any differently under torture than ordinary mortals: he eventually broke down and did what he was told to, much like everyone else. Much play is made of his refusal to accept the offer of an early release*, as the son of the US Naval commander in Vietnam: but this is basically the minimum one would expect of a man with a shred of dignity. If he had walked free while leaving his less well-connected comrades in the slammer, then he would have kissed goodbye to any hope of a future political or military career.

And that about sums it up for McCain's so-called war heroism. While he no doubt displayed courage during his service and captivity, and while I wouldn't wish the suffering he endured on anyone, to call him a "hero" based on this record is quite flatly an abuse of the term, and one with definite political implications.

* Interestingly, most of Wikipedia's "facts" about McCain's heroism as a P.O.W. come from "The John McCain report", a serialised hagiography in the Arizona Republic, written in the style of a Tom Clancy novel, and "P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam" by John G. Hubbell, published by the Reader's Digest Press in 1976, which is described in the Pacific Historical Review as "more a feel-good tribute to American valor than an objective history."

thirdplace posted:

and it wouldn't even bother me if people had their reasons for waiving it all off as more of the same, but it all reads to me as "we can't pretend there's a difference between liberal white supremacy and fascist white supremacy because that would suggest that liberal imperialism isn't the worst of all possible worlds." it's like the marxist version of the guy who blames every evil in the world on the corrupt corporate duocracy.

Not all right-wing populist, nationalist, militarist, racist buffoonery is fascist, though. Fascism is total class war in the hopes of forging social peace through extreme violence and exploitation, it is a radical right counter-revolution designed to break the labour movement completely, to systematically murder or imprison even passive potential resistance. It emerges to suspend all forms of bourgeois democracy and conciliation as an emergency form of bourgeois dictatorship against socialist revolution.

I think Trump does open the door to those sorts of things, though, in that he's deliberately weakening some of the civility of bourgeois discourse. I mean, we don't want total class war like that, we want the bourgeoisie to be surprised by the sudden insurgency of the working class and to vacillate enough about legality and politeness that it hesitates at key moments. I was reading the other day that the resistance of everyday people during the first days of the Paris Commune was so unexpected, for example, that one of the commanders leading a cavalry unit was routed out of town by children beating his horse with sticks, solely because all the troops refused to mow down kids.

gyrofry posted:

the civility of bourgeois discourse is not an end worth preserving

yes, but it's worth being concerned about nonetheless. it's not as though a clinton victory* would put the cat back in the bag, in fact i think there is a real risk of trump supporters lashing out in reaction to what they would see as their disenfranchisement. but the fact is that trump has reintroduced overtly fascist discourse to the mainstream, and the polite "liberal" response is disquieting at best. anyway, the "end" worth struggling for is of course not a return of bourgeois civility but the defeat of fascism and its bourgeois sponsors.

* hypothetical of course, as trump is bound to win