How the media and John McCain’s political buddies are painting his legacy is a lesson in how the definition of words become twisted and distorted, if not downright altered to an opposite meaning, over time.
If there’s one word – one twisted example of how the meaning of words can be manipulated – that has become synonymous with John McCain’s life and legacy, it’s hero.
A “hero,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, is 1. In mythology and legend, a man of great strength and courage, favored by the gods and in part descended from them, often regarded as half god and worshipped in death.
2. Any man admired for his courage, nobility, or exploits, especially in war; as Washington is a national hero.
Far from its original meaning, in America today, anyone who is sent to fight illegal wars in foreign nations, under the guise that they are making a sacrifice to protect the homeland and preserve our liberties, is championed by politicians, the media, sports teams, banks, insurance companies, car dealerships … anyone selling anything … as a hero.
They, as with John McCain, are no George Washingtons for joining the service, going to war or being injured or killed.
Most notably, the myth of McCain’s heroism is rooted in his years as prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, not for his acts of courage to protect, defend and save the lives of others.
While “McCain” and “hero” are now synonymous words wedded into his legacy, staying true to the core meaning of the word, he is not an “American hero.”
McCain’s plane was shot down when he was dropping bombs over Hanoi. He was a victim, as were the thousands of other captured and tortured U.S. troops, including the 58,000 killed and hundreds of thousands of young boys that were physically and mentally wounded for life, who either signed up or were forced to fight a war that killed nearly 4 million Vietnamese, poisoned the country with Agent Orange and bombed it into ruin.
And as for McCain being a “hero” while in captivity? According to Phillip Butler, who went to both the U.S. Naval Academy and was a Prisoner of War in Vietnam with McCain, wrote in 2008, that “John allows the media to make him out to be THE hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals.”
While the media also makes McCain a hero for declining an early release from prison, Mr. Butler, who was imprisoned for 8 years, while McCain was imprisoned for 5 ½ years, notes that “John was offered, and refused, early release. Many of us were given this offer. It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to ‘admit’ that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was ‘lenient and humane.’ So I, like numerous others, refused the offer.”
Butler also states 95 percent of the POWs in Vietnam were tortured: “Succeeding as POW is a group sport, not an individual one. We all supported and encouraged each other to survive and succeed. John knows that. He was not an individual POW hero.”
WAR OF LIES
Vietnam, another great American war, which like so many others was based on lies and started and supported by mentally deranged psychopathic Presidents, Congressional leaders, the military industrial complex sociopaths … and sold to the public by the Presstitute media who get paid to put out by their Washington Whore Masters and Corporate Johns.
Despite the fact that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened the way it was reported, as detailed in my book, Trends 2000 (Warner Books, 1997), the only regrets for McCain was not that the war was illegal and immoral, but as he wrote in 2003, he regretted that more Vietnamese were not killed and more of the country was not destroyed: “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal,” McCain lamented.
Tools? More napalm bombs? More tons of poison chemicals?
Are those the words of a “hero?” Was McCain “a man of great strength and courage, favored by the gods and in part descended from them”?
And by his deeds, McCain did not possess one shred of the courage, integrity, nobility and bravery of George Washington
In fact, quite the opposite. Are these the words of a “hero” or a ruthless war hungry psychopath?: “I hated my enemies even before they held me captive because hate sustained me in my devotion to their complete destruction and helped me overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what had to be done by my hand,” McCain said in April 2001 in reference to the Vietnam War.
Later that year, reaffirming his mental illness in a Wall Street Journal column, madman McCain wrote, “However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that will be lost when war claims its wages from us. Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must.”
Yes, kill our “enemies.” Innocent victims … children, women, men, elderly … “ruthlessly” slaughtered by coldhearted “hero” McCain for merely living in nations attacked by the United States in its constant march to obscene, merciless, unjust wars launched by murderous gangs that morons and the courage-less call Democrats and Republicans. TJ