Senator John McCain & the Failure of Our Elders

1,969 words

After revealing he was suffering from a serious brain tumor, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) received a sudden flash of adoring media coverage.[1] This positive media coverage is surprising if one remembers the 2008 Presidential Election. During Senator McCain’s forlorn presidential run, America’s “Newspaper of Record” ran articles implying the Senator was having an affair with a lobbyist.[2] He was also accused, in the larger media ecosystem,[3] of being a “right-wing[4] Nazi.[5]”

Senator McCain has given two “farewell” speeches and gotten one sympathetic media interview with Tom Brokaw. These occurrences are interesting and should be discussed, for two reasons. First, there is always some wisdom in what a grey-haired elder says. Second, Senator McCain suffers from some deeply-flawed assumptions. These flawed ideas have damaged white America and the role of Americans in the world, and need deconstructing.

The wisest advice he gave works at the heart of Washington D.C. and can be scaled down within any social movement, including one as small as White Advocacy:

“Incremental progress — compromises that each side criticizes but also accepts, just plain muddling through to chip away at problems and keep our enemies from doing their worst — isn’t glamorous or exciting. It doesn’t feel like a political triumph. But it’s usually the most we can expect…”[6]

The truth of the matter is, when someone embarks upon his life’s vocation he doesn’t set the world on fire right away. Such a journey necessitates a day-to-day struggle of getting out of bed and plugging away to make things better. It takes a long time to see progress, but progress does come. So the lesson is, to keep at it despite routine discouragements.

McCain’s other comments show the truth behind a statement Peter Brimelow once made: “Very few people can absorb new realities after the age of twenty-one.”[7] Senator McCain has clearly not absorbed new ideas since he was 21, back in 1957. One McCain quote in need of deconstruction is:

America has made a greater contribution than any other nation to an international order that has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have been the greatest example, the greatest supporter and the greatest defender of that order. We aren’t afraid. We don’t covet other people’s land and wealth. We don’t hide behind walls. We breach them. We are a blessing to humanity.[8]

Americans did shore up the disorder caused by the First World War after the Second World War in 1945, but the 19th Century was a gentle world of expanding progress under the British Imperial Hegemony. Ignoring that reality, and continuing on with an exclusivist hubris is dangerous. All sorts of poor decisions have been made under the assumption that American intervention is automatically good. For example, American intervention in the Middle East has resulted in unmitigated disaster since 2003. In particular, overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and supporting Syrian rebels has created an explosive problem-set whose ripples continue to spread.

Furthermore, the claim that Americans lift others out of poverty is dubious. Ending European rule in Africa, especially in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, has plunged great swaths of the world into a state of poverty and savagery. McCain also fails to see the economic realities of the Rust Belt. China, Japan, and South Korean cities glitter with prosperity, while the towns of upstate New York and Pennsylvania have declined from their former industrial glory. In 1900 the Chinese were hooked on opium and lived in poverty. Today Americans, especially in the former industrial areas, are hooked on opium and live on handouts. It could be that high-end manufacturing and industry is zero-sum: there can be profitable factories and shipping yards in China or America, but not in both places at once.

Americans also build walls, if not literal ones, then figurative ones. Americans support walls for Israel and Jordan as well as South Korea’s “wall” of defensive fortifications on the DMZ. McCain’s stubborn resistance to a border wall with Mexico that protects all Americans is a scaled-up version of most of what the wealthy in the Southwest are already doing. There, McCain’s wealthy supporters like George W. Bush live in walled communities to protect themselves from the non-white masses they’ve invited into the country. The greater Phoenix metro area is one walled neighborhood after another. Arizona’s Anglos must protect themselves from the petty crime and theft of the Hispanics.

Americans, of course, have taken others’ land and wealth. The first attempt to capture Canada was launched from Massachusetts in 1690 and continued on until the “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” campaign of President Polk in the 1840s. The Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 was a naked land grab, as was the Spanish-American War of 1898. The United States took on new colonies as late as 1947.[9] The Iraq War was sold, in part, with promises of using Iraqi oil wealth. The truth is the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Why ignore that great truth?

In another quote McCain compares America’s increasing skepticism to foreign adventures to the isolationists of the 1930s,

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.[10]

The problems with foreign adventures he supported has been discussed. Here McCain is talking about the conventional wisdom regarding World War II as taught to the youngsters of the 1940s and 1950s. The idea is that Hitler should have been stopped at Munich, by having the French and British governments go to war with Germany in 1938, rather than a year later when the Germans invaded Poland. But the soundness of this idea is highly suspect: who knows what would happened had war kicked off in 1938? Certainly the French and British would have been seen as the aggressors.

Ultimately, World War II was the result of democracy and diversity. Czechoslovakia was a multicultural democracy filled with ethnic conflict from one end to another. After the Cold War, that nation broke in two. Between the World Wars, Poland was wracked with conflict between Poles and Germans and Jews. The long peace in Europe that followed the war was due to ethnic cleansing. Indeed the World Wars themselves were the result of the instability of Bosnia. When the Cold War ended, the instability in Bosnia continued, and another war occurred. The Dayton Accords were able to be signed when the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was finished.

Another ignored lesson of World War II is the story of dubious allies. The Polish, British, and French alliance was a disaster for all. The British lost their Empire over the status of Silesia, the French lost their Empire and were occupied for four years, and the Poles were effectively occupied from 1939 to 1989. The German alliance with Japan was a disaster for both. What alliance does the United States have today that is like that of Britain and Poland in 1939?

There is more here, World War II is now nearly a lifetime in the past. The world has moved on. Indeed the Cold War that followed is long over. Today, protests that occurred in Gwangju, South Korea in late May of 1980 have a greater real world impact upon American soldiers, diplomats, and policy makers than the dead issues of the 1930s, or indeed the issues regarding international Communism. McCain seems to have no understanding that refugee waves are a new type of post-atomic bomb military invasion. Additionally, failed non-white ruled states, a resurgent Islam, and parasitic Jewish societies (Israel and the now defunct USSR) are the key post-WWII problem.

McCain goes on to say:

We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.[11]

These noble sounding words simply don’t match reality. America is a white nation. If it wasn’t so, why the “Take a Knee Movement” among black NFL players? Additionally, the ideals of Americans shift over time. Moral Absolutes have more to do with the fashion of the times than any commandment inspired by a deity. Plus, spreading these ideals could be dangerous. Should America got to war with Russia over Moscow’s laws regarding sodomy?

During Senator McCain’s interview with Tom Brokaw, the reporter asks, “Do you think we are more divided now then we were then?”[12]

McCain answers, “No, I think we were more divided then because we were talking about body bags. It was a period of real upheaval in our history. And all of it with a backdrop of these brave young people who were over there serving and sacrificing.”[13]

Incredibly, Senator McCain misses the point here of the nature of the fractures that occurred in the 1960s. There were in fact upheavals within the anti-war protests regarding Vietnam:

1. The Vietnam War protests had within them a conflict between northern WASPs, i.e., Yankees and Jews. The Jews triumphed and the WASPs were displaced. Only now are WASPs waking up to that fact. To read more on this, I suggest this article.
2. The 1960s also contained a Negro Revolution. The 1964 Civil Rights Act turned cities into ruins, helped launch a decades-long African-fueled crime wave, created an Affirmative Action drain on society, and started a religion of Negro Worship.
3. The 1965 Immigration Act greatly facilitated 9/11 and is leading the US towards a second civil war.

Tom Brokaw and McCain discuss the press. Brokaw complains that President Trump “turned the country against [the press].”[14] The Senator goes on to state that a “free press” is essential. Again, McCain seems to be unable to process new realities, or even absorb existing realities. The press in the United States is free in that the government doesn’t control it, but the press collectively frames the limits of the debate to pursue the agenda of its masters. This is especially apparent in two areas: when it concerns Jewish interests, and in racial matters. As far as “Jewish interest” examples, one can recall the media stampede to beat the war drums prior to the 2003 War in Iraq (and later in the case of Syria following the Arab Spring.) In the area of racial matters, the press often omits key facts or simply lies. The Trayvon Martin Affair, and the Ferguson Situation are two of the most recent examples. The lies were exposed by internet sleuths outside the mainstream media.

Incredibly, the dying Senator, mentions none of this with nothing to lose. Senator McCain represents the failing of our Elders. Wilmot Robertson might very well have been writing of McCain when he wrote, Senator McCain, “…[M]ay be compared to the captain of a ship in distress, who, in an another century and with another crew, might have counted on his stubborn courage to have piloted his vessel safely into port. Today the prisoner of his own outdated seamanship, he steers blindly from reef to reef.”[15]

Notes

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/us/politics/mccain-cancer-trump-career-twilight-speech.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_lobbyist_controversy See also: http://humanevents.com/2008/02/27/new-york-times-slimes-mccain/

[3] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/10/17/634112/-

[4] http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/379524.shtml

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/07/uselections2008.johnmccain2

[6] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539323689/watch-sen-mccain-calls-for-compromise-in-return-to-senate-floor

[7] https://archive.org/stream/Alien_Nation/alien-nation-peter-brimelow#page/n115/mode/2up/search/Very+few+people+can+absorb+new+realities

[8] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539323689/watch-sen-mccain-calls-for-compromise-in-return-to-senate-floor

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Territory_of_the_Pacific_Islands

[10] http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/16/politics/mccain-full-speech-liberty-medal/index.html

[11] http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/16/politics/mccain-full-speech-liberty-medal/index.html

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9txFVgVkX-s (Start at 1:30)

[13] Ibid.

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9txFVgVkX-s (2:39)

[15] https://archive.org/stream/TheDispossessedMajority/WilmotRobertson-DispossessedMajority-Dm#page/n63/mode/2up/search/reef+to+reef