Remembered as ‘Human Rights Champion’—Illustrated by His Hanging Out With Fascists

The Washington Post (8/27/18) published an op-ed by conservative staff opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin praising the late Sen. John McCain for his supposed commitment to “human rights.”

A Washington Post column (8/27/18) celebrating John McCain as a human rights “champion” was illustrated with a photo of him making common cause with a far-right, antisemitic Ukrainian politician.

Rubin waxed poetic on human rights’ “lost champion,” who “model[ed] for others the behavior of a free society.” She declared, quite paradoxically, “With the possible exception of the US military…no group was more indebted to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) than the human rights community.”

Another glaring paradox: For the header image on this column, the Washington Post used a photo of McCain speaking next to the notorious Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok.

Tyahnybok, a longtime fascist, has called for a war on the so-called “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” (BBC, 12/26/12). The far-right leader blames his country’s past troubles on “Jews-Bolsheviks,” and claims there’s still a cabal of “Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine” (JTA, 3/25/09).

McCain met with Tyahnybok, who stood by his side as the senator gave a speech in Ukraine in late 2013 (Business Insider, 12/16/13). The Washington Post indicated in its photo caption that McCain was “wav [ing] to protesters during a mass rally of the opposition in Kiev, Ukraine.” But it failed to identify the person standing next to McCain —or his extremist politics, which are the antithesis of human rights.

McCain was in the Eastern European nation to cheer on the ongoing right-wing protest movement. In February 2014, this movement was successful: Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro-Russian government was overthrown in a coup, in which fascist forces played a significant role (FAIR.org, 3/7/14).

The hard-line conservative lawmaker’s ties to fascists went beyond the Post’s ill-chosen photo. In 2017, McCain welcomed another Ukrainian neo-Nazi into his office, as I reported with Max Blumenthal at AlterNet (6/23/17). McCain tweeted out a photo of his meeting with Andriy Parubiy, the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, who today serves as the chair of Ukraine’s parliament, despite his explicitly fascist politics.

Years earlier, journalist Chip Berlet (Huffington Post, 11/7/08) detailed how McCain served on the advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the US affiliate of the pro-fascist World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a group that “brought together conservatives, fascists and representatives of right-wing death squads.” Berlet quoted the staunch anti-Communist British Conservative politician Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, who described WACL as “largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers.”

McCain’s undying support for far-right Salafi-jihadist rebels in Syria likewise followed this pattern. Just a few months before speaking in Ukraine, McCain traveled to Syria, where he met with a rebel leader who helped kidnap a dozen Lebanese Shia pilgrims.

Utterly overlooking John McCain’s fascist dalliances, Western corporate media outlets have almost without exception bent over backward to portray the relentlessly war-mongering Republican senator as a supposed human rights hero:

• “Ayotte: McCain Was a Champion for Human Rights” (CNN, 8/26/18)
• “John McCain, a Maverick We Can Learn From” (New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, 8/25/18)
• “John McCain, America’s Revolutionary Conscience” (Bloomberg, Eli Lake, 8/28/18)
• “John McCain, Senator Who Made Human Rights and Israel Central to His Foreign Policy, Dies at 81” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 8/25/18)
• “‘John McCain the Diplomat’ Will Be Irreplaceable, Senate Colleagues Say” (Daily Beast, 8/28/18)

Thus is remembered a neoconservative ultra-hawk who cheerled the illegal US invasion of Iraq, proudly referred to the Vietnamese people with racial slurs, and lobbied for military intervention in well over a dozen countries. He never apologized for the mass killing of Southeast Asian civilians he took part in during the Vietnam War, instead arguing that the United States should have bombed more intensely and indiscriminately (Salon, 7/4/08).

That so many corporate media outlets can uniformly whitewash a right-wing war hawk with links to fascists as a “human rights champion” and “defender of democracy” is a testament to just how beholden corporate media are to US government interests.

When seasoned war criminal Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, satirist and musician Tom Lehrer joked that he was retiring, as “political satire became obsolete.” One can draw the same conclusion when a major newspaper illustrates a eulogy to a human rights “champion” with a photo of him giving a speech alongside a Nazi.