There is a longstanding tradition that one should not speak ill of the dead, especially in their obituary, and we dedicate this first sentence to the spirit of that tradition.

John Sidney McCain III was both a product of the US military and of the racial/financial elitism that his full name suggests. He grew up on naval bases around the world as the son and grandson of American admirals with a family heritage of rich, white, southern plantation and slave owners.

He was able to cite one ancestor’s participation in the mass slaughter of Native Americans and another as having fought for the Confederate States of America in the civil war of the 1860s – in both cases as officers. But let’s not condemn a man for the sins of his ancestors; Mr McCain surely did enough to earn condemnation in his own right!

During the genocidal war that was waged by the USA on Vietnam, McCain was a navy pilot, flying missions against the people of Vietnam, whether they were soldiers or civilians, adults or children. It was during his 23rd sortie over the capital Hanoi in 1967, as part of Operation Thunder (the 1965-68 strategic bombing campaign against north Vietnam), where he was helping to pour high explosives and napalm over villages, cities and factories alike, that his warplane was shot down by the defiant defenders.

McCain was apparently knocked unconscious for a short time as he ejected from his damaged bomber. Both his arms were broken and his right knee was shattered (these wounds he would later accredit to being tortured by his captors).

These injuries, combined with around 50 pounds of flight gear, would have meant certain death from drowning, if he hadn’t been rescued him from under the water in TrúcBạch Lake by a Vietnamese worker, who found him and pulled him ashore.

It was the workers’ and farmers’ government that forbade the killing of this beast, who had been blowing up and burning alive the children of the Vietnamese people. Instead, McCain was treated as a prisoner of war, when, in all fairness, he could have been put down like a mad dog for the carnage that he and other pilots had visited upon the Vietnamese, and few would have blamed them.

And yet, when he was released following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, McCain poured scorn on those he had so savagely sinned against, and who, despite that, had spared his miserable life. He made accusations of torture and murder against the Vietnamese people, as his eye settled on the prospect of a career in the seedy world of US bourgeois politics.

The American press, jumped upon these stories and on others like them coming from other released US POWs.

Back in the US, McCain was soon a celebrity – opening ball parks, being photographed shaking hands with President Nixon, taking part in Republican party rallies, where he was always willing to speak, being a constant dinner guest of one Ronald Reagan, and writing in the papers his reasons for supporting Nixon and the war against the Vietnamese.

He was appointed as the navy liaison to the Senate and on leaving the navy in 1981, all the right contacts had been made to help him travel further on his road to political ‘greatness’.

McCain himself said later that the liaison job was; “my real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant”. Indeed, while still in the navy, McCain had worked so hard for Ronald Reagan’s 1976 Republican primary campaign that his base commander apparently reprimanded him for being too politically active for his navy liaison position.

There is no need to list all the job titles that were gathered in the course of McCain’s chosen career, but wherever he was, and whatever dirty war the US was involved in, McCain would be there cheerleading for US imperialism for all he was worth.

When the US and European imperialists brought about the destruction of Yugoslavia, and Nato was daily bombing bridges, hospitals, oil refineries, radio and tv stations, telephone systems, embassies, universities, schools, apartment complexes, care homes, civilian trains, food warehouses and electricity generators, there was John McCain, defending both the crimes and the criminals.

When the US invaded Iraq, McCain was there again, defending every air-raid shelter that was bombed, every wounded enemy combatant who was summarily executed, every part of the civilian infrastructure that was destroyed leaving famine and disease in its wake, along with the use of toxins and nerve agents as weapons against the Iraqi people.

Every time that US imperialism rampaged against humanity at large, John bloody McCain was its smiling, nodding accessory.

This is imperialism’s idea of a ‘war hero’. Any civilised society would be bound to acknowledge quite the reverse, however: that John McCain was repeatedly, and throughout his life, a war criminal.

When he died on 25 August at the age of 81, it was not a source of joy to us. That this disgusting reveller in the spilling of so much blood should live until 81 in luxury, and pass peacefully away without having felt the justice that he was owed by so many peoples, is a source only of sadness.

It has come to our notice that the nasty little (in political terms, anyway) Ukrainian puppet president, Pyotr Poroshenko, has recently decided to change the name of Kiev’s Ivan Kudrya street to John McCain Street, as a mark of respect by the fascist regime for one of its biggest backers and co-conspirators against the masses of Ukrainian people.

For those who do not know, Ivan Kudrya was a hero of Soviet Kiev. During the fight against the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), he was a leading figure of resistance, blowing up a cinema full of German fascist invaders, derailing troop trains, etc, and when they caught him, he was tortured before being killed by the Gestapo.

Having read the above article, we think most readers would agree with us that Comrade Ivan Kudrya is far more worthy of remembrance by progressive humanity than John McCain.