"John McCain was a chronic warmonger, not a war hero" | SCMP

John McCain gets slandered by The Left

I'm really disturbed by the amount of anti-Americanism in Asia. Or maybe it's just amongst the Left in Asia as it's amongst the Left everywhere else.  America has to socialise its successes (the moon landing was for "humanity") while it has to privatise its failures (slavery is *all* America's fault). 

I remember Vietnam.  I was against it (that's me above with the pipe in anti-Vietnam war demo in Canberra, November 1972). 
John McCain fought and was captured in Vietnam. For that they call him -- Yonden Lhatoo and his acolytes -- a baby killer. That's sick.

I was in the draft for the war and would have gone if I'd been balloted.  While John McCain was a prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” I was there demonstrating against the war. Didn’t take much courage. Still, I've come to realise and appreciate that the logic for the war was simple and compelling: to fight back against the encroachment of communism. (I felt that even more strongly when I lived under Chinese communism in the late seventies). 

It wasn't warmongering. Wrong, in retrospect. Perhaps. But not warmongering. 

I know some mixed-race Amerasians here in Hong Kong, born during that war, children of black American soldiers and Vietnamese women, often given over to orphanages. When the war was lost, many were found, taken out of their orphanages and adopted.   My friends were adopted by English parents here in Hong Kong.

But some were not found and adopted.  The were, instead, killed.

They were killed by the advancing Vietcong. They harboured such a hatred of America that they killed their babies.
Who's hateful here. who's the hero?

McCain was a hero whatever Lhatoo and his acolytes say. He was offered early release by his Vietcong captors because he was the son of an Admiral (Vietcong thought it would be a propaganda coup to release him). McCain refused. He would not leave until all his mates had been released. For that alone he's a hero.  

Also he became a major promoter of US-Vietnam relations when diplomatic relations were reestablished. 

I think it's sick and deluded to slander McCain as Lhatoo does. And as so many of the commenters do. 

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John McCain was a chronic warmonger, not a war hero.  South China Morning Post,  2 September 2018