The American Spectator

Political Hay

Seeing Evil: The Arms of John McCain

By Jeffrey Lord on 5.27.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 3)

WHICH BRINGS US to the arms of Senator McCain.

Although McCain has been a familiar figure in the American spotlight for a couple decades, there are doubtless millions of Americans who are focusing on him seriously for the first time because he now looms as a potential next president. As they do focus, they are beginning to notice on their television and computer screens the physical oddity of his arms as he does the standard candidate's wave. It is all too easy to simply look, note the oddity, and move on to McCain's political point of the moment without understanding the direct connection between those arms and the lethal connection to appeasing enemies as Chamberlain and Baldwin did repeatedly in the 1930s.

McCain's arms cannot be raised above shoulder level. This is so specifically because in his time as a POW in North Vietnam -- five and a half years -- he was savagely beaten. Repeatedly. Let's be very detailed here, and a warning that what follows is not for the squeamish.

After McCain's plane was shot down, he fell into a lake in Hanoi, breaking a leg and both arms as he ejected from the plane. A crowd gathered and pulled him out of the water, kicking and hitting him as his right foot dangled next to his left knee at a 90 degree angle. Instead of being treated under the rules of the Geneva Convention, someone smashed a rifle butt into his shoulder and broke it. A bayonet was stuck into his ankle and his groin. Taken to the Hanoi Hilton, as the prison for American POWs was called, he was stretched out on the cold floor -- and over the next several days beaten again and again, his broken arms and leg included. They let him lay there for days in excruciating pain, lying in vomit and his own waste. Eventually he was moved to a hospital, never washed or cleaned, to lie with rats and swarming mosquitoes. His interrogators came to the "hospital" and -- repeatedly -- savagely beat him day after day as he shrieked in agony. Then it was back to his prison cell, where one guard would hold him while others took turns beating him over and over again. His ribs were broken, his teeth cracked. Both arms were broken, for the second time, neither set properly when finally treated.

John McCain would never again be able to accomplish the most routine of human bodily motions -- lifting his arms above his shoulder.

Now. What does one call this kind of treatment of a soldier captured in wartime, a man who right from the beginning was a helpless POW? For that matter, what does one call this kind of treatment of any human being anywhere at any time? There is a word for it, and it is a word Democrats like Barack Obama and Chris Matthews shy away from.

The word is "evil."

Every single time the American people watch John McCain give that odd little wave of his two arms they should be reminded those damaged arms are the way they are as the result of evil. They should understand something else, too. The type of men who did this to McCain were fully capable of doing the same kind of evil to their own fellow citizens, which they did in fact do when Democrats, in the spirit of Chamberlain, cut off the funding of South Vietnam and Cambodia after winning the 1974 election.

HOW DID EVIL SHOW itself after the great Democratic Party appeasement of 1975? It showed up, for one, as genocide in Cambodia. Residents of cities and towns were forced into the countryside, with the sick, the old and the children not excepted. If you refused, you were killed. Political and civil rights were abolished, labor camps built. Murder -- mass murder to the tune of almost 2 million human souls-- was the order of the day. People were tortured, shot to death, hacked to death. Mothers and children were photographed -- and then slaughtered.

It was, that word again, evil.

Churchill saw evil on the march in the 1930s. He knew exactly what he was seeing as concentration camps were built and filled with Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, and the disabled. He understood what it meant when he heard and read the words of Hitler promising death to the Jews and threatening the violent takeover of other European countries. He knew well before what he called "the rape of Austria" that the sheerest of evil lay ahead for millions of people. Those "poor, poor people" he once remarked in the 1930s as he saw a crowd of his fellow countrymen going about the London nightlife with no inkling of what would be happening to their lives as a result of Chamberlain's inability to see the evil ahead.

Matthews's revision of history, that what Chamberlain did wrong was not talking to Hitler but giving him Czechoslovakia is, fortunately, refuted by Churchill himself. When, to his horror, he heard that Chamberlain's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, had stood up on the floor of the House of Lords and proposed talking to Hitler, Churchill instantly protested that "it seems to me quite impossible to enter into discussions with Hitler." Indeed, implored by the Nazi Ambassador von Ribbentrop to meet with Hitler himself, Churchill refused. Chamberlain, famously, ignored this advice. What most people remember today is that Chamberlain met with Hitler in Munich. In fact, meeting exactly the dictionary definition of appeasing as "anxious overtures and undue concessions," Chamberlain flew back and forth between Britain and Germany not once but three times in the space of two weeks. The first time he met with the Fuhrer on Hitler's personal turf, his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. The second time was in Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. The third, final and historically infamous meeting was in Munich. There the anxious prime minister looked the embodiment of evil in the eye with what one of his own disgusted (and resigning) cabinet officers said was "sweet reasonableness" when he should have spoken "the language of the mailed fist."

The result was fatal -- for the Jews, the Czechs, for his own British people, the Americans across the Atlantic and eventually the rest of the world. Chamberlain looked Hitler literally in the eye and was incapable of seeing what Churchill saw without once sitting across from him. Churchill called it an "overpowering hate."

Evil.

IT IS A SAD if curious and very, very dangerous fact that not only will there always be evil in the world, there will always be men like Chamberlain or Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter. Or Chris Matthews. People who simply, honestly cannot see evil unless they are looking at old newsreels from seventy years ago. People who will, in the current context, watch Iran go busily about building a nuclear capability even as its leader vows to exterminate the "stinking corpse" that is Israel. People who would and did turn a blind eye to the evil of Saddam Hussein just as Chamberlain believed in negotiating with Hitler or Jimmy Carter was convinced peace with the Soviet Union was better than the Reagan policy of simply defeating the "focus of evil in the modern world." People who are utterly incapable of speaking "in the language of the mailed fist."

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, John McCain, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Television, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Israel, NATO