The sheer unreality of such a claim is compounded by Mr. McCain's callous insensitivity in making it just after the latest terrorist atrocity to take place in the West — this time in Manchester in the UK — in which 22 people were killed, including an 8-year-old child, and in which a further 160 were injured and maimed.
It is an atrocity which confirmed that Daesh-style terror attacks are now a daily threat not only to children in the Middle East, but also across Europe and the United States. With this in mind, it is hardly a stretch to claim that the citizens of Manchester, London, Paris, Brussels, or indeed any city and town in the US, are not going about their daily business feeling threatened by Russia or its government, despite the extraordinary efforts of people like John McCain to tell them they should be, but do understand the threat posed by Daesh.
Of course, Senator McCain has a history of making such grotesque statements. He is, after all, a man who wears his Russophobia with pride. His role in whipping up anti-Russian sentiment in western Ukraine, where he visited Maidan Square at the end of 2013 to urge on a movement that eventually led to a coup overthrowing the country's democratic government by, among others, neo-fascists, will never be forgotten, exposing him as a hawk with a penchant for regime change. Similarly, he has form when it comes to supporting "rebels" fighting to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
But yet, with all that being said, holding up McCain's assertion to closer scrutiny, we begin to understand that when he claims that Russia is a threat to "global security," what the US senator really means is that Russia is a threat to "global hegemony" — i.e. US global hegemony. And when embracing this particular interpretation of his words we find that we cannot but agree with Senator McCain — the Russian government does indeed pose a threat to US global hegemony, and a good thing too.
Why is it a good thing? Simply because US global hegemony has over the past three decades been an out of control juggernaut of unfettered power, responsible for the kind of chaos, carnage, destruction, and instability that no rational or even sane person could accept in the interests of justice. Destroying one country after the other in service to the ethos of might is right may sit comfortably with Senator McCain and his ilk, but this only goes to prove that in the corridors of power in Washington moral sickness pervades.
Throughout human history there have been those who have championed empire and those who have opposed it. There have been countries that, imbued with hubris and a sense of their own exceptionalism, have made the fatal mistake of appointing themselves masters of the world, only to learn at great cost to others and eventually themselves that every empire, no matter how big or seemingly indomitable, is destined to fall. The US/Western Empire of our time — geopolitical, economic, military, and cultural — is no different in this regard.
The resulting legacy of unremitting conflict, devastation, and human despair is self-evident. Yugoslavia destroyed; Iraq destroyed; Libya destroyed; Afghanistan in pieces — a litany of death and destruction combined with a global economic crisis brought to us courtesy of inhuman levels of greed and venality. This has been Washington's contribution to civilization over the past three decades, a contribution rendered more contemptible by the fact it has been justified on the basis of democracy and human rights.
Imagine if Russia had not answered the call from the Syrian government to come to its aid at the end of 2015. There is a very high probability that by now, two years later, a multicultural and pluralist society would be no more, pushed into an abyss of medieval barbarism and fanaticism, its minority communities extirpated and cleansed from a part of the world in which they can trace their existence back a millennia and more.
Yet for John McCain, Russia's role in coming to the aid and helping save a secular and multicultural country makes it a greater threat to global security than Daesh. If truth be told, John McCain is a man suffering from a bad case of swaggering arrogance, the kind associated with those B Western cowboy movies that Hollywood used to churn out in the 1950s.
And as every philosopher knows, arrogance is a roadblock on the highway of wisdom.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
