Political Corpses as Propaganda Props
The week-long deification of the late John McCain was quite the deep-state performance: Three “state funerals”(in Phoenix, D.C., and Annapolis) accompanied by the constant clucking of the “mainstream” media about how the epitome of a deep-state insider — son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, mass murderer of Vietnamese peasants, “Keating Five” criminal conspirator, friend of “the right kind” of Middle East terrorists, lifelong government employee whose senate office was ground zero for defense industry lobbyists for the past several decades — is somehow an anti-establishment “maverick.” The televised sobbing of the very appropriately named Senator Jeff Flake was rich, as were proposals to name a government building after McCain and the seemingly endless feigned sorrow in the voices of television talking heads.
Deep state propagandists and their media apologists apparently believe that a dead politician can be worth his weight in gold if a big enough spectacle of lies and superstitions can be concocted after the “great man’s” demise and used in support of the current regime. As Murray Rothbard argued in an essay entitled “The Nature of the State,” “it is precisely the function of the State’s ideological minions and allies to explain to the public that the Emperor does indeed have a fine set of clothes . . . The age-old success of the ideologists of the State is perhaps the most gigantic hoax in the history of mankind.”
As with so many other statist stunts and superstitions, it all started with Lincoln. As Larry Tagg wrote in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President, during his lifetime Lincoln was by far the most hated and despised of all U.S. presidents but became a “sudden saint” in death.
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