IN comparison to the odious bully and dangerous demagogue who now inhabits the White House, Senator John Sidney McCain III, was a relative saint. Yet McCain, who died at the weekend aged 81, was also a prime representative of the American military-industrial complex – President Eisenhower’s description – that has dominated and shaped the global community for its own ends since the Second World War. For that reason alone, John McCain deserves a more nuanced obituary than “war hero”.

McCain was born directly into an old, Southern military clan that exuded all the imperial opportunism of the Old South. The McCains emigrated originally from Argyll to Donegal, before pitching up in America in the 1830s. The family were plantation owners in Carroll County, Mississippi. For plantation owner, read slave owner.

Indeed, there exists a branch of the McCain family (known as the “black McCains”) who are direct descendants of the former US presidential candidate’s great-great-grandfather William Alexander and his routine rape of his female household property. One of John McCain’s black relatives, Lillie McCain, tried to contact the senator after she heard him claim (unreasonably) that his ancestors owned no slaves. McCain, for whatever reason, failed to respond to her approach. There is a definite irony that John McCain, descendant of slave owners, was beaten in the 2008 US Presidential election by Barak Obama, the first black American to enter the White House.

At the end of the 19th century, the American frontier closed. There was no more indigenous land to expropriate. What to do next? America then divided politically between its isolationists – then represented by the Republicans in the industrial north – and a new breed of imperialists represented by a racist Democratic Party whose base lay in the Old South.

Crudely, the Southern Democrats (who controlled Congress) saw foreign adventures as a way of restoring their lost pride. When the old plantation economy withered completely at the start of the 20th century, the energetic sons of the Old South turned to military careers, as the leadership of America’s new imperial outreach.

Among these were the McCains, who sought their fortune in the US Navy. Grandfather John Senior graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1906. Despite (or maybe because of) being a gambler and heavy drinker, grandad had a distinguished naval career in two World Wars, ending up in charge of the Fast Carrier Task Force in the Pacific. Father John “Jack” McCain was a senior submarine captain during the Second World War, when the US carried out a campaign of indiscriminate sinking of Japanese merchant ships, successfully starving the Home Islands. A virulent anti-Communist, Jack McCain ended up as head of all US forces in the Vietnam war theatre from 1968 to 1972.

Which brings us to John McCain III. He was born in 1936, not in the United States proper but at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone. From this base, the US dominated Central America. With a grandfather and father as admirals, McCain III was bound for a naval career, though his romantic nature led him to contemplate joining the French Foreign Legion. Eventually, he opted to become a naval pilot – a bad idea given he inherited the family penchant for gambling.

On his first overseas detachment, in Spain, he deliberately flew his Skyraider bomber too low and crashed into overhead electric power lines. McCain saw combat – and eventual capture – in Vietnam. Reading his rather honest and ingenuous autobiography Faith of My Fathers is illuminating. The US had blundered into an ill-conceived Asian war it could not win. At home, the US people soon turned against a war that cost 60,000 Americans lives. But McCain comes across as an unquestioning supporter of the conflict, lambasting President Johnson for not extending the bombing of the North to include Russian ships in Haiphong harbour – a good way to start World War III. McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over Hanoi when he was shot down. Estimates of the number of North Vietnamese civilians killed by US bombing vary widely but mid-range would be around 65,000.

In his autobiography, McCain makes very clear that his plane could have evaded the missile fired at him, but: “I was just about to release my bombs … had I started jinking. I would never have had the time nor, probably, the nerve to go back in …”

There you have it – he gambled that he could bomb and get away with it. He spent the next six years as a prisoner of war. I don’t doubt John McCain was a brave man, although more foolhardy than conventionally courageous. I also think he fought in a senseless, unjust war.

None of that justifies the severe ill-treatment he suffered as a prisoner. Yet the crushing of his shoulder with a rifle butt was done in the heat of the moment when he was first captured. If you bomb strangers, you might possibly expect them to be angry. In fact, a lone female nurse intervened as a crowd tried to lynch McCain and got him to safety. That’s what I do call bravery.

In 1972, President Nixon negotiated a retreat from Vietnam and McCain was repatriated, only to discover that his wife, Carol, had been involved in a terrible car accident (which she kept from him) which had left her using a wheelchair or crutches. He divorced her and remarried. At least McCain had the honesty to admit: “My marriage’s collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam.”

McCain survived imprisonment psychologically by adopting an extreme American patriotism. Back home, this converted into a new political career. He was elected to Congress in 1983 as a supporter of Ronald Reagan. One of his first political acts was to oppose the creation of a national holiday in memory of Martin Luther King.

In 1986, McCain succeeded arch conservative Barry Goldwater as senator for Arizona. But a botched run for the presidency in 2000 against George W Bush turned him against the Republican Party’s establishment – there was a definite vain streak to McCain.

Thereafter, he increasingly adopted maverick positions, as he struggled to build a national base that would allow him another try for the White House. This did not stop him supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003. When Iraq proved a disaster, McCain criticised Bush for not deploying enough troops – a view identical to his criticism of Johnson in Vietnam.

Sometimes he came across as a liberal. At others, he veered to the extreme right – witness his accepting the bonkers Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. This opportunism lost McCain support among conservatives and on the left. His recent vocal opposition to Donald Trump should be seen in this light. Trump is a knave but at heart John McCain was a card-carrying member of the US military-industrial complex who, till his dying day, regretted North Vietnam had not been pounded into submission by waves of B-52s.

Today, young citizens are again taking to the streets to demand an end to America’s foreign adventures, racism and economic imperialism. It is to them we need to look, not to the likes of John McCain, brave or otherwise.