Lindsey Graham was a monster, but not exceptional

Some readers may find this shocking or unkind. But it is a fact that there is no way to write about the intriguingly sudden end of the long-term US senator from South Carolina in a ‘balanced’ manner and stay honest.

Graham was an almost cartoonishly evil man and since he was also very powerful, his moral depravity made a big difference to the lives of all too many. Downplaying that fact out of misplaced piety would be perverse; it would mean to disrespect the many victims of perfidious and brutal US and, in fact, Israeli policies of vicious violence and outrageous injustice that Graham promoted with every fiber of his being for his whole political life.

During the Gaza genocide, when challenged specifically about the Israeli mass killings of civilians, including women and children, Graham launched into what can only be called a psychopathic rant comparing the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with American warfare against Germany in Japan in World War II (an intriguing comparison in and of itself, but that is another matter) and drawing the conclusion that Gaza should be flattened, including with nuclear weapons. Gaza has been flattened, and to his dying day, Graham never showed an ounce of compassion for those slaughtered by his Israeli friends and did everything he could to support that slaughter.

That is, of course, also why internationally wanted war criminal – really genocidaire – Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to offer his public condolences.

Speaking of Graham’s obvious subservience to Israel, the senator was, unsurprisingly, also a great fan of going to war with Iran, tirelessly calling for attacking it as violently as possible. He spread the Orwellian lies that Iran was about to pose a nuclear threat to the US and that its ballistic missile arsenal was a tool of reckless aggression, all to produce domestic support for yet another criminal American war. Himself addicted to hiding his foul character behind a bigoted and utterly fake Christian piety, Graham compared Iran’s leaders to Hitler and called them “religious Nazis,” thereby not merely offending brave men towering above him in moral and intellectual terms, but also helping to drum up propaganda for murdering them.  

It is an irony of history or, maybe, divine justice that he lived just long enough to see the US follow his insane and corrupt advice and suffer a geopolitically catastrophic defeat for it. 

Yet Graham was a monster long before the Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran. He was obsessed with brutalizing as many other countries and societies as possible. He could not see an opportunity for a war and not do his worst to make it happen. Graham’s record of warmongering is so extensive that it is hard to reproduce it in its entirety. Just shortly before his end, he had been calling for more US violence in Cuba, Lebanon, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Yemen – apart, obviously, from his eternal compulsion to scream for, in effect, more dead Palestinians and Iranians.

In true American fashion, if being Graham’s target was terrible, being his ‘friend’ was no better. Ukraine has come to stand for that experience. Even while pretending to be its ardent supporter, Graham was always among those most brutally open about using Ukraine and its people for the geopolitical and commercial interests of the US. He praised opportunities to rob Ukraine of crucial raw materials and he clearly considered pumping money into its ultra-corrupt Zelensky regime a great deal as it produced dead Russians (and, he failed to mention, Ukrainians, too, of course). 

There is no other way of putting it. Lindsey Graham was an infernally bad man. And he was a revolting man: his viciousness was glaringly obvious. Graham was not a complicated case, a conflicted character, a man of light and dark. He was among the closest to pure, unadulterated, and shamelessly brazen evil many of us will ever lay eyes on. 

That is why it is telling – but not surprising – to see who is lining up to let us know how much they’ll miss him, that they were buddies with him, or what a wonderful person he was. Apart from Netanyahu, for instance, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO’s Trump bellboy Mark Rutte, Ukraine’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Zelensky, and, of course, AIPAC.

What these often abject condolences show is not merely the moral failure – polite term – of those who offer them. There is a more general and, in its way, worse point: Horrible as Graham was, he was also representative of the elites of the US and the West. Normal people would be ashamed to be seen with Graham, dead or alive; Western elites are boasting of their intimacy with him. 

Graham was explicit in displaying his genuine, sick joy in inflicting pain and misery on as much of the world as he could. Indeed, one way to describe him would be as an openly, enthusiastically sadistic imperialist. Graham was a depraved pervert of power who let it all hang out. But apart from his lack of filter, he was not an exception but typical. 

Graham was the ugly and all too realistic face of much of the West and its leaders in Washington. He is gone, everyone and everything else is still in place.