Alexander Cockburn RIP

[David Morris]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/loving_totalitarianism_hating038785.php

My memories of Cockburn, while much dimmer than Kathleen’s, are bright
on two persistent features of his noisy writing: he was a stubborn
defender of totalitarianism, long after the time when anyone could
plead ignorance about the fundamental nature of life in the Soviet
Union, and was an equally stubborn detractor of liberalism, from
various perspectives. So I’ll pass along the assessment of someone who
did know him quite well, and did not consider the charm, the
occasional literary flair, or the erratic service to good causes (or
more usually, against bad causes) enough to obscure what the man loved
and hated. This is from Harold Meyerson at TAP:

----------------------
Like Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz, he found his comfort
zone on the fringes of the political spectrum, whether left, right or
simultaneously both. The son of Claud Cockburn, a Communist Party
journalist whose misrepresentations of the Spanish Civil War prodded
George Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia, Alex never ceased casting
Stalin in the best light possible, consistently downplaying the number
of Russians (including virtually all the original Bolsheviks) who died
by his hand. Alex also periodically issued forth with defenses of
Brezhnev, which was more remarkable yet: While Stalin retained a few
nostalgic apologists, Brezhnev had virtually none. I still remember
one column in which Alex enthused about the rise in the number of
refrigerators in the Soviet Union in the days of the beetle-browed
Leonid—a blast from the Frigidaire Faction of Kelvinator Kommunism….

[C]ontempt for liberals and social democrats was a hallmark of
Cockburn’s work. It was surely one reason why for several years The
Wall Street Journal opened its op-ed page to him every week: The
editors had found a left-wing columnist who detested liberals and
liberalism as much they. It informed, if that’s the word, Cockburn’s
attacks on Al Gore and his paeans to Ralph Nader during the 2000
presidential campaign, and his more recent crusade for climate-change
denialism. Like Hitchens (a more felicitous writer) at his worst, and
like Horowitz (an immeasurably less felicitous one) consistently,
Cockburn lived on and for the extremes, a nasty pen at the ready, and
bile on tap for all occasions.
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On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Madeleine Maudlin
<madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Denialist"?
>
> God that's pathetic.
>
> What an awful, degenerate human Kathleen Geier must be.
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 1:02 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/alexander_cockburn_rip038739.php
>>
>> I was saddened to hear today about the passing of left-wing
>> journalist/provocateur Alexander Cockburn, who died of cancer at the age of
>> 71. Cockburn was a difficult, frequently exasperating figure. First, some of
>> the awful things: as this right-wing website gleefully notes, the man ended
>> his days as a climate change denialist. Throughout his career, he took great
>> delight in viciously attacking Democratic politicians, which is something
>> that I’m not against in principle, but it never made any kind of sense to me
>> that the very people he went after most ferociously were often stalwarts of
>> the most leftward precincts of the Democratic party, such as his perennial
>> punching bag, Bernie Sanders, who is after all probably the closest thing we
>> have to a genuine fire-breathing social democrat in the U.S. Congress.
>>
>>
>