Alexander Cockburn RIP

[Paul Mackin]

On 7/24/2012 12:00 PM, David Morris wrote:
> 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.


Anything to hasten the Revolution.

P
> -------------------------------------------
>
>
> 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.
>>>
>>>