Alexander Cockburn: The Last Stalinist, an Enemy of Freedom, and a low-level Anti-Semite. May He Not Rest in Peace
Another cause to which he devoted much space was trying to prove that the Soviet refusenik and leading dissident Anatoly Sharansky was indeed a spy for the United States, just as the Communists had claimed. In a 1986 column, he posited a conspiracy of L.A. Times reporter Robert Toth and Sharansky to publish Soviet defense secrets as supposedly innocent news stories. One of his efforts, Cockburn claimed, was to work for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and get a catalogue of Soviet military installations.
And perhaps I should end by citing one of his most infamous columns, which a good Samaritan has put on the internet for those without access to The Nation archives. Here Cockburn attempted to refute the claims of the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, who had concluded that 20 million Russians had died as a result of Stalin’s policies. He quoted favorably the historian Jerry Hough, who was one of the most fierce apologists for Stalin and who had argued that only hundreds of thousands had died in the purges, not a number in excess of one million.
What was behind this obscene number crunching was Cockburn’s desire to denigrate those who dared compare Stalin to Hitler, especially Robert Conquest, whom Cockburn went out of his way to attack. As he put it, to place high numbers on those killed by Stalin had a “regulatory ideological function,” so as to put down anyone who says fewer people were killed by Stalin were therefore “soft” on him. So Cockburn wrote: “The symmetry that calculations such as Medvedev’s seeks to establish between Stalin and Hitler performs, in its service to ideology, similar injury to history.”
One might say, to use those very words, that Cockburn’s service to ideology was meant, just as it was by his father, to paint a portrait meant to explain the Soviet policy in the Stalin years as one that sought to minimize death, and hence to reveal Josef Stalin as a humane and practical leader who did his best to save as many lives as he could. Speaking of doing injury to history, indeed.
Finally, read this article by John Paul-Pagano, who calls Cockburn out for no-holds-barred, old-style antisemitism, including the use of the blood libel charge against Jews, which he terms Cockburn’s “most wicked accomplishment.” Israel was guilty of organ harvesting of Palestinians they killed for just that purpose. As Pagano writes, Cockburn wanted “you to believe a broader, darker narrative that Israel maintains the occupation of the Palestinians in part to shore up its reserves of organs for Jews in need of donations.”
The defender of Stalin turns out to have been a crazed low-level antisemite as well. No wonder he got along so well with Pat Buchanan. Those who celebrate Alex Cockburn’s life have a lot of explaining to do.
Thanks, Ron, for an honest appraisal of the late Alexander Cockburn. I was wondering when someone would call out Cockburn for what he really was, a toadying anti-Semitic sycophant of the left.
Let me check to see if I’m crying….uh…no
I had the misfortune of meeting this arrogant, rich, spoiled Brit once and the man was a cultural imperialist, racist and overlord extraordinaire.
I remember seeing a poster in Berkeley many years ago; Cockburn was speaking. He was going to discuss how the job of a journalist was to lie for the cause if it was useful.
To give the devil his due, the only honorable thing Alexander Cockburn ever did was to oppose the US/NATO war against the Serbs.
The US clearly backed the wrong side – namely, the Muslim narcoterrorists who were, even at that time, affiliated with al Qaeda – against the Christian Serbs.
Too bad Cockburn backed the right side for all the wrong reasons.
May the Serb combatants of the ’90s be reunited with their buddy, and that right soon.
It’s amazing how many people I knew in grad school who took him seriously.
I gotta say, I read a book by him (I think) and thought it worthless, and from what you’ve described he has a lot to answer for, but…
The man just died. You had the good fortune to outlive him. Give it a rest, OK? Maybe next week it’ll be OK to piss on his grave, but not while the guy’s warm…you won. Back off just a bit.
Oh please.
As if a guy who was a career camouflager of mass murder and torture deserves any respect.
And the bit about palestinian organ harvesting . . . .
Doesn’t matter if he’s warm, cold, or room temperature.
Another hateful British twit. The UK really pumps them out, doesn’t she?
The charge about Israeli organ harvesting, unfortunately, does have some basis in fact, according to the Israelis themselves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs
As for mass murder, Cockburn accused Stalin of murdering 3.5 million, a laughably low number but mass murder nonetheless. Cockburn actually denounced Stalin long ago (just as RR did) and, in fact, used “Stalinist” as a term of invective.
As for torture, I thought you guys were all for it because you believed it was effective.
Cockburn was a snake in many ways, but he could write rings around our home-grown pundits, and his writing was a model of learning worn lightly — i.e.,the use of allusions from a grade-A education without seeming to be raiding Bartlett’s.
There’s a big difference between harvesting organs (of Jews and Palestinians alike) without obtaining family consent, and murdering Palestinians in order to harvest their organs.
I would not pea in Cockburns mouth if his teeth were on fire along with the left wing POS Sean Penn & Michael Moore- these left wing nuts CANNOT face facts- here is a simple one- HOW MANY Died crosing the sea from USA to get to CUBA & free healthcare- ZERO & idiots like Penn, Moore & Cockburn WOULD NEver admit it
More proof Liberalism is a Brain Rot disease – they will all burn in hell for their sins to mankind
Duke5343: Well-said. To be a Leftists (or a Democrat, same difference) is to suffer from some form of mental illness. That is because truth for Leftists is what they want it to be, not what is empirically so.
Um, spare us the right-wing astro-turfing. Cockburn has more in common with right-wing thugs like you then he ever did with Democrats and liberals. Duke and Jack, both of you trolls should go away.
If Alexander Cockburn was as big scoundrel as his father, we should know it right away, not next month or next year.
No, there are no winners here.
The truth still needs to get out, and the sooner the better. Waiting any longer would mean that much fewer people will know the truth.
Perhaps that is what you want.
@ David W. Nicholas, who said “you won.”
Who won? What are you talking about?
Do you mean that those of us who do not admire Cockburn somehow “won” because he died?!? I have news for you. We all die, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Or do you mean the anti-communists, the anti-Stalinists won? If that is what you mean, it is interesting that you use the word “you.” You might have said “WE won,” unless you, like Cockburn, actually prefer the likes of Stalin to the likes of Ronald Reagan.
And by the way, no one has “won” this war. The battle to preserve (or destroy) the West is still ongoing.
His level of research can be gauged from his foray into, of all things, chess history — his book “Idle Passion”, trying to prove (yet again) that “chess players are crazy”. As the noted chess historian Edward Winter noted in a devastating review (see link), his “research” consisted of, in effect, taking as fact all silly rumor about chess players — most of them known to be false — and then adding pseudo-”psychoanalysis” to them.
For example, he believed Paul Morphy, the 19th century chess champion, was a “paranoid fetishist”. Evidence of his “fetishism”? Cockburn claims Morphy liked to “stand in a circle of women’s shoes”. The reality? Morphy’s niece innocently wrote in the 1920s that he liked to arrange *HIS OWN* shoes next to the his bed so he would be able to choose a pair easily in the morning. Well, at least Cockburn didn’t add, like some “chess historians” did, that Morphy died in his bath “surrounded by women’s shoes”, no doubt due to some sexual fetish play (Morphy *did* die in his bath, but there the truth ends and the “women’s shoes” fetishism myth takes over).
As Winter notes: “it is bad enough to wade through endless factual inaccuracies, but it is infuriating to find these mistakes then used as the basis of character analysis.” If this was the level of his “research” in general, no wonder he swallowed the latest blood libel and the communist lie.
Sounds like the typical passive-aggressive kind.
Rolls a grenade out there in the form of some written garbage, knowing SOMEone will believe it and spread the lie.
“Lies are half-way around the world before the truth can even get its shoes on” so the saying goes. And people like Cockburn (seriously? That was his real name?) loved to play the manipulation game, telling lies, knowing they’re lies yet letting them out there for others to do the dirty work.
When I was a kid, we called them troublemakers and took them out to the woods and gave them a beating. Yet this now-deceased piece of human refuse would probably have screamed bloody murder if someone published an expose’ on him, claiming it to be libelous.
I have read some of his ravings in the past. No idea he died recently. May I say how happy I am to hear the good news? I only wish scores of others will follow him into eternity and eternal damnation. As always Mr. Radosh, your columns are an education.
“I’m told one should say nothing but good things about the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
-Bette Davis
She was right.
Admirers of this man called him “A man of the Left who defined the frontiers of candid progressive ideas” or “An avowed liberal — even a radical.” What is so wrong with the term Communist? After all, it sounds like that was what he was, a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union and a supporter of communism and its policies. Pretty much sounds like a communist to me. Yet the American press always seems to be afraid to call things what they are.
Even today, everybody in the press is afraid to call Obama what he is, and that’s a socialist. Obama has been an unashamed supporter of a European-style social-welfare state, yet few people call him on it. And when they do, there are angry denials from the White House, even though all of their actions, from the “stimulus” to Obamacare, all resemble the policies you would normally see in a socialist country like France.
Our media seems very afraid of labels in this country, and by doing that they are doing a disservice to the American people. The press has a responsibility to report the news accurately to the public and when it knowingly refuses to call things as they are, they misinform the public. And that should NOT be the function of the press, misinformation. You would see that in the Soviet Union, NOT here in the United States. No wonder so few people pay attention to the mainstream media anymore.
Saddly Libertyship46- our main media in the USA is afraid of the TRUTH- they want to SHOVE THEIR Truth down our throats – they care not for FACTS- so sad
Actually, I’m not too sure he’s a “fan” of the European socialist welfare state for two reasons.
1) He hates Europe. All those honky white people who were historically imperialists, destroying his beloved Africa and putting the black man into slavery.
2) He doesn’t know or understand the European socialist model but serendipitously imitates it because it drains the federal coffers of cash, which more suits his end-game. This is why he said he didn’t care if he was a one-term preezy. However, with the promise of doing even more damage, a second term looks that more attractive. Indeed, I think he does know that certain things are damaging to the US but seems to have the blessing of the combined ignorant masses in government, comprised of over-the-hill hippies, greenies, druggies, commies, socialists, racists, haters of all things conservative or a combination of any/all. So they go for it under the pretense of “social justice”, “fairness”, “equality”, etc. Cuz that’s how he sells it.
He seems to know that the conservatives won’t buy it. But he also knows that the idiots in the media will help him sell it, along with the previously mentioned operatives unwittingly doing his bidding to meet the goal of a broke but socialist America.
I’m pretty sure his plan, if he has one, when he’s defeated in the fall, is to try the lecture circuit where he’ll babble incessantly like a reverend Wright copy and when that wears thin, he’ll move away, or maybe even get set up as a government official in third-world piss-hole. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
That’s because labels are a) inherently deceptive; b) easily manipulable by people like you. Show me proof that Obama is a socialist. Do you even know what one is? Proof, please. You have none. “Drains the federal coffers of cash?” Isn’t that what Bush did? Hello? Bank bailouts? And don’t point at the car companies. They actually paid us back, unlike your buddies on Wall Street. You (and, in fact, Obama) espouse state capitalism. He is your buddy. You should love him. The reason you don’t? Could it be, perhaps, the color of his skin you object to?
Here’s a lesson in history, genius: if anything, mass killers like Stalin and Hitler were more like right-wing Republicans than anything else. Stalin ran an oligarchy, in which all wealth trickled upwards to his select group, as anyone who bothers to do basic reading about his governmental structure will learn. And his treatment of dissent and opposition reminds me more than anything else of the modern Republican Party. The opening of the Soviet archives prove all this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Your scorched-earth attitudes remind me of nothing so much as a KGB thug hauling a protester to the Lubyanka.
Try at least to be accurate in your reasons for hating him. Here is what this “defneder of Stalin” actually said: “Evil though he was, Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide.”
Amen, Mr. Radosh.
BTW, see John Fund’s eulogy of Cockburn at the oh-so-respectable National Review, with almost no commenters disagreeing.
The National Review calls itself conservative. Well, I can call myself the Pope, but that doesn’t make it so.
This is ironic, given that the NR came down squarely on the anti-Serb side back in the day. Evidently, they have short memories, or their readers do.
NRO “forget” Cockburn’s account of the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner in The Nation. Cockburn claimed it was a spy plane and therefore “deserved” being shot down with the loss of civilian life.
He really was a Stalinist. I used to see his editorials regularly in the Louisville Times (and that will show you what kind of gray, colorless agitprop rag THAT newspaper was).
Cockburn would say ANYTHING in support of left-wing, Stalinist causes. He no doubt loved Obama’s collectivization of medical care as much as he approved of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, with its man-made famine and its dispossession of the “kulaks.”
I don’t agree that Stalin was left-wing. He was in no way a liberal, did not espouse liberal causes, and massacred people in his country who were. His governmental structure was a pure oligarchy – almost a pure right-wing economic paradise. No unions. No workers’ rights whatsoever. All wealth concentrated in the hands of a few! Beria, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, etc… ad nauseum. Unfortunately, the facts of what really happened under Lenin and Stalin (and those who followed) more closely resembled a right-wing economic dystopia, which is seldom understood factually in this country. Dissenters – were imprisoned. Unions – didn’t exist. Voting – was single-party. The media – was completely muzzled. All this is beyond established as fact. Stalin called friendly liberals “useful idiots.”
You know, Ron, as I read your essay…I kept thinking, “how is this different than 95% of the JourOlistas today?”
It’s not that this guy isn’t beneath contempt. He is.
The frightening thing is, he and his radical leftist ilk have spawned thousands of despicable offspring and clones in this country.
The Propaganda and Lies machine of the left do all this and more. The Daily Duranty could be the The Morning Cockburn…somehow equally fitting I would say.
Exposing him as a liar, a communist apologist, and a Jew hater puts him not at the top of any current list, but smack dab in the middle of the road, stinking to high hell.
Brian Ross pulling that “tea party” stunt, ABC fuzzying up the pictures of George Zimmerman’s head, NBC “editing out” words to make a narrative, CNN fronting for enemies, CBS forging documents, the wholesale acts of intentional omission and commission pushing a radical leftist narrative…there is no limbo bar beneath which they will not slither.
Comrade Alexander goes to his grave as a run of the mill pissant traitor. A traitor to the truth, a traitor against honor and integrity, a traitor against a nation of people, a traitor against the world. That made him…a typical “mainstream JourOlista”. They all should rot in hell. And he can blaze that trail for them to follow as well.
“The Morning Cockburn”.
Somehow…that reminds me of stories about hookers in Vietnam I once heard about.
(sorry..but it was out there….)
Excellent points all! Cockburn was at least fairly up-front about what he was and what he believed. Our “establishment jounalists” pump out the same bilge under the banner of “nonpartisanship.” It reminds me of that observation that Claude Raines (Dryden) made to Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.” – “If I have told lies than you have told half-lies. A man like me tells lies to conceal the truth but a man like you who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”
Great comments.
Using cold war rhetoric to grind a grudge against the dead. What an opportunist.
Up to now, we Americans of the last century have allowed our crop Stalinist tools to wither and die of old age.
Maybe in the near future, we will reconsider that, and help some of the more traitorous individuals into the void.
Here we see the Stalinist voice of the anti-Stalinists!
No, pard. Uncle Joe had his state apparatus kill on his behalf. Very impersonal. Funny thing though, he was always able to find creatures, such as yourself, who would pull the trigger for him.
Think 1783. Where did all the Tories go? Regular folks ran them out, to go back to Britain or relocate to Canada, or be killed.
“If the facts are unflattering to my ideology, I’ll just label them rhetoric.” In other words, you have no factual basis for defending Cockburn.
The Cold War was fought for serious stakes, and had its heroes and monsters. Cockburn counted foursquare among the latter, and lived a long, prosperous life … unlike many of his betters, who suffered and died at the hands of his allies.
Because I would not break faith with the unjustly slain, I will not besmirch their memory with false complaisance towards the memory of the unjustly spared.
Cockburn’s family background is similar to that of Prez Barack Hussein: both had pinko commies for dads. But BHO gets the edge with his mom, who all but declared as the same, and oversaw his apprenticeship under Franklin Davis Marshall, one of the most significant card-carriers in the history of our nation. On the other hand, Cockburn was a great writer, while Barack Hussein’s skill in that department are… not so much. Not that he’s ever written anything, well, apart from a couple of ghost written books. But to listen to him talk without the teleprompter indicates a mental version of runny scrambled eggs.
I most vividly remember Cockburn thrilling to the mayhem of the LA riots, cheering the violent thugs and hateful criminals who intentionally targeted innocent white and Korean bystanders and destroyed the neighborhoods and livelihoods of thousands upon thousands of innocent black and Hispanic residents.
For Cockburn, this was great sport and a pleasure to witness, far from the danger of course, from the vista of his own tony address. That tells you everything you need to know about this sort of socialist, and his peers at The Nation. They gleefully fiddle while the world burns after setting it on fire. Then they enjoy a very good wine with dinner.
That tells you everything you need to know about this sort of socialist, and his peers at The Nation.
Unfortunately, when the editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel appears on prime time national TV to spout her doggerel, the news entertainer running the whatever show she’s on at the time never go into that part. It’s a chosen area of silence, much like the things left out of the proclamations made by another influential delusional organization, the Nobel Prize selection committee.
Chianti and fava beans, perhaps?
The revolution always eats its children, but never soon enough.
Right, I always thought of Coburn as the Hannibal Lechter (sp?) of communists: ultra-refined and coldblooded.
Cockburn benefits in his NYT obit–just as he did for years while living–from a reluctance to be frank about identifying an obvious fellow-traveler of the Communist party. We all know anyone who engaged in such descriptions was a crass McCarthyite–even if the description was correct. In fact, no one could read his columns and articles without knowing what he was, but the liberals to whom he attached himself could not bring themselves to say so.
Justin Raimondo gets his panties in a bind over a GI-Joe toys. His love for an unabashed totalitarian is no surprise.
I seem to recall that Claude and Alexander Cockburn were direct descendants of Sir George Cockburn, the commander of the British naval forces that helped burn Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812. At least Alexander made the claim. That family will work for anyone won’t they?
I find it ironic that his ancestor, Admiral Cockburn, is the one who had Washington, DC burned down during the War of 1812. The Cockburns have had a very destructive relationship with America, haven’t they?
Incidentally, Alex Cockburn once wrote in support of the Soviet invasion of and brutal suppression of Afghanistan. He said words to the effect that Afghans were barbarians and deserved their fate.
As usual, Radosh hits the bullseye with this appraisal of Cockburn’s career of publishing Stalinist propaganda. But I take issue with his claim that he was the last Stalinist. One that comes to mind is Grover Furr, an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, who proudly describes himself as somebody who “feel[s] kinship with Stalin and the Communist movement of his day” and uses his classroom to advance his Stalinist ideology. And like Cockburn, he is obsessed with denying Stalin’s crimes, calling them “hoary horror tales,” for which there is no evidence. Unfortunately, Stalinist apologists like Cockburn and Furr and more numerous than one would like to believe.
Absolutely true, but only his poor students know about him. He is hardly a “public intellectual” and has no influence whatsoever. He should be fired, of course, for malpractice.
This type’s relationship with Stalin parallels that of many Arabs and homegrown anti-Semites towards Hitler: with one side of their mouth they proclaim that he had less blood on his hands than believed, but can’t stop the other side of their mouths from voicing the wish that he’d killed even more.
I believe it was the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who stated “Three generations of idiots is enough”
Okay, we all know about BHO’s grandpa, Hussein Onyango Obama, his father BHO Senior, and BHO himself. It’s an Obama family tradition.
Although I disagreed with most of Cockburn’s opinions, and Radosh is right on point about his apologetics on behalf of Stalinism and anti-Semiticism, his writing was more entertaining than most of the left’s propaganda, and he had the ability to surprise, as in his harsh critiques of the power politics behind the global warning campaign. Cockburn was a polemicist and would have taken no offense at Radosh’s comments, but I will rather miss his lurid rants against his fellow leftists.
Those who defend(ed) Stalin or Castro deserve nothing more than our contempt, in life or in death. RIP Alexander Cockburn, good riddance, and may your soul burn in the hottest corner of hell for all eternity.
Give him credit for being a skeptic on global warming. Plus, he’s the only progressive I know of who is a cynic about peer review.
Read here to see why Radosh hated Cockburn:
http://goo.gl/TQpBQ
Also, Alex wrote this about Radosh:
Village Vocie November 1, 1983.
Reformed communists like Radosh never can take being mocked.