[PEN-L:655] Re: The political devolution of Alexander Cockburn

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Of course, there were some things about Cockburn's politics back then that
> I always found a bit troubling. He supported the Soviet intervention in
> Afghanistan on the basis that it was a lesser evil to the misogynist
> fundamentalism of the village chieftains.

Specifically, he wrote that if a country ever deserved to be raped,
Afghanistan qualified. It was a jackass thing to say, of course, but Alex
is always frothing at the bit at something or other. In the article
about indigenous Americans, Alex is coming from the perspective of the
Irish, who experience a 1 million+ genocide in the 19th century at the
hands of those arch-civilized Brits; you reach a point where the usual "My
people have suffered X casualties" runs a bit thin. He's not talking to
whitefolk who don't know diddley about the history, he's talking to a
younger generation of activists who are demanding their cultural rights,
and saying, look, this Spielberg-style cinematization of the past is not a
solution, it's part of the problem. When history is nothing but a
spectacle, that's when barbarism not only happens, but is legitimized and
perpetuated in new, horrible ways.

> Actually, Cockburn's not the journalistic superstar he once was. The Wall
> Street Journal dropped him, and the Nation Magazine cut him back to a
> single page.

He never was a superstar and never wanted to be. The Wall Street Urinal
mostly wanted to discredit the Left, a bear-baiting thing, I think, but no
way would they let Alex spill all about the CIA's cocaine wars in public.
More to the point Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are putting out
"Counterpunch", which remains one of the finest, most stylish and simply
best radical newsletters out there today -- totally worth the price of the
subscription.

-- Dennis