And, yes, this is going to be fun and a takedown, and added fun since it's Counterpunch where I saw this, and given thoughts at the end of a recent Substack piece, in depth, about third party voting, I'm realizing more and more, but for different reasons than 20 years ago, the degree of growing dislike in some ways for Counterpunch.
Let's start here, from the book's editorial blurb:
Cockburn wrote dispatches while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he helped W. H. Auden and clashed with George Orwell. Claud’s private life, too, was eventful. He was married three times, once to Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles.
OK?
That's versus Wiki's page:
Cockburn's reporting in Spain, as "Frank Pitcairn", was heavily criticised by George Orwell in his 1938 memoir Homage to Catalonia.[11] Orwell accused Cockburn of being under the control of Stalinist handlers and was critical of Cockburn's depiction of the Barcelona May Days in which Orwell had taken part and during which anti-Stalinist communists and anarchists were caught and executed by operatives of the Soviet NKVD.[11] Specifically, to undermine anti-Stalinist factions on the Republican side, Cockburn falsely reported that the anti-Stalinist figurehead Andrés Nin, who had been tortured and executed by the NKVD,[12] was alive and well after escaping to fascist territory.[13]
Oops ... Or ... whitewash?
And, I've read about the May Days in Orwell biographies. It was serious, and it was where Orwell first really started looking askance at tyranny of the left as well as of the right. In addition, it seems a deliberate slur by Cockburn to claim Nin, a well-known (at that time) non-Stalinist Catalan leftist, had escaped to Fascist territory.
Reality? Nin was first an anarcho-syndicalist, along with being a Left Oppositionalist, then a Trot. The NKVD had "good reason" to whack him.
Indeed, this, per Wiki's piece:
During the spring of 1937 the Republican police located an alleged letter written by Nin to Francisco Franco, in which the Trotskyist leader was to endorse a plan for an uprising by the Madrid fifth column; the letter, in reality a forgery by the NKVD,[26] constituted one of the main pieces of evidence against Nin.[27] After the May Events, the Communist campaign against the POUM [Workers Party of Marxist Unification] intensified. Its leaders were openly accused of being fascists and conspiring with Franco.[28] As early as 28 May, Communist pressure got the authorities to suspend the circulation of the party's newspaper, La Batalla.[29]
Oops again. The entry goes on to note that Nin's death was almost certainly on orders from Moscow. (Nin had moved there in the early 1920s, joined the Left Opposition in 1926, and left the USSR in 1930.) It also notes that an NKVD assassination was being rumored about just days after Nin was arrested.
As far as good reason to whack him? Wiki's piece on it notes that POUM had become larger than the official Communist Party of Spain. With Nin as one of its founders, there's other reason Stalin would want him dead. Let's add that in those above mentioned May Days or May Events, the Spanish Communist Party and allies attacked POUM and allies.
Per Claud's catchphrase, "Believe nothing until it's been officially denied"? We'll see what official high-dollar reviewers say about it, and what Patrick says about them.
Or, to riff on something else? Rather than "Beat the devil," Claud was his press agent and now Patrick is Claud's Wormwood.
And, one biggie is out, from the London Review of Books. Sadly, Neil Ascherson may be doing some whitewashing, with this in the first paragraph:
To the end of his life, Cockburn stuck to two other core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority: the British establishment, all governments and even the leadership of the Comintern and the Communist Party of Great Britain, of which he was for many years a wayward member.
Sure. No USSR or CPSU mentioned there. The Comintern in general?
He does get somewhat better when he talks about the May Days and the book:
Patrick Cockburn’s account now reaches an eternally inflamed region: the ethics of journalism. Inevitably, he brings up the bloody communist coup in Barcelona in May 1937, and the way two British writers – Cockburn and Orwell – recorded it. Orwell had been wounded fighting with the vaguely Trotskyite POUM militia and found the crushing of non-Stalinist units and the terror used to hunt down their sympathisers unforgivable. Cockburn took the party line, writing in the Daily Worker that the POUM was full of saboteurs and had been stealing weapons – even tanks – from the Republic. These allegations were lies, and he must have known it. It’s worth adding that both men later modified their views slightly. Orwell recognised, if he did not fully accept, the argument that only a unified army, under strong central command, stood a chance of defeating Franco. Cockburn came to deplore the savagery of Soviet agents in Barcelona: ‘The rooting out of heresy ... in 1937 did become an evil preoccupation.
Still pale-washing if not a full whitewash, and Ascheron doesn't admit that Cockburn in all likelihood knew the truth at the time. And, that said, hold on to the name of Neil Ascherson; he's going to show up again before we're done.
So, LRB at least, is a review that Cockburn fils won't have to officially deny.
None of this is to excuse Orwell's "snitch list." But, contra this O'Shaughnessy's piece, Wikipedia doesn't make Claud "sound sinister," it simply reports his actual sinisterness.
But, wait, that's not all. The book's blurb, per the first link, concludes:
Patrick Cockburn, himself an international journalist, chronicles his father Claud’s lifelong dedication to a guerrilla campaign against the powerful on behalf of the powerless. It is a biography for today’s age, in which journalism is frequently suppressed, overshadowed, undervalued, and corrupted
Well? See above in part.
To add to the above info from Wiki?
According to writer Adam Hochschild, Cockburn functioned as Stalinist propagandist during the war "on [Communist] Party orders".[14] In one instance, Cockburn claimed to have been an eyewitness to a battle that he totally invented.[14] This hoax was intended to persuade the French prime minister that Francisco Franco's forces were weaker than they appeared and thus make the Republicans seem worthier candidates for help in obtaining arms. The ruse worked, and the French border was opened for a previously-stalled artillery shipment.[15]
And:
British historian D.C. ... Watt alleges that the information printed in The Week included rumours, some of which suited Moscow's interests.[18] Watt used as an example the claim The Week made in February–March 1939 that German troops were concentrating in Klagenfurt for an invasion of Yugoslavia, which Watt says had no basis in reality.
Again, oops. Or more than oops, of course.
Neither of those is a capital offense, but they add to shading the truth. On the Yugoslavian invasion rumor, I suspect that Stalin's intent, as this was before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was to try to push various countries of eastern Europe into a united anti-Hitler front under USSR control.
Duncan Campbell, set to interview Patrick Oct. 24, writes up the Guardian's review. He notes that, on the hoax battle, Patrick notes in his introduction that Claud was unrepentant, and by not challenging it himself, justifies it.
Claud was really a guerrilla campaigner against the powerful of the right, but not the left, where instead he was a deliberate flak.
Will Patrick tell us how much money the Soviet Union sent to his dad? I'm presuming that some of this, like the presumably willful slander against Nin, wasn't for free. That said, if it was, he's
Interestingly, the blurb claims he was married three times, when multiple sources say 2x plus one or more domestic partnerships.
At The New Republic, Paul Berman's lancing of Alexander Cockburn makes me think that apple didn't fall far from the parental tree, either. This:
Could probably be said about Claud, too.
His own Marxism was a product of the little world in London around the New Left Review in the 1960s—an Anglo-Marxism that had gotten its start in the 1950s by inching away from the British Communist Party, and after many years had failed to inch very far. Anglo-Marxism, in his presentation, looked on the Soviet Union as a gray and uninteresting place, which, by lending support to Third World liberation struggles in the remote tropics and hotlands, nonetheless served as the powerhouse of social progress.
That said, it raises one other issue: Anti-Zionism vs antisemitism. That was one reason I de-blogrolled Counterpunch long ago; the other was stuff that follows from the above. And, yes, I thought Alex went over that line at times. (That said, the TNR piece gives a blanket defense to Zionism.)
But wait. Berman pivots from Alec to Claud:
Claud Cockburn was a propagandist for the Communist Parties of Britain and the Soviet Union during the period of the Great Purge.
And then to those Barcelona days in particular:
In Madrid his access to Soviet officials was at the highest level, such that one day he found himself listening to the voice of Stalin himself on the other end of the telephone line. His son assures us in A Colossal Wreck that Claud Cockburn was, in spite of appearances, a fine man who would never have turned over names to the Soviet police in Spain. But then, proud of his father, Alexander includes within the Wreck a brief memoir by Claud of his Spanish experiences, which leaves the impression that, in regard to the Soviet police activities, Claud was not a reluctant participant. ... Claud cites his own “experience in the field of espionage, or rather, counter-espionage.” He was “a section leader of the counter-espionage department of the Spanish Republican government dealing with Anglo-Saxon personalities,” which does sound like a job dedicated to informing the police.
Oops! I guess being a police informer somehow fits in with being skeptical and cynical about all who hold authority?
Berman wraps with:
Soviet journalism alarmed still other people, and one of those frightened persons was George Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, his own account of the Spanish war, Orwell subjected the Soviet propaganda to a sharp analysis, generally without singling out individual journalists. But he did single out Frank Pitcairn, meaning Claud Cockburn, whose news stories evidently drove Orwell into a fury. I have always supposed that, when Orwell laid out the principles of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his inspirations was Claud Cockburn, British correspondent: a cheerful example of a man willing to say everything and its opposite in the interest of a totalitarian state, committed to the renunciation of truth, to the hatred of free-thinkers, to the cause of persecution, and to the cult of obedience.
So, yes, Orwell's snitch list (same link as above, so you don't have to hunt, because we're getting back to it now) was loathsome. But, it didn't come out of the blue, either. Let's not forget that Orwell's trenchmate Bob Smille faced the same end as Nin.
That snitch list link, from Wiki? Quotes one Alec Cockburn:
Cockburn attacked Orwell's description of Paul Robeson as "anti-white", pointing out Robeson had campaigned to help Welsh coal miners. Cockburn also said the list revealed Orwell as a bigot: "There seems to be general agreement by Orwell's fans, left and right, to skate gently over Orwell's suspicions of Jews, homosexuals and blacks."
Tu quoque on the antisemitism claims.
And, another bit of possible hypocrisy, tying back to a review of this book:
The journalist Neal Ascherson was critical of Orwell's decision to give the information to the IRD, claiming "there is a difference between being determined to expose the stupidity of Stalinism and the scale of the purges and throwing yourself into the business of denouncing people you know"
"Oops" has been used before.
And with that and for various other reasons? Sorry, but I'll pass, Joshua Frank, on donating for your 30th anniversary. And, you're passing out made in China (or wherever) environmentally wasteful T-shirts as bonus merch? Speaking of? How much of all that merch, if any, is made in the US of A?
