Claud Cockburn. Photo: Courtesy of Verso.
I never cared for the expression, “Telling Truth to Power,” but didn’t know why. Now I do. In a review of a book by Patrick Cockburn about his father Claud, the reviewer, Neal Ascherson, writes that Claud “disbelieved strongly the axiom about telling truth to power” because the “rulers of the earth” didn’t give a shit about the truth. Claud believed that it was “much more effective to tell the truth to the powerless so they had a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.”
According to Ascherson, Claud Cockburn had two core beliefs: one was to be skeptical and even cynical when it came to the authorities, whether in the British government or in the British Communist party; and two to remember that “decision-makers were more weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.”
Two cheers for cynicism and skepticism.
Cockburn liked to say, “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied,” though he didn’t claim to be the author of the expression.
Now may not be the most advantageous time to unleash the attack dogs in the media and encourage them to expose Trump, the Trump government and all its supporters. We might need to regroup, chill for a moment, catch our collective breath, recharge our batteries and zero in on the corruption and incompetence of the Trumpers.
If we’re to survive the next four years we’re going to need to know what’s going on in the White House and in all branches of government, as well as at the Pentagon and wherever power holds sway and pulls strings.
And to survive we’ll need vital news and information about local Trumpers and their conspiracies. We’ll need
reliable sources inside and outside of government and in corporations, too, and we’ll have to get the news and the information quickly to those who can weaponize it and aim it at the senators, congressmen, congresswomen, judges and generals. How about that? I sound like my own self who wrote for Liberation News Service, the movement alternative to United Press International.
To gather news and information as well as gossip, will be more difficult than ever before in the USA because the nation is slipping and sliding toward fascism as even former Trumpers have recognized and said.
Let’s be in the open and let’s also be clandestine. Those of us who were alive in the Sixties and wrote for the underground press might revive those skills and those who can navigate the Internet might hone their skills.
Claud Cockburn happened to be in the right place at the right time: in Spain in July 1936 when Franco launched his putsch. He spent two years in Spain, reporting on the civil war, took part in the defense of Madrid and got out of Spain with tales to tell.
Some say that his finest hour was as a godfather to Private Eye, the irreverent, satirical British publication founded in 1961 and still feisty, still incorruptible and a thorn in the side of establishments.
His son Alexander noted that “Claud was the greatest radical journalist of his age, an inspiring influence not only on CounterPunch, but on many other seditious journalistic enterprises.” We might remember him now by doing the kind of work he did.
