Claud Cockburn. Photo: courtesy of Verso.
The phrase “Telling truth to power” never interested me, but I 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 “believed strongly in the axiom about telling truth to power” because the “rulers of the earth” did not care about the truth. Claud believed that it was ‘much more effective to tell the truth to the people powerless so they had a fighting chance in every battle against the big battalions.
According to Ascherson, Claud Cockburn had two core beliefs: the first was to be skeptical and even cynical when it came to authorities, whether the British government or the British Communist Party; and two to remember that “decision makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, and more self-destructively corrupt than they would like people to understand, and therefore more vulnerable to journalistic attacks and exposure.”
Applause for cynicism and skepticism.
Cockburn was fond of saying, “Don’t believe anything until it’s officially denied,” although he did not claim to be the author of the phrase.
This may not be the best time to unleash the media attack dogs and encourage them to expose Trump, the Trump administration and all its supporters. Maybe we should regroup, chill out, catch our breath, recharge our batteries, and focus on the corruption and incompetence of the Trumpers.
If we are to survive the next four years, we will need to know what is going on in the White House and in all branches of government, as well as in the Pentagon and wherever the powers that be hold sway and pull the strings.
And to survive, we need vital news and information about local Trumpers and their conspiracies. We will need
reliable sources inside and outside government as well as corporations, and we will need to quickly deliver the news and information to those who can weaponize it and target it at the senators, congressmen, congresswomen, judges and generals. How about that? I sound like myself writing for Liberation News Service, the movement alternative to United Press International.
It will be harder than ever in the US to gather news and information as well as gossip, as the nation continues to slide and slide toward fascism, as even former Trumpers have acknowledged and said.
Let’s be open and also clandestine. Those of us who lived in the 1960s and wrote for the underground press can revive those skills, and those who can navigate the Internet can 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 coup. He spent two years in Spain, covering the civil war, taking part in the defense of Madrid and leaving Spain with stories to tell.
Some say his finest hour was as godfather of Private Eye, the irreverent, satirical British publication founded in 1961 and still feisty, still incorruptible and a thorn in the side of the establishment.
His son Alexander noted that “Claud was the greatest radical journalist of his time, and had an inspiring influence not only on CounterPunch but on many other incendiary journalistic enterprises.” We might now remember him by the kind of work he did.