New Left Review 76, July-August 2012

Alexander Cockburn was not only a compelling writer but a highly skilled editor, not least of his own work. In Corruptions of Empire (1987), limpid evocations of boyhood in Ireland and prep-school in the fifties, lethal analyses of establishment media and a Hogarthian panorama of the Reagan era were brought into an intelligible relationship. With the principal enemy always in his sights, Cockburn’s counter-attacks drew on a vast range of resources, fuelled by a healthy appetite for reading and for life. The Golden Age Is in Us (1995) enlists Lucretius, Lenin, Malaparte and The Monkey Wrench Gang as comrades-in-arms against the New World Order. The extracts below, on the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the last-ditch coup attempt against the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and advice to foreign correspondents, are drawn from their pages.

alexander cockburn

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On Revolutions and On Foreign Correspondents

FRANCE: BICENTENARY OF 1789

It was robespierre who said, ‘If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is murderous, terror without which virtue is powerless.’ This is not at all what a bunch of Social Democrats running France in the age of the Fifth Republic want to be quoting this year and next. The official programme has a lot of virtue and positively no terror, at least on the evidence of their calendar of upcoming events. [1] Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is in Us: Journeys and Encounters, 1987–1994, London and New York 1995, pp. 57–65.

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