A Colossal Wreck (19 page)

“In the past, the leaders of the POUM have frequently sought to deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People’s Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union.”

Note Claud Cockburn’s party line reference to the Moscow show trials.

Orwell, of course, fought with the POUM. In his vivid and moving memoir of the Spanish Civil War,
Homage to Catalonia
, Orwell responds to the Communist propaganda attacks, including some produced by Cockburn, directed against the POUM. Ironically, Orwell went to Spain with the intention of enlisting with a Communist unit. He still planned to join one until the POUM, which had been labeled Trotskyist by the Communists, was attacked in Barcelona and its leaders purged. Anyone interested in the details should read
Homage to Catalonia
in which Orwell refers to Claud Cockburn by his
Daily Worker
pseudonym, Frank Pitcairn.

Interestingly, Alexander Cockburn, in
The Golden Age Is in Us
, quotes a section of a review of a book about Roger Hollis in which his father, Claud, figures prominently. Roger Hollis, if memory serves, was the head of MI5, roughly the British equivalent of the FBI, and is now suspected of being a long time Soviet mole. It appears, according to the review, that Claud Cockburn was under the protection of Hollis. Cockburn and Hollis were at Oxford together, but Hollis concealed their association and kept Cockburn’s file in his personal safe. And Hollis has been accused of refusing to provide evidence to wartime witch-hunters who wanted to prosecute. Hollis is also accused with involvement in furthering Cockburn’s “activities.”

Was Claud Cockburn a Soviet agent? Did he dutifully name names to his superiors? If so, what happened to their sorry asses? Perhaps, when Claud Cockburn’s Russian, American and British Intelligence files are released, it may be time for another round of righteous indignation.

As far as I know, Orwell never had a secret agenda. His political views and his political loyalties were out in the open. I suspect that Orwell would have given the same assessments of the same people to anyone who asked.

Also, according to Cockburn, “the list displays Orwell as suspicious of Jews, homosexuals, and blacks …” This is an interesting statement coming from a journalist whose Mossad file is probably as thick as Noam Chomsky’s.

Moreover, when I sent an earlier version of this letter to the AVA in September, 1996, it wasn’t printed because Alexander Cockburn was unable to respond. Cockburn, it seems, was busy fag-baiting in the Dakotas. As I recall, Cockburn outed some Senatorial candidate who Cockburn later took partial credit for defeating. But, of course, Cockburn was only battling hypocrisy.

Sincerely yours,

Jock Penn, San Rafael

Alexander Cockburn replies: Anyone who wants to test Graham Greene’s high estimate of my father’s work should read his memoirs, issued under various titles including
A Discord of Trumpets, I Claud, In Time of Trouble
, and
Cockburn Sums Up. A Discord of Trumpets
shows up from time to time in second-hand bookstores here, or on internet sites.
Cockburn in Spain
was a reissue of
Reporter in Spain
, my father’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War for the
Daily Worker
, written under the name Frank Pitcairn. There were good things in that collection, and stuff that reads badly now. It was done at great speed during the Spanish Civil War to rally popular support for the Loyalists, and sold in great numbers and translations around the world. He believed in the “treason trials” then. So did a lot of other people. Later, he ceased to believe in them. In 1946 he stopped working for the party. Unlike Orwell, he didn’t
rush to squeal, secretly squeal, on his comrades to the British Secret Service.

There’s enormous mythmaking about POUM and Spanish anarchism today. I don’t think my father, in hindsight, would particularly modify his views.

Penn uses a passage from
Golden Age
very disingenuously. A friend of my father is describing, and deriding, the views of a right-wing nut, to the effect that Roger Hollis was a Soviet agent. Penn alludes to the views of the nut, views which were held by a particularly nasty bunch of ultra-right-wingers in the British intelligence establishment, but doesn’t disclose the context.

I dimly remember some earlier, even more stupid letter from Penn. Perhaps I said it was too stupid to publish—not that this warning infallibly deters the mighty editor. I do remember with pride my excursion to South Dakota in 1996 to point out to the citizenry that Senator Larry Pressler was a hypocrite. The citizenry evidently agreed, in the only upset of a Republican Senator that year.

I don’t understand the paragraph about the Mossad. Orwell certainly was suspicious of Jews, blacks and homosexuals. My father was a Communist agitator. No, he didn’t send Orwell-type lists to Moscow.

October 16

Hucksterism in the name of “good causes” is now as embedded in the liberal life and mindstyle as hookworm in the foot of an African child. Today, at the level of symbolic action, a person of progressive temperament can live in a bubble-bath of moral self-satisfaction from dawn to dusk.

Take that morning cup of coffee. Maybe it comes courtesy of the self-congratulatory Thanksgiving Coffee, or Equal Exchange, an outfit in Boston which, as its name suggests, claims it has smoothed out the inequitable wrinkles in the coffee trade between the Third World and the First.

The coffee is perhaps consumed at a table made of choice hardwood certified as having been harvested under “sustainable” forest
practices. The coffee machine is powered by “green electricity” offered by Working Assets. And who knows? The coffee pot was perhaps acquired with a
Nation
credit card.

Take Equal Exchange. Here is a nonprofit in Massachusetts that makes the very big claim that it is rectifying the iniquities of First/Third World trade in coffee beans. “Feed your soul as well as your body,” the outfit’s ad proclaims in the
New Yorker
, raising the battle-standard of fairness. They buy “direct” from small farmers, they say, thus eliminating the middle man.

No they haven’t. They’ve taken over the function of “conscience” middle man from the ordinary First World coffee brokers and there’s really very little evidence that the Third World growers, as opposed to the soul-fed coffee drinkers at First World tables, do better because Equal Exchange is doing the brokering. They buy from grower co-ops, Equal Exchange boasts. But so do ordinary First World coffee brokers, paying the same prices.

But if Equal Exchange is having little or no impact on conditions of production in the Third World, it certainly is having an effect, a baneful one, on small local businesses across America. Equal Exchange flies a buyer from a First World co-op grocery store on a two-week jaunt to Costa Rica, courtesy of the American taxpayer. The group tours the coffee
fincas
and a good time is had by all. On return, the buyer might expand the coffee rack of Equal Exchange, with bins provided by Equal Exchange.

This means less business for the small local roaster, local sales people, local distributors. Lo and behold, what do we have but the Conscience Industry’s equivalent of General Foods or Proctor and Gamble, with the nonprofit’s executives scarcely paying themselves starvation salaries.

Start with the word “sustainable.” These days fund-raisers and grant-writers string it round each sentence like an adjectival fannypack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it’s a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.

Working Assets’ offer of “green” power has been an astounding
piece of effrontery, since the consumer has not the slightest way of knowing whether the electricity thus provided comes from solar or nuclear, or hydro or coal-burning generating stations. The
Nation
’s credit card offers a low interest charge, to be sure, but you’d better not be late with your payments.

Imagine singling out a major oil company as morally in good standing! It’s far less rational than pumping Amoco’s gas because Johnny Cash stands behind the product. At least that’s an aesthetic decision. World Wildlife thus singled out Shell for praise last year, the same oil company in whose interests, absent any bleat of protest by Shell, the Nigerian generals hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions. And imagine giving Mitsubishi, as Rainforest Action Network did, the opportunity for this prime destroyer of Asian forests the chance to hang a “good behavior” sign around its neck.

The problem here is that because there’s barely a left and certainly no politically left party, fake politics have taken over. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center has raised an endowment of almost $100 million with which he’s done very little, meanwhile frightening elderly liberals into ponying up contributions with the fantasy that the heirs to Adolf Hitler are about to come marching down Main Street, lynching blacks and putting the Jews into gas ovens. The fund-raising of Dees offers a banefully distorted view of the American political landscape. There isn’t a public school in any county in the United States which doesn’t represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than what remains of the KKK.

As for B. Sanders, whose fund-raising letters this election time have once again been touting Congress’s only “independent progressive socialist,” his latest achievement has been to give the cold shoulder to delegations traveling all the way from Texas to Vermont to challenge the Conscience Complex in one of its most self-satisfied redoubts.

Sanders has been prominent among those in the North East congressional delegation on trying to export the region’s nuclear waste to a poor, largely Hispanic community in Texas, Sierra Blanca. The only merit in dumping the waste there as opposed to, say, Burlington, is that the people in Burlington are richer and have more clout. When the Sierra Blancans turned up in Vermont, Sanders put out the word
that he would quit any platform graced by any of their members. If you truly like “independents” in Congress, better by far to send your money to Ron Paul, who acts upon his proclaimed beliefs, unlike Sanders.

November 18

“So it turns out Koestler was a rapist. I can’t say I’m surprised.” It’s bracing to have one’s dislikes confirmed, and since I’ve always thought Arthur Koestler was a shit, I hastened to get back to my sister-in-law, Janet Montefiore, who had phoned me with the news.

Why wasn’t she surprised? Jan, a prof of English lit with a prodigious memory, quoted something a disobliging Koestler had written about a woman in his essay in
The God That Failed
. “She was a puny, plain girl whom I had never seen before, but the deliberately slatternly way in which she was dressed and her provocative air in walking in betrayed her at once as a comrade … She was the neurotic, Cinderella type—the frustrated bourgeois girl turned voluntary proletarian—which abounded in the German Party.”

The disclosures about Koestler as a rapist come from David Cesarani’s new book,
Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind
, excerpted recently in the London
Daily Telegraph
. The most graphic description is of Koestler’s attack on Jill Craigie, a filmmaker and wife of Michael Foot, well-known socialist and, for a brief period, leader of the Labour Party.

It was 1951. Koestler was still married to the Englishwoman Mamaine Paget. On May 4, Koestler called up and said he wanted to go to a pub. Craigie said Michael was away but finally agreed to take Koestler on a little tour of Hampstead, at the conclusion of which Koestler insisted she give him lunch.

Craigie recalls that while he was helping her wash up, Koestler “suddenly grasped my hair, he pulled me down and banged my head on the floor. A lot.” Koestler was “very, very violent,” but Craigie managed to struggle free and rush outside. She thought of going to the police station nearby but, in Cesarani’s words, “she was scared that such a recourse would lead to awful publicity for her and
Michael. She would be accusing a world famous novelist of rape; they had been on a pub crawl and she had admitted him into her home by herself. It didn’t look good.”

She hoped that Koestler would leave, but he didn’t. Having no money and no exact idea of what she should do, she went back inside. It was a move that was, as she recalled, “rather stupid of me.” Koestler attacked her again, gripping her by the throat. Craigie was frightened he would kill her. “In the end I was overborne. I was terribly tired and weakened. There’s a limit to how much strength one has and he was a very strong man. And that was it.”

As he was leaving, Koestler said, “I thought you always had a bit of a yen for me.” Craigie insists she had given Koestler not a bit of encouragement, but reckons that the practiced way he embarked on his assault suggested it was part of “a pattern.” Richard Crossman, another prominent member of the Labour Party, later told Craigie and Foot that Koestler “was a hell of a raper, Zita [Crossman’s wife] had a terrible time with him.” Cesarani writes that “Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next few years it would be almost a hallmark of his conduct.”

Koestler’s enthusiasm for rape was matched by his aversion to abortion. In
The Lotus and the Robot
, he deplored “the slaughter of the unborn with its concomitant ill-effects on women,” the supposed effect of Western decadence on Japan. As Cesarani remarks, “his comment on abortion is a grotesque example of hypocrisy.”

Cesarani was alluding to Koestler’s refusal of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s request that he use a condom while making love in a canoe. She became pregnant, and Koestler went into “a state of panic,” she said. The “idea of having children was anathema to him.” She had an abortion, and afterward called Koestler because she had no food and was too weak to shop. He came over, exhibited scant sympathy and told her, “You’ll get over it.”