The Hitchens-Cockburn spat has been going on for quite a long
time, certainly long before the Hitchens/Blumenthal incident.
As always in these situations one must ask to what extent it is
rooted in real political differences and to what extent it is simply
a manifestation of personal animosities and competitiveness. I
suspect that the latter is more crucial here than the former. At any
rate both men can be charged with betraying leftist ideals in various
ways. In Cockburn's case through his championing of the militias
and as Lou emphasizes, his support for Indian gambling casinos.
While Hitchens has ruffled feathers with his anti-abortion stance.
With Cockburn, the championing of the militias is probably not
out of line with his idiosyncratic Stalinist politics since after all
the German Communists in the early 1930s for a time collaborated
with the Nazis in fomenting strikes in order to undermine the
Weimar Republic. I think for Cockburn anything that disrupts the
status quo, even if it comes from the lunatic right is viewed by him
as good. Likewise Cockburn's cultivation of an image as what
Lou calls a " backwoods misanthropic crank" is I suppose a return
to certain family traditions.\, in this case perhaps not so reminiscient
of father Claud, as of cousins Evelyn Waugh (and his son Auberon).
It is intersting to note that both men cut their political teeth in
British
Trotskyist politics, with Cockburn, arguably, returning more or less
to the Stalinist politics of his father, Claud and Hitchens remaining
more or less a left social democrat. I remember back in the '80s,
Hitchens wrote a highly laudatory article on the left Labour politician,
Tony Benn for Mother Jones. On the other hand Hitchens has not
been shy about attacking such sacred cows as Mother Teresa
and Princess Di.
As far as Sidney Blumenthal is concerned, I think here is a
case of rather naked careerism and oppurtunism. Back in the
1970s, he used to write Marxist screeds for The Boston Phoenix
and The Real Paper. By the 1980s he graduated to writing for
The New Republic. In 1991, when candidate Bill Clinton was engaged
in vigorously courting support within the media, Blumenthal was
one of the first journalists to support him. After Clinton was
elected president, Blumenthal's ass-kissing of Clinton began
to regarded even within The New Republic as a kind of standing joke.
However, it eventually paid off for him in the form of a White House
job and the rest was history.
Jim Farmelant
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
