More thoughts on the late Stalinist:

Sometimes, this hypocrisy took the form of amnesia. In 1980, when the Afghans were getting their own taste of the Brezhnev doctrine, Cockburn wrote of their country:

An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world…. If ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too.

That, you see, is what they call “speaking truth to power.” Predictably, Cockburn opposed the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. An alleged “radical,” he nevertheless defended the status quo when it came to the most barbaric reactionaries and seemed comfortable with, if not amenable to, the death-cult establishments in Palestine and Lebanon. In fact, when I think hard about it, I wonder why this man was considered a radical at all. When your essential worldview is shaped by the writings of a 19th century German philosopher, you are not a radical. When you publish op-eds by dictators who have been in power since Eisenhower was president, you are, in a very literal sense, a conservative. When you’re skeptical about everything except Josef Stalin, you cannot be said to have a very developed sense of bucking “the establishment.”

Really, these people are quite odious.