A talented and courageous writer, and one of the most influential radical journalists of his generation, Alexander Cockburn was most at home in the political and cultural battlegrounds of the US. In a career that spanned 40 years he wrote for an array of publications, co-edited CounterPunch and was the author of a number of titles, including Corruptions of Empire, The Golden Age Is in Us, Imperial Crusades and co-author with Susanna Hecht of The Fate of the Forest.
He began his career in journalism writing for the student newspaper Cherwell at the University of Oxford. After a few years freelancing for the New Left Review, the New Statesman and others he crossed the pond in 1972. From 1973 he was a writer with the Village Voice, originating its Press Clips column. He went on to write for The Nation and a selection of other titles in the US and the UK.
Join us to look back on Alexander Cockburn’s extraordinary career, exploring his view of America and his style of radical journalism. We will also hear readings from his final work, A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture, finished shortly before his death in July 2012.
Chaired by Charles Glass, a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau and was chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since then, he has been a freelance writer, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region.
With:
Journalist and brother of Alexander Cockburn, Patrick Cockburn. He has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979, first for the Financial Times, then for The Independent. He is author of several books including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq.
Ellin Stein is a journalist and author, her book That’s Not Funny That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream was published in June. She has written for publications including The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The New York Times, Variety and the Village Voice. She currently teaches in the department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College.
Joe Paff studied politics and philosophy at Berkeley from 1957-66. Over the next decade he taught at Berkeley, Toronto and Stanford. In 1975 he moved to Petrolia, California where he created the first high school in the area and now roasts Goldrush Coffee. He is the president of CounterPunch.
Robin Blackburn teaches at the University of Essex and at the New School in New York. He is a former editor of the New Left Review and is the author of many books, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock, Banking on Death, and The American Crucible.
"We were attacked by hammers, by screwdrivers, by knives, by clubs with nails," Maajid Nawaz said of the attacks he faced as the teenage son of Pakistani immigrants in Essex, South London, in the early 1990s.
"These were men in their 20s, with shaved heads…it was a sport for them. They called it ‘Paki-bashing’."
Nawaz discussed his memoir Radical at the Frontline Club, tracing his path from an angry, hip-hop obsessed teen, to a high-level organizer for the global revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), to a four-year prison term in Egypt, to his co-founding of Quilliam, a London-based think tank that counters Islamist extremism.
"Hip-hop culture was crucial in developing the self-confidence needed to assert oneself," Nawaz remembered. But it was Islamism that truly gave him community, security, and identity. An organizer for HT handed him a flyer one day,
"an articulate, young, trendy, and intelligent man who was studying medicine, from my hometown, who could relate to me and my problems."
Nawaz joined HT, electrified by
"the level of power and seeing results that came immediately as a result of me adopting this identity… how we managed to face down so many of the conflicts and violence that we were exposed to on the streets of Essex…. Suddenly, we had backup. Suddenly we were members of this internationally feared and renowned club…the global Muslim community."
Nawaz built HT branches in Britain, Denmark, Egypt and Pakistan. The aim of HT being to reestablish a Muslim caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, whose "armies would protect Muslims across the world just as the American army protects American citizens."
After 9/11 he was imprisoned in Egypt and there he experienced a change in thinking, coming to believe that Islam as a faith had nothing to do with the political project of Islamism. Islamism, he came to feel,
"was a stifling, totalitarian, victimhood ideology that prevented independent thought, and all it ever did was breed more extremism, more discrimination, more racism, and more division."
At Quilliam, Nawaz seeks to address the grievances of Muslims and to reverse radicalisation by taking on the arguments of Islamism and countering them.
Nawaz does not agree with the line of thought from the right or the left. The left, he says, must challenge the injustice not only of racism but of Islamism as well. The right, he says, must show care for Muslims’ grievances at the hands of racism and Western foreign policy.
Muslims, meanwhile, must question their own narrative. Nawaz explained,
"sadly…the victimhood narrative has become popular. And it’s part of the story, but it’s not the whole story."
He put particular focus on Muslims’ ideological narrative, without which,
"the 7/7 bombers wouldn’t have said, in their thick Yorkshire accents by the way, that your people have attacked my people. Here’s a British Pakistani talking about the Iraqis as his people, in a Yorkshire accent… So the recalibration of identity…is what I call the ideological narrative […]
What we’re trying to do [is] engage the young, angry British Muslims with counter-narratives. Those young angry Muslims aren’t engaged in faith […] They’re people like me who weren’t particularly religious, and then get politiciised. […]
Crucially, Nawaz emphasized that the title of his book, Radical, doesn’t refer to his days spreading Islamism. "[It’s] describing me now," he said.
"I’m trying to reclaim the word, and to say that what’s truly radical in majority Muslim societies is to advocate democratic culture on the grass roots. [If that] can be entrenched… then we can secure the future, the democratic future."
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