Book review: Keeping tabs on propaganda

Claud Cockburn built his reputation by encouraging readers to be far less trusting of the official version of their reality

Claud Cockburn edits 'The Week', the magazine he founded in 1932; an anti-establishment, anti-Nazi voice, the magazine challenged conventional wisdom when doing so was dangerous.

• Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism 
• Patrick Cockburn 
• Verso, hb €35.00 

A reader would not need to be as sceptical as the subject of this interesting, challenging, and revealing biography-cum-history to wonder if the author — a son of the figure under review — could give a full and accurate account of his father’s early life.

Blood, after all, is thicker than ink. That the son — Patrick — followed his famous/infamous father Claud’s instincts and built his own glittering career in international journalism adds another layer to that eyebrow-cocking question.

It is a question very few people today can answer as Claud Cockburn died nearly 50 years ago and the most substantial period of his career ended when Hitler’s tanks rolled across Europe.

It is a compliment to both men that such doubts, if that is not too strong a word, niggle as Claud built his reputation by encouraging readers to be far less trusting of the official version of their reality. 

It may be a stretch to suggest that through The Week, the magazine Claud founded in 1932, was one of the kernels of today’s post-truth age but it certainly was a step away from the idea of forelock-tugging acceptance of governments’ propaganda. 

An anti-establishment, anti-Nazi voice, the magazine challenged conventional wisdom when doing so was dangerous. 

His work with that publication and a few others earned him the attention of the security services in nearly every country he worked in, particularly in Eastern Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Indeed, the author makes extensive use of British security agency files to build this portrait. 

The banality of some of those files is an eye opener, files that often cross the line to state-funded voyeurism when Claud’s relationships are detailed.

One of those was with journalist Jean Ross, who became the model for Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, a figure far beyond the imaginations of her Irish contemporaries.

Those files were built in part because of Cockburn’s prescient expose of those he christened the Cliveden Set, an English cabal of extremely powerful, rich, and occasionally disturbingly stupid people led by the Astor family from their Cliveden estate. 

They conspired to have their government embrace appeasement with Hitler and contributed to delaying preparations for what, with the benefit of hindsight, seems an inevitable catastrophe.

If Cockburn did nothing else, that campaign would have been an enviable legacy, but he was one of the first to write about the barbarism inflicted on Europe’s Jews by “Himmler’s young men”.

As ever, and as is still the case, the optimists were confounded by humanity’s capacity for evil — and again today, someone else pays the price.

Cockburn spent the late 1930s reporting on Spain’s savage civil war and the half-cocked international response. 

The opponents of Franco were a colourful mish mash of idealists, communists, and anti-clerical individuals who could not sustain a campaign against El Caudillo’s well-manned and -supplied forces.

Cockburn’s and Ross’ frontline reportage of this savage episode was exceptional in more ways than one.

One of the comforting lessons offered is the idea of how quickly an elite might be ostracised when their actions are exposed as deeply erroneous. 

This happened to the once unimaginably powerful Cliveden Set, Germany’s Nazi leaders, and Britain’s doddering, amateur governments of the 1930s. 

It offers a sliver of hope today and reminds us that the Assads, the Netanyahus, the Putins, the Trumps, the Musks, and the Zuckerbergs too are but passing ships in the night and if held to account, whatever that idea can mean today, they might be overthrown.

Ever-changing media technologies probably make a career like Cockburn père’s unlikely today but the idealism that drove him was never more important. 

So too is the kind of refuge he found in Youghal where he lived and worked for the closing decades of his high-wire life.