Alexander Cockburn’s Amerika
Two percent of the U.S. adult population in lockup; 600,000 “stop-and-frisks” in New York City; three-quarters of a million people booked as official sex offenders. Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn thinks it's time we revisit the notion of “fascism.”
Two percent of the U.S. adult population in lockup; 600,000 “stop-and-frisks” in New York City; three-quarters of a million people booked as official sex offenders. Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn thinks it’s time we revisit the notion of “fascism.”
Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch:
The mobs that flooded into the streets to revel in the execution of Osama bin Laden were not exulting in America, land of the free and of constitutional propriety. They were lauding brute, lawless, lethal force. In this year of political conventions, we’ll be hearing a lot of tub-thumping about American freedoms, but if there’s any nation in the world that is well on the way to meriting the admittedly vague label of “fascist,” surely it’s the United States.
Fascism, among other things, is a system of extreme, methodical state repression, violent in contour and threat, buttressed by ultra-nationalist mythology, a militarist culture of imperial ambition. In the 1980s, America started locking up its poor people. Seven million adults were under correctional supervision in 2009.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly
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CounterPunch, the muckraking political newsletter founded in 1994 by investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair and recently deceased iconoclast Alexander Cockburn, has paid a “savage price” for maintaining its deeply critical view of President Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign season.
Fashion, tips for surviving a police encounter, and why we might all be better off when the American empire crumbles are among the subjects the late CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn rapped about in a conversation in the Deep South sometime during the summer of 2006.
He could be infuriating in his lust for truth and social justice, but no serious student of our time can deny Alexander Cockburn’s importance as one of the most principled and insightful political journalists of the past half-century.
Alexander Cockburn, editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch, lost a two-year battle against cancer when he died in Germany on Friday night.
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