Laura Flanders: Why did you decide that Claud, who had written several volumes of his autobiography, deserved another look by you?

Patrick Cockburn: I think what tipped the balance in my mind towards writing a biography about him was in 2003. I asked MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, if I could see his archive. I heard nothing, and then they released them. There was an awful lot that I didn’t know. I’d often wondered if Claud’s newsletter The Week, all his campaigning against the Nazis and the government at the time had much impact on the powers that be. I could see from the MI5 files that it had enormous influence at a time when The New York Times and others were saying that Hitler’s bark would be worse than his bite. Claud had graphic accounts of the persecution and murder of Jews in Germany, and he had no doubt that Hitler and the Nazis were the ultimate evil long before any of the newspapers and the politicians realized the same thing in the US and UK.

LF: He had that because he had spent time in Germany. He’d been in prewar Berlin. Talk a little bit about his history, and how you think he came to be so clear-sighted as to what was going on.

PC: His father was a British diplomat, so at about 16, he went to join his father in Budapest. The First World War had officially ended, but in a sense, it was still going on in Budapest. There were pogroms going on, red terror, white terror. There was eventually a very nasty dictatorship. So he was very plugged into the politics of Central Europe. He learned German, he went to Berlin, he worked for the London Times. He went to the US just before the Great Crash. He covered that. Then, in 1932, through German friends, he knew things were getting worse in Berlin. He resigned from The Times, he was one of the New York correspondents, and returned first to Vienna and then to Germany. Nazi storm troopers were already in the streets. About 48 hours before Hitler took power, Claud was told by friends, “It’d be a really good idea to get out. They got your name on the list.” He thought for a moment, maybe I’ll stay. I’ve got a British passport. Then common sense reasserted itself, and he got on the train to Vienna. He had no money, he didn’t have a job, but he thought, what can I do to oppose this ultimate evil?

He set up this newsletter, The Week, in London in an attic. It was filled with scoops from the beginning. His idea was to influence the influencers. He knew it wouldn’t get to that number of people, but he hoped it could get to people who were really interested in what was going on. It could get to journalists, politicians, and so forth. But that only works if you can provide the goods in terms of information that other people don’t have, which he did, which is the real reason why it took off and became influential.

LF: There’s a part in his memoir that you quote in your book where he’s describing what people are actually saying in the capitals of Europe and how refugees from Germany are quite clear about what’s happening. He then points out that the language, what is being said and the way that it’s being said, is simply not appearing in the newspapers of the day. Can you talk about the significance of that and the parallels, if you see them, to this moment?

PC: It was a great sort of vacuum of information about what a lot of people knew, and what was appearing in the media. Now, this doesn’t really come across in history books because newspapers in general, invariably in fact, don’t want to admit to their own failings in terms of Hitler or any other historic event, be it the invasion of Iraq, what’s happening at the moment in Gaza and Lebanon. I think this became somewhat obscured later, but he felt that it was very discouraging that this wasn’t in the newspapers. But he also thought it’s very encouraging in a way, because he could fill that vacuum. He said at one point that even if he made only a small noise in the atmosphere of the 1930s, of continual crises, this would sound like a scream, and in many ways it did. That was again, a reason for writing the book now because it seems to me the 2020s are rather like the 1930s, that we have one crisis succeeding each other. The 1930s became known as the Devil’s Decade. In a way, I think one could use the same words to describe the 2020s.

LF: One moment that sums up a lot of the parallels is where the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, takes to the podium to declare that he has a relationship with Adolf Hitler, they’ve met, and that there is not war but peace in the offering. Forgive me if I’m exaggerating, but I hear in that a version of what we have been hearing all year from the US president,Joe Biden, in relation to Israel and Gaza, of ceasefire is in the works. Just a little bit longer. We’re working ceaselessly. Kamala Harris says the same thing. Am I being hyperbolic?

PC: No, unfortunately not. I think that was Claud’s great frustration as one might feel frustrated now. It was pretty obvious what was going on. It was pretty obvious that things were going to get worse. Yet those who were meant to be in charge kept on announcing that peace was just around the corner, that things weren’t as bad as they looked. I think the parallel is all too strong.

LF: As somebody who’s written for mainline publications like The Independent and others, why do you think mainstream media is so bad at sounding an alarm?

PC: A lot of them reflect the attitude of the government, of the country they’re in. Certainly the press often have an amnesia about this. At the time that Neville Chamberlain was speaking in 1938, none of the established press wanted to disagree with him. Claud felt one simple thing, and this is reflected in the title of the book, which is skepticism for individuals. Whether you read a newspaper, watch television or any news outlets, just to be skeptical and not believe anything until it’s officially denied. It’s amazing how many people, including lots of journalists, don’t focus on the fact that so much of what they’re being told is partisan. Those who leak things have very good reasons for doing so. You find this not just in the present war. I’ve been a war correspondent in the Middle East and have covered wars elsewhere. It amazes me how very crucial things were misreported by the press. I remember in 2001 in Afghanistan, it was fairly obvious if one was reporting day to day that the Taliban hadn’t been defeated—they’d gone home—but the media sort of reported that they were out of business. No need to pay any attention to those guys anymore. Well look what happened since. In 2003, the Iraqi army was completely defeated, mission accomplished. We can put our own guys in to rule in Baghdad. Completely untrue. There was no way the Iraqis were going to accept an occupation. The revelations about what’s really happening often don’t come from the mass media, they come from politicians or elsewhere.

LF: You have two brothers, Andrew and Alexander. Alexander, much missed, passed away a few years ago. His publication Counterpunch surely is an example of the kind of guerrilla journalism that you described. Your other brother, Andrew Cockburn], has been doing extraordinary reporting on the role of Amazon in this moment in providing IT services and satellite services to the Israel Defense Forces. The family continues to do this work. I’d love to ask you the question that I ask all of our guests, which is what you think the story will be that future journalists will tell of now.

PC: I think they’ll be pretty astonished, particularly on Gaza and Lebanon and Iran. I covered many wars in the Middle East. Usually, the US may have been complicit with Israel in various attacks and invasions, but after a bit, they would restrain them. That hasn’t happened this time. This is pretty extraordinary. The role of the Biden administration was something I didn’t expect. So it happened quicker, it happened when it didn’t have to happen, and it’s awful lot worse than I imagined. So likewise, in the 1930s, there was inevitability of what was going to happen after Hitler came to power, after Franco had won the civil war in Spain, the rise of fascism, very difficult to stop. And in one sense, Claud did get exactly what he wanted at the end of the day, which was he’d wanted the British and US governments fully committed to fighting fascism and the Nazis and Hitler. Eventually, that happened. He said they could only do this in an alliance with the Soviet Union, that happened too. Two-thirds of the German army was on the eastern front come D-Day. And in Britain, you had a sort of popular front government that sort of united everybody. So I don’t think one should sort of depress oneself too much. Claud, it’s often said, that horrible phrase, was talking truth to power. Well, dear old power certainly doesn’t want to hear the truth. What everybody ought to do is tell the truth to the powerless and enable them to do something about it.