Cockburn kept his cancer treatment a secret – he did not want the disease to define him

BY Nigel Horne

THE DEATH of Alexander Cockburn at 71 robs political journalism of one of its most radical and honest voices. In his columns for The Village Voice, The Nation and The First Post (latterly The Week), and his articles for CounterPunch, he shared his controversial views on US foreign policy, global warming and the sins of corporate America.

In one memorable article for this website, he argued that Tillikum the orca whale, who drowned his trainer in a Florida aquatic park in 2010, was a victim of corporate enslavement. Like Spartacus, Tillikum chose to fight back.

“No one could skewer the banksters, the robber barons and the crony capitalists of this broken era quite so ably as Alex,” John Nichols, a fellow columnist on The Nation, wrote yesterday.

What turned out to be his final two columns, written about ten days before he died on Friday night from complications with cancer, were classic Cockburn.

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