Susan Sontag is Dead
<p>Imagine a writer/playwright/intellectual whose most famous single<br />
remark was &#8220;the black race is the cancer of human history&#8221;.  Who said<br />
&#8220;The Pinochet revolution is astonishingly free of repression<br />
and bureaucratization.&#8221;  Who praised the attack on Pearl Harber as a<br />
brave deed.  Do you suppose such a person would collect laudatory<br />
tributes and glowing obituaries on the occasion of her death?</p>
<p>Substitute &#8220;white&#8221; for &#8220;black&#8221;, &#8220;Cuban&#8221; for &#8220;Pinochet&#8221;, and &#8220;9/11&#8243;<br />
for &#8220;Pearl Harbor&#8221; and you&#8217;ll have remarks Susan Sontag actually did<br />
make, and never retracted. (She later glossed her equation of white<br />
people with cancer as a slander on cancer patients).  Her equally<br />
abominable expressions of racism, tyrannophilia, and anti-American<br />
hatred have either gone totally unmentioned in the <cite>New York<br />
Times</cite>, <cite>Philadelphia Inquirer</cite> and AP wire service<br />
stories, or else been surrounded by exculpatory verbiage about<br />
Sontag&#8217;s alleged devotion to high ideals.</p>
<p>Sontag&#8217;s willingness to say in 1982 on the occasion of the<br />
anti-communist Polish worker&#8217;s revolution that &#8220;Communism is Fascism<br />
with a human face&#8221; has been much feted.  In fact the utter<br />
anti-humanity of Communism had already been demonstrated by the<br />
Kronstadt massacre and other atrocities years before Sontag was born.<br />
Her failure to absorb that lesson forty years sooner than she did led<br />
her to utter a great deal of toxic garbage, and should neither be<br />
forgotten nor forgiven.</p>
<p>George Orwell once said that &#8220;There are some ideas so wrong that<br />
only a very intelligent person could believe in them.&#8221; In the AP<br />
obituary, author author Francine Prose says Sontag &#8220;represents<br />
something that I&#8217;m afraid that&#8217;s passing, I don&#8217;t think that many<br />
people these days say, `Oh, I want to be an intellectual when I grow<br />
up.'&#8221;  Not the least of Sontag&#8217;s crimes is that Prose is right &mdash;<br />
by repeatedly living out Orwell&#8217;s observation throughout her lifetime,<br />
Sontag is one of the people who taught Americans by her example to hold<br />
intellectuals in contempt.</p>
<p>I have spoken ill of the dead here in order to make a point about<br />
the living.  The damage Sontag did is in the past, but the<br />
muddleheadedness of her eulogists and their willingness to embrace<br />
the same evils she did is a problem for the present and the future.<br />
Only by confronting and condemning those evils can we excise the<br />
true cancers of human history.</p>
