Susan Sontag is Dead <p>Imagine a writer/playwright/intellectual whose most famous single<br /> remark was “the black race is the cancer of human history”. Who said<br /> “The Pinochet revolution is astonishingly free of repression<br /> and bureaucratization.” 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 “white” for “black”, “Cuban” for “Pinochet”, and “9/11″<br /> for “Pearl Harbor” and you’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’s alleged devotion to high ideals.</p> <p>Sontag’s willingness to say in 1982 on the occasion of the<br /> anti-communist Polish worker’s revolution that “Communism is Fascism<br /> with a human face” 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 “There are some ideas so wrong that<br /> only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” In the AP<br /> obituary, author author Francine Prose says Sontag “represents<br /> something that I’m afraid that’s passing, I don’t think that many<br /> people these days say, `Oh, I want to be an intellectual when I grow<br /> up.'” Not the least of Sontag’s crimes is that Prose is right —<br /> by repeatedly living out Orwell’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>