40 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
40 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
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>
|