Posted on 12/30/2004 11:12:30 PM PST by Catholic54321
Susan Sontag died of leukaemia in New York on December 29 at the age of 71. The obituarists described her as "one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights" (The Financial Times, Dec. 30). Her essays "expanded the universe of subjects it was 'all right' for intellectuals to take seriously," such as drugs, porn, and pop, ensuring that we'd "get used to these as intellectual topics."
All of which is one way of saying that Ms. Sontag has made a solid contribution to the degrading of our cultural and intellectual standards over the past four decades. But unlike some other purveyors of bad ideas, such as Voltaire, who could present them in eloquent prose, Sontag was unable to write a decent sentence. Take this gem for style and contents:
"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself" (Partisan Review, winter 1967, p. 57).
A week after the non-whites struck at the cancer's epicenter on September 11, 2001, Ms. Sontag asserted in The New Yorker, that this "monstrous dose of reality" was squarely a consequence of specific American actions, and paid tribute to the courage of those willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill others: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Courage means doing the right thing in the face of fear. Ms. Sontag's standard of "courage," based on an actor's readiness to die in pursuit of his objectives, makes sense only in the universe of an atheistic adorer of the self who cannot face the thought of self-annihilation. On that form she would have to admit that, "whatever may be said of their activities in Eastern Europe, the Waffen SS were not cowards." She was equally unaware that the word "coward" also designates a person who attacks defenseless victims, as in "Bringing the murderous coward to the stake" (Gloucester in King Lear, Act II, Scene 1). Ergo the terrorists were brave and therefore virtuous men, but Sontag's oxymoronic claim that courage is a "morally neutral virtue" was supposed to make that assertion less unpalatable.
More seriously, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 and thereafter Ms. Sontag was reluctant to address the phenomenon of Islam in general and, in particular, to note the difference between "secular" terrorism—which may be closely correlated to the intended target's "specific actions"—and the Islamic variety of the phenomenon. Her reluctance was understandable: a hater of Western Civilization could not but feel the corresponding urge to justify those attacking it, especially if the attackers can be depicted as victims of the victim. Hence her enthusiastic support for the Muslim side in the Bosnian war. Hence her attempt to remove moral authority from the terrorists' "courage" and at the same time to make their motives understandable strictly through the prism of the target's "specific actions."
That Ms. Sontag felt no sympathy for the victims of 9-11, for those thousands of her fellow citizens on whose tax dollars, philanthropic largesse, and buying habits her own existence had depended for most of her life, or for the city of her birth which she called home, goes without saying. The gap between Ms. Sontag's heart and mind was total, reflecting the soul of a rootless purveyor of self-hate. The leading advocate of "human rights" was not only a hypocrite and a fraud to boot, she was also a moral degenerate terminally devoid of human compassion and common decency.
Ms. Sontag's absence of sympathy for the "wrong" victims of any crime was on full display a generation earlier, two years after the fall of Saigon, when she wrote that "one can only be glad about the victory of the DRV [i.e. the "Democratic Republic of Vietnam"] and the PRG [Viet Cong], but there seems little taste for rejoicing." Such melancholy note was not due to the Communist reign of terror unleashed on South Vietnam, exemplified in tens of thousands of ad-hoc executions, the unspeakable "re-education camps," or the plight of hundreds of thousands of perfectly innocent and ordinary "boat people." No, Ms. Sontag's sole reason for lamentation was the loss of vigor of the anti-war crowd here in the United States: "For while 'they' won, 'we' did not. The 'we' who wanted 'us' to lose had long since been disbanded. The domestic convulsion set off by the Vietnam War had subsided long before the peoples of Indochina were liberated from the American murder machine."
Ms. Sontag's qualities were on full display during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She supported the Muslim side and was a leading purveyor of the Muslim-fabricated myth of the Serbian "rape camps" where she asserted that "tens of thousands of women" were raped "by military order." Writing in the Nation on Christmas Day 1995 she likened her trips to Sarajevo—comfortable, safe, and well-publicized—to the struggle of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Ms. Sontag's a-priori assumptions, that the Serbs were Fascist monsters, the Muslims innocent victims of a brutal aggression, were beyond dispute. Her smug self-depiction as a brave voice of intellectual and moral integrity in a cynical world was laughable.
Ms. Sontag was an enthusiastic supporter of Clinton's war against the Serbs in 1999. She ridiculed the objection that the war is ("wonderful word") illegal" with the usual reductio ad Hitlerum: "Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision?" Writing in The New York Times in May 1999 she reasserted the lie of the Kosovo genocide, then repeated the already discredited claim that its prevention was the reason for Clinton's war, and finally dehumanized the victims of that war:
"it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing. Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust? There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war? The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples."
Sontag's view of the Balkans provides an apt summary of her opus. As The New York Times obituarist has noted, she championed style over content: "She was concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term." In short she was not concerned with the truth. She dabbled in ideas but she could not think. Her lies, dishonesty, absence of moral sense and self-deceptions amounted to a sustained exercise in counter-realism, which is the essence of post-modernism.
In the post-modernist vein Susan Sontag was also a plagiarist who routinely stole words written by other people and presented them as her own. She inserted 12 segments totaling four pages written by others into her 387-page historical novel "In America," and did so without credit or attribution. The New York Times—a sympathetic source that has given Ms. Sontag thousands of column-inches over the years—wrote that "in some passages the language itself is taken almost verbatim from other authors." But Ms. Sontag blithely responded that the historical novel is an evolving new genre that does not require the rigor of footnotes and attributions: "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain? I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them? There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions."
It defies belief that someone of Susan Sontag's talent, literacy, integrity, education, moral sense, and beliefs could be taken seriously by any segment of any country's educated public for any period of time. That this was so in America is as sad as the fact that Bernard-Henri Lévy is widely regarded as France's foremost contemporary philosopher. But "BHL" is Sontag's twin brother in almost every field imaginable: a media personality, an "intellectual," a hater of Western civilization, a Christophobe, an "essayist," an enthusiastic promoter of homosexuality, an admirer of Sartre, an outspoken advocate of the Muslim side in the Bosnian war and in Kosovo. In Sontag's and Levy's lunatic account of world affairs the Christians are always at fault and their enemies are always innocent of any wrongdoing. For both of them the "siege" of Sarajevo became a stage for countless self-serving media appearances, as well as the symbol of their decisive move beyond truth and reality and beyond the limits of the aesthetic.
Thanks to Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy and their ilk, New York and Paris—until not so long ago two intellectual capitals of the world—have succumbed to the culture of depravity, victimology and self-hate. Financed by George Soros, the MacArthur Foundation & Co., lionized by the likes of the New Yorker and Liberation, they have done the best to destroy the civilization they hate while feeding the minds of future suicide bombers with a political pap that nourishes their hate and legitimizes their rage.
Susan Sontag's death at 71 was at least four decades overdue.
She joins that other social/moral anarchist scum that died this year, Edward Said.
Good summation. I'd say she was just another participant in an ever shrinking circle jerk. They only gratify each other while the rest of the world goes about the difficult work of life and making it better for the future.
And she died from cancer...bitter spirit Susan.
you're right ...it was shallow of me to suggest otherwise.
maybe it's a southern thing....down here there are precious few pretty fembots...course there are few fembots here anyhow.
Great article! Thanks for posting it!
Susan Sontag is definitely one of the most vicious of the woodworms who have been busy boring at the foundations of our culture for many a long year. She got a sympathy bounce over her breast cancer (like she's the only one who ever had it???) and I think that always protected her from the very severe criticism which she really deserved.
EVERY knee shall bow, Every tongue confess....
Yeah, so?
Seems we have lost an excellent source of raw material, but there is sufficient such raw material to last for a long time.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Some people have such an overwhelming and abiding sense of inferiority and worthlessness that they have to devote their entire lives to proving how intellectually and morally superior they are to everyone else.
10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad" and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow." The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to reject the word "pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to upper-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative," "enterprise," "optimism," etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's problems for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.
18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e. failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly.
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
The psalmist provides you with ample precedent. Anger is not a sin. Staying angry, hating and enjoying hating, is most definitely sinful.
I do, I will admit, regret the fact that Ms. Sontag's eternal sojourn in hell will not repair all of the harm she and her ilk have wrought upon Western culture.
So, what are the TOP TEN reasons for having utter contempt for liberals?
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