A reader comes across an old essay by Susan Sontag, whose latest indictment of America will be published this weekend in the New York Times Magazine:
I came across the December 1968 Esquire. Its cover flap touts the big story: “Exclusive: Trip to Hanoi 28,000 Word Report by Susan Sontag.”
Much of the article is little more than a travelogue with discussions of how she got there, what the airport was like, how well-mannered the Vietnamese are, the fact that their babies don’t cry, what they serve for snacks (“overripe green bananas, Vietnamese cigarettes, damp cookies….”), how much they like individual Americans.
However, it quickly becomes clear that she is more than just a Communist sympathizer: She is herself a Communist who not only advocates U.S. defeat in Vietnam but also Communist revolution here.
Here is the money quote:
“And the revolution that remains to be made in this country [the United States] must be made in American terms, not those of an Asian peasant society … Life here [in America] looks both uglier and more promising … Increasing numbers of [Americans] do realize that we must have a more generous, more humane way of being with each other; and great, probably convulsive, social changes are needed to create these psychic changes … The wide prevalence of unfocused unhappiness in modern Western culture could be the beginning of real knowledge – by which I mean the knowing that leads simultaneously to action and to self-transcendence, the knowing that would lead to a new versions of human nature in this part of the world … Just possibly, the process of recasting the particular historical form of our human nature prevalent in Europe and American can be hurried a little, by more people becoming aware of capacies for sentiments and behavior that this culture’s values have obscured and slandered.
Sontag is urging on America “convulsive” social change to produce “new versions of human nature.” Lenin, anyone? No wonder she has found members of al Qaeda to be more moral than American soldiers.
CONTRA COLE: Juan Cole, stung by criticism that he directy equated Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein, tears me a new one on his blog. I should repeat for the record that Cole’s blog is well worth reading and a font of information and analysis. But it is also beset by a hatred of the Bush administration that mars its credibility. Cole lambastes me for a column I wrote before the war complaining about Howell Raines’ explicit camaigning against the war in the NYT. I would think by now that the question of Raines’ abuse of the NYT is largely settled. But Cole understandably loved Raines’ polemicizing in the guise of journalism. Then he attacks my column on several grounds. Firstly, that I dismissed predictions that the war would wreck the American economy. But I was right. If anything, war spending has juiced the economy, now predicted to grow at around 4.7 percent this year. Then he argues that paranoia and skepticism about the Bush administration’s motives, as exemplified by Raiunes, were rational. I beg to differ. I still see no evidence that the Bush administration’s motives were insincere. You can criticize them, as I have, for all sorts of things. But the insistence of the far left that it is an administration of deliberate lies and deception seems to me overblown and shrill. And even if such paranoia were defensible, the man running the most authoritative paper on the planet should try and rein his biases in, not give them full expression through news reporting. That was my point. Cole subsequently describes my description of possible motives for opposing war in 2002 as “character assassination.” Again, he exaggerates. It is perfectly fair to notice that Brent Scowcroft might be seeking to defend his past in opposing a new Iraq war. When your policy of keeping Saddam in power led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands, you have a good reason to make the case that you were nonetheless right. Cole then says my description of some military brass as “gun-shy” implies I am impugning their courage. Please. I’m merely describing the U.S. military’s long-held aversion to difficult conflicts.
TAINTED BY EXTREMISM: Cole then concedes that his posting was prompted by my criticism of his moral equation of Paul Wolfowitz with Saddam Hussein. Here is what he wrote:
“Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.”
Cole defends this obscenity by saying the following:
There is an enormous difference in scale between what Saddam did to them and what the Coalition has done since the beginning of April. But it is early days, after all. And in issues of ethics and hypocrisy, scale is less important than principle… “Saving” the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn’t been discredited. Since April 2 they haven’t been saving them any more. They have been killing them.
Notice that Cole has accused me of character assassination because I criticized an editor for being biased. But I haven’t accused anyone of deliberately following the genocidal policies of Saddam Hussein. Cole now steps back a bit and concedes that the Marsh Arab casualties in the insurgency cannot be compared to Saddam’s attempted wholesale destruction of an entire people. But he’s still vicious with regard to Wolfowitz. “Crowing” about the liberation of an entire sub-population? How about “celebrating”? And does Cole honestly believe that the Shiites now freed from Saddam haven’t really been saved? Notice also what Cole doesn’t take back: his vilest assertion that Wolfowitz, a decent and honorable man, is deliberately killing Shiites for the same reasons as Saddam Hussein. Does Cole really believe that Wolfowitz wants to commit genocide to entrench his own vile police state? Cole strikes me as a text-book case in the virtues and merits of today’s academic elite. They can marshall great scholarship and knowledge; but their ideological extremism taints it all.
The Dish 