Word: sontag
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...CROWD EXPECTED no surprises from Susan Sontag when she rose to speak, just another speech in a night of speeches on the theme "Solidarity." Like almost everyone else on the platform at Manhattan's Town Hall for the Jetty convocation that night. Sontag was sure to call Poland a tragedy, point out that America was doing much the same thing in El Salvador, denounce the president as a hypocrite, and sit down Instead. Sontag devoted most of her ten minutes to an attack on communism qua communism, and on the American left, at least some portion which she accused...
...another been notorious anti-Communist crusaders Not a single American with higher name recognition that Angela Davis might still be classed as an outright red, or even an obvious Comsymp. So where does this indictment of Cooper's--common enough in right wing circles--come from? Who is Sontag scolding...
...leftists, mostly intellectuals and mostly New Yorkers, who actually spent some or all of their lives in the thrall of sectarian myth. And maybe, more to the point, a somewhat larger number of"60s types who glorified a bit too strenuously the virtues of Fidel and Ho and Mao Sontag belongs, more or less, in both categories; she was born into the Manhattan neo-Stalinist school of the '30s and '40s (though she was never a supporter) and in the '60s revived her interest in Matters political to take an active part in the antiwar movement. She made the ritual...
EXCEPT THAT, once confessed, Sontag seems to want the rest of us to say her Hail Marys for her. The uproar that her speech set off at hysterics in The Nation can rightly be termed an uproar (may indicate there are a few remaining who see Sontag's speech as heresy, the fact that student activists on this campus have been more concerned about South African than the Ukraine might be proof of a subtle. Perhaps subconscious, willingness to set up double standards for "leftist" regimes (The again, it might not be evidence. South Africa, after all doesn't have...
...that perhaps this was the start of some peaceful evolution to a human government. If martial law served any good end, it was to remind the world what almost all of us knew that the soviet system was impermeable to decency, incontrovertible in its evil. In the same way, Sontag's formulation of "the essentially despotic nature of the Communist system (that is, a country any country ruled by a I Leninist Party)" is useful as a reminder of what happened to those who were shouting "Two, three many Vietnams" in 1969 Come 1990. We don't want to have...