Kicking at Dead Women
Well I suppose we should start at the top and head on from there. Beating up on a dead woman takes real guts... and you didn't do a very good job. If you would like to see someone take the piss out of her I would suggest the essay "I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag" in the UK Daily Telegraph, but I want you to notice something buried in the article:

Admittedly, the vainglorious silliness that was her most salient characteristic did not lead her to embrace the Marxism of so many similarly silly Cambridge intellectuals.

Why would the author write such a thing? Well... because Susan Sontag wasn't a Marxist/Communist. In fact Susan Sontag believed that Communism was a form of fascism. You see you have taken your quote completely out of context. The quote you use is from a meeting called to express condemnation of the crushing of the democratic movement in Poland. The "enemy" Susan mentions in this quote isn't Communist, it is the Anti-Communist.... the "we" she refers to is the "people at whom the folks living in that collective know as "the Upper West Side" look down over the their Beluga from Zabars)" as you so eloquently and insultingly put it. So she is saying "Can it be that our (us the liberal's) enemies (the Anti-Communist) were right?"

To make this very clear here is a bit from the same speech that you quote:

We were unwilling to identify ourselves as anti-Communists because that was the slogan of the right, the ideology of the cold war and, in particular, the justification of America's support of fascist dictatorships in Latin America and of the American war on Vietnam. (The story, of course, starts much earlier, in Europe in the late 1920s, with the rise of fascism, whose principal war cry was anti-Communism.) The anti-Communist position seems already taken care of by those we oppose at home.

I want to challenge this view.

Further more.

There are many lessons to be learned from the Polish events. But, I would maintain, the principal lesson to be learned is the lesson of the failure of Communism, the utter villainy of the Communist system. It has been a hard lesson to learn. And I am struck by how long it has taken us to learn it.

Further more.

I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism--successful fascism, If you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown=-that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies--especially when their populations are moved to revolt--but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.

WOW she sounds like a raving commie to me!!

In the future before thrashing about insulting people please at least read the source material you are quoting.

- posted by Anonymous @ Thursday, January 13, 2005