A Short Reply
I think Susan Sontag would be pleased that people are debating her ideas and speeches after her death. Indeed, "kicking her", as you so wonderfully chose to put it, would look more like casting aside her life's work as not having the necessary gravity for debate, rather than preserving those ideas by discussing their worth. It's unfortunate, and kind of weird, that you feel otherwise.

It's not like I called her ugly.

Sontag placed her self squarely in the original center of the "anti- anti-communist crowd" (note the use of the word "we"). She was trying to convert her friends (and some might say herself), not give aid to the converted. Additionally, she seems unable to grasp where things went wrong with The Movement, and is reduced to tacitly calling the anti-communist / conservatives that which they also (in addition to communism) existentially opposed (fascists and fascism). It is a canard that conservatives supported fascism to defeat communism. It's a logical mind-trick that she employs to convince herself that she's been anti-communist all along. And it's rubbish.

Additionally, there is a difference between marxism in theory and communism as exited (and exists) in nature. Sontag was fond of the former, but against (as you cite) of the latter. I never said she was a "commie". The irony is that for being a Woman of Ideas, she failed to conprehend that ideas have consequences unless the realities of history demonstrated those consequences to her in cold blood. It took her 20 odd years to finally see the "human face" of tyranny, and even then, went down hurling names at those who could see clearly in the first place.

- posted by Anonymous @ Thursday, January 13, 2005