On 10/9/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Good God, I agree with Pug!
Heh, Oh oh, time to change my mind ;-)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19820227/sontag
>...This broad consensus was abruptly--some have said
rudely--disturbed by a speech by Susan Sontag. With her permission, we
reprint her version of the speech so that readers can form their own
opinions of it. But those attending the meeting, as well as the Soho
News, which reprinted the speech without obtaining the author's
permission, agree that she also said the following:
Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19820227/sontag/6
Communism and the Left: Poland and Other Questions CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor of The Nation.
I was at the meeting, and I have spent ten years working for the New Statesman and The Nation. I was pleased that Susan Sontag invited the left to criticize its own record on Stalinism, and I see no sign that she has moved noticeably toward the Manichaean anti-Communism of the bad old days.
The Polish workers movement is a cause in its own right. It should be supported without any throat-clearing about El Salvador. We do not have to prove that we are not reactionaries--it was never demanded of Walesa that he denounce Pinochet (though it would have been nice if he had). Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and ship-builders have been abolished. It is, really, casuistry to mention them in the same breath.
Having tried to open a debate on the responsibilities of the left, Sontag has done her best to close it again by ill-tempered and ahistorical remarks about fascism and the record of the Reader's Digest. (Actually, if the Bolsheviks had not won the civil war, the word for fascism would be a Russian one and not an Italian one.) Let us be charitable and assume that she was trying to galvanize an audience by deliberate exaggeration. Aren't there some people who wish that what she said was even more untrue than it is? Are there not "intellectuals" who condemn Stalinism for the sake of symmetry, or because it embarrasses the left and encourages the right, rather than because it is a deadly foe of socialism and democracy?
Actually, the real trahison in the Polish affair has come from the liberals, not from the left. It is the George Kennans, hostile to socialism as an idea, who have found the excuses of Realpolitik for Soviet conduct. But on the left, too, there are some who divert an argument about Polish self-determination into an argument about the hypocrisy of Reagan and Haig. By doing so, they devalue solidarity with Solidarity, and I think Sontag was right to say so.
-- Michael Pugliese