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Susan Sontag: bites the dust at age 71

Thread ID: 16104 | Posts: 32 | Started: 2004-12-28

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jay [OP]

2004-12-28 18:18 | User Profile

[QUOTE]Highly ironic that the woman who called the white race the "cancer" of history ends up dying of.....yep....cancer. - Jay[/QUOTE]

[URL=http://]http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/la-122804sontag_lat,0,4918993,print.story?coll=ny-entertainment-headlines[/URL]

Author Susan Sontag Dies She was one of America's most influential intellectuals who wrote about diverse subjects and authored 17 books. She was 71.

By Steve Wasserman Times Staff Writer

December 28, 2004, 11:38 AM EST

Susan Sontag, one of America’s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died today of leukemia. She was 71.

The author of 17 books translated into 32 languages, she vaulted to public attention and critical acclaim with the 1964 publication of "Notes on Camp," written for Partisan Review and included in "Against Interpretation," her first collection of essays, published two years later.

Sontag died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Sontag wrote about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism, Bunraku puppet theater and the choreography of Balanchine, as well as portraits of such writers and intellectuals as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti.

Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform.

"We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."

In a Rolling Stone article in 1979, Jonathan Cott called Sontag a writer who was "continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other — much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one’s touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving."

A self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist," Sontag sought to challenge conventional thinking.

She wrote four novels, "The Benefactor," "Death Kit," "The Volcano Lover," and "In America," which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction.

Sontag was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of an alcoholic schoolteacher mother and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5. She was a graduate of North Hollywood High School and attended UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago — which she entered when she was 16 — and Harvard and Oxford.

In 1950, while at the University of Chicago, she met and 10 days later married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor in social theory. Two years later, at age 19, she had a son David, now a prominent writer. She was divorced in 1959 and never remarried.

Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables."

"I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all."

She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom."

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London’s "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations."

At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night."

Sontag began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature — buying when I could, stealing when I dared."

She also became a "militant browser" of the international periodical and newspaper stand near the "enchanted crossroads" of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where she discovered the world of literary magazines. She was fond of recounting how, at 15, she had bought a copy of Partisan Review and found it impenetrable. Nevertheless, "I had the sense that within its pages momentous issues were at stake. I wanted desperately to crack the code."

At 26, she moved to New York City where, for a time, she taught the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. At a cocktail party, she encountered William Phillips, one of Partisan Review’s legendary founding editors and asked him how one might write for the journal. He replied, "All you have to do is ask." "I’m asking," she said.

Soon Sontag’s provocative essays on Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Jasper Johns and the Supremes began to spice Partisan Review’s pages. Sontag recoiled at what she regarded as the artificial boundaries separating one subject, or one art form, from another.

"I love to read the way people love to watch television," she told Rolling Stone. For her, culture was a vast smorgasbord, a movable feast. The point, she often said, quoting Goethe, was "to know everything."

"So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, appreciate and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche. The main reason I read is that I enjoy it. There’s no incompatibility between observing the world and being tuned into an electronic, multimedia, multi-tracked, McLuhanite world and enjoying what can be enjoyed about rock ’n’ roll."

Sontag devoted herself to demolishing "the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking."

Her quest was admired by such writers as Elizabeth Hardwick, a founder of the New York Review of Books, whose editors quickly embraced Sontag. In her introduction to "A Susan Sontag Reader," Hardwick called her "an extraordinarily beautiful, expansive, and unique talent."

Each of Sontag’s essays, Hardwick wrote, "has a profound authority, a rather anxious and tender authority — the reward of passion. The tone of her writing is speculative, studious and yet undogmatic; even in the end it is still inquiring."

Others were less impressed. John Simon accused Sontag of "a tendency to sprinkle complication into her writing" and of tossing off "high-sounding paradoxes without thinking through what, if anything, they mean." Greil Marcus called her "a cold writer" whose style was "an uneasy combination of academic and hip pedantic, effete, unfriendly." Walter Kendrick found her fiction "dull and derivative."

In 1976, at 43, Sontag discovered she had advanced cancer in her breast, lymphatic system and leg. She was told she had a one-in-four chance to live five years. After undergoing a radical mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was pronounced free of the disease. "My first reaction was terror and grief. But it’s not altogether a bad experience to know you’re going to die. The first thing is not to feel sorry for yourself."

She learned as much as possible about the disease and later wrote "Illness as Metaphor," an influential essay condemning the abuse of tuberculosis and cancer as metaphors that transfer responsibility for sickness to the victims, who are made to believe they have brought suffering on themselves. Illness, she insisted, is fact, not fate. Years later, she would extend the argument in the book-length essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors."

An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."

In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. [SIZE=6][COLOR=DimGray]The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself[/COLOR]."[/SIZE]

Considering herself neither a journalist nor an activist, Sontag felt an obligation as "a citizen of the American empire" to accept an invitation to visit Hanoi at the height of the American bombing campaign in May 1968. A two-week visit resulted in a fervent essay seeking to understand Vietnamese resistance to American power.

Critics excoriated her for what they regarded as a naive sentimentalization of Vietnamese communism. Author Paul Hollander, for one, called Sontag a "political pilgrim," bent on denigrating Western liberal pluralism in favor of venerating foreign revolutions.

That same year, Sontag also visited Cuba, after which she wrote an essay for Ramparts magazine calling for a sympathetic understanding of the Cuban Revolution. Two years later, however, she joined Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers in publicly protesting the regime’s harsh treatment of Heberto Padilla, one of the country’s leading poets. She also denounced dictator Fidel Castro’s punitive policies toward homosexuals.

Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left’s refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin’s terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed.

Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she would called for vigorous Western — and American — intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo prompted her to make more than a dozen trips to the besieged city.

Then in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards."

She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism.

Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel’s Jerusalem Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and Germany’s Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Upon accepting the prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments [is] never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians."

Last March, she was found to have a condition that, if left untreated, would be fatal: a pre-acute leukemia that doctors concluded was a consequence of the chemotherapy she had undertaken to rid herself of a uterine sarcoma discovered five years before. A little more than four months after the diagnosis, she received a partial bone marrow transplant.

In an interview for the Paris Review, in 1995, Sontag was asked what she thought was the purpose of literature.

"A novel worth reading," she replied, "is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness." She was the cartographer of her own literary explorations. Henry James once remarked, "Nothing is my last word on anything." For Sontag, as for James, there was always more to be said, more to be felt.

She is survived by her son, David, and a sister, [COLOR=Red][U]Judith Cohen[/U][/COLOR].

Her papers — manuscripts, diaries, journals and correspondence — as well as her 25,000-volume personal library were acquired by the UCLA Library in 2002 and will be housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. Copyright © 2004, The Los Angeles Times

Okiereddust

2004-12-28 22:10 | User Profile

[QUOTE=jay][URL=http://]http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/la-122804sontag_lat,0,4918993,print.story?coll=ny-entertainment-headlines[/URL]

Author Susan Sontag Dies She was one of America's most influential intellectuals who wrote about diverse subjects and authored 17 books. She was 71.

By [B]Steve Wasserman[/B] Times Staff Writer

December 28, 2004, 11:38 AM EST

Susan Sontag, one of America’s most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights, died today of leukemia. She was 71. Golly. I keep getting more little bits and pieces here every time I read this. Note the author of this little celebratory eulogy. Little wonder at Sontag's success - if here name was Jones or Murphy I doubt she'd have rated higher than a bright high school english teacher.

She also became a "militant browser" of the international periodical and newspaper stand near the "enchanted crossroads" of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where she discovered the world of literary magazines. She was fond of recounting how, at 15, she had bought a copy of Partisan Review and found it impenetrable. Nevertheless, "I had the sense that within its pages momentous issues were at stake. I wanted desperately to crack the code."

At 26, she moved to New York City where, for a time, she taught the philosophy of religion at Columbia University. At a cocktail party, she encountered William Phillips, one of Partisan Review’s legendary founding editors and asked him how one might write for the journal. He replied, "All you have to do is ask." "I’m asking," she said.

Ah yes, the old Partisan Review crowd. See MacDonald on that.

Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left’s refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin’s terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed

Ten years later, almost alone among American intellectuals, she would called for vigorous Western — and American — intervention in the Balkans to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to stop Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her solidarity with the citizens of Sarajevo prompted her to make more than a dozen trips to the besieged city.

Iconoclastic - in the same uniform way that all the New York Intellectuals were. Wasserman must figure though the [I]goy[/I] will never pick this up, and the tribesman will never complain.

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Especially uniconoclastic

She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism. Obviously though never the big one "Anti-S"

Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel’s Jerusalem Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and Germany’s Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Upon accepting the prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments [is] never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians." Must not have complained too loudly. Would Chomsky ever receive this award?

She is survived by her son, David, and a sister, [COLOR=Red][U]Judith Cohen[/U][/COLOR].

Just curious about the name difference. Sontag is not your most obviously jewish name.

Free The Truth

2004-12-28 23:33 | User Profile

A Jew who is anti-American :yawn:

What am I saying, Jews are anti-everything non Jewish. I wasn't aware of this Susan Sontag, but to me she sounded like another Jewish Rat.

Okiereddust pretty much answered what I was thinking when I was reading the story.

Howard Campbell, Jr.

2004-12-29 00:11 | User Profile

Her "White Race = Cancer" remark was merely an overt expression of an covert sentiment held by many, many of her Tribesmen--from Marxist to Neo-Con.

She could be brilliant. "Notes on Camp" and "Fascinating Fascism" are deeply insightful pieces on the psychopathology of homosexuality and the counter-productive fetishism of Hollywood Nazis, respectively...

Walter Yannis

2004-12-29 06:21 | User Profile

Let's do an instant poll!

Susan Sontag:

A. went to Heaven B. went to Hell C. went to Purgatory for a very long stay D. Was reincarnated as a brood sow on a small farm in Iowa.

Walter

Faust

2004-12-29 07:39 | User Profile

Walter Yannis,

[QUOTE]Let's do an instant poll!

Susan Sontag:

A. went to Heaven B. went to Hell C. went to Purgatory for a very long stay D. Was reincarnated as a brood sow on a small farm in Iowa.[/QUOTE]

[COLOR=Red][SIZE=7]D[/SIZE][/COLOR]

Kevin_O'Keeffe

2004-12-29 13:11 | User Profile

[quote=walter yannis]A. went to Heaven B. went to Hell C. went to Purgatory for a very long stay D. Was reincarnated as a brood sow on a small farm in Iowa.

At least with option D, she is performing a useful function for the first time in her previously rotten existence, i.e. producing pork for our "cancerous" offspring to delightfully munch upon....

Walter Yannis

2004-12-29 14:20 | User Profile

I'll wait a day or two before posting the correct answer so that others may have a chance to respond.

Walter Cardinal Yannis

Free The Truth

2004-12-29 14:29 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]I'll wait a day or two before posting the correct answer so that others may have a chance to respond.

Walter Cardinal Yannis[/QUOTE] I'll have to go for [size=4][color=red]D[/color][/size] as well. If she were Jewish it would have to be either [size=4][color=red]B[/color][/size] or [size=4][color=red]D[/color][/size]

Can I say [size=4][color=red]D[/color][/size], then went on to [size=4][color=red]B[/color][/size] :thumbsup:

vytis

2004-12-29 15:50 | User Profile

First of all she was a Jew.....

And since I usually sign off with 'Wer kennt den Jude kennt den Teufel' ('Whoever knows the Jew knows the Devil') my answer to the poll is size=4.[/size]

vytis

jay

2004-12-30 00:45 | User Profile

Depends on if she accepted the Gospel or not.

I'd have to guess that she did not - but that's not for me to judge. The only thing I can say with any assurety is this: her comment on the "white race" being a cancer was utterly amazing, and should have led to her banishment from any relevance in society and coverage in the papers.

As such, it was the opposite. I guess we can expect that from a culture that elevates such mediocrities as Paris Hilton, Ray Lewis and George W.

Bardamu

2004-12-30 01:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Let's do an instant poll!

Susan Sontag:

A. went to Heaven B. went to Hell C. went to Purgatory for a very long stay D. Was reincarnated as a brood sow on a small farm in Iowa.

Walter[/QUOTE]

I just got back from Iowa and I resent this.

Blond Knight

2004-12-30 02:04 | User Profile

The following article identifies this old fart-bag's birth name as Susan Rosenblatt. Sounds kosher to me.

[url]http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/10514651.htm[/url]

As to the poll, I'll vote for D, but only after the old bag of guts serves a long stretch in a Turkish bordello.

Bardamu

2004-12-30 02:08 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Blond Knight]The following article identifies this old fart-bag's birth name as Susan Rosenblatt. Sounds kosher to me.

[url]http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/10514651.htm[/url]

As to the poll, I'll vote for D, but only after the old bag of guts serves a long stretch in a Turkish bordello.[/QUOTE]

If you are wondering whether she was a Jew? I can answer that: She was.

Okiereddust

2004-12-30 02:37 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Blond Knight]The following article identifies this old fart-bag's birth name as Susan Rosenblatt. Sounds kosher to me.

[url]http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/10514651.htm[/url] [/QUOTE]So does Nathan Sontag I guess.

Golly that's a scary picture. :eek:

Interesting link BTW on the New York Intellectuals in general.

[url]http://wrf.ca/comment/2004/0101/31[/url]

Okiereddust

2004-12-30 03:36 | User Profile

[IMG]http://www2.davidduke.com/images/thumb-sontag.jpg[/IMG] Left: the deification of Susan Sontag

The Canonization of Susan Sontag commentary by [URL=http://www.davidduke.com]David Duke[/URL]

Susan Sontag is best known for her statement that “The white race is the cancer of history.” In life, the media establishment never condemned her for that racist, hateful statement. She was, in fact, one of those larger than life darlings of the media who received positive prime time coverage too many times to count.

Now that she has passed on, you can be sure that her sainthood will not be one bit diminished bt that hateful statement. In fact, she is at this moment being praised by many in the media for having the “courage” to make such a “daring, outspoken utterance.” Her canonization has commenced and be ready to wade though the cascading media praises.

In reality, the “against all war” writer turned out to be in favor of war when it suited the cause of globalism against pesky nationalism. The New York Times Magazine published Susan Sontag’s, “Why Kosovo Is Not That Complicated.”

The writer who labelled the white race as the cancer of history had decided a little chemo-therapy in form of bombs dropped by B-52s was the humanitarian thing to do. Was this not the same writer who decried the bombings of Vietnamese in the 60s?

Sontag’s son, (Jewish supremacism definitely runs in the family), David Rieff, was the guest of honor at an editorial meeting of the nominally socialist magazine Dissent.

Rieff said things like, “I know most of you probably won’t agree. I’m not coming from a left perspective. I have a different analysis of how power works.” He said “I’m in favor of more bombing. I don’t think they’re doing enough.” He loved the idea of American ground troops in Serbia – he said, as if he weren’t the nerdy little Jewish type like most in the room, “I would be in the lead vehicle!”

In truth, Susan Sontag was one of those so-called human rights activists who incongruously also happen to be Jewish supremacists and haters of European mankind, Palestinian or Arab resistance, or anybody who gets in the way of Jewish supremacy. Oh, you know the type, like Alan Dershowitz the “civil rights activist” who supports Apartheid Israel and is now on record for advocating torture of suspects in the United States.

A person who never passed up the chance to put down White people, Sontag, born Rosenblatt, was also careful to never speak against the unspeakable atrocities of her brethren in Israel against the hapless Palestinians. After all, the mass deportation, murder, destruction and torture were done against Jewish enemies, not against Jews, so that makes all Okay, maybe even commendable. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize by her fellow supremacists in Israel.

In the coming days, as you see the praises of Susan Sontag coming at you full bore in print and broadcast media, you might ask yourself what treatment she would be getting at the hands of the media if she would have said that “The Jewish people are the cancer of history.” I don’t think she would have won any Jerusalem Prizes,” and far from being made a saint, she would have long ago been made a devil.

Those of you reading this who want to know who really runs the establishment in America, consider the hypocritical canonization of Susan Sontag.

Walter Yannis

2004-12-30 04:52 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Bardamu]I just got back from Iowa and I resent this.[/QUOTE] :punk:

Kevin_O'Keeffe

2004-12-30 06:49 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Okiereddust]Golly that's a scary picture. :eek:[/QUOTE]

Its so funny that Jews actually go around looking like that. They might as well all wear signs that say "Servant of Satan - Liable to Commit Human Sacrifice of Gentile Babies and Gargle Their Blood at any Moment." Seriously, she looks like a character from a horror movie, as do many, many Jews (which may say something about what we're trying to subconciously tell each other via our horror literature, come to think of it - that would be an interesting essay - "Subliminal Depiction of the Jew in Modern Horror Cinema"). Its even scarier to note that's how she looked in 1992. Imagine how hideously ugly and demonic she looked on the day she died!

Okiereddust

2004-12-30 16:48 | User Profile

(Re this picture) [IMG]http://www.duluthsuperior.com/images/realcities/realcities/10514/110551933304.jpg[/IMG] [QUOTE=Kevin_O'Keeffe]Its so funny that Jews actually go around looking like that. They might as well all wear signs that say "Servant of Satan - Liable to Commit Human Sacrifice of Gentile Babies and Gargle Their Blood at any Moment." Seriously, she looks like a character from a horror movie, as do many, many Jews (which may say something about what we're trying to subconciously tell each other via our horror literature, come to think of it - that would be an interesting essay - "Subliminal Depiction of the Jew in Modern Horror Cinema"). Its even scarier to note that's how she looked in 1992. Imagine how hideously ugly and demonic she looked on the day she died![/QUOTE]

Yes it is weird. I don't know if its significant in this case, but Richard Wurmbrand, who has an interesting hypothesis ([I]Marx and Satan)[/I] ) that many left-wing personas maintained occult ties, thought at times even their appearance betrayed occultic connections, such as with Marx's beard, which was similar to followers of one Satanic cult. Sontag - just looks - weird to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some new age fashion tendency she's mimicking.

Free The Truth

2004-12-30 17:33 | User Profile

[color=black]She looks like that evil women from 101 Dalmatians. I mean she is ugly, but then again she is Jewish so what could we expect. No wonder Jews are the directors of Porno films and not the actors, they are too ugly and want Good White Christians to be taken into hell with them.[/color]

jay

2004-12-30 18:58 | User Profile

The white race is the cancer of history.

If so, why didn't she move to Mexico or Zimbabwe, where she could easily avoid living amongst those "cancerous" whites?

Faust

2005-01-02 06:17 | User Profile

Well, she was not as bad as Alan Dershowitz, she did not join the Neocons, like many of her type. Alan Dershowitz is a lower form of Life.

[QUOTE]Then in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards."

She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism.

Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel’s Jerusalem Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and Germany’s Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Upon accepting the prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments [is] never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians."[/QUOTE]

Walter Yannis

2005-01-03 15:05 | User Profile

I guess everybody's answered who wants to, so I'll post the correct answer.

The correct answer is B. She went to hell.

When approaching a multiple choice question, it's always best to eliminate the obviously wrong answers first. Clearly, this miserable anti-White bitch didn't go to heaven directly, so we can eliminate A.

We also know that there is no such thing as reincarnation, so we can eliminate D (although clearly there would be some poetic justice in such a fate for her). From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

[QUOTE]1013 Death is the end of man's earthly pilgrimage, of the time of grace and mercy which God offers him so as to work out his earthly life in keeping with the divine plan, and to decide his ultimate destiny. When "the single course of our earthly life" is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives: "It is appointed for men to die once." There is no "reincarnation" after death.[/QUOTE]

Susan Sontag is not now a brood sow in Iowa, however might we might wish for it.

This narrows the choice down to purgatory and hell. The choice gives one pause, to be sure, but ultimately we must eliminate purgatory as a possibility. Susan Sontag died wishing for the genocide of one billion white people, reviling them as a "cancer." The Catechism teaches that genocide is a mortal sin, and she actively advocated genocide to the day she died.

[QUOTE]2313 . . . .Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.[/QUOTE]

This means that she did not die in God's grace. I point out as well that she was presumably not baptized and did not accept the atonement of Christ as her only reprieve from hell. This precludes purgatory.

Thus, the only answer that could possibly be correct is B, hell.

The soul of Susan Sontag is now in hell, where it shall forever cringe in the horror of her separation from the Source of All Being, may His Name be forever blessed.

I take some cold comfort in that nearly certain knowledge.

The Holy Inquisition has spoken! :alucard:

Walter Yannis

2005-01-03 15:11 | User Profile

QUOTE=Okiereddust [IMG]http://www.duluthsuperior.com/images/realcities/realcities/10514/110551933304.jpg[/IMG]

Yes it is weird. I don't know if its significant in this case, but Richard Wurmbrand, who has an interesting hypothesis ([I]Marx and Satan)[/I] ) that many left-wing personas maintained occult ties, thought at times even their appearance betrayed occultic connections, such as with Marx's beard, which was similar to followers of one Satanic cult. Sontag - just looks - weird to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some new age fashion tendency she's mimicking.[/QUOTE]

Kevin, Okie, great observations. The "left" is all about Jews, and Jews are as a culture heavily influenced by the profoundly occult kabbalah.

The leftist acquaintaces I have tend strongly toward neo-pagan, new age religions and beliefs. Being "religious" is bad, but being "spiritual" is good.

I think she might very well have been a satanist. I can easily imagine her at that orgy in Kubrick's last flick.

Free The Truth

2005-01-03 15:12 | User Profile

Like Lazarus and the Rich man, I hope she may forever see her errors (which from what I read/hear she most likely will not!

Faust

2005-01-26 05:31 | User Profile

Sobran on Susan Sontag:

THE DARK LADY, AND OTHER INTELLECTUALS January 4, 2005

by Joe Sobran

 Susan Sontag, who has died at 71, was more than just

a pretty face. When she made her splash among New York intellectuals in the Sixties, I was a college boy watching from afar in Michigan and grasping only a few enigmatic words people were quoting from her. She drove conservatives nuts with such pronouncements as "The white race is the cancer of history" -- one of her more lucid lines.

 It was unsettling to me that a young woman so

beautiful could be so infatuated with Cuba and North Vietnam. Did she see something in them that I was missing? She spoke as one who had some special insight, not easily communicable to lesser mortals, such as Midwestern college boys.

 Miss Sontag had a beauty all her own: arresting dark

eyes, perfect mouth, flowing hair. Even when she aged, her looks remained absolutely distinctive. I once passed her on the street in Greenwich Village and recognized her instantly. She was older by then, but she still looked like nobody else.

 I dwell on her looks because I think they were the

real reason people -- men, for instance -- paid attention to her. And I think she knew it. She had a feminine knack for getting noticed and saying provocative things. In her seemingly abstruse writing, I always sensed an element of flirtation. As with many lovely women, you listened in fascination even when she made no sense at all. Was she talking nonsense, or deepening her mystery?

 Someone called Miss Sontag "the Dark Lady of Radical

Chic." If she was left-wing, it had nothing to do with the class struggle and the labor theory of value. It was just vaguely aesthetic. Roger Kimball of THE NEW CRITERION, in a testy obituary, quotes her early essay in praise of Communist Cuba. She urged her American readers to "love the Cuban revolution." American culture, she said, was "inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian." Whereas "the Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality, and freaking out. They are not linear, dessicated creatures of print culture."

 To which the only rational reply is: Say what? That

was my general reaction to her writing. Every dogmatic assertion lost me, and I could only move on to the next dogmatic assertion. Her early prose was a kaleidoscope of obscure overstatements, delivered in unmeasured words. You couldn't even argue with it. Any attempt to refute her might expose you as a hopelessly linear, dessicated creature of print culture.

 It was her way to say controversial things without

getting into controversy herself. She'd just say them, then let everyone else overreact. Kimball, for example, says of her, "Few people have managed to combine naive idealization of foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable effect." Deplorable effect? I don't think she had any effect at all, except on conservative intellectuals' digestive systems. She struck poses and uttered a few outre aphorisms, but that hardly adds up to cultural influence.

 Kimball goes on to say that "her celebrity was ...

the tawdry coefficient of a lifelong devotion to the mendacious and disfiguring imperatives of radical chic." Come again? That sentence rivals Miss Sontag herself in its fusion of exaggeration and obscurity. It lacks only a certain coquettish touch.

 I may as well say it: I'm tired of intellectuals,

Left and Right. Every week I buy a handful of highbrow magazines from New York and London, and after reading them I plunge into depression. I hardly know what they're talking about.

 For a long time I thought I'd missed something --

walked in late on the conversation, so to speak. Then I came to realize that most intellectuals simply don't know how to write; they know only how to punctuate. They don't listen to themselves or each other. And their editors don't send their copy back, demanding clarity.

 Of course this isn't just a vice of the highbrow.

Most people don't listen closely either to themselves or to others. But we assume that some people are trained to do it habitually, and it comes as a shock to find that most of them don't. They just drone on, like your Uncle Harry.

 Susan Sontag was a feast for the eye, if not for the

mind. That's more than you can say of most intellectuals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read this column on-line at "http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050104.shtml".

Copyright (c) 2005 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate, [url]www.griffnews.com[/url]. This column may not be published in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate. You may forward it to interested individuals if you use this entire page, including the following disclaimer:

"SOBRAN'S and Joe Sobran's columns are available by subscription. For details and samples, see [url]http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml[/url], write [email]PR@griffnews.com[/email], or call 800-513-5053."

[url]http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050104.shtml[/url]

na Gaeil is gile

2005-01-26 12:08 | User Profile

[QUOTE]The distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.[/QUOTE] The Brownian Motion basis of liberal thought summed up in one simple sentence.

albion

2005-01-26 14:48 | User Profile

[img]http://www.librarycommunityfoundation.org/Archive/1999/sontag.gif[/img] Susan Sontag died of leukaemia in New York on December 29 at the age of 71. The obituarists described her as "one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights" (The Financial Times, Dec. 30). [right][img]http://www.kulturkueche.de/inhalt/mixer/img/mixer18.jpg[/img][/right] Her essays "expanded the universe of subjects it was 'all right' for intellectuals to take seriously," such as drugs, porn, and pop, ensuring that we'd "get used to these as intellectual topics."

All of which is one way of saying that Ms. Sontag has made a solid contribution to the degrading of our cultural and intellectual standards over the past four decades. But unlike some other purveyors of bad ideas, such as Voltaire, who could present them in eloquent prose, Sontag was unable to write a decent sentence. Take this gem for style and contents: "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself" (Partisan Review, winter 1967, p. 57).

A week after the non-whites struck at the cancer's epicenter on September 11, 2001, Ms. Sontag asserted in The New Yorker, that this "monstrous dose of reality" was squarely a consequence of specific American actions, and paid tribute to the courage of those willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill others: "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

continues at: [url="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1311425/posts"]http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1311425/posts[/url]

il ragno

2005-01-26 14:52 | User Profile

Hard to fathom that [B]this [/B] is the face that launched a thousand ships - or at least one dinghy - in Joe Sobran's pants, eh?

il ragno

2005-01-26 15:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE]A person who never passed up the chance to put down White people, Sontag, born Rosenblatt, was also careful to never speak against the unspeakable atrocities of her brethren in Israel against the hapless Palestinians. After all, the mass deportation, murder, destruction and torture were done against Jewish enemies, not against Jews, so that makes all Okay, maybe even commendable. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize by her fellow supremacists in Israel.[/QUOTE]

One can certainly build a formidable case against Sontag, but Duke sounds as if he's hit that fork in the road where it's now time to cut his losses and raise money by giving the VNN crowd only what they want to hear.

Sontag was a very vocal, high-profile critic of the Israeli occupation, a key voice in making people awae of who Rachel Corrie was, even urging IDF troops to follow their consciences and disobey orders - and many, many Jews despise her for it.

What the heck's going on with Duke? This barely even [I]reads [/I] like him, and - given that anybody with a search-engine can debunk the paragraph above - inordinately sloppy. Given the multitude of Sontag's [I]actual [/I] sins, framing her for something an idiot can disprove in five minutes is lazy at best, and noxiously counter-productive at worst.

jay

2005-01-27 03:07 | User Profile

Help, Il. What is so easily disprovable here?

In any case, i'm glad Sontag bit it. There's some serious [I]shaudenfreude [/I] about a liberal bitch who called the white race "a cancer" dying of....yep...cancer.

PaleoconAvatar

2005-01-27 03:15 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]Hard to fathom that [B]this [/B] is the face that launched a thousand ships - or at least one dinghy - in Joe Sobran's pants, eh?[/QUOTE]

She looks like a guy wearing a wig.