In the wake of Susan Sontag’s death, the most quoted of her writings is this paragraph penned in the New Yorker just after 9/11 (see Tim Blair or LGF):
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? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing America bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves 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.
For Marc Cooper, jumping to her defence, “Sullying Sontag for this postulation was, in itself, an act of cowardice.” Marc goes on to say how poorly Sontag fitted the stereotype of a kneejerk leftie:
In 1982, Sontag raised a storm at a New York Town Hall rally for the Polish Solidarnosc movement. Saying that Communism was but Fascism with a human face, Sontag angered the liberal audience by arguing that if anyone had read only The Nation or only the Readers Digest over the previous 20 years, the one who read the Digest would be be better prepared to understand the revolt in Poland.
During the 1990’s Sontag made the Balkans and opposition to Milosevic’s form of facsism her personal crusade, making serveral perilous visits to Sarajevo and — somtimes alone among American intellectuals- calling for armed Western intervention.
Which is all true. Nevertheless her New Yorker remarks were offensive. She’s claiming to be stating uncomfortable facts whereas she is in truth condoning – “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions” – and even lauding, comparing the hijackers favourably with pilots bombing Iraq. Despite the pretence that courage is morally neutral, it is no such thing. To ascribe courage to someone is to praise them. That’s why her contention that the attackers were not cowards – in effect, that they were courageous – grates so much, and intentionally so. She claims to be just giving the facts, which the general hysteria of the moment had obscured, which people of lesser integrity (and, yes, courage) than herself were too scared to utter, intimidated as they were by the herd requirement to condemn. But to ascribe courage to the 9/11 hijackers, or to suicide bombers generally, is simply perverse. Yes, it’s clear why someone might wish to say that: in a sense the decision to pull the pin and end your life along with other innocents around you requires a certain determination which is also required by acts of courage; but that’s as far as it goes. Courage is not a word we should be using in such situations. Perhaps cowardly is not much more appropriate, but at least it manages to convey some condemnation of a despicable act: a condemnation which Sontag was at pains to distance herself from.
Update: Roger Kimball provides a typically jaundiced but amusing overview of Sontag’s career. Going to Sarajevo in 1993 to produce Waiting for Godot–“surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time”.
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