The "traitor" fires back

Denounced as a fifth columnist by the right, Susan Sontag blasts America's cowlike media and scaremongering leaders -- and says she fears that another terror attack could turn the U.S. into a police state.

By David Talbot

Oct 16, 2001 | Writer Susan Sontag has produced many texts during her four-decade career, including historical novels and reflections on cancer, photography and the war in Bosnia. But it was a brief essay, less than 1,000 words long, in the Sept. 24 issue of the New Yorker that created the biggest uproar of her life. In the piece, which she wrote shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Sontag dissected the political and media blather that poured out of the television in the hours after the explosions of violence. After subjecting herself to what she calls "an overdose of CNN," Sontag reacted with a coldly furious burst of analysis, savaging political leaders and media mandarins for trying to convince the country that everything was OK, that our attackers were simply cowards, and that our childlike view of the world need not be disturbed.

As if to prove her point, a furious chorus of sharp-tongued pundits immediately descended on Sontag, outraged that she had broken from the ranks of the soothingly platitudinous. She was called an "America-hater," a "moral idiot," a "traitor" who deserved to be driven into "the wilderness," never more to be heard. The bellicose right predictably tried to lump her in with the usual left-wing peace crusaders, whose programmed pacifism has sidelined them during the current political debates. But this tarbrush doesn't stick. As a thinker, Sontag is rigorously, sometimes abrasively, independent. She has offended the left as often as the right (political terms, she points out, that have become increasingly useless), alienating some ideologues when she attacked communism as "fascism with a human face" during the uprising of the Polish shipyard workers in the 1980s and again during the U.S. bombing campaign against the Serbian dictatorship, which she strongly supported.

Sontag, 68, remains characteristically unrepentant in the face of the recent attacks. On Monday, she talked with Salon by phone from her home in Manhattan, reflecting on the controversy, the Bush war effort and the media's surrender to what she views as a national conformity campaign.

Did the storm of reaction to your brief essay in the New Yorker take you by surprise?

Absolutely. I mean, I am aware of what a radical point of view is; very occasionally I have espoused one. But I did not think for a moment my essay was radical or even particularly dissenting. It seemed very common sense. I have been amazed by the ferocity of how I've been attacked, and it goes on and on. One article in the New Republic, a magazine for which I have written, began: "What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Susan Sontag have in common?" I have to say my jaw dropped. Apparently we are all in favor of the dismantling of America. There's a kind of rhetorical overkill aimed at me that is astonishing. There has been a demonization which is ludicrous.

What has been constructed is this sort of grotesque trinity comprised of myself, Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky. In the Saturday New York Times, Frank Rich tried in his way to defend us by arguing for our complete lack of importance, by saying that any substitute weather forecaster on TV has more influence than any of us. We were identified as a writer, a late evening comic, and a linguistics professor. Sorry, but Noam Chomsky is a good bit more than a "professor of linguistics." Our critics are up in arms against us because we do have a degree of influence. But our own "defenders" are reduced to saying, "Well, leave the poor things alone, they're quite obscure anyway. "

Look, I have nothing in common with Bill Maher, whom I had never heard of before. And I don't agree with Noam Chomsky, whom I am very familiar with. My position is decidedly not the Chomsky position

How do you differ from Chomsky?

First of all, I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy -- it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist.

I think what happened on Sept. 11 was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.

There was a very confident, orotund piece by Stanley Hoffman in the New York Review of Books -- he's a very senior wise man in the George Kennan mold, certainly no radical. And I felt I could agree with every word he was saying. He was saying bombing Afghanistan is not the solution. We have to understand what's going on in the Middle East, we have to rethink what's going on, our foreign policy. In fact, since Sept. 11, we're already seeing the most radical realignment of policies.

Bill Maher has abjectly apologized for his remarks --but you don't seem to be getting any more docile in the fact of this storm of criticism. Why not?

Well, I'm not an institution, and I don't have a job to lose. I just get lots of very nasty letters and read lots of very nasty things in the press.

What do the letters say?

That I'm a traitor. The New York Post, or so I've been told, has called for me to be drawn and quartered. And then there was this Ted Koppel show -- the producer invited me onto the show a week ago. It's not my thing, but I did it. And they got someone from the Heritage Foundation [Todd Gaziano], who practically foamed at the mouth, and said at one point, "Susan Sontag should not be permitted to speak in honorable intellectual circles ever again." And then Koppel said, "Whoa, you really mean she shouldn't be allowed to speak?" And he said, well maybe not silenced, but disgraced and "properly discounted for her crazy views."

So there's a serious attempt to stifle debate. But, of course, God bless the Net. I keep getting more articles of various dissenting opinions e-mailed to me; naturally, some of them are crazy and some I don't agree with at all. But you can't shut everyone up. The big media have been very intimidated, but not the Web.

I don't want to get defensive, but of course I am a little defensive because I'm still so stunned by the way my remarks were viewed. What I published in the New Yorker was written literally 48 hours after the Sept. 11 attacks. I was in Berlin at the time, and I was watching CNN for 48 hours straight. You might say that I had overdosed on CNN. And what I wrote was a howl of dismay at all the nonsense that I was hearing. That people were in a state of great pain and bewilderment and fear I certainly understood. But I thought, "Uh-oh, here comes a sort of revival of Cold War rhetoric and something utterly sanctimonious that is going to make it very hard for us to figure out how best to deal with this." And I have to say that my fears have been borne out.

What do you think of the Bush administration's efforts to control the media, in particular its requests that the TV networks not show bin Laden and al-Qaida's video statements?

Excuse me, but does anyone over the age of 6 really think that the way Osama bin Laden has to communicate with his agents abroad is by posing in that Flintstone set of his and pulling on his left earlobe instead of his right to send secret signals? Now, I don't believe that Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the administration really think that. At least I hope to hell they don't. I assume they have another reason for trying to stop the TV networks from showing bin Laden's videotapes, which is they just don't want people to see his message, whatever it is. They think, Why should we give him free publicity? Something very primitive like that. Which is ridiculous, because of course anyone can see these tapes for themselves online, via another TV news network abroad. Although I see the BBC, our British cousins who are of course ever servile, are discussing whether to broadcast the tapes. We can always count on the Brits to fall in line.

Why has the media been so willing to go along with the White House's censorship efforts?

Well, when people like me are being lambasted and excoriated for saying very mild things, no wonder the media is cowed. And self-censorship is much more widespread than one can imagine. Here's something no one has commented on that I continue to puzzle over: Who decided that no gruesome pictures of the World Trade Center site were to be published anywhere? Now I don't think there was single directive coming from anywhere. But I think there was an extraordinary consensus, a kind of self-censorship by media executives who concluded these images would be too demoralizing for the country. I think it's rather interesting that could happen. There apparently has been only one exception: one day the New York Daily News showed a severed hand. But the photo appeared in only one edition and it was immediately pulled. I think that degree of unanimity within the media is pretty extraordinary.

What is your position on the war against terrorism? How should the U.S. fight back?

Next Page: One more attack could lead to martial law

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