Remember Susan Sontag? Back in the 1960s and 1970s the Heroine of Hip made something of a career of highbrow anti-Americanism. America, she complained, was a “mechanized, anxious, television-brainwashed” society, a country that was “founded on genocide” and that in its maturity indulged in a “lethal” barbarism. Sometimes she described America as “cancerous,” sometimes as “inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian.” After the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, Sontag, writing in The New Yorker, demanded to know

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 citize ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 October 2002, on page 3
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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