By Carl K. Savich

Humanitarian Interventionism

Susan Sontag died on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 in New York of leukemia at the age of 71. What is the legacy of the "obsessed moralist", "besotted aesthete", and "zealot of seriousness"? None of her many novels ever found much success with the public. They were exercises in narcissistic vanity more than literary works of art. Sontag was at best a dilettante and a wannabe.

It was as an activist for "humanitarian interventionism" and "military humanism" that she found her niche. She was at the forefront of the racist ant-Serbian demonization policy. This is where she found her lasting legacy. It was this absurd and anachronistic and atavistic spasm of race hate against the Serbian people where she excelled. She did not originate this anti-Serbian policy but became its outspoken champion and mouthpiece and cheerleader with her posturing and posing. It was an exercise in absurdity. Susan Sontag created a Theater of the Absurd in the Balkans.

Anti-Semitism in the 1930s, Anti-Serbianism in the 1990s

Sontag was at the forefront of the dehumanization and demonization of the Serbian people. It was an atavistic spasm of Hitlerian racism and ethnic hatred. She was the major proponent of the Alija Izetbegovic ultra-nationalist Islamic regime in Bosnia during the civil war from 1992 to 1995. Izetbegovic was a radical Muslim nationalist who propounded his views in The Islamic Declaration (1970; republished,1990), described as a Mein Kampf for Balkan Muslims. She blindly supported Izetbegovic even though she fully understood that he was a militant Muslim ultra-nationalist and that his Party of Democratic Action was a nationalist, all-Muslim political party. She made Sarajevo a global stage for her absurdist viewpoint. Sarajevo was the stage, the Balkans was the Theater, and she was the director of the tragicomedy.

She was the main cheerleader of the illegal NATO bombing of Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Pristina in 1999. Like the obsession of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with anti-Semitism in the 1930s, she was obsessed with an identical anti-Serbianism, which was racist and genocidal. Just as Adolf Hitler saw the root of all evil in the world in the Jews, Sontag saw the Serbian people as the source of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Like Hitler's obsession with the Jews and anti-Semitism, Sontag suffered from a sociopathic and psychopathic obsession with anti-Serbianism. She was ignorant but it was a willful ignorance, a purposeful ignorance. She saw only what she wanted to see. This is the most baneful and woeful ignorance.

The most blatant example of her anti-Serbian racism is found in her snide comment that the Serbs are not part of Europe in The New York Times Magazine justifying the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. She talked about how the French were a part of Europe. And then, when referring to the Serbs, wrote: "And ‘they' are not." This was over the top bigotry. Of course, Hitler made the similar argument about Jews. Jews were a Semitic, Asian peoples that were not a part of Europe, were not indigenous to Europe. Therefore, Jews should be exterminated. It is absurd that Sontag parrots Adolf Hitler. But Sontag's entire life is an absurdity.

She was a narrow-minded and ignorant racist but masqueraded as a "humanitarian interventionist". She advocated the illegal bombing of schools, bridges, nursing homes, residential districts in Serbia, all war crimes and acts of genocide. But she maintained that she opposed genocide. She lived an absurd life. She was illogical, irrational, deluded. She was as racist as Adolf Hitler or Ariel Sharon. And yet she deluded herself into thinking she was a humanist. Her thinking was irrational and sociopathic, absurd.

Nothing better illustrates the absurdity of her whole life than her staging of Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993 during the Bosnian civil war, at the height of the "siege".

Waiting for Godot, a tragicomedy, written in 1948 and published in 1952, is an existentialist and absurdist two act play about the meaninglessness and boredom and tedium of modern life. But primarily it is about the absurdity of life. It is about the absurdity of the intellectual and intellectualism. In the final act, Vladimir and Estragon are engaged in the following colloquy:

Vladimir: Well, shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.

The play symbolizes the sterility, nihilism, and bankruptcy of 20th century thought and intellectualism. The 1960s rock musical "Hair" would also be staged in Sarajevo. This was a propaganda ploy to demonstrate how Westernized and Americanized the Bosnian Muslims were, to prove to us ignoramuses just how secular and progressive and hip they really were. Never mind that "Hair" is passй and laughable and an archaic joke in the 1990s. Does anyone want to engineer a Cowsills revival? Maybe bell bottoms will come back in style someday? What do we know? For Sontag, what is "in" is what she says is "in". Mozart's Requiem would be played in Sarajevo to show that the Bosnian Muslims were part of the Western world. It was another absurdist propaganda stunt. Sontag also liked nothing better than to play with our minds.

Nothing better exemplifies this absurdity than the notion of "military humanism", of bombing cities like Belgrade, Novi Sad, Pristina, Baghdad to achieve humanitarianism. There is nothing more absurd than taking sides in a civil war where each side is merely protecting their interests. She was a powerful advocate of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 because she did not believe borders mattered any more. Sovereignty was archaic. Of course, this is hypocritical and disingenuous. What she meant was that Serbian borders don't matter and are irrelevant, not all borders. She is so confused and muddled that she doesn't even know what she is talking about.

Sontag argued that some wars were just: "There is such a thing as a just war." She argued that US military intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslim faction was an instance of a "just war." She wrote that the so-called Kosovo War was a "just war" to prevent "genocide." But there never was any genocide in either Bosnia or Kosovo. Sontag never retracted her erroneous statements. This is because she did not care about the truth or reality. Susan Sontag made her own reality. She was an intellectual, she was part of the elite. She exhibited all the psychopathologies of the intellectual elites. First, the intellectual has moral certainty. Mere mortals have doubts and questions. They can never be certain. But the intellectual is dead certain in a sociopathic way. Secondly, intellectuals elevate the illogical and irrational to the absurd. This is because they deal with abstraction and a pseudo-reality, a fantasy world of illusion and delusion that borders on megalomania. The intellectual is detached from reality.

Isn't a "just war" a contradiction in terms and an oxymoron? It is like saying there is a just murder. It is a bizarre moral calculus. It shows the nihilism and moral bankruptcy of the intellectual elite like Sontag.

1930s Redux

The intellectual manufactures a delusion structure for reality. Indeed, the intellectual creates his or her own reality. This is what Susan Sontag created, a delusional fantasy world. Just like Hitler saw Jews in stereotypical terms, she saw Serbs as caricatures manufactured by neo-Ustasha propagandists and US PR firms who all had hidden agendas in the Balkans.

Sontag was a throwback to the 1930s when racism was in vogue. It was a simpler time where it was easy to divide the world between good and evil, between good people and bad people. It was a time when Jews could be portrayed as evil monsters bent on enslaving humanity and controlling the world. The world was so simple. Us: Good. Them: Bad. Sontag resorts to this type of bipolar Us versus Them enmity and racism. It is based on self-induced psychological delusions. She refers to the Serbian people as "they" or Them. It is a simple conflict of Us against Them. In the 1930s, it was the Jews who were evil. In the 1990s, it was the Serbs. Just change the names, everything else is the name. Just fill in the blanks. Can you really divide the world morally in this oversimplified way? Sontag was convinced that you could. Adolf Hitler was convinced that you could.

Sontag, in a perverse way, was seeking a return to this less complex period. It was a 1930s redux for her. Of course, the US government was sponsoring this kind of post-Cold War racist atavism. But Sontag, Anthony Lewis, Bill Kristol, Cokie Roberts, Georgie Ann Geyer, T.D. Allman, Christopher Hitchens, and Fuad Ajami were all on board in this politically correct (because sponsored by the US government) racism. You couldn't have racist attacks against politically correct targets who were well organized and financed like Jews and blacks, but the Serbs were fair game. Anything goes with respect to them. Sontag was instrumental in driving a wedge between Serbs and Jews, who had no history of animosity before. Along with Abe Foxman, Bill Kristol, Tom Lantos, and Anthony Lewis, she created a rift between Serbs and Jews and poisoned and soured relations between the two groups. Sontag's Hitlerian racism and bigotry troubled many. Is this all she learned from the Holocaust? Did she learn to mimic and parrot Hitler? Is this what she learned?

Absurd Hypocrite

The central absurdity of her life is that she was a militant advocate for the Bosnian Muslims but never lifted a finger to help the Palestinian Muslims. This could perhaps be explained by her statement that she was a Jew first, a writer second, and an American third. She placed her Jewishness above everything else in her life, including her country of birth and citizenship. If this isn't a shallow and atavistic ethnocentrism and racism, what is? She exposed the worst aspects of a militant ultra-nationalist Zionist masquerading as a humanitarian.

In 2001 she was the recipient of the Jerusalem Prize for her writing. She traveled to Jerusalem to receive it although she knew Ariel Sharon's right-wing regime was suppressing/repressing the Palestinian Muslim population. But she could care less for the plight of Palestinian Muslims. All she cared about was her vanity. And, moreover, the Palestinians were the wrong Muslims. They threatened her psychological balance by endangering her Jewish identity. No, they had to be suppressed and denied. This exposed her hypocrisy.

She had no problems with Ariel Sharon, a known war criminal responsible for the massacres of Palestinian Muslim civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon on September 16-18, 1982. On June 23, 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged that a criminal investigation be launched. But no Israeli was ever punished for these massacres. Estimates range from 700 to 800 Palestinian Muslim civilians to several thousand killed in the camps under IDF control. Sharon was the Israeli Defense minister in charge of Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon. Palestinian Muslim women, children, pregnant women, the elderly were brutally massacred by forces under Israeli army control. Muslim men in their 20s and 30s were lined up against walls and summarily executed. Elderly Muslim were murdered, their bodies mutilated, and they were disemboweled. Sabra and Shatilla were egregious examples of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. But Susan Sintag was not bothered. She remained blissfully ignorant of Sharon's war crimes. All she cared about was Slobodan Milosevic. She didn't care about the "Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla". This was because the war criminal was a Jew like herself. And as she admitted, she identified with her Jewishness above all else. All that mattered was that she was a Jew. And she based her reality on this selfish and ethno-centric viewpoint. Where is the altruism and concern for others? Where is the humanism and humanitarianism? Where is the empathy for non-Jews?

Sontag never took any interest in the real genocide in Rwanda where up to a million people were killed. Why? Because the victims were black. As Sontag herself noted, the Albanian Muslim refugees should be supported because they were people "who look like us", that is, are white like her. Sontag made the famous quote that the Bosnian Muslim Slavs should be supported because, "after all, they are just like us." This is a fundamental propaganda appeal. Implicitly, she argues that only those who look like us should be protected. If they are black or don't look like us, they should be allowed to die, like the Kosovo Serbs or the Krajina Serbs or the Rwandan blacks. This is a very perverse moral calculus. It is the morality of a nihilist and a racist.

She waged a campaign to get NATO and European states to go to war with the Serbian people. She had no interest in ending the conflict, just in getting the US and NATO to wage a war against first the Bosnian Serbs, then the Krajina Serbs, then the Kosovo Serbs. She was bitter that the European countries did not take sides in the Yugoslav civil wars. She wrote: "The Europe that let Bosnia die." She saw herself as the midwife of Bosnian independence. She was the great emancipator and liberator of oppressed peoples in her own mind. With the exception of the Palestinian Muslims. And the Kurds of Turkey. In fact, her victims were the victims the US government had chosen or pre-selected as victims.

Why this obsession with the Muslims of Bosnia? They were not oppressed. They had business suits and drove Mercedes-Benzes. Indeed, they were oppressing Bosnian Serbs. Butros Butros Ghali said Bosnia was "a rich man's war," Why didn't Sontag help the Muslims in occupied Gaza and the West Bank? Why didn't she show the same fanaticism and militancy and commitment towards establishing a Palestinian Muslim state? Why the hypocrisy and double-standard?

I think Sontag told us herself. She is first and foremost a Jew. Psychologically, she is in denial and has guilt about the genocide being committed against Palestinian Muslims by Israel. Guilt and denial are among the strongest human emotions. She knows what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. So she compensates for this denial and guilt. There is psychological transference. She relieves her guilt and denial about the oppression/repression of the Palestinian Muslims by an exaggerated and obsessive concern for the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. This is the only explanation that is plausible. Because she does "complain too much, methinks." Her obsession with Bosnian Muslims betrays compensation and guilt feelings. What could she be guilty or in denial about? The only answer to this is the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. This is what is going on in her Theater of the Absurd. This is why she staged Waiting for Godot. It is all absurd, isn't it? Maybe she should have focused her life on helping the Palestinian Muslims. Instead, she was in denial and was racked with guilt. She was a psychological mess. We can only have pity for her plight.

She took no stand against the Israeli government policy to demolish homes of Palestinians, to seize Palestinian land, to incarcerate thousands of Palestinians in mass arrests with no charges. But she did go out of her way to advocate the NATO bombing against Yugoslavia. In a May 2, 1999 op ed article in The New York Times Magazine, "Why We Are In Kosovo?," she created her own delusional and absurd reality, invoking the 1930s as her model. Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist, was the new Adolf Hitler, intent on committing genocide in Kosovo. It was the best fiction she had written to date. It was much better fiction than her vapid novels that never sold and were never popular with the public. Her true talent lay in this kind of racist fiction. She would have made a top-notch propagandist. And indeed this was where she was most effective, as a propagandist for the New World Order.

Literary Legacy

She was born as Susan Rosenblatt in 1933 in New York. He father was a fur trader who died when she was five. Her mother was an alcoholic. Sontag attended the University of Chicago where she married historian Philip Rieff. She was a literary dilettante, critic, playwright, essayist, film critic, film maker, activist, and failed novelist. She was competent in many different fields but really exceptional at none. No one will remember Sontag as a writer. She was a dilettante and a hack. No one remembers or reads her books "Death Kit", "Benefactor", "In America", "The Volcano Lover". She also wrote an unsuccessful play called "Alice in Bed". She had her first impact with "Notes on Camp" in 1964 and later with "Against Interpretation". "On Photography" was a major effort in the 1970s. She also made movies such as "Duet for Cannibals", "Brother Carl", and "Promised Lands". Sometimes Sontag got it right, such as her opposition to the Vietnam War and her support of Salman Rushdie.

As a novelist, she had no great success. Gore Vidal noted her self-delusional and narcissistic vanity when he wrote in a review of "Death Kit" in 1967: "Miss Sontag's intelligence is still greater than her talent."

She won the National Book Award for "In America", but it was really based on her connections with the board. The book flopped in sales and was never popular. She was accused of plagiarism for not crediting her sources which she borrowed from liberally. The award did not improve her literary standing, it just buttressed her vanity.

None of her books ever sold. She never achieved popular or critical acclaim for her literary works. It was only as a dilettantish "essayist" and roving intellectual that she gained notoriety. And it was only as a humanitarian interventionist that she achieved any wide-spread influence and success. She was at best a minor writer. And so she will not be remembered for her literary output which was mostly self-indulgent and narcissistic in nature.

Absurd to the End

Sontag continued with her absurdist take on reality by offering "backhanded praise" for Ossama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. In 2001, she wrote an article in The New Yorker in which she argued that Ossama Bin Laden's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was in reaction to a US foreign policy that was hostile to Muslims: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly' attack on ‘civilization' or ‘liberty' or ‘humanity' or ‘the free world' but an attack…undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She also argued that the 9/11 hijackers and the Al-Qaeda planners of the terrorist attack were not cowards: "They were not cowards." This is a trite truism. Do we need an intellectual to tell us this? But it is another instance of Sontag's delusional vanity. She was telling us, the unenlightened and ignorant, what we didn't already know. But the only one who was ignorant was her.

She continued to be contrary just so she could stand out from the crowd, the herd or mob that she so despised. It was contrariness that was rooted in absurdity. She continued her Theater of the Absurd until the end. She personifies the age, the New World Order, a time when white is black, and black is white, a delusional world where only power matters. Who's got the guns? That is all that matters in this delusional made-up world, a amoral and absurdist universe worthy of Samuel Beckett.

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