Susan Sontag

Shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia's parliament outlawed all forms of LGBT propaganda, and the authorities set up an expert center to determine whether books were in compliance.

The center created a list of objectionable literature that included Russian classics by Dostoevsky, as well as works by Western authors like Susan Sontag and Stephen King.

Last year, police used the law as a pretext to raid publishing houses in connection with a teen romance now with LGBTQ themes.

Then prosecutors charged three employees with extremism for their role in distributing that book.

I am no fan, but Bill Maher was kicked off the air.

Susan Sontag was driven out of American journalism.

The German composer Stockhausen had his...

I mean, the Dixie Chicks.

And there were people who argued in the United States that, uh, we needed to pay attention to those historical and material grievances, and we could address them accordingly, either without recourse to war or without the sort of endless infinite war that was ultimately constructed.

So for instance, uh, Susan Sontag, the very, um, notable American cultural critic, wrote in The New Yorker, uh, a very, very delicate version of, of what I've just said without really, you know, going too deeply into, you know, portraying American complicity.

But for that, she was widely denounced, including, uh, among liberals, uh, and basically driven for a great deal of time, and she didn't live much longer, from, uh, American respectable discourse.

Those sorts of wide-ranging propaganda functions from a culture growing increasingly unwilling to deal with, to accept, uh, and to even acknowledge critiques of 9/11 that had to do with blowback from American foreign policy, most recently, uh, in Afghanistan itself, where America, after the Soviet invasion, devoted for reasons of superpower competition, a great deal of time, resources, and energy promoting radical Islam as a way of combating the Soviet Union.

You know, there's an episode I recount in my book where less than a week after the attacks, the New Yorker published an issue containing a series of reflections on them from its contributors.

And Susan Sontag in, uh, you know, a short paragraph wrote, and I'll just cherry-pick a few sentences.

She wrote, "The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing.

The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.