AMERICA II
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Mongol hordes, have themselves fallen into the easy cliches of racism
with its incitements to blind and stupid violence. They are also insincere.
Every privilege and comfort Miss Sontag enjoys she owes to those whom
she denounces as racists and murderers.
If
she accepts the Hitlerian doc–
trine of collective responsibility and guilt by association let her resign
from her country, culture and race and make it up to the Indians and
the African tribes whose historical crimes against the members of their
own races differ from those of the whites only in scale.
Miss Sontag regards Marx as a "fink" because he was not as sexually
liberated as the youngsters whom she approves of, but she can still learn
a great deal from him. In her wholesale condemnation of America and
the white race she sounds like some of the young who sneer at Greek
culture because it was a slave society. What she and they forget is that
the Greeks did not invent slavery; they invented freedom. The ideals of
the Declaration of Independence which inspired movements of freedom
everywhere, including Africa and Asia, and whose very existence was
everywhere construed as a threat to privilege, have had a profounder
importance for world history than the decayed institutions inherited
from the past. To judge the Greeks or the American settlers today by
ideals which were their groping, creative discoveries in a time of uni–
versal darkness is to spit into the waters from which one has drunk.
Morally we are responsible today for the things that our own actions
or failure to act can affect, not for the tragedies and evils of the his–
torical past. This moral judgment is perfectly compatible with an his–
torical point of view that accepts the fact that our primitive mothers
were not as sophisticated as Miss Sontag. This does not mean they lived
with less wisdom and integrity. A good case can be made for the view
that because they lived in ways different from hers, they made her
independent way of life and thought possible. She has no sense for
historical alternatives and probabilities, and like a spoiled child cries out
because not all things are possible at all times. Even slavery as an institu–
tion was morally preferable to the destruction or cannibalizing of the
prisoners of war which it gradually replaced. The colonization by the
cancerous white race as a movement of peoples should be compared to
the movements of the people led by Genghis Khan or Attila. There
were good settlers and bad settlers, and Miss Sontag's blanket condemna–
tion of them
all
from William Penn to the whiskey traders expresses
Dot really a judgment but lack of it.
Miss Sontag's extreme remarks are most charitably interpreted as
a kind of misplaced metaphysical rebellion at the condition of man. The
white race isn't much but the other races aren't much better! The
trouble really lies with the whole human race. All metaphysical rebellion
