Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Tragedy and Politics

(Reprinted from the issue of January 6, 2005)

The tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which was felt from Africa to Australia, stunned even those of us who saw it only on television. Here was a natural disaster so huge and unexpected that it made all our ordinary public concerns seem petty. Some 60,000 are estimated to have died violently, and as many more may die of malaria, cholera, diarrhea, and other afflictions in the aftermath, despite all frantic relief efforts. And these figures don’t count those who are missing.

“On horror’s head horrors accumulate.” It was awesome, incomprehensible. Millions of poor people lost their homes in a flash, and felt blessed if their children didn’t disappear too. All comment seemed hopelessly inadequate to this gigantic tragedy. One could only pray.

You might think that such a colossal act of God would banish thoughts of politics. But in our time everything this side of the planet Pluto gets politicized, and a (Norwegian) United Nations official accused the United States of being “stingy” with emergency aid. Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the charge, announcing that the U.S. was immediately increasing its donation from $15 million to $38 million.

How much is enough? One might wryly reflect that $38 million is still a lot less than the $5 billion or so the U.S. annually gives to the state of Israel, one of the world’s richer countries in per capita income. It’s also a lot less than the U.S. is spending on the War on Terror, in response to an attack that claimed fewer than 3,000 American lives. It’s probably best not to search for rationality in governmental distributions of wealth. Once again we are reminded that, despite all humanitarian rhetoric, the state’s money always goes to politically powerful interests.

And we are reminded that all human power is as nothing. God’s purposes are veiled from us; we can no more understand why He permits such evil to strike so many than why He shows such mercy to the rest of us.
 
Bin Laden and Islam

Feeling communicative, Osama bin Laden has reappeared on video to declare that anyone who votes in Iraq’s U.S.-sponsored January 30 elections will be deemed an “infidel.” He also has praise for the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom he has promoted to the rank of “emir,” urging Muslims to “listen to him.”

Bin Laden has also reportedly been trying to acquire nuclear weapons, though apparently without success. Let’s pray that he doesn’t get them. He’d clearly be willing to use them.

Though I can understand his fury at the West, his readiness to kill millions of innocent people seems to me unfathomable. How does he reconcile that, in his own mind and heart, with Muslim morality?

True, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, both Christians of sorts, were willing to kill countless people with aerial bombing, but they didn’t profess to be religious leaders. They didn’t make Christianity a synonym for fanaticism and mass murder. Bin Laden, if he got his way, would, it seems, make Islam a synonym for evil without shame or regret.

Maybe he’s a madman. If so, he recalls Chesterton’s definition of a madman as “one who has lost everything but his reason.” But how do other, presumably normal Muslims regard him? Even in their rage at America, do they really want such a man representing Islam in the eyes of the world? And even in their own eyes?

The terrible fact is that more Muslims admire him than deplore him. Muslim denunciations of him have been notably few and tepid. I’m all for interfaith harmony and understanding, but this certainly doesn’t reflect well on their religion.
 
Voice of the Sixties Left

Susan Sontag, the most glamorous intellectual of her generation, has died of leukemia at 71. She became famous in the 1960s for her political and esthetic radicalism, her popularization of “camp,” and such oracular pronouncements as “The white race is the cancer of history.” She combined striking good books with a fondness for quoting European intellectuals nobody had ever heard of.

She liked to shock. In the sixties she was the pinup girl of Radical Chic, taking the part of Castro and Ho Chi Minh. She wrote avant-garde novels and made avant-garde films, while uttering rather obscure aphorisms. The New York Times has eulogized her as “a rigorous intellectual dressed in glamour”; I certainly noticed the glamour — I once passed her on a Manhattan street; you couldn’t miss her — but not the rigor. I found her expository prose so hard to make sense of that I never even tried her fiction.

For all that, Miss Sontag had her creditable moments. In 1982, perhaps tiring of Radical Chic, she stunned the New York Left with a speech at Town Hall in which she denounced Communism as “fascism with a human face,” adding the stinging opinion that you could get a far truer understanding of the Soviet Union from Reader’s Digest than from The Nation. Tom Wolfe couldn’t have said it better. And it took some nerve: Probably 90% of her Town Hall audience subscribed to The Nation, whereas I’d be surprised if there was a single Digest subscriber in the place. But then, nobody ever accused her of lacking nerve.

Three years ago she outraged neoconservatives when, only days after the 9/11 attacks, she wrote in The New Yorker, “Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.” That was certainly out of step with the mood of the moment, but she had a point. The jingoistic denunciations of the terrorists were getting out of hand. If evil men were all cowards, the world would be a lot safer.

After suffering from cancer, a mastectomy, and two years of grueling radiation therapy, she apologized for her infamous youthful remark about the white race. One of her later novels resulted in charges of plagiarism against her; she vigorously denied them, claiming she had “completely transformed” the source material she used. Maybe so; at least I find it hard to imagine her needing to steal anyone else’s words.

Susan Sontag was a headlong representative of a heady time — a leftist intellectual who recovered more of her sanity than most of her generation.


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Joseph Sobran