Susan Sontag was one of the most influential American Left wing intellectuals of the 20th century. Her essay, Notes on ‘Camp’, and its exploration of homosexual cultural aesthetics as a “solvent of morality” (pg. 12) designed to breakdown the ruling cultural norms, was a laudatory Left wing bombshell. In more contemporary terms, it asserted that homosexual culture is designed to dissolve the “ruling heteronormative Patriarchy,” or as Andreas K. Georgiou explained it:
The more we study art, the less we care for nature, meaning nothing in nature can be camp. Camp is the love for the perverse. The convertibility of man and woman and person and thing. Sexless bodies. Haunting androgynous vacancy. Susan Sontag talks on how the most attractive form of sexual attractiveness consists of going against the grain of one’s sex. What’s most attractive in men is the presence of something feminine. And vice versa when it comes to the most attractive women. This is something that fashion has been employing very successfully. Camp means becoming transitional figures.
The love of the perverse is a great way to describe Camp. Sontag saw all this is a positive development. And her influence here hasn’t waned, as evidenced by the 2019 Met Gala embrace of Camp which was inspired by Sontag’s writings. I say all this to drive the point home:
Susan Sontag was what anyone would called a “diehard Progressive far-leftist.” That is what makes her following comments, made on February 6, 1982 so important.
That was the day that she stood up in front of a conclave of like-minded individuals and ripped them to shreds about their intellectual dishonesty, exposing the outright lies they knowingly spread about the supposed glories of Communism, all while knowing and ignoring the true horrors of it. Further, she nailed Communism done to the floor by its feet when she correctly pronounced that Communism is nothing more than, “Fascism with a human face.” Telling the truth about the relationship between Communism and Fascism, that they belong to the same part of the political spectrum (i.e are both “Leftist” political movements) and that they are so closely related in how they work and effect the lives of people, sent the audience into an uproar.
In its wake, Socialist apologists scrambled to explain how the “military socialism” in Communist countries was different from Marxist socialism (as opposed to the product of it) or Communism generally. Of course, no one could really explain how “military socialism” is different from Fascism in the first place. Which just demonstrates how correct Sontag was when she said that Communism was just the most successful variant of Fascism. She told the truth her peers could never admit to themselves and which Socialists today do everything they can to ignore or escape.
Below is her full speech, exposing the purposeful lies that “leftists” told (and still tell today) about the nature of Socialism/Communism and the truth about the inevitable end product of Socialism – not the Communist utopia promised by Karl Marx but the totalitarian Fascist Hell of real life. I highly suggest it to anyone who wants to delve deeper into the truth of “leftist” culture and learn the truth about Socialism.
Communism and the Left
We meet here tonight to express our solidarity with the people of Poland, now languishing under the brutal oppression of what one can only call–if that word has any meaning–a fascist regime. To protest the infamy of the Jaruzelski junta is not a difficult position to take. No sentiment could be more mainstream. “Solidarity with Poland, solidarity with Solidarity” is a call launched by dozens of governments in the rich world, a call that has resounded in public meetings held since mid-December in every major city in Western Europe and a few in North America. It is legitimate to ask: What is the point of our meeting? To add our voice to the chorus of indignation? I do not offer this hypothesis with irony. That may be indeed just what we are doing–and quite rightly so. But it is my understanding that those who have organized tonight’s meeting, and most of those who are speaking here, have a somewhat different purpose. It is, of course, to express our condemnation of the crushing of the democratic movement in Poland. But it is also to distinguish ourselves from others in the chorus of virtuous indignation, to stake out a different kind of support for Poland than that tendered by, say, Reagan and Haig and Thatcher.
With this purpose I am wholly in agreement. Otherwise I would not be speaking here. One of the many excellent reasons for detesting the Reagan Administration is the utter hypocrisy of its support for the Polish democratic movement. Being a citizen of this country, I cannot help but single out Reagan–Reagan the union-buster, Reagan the puppet master of the butchers in El Salvador. But it is worth remembering that the entire economic and political leadership of capitalist Europe and North America bears great responsibility for what has happened in Poland. Poland was not just done in by a fascist coup engineered by the Soviet Union–using Russian-authorized tanks with Polish rather than Russian markings. Banks and tanks did Poland in, to use my friend Joseph Brodsky’s formulation. The Polish debt continues to be refinanced by the Western governments, grain continues to be sold to the Soviet government, the French government–most eloquent of all the hypocrites–signs a vital commercial treaty with the Soviet government a few weeks after the Polish events. In other words, business continues as usual. Landing rights may be denied to Aeroflot and Lot at Kennedy Airport, tourism opportunities for Polish diplomats stationed here may be restricted, cultural exchanges may be pared… That is the kind of retaliating the Western democracies are prepared to make for the enslavement of Poland. That…and a lot of rhetoric.
We tonight are adding our rhetoric to the avalanche of good words about Poland–but, as I say, in the hope of distinguishing our position from the official hypocrisies. I would also hope, however, that we do not let our sense of whom we oppose on our side of the frontier between capitalism and Communism lead us into certain hypocrisies and untruths.
I have the impression that much of what is said about politics by people on the so-called democratic left–which includes many people here tonight–has been governed by the wish not to give comfort to “reactionary” forces. With that consideration in mind, people on the left have willingly or unwittingly told a lot of lies. We were unwilling to identify ourselves as anti-Communists because that was the slogan of the right, the ideology of the cold war and, in particular, the justification of America’s support of fascist dictatorships in Latin America and of the American war on Vietnam. (The story, of course, starts much earlier, in Europe in the late 1920s, with the rise of fascism, whose principal war cry was anti-Communism.) The anti-Communist position seems already taken care of by those we oppose at home.
I want to challenge this view.
There are many lessons to be learned from the Polish events. But, I would maintain, the principal lesson to be learned is the lesson of the failure of Communism, the utter villainy of the Communist system. It has been a hard lesson to learn. And I am struck by how long it has taken us to learn it. I say we–and of course I include myself. I can remember reading a chapter of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind in Partisan Review. When it came out in 1953, I bought the book–a passionate account of the dishonesty and coerciveness of intellectual and cultural life in Poland in the first years of Communism, which troubled me but which I also regarded as an instrument of cold war propaganda, giving aid and comfort to McCarthyism. I put it on my student’s bookshelf. Still a student (though an unofficial one) twenty-seven years later, in 1980, on the eve of my first visit to Poland, I took down my old copy of The Captive Mind from the shelf, re-read it (for the first time) and thought, and thought only: But it’s all true. And in Poland, I was to learn that Milosz had, if anything, underestimated the disgrace of the Communist regime instilled by force in his country.
I have asked myself many times in the past six years or so how it was possible that I could have been so suspicious of what Milosz and other exiles from Communist countries–and those in the West known bitterly as “premature anti- Communists”–were telling us. Why did we not have a place for, ears for, their truth? The answers are well known. We had identified the enemy as fascism. We heard the demonic language of fascism. We believed in, or at least applied a double standard to, the angelic language of Communism. Now we take another line. Now it seems easy to do so. But for many decades, when horrors exactly like, no, far worse than, the horrors now taking place in Poland took place, we did not meet to protest and express our indignation, as we are doing tonight. We were so sure who our enemies were (among them, the professional anti-Communists), so sure who were the virtuous and who the benighted. But I am struck by the fact that, despite the rightness of many of our views and aspirations, in particular our sense of the madness of a nuclear war between the superpowers and our hopes for reforms of the many injustices of our own system, we were not responding to a large truth. And we were countenancing a great deal of untruth.
The émigrés from Communist countries we didn’t listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader’s Digest than in The Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth. Now we hear them. Why didn’t we hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now? We thought we loved justice; many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough. Which is to say that our priorities were wrong. The result was that many of us, and I include myself, did not understand the nature of the Communist tyranny. We tried to distinguish among Communisms–for example, treating “Stalinism,” which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration, and praising other regimes, outside of Europe, which had and have essentially the same character.
At the beginning I called the brutal oppression under which the people of Poland are languishing “fascist.” This is true in the sense that all the normal pretenses of Communist ideology have been abandoned. The methods and even the language are those of fascism: the demand for “normalization” and “order,” the re-legitimizing of anti-Semitism, military rule presented in the guise of a “Committee for National Salvation.” The similarities between the Polish military junta and the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and other South American countries are obvious. Indeed, future fascist coups d’état will certainly imitate the Polish coup. No despot had ever thought of turning off the phones for an indefinite period, of forbidding the sale of gasoline to all private cars, of stopping the sale of rucksacks and of writing paper, Draconian measures that are not for twenty-four hours but, simply, a new way of life. For the imposition of martial law on December 13 has resulted in a perfect stalemate. It is, plainly, unlivable. And yet, despite the early promises of the government, it cannot be lifted. The present government has not only adopted the standards of fascist rule; it has offered fascist rule a whole arsenal of new techniques.
All this is obvious, or almost, when one uses the word “fascist” to describe the present Polish government. But I mean to use the word in a further sense. What the recent Polish events illustrate is something more than that fascist rule is possible within the framework of a Communist society, whereas democratic government and worker self-rule are clearly intolerable–and will not be tolerated. I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism–successful fascism, If you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown=-that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies–especially when their populations are moved to revolt–but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.
This, I would argue, must be the starting point of all the lessons to be learned from the ongoing Polish events. And in our efforts to criticize and reform our own societies, we owe it to those in the front line of struggle against tyranny to tell the truth, without bending it to serve interests we deem are just. These hard truths mean abandoning many of the complacencies of the left, mean challenging what we have meant for many years by “radical” and “progressive.” The stimulus to rethink our position, and to abandon old and corrupt rhetoric, may not be the least of what we owe to the heroic Poles, and may be the best way for us to express solidarity with them.
Note: A digitized version of the original article can still be found here.