My review for the Telegraph of Douglas Murray’s latest book is now up.

I reference Susan Sontag’s famous “cancer of human history” putdown, published in 1967 in Partisan Review (online here, beginning on page 51). As you’ll see if you follow the link above, it’s part of a much longer essay and contextualised as a critique of contemporary America. Still, it is worth reading the whole extraordinary putdown, which is rarely quoted in full because of its length:

“If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. […] The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone – its ideologies and inventions – which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western ‘Faustian’ man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.”

Note the reference to “Faustian” man, which reveals Sontag’s debt to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Indeed, as Sontag goes on to make plain in the same piece, her dismissal goes hand in hand with her certainty that the United States is already heading for the scrapheap:

“This is a doomed country, it seems to me; I only pray that, when America founders, it doesn’t drag the rest of the planet down, too.”