Frankfurt, Germany — New York-born author and human rights activist Susan Sontag on Saturday condemned U.S. President George W. Bush's policies as imperialistic.
Sontag spoke to reporters Saturday, a day before she is to receive the German book trade's prestigious $17,700 Peace Prize.
“I think as long as the U.S.A. has only one political party — the Republican party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic party — we aren't going to see a change of the current policy,” she said.
Sontag said Bush's policy breaks with the United States' 50-year-old tradition of consulting with its allies on global matters instead of acting on its own, which the Bush administration did when it went to war against Iraq without the backing of the United Nations.
U.S. writer Susan Sontag speaks to reporters at the Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany, on Saturday (Michael Probst/AP)
“It's really the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire,” she said, likening former president Bill Clinton to Julius Caesar and Bush to Augustus.
Sontag also had harsh words for California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom she called “stupid” and “a bad joke.”
“I think, of course, he will fail,” she said, adding that his election also showed that traditional politics is going the way of classical music. “We are in a new civilization, a post-political civilization,” she said.
Sontag, whose works have been translated into more than 30 languages, is a lover of European literature, especially German classics and philosophy. She is popular in Germany, where she has lived from time to time. She also spent three years in Sarajevo during the Serb siege of the Bosnian city in the early 1990s and has campaigned on behalf of jailed and persecuted authors.
The prize jury's selection of Sontag recognized her for standing up for “the dignity of free thinking” and her work to bridge the United States and Europe.
“Through her work, which has never lost sight of the European heritage, she has become the most prominent intellectual ambassador between the two continents,” and has also stood up for the rights of victims of war, the prize jury's citation said.
Sontag, 70, told reporters that while she doesn't use her books to advance her political views, she does take advantage of her position as a writer to question and explore policies that she sees as wrong.
“I'm not only a writer, I'm first of all a person with a moral conscience,” Sontag said. “I will never support a decision which seems to me absurd.”
Sontag said it is the role of authors to explore the complexity of moral questions in their works.
“We should always be fighting against this simplification, that is the role of literature,” she said.
Shortly after Sept. 11, Sontag accused U.S. public officials and media commentators of trying to “infantilize” the public through its black-and-white depiction of the attacks.
She also sympathized with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's refusal to take part in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but denied the jury selected her for this reason.
“I am immodest enough to think that even if I hadn't spoken up about Bush I would have earned this prize anyway,” she said.
Last year's prize went to Nigerian-born writer Chinua Achebe. Past winners also include Nobel Peace Prize laureates Octavio Paz and Hermann Hesse, and former Czech president and anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel.
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