Empires love their dissidents foreign

4:21 PM, JUNE 11 2014
Dissident Fetish
by Molly Crabapple


One May night, I sat beneath the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History, nibbling through a four-course dinner at the gala for an Eminent Literary Organization.

This Organization defends persecuted writers from Qatar to Honduras. Founded in 1921, their history glitters. With them, Susan Sontag slugged whiskey. With them, Arthur Miller refused to denounce his Communist friends. They stood in solidarity with Salman Rushdie when the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death.

The Organization whose gala I drank at does deeply admirable work, but its hush on domestic political prisoners mirrors that of those with more troubling motives. By ignoring humans locked in their own cells, states can pretend that dissent is only punished elsewhere. They can both toast hell-raisers abroad, and clamp down on hell-raisers at home.

Empires love their dissidents foreign.


http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/06/dissident-fetish-molly-crabapple