Laura Restrepo’s “Good Imperialism” |
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With justified outrage, V.S. Naipaul once wrote that a Peronist had warned him there are two kinds of torture: bad torture and good torture. Bad torture is what the enemies of the people do to you; good torture is what you inflict on the enemies of the people.
Venezuela embodies the chilling persistence of this aberration. UN reports, along with the abundant personal and journalistic testimony documenting how the Chavista regime destroys its opponents, have failed to erase in some quarters the certainty that anyone who does not think like them deserves to be tortured.
Something similar is happening with anti-imperialist thinking—a shiny badge marked by the dichotomy of bad imperialisms and good imperialisms. We raise the issue because it is surprising to see Laura Restrepo’s sudden solidarity with Venezuelan sovereignty, underscored by her decision to withdraw from the Hay Festival as a gesture against “Yankee imperialism.”
The problem is that there is no way to verify that she has spent these years also questioning the aggressive presence of the governments of Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and Colombian guerrilla groups in Venezuelan affairs.
In the Cuban case, one can understand it as a gesture of gratitude toward her habitual hosts at events controlled by the Castro dictatorship. But she might at least have said something about the actions of the other countries that are suffocating Venezuela through imperial........