Autocrats criminalize imagination itself as political treason

Evidence

While Abacha was naïve enough to believe that murdering Saro-Wiwa would silence him, another African autocrat, Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, was simultaneously seeking to stamp out subversive fantasy. He had a journalist arrested for “the crime of imagining the death of the president.” This was surely the high-water mark for the dictatorial tendency to equate fantasy with political treason. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 340

Categorization

• CANDY: The absurd specificity — codefendant arrested for imaginatively killing the president — is a shareable jaw-dropper.
• XREF: connects to: Treason can be institutionalized through ritualized group reallocation; Siege regimes criminalize opposition and cross-societal solidarity as treason — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 677; Depriving colonized peoples of their own philosophy amounts to high treason — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 216 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Siege regimes criminalize opposition and cross-societal solidarity as treason #corroborates (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 677
• Nationalist ideology turns dissent into treason and undermines civil society #qualifies (0.82) — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 56
• Depriving colonized peoples of their own philosophy amounts to high treason #exemplifies (0.80) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 216
• Treason can be institutionalized through ritualized group reallocation #expands (0.75)