Financial privilege enabled a dissident intellectual to flee and become a native informer

Evidence

By definition, comprador intellectuals must be able to feign cultural authenticity. Nafisi was an assistant professor of literature who suffered the abuses that the ideological machinery of the Islamic Republic has perpetrated on secular intellectuals. When she felt her career was being compromised, she had the financial resources to resign—a privilege available to few other Iranian faculty members suffering under a beleaguered theocracy whose fanaticism is exacerbated by ongoing threats from an equally fanatical Christian empire and Jewish state. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 373

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether the ‘financial resources to resign’ is the load-bearing criterion — how many genuine dissidents lack that option, and does it blunt the moral force of dissent from exile?