Tyranny’s fellow travel writers (Part 3)

Earlier this year I noted a piece by Michael Moynihan in Foreign Policy. He looked at how the authors of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guide books were producing apologias for tyranny. I argued that the kind words for Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and the Khomeinist Iran, were a result of the capitalist leftism – or politically correct capitalism – of the last decade. The whitewashing of dictatorial crimes could appear left-wing because the regimes opposed the West, or more specifically Bush’s America. But in their efforts to apply a thick covering of masking paint, the fellow travel writers had to brush aside any thought for a regime’s murdered or tortured victims of the regimes, and of the curtailed freedoms and stunted lives of the remainder of the population.

They had a strong commercial interest in looking the other way. Tourists did not want to read accounts of suffering when they relaxed.