Governments Destroy Reputations

[From Review]
Eager to discredit a man with a worldwide reputation for probity, the British government circulated what it claimed to be Casement’s private diaries, full of graphic details of his homosexuality. The use of sex to discredit Irish leaders was an old tactic—a generation earlier, Charles Stewart Parnell had been exposed as an adulterer—and many people believed (as some still believe) that the “Black Diaries” purported to be Casement’s were frauds. Still, by the time Casement was hanged for treason in August 1916, his reputation was in ruins, and he became an untouchable figure in Irish politics for several generations.
[. . .]
 the Poet quickly learns that the adults in charge, right up to the top of the Peruvian military, are interested only in covering up the crime. Power, Vargas Llosa asserts as early as his first book, is inevitably corrupt, brutal, and self-interested.

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_1_urb-mario-vargas-llosa.html

ADAM KIRSCH
The Dream of the Peruvian
Mario Vargas Llosa’s writing defends liberty and reason, even as it remains fascinated by fanaticism and violence.
City Journal
Winter 2013
Vol. 23, No. 1