Nothing tastes better than freedom—except possibly burrata.

One May night, I sat beneath the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History, nibbling through a four-course dinner at the gala for an Eminent Literary Organization.

This Organization defends persecuted writers from Qatar to Honduras. Founded in 1921, their history glitters. With them, Susan Sontag slugged whiskey. With them, Arthur Miller refused to denounce his Communist friends. They stood in solidarity with Salman Rushdie when the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death.

The Organization is committed to free expression without borders, a value reflected in its international literary festival. They have conducted a powerful study on the effect of N.S.A. surveillance on U.S. writers.

In countries that lock their critics into jail cells, the Organization’s advocacy saves lives.

Earlier that day, police locked former Occupy Wall Street protester Cecily McMillan into a cell at Rikers.

She’d been found guilty of assaulting a cop.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 2012, as McMillan testified in court, a plainclothes officer grabbed McMillan’s breast from behind during an Occupy Wall Street protest. Instinctively, she elbowed him. Any woman would have done the same. In response, the N.Y.P.D. beat her. Along with hundreds of other protesters, I watched in horror as McMillan convulsed in seizure on the pavement.

During McMillan’s trial, the judge banned her defense from addressing the officer’s violent record. The prosecutor said it was more likely that “aliens” assaulted McMillan than a New York City cop. (The officer in question denied grabbing her breast.)

“I cannot confess to a crime that I did not commit. I cannot throw away my dignity in return for my freedom,” McMillan told a jury that declared her guilty. At the time, her projected sentence was two to seven years.

At the gala, I could not stop thinking about Cecily McMillan.

Writer after writer took the stage. Silver with passion, they spoke of the Organization’s work in Turkey and China. They showed a film about imprisoned Uighur journalist Ilham Tohti. I cried as his teen daughter spoke.

World-renowned authors talked of freedom. So did Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, formerly of Pussy Riot.

No one said a word about Cecily McMillan.

The Organization’s bedrock is its support of writers, but this has always stretched to other political prisoners abroad. It has extended help to foreign composers, translators, editors, and lawyers who have been persecuted for their beliefs. Why not Cecily McMillan, hours after her verdict, miles from where she was held?

Speakers had no words for writer Barrett Brown.

Brown’s been jailed since September 2012 for his coverage of hacker group Anonymous, which prosecutors claimed amounted to participation in illegal activities and which resulted in 17 total charges. On its Web site, the Organization posted a mild note of support in March 2014, when some of his charges were dropped. No one mentioned him that night.

That night, no one had one word for any American political prisoner, hacker and whistle-blower and activist, cracking from solitary in their 6-foot-by-11-foot cells.

The Organization is a savior for imprisoned dissidents the world over. That night, it seemed to forget those closer to home.

The Organization whose gala I drank at does deeply admirable work, but its hush on domestic political prisoners mirrors that of those with more troubling motives. By ignoring humans locked in their own cells, states can pretend that dissent is only punished elsewhere. They can both toast hell-raisers abroad, and clamp down on hell-raisers at home.

Empires love their dissidents foreign.

Any regime, no matter how repressive, will gladly fête its enemy’s critics—while homegrown versions of those critics occupy concrete cells. Cooing over foreign dissidents allows establishment hacks to pose like sexy rebels—while simultaneously affirming that their own system is the best.