A brief history of exile in the

Western worldhttp://www.theorb.net/textbooks/westciv/romanrev
olution.html
http://windomrome.weebly.com/ro
man-republic---31-bce.html
JUL 27
Toronto mayor Rob Ford suggested last week that criminals convicted of gun
crimes be exiled from the city. The minister of immigration, Jason Kenny, shot
the idea down soon after.
Exile, however, has a long history in the Western world. While Ford has been
ridiculed for suggesting it, the practice has been used in various ways by
different societies.
Rome and Athens during antiquity
In antiquity, the practice was used in the Roman Republic as well as the
Roman Empire. It was also used in places like Athens, the Greek city state that
is often credited with inventing democracy.
In the Roman Republic, exile was often an option given to upper class
criminals, says Gordon Kelly, who is a visiting assistant professor of
humanities at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Kelly is the author of
A History of Exile in the Roman Republic.
During the Roman Republic, between the 5th century BC and 27 BC, exile was
used by upper class Roman citizens as a means to escape capital punishment.
Having chosen exile instead of death, they would never be allowed to return
to Roman territory.
Kelly says it is hard to know whether exile was an option for lower class
members of the Roman Republic because of a lack of evidence. During this
period, those who were exiled did not lose their Roman citizenship, though
most chose to adopt that of their new state.

This would be very serious, for these political classes, because that would
absolutely rule out a further political career, says Kelly. It was a form of
political death.
At times, Kelly says, you could move a mere 10 miles outside of Rome and live
in comfort as a result of your accumulated wealth, but would likely leave your
family behind. The sons of an exiled father, having remained in Rome, could
still pursue a political career themselves.
For a lot of ancient communities, the community is everything. So having to
leave the community is a pretty serious blow to them; their identity is really
wound up in this particular community, says Kelly.
During the later Roman Empire, there is evidence that different punishments
were given out to people of different social status. Kelly says that while those
in the upper classes could be exiled, those of the lower classes could be killed,
worked to death in mines or killed for sport in an arena, for similar serious
crimes.
Peter OBrien, who is an assistant professor in the classics department at
Dalhousie University and specializes in Latin literature, says most of the
ancient Mediterranean cultures used exile as a form of punishment.
At the root of exile as a form of political punishment is the notion that
participation in a particular state, the one into which one was born, really
defined what it meant to be human, says OBrien.
Famously, Aristotle says that, life outside of the polis, their form of state, is
the life either of a god or a dog, of an animal. Humanity is defined by
participation in the state. So exclusion from that at any level is an extremely
serious thing and in some cases is considered to be even worse than death,
says OBrien.
The practice of exile took a different form in the Greek city state of Athens.
There, the practice of ostracism, took place once a year. The citizens of
Athens who had voting rights, usually men who owned property and whose
families were from Athens, gathered annually and voted for an individual to be
exiled.
You didnt need any reasons, you just voted somebody off the island, or the
polis, says Jack Mitchell, an assistant professor of Roman history at Dalhousie
University.

The practice is named ostracism because each citizen scratched the name of
the person they wanted to exile on a shard of pottery called ostraca, the
voting ballot of the day, says Mitchell.
Once voted out of Athens, the citizen would generally be able to return after
ten years in exile. This allowed Athenians to diffuse political tensions between
rival parties, or get rid of a prominent politician who might try to become a
tyrant and wrest control of the city.
Medieval England: 12th to 15th centuries
During the medieval ages the practice of exile served a similar function as it
did during the Roman Republic.
In England, between the 12th and 15th centuries, exile took the form of
abjuration, a practice which was integrated into English Common Law, says
Shannon McSheffrey, a professor at Concordia University who specializes in
late medieval and early Tudor England.
During that time period, murder and theft were punishable by death. If a
criminal wanted to avoid capital punishment they could claim sanctuary on
church grounds, where because the land was considered sacred, they could
not be arrested.
Once a person claimed sanctuary they could ask to speak with a coroner, who
at the time both investigated murders as well as preformed other civic duties.
The perpetrator would have to confess to the crime they committed and have
the coroner record the confession.
The criminal could then ask for the right of abjuration, which meant that they
would swear off the realm, says McSheffrey. You would agree to go into
exile for the rest of your life. That would be in return for not then suffering the
capital punishment that was due to you.
The person was given a white cross and put into the custody of a legal official
called a constable who would escort the criminal to the end of their
jurisdiction and hand them over to the constable in charge of the next
jurisdiction. This was done until the perpetrator reached the nearest port,
where they would be forced to seek passage on a ship to Europe.
McSheffrey adds that if the perpetrator was ever seen on English soil, they
would then face capital punishment. This experience would have been easier
to deal with for those who were wealthy and may have had money or property
elsewhere in Europe. However, it was still seen as a horrific punishment
because many often did not speak other languages besides English, a

language not spoken in Europe at the time. Most would never see their friends
or family again.
McSheffrey says that there is almost no evidence of what happened to people
who abjured the realm and went into exile. It is thus very hard to know how
they fared wherever they ended up.
Early Modern Europe: 16th to 18th centuries in Italy and France
During the early modern era, between the 16th and 18th centuries in Italy,
exile was used as a means to dispense justice as well as avoid feuds and
vendettas among people living in close communities.
Gregory Hanlon, a university research professor at Dalhousie University who
specializes in early modern Italy and France, among other fields, points out
that exile was used during this period while there were still no jails, and little
money in government coffers to set them up.
Everybody lived their lives locally. This is a period in which even a lot of poor
people owned some land, and they resided there for generations. That meant
that there were constantly tensions between different families, says Hanlon.
Authorities were concerned that cycles of violence would erupt between
families who would seek retribution for murders or rapes committed by
members of another family.
When a person was exiled, they would in extreme cases, have their goods and
property confiscated and given to their family members who could then use
those assets to send an allowance to the exiled individual.
The period of the exile was either a set duration or indefinite, but people could
petition the local magistrate or authorities and plead for the right to return.
Poorer families would often suffer because a main breadwinner was exiled,
and their plight would often be a reason why authorities would allow an exiled
individual to return after a period of time.
The communities that received the exiled individuals were not very welcoming
and, as in France, sometimes had derogatory words referring to exiles. In
periods when most people owned lands, they didnt move around a whole lot.
And so, some stranger coming in to live with you is perhaps bad news. Theyd
probably been sent away from their homes for bad behavior and therefore you
can suspect they will commit bad things in their new locality, says Hanlon.
They were supposed to make peace with their enemies, that is a formal
written peace with their enemies and pay some kind of compensation before

theyre allowed to come home. This is a reasonably efficient way of doing

justice in a period when you dont have much money for the means of
punishment, like prisons, says Hanlon, who adds that this form of
punishment was extremely common. He also adds that most people were
allowed to return from exile after a period of time.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction
1. Overview
2. The Cultural and Political Background of Roman Exile
3. Summary of the Relationship of Exile to Roman Republican Politics
Chapter Two: Exilium: Legal and Historical Issues
1. The Basics of Exile
2. Exile as a Citizen Right
3. Aquae et ignis interdictio
4. Exile and Interdiction as a Legal Penalty
5. Exile and Citizenship
6. The Attempted Exile of L. Hostilius Tubulus and Q. Pleminius
7. The ius exulare
8. Relegatio
Chapter Three: The Journey Into Exile: The Early Republic to the
Social War
1. Choosing a Site for Exile: An Introduction
2. Brief Journey Into Exile: The Early Republic to 123
3. Politics, Demonstrations and the Hope of Recall
4. The Advantages of Dyrrachium and Western Greece for Exiles
5. Locations Distant From Rome and the Permanence of Exile
Chapter Four: Exilium from the Social War to the Death of Julius
Caesar
1. The Mass Recall of Exiles in the 80s
2. Exules in Italia: The Cases of Oppianicus and Q. Pompeius
3. The 60s and the Exile "Boom" in Western Greece
4. The Exile of M. Tullius Cicero
5. Milo and the Mullets of Massilia: Exilium in the 50s
6. A New Civil War and Mass Recall of Exiles
7. Defeated Pompeians and Casesar's Clementia
Chapter Five: Topics of Exile
1. Accompaniment Into Exile
2. The Economics of Exile
3. Exempla and Accounts of Exile
Chapter Six: Prosopography of Roman Exiles
Conclusions
Appendix I: The leges Clodiae Concerning Cicero's Exile
Appendix II: Restoration of Legendary Figures of the Early Republic
Bibliography

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Exiles -- Rome -- History.
Rome -- History -- Republic, 510-30 B.C.
Exile is a form of punishment in which one has to leave one's home (whether that be on the
level of city, region, or nation-state) while either being explicitly refused permission and/or
being threatened by prison or death upon return. It is common to distinguish between internal

exile, forced resettlement within the country of residence, and external exile, deportation
outside the country of residence.
When an entire people or ethnic population is forced or induced to leave their traditional
homelands, it is called a diaspora. Throughout history, numerous nations have been forced
into diasporas. For the Jews, whose diaspora lasted more than two thousand years, until the
founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948, theological reflection on the meaning of exile
has led to the insight that God, who dwells amongst his people, also lives and suffers in exile.
Exile can also be a self-imposed departure from one's homeland. Self-exile is often practiced
as form of protest or to avoid persecution or prosecution for criminal activity.
Contents
[show]

Whatever the cause or circumstances, exile necessarily causes emotional pain to all involved.
Leaving one's homeland means breaking the first and most essential bonds developed to
one's family, community, and the natural environment. Prevented from reuniting with those
people and places cherished from youth, human hearts can never be whole.

History
Exile, also called banishment, has a long tradition as a form of punishment. It was known in
ancient Rome, where the Senate had the power to exile individuals, entire families, or
countries (which amounted to a declaration of war).
The towns of ancient Greece also used exile both as a legal punishment and, in Athens, as a
social punishment. In Athens during the time of democracy, the process of "ostracism" was
devised in which one man who was a threat to the stability of the society was banished from
the city without prejudice for ten years, after which he was allowed to return. Among the more
famous recipients of this punishment were Themistocles, Cimon, and Aristides the Just.
Further, Solon the lawgiver voluntarily exiled himself from Athens after drafting the city's
constitution, to prevent being pressed to change it.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a court of law could sentence a noble to
exile (banicja). As long as the exile (banita) remained in the Commonwealth, he had a price
on his head and lost the privileges and protection granted to him as a noble. Even killing
a banita was not considered a crime, although there was no reward for his death. Special
forms of exile were accompanied by wywiecenie (a declaration of the sentence in churches)
or by issuance of a separate declaration to townfolk and peasantry, all of them increased the
knowledge of the exile and thus made his capture more likely. A more severe penalty than
exile was "infamy" (infamia): A loss of honor and respect (utrata czci i wiary) in addition to
exile.
On October 23, 2006, for the first time in United States history, a judge in the United States
imposed exile on a U.S. citizen for crimes committed in the U.S. The case concerned Malcolm
Watson, a citizen of the United States and a permanent resident of Canada, who resided in
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, across the border from Buffalo, New York. Watson, a
teacher at Buffalo Seminary and a cross-border commuter, pleaded guilty to
misdemeanor sex crimes against a 15 year old former student. Watson received a sentence
of three years of probation, but wanted to serve this time in Canada where he, his wife, and
their children lived. This was approved subject to the condition that Watson had to remain out
of the U.S. except for meetings with his probation officer, effectively exiling Watson for three

years. Watson, however, was arrested upon his re-entry to Canada amid public outcry, and
faced possible deportation to the U.S.[1]

Personal exile
Exile has been used particularly for political opponents of those in power. The use of exile for
political purposes serves the government by preventing their exiled opponent from organizing
in their native land or from becoming a martyr.
Exile represented an especially severe punishment in times past, particularly for those,
like Ovid or Du Fu, who were exiled to strange or backward regions, cut off from all of the
possibilities of their accustomed lifestyle as well as from their families and
associates. Dante described the pain of exile in The Divine Comedy:
Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
pi caramente; e questo quello strale
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.
Tu proverai s come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale
You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another's bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another's stairs "
Paradiso XVII: 55-60[2]
Exile has been
softened, to some
extent, in the
nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, as
exiles have been
welcomed in other
countries. There, they
have been able to
create new
communities in those
countries or, less
frequently, returned to
their homelands
following the demise of
the regime that exiled
them.

Deportation serves as
a modern form of exile.
This involves either the
expulsion of persons of
foreign citizenship from
a country (usually back
to that person's
country of origin) or
forcible relocation
within a nation.
Deportation is imposed
either as the result of a
criminal activity,
including illegal
immigration, or based
on the needs and
policies of a
government.
The British and French
governments often
deported people
to penal colonies, such
as Australia or
Georgia. These
colonies were usually
underdeveloped
pieces of land owned
by that government in
which conditions were
harsh enough to serve
as punishment.[3]

Famous people
who have been
in exile

Napoleon I exiled
from France to
Elba and, later, St
Helena

Idi Amin, exiled

to Libya,
and Saudi
Arabia until his
death.

Bertolt Brecht

Joseph Brodsky,
exiled from Soviet
Union to United
States

John Calvin, exiled

from Switzerland t
o France, but later
let back into
Switzerland, due to
change in
government

Frdric Chopin,
exiled
from Poland to
France

El Cid, banned
from Castile,
served other
Iberian kings
ending with the
conquest of
Valencia

Dante Alighieri,
Medieval Italian
poet and author of
the Divine
Comedy, sentence
d to two years of
exile and forced to
pay a fine when
the Black Guelfs
took control of
Florence.
However, Dante
could not pay his
fine because he
was staying at
Rome at the
request of Pope
Boniface VIII and
was considered to
be an absconder
and sentenced to
permanent exile.

Albert
Einstein self-exiled
from Germany to
the United States

Sigmund
Freud self-exiled
from Austria to Uni
ted Kingdom

Heinrich Heine

Victor Hugo exiled

from France to
the Channel
Islands

Arthur Koestler

Jan Amos
Komensk

Lenin self-exiled to
Switzerland

Thomas
Mann self-exile to
Switzerland and to
the United States,
moved back to
Switzerland

Karl Marx selfexiled from

Germany to United
Kingdom

Adam Mickiewicz

Ovid

Emperor Haile
Selassie of
Ethiopia

Alexander
Solzhenitsyn exile
d from the Soviet
Union, returned

after the fall

of Communism

Leon
Trotsky exiled
to Turkey,
France, Norway,
and Mexico

Miguel de
Unamuno confined
to Fuerteventura,
fled to France

Government in
exile
A "government in exile"
is a political group that
claims to be a
country's legitimate
government, but for
various reasons is
unable to exercise its
legal power, and
instead resides in a
foreign country.
Governments in exile
usually operate under
the assumption that
they will one day return
to their native country
and regain power.
Governments in exile
frequently come into
existence
during wartime occupa
tion. For example,
during the German
expansion of
the Second World War,
numerous European
governments
and monarchs were
forced to seek refuge
in the United Kingdom,
rather than face certain
destruction at the
hands of the Nazis. As

well as during a foreign

occupation, after an
internal coup d'etat, a
government in exile
may be established
abroad.

Actions of
governments in
exile
International law
recognizes that
governments in exile
may undertake many
types of actions in the
conduct of their daily
affairs. These actions
include:

Becoming a party
to a bilateral or
international treaty

Amending or
revising its own
constitution

Maintaining
military forces

Retaining (or
"newly obtaining")
diplomatic
recognition by
sovereign states

Issuing identity
cards

Allowing the
formation of new
political parties

Instituting
democratic
reforms

Holding elections

Allowing for direct

(or more broadlybased) elections of
its government
officers

However, none of
these actions can
serve to legitimatize a
government in exile to
become the
internationally
recognized legal
government of its
current locality. By
definition, a
government in exile is
spoken of in terms of
its native country;
hence it must return to
its native country and
regain power there in
order to obtain
legitimacy as the legal
government of that
geographic area.

Past
governments in
exile

Provisional
Government of the
Republic of Korea

Crown Council
of Ethiopia, led by
H.I.M Prince
Ermias Sahle
Selassie and
based in
the Washington
D.C. area, claimed
that the Emperor
was still the legal
head of Ethiopia

The government in
exile of the Free
City of Danzig

Spanish
Republican
government in
exile after Franco's
coup d'tat. Based
in Mexico City from
1939 to 1946,
when it was moved
to Paris, where it
lasted until
Franco's death

The Provisional
Government of
Free India was
established by
Indian nationalists
in exile during the
war

Other exiled
leaders
in England include
d King Zog
of Albania and
Emperor Haile
Selassie of Ethiopi
a

Many countries
established a
government in exile
after loss of
sovereignty in
connection with World
War II:

Belgium (invaded
May 10, 1940)

Czechoslovakia (e
stablished in 1940
by Bene and
recognized by the

British
government)

Free France (after

1940)

Greece (invaded
October 28, 1940)

Luxembourg (inva
ded May 10, 1940)

Netherlands (invad
ed May 10, 1940)

Norway (invaded
April 9, 1940)

Poland (from
September 1939)

Yugoslavia (invade
d April 6, 1941)

Commonwealth of
the Philippines (inv
aded December 8,
1941)

Denmark's
occupation (April
9, 1940) was
administered by
the German
Foreign Office,
contrary to other
occupied lands
that were under
military
administration.
Denmark did not
establish a
government in
exile, although
there was an
Association of
Free Danes
established

in London. The
King and his
government
remained in
Denmark, and
functioned
comparatively
independently for
the first three
years of German
occupation.
Meanwhile, Icelan
dand the Faroe
Islands were
occupied by the
Allies, and
effectively
separated from the
Danish crown.

Nation in exile
When large groups, or
occasionally a whole
people or nation is
exiled, it can be said
that this nation is in
"exile,"
or diaspora. The
term diaspora (in Ancie
nt Greek,
"a scattering or
sowing of seeds")
refers to any people or
ethnic population who
are forced or induced
to leave their
traditional homelands,
the dispersal of such
people, and the
ensuing developments
in their culture.
Nations that have been
in exile for substantial
periods include
the Jews, who were
deported
by Nebuchadnezzar II
of Babylon in

597 B.C.E., and again in

the years following the
destruction of the
second temple
in Jerusalem in the
year 70 C.E. The
Jewish diaspora has
lasted more than two
thousand years, until
the founding of the
modern State
of Israel in 1948, which
finally opened the
possibility of returning
to the ancestral
homeland. The Jewish
diaspora brought on
many distinctive
cultural developments
within the exiled
communities.
Theological reflection
on the meaning of
exile has led to the
insight that God, who
dwells amongst his
people, also lives and
suffers in exile. The
Hasidic master Israel
Baal Shem Tov said,
"Pray continually for
Gods glory, that it may
be redeemed from its
exile."[4] In modern
Israel, there is a
Ministry of Diaspora
Affairs, and Jews from
around the world are
encouraged to
make aliyah (ascend)
to end their exile by
emigrating to Israel.
History contains
numerous diasporalike events. The
Migration Period
relocations, which
included several

phases, are just one

set of many. The first
phase Migration Period
displacement from
between 300 and
500 C.E. included
relocation of the
Goths, (Ostrogoths,
Visigoths), Vandals,
Franks, various other
Germanic tribes
(Burgundians,
Langobards, Angles,
Saxons, Jutes, Suebi,
Alamanni, Varangians),
Alans, and numerous
Slavic tribes. The
second phase,
between 500 and
900 C.E., saw Slavic,
Turkic, and other tribes
on the move, resettling in Eastern
Europe and gradually
making it
predominantly Slavic,
and
affecting Anatolia and
the Caucasus as the
first Turkic peoples
(Avars, Bulgars, Huns,
Khazars, Pechenegs)
arrived. The last phase
of the migrations saw
the coming of
the Magyars and
the Viking expansion
out of Scandinavia.
Here is a partial list of
forced exiles in recent
times:

After the partitions

of Poland in the
late eighteenth
century, and
following the
uprisings

(Kosciuszko
Uprising,
November
Uprising, and
January Uprising)
against the
partitioning powers
(Russian
Empire, Prussia an
d Austro-Hungary),
many Poles chose,
or were forced,
into exile, forming
large diasporas
(known as
"Polonia"),
especially
in France and
the United States.

The Acadian
diasporathe
Great
Expulsion (Grand
Drangement) occ
urred when the
British expelled
about 10,000
Acadians (over
three-fourths of the
Acadian population
of Nova Scotia)
between 1755 and
1764. The British
split the Acadians
between different
colonies to impose
assimilation.

Armenian diaspora
Armenians living
in their ancient
homeland, which
had been
controlled by
the Ottoman
Empire for
centuries, fled

persecution and
massacres during
several periods of
forced emigration,
from the 1880s to
the 1910s. Many
Armenians settled
in the United
States (a majority
of whom live in the
state
of California), Fran
ce, India, Iran, Leb
anon, Russia and
Syria.

Circassiansfled
Circassia
Kabardey,
Cherkes, Adigey
Republics and
Shapsug Area in
1864. Exiled 90
percent of
Circassians are by
Russian
colonialists
to Ottoman
Empire or
imperial Turkey.
The Circassian
Diaspora is over
four million
worldwide, with
large Circassian
communities
in Bulgaria, Cyprus
, Egypt, Greece, Is
rael, Jordan, Leba
non, Romania, Syri
a, Russia as well
the former USSR,
and 100,000
Circassians in
North America (the
United States and
Canada), as well
over 10,000

Circassians
in Australia.

The entire
population of
Crimean Tatars
(200,000) that
remained in their
homeland Crimea
was exiled on May
18, 1944, to
Central Asia as a
form of "ethnic
cleansing" and
collective
punishment on
false accusations.

The twentieth century

saw huge population
movements. Partly this
was due to natural
disasters, as has
happened throughout
history, but it also
involved large-scale
transfers of people by
government decree.
Some diasporas
occurred because the
people went along
with, or could not
escape, the
government's plan
(such as Stalin's desire
to populate
Eastern Russia,
Central Asia, and
Siberia; and the
transfer of hundreds of
thousands of people
between India and Pak
istan in the 1947
Partition). Other
diasporas occurred as
people fled the
decrees; for example,
European Jews fleeing
the Holocaust during

World war II), and Hutu

and Tutsi trying to
escape the Rwandan
Genocide in 1994.
During the Cold
War era, huge
populations of
refugees continued to
form from areas of war,
especially from Third
World nations; all
over Africa (for
example, over 50,000
South Asians expelled
from Uganda by Idi
Amin in 1975),South
America (for example,
thousands
of Uruguayan refugees
fled to Europe during
military rule in the
1970s and 80s)
and Central
America (for example,
Nicaraguans, Salvador
ians, Guatemalans, Ho
ndurans, Costa
Ricans andPanamania
ns), the Middle East
(the Iranians who fled
the 1978 Islamic
revolution), the Indian
subcontinent
(thousands of former
subjects of the British
Raj went to
the UK after India and
Pakistan became
independent in 1947),
and Southeast
Asia (for example, the
displaced 30,000
French colons from Ca
mbodia expelled by
the Khmer
Rouge regime
under Pol Pot). The
issue of untold millions

of Third World
refugees created more
diasporas than ever in
human history.

Tax exile
A wealthy citizen who
departs from a former
abode for a lower tax
jurisdiction in order to
reduce his/her tax
burden is termed a "tax
exile." These are
people who choose to
leave their native
country for a foreign
nation or jurisdiction,
where taxes on their
personal income are
appreciably lower, or
even nothing. Going
into tax exile is a
means of tax mitigation
or avoidance.
Under UK law, a
person is "tax resident"
if they visit the country
for 183 days or more in
the tax year or for 91
days or more on
average in any four
consecutive tax years.
[5]

Tax haven
A tax haven is a place
where certain taxes
are levied at a low rate
or not at all. This
encourages wealthy
individuals
and/or businesses to
establish themselves
in areas that would
otherwise be
overlooked. Different
jurisdictions tend to be
havens for different

types of taxes, and for

different categories of
people and/or
companies.
Often described in
different ways, it is
difficult to find a
satisfactory or
generally accepted
definition for what
constitutes a tax
haven. The
Economist tentatively
adopted the
description by Colin
Powell (former
Economic Adviser
toJersey): "What
identifies an area as a
tax haven is the
existence of a
composite tax
structure established
deliberately to take
advantage of, and
exploit, a worldwide
demand for
opportunities to
engage in tax
avoidance." The
Economist pointed out,
however, that this
definition would still
exclude a number of
jurisdictions
traditionally thought of
as tax havens.[6]
One way a person or
company takes
advantage of tax
havens is by moving
to, and becoming
resident for tax
purposes in, a
particular country.
Another way for an
individual or a

company to take
advantage of a tax
haven is to establish a
separate legal entity
(an "offshore
company," "offshore
trust," or foundation),
subsidiary or holding
company there. Assets
are transferred to the
new company or trust
so that gains may be
realized, or income
earned, within this
legal entity rather than
earned by the
beneficial owner.
The United States is
unlike most other
countries in that its
citizens are subject to
U.S. tax on their
worldwide income no
matter where in the
world they reside. U.S.
citizens therefore
cannot avoid U.S.
taxes either by
emigrating or by
transferring assets
abroad.

Notes
1. www.canada
.com, U.S.
sex offender
serving
probation in
Canada was
not "exiled,"
says N.Y.
judge. Retriev
ed December
6, 2006.
2. Read
Easily, Dante

Alighieri.
Retrieved
December 6,
2006.
3. Public Book
Shelf, History
of Colonial
Georgia.
Retrieved
December 12,
2006.
4. Martin
Buber, Hasidi
sm and
Modern
Man (New
York: Harper
& Row, 1958).
5. www.hmrc.g
ov.uk,Taxable
UK Residents.
Retrieved
December 6,
2006.
6. Caroline
Doggart, Tax
Havens and
Their
Uses (Econo
mist
Intelligence
Unit,
2002, ISBN
0862181631).

External links
All links retrieved
October 11, 2013.

Offshore Financial
CentersIMF
Background
Paper.

Tax Justice
Network.

An OECD
Proposal To
Eliminate Tax
Competition Would
Mean Higher
Taxes and Less
PrivacyHeritage
Foundation:
Washington D.C.

Credits
New World
Encyclopedia writers
and editors rewrote
and completed
the Wikipedia article in
accordance with New
World
Encyclopedia standard
s. This article abides
by terms of
the Creative Commons
CC-by-sa 3.0
License(CC-by-sa),
which may be used
and disseminated with
proper attribution.
Credit is due under the
terms of this license
that can reference both
the New World
Encyclopedia contribut
ors and the selfless
volunteer contributors
of the Wikimedia
Foundation. To cite this
article click here for a
list of acceptable citing

formats.The history of
earlier contributions by
wikipedians is
accessible to
researchers here:

Exile (Nov 9,
2006)

history

Government_in_ex
ile (Nov 9,
2006)

Tax_exile (Nov 9,
2006)

history

Tax_haven (Nov 9,
2006)

history

history

Diaspora (Nov 9,
2006)

history

Exile, meaning to be away from ones home state while either being explicitly refused
permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return,
has become in vogue once more for heads of state. The departure of Tunisian
President for exile in the Saudi city of Jeddah (the same city where former
President Idi Amin of Uganda lived in exile until his death on 2003 after being
removed from power on 1979 at end of the Ugandan-Tanzanian War) in February has
been followed by the departure of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to the same
country, ostensibly for medical treatment following a rocket attack on his presidential
palace on Friday, but which many speculate may become permanent. Though the
government rejected an opposition proposal to prepare for the transition from the rule
of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and for the election of his replacement and though his
spokesmen said no decisions on Yemens future could be taken until he returned from
Saudi Arabia, the US and EU have pressured Sanaa to initiate what US secretary of
state Hillary Clinton called an immediate transition to a new regime. Salehs
departure, if it becomes permanent, will inevitably have an impact on any process of
accountability for crimes committed during the recent spike in repression Saudi
.Arabia has not signed the Rome Statute
Exile has a very long history, stretching back to Greek tragedy. Euripedes Medea
made herself and her family exiles in Corinth because of her actions in Iolcus. She
talks of her exiled state in Corinth: I, a desolate woman without a city no relative
at all. The exile of Medea, like that of Pol Pot in Cambodia and Hosni Mubarak in

Sherm-al-Sheik, is internal in form. The more usual form in recent history is external.
It is unlikely that Saleh and Ben Ali will be as desolate as Medea, though the recent
history of the phenomenon shows a variety of outcomes. Typically, modern exile is
permanent in the form of asylum, though Charles Taylors deportation from Nigeria
for face trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2005 presents an exception
which may one day constitute the rule. While 2011 may yet turn out to be an annus
mirabilis for exile, it is worth nothing that Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed Baby
Doc, who was the President of Haiti from 1971 until his overthrow by a popular
uprising in 1986, unexpectedly returned to Haiti on 16 January 2011, after two
decades in exile in France due to a popular uprising on 7 February 1986. The
following day, he was arrested by Haitian police, facing possible charges for
embezzlement. On 18 January, Duvalier was charged with corruption, and is expected
to be held before a judge in Port-au-Prince for his trial. It may prove a happier ending
that some of the other exiles the international community has tolerated in the interest
.of regime change or peace, as the following survey demonstrates

Idi Amin
After an eight-year rule (1971-79) characterized by human rights abuse, political
repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross
economic mismanagement (the number of people killed as a result of his regime is
estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from
100,000 to 500,000), internal dissent within Uganda and Amins attempt
to annex the Kagera province of Tanzania in 1978 led to the UgandaTanzania
War and the demise of his regime. Amins army retreated steadily in the face of
Tanzanian counter-attack, and, despite military help from Libyas Muammar alGaddafi, he was forced to flee into exile by helicopter on 11 April 1979,
when Kampala was captured. He escaped first to Libya, where he stayed until 1980,
and ultimately settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him
sanctuary and paid him a generous subsidy in return for his staying out of
politics. Amin lived for a number of years on the top two floors of the Novotel
Hotel on Palestine Road in Jeddah. In 1989, he attempted to return to Uganda,
apparently to lead an armed group organised by Colonel Juma Oris. He
reached Kinshasa, Zaire, before Zairian President Mobutu forced him to return to
Saudi Arabia (exile throws up some very colourful characters). Amin died in 2003 and
.is buried in Jeddah

Erich Honecker

Honecker led the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist
Unity Party from 1971 until 1989, serving as Head of State from1976. Following the

definite end of the Cold War, Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes and was
ousted by the party in late 1989 and removed from power. After the GDR was
dissolved in October 1990, the Honeckers stayed in a Soviet military hospital near
Berlin before later fleeing the republic to Moscow, to avoid prosecution over charges
of Cold War crimes. He was accused by the German government of involvement in
the deaths of 192 East Germans who tried to leave the GDR in violation of antiRepublikflucht laws. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December
1991, Honecker took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, but was extradited by
the Yeltsin administration to Germany in 1992. He was officially expelled from the
reformed SED-PDS before the trial opened. He then joined the very small new
Communist Party. When the trial formally opened in early 1993, Honecker was
released due to ill health and on 13 January of that year moved to Chile to live with
.his daughter who was married to a Chilean

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Mengistu was the most prominent officer of the Derg, the Communist military junta
that governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987, and the President of the Peoples
Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1987 to 1991. He oversaw the Ethiopian Red
Terror of 19771978, a campaign of repression against the Ethiopian Peoples
Revolutionary Party and other anti-Derg factions. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991
at the conclusion of the Ethiopian Civil War. He remains there, though unusually there
was some degree of accountability after one of the Ethiopian courts Red Terror trials
verdict found him guilty in absentia of genocide. His charge sheet and evidence list
was 8,000 pages long. The evidence against him included signed execution orders,
videos of torture sessions and personal testimonies. The trial began in 1994 and ended
in 2006. Mengistu was found guilty as charged on 12 December 2006, and was
sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. After Mengistus conviction in December
2006, the Zimbabwean government said that he still enjoyed asylum and would not be
extradited. A Zimbabwean government spokesman explained this by saying that
Mengistu and his government played a key and commendable role during our
struggle for independence. According to the spokesman, Mengistu assisted his
countrys guerrillas during their liberation war by providing training and arms, and
after the war he had provided training for Zimbabwean air force pilots; the spokesman
.said that not many countries have shown such commitment to us

Ferdinand Marcos
Marcos, sadly most famous for his wifes enormous shoe collection, was President of
the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. His administration was marred by
massive authoritarian corruption, despotism, nepotism, political repression, and

human rights violations. In 1983, his government was implicated in the assassination
of his primary political opponent, Benigno Aquino, Jr. The implication caused a chain
of events, including a tainted presidential election that served as the catalyst for
the People Power Revolution in February 1986 that led to his removal from power
and eventual exile in Hawaii. A close ally of Ronald Reagans administration, Marcos
.died in Honolulu on September 28, 1989, of kidney, heart and lung ailments
Jean Bedel Bokassa

This is perhaps the most interesting exile, incorporating return, trial, punishment and a
decisive role in French elections. Bokassa was the head of state of the Central African
Republic and its successor state, the preposterously named Central African Empire,
from his coup detat on 1 January 1966 until 20 September 1979. After his overthrow
in 1979, Central Africa reverted to its former name and status as the Central African
Republic, and the former Bokassa I went into exile. On the date of the coup against
him by David Dacko, Bokassa, who was visiting Libya on a state visit, fled to the
Ivory Coast where he spent four years living in Abidjan. He then moved to France
where he was allowed to settle in a suburb of Paris. France gave him political asylum
because of the French Foreign Legion obligations. During Bokassas seven-year of
exile, he wrote his memoirs after complaining that his French military pension was
insufficient. But the French courts ordered that all 8,000 copies of the book be
confiscated and destroyed after his publisher claimed that Bokassa said that he shared
women with President Valry Giscard dEstaing, who has been a frequent guest in the
Central African Republic. Bokassa also claimed to have given Giscard a gift of
diamonds worth around a quarter of a million dollars in 1973 while the French
president was serving as finance minister. Giscards next presidential reelection
campaign failed in the wake of the scandal. Bokassas presence in France proved
embarrassing to many government ministers who supported him during his entire rule.
He returned to Central Africa in 1986, and was arrested as soon as he stepped off the
plane. He was tried for 14 different charges, including treason, murder, cannibalism,
illegal use of property, assault and battery, and embezzlement, and convicted of these
offenses in 1987. He was imprisoned in 19871993. Bokassa lived in private life in
.his former capital, Bangui, until his death in November 1996

Mobutu Sese Seko

Mobutu Sese Seko as the President of the Democratic Republic of the

Congo/Zaire from 1965 to 1997, a rule characterised by authoritarianism, war and
mass human rights abuses. Mobutu was overthrown in the First Congo
War by Laurent-Dsir Kabila, who was supported by the governments of Rwanda,
Burundi and Uganda. Mobutu went into temporary exile in Togo but lived mostly

in Morocco. On the very same day he was exiled, Laurent-Dsir Kabila became the
new president of Congo. He died shortly after on 7 September 1997, in Rabat,
Morocco, from prostate cancer. He is buried in Rabat. In December 2007,
the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of the Congo recommended
.returning his remains to the Congo and interring them in a mausoleum

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Written by Pdraig McAuliffe

Padraig McAuliffe graduated from UCC in 2004 and completed his PhD from the same
institution in 2009. He lectures in the University of Dundee. His research interests include the
interaction of transitional justice with rule of law reconstruction and the politics of international
.criminal tribunals, most notably the on-going Khmer Rouge Trials
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Declan Costello (1926-2011) and Irish Socio-Economic Rights

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The cult of exile
Modern intellectuals should stand up for outcasts. But not by
pretending to be outcasts themselves
by Ian Buruma / March 20, 2001 / Leave a comment
Published in March 2001 issue of Prospect Magazine

Exile is in fashion. It evokes images of a critical spirit operating on the margins of

society, a traveller, rootless and yet at home in every metropolis, a tireless
wanderer from conference to academic conference, a thinker in several
languages, an eloquent advocate for minorities, in short, a romantic outsider
living on the edge of the bourgeois world.
This may sound frivolous. For exile is surely no fun. There is nothing glamorous
about the poor shivering Tamil, sleeping on a cold, plastic bench at Frankfurt
railway station, or an Iraqi, fleeing from Saddams butchers, afraid of walking the
streets of Dover lest he be attacked by British skinheads, or a young woman from
Eritrea, standing at the side of a minor road to Milan, picking up truck drivers so
that she can feed her baby. These are not fashionable figures, but outcasts, who
have nothing in common with the multicultural intellectuals whom we honour as
the poets of post-colonial narratives.
I have in front of me a book, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity,
Language and Loss. It is a collection of lectures given at the New York Public
Library by five well-known writers in exile. Edward Said is introduced as a
Palestinian in exile, Eva Hoffmann as a Pole in exile, Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali
in exile, Charles Simic, a Yugoslav in exile, and Andr Aciman, as an exile from
Alexandria.
The lectures are, on the whole, unexceptionable. The curious thing is, however,
that of the five, only two were forced to leave their country of origin: Aciman,
whose family was kicked out of Egypt, and Simic, whose parents could not live
under communism. Said, who grew up in Cairo, was sent to a private boarding
school in the US, not because of any force majeure, but because his father, a US
citizen, believed that an American education offered better prospects for a bright
young man. Bharati Mukherjee, born into a rich Calcutta family, married a
Canadian writer, moved to North America and has no desire to return to India,
except for vacations.
Why then, this description of exile? Why the conscious identification with
banishment, with the outcasts of the world? In her contribution, Eva Hoffmann
comes up with a plausible explanation. Exile, in her view, involves dislocation,
disorientation, self-division And within the framework of postmodern theory, we
have come to value exactly those qualities that exile demands uncertainty,
displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this framework, exile becomes,
well, sexy, glamorous, interesting.
In literary and academic circles, then, exile has acquired something far removed
from those cold plastic benches at Frankfurt station, the skinheads of Dover, or
the truck drivers along the B-routes to Milan. What we have here is exile as
metaphor, to use Saids own phrase, exile as the typical condition of the modern
intellectual. This is not an original thesis. Saids hero, the German critic Theodor
Adorno, who was for a time a real as well as theoretical exile, claimed that a sense
of alienation, of not feeling at home even in your own home, was the only correct
moral attitude for an intellectual to adopt. Adorno is part of a German romantic
tradition in which intellectuals form a secular clerisy guarding the moral and
intellectual health of the nation. (Gnter Grass is an example of a writer who still
takes this line.)

Exile as metaphor is not a new idea either. In the Jewish tradition, a metaphorical
meaning has been attached to exile for a very long time. The last words of the
story told at the Pesach Seder, Next year in Jerusalem, express a pious wish,
which, for most of those who voice it, is an abstraction. For orthodox Jews, it is
only time to return to Jerusalem once the Messiah has come and the temple has
been restored to its former glory. It would be a form of blasphemy, in the orthodox
tradition, to turn the vision into a political reality. So the idea of doing just that, of
making Israel the homeland of the Jews once again, had to be a secular
enterprise, started by non-orthodox, often socialist Jews like Theodor Herzl.
The Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua calls Jewish exile, the golah, a neurotic
condition. It is neurotic to express a longing for something, without actually
wishing to attain it. In Yehoshuas view, the longing to return to Jerusalem is no
more than a neurotic form of nostalgia, a not uncommon condition among certain
literary exiles too. But Yehoshua goes further he thinks that Jews are victims of
their own delusion, the idea, that is, of having been chosen by God. The idea of
Jewish exceptionalism is hard to maintain at home, in a largely Jewish nation, with
its own government, army, political parties, showbiz celebrities, scandals,
gangsters and whatnot. The self-flattering notion of being chosen, of being
different from the others, is easier to maintain in exile, where ones special status
can be confirmed almost daily by instances, imagined or real, of discrimination.
The Holocaust came as the final proof that this was not a sensible recipe for a
quiet life.
The choice to live in a metaphorical exile is in fact already a form of privilege,
something only people who face no real danger can afford. Herzl, who felt at ease
with the higher goyim of Europe, understood this perfectly well. The return to the
holy land was not to help himself, but to help other Jews who were not in a
position to enjoy their status as the chosen ones. But Herzl, as far as I am aware,
had the honesty never to use the word exile to describe his own condition.

***

One of the first stories of exile in our literary tradition is the story of Adam and
Eve. No matter how we interpret the story of their expulsion from the Garden of
Eden original sin or not we can be certain of one thing: there is no way back to
paradise. After that bite of the apple, the return to innocence was cut off for ever.
The exile of Adam and Eve is the consequence of growing up. An adult can only
recall the state of childlike innocence in his imagination, and from this kind of
exile a great deal of literature has emerged; it is infused with the melancholy
knowledge that we can never return to Eden.
The transition from childhood innocence, and the security of the maternal
embrace, to the hard world of maturity, is described in Edward Saids memoir, Out
of Place. He describes his arrival from Cairo in 1951, to go to school in the US. The
worst wrench was to leave his mother, who never ceased to remind her son how
unnatural it was to be living apart. He can still feel the loss today, the sense
that Id rather be somewhere else-defined as closer to her enveloped in her
special maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving-because

being here was not being where I/we had wanted to be, here being defined as a
place of exile
We all know the feeling, even though we may not express it quite so tearfully. But
exile from Eden is a part of life. Some men never look back, some never get over
it, and look for the maternal embrace in the beds of many women, and yet others
turn it into art. This explains the universal fascination with exile in literature. Ovid,
Li Po or Joseph Roth appeal to us, because their banishments, which were not
imaginary, also contain a deeper, metaphorical meaning.
There are some instances where the childhood Edens cease to exist. A society, a
culture, even a people can disappear. Czeslaw Milosz, born as a Pole in Lithuania,
has described what it is like to look back now, as an American in California, to his
youth in Vilnius. He still writes in Polish about people and ways of life which no
longer exist. All things change everywhere, of course. But in the case of Milosz
and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the worlds they describe exist only in their books. The
same was true for Joseph Roth. He lived in exile, twice over, for he grew up in the
Austro-Hungarian empire, which ceased to exist in 1918, and died as an exile in
Paris in 1939, one year after Austria was swallowed up by the Third Reich.
On the other hand Ulysses, one of the most remarkable exiles in western
literature, was not really banished at all. But since his return from Troy was
blocked for ten years, he was a kind of exile. Ulysses pined for Ithaca, where his
house was, his family, and his wife Penelope. He was lord of Ithaca; that was his
place in the order of things. A man who has lost his house, his wife or his position
is not a proper man, but a beggar, a vagabond, half dead in the land of the living.
A vagabond is sterile; he doesnt produce a family; he leaves nothing behind. The
Odyssey is the story of a man who must regain his position in the order of things.
It is impossible to know precisely what Homer meant to convey in his epic, but I
think he was dealing with the tension between human autonomy and fate. A
grown person has to feel responsible for his or her life. This is to assume that we
have some degree of control over it. But The Odyssey shows that man is also a
plaything of the gods. And this has something to do with exile too. Anyone who
has wandered alone in foreign countries, often without knowing the language or
customs, knows how helpless, indeed child-like, that can make you feel. Your fate
really does appear to be in the hands of others, government officials, hotel
managers, policemen, or even, who knows, the gods. And if I, a privileged
European can feel this way, how about the poor Tamil in Frankfurt station? Only
after his return to Ithaca can Ulysses wake up as a grown man who knows his way
around.
There are many ways to interpret The Odyssey. Dante, himself an exile from
Florence, believed that the hero never really wanted to be at home. Dantes
Ulysses was a kind of eternal student who loathed the idea of domesticity, with a
wife and children and a nice little dog. Who needed that kind of responsibility? It
was too boring. First he would win experience of the world, hitchhike to India, as
it were, sleep with many women, and above all, gather knowledge. Just as Eve
couldnt resist that bite of the apple in Eden, Dantes hero thirsts for knowledge,
with the risk of getting burnt, like Icarus. Ulysses returns to Ithaca, just as he does
in Homers tale, but then takes off again, and ends up entering the infernal gates.
Dante lived in the middle ages, but he was also touched by the spirit of the
Renaissance. He admired the heros wish for knowledge. His Ulysses is really the

harbinger of the intellectual as a romantic exile. Banishment is his fate by choice.

He was almost a man of our time.
Heinrich Heine was already a man of our time. A romantic, a poet, a revolutionary
and an intellectual outsider, Heine felt nostalgia for his native Germany, but
preferred to live in Paris. Germany, as he put it, kept him awake at night. Heine
was an outsider as a Jew in Germany. He found it impossible to get an official
position, even after he had converted without conviction to Christianity. He felt
like an outsider, too, because he was a free-thinker who couldnt stand the
authoritarianism of the German states. Heine loved Germany, just as Germans
loved his poems, but at a distance. He would have liked to have died in Germany,
but politics and illness prevented his return, and like Marlene Dietrich, another
ambivalent wanderer from German lands, he died in Paris.
Heine was in many ways a typical example of the modern literary exile. The
borderline between banishment and emigration was fuzzy. He was really an
expatriate, someone who has chosen to live his life abroad. And by Heines time
the typical place of exile has shifted, from the desert the cold, lonely, windswept
plains, beyond the borders of civilisation to the metropolitan centres of the west:
London, Paris, Berlin, New York. Here political action, plotted in cafes and public
libraries, began to play an increasingly important role in the life of exiles-freedom,
usually in a left-wing form, was their typical religion. Exile from Rome in the age of
Augustus, or Florence in Dantes time, meant the loss of liberty, the civil rights of
a metropolitan citizen. The modern exiles in our great cities, however poor or
lonely, almost invariably enjoy more freedom than the citizens of the countries
they left behind. Karl Marx could complain as much as he wanted to about all
those British philistines, but he stayed in London because he was free to design
his workers utopia.
London was a centre of European revolutionary activities after the disasters of
1848, just as London today is a centre for Arab or African politics, or New York for
the Chinese diaspora. It is not an easy life, in this twilight world of migr journals,
shabby apartments and personal feuds, fed endlessly by old animosities and
political frustrations. Time, in this kind of exile, often appears to have been frozen.
People live only for the future, and once it finally dawns on them that the desired
future will never come, they live only in the past. I have seen many examples:
Chinese intellectuals, who once advised government leaders in Beijing, subsisting
in lonely rooms in Queens, in a mess of old newspapers and magazines. Because
exile was supposed to be temporary, these fallen men never bothered to learn
English or read an American paper. Before they know it, it is too late to returnstranded, their place gone, their way back cut off for ever, they might as well be
dead.
It doesnt have to be like that. Sometimes an exile will go home as a revolutionary
hero. The point is, however, that exile has become a phenomenon of the big citylike alienation, existentialism, and post-modern, multicultural deconstruction. The
outsider romantic, sexual, ethnic or whatever is described and often
celebrated in our metropoles. Isherwoods English novels came from the
homosexual world of 1930s Berlin. Joyce wrote about Dublin in Trieste and Paris.
Burroughs brooded on his American sexual delirium in a hotel room in Tangiers.
Salman Rushdie wrote in London about his fantasies of Bombay. What started with
Heine became almost mainstream in the 20th century.

Once more, I do not wish to appear frivolous. Writers and other exiles did not
always move abroad for fun. Joyce chose to live abroad. But Roth, Feuchtwanger,
Zweig, Schoenberg, Weill and many others, had to flee for their lives. However,
the difference between self-imposed exile and banishment was in many cases
ceasing to exist altogether at the end of the 19th century. Exile had became an
attitude, a literary and intellectual way of observing the world. Baudelaire saw the
writer as a detached flneur, a mocking dandy in the big city crowd, alienated,
isolated, anonymous, aristocratic, melancholic. For Joyce and other writers
isolation and detachment were necessary conditions for writing literature.
Silence, exile and cunning was his prescription, or at least that of Stephen
Dedalus, his literary alter ego. A writer has to operate alone, as a stranger among
strangers. Joseph Brodsky, whose departure from the Soviet Union was hardly
voluntary, wrote that being a writer in exile is like being a dog or a man hurtled
into outer space in a capsule And your capsule is your language. Like Joyce, he
believed that exile was good for a writer; you were alone with your language.
Exile provided distance. Exile, in this sense, is not so much metaphorical as
metaphysical; it gives meaning to a way of life.
Many people were forced into exile before and after the second world war. But the
middle decades of the last century also saw exile and the outsider, or the outlaw,
emerge as one of the main subjects of European literature. Detachment as an
ideal held a particular attraction for homosexuals, but also for straight Don Juans.
Genet was an extreme example; gay, criminal, homeless. Isherwood, in Berlin and
LA, was a less extreme case. But aside from the quality of their prose, about
which one might argue, we should also consider Henry Miller, an American in
Paris, and Lawrence Durrell, an Englishman in Egypt.
And yet detachment, like everything, has its limits. Joyce might have seen
distance and isolation as necessary conditions for writing his masterpieces, but
the loneliness of the modern tranger, and the absurdity of the weightless,
unbounded existence, made others thirst for engagement, a kind of solidarity, if
not with a particular people, then with humanity in general, or at least that part of
humanity living in what came to be called the third world. This is how a fashion for
Maoism, the most extreme revolt against individualism, could follow from
existential alienation. But extreme nationalism has also cast its spells.
A number of Japanese artists and writers moved to Europe at the beginning of the
last century, to find a refuge from the narrow provincialism of Japan. They lived
mostly in Paris, gathering knowledge, seducing women, painting, writing poems,
and seeking the key to their innermost souls in the anonymity of a foreign crowd.
And it was precisely these same people who often returned home in the 1930s,
with a sigh of relief, to bask in the motherly embrace of the Japanese nation,
which was being whipped up just then into a mood of xenophobic hysteria.
Scorched by their lonely travels, some became the fiercest war propagandists
once they got home.

***

My intention, in citing these examples, is not to plead against the spirit of

adventure, promiscuity, curiosity or freedom abroad. On the contrary. I have
always been led by wanderlust myself. What I am trying to get at instead is the
tension between political engagement and intellectual independence. Edward
Said has written about this, without quite resolving the problem. He has made
great claims, for independence as well as engagement. His argument is that an
intellectual should always stand up for the poor, the weak and the disadvantaged.
The free-thinker should resist the dominant powers, which means, in his case,
Israel and the US. But while going about his acts of resistance, he should also
guard his independence. The question is whether this is always possible. Can you
be a spokesman for the Palestinians, as Said was for many years, and remain
independent at the same time? He believes you can. Im not so sure it is possible.
One solution to this dilemma is to plump for an offshore kind of engagement, a
detached involvement. The intellectual abroad, a Sikh in Toronto, let us say, or a
Palestinian in New York, or a Jew in Washington, calls for action, sometimes violent
action, to be carried out thousands of miles from his home, the consequences of
which he will not have to bear. Engagement of this kind can become a politics
without responsibility. This type of politics, like modern literary exile, might be
metaphorical for the exile in New York, Paris or Toronto, but not for those living
in India, Jerusalem or Gaza. Said called his stone-throwing stint on the Lebanese
border a symbolic gesture, a metaphoric throw of a metaphoric stone. But
stones in the middle east are seldom metaphoric; they hurt; they result in further
violence; they kill people.
Political engagement can be essential. But too often it results from intellectual
frustration. Intellectuals have neither power (outside the universities), nor much
influence in modern democracies. This is because western intellectuals, since the
Enlightenment, have won their independence. They have fought themselves free.
Unlike in China, where the notion of the independent intellectual barely exists,
western intellectuals represent nothing but their own ideas. They are not, or
should not be, a band of scribes who guard the dogmas that justify the powers
that be. Instead they are obliged to take their ideas to the marketplace, and that
is how it should be. For intellectual independence is sacrificed once ideas are
made to serve a political organisation. This might be essential, on occasion, but
one should be clear about the sacrifice involved.
Yet, many intellectuals would like to represent more than themselves. The
Republic of Letters is pregnant with political ambition. The great revolutionary
ideals, which intellectuals once served as secular priests, are out of fashion for the
moment. But the multicultural society in which we live, (if we live in the great
cities of the western world), offers new chances. Especially in the US, the identity
politics of minorities have become increasingly important, and the identities to be
promoted are often based on a sentimental sense of collective victimhood. The
smart thing to do for an intellectual with political ambition, is to act as the
spokesman for such feelings. By identifying himself with the plight of more or less
discriminated minorities or other forms of collective suffering, the lonely
intellectual manages not only to escape from his isolation, but becomes a symbol
of that suffering himself, and so obtains many of the perks and privileges that go
with it.

The point here is not that intellectuals shouldnt stand up for societys victims.
They should. But not by pretending to be victims themselves. To don the bloody
mantle of real victims trivialises actual suffering; victimhood becomes a fashion
item. The soi-disant exile status might attach a certain glamour to the writer in
London or New York, but it does nothing for that poor Tamil sleeping in Frankfurt
station.
The cult of victimhood, marginality and exile has also had a paralysing influence
on academe, where literature, anthropology and even history are difficult to
discuss anymore without being cuffed in the chains of post-colonial discourse. The
notion of exile, especially from the third world, has given post-colonial
intellectuals the sacred task of attacking the cultural imperialism of the western
metropole. Intellectuals compete to become the new priests of the post-colonial
dogma. One of the main dogmas is that hybrid, marginal, post-colonial
writing should undermine the imperialist, even racist propaganda of the European
literary canon.
There is something to be said for this. Any culture or tradition is bound to be
rejuvenated by outside influences. And the idea that the western canon should be
surrounded by a culturally impregnable moat is absurd. But this so-called
marginality is often a form of intellectual self-celebration, for the new influences
rarely penetrate from anywhere outside the western world. Glamorous exile, the
hybridity of literary style, the attack on the cultural imperialism of the
metropole are products of that same metropole, and have become part of a
dogma which is exported to the rest of the world. Bookstores in Beijing or Bombay
are full of books which evangelise the post-colonial, multicultural, anti-imperialist
gospel. And the authors of these gospels live in New York, London or Boston. They
live in a closed world of theory, in metaphorical exile, far from the problems of
real victims, of people who are forced to live in real exile. Worse than that,
multicultural theory has led to ethnic and sexual divisions of labour in intellectual
life: more and more, women write about women, gays about gays, blacks about
blacks, and so on. This is not hybridity or marginality in a positive sense; it is a
new and unnecessary constraint.
One way of creating more clarity in these matters is to separate metaphor from
reality, or what Confucius called the rectification of names. All he meant by this
was that we should call a spade a spade. Exile means banishment, not intellectual
loneliness. A writer or an intellectual might operate on the margins of a modern,
democratic society, without political authority, but that does not make him an
outlaw or an exile. It is time to reject the assumed badges of victimhood. For then
we would be better able to recognise the real victims, as well as maintain our
intellectual independence. And for those who find an intellectual odyssey too
burdensome, they are best advised to seek another occupation.

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CFP: Roman Exile: Poetry, Prose, and Politics

Organizers:
David M. Pollio, Christopher Newport University
Gordon P. Kelly, Lewis and Clark College
Exile during the late Republic/early Empire has traditionally been studied as either an
historic and political phenomenon or a literary theme. This panel aims to integrate these
heretofore distinct lines of inquiry into two innovative approaches. The first seeks to
analyze poetic treatments of exile specifically in relationship to the political institution of
exile; the second, to apply techniques of literary interpretation to depictions of exile in
works of historical interest such as histories, orations, and letters.
Although the Romans inherited a rich and diverse tradition of Greek exilic literature,
Roman poets and prose authors nevertheless adapted that tradition in order to address
specifically Roman interests. Exile turns out to be an especially poignant topos for
Roman writers of the late Republic/early Empire, in particular, as it relates not only to
Romes legendary founding by the descendants of Trojan exiles, but also to a political
institution that played a significant role in shaping the events of that era. We define exile
broadly for this panel, including such phenomena as voluntary exile, exile as a legal
penalty, deportation, relegation, and proscription.
The organizers seek papers that consider images of exile and exiles in the poetry of
Horace, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and others, as well as in the works of prose authors such as
Cicero, Livy, and Seneca. Possible topics include:

How a Roman reader would have understood exile as a literary device in

relation to the current political institutions of banishment.

Would the political institution of exile affect the way a reader perceived the

trials and tribulations of a poems exiles?

How are images of exile deployed in different genres?

How the literary motifs of exile influence its depiction in historical sources.

Please send an anonymous abstract of no more than one page in length for a paper
suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation as a PDF attachment
to apameetings@sas.upenn.edu by March 10, 2014. Be sure to mention the title of the
panel and provide complete contact information and any AV requests in the body of your
email. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by the panel organizers.
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See more at: http://apaclassics.org/annual-meeting/146/cfp-roman-exile-poetry-prose- and-politics#sthash.HEXrTrdb.dpuf

Caesar's Daughter by Alex Johnston
Marcus Mettius is back! Working for Julius Caesar almost had him burnt at the
stake and arrested by a mad Egyptian Pharaoh, but it seems our favourite Roman
hasn't learnt his lesson yet. When Caesar once again asks for his help, Marcus
obliges. Although, in his defence, this time his assignment is easy enough. All he has
to do is take a gift to his daughter Julia, who is married to Pompey, and have a chat
...with her while there. Pretty safe, right? Surely nothing could go wrong
Caesar's Daughter is a bit different from Johnston's two previous novellas. His
previous work is more action-packed, while this one more political. With that, I by no
means mean boring. In fact, Johnston is one of the funniest historical fiction authors
I know. What I mean is that, in Caesar's Daughter, we can watch the machinations of
the political players of the late Roman republic. Pompey, Cicero, the infamous exTribune of the Plebs Clodius, the deposed King of Egypt... they are all here, hatching
.plots and fearing for their own lives
Johnston well captures the atmosphere of this dangerous era, but as always infuses
his story with a huge dollop of humour that will make you laugh from beginning to
end. I particularly enjoyed Julia's Song, a short and fun rap song warning you not to
mess with Caesar's daughter. The language, as you've probably guessed, is very
anachronistic. Some people may be put off by the modern language the characters
use, but to me, that just helps you relate better to them and to the story. It also
...brings home how modern ancient history really is. The more things change
I also loved the afterword, where the author explains what really happened and
what he made up. Fast and entertaining, Caesar's Daughter is a great way to spend a
.summer afternoon
Available at: amazon
Rating: 4/5