First Dispatch from Exile: Why Exile is Good
(Imported from my blog - “DIPLO DENIZEN”)
Pardon the inactivity over the past several weeks. I've decided to join the growing exodus of writers from atrophying corporate and non-profit-owned journalism to independent journalism, using the Substack platform. Renowned writers such as Heather Cox Richardson, Matthew Yglesias and Matt Taibbi now use it as their platform. My newsletter, "Dispatches From Exile," is newly launched with the following piece. I will continue to blog and I'll be sure to re-post in this blog - at least until "Dispatches From Exile" might need to go behind a pay wall. Enjoy!
c/o POLITICO
For some exile frees mind & soul. For others it's well deserved for their perfidy - the case of Donald Trump.
As a U.S. diplomat, I got to meet many people who chose or were forced into exile by their governments. Cubans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Laotians, East Europeans, North Koreans. One who stands out in my mind is Dương Thu Hương, a Vietnamese writer and political dissident, now living in Paris. I asked her how she dealt with the many years of harassment by her government. Without a blink of the eye, she answered, “I spit in their face.”
For Madame Hương, exile has been both bad and good. On the one hand, most of her life as a creative writer was blunted by the communist regime. On the other, exile abroad has freed the 74-year old to blossom in her remaining years albeit far removed from her countrymen.
And for others, exile is really, really bad. Son Sen was the Khmer Rouge’s Heinrich Himmler, having supervised the genocide of some two million Cambodians during the KR’s bloody four-year misrule. I sat across from Sen, alias “Comrade Khieu,” for a year at UN-sponsored negotiations to end Cambodia’s civil war. The man radiated evil. He, however, was later stripped of power and forced to live in internal exile for five years until KR leader Pol Pot had him and thirteen members of his family, including children, murdered and their corpses run over by trucks. Sen’s exile and ultimate demise were well deserved. His family, unfortunately, became collateral damage.
So, what about the out-of-power Donald Trump, antsy, angry and plotting his reconquest from Mar-a-Lago? I’ll get to that momentarily. But first I want to address my own “exile.”
Here I launch “Dispatches from Exile.” After twenty-five years in servitude to Uncle Sam, working in national security, I fled the Belly of the Beast some years ago to become a writer - of fiction as well as a journalist. And as newsrooms have atrophied and freelancers more and more used and abused, I’ve decided to take Substack for a spin, to be my own boss, to write my mind, free from capricious, revolving-door editors. Due to a Faustian non-disclosure agreement I signed in my wayward youth, however, Uncle Sam still has his claws in me, requiring me to clear with government censors anything I publish regarding national security. While I have no reason to “spit in their face,” I like to think of myself as a dissident of sorts - specifically during times of misrule in our own country.
And that gets me to Donald Trump.
While it may be too early to conclude whether his current exile is good or bad for him, it certainly feels better for most of us to have him exiled at his very own Elba on Lake Worth Lagoon. But rest easy we cannot.
For, as with Napoleon on Elba, Trump is plotting his own reconquête, a glorious return to power, fueled by revenge and hell-bent on delivering the coup de grace to American democracy.
Those committed to defending the 245-year old American Experiment, be they Democrats, uncorrupted Republicans or independents, must work together to ensure Trump does not succeed. And here is where we must pay close attention to history.
Napoleon (like Trump) would not be caged up on tiny Elba, off the French coast. He plotted his return to power and succeeded - for 100 days, then was forced to surrender to the British in July 1815. Taking no chances this time, his captors banished him to St. Helena, a speck of rock in the middle of the South Atlantic. The island’s governor was informed by London:
“His Majesty’s Ministers deeply sensitive of the high importance of effectually securing the person of a man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the happiness of the World, [have judged] that the Island of St. Helena is eminently fitted to answer to that purpose.”
“A man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the happiness of the world” also aptly fits Trump and his crimes. Thus, Mar-a-Lago, as with Elba, doesn’t cut it as an adequate place of exile. Perhaps, if the law finally catches up with him, Trump will be banished to a white collar prison in some cold windswept prairie, a red region, fittingly, populated by his deluded followers.
He could even be permitted some trappings of past glory. Napoleon was allowed 28 fawning camp followers on St. Helena. The fallen emperor gave formal dinner parties at which the men were required to don full military dress and the women formal gowns and jewelry. The British governor, however, ordered that Napoleon could be addressed as “general,” not “emperor.” Trump, therefore, must be prohibited in his own future punitive exile from being addressed as “Mr. President,” and simply as “Mister Trump.” Or, a variety of epithets would do.
Upon arriving at the desolate, wind-shorn St. Helena, Napoleon reportedly gasped and asked what could be done in such a godforsaken place. His aide replied, “Sire, nous vivrons du passé: il y en a assez pour nous satisfaire.” —
“We shall live upon the past. There is enough of that to satisfy us.”