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Jurandir Antonio Xavier was a student activist when the first coup happened, in 1964 in his native Brazil. He escaped to Bolivia, and when Bolivia, rocked by a series of military dictatorships, became too dangerous, he emigrated to Chile in 1971.
He hoped to find “a little tranquility, a little repose.” Instead, he saw the signs of another coup in the making. He tried to warn Chilean leftists that only a united front of all parties could stop the rising right-wing danger. When the military went into action in 1973, he was arrested. Upon his release, he went into exile once again. He was 26 years old.
This is the third of a series of essay on exiles --the "nation outside the nation" that is created when illiberal states target people on grounds of religion, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or politics, forcing them to leave home. I've looked at the difficult decision to relocate, and the ways that exiled individuals can become targets if they criticize the government, even from abroad.
Here I pay tribute to the resiliency and courage of those who go into exile to escape tyranny, and highlight lesser-known elements of a collective experience that has changed the lives of millions around the world.
As Xavier's trajectory attests, finding a safe place to resettle can be a long process. The anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand was one of many who relocated repeatedly as Adolf Hitler expanded throughout Europe. Von Hildebrand moved from Germany to Austria to France before settling in Portugal.
Going into exile might even mean exchanging one regime for another. Of the 200,000 Chileans who left their native land after the United States-backed coup, many resettled in democracies, while Chilean Communists often went to Cuba or Soviet bloc countries. Yet immigration and employment circumstances led some twenty-five thousand Chileans to relocate to Brazil’s military dictatorship. Some joined a resistance group based in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
Authoritarian states have a history of engaging in "exile politics," with one strongman accepting another's enemies to gain foreign credibility. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini seemed to many to be "the good Fascist" when he took in German Jews fleeing Hitler, and Turkey's Recep Tayyep Erdogan hosts several million Syrian refugees from Bashar al-Assad's government.
Yet the welcome extended by these transactional individuals rarely lasts. The German Jewish philosopher Karl Lowith, who emigrated to Rome in 1934, felt that “the Italian is humane even in a black shirt." Then Il Duce began to persecute Italian Jews and Lowith was eventually given the choice of expulsion or imprisonment. He emigrated to a third Axis power, Japan, before coming to America.
Exile can become a space of healing for those scarred by persecution in their countries of origin. The pastor Luis Caro traveled throughout Europe to offer aid to Chilean exiles suffering from the effects of torture and loss of friends and family.
Therapists who go into exile and become licensed in their adopted countries can help their compatriots to recover. The Chilean exile psychotherapists Paulina and Alejandro Reyes have written eloquently about the "internal homelessness" of those who have been subjected to state violence.
They tell the story of a Chilean patient who moved to England, but felt she was "forever locked up in the torturer's room." Years of treatment and distance from her homeland helped her to forge relations with others. She eventually married and had a child.
Ultimately, the history of exile reveals the self-destructive nature of authoritarian regimes, which lose multitudes of talented individuals who are happy to place their skills in the service of democracies.
The physicist Enrico Fermi, who left Italy in 1938 with his Jewish wife Laura Fermi to escape Fascist anti-Semitic laws, collected his Nobel Prize on his way to a new life in America, where he worked on the development of nuclear weapons with the Manhattan Project.
Today, exiles from tyranny continue to warn us of the signs of democratic decay, including in America. Russian exile Masha Gessen's 2020 book, How To Survive Autocracy, and Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's 2017 collected essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech are two examples.
Exiles have learned the hard way that nothing is fixed in life and nothing should be taken for granted. Yet they also know that people are resilient. At a time of upheaval and foreboding in political life, we can be inspired by their courage and learn from their histories. Like the Brazilian student Xavier, any of us could become exiles one day.
"Resiliency and Hope: Lessons from Life"
Thank you Professor, for the boosting of confidence (in this essay) of those who are seeking refuge from death.
To make a long story short, my own current experience in seeking refuge from death, has brought me to the identification of two groups of people in issues of exile:
(1) The ordinary people, who are running from death;
(2) those sought by the killer governments for assassination anywhere on this planet. It is their (sought people's) existence that is a problem for these killer governments.
If by some deceptive means, they get to have control over this group of targeted people, the killer governments will handicap them in such a way that, they would not be able to evade their control or leave the country. For example, they might deny them travel documents, or national ID card, or not allowing them to cross the country's borders, or to have access to any foreign power. This is my current situation. In this case, exile can happen only on action of foreign power. Thank You Professor. Rodolphe Nogbou
I found RBG’s post of November 16, “Waiting for the Apocalypse,” to be reassuring, particularly in its accepting and tolerant observation, “in times of transition” [like the present] “some may take their distance from politics.” Then in her post of November 7, “Resiliency and Hope,” she wrote that “exiles have learned the hard way that nothing is fixed in life“ and “any of us could become exiles one day.” In contrast to her earlier post, this resonated for me emotionally as, “The end is coming, it’s time to run for your life. “
When I am doomscrolling, I almost always think the end is indeed coming. When I ask myself what the nature of the situation in America in 2021 is from an objective point of view, I think that those who have the power to protect democracy do not understand what must be done, while those who understand what must be done do not have the power to do it. It is too late for mass action to save us. In 2021 the government of the greatest and most powerful country in the history of the universe can’t even deliver the mail. Those who have the power to protect democracy are complicit in its destruction, and will not wake up until it is too late.
But occasionally when I am not doomscrolling, I feel that disaster may yet be averted. There is more fright than hurt in life. Sometimes you get lucky. And the future is unknowable, after all.
On rare occasions, I reflect that while others may suffer terribly in the years to come, this has always been the nature of life in this world. Every human being has had to live in the midst of the immense suffering of the human race. Perhaps I will be able to live in a reasonably satisfactory way in the ruins, as so many people throughout human history have done. Then I feel ashamed of myself for having such thoughts.
Many of us undoubtedly are experiencing this ambivalence, oscillating between hope and fear. Many sensitive, intelligent, informed comments on Lucid exhibit this ambivalence.
This situation suggests to me that my ambivalence is itself a problem that I need to address. Actually resolving my ambivalence is impossible, because it reflects the objective nature of the situation. But in the form it presently takes in me, it resembles the bipolar disorder, oscillating wildly between the extremes of irrational exuberance and irrational despair. I have become so accustomed to it, and see it so strongly exhibited in the media every day, that it has come to seem normal to me, not extreme. Neither an individual’s nor a society’s mental health can survive such ambivalence. In fact, integrating the positives and negatives of internal and external experience is one of the major tasks of our psychological life, essential to our mental health. (The child’s failure to do so is how the narcissistic personality disorder gets started, and the failure remains highly visible throughout life.) My ambivalent feelings are not “wrong.” But they are based on a false perspective.
My ambivalence is based on an obsession with the future. Obsession intrinsically involves a distorted perspective. I am constantly looking into the future, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. This is neither healthy nor sane, first of all for the simple reason that it is impossible to know the future. A sane, realistic approach to life cannot be organized around trying to predict the future. Constantly surveying the future for the threats it might hold is not only manic-depressive, it is paranoid.
We live in a present that is always receding into the past, and simultaneously moving into an unknown future. A sane, healthy approach to living requires that we continually reintegrate the past, present, and future as a whole, in order to live in the present. Supporters of the anti-democracy forces are paranoiacally obsessed with an infantile desire to return to a stolen paradisal past that never was. In my ambivalence, I am mirroring their withdrawal from reality and sanity, paranoiacally obsessing about a hellish future that may or may not come into being.
Some of us will conclude, contemplating our polarized situation, that they must emigrate, either because all Americans will be reduced to merely struggling to survive a life hardly worth living; or because they judge their individual prospects in America to be intolerable. These are reasonable conclusions, but I cannot imagine emigrating myself.
Nor can I put an end to my ambivalence about future conditions in America. But I can learn to tolerate my ambivalence, and stop being subject to violent, paranoid, manic-depressive oscillations between hope and fear. I can stop feeding my ambivalence, constantly being frustrated and indignant at the apparently immovable inertia of those who should be protecting American democracy and are not.
I can begin to realistically assess the various possibilities the future holds, and try to figure out how to deal with them. I need not succumb, as so many pro-democracy Americans seem to have done in 2021, to the learned helplessness that the anti-democracy forces are trying to teach us. Human beings have always given up their liberty because they have failed to realize that the powers within ourselves are immeasurably greater than we know, while the superior power of tyranny, being based on illusions, is therefore itself an illusion, that which both is and is not.