On the modern state of exile; what does it mean?

Exile is another tool of political attack through other means and a prerogative of political power.

Exile in the world today has gone far beyond the traditional meaning of the term, and what was that you might ask? Russia is a society with a solid tradition of internal and external exile practiced even today. Last year a former Russian spy in exile Alexander Litvinenko who had said that President Putin was a pedophile was poisoned to death by thallium in a London restaurant-and it wasn't on any menu except perhaps one at the Kremlin. Litvineko formerly was employed by a later Russian exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky, as a security officer.

Usually Russian writers like Radischev were sent into exile for failing to please state censors. Radischev suicided the second time he was sentenced to Siberia. The author of 'A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow' found Catherine the Great's proscriptions on his works unbearable and hoped the sin of self-exile from life was forgivable. Sometimes Russian politicians have experienced exile when it was politically incorrect to have them murdered. Stalin sent his rival Trotsky into internal exile first before sending him out of Russia eventually to be assassinated in Mexico City in the midst of writing his biography of Stalin.

Georgi Markov a Bulgarian dissident was poisoned in London in 1978.

Then Ukranian political opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko ingested large amounts of the most toxic dioxin known YCDD during a campaign for President against Mr. Putin's favorite; Viktor Yanukovych. Trans-national illegal activities by state authorities is another fruitful area of interest controlled mainly by certain undemocratic elite balancing equations.

Studies have been made on the transnational expulsion of entire peoples trans-nationally into exile such as this workshop at Rutgers University in 2002...http://www- 2005.rhul.ac.uk/Music/Golden-pages /Conferences/02-5-eme.html

Entire peoples may go into political exile without a right of return to their own nation. Exile is also a traditional place to plot a revolution in the exiling country for the exiled. One thinks of Afghan rebels, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Iraqi dissidents against Saddam Hussein as examples of rebels that have plotted revolution. The Palestinian exile refugee camp gangsters that transitioned through terror into the Palestinian Government are additional examples of political exiles and trans-national activity in exile.

Trans-national broadcast corporations themselves have the opportunity to flank national civil rights and attack political targets from over-the-border rebroadcast though affiliates into the relevant nation was legal deniability as simply a 'quote with spin on it'. National democracy with sound civil rights is the primary bulwark against trans-national predations on private citizens.

Modern global communications and travel technology has made physical exile somewhat anachronistic now; what is more important in exiling today is deletion of the individual or group from power and additional ad hoc ostracism. In the power group relationship of us versus them the targeted individual is moved from the us side to the them side-sometimes that is fatal, sometimes it means house arrest, other times some may escape over the border yet few political entities will permit political opponents more liberty than they must in relation to the natural cruelty or political necessity of the regime in power.

It is illustrative of the conditional use of the term exile today to compare Bin Ladin in possible clandestine 'exile' in Pakistan from terrorist bases in Afghanistan after the removal of the Taliban regime in the 2002 Afghan war with that of self-imposed-exile to avoid legal processes by political rivals former Prime Minister Bhutto of Pakistan accused of crimes in office by succeeding P.M./Junta leaders. It is convenient for political opponents to be removed as part of a deal for control by the new military governments on occasion. Exile's purposes haven't changed; just the technology, geographical and social relationships have. The broadcast media of any nation, and the ad hoc trans-national undemocratic broadcast 'empire' represent an ad hoc consortium of trans-national authoritarians (corporations are naturally opposed to democracy for-themselves and support it in nations only so far as it supports corporate increase politically and financially) that may afford no where within global broadcast network 'territory' for escape to exile. Exile may mean an escape to a social sub-class or removal from certain power centers. Exile may mean simply agreeing to a non-competition 'contract' with the establishment for some period of time or for a lifetime. In that way there are a variety of informal exile procedures, many illegal of course, in effect in the world today. Exile today, like American declarations of war, seldom reach the formality of legal proceeding, instead they are carried out through informal and effective adverse processes that enable removal from the protected compresence of political or social power and promotion.

Former Pakistani P.M. Nawaz Sharif was sent into exile, yet in the 1960s hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis and Hindus became refugees in exile as a process of formation after the cleansing. Social ethnic cleansing creating refugees in exile occurred in the former Yugoslavia during the 90s Balkin wars and is happening presently in Iraq as Shi'a and Sunni conflict in the wake of the removal of Saddam Hussein's government by the 2003 American led invasion. Thousands of Iraq's of each side have been killed by sectarian and terrorist forces while hundreds of thousands have gone into voluntary exile abroad for safety.

In exile today it may be convenient to conceal the term exile in order to deny that exiles occur. Exile may be enforced by structuring natural class conditions such that making a politically incorrect decision results in instant disqualification from residence. Perhaps it might be as trivial as building a fence taller than one permitted by a homeowners association causing an eventual expulsion from subdivision paradise, or removal from a social set when a proscribed set characteristic is found- Exile can be a self-exiling process in non-conformity to the established power. It is a perennial political device in that regard but the conditions of its applications have evolved and shall continue to do so until the unsaved are exiled forever to hell metaphorically speaking.