The Exiles

Men have always regarded exile as a little death. In sackcloth and ashes, Job lamented man's mortality as a kind of homelessness: "He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more." And Aeschylus, 500 years before Christ, wrote bitterly, "I know how men in exile feed on dreams." The military and political shocks of this century sent hordes of the dispossessed swarming over the earth--some 40 million people since World War II.

Some of these human tides, last week, were at the full. Tens of thousands of Red Chinese refugees burst into Hong Kong to glimpse briefly the light of freedom. In Algeria, Europeans crowded docks and airports, fleeing in terror from their homes and fathers' graves. In India and elsewhere 75,000 Tibetans waited in miserable exile for the time when their mountain homeland would be free of Communist oppression. In the Middle East, a million Palestinian Arabs vegetated for the 14th year in camps and villages, still pawns in the irreconcilable conflict between the Arab states and Israel. In East Berlin, the Wall dammed up the flow of refugees, but men still tunneled beneath it, or leaped over it, or sought to blow it down.

The refugees now on the move were few in number compared with the teeming millions who have gone before, feeding on dreams, hope--or hate. What remained unchanged was the fact that the world was not yet ready to receive them.

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