You're fired!

Disappearance has been an effective tool for tyrants through the course of millennia. That is, the tyrants themselves didn't disappear; they "disappeared" citizens they deemed to be enemies.

The word didn't always have a pejorative connotation. Our word is from the Greek "tyrannos," which refers to a ruler with absolute power which he has usurped from a legitimate monarch or other leader. But power corrupts, and tyrants almost always wind up wielding their power badly. Thus the word took on a negative sense.

Long before the Greeks, tyrants were disappearing people. In ancient Egypt, a former pharaoh or court official might be disappeared by having his name stricken from monuments and buildings, making it seem he never existed.

In some ancient societies, including Israel and Greece, enemies of the government (i.e. the ruler or ruling party) were exiled--cast out of their city under threat of death if they should return. Athenian citizens, who believed their city to be the omphalos of the universe, considered exile worse than death.

In the ancient world, to be exiled, even if one settled in a city not all that far away, was an effective disappearance, as other citizens of the exile's city were forbidden to have contact with him. As the line in "Jesus Christ Superstar" goes, "Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication." Even so, some disappearees are still known. St. John the Divine, credited with writing the Book of Revelation, had been exiled to the island of Patmos by the Roman emperor Diocletian.

Out of sight, out of mind. The French term oubliette, which derives from the term for "forget," referred to covered pits in dungeons where enemies were tossed, to be forever forgotten. The Bridge of Sighs in Venice was another means of disappearance; once an enemy crossed it they were gone forever.

The list goes on. For Hitler, the "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" was incineration and unmarked burial; for Stalin and later Soviet leaders it was Siberia; for FDR it was internment camps in the Western states where as many as 120,000 Japanese-Americans were disappeared for the duration of WWII.

The reason always given by tyrannical governments for putting their own citizens out of sight is that they are "enemies of the state." We've heard it from the Soviets, the North Koreans, the Chinese. But remember Louis XIV's famous statement: "I am the State."

When a leader begins to believe that, she or he is on the road to tyranny. Nixon had his enemies list, we recall, and if he couldn't disappear them he could certainly try to get them out of his way. And then there's Trump.

"You're fired" has become a Trumpian icon since he uttered it ad nauseam on the execrable "Apprentice" series. In his blinkered view of the world from a business perspective being fired by Trump probably meant in his mind that the person was gone and forgotten--disappeared. And so s/he had been from his solipsistic point of view.

But in a world where the phrase "You're fired" has become the stuff of late-night comedy and its originator the butt of jokes, Trump's narrow vision doesn't prevail. The Great Pretender may think that firing people--high-profile people at that--is his equivalent of dropping them into an oubliette, but all it does in reality is to make them even more visible, and gives them a platform to denounce him. Three cheers for the Trump oubliette!

--Richard Brown