Reassigned To Antarctica / Real Life

Reassigned to Antarctica in Real Life.

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Business

General examples

• Constructive dismissal is when a company's management tries to force an employee to quit by making their working conditions worse, usually done to avoid paying severance bonuses. While this means the employee has Ultimate Job Security until their patience holds out, they would likely be better off looking for a less abusive job, and in some places, it's possible to take the employer to court for this after leaving.
• In Japan, the ethos of "lifetime employment" means that outright firing or laying off an employee is considered disgraceful for both the company and the employee. There have been two ways of avoiding this in Japan's modern history:
  • When an employee's services were no longer needed but the company would rather not fire them, they used to be given a spot by the office building's windows to pass the time idly, doing so every day until they left or retired. This type of employee was called "the crew sitting by the window" (窓際族 madogiwa-zoku), but the practice has largely been phased out.
  • In more recent times, unwanted employees are placed in "banishment rooms" (追い出し部屋 oidashi-beya), windowless offices where they have to do incredibly boring tasks or don't get any work to do. The idea is that with no status, no ties to their colleagues, and no real tasks, employees will quit out of shame.
• This is a favorite tactic of South Korean conglomerates:
  • Underperforming corporate employees are transferred to rural industrial affiliates in the hope that the shame of a lateral demotion will get them to quit. Younger workers usually quit within a year to try their luck at other companies (which all use the same tactic).
  • Long-serving middle and upper managers who've fallen out of favor are transferred to an office space where they can be seen by as many people as possible, especially by those working in the C-Suite. They are not given any responsibilities and are not allowed phones or computers and are expected to sit ramrod straight, looking straight ahead all day. They are also given different work hours and lunch breaks to completely isolate them from the rest of the company. The idea behind this tactic is that these people will be shamed into quitting of their own volition so that the company won't have to provide severance payments and unemployment insurance. There are some ultra-tough hold outs^note typically middle-aged fathers who've sent their children to expensive foreign schools who will go through the humiliation for months or even years before the company will try and compound the shame by transferring them to work in menial positions such as cashiers in factory cafeterias^note a superfluous task since all they have to do is scan workers' company IDs.

Specific examples

• During pre-production for Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Bill Peet was exiled from the feature animation division to supervising animation for peanut butter commercials after getting on Walt Disney's bad side. After enduring the punishment for two months, Bill stubbornly moved back to his regular office, only to realize that Walt had either decided to not acknowledge their clash or forgot about it.
• According to an infamous report by Nikkei, Konami often punished its employees (for lack of productivity or other infractions) by demoting them to entry-level positions such as security detail, pachinko factory assembly lines, or cleanup at Konami's fitness clubs. It got especially petty when, in the spring of 2014, a former Konami employee made a Facebook post about his new job and every then-current employee who liked the post was reassigned.
• Throughout most of the late 1980s and the 90s, WCW was owned by Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting system of media companies. Wrestling being a relatively niche area of media compared to pro sports and news, those outside employees assigned to work there were either dedicated wrestling fans or had been shuffled off from other areas against their will. This was to the company's benefit, as the shows took on a very polished, professional tone and appearance comparable to rival WWF programming, as opposed to the gritty, low-res amateur feel it had held before. But later, when ticket sales and ratings began to plummet, those same media employees had no idea how to correct it, as they had very little experience in the wrestling field as a whole and creative control was held by a small handful of entrenched veterans who had no interest in giving up control of their fiefdom without a fight. So even energetic and interested employees who came to WCW in its later years quickly became jaded and, with no investment in the product itself, the company became a place to collect a paycheck and not much else until its sale.
• After one too many clashes with Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca was reassigned from president of Ford Motor Company to some impressive job title — with a run-down office in a parts warehouse in a rough part of Detroit (mind you, this was in The '70s, before "rough part of Detroit" became redundant). A job offer from Chrysler made this a Reassignment Backfire for Ford, as he pulled their ailing competitor back from the brink and became the first modern "celebrity CEO".
• Apple did this to Steve Jobs in 1985, moving him to an office that was even nicknamed "Siberia" before he got tired of the abuse and quit. Reassignment Backfire set in during the following decade, as Apple steadily lost market share to Microsoft until Jobs was brought back in 1997; his successful turnaround of the company gave him near-dictatorial authority for the rest of his life.

Law Enforcement

• Irish politician Seán Doherty, when caught drinking in a pub after hours, once infamously asked a garda (policeman), "Do you want a pint or a transfer?"^note Doherty was Minister of Justice at the time, so he was in a position to make good on his threat.
• San Francisco police officers who screw up badly are often said to be sent off "to walk a beat in the Farallones" (a rocky island group that is technically part of the city of San Francisco, but 27 miles (43.5 km) off the coast and inhabited only by research teams).
• In the Denver Police Department, reassignment to Denver International Airport security detail is as low as you can go and still be on the force. It's said that an officer who goes to the airport is "on their way out".
• In the New York City Police Department, the equivalent is "highway therapy" by getting reassigned to Staten Island, connected to the rest of New York City only by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and barely acknowledged by any resident that doesn't live there. It's the least populous of the city's five boroughs, yet Staten Island is home to a disproportionate number of police officers with multiple prior complaints and lawsuits against them.
• "Highway therapy" is also practiced within the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. A prosecutor who displeases their supervisor might be reassigned to an office at the other end of the sprawling, gridlocked county from their home address, resulting in hellish multi-hour daily commutes. It's a powerful incentive to keep on good terms with one's boss.
• In a bit of a flip, back when the police of Hong Kong were notoriously corrupt and before Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) cleaned it up, any undesirable cop would be sent to "guard the reservoir" where there is nothing to do and no one to take bribes from.

Media

• NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was caught embellishing some of his stories to make them more dramatic. After serving a six-month suspension, he lost his position as the anchor of the top-rated network news show and was transferred to ratings-challenged MSNBC to become the cable channel's "breaking news anchor", with no guaranteed air time and all his appearances subject to the discretion of network executives. He chose to stick it out rather than resign in disgrace, and after proving to be a decent ratings draw during the 2016 presidential election, he was given the weekday 11 PM to 12 AM slot for his own show. Despite the late hour, he turned the show into a success that allowed him to retire on his own terms and for MSNBC to keep the brand going with Stephanie Ruhle.
• After the Dateline "Waiting to Explode" controversy^note In an attempt to show that GM trucks were prone to explosions, segment producers installed incendiary devices to the vehicles used in taped crash tests. GM learned of this and sued NBC for defamation and removed advertising from the network led to NBC firing the segment's executive producer, senior producer and segment producer; Michele Gillen, the correspondent involved in the segment, was exiled from NBC News to the network's Miami O&O WTVJ, where she went to work as an evening newscast anchor.
• Dan Rather would find himself an example as a result of the Rathergate controversy, losing his longtime job as anchor of the CBS Evening News on March 9, 2005 after exactly 24 years (not helping matters was the CBS Evening News having been in the network news basement for over a decade compared to being the top-rated newscast when Rather succeeded Walter Cronkite in 1981); spending a year more or less in exile doing minor projects for CBS before ending his 44-year tenure with the network in 2006.
• Several Dreamworks staff members had been reassigned ("shreked") to a little production known as Shrek that was mostly done to cash in on the success of Pixar movies. Those who were "shreked" had a happy ending, as Shrek was a huge success and won the first-ever Academy Award For Best Animated Feature.

Military

Every nation's military has at least a couple highly undesirable bases or postings said to be dead-end assignments for problem soldiers.

• In the U.S. Army:
  • The U.S. Army's least popular posting is Fort Polk in Louisiana, set in the middle of a hot, humid, bug-infested swamp. Runners up are Fort Irwin, located in the middle of the California desert, and Fort Drum, located in the middle of an cold, damp forest on the U.S.-Canadian border.
  • The U.S. Air Force has two such locations. First is Thule in Greenland, which is above the Arctic Circle and remains icebound throughout the winter. The few local inhabitants mostly speak Greenlandic Inuit or Danish, so there's not much entertainment to be found off-base. Soldiers stationed there have little to do besides 8-hour shifts staring at a radar screen for incoming missiles... and in over 60 years of operation, there have never been any incoming missiles. The base was later renamed Pituffik Space Base as command transferred to the newly independent Space Force.
    
    The other is the refueling base in Shemya Island, which is considered worse than mainland Alaska due to constant high winds rarely below 30mph, temperatures always below 50F, and omnipresent fog. At the tail end of the Aleutian archipelago, Shemya is closer to Eurasia than the North American mainland. Primary duties consist of clearing the runway of obstructions and running the radar station. Legend says that every time someone leaves Shemya, they take a rock with them so someday there will be no more island and no one will ever have to go back there.
  • The United States Marine Corps has the 29 Palms remote training base. While a decent posting in terms of career advancement, the base is in the middle of the Mojave Desert and incredibly boring for energetic young Marines...
  • The U.S. Navy has Naval Air Station Lemoore, located in Central California. To put things in perspective, this is a Navy base that is as far away from the coast as you can get. Instead of water, Lemoore is surrounded on all sides by endless swathes of farmland which provide limited recreational opportunities. Another quirk that sets Lemoore above all other undesirable posts is the area's infamously bad air pollution.
  • The Navy also has Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, on the east African coast. It's based right on the equator, leading to yearlong sweltering muggy weather Having begun life as a forward expeditionary base that's never quite made the leap to being a permanent installation, those assigned there live either in deployment tents or rusty container housing units. There is very little to do and access outside the base is heavily restricted to command activities, as Djibouti is notoriously corrupt and dangerous. To make matters worse, just across the bay is a Chinese Navy base that has been built to purpose and is reportedly state of the art.
  • Seemingly averted with "Operation Deep Freeze"; the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard program supporting American scientific research in Antarctica, because it mostly involves spending southern summer in New Zealand and flying cargo & people back and forth from the ice. But the people assigned to over-winter details at the stations in Antarctica can get a little strange.
• In the Canadian Forces:
  • Canadian soldiers often joke about Cold Lake, Alberta, because it's a small isolated town that gets nasty winters and has a brutal cost of living. Even new recruits from Basic Training, who can pick three posting preferences, jokingly claim that no matter what they pick, they'll get "Cold Laked" for lack of seniority.
  • Oddly enough, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was seen as an Antarctica in the Canadian Land Forces. It is also a cautionary tale: so many regiments exiled problem soldiers to the Airborne Regiment that its home base degenerated into a hotbed of hazing, white supremacist activity and criminality. It all came to a head when the Airborne Regiment tortured and killed a Somalian teenager during a UN peacekeeping mission, which led to the regiment being permanently disbanded.
• In World War II, each of the combatants had at least one theater they particularly reviled.
  • The Japanese hated the Burmese front the most. It had minimal strategic worth, the British had them outnumbered and outgunned, and the dense jungle strained supply chains to their limits. Japanese staff officers in Tokyo would joke "I've upset Tojo; it's Burma for me!"
  • The Western Allies felt the same way about the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater. In the US Armed Forces, the number one threat was "You fuck up one more time, I'll have you sent to CBI!" The broader Pacific theater was also viewed this way: Europe's Western Front was much more fortified, yes, but it wasn't nearly as hot and disease-ridden, you still got some of the comforts of civilization, and enemy troops would at least consider surrendering after defeat. The opposition in the Pacific might be short on men and resources but their fighting style was fanatically bloodthirsty and dedicated.
  • Similarly, the Eastern front was this for the European Axis Powers. German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian troops hated it due to the brutal fighting, urban warfare, muddy summers and frigid winters, guerrilla warfare, "collective drastic reprisals" against civilian communities, and relatively harsh Soviet treatment of POWs (compared to the Western Allies — Nazi POW policies were even worse).
  • While the Soviet Union only ever had one formal theater of war, there were certainly better and worse assignments along the frontlines — and nobody wanted the siege of Stalingrad. There was also the undeclared Far East theater in Siberia and Mongolia, the frozen ass-end of the USSR where the Soviets were trying to discourage the Japanese from attempting a full-scale invasion based out of occupied Manchuria. Iosif Apanasenko, a successful field commander with a tendency to overstep his authority and talk back to high-ranking Party officials, was eventually transferred there.
• A Russian proverb that originated in the Soviet officer ranks conveys the typically Russian philosophical approach to the problem: "They can't send you further than Kushka and they can't give you less than a platoon to command."^note Kushka is the current Serhetabat, a town in Turkmenistan across the border from Afghanistan that was the southernmost point in the Soviet Union.
• In England, threatening to "send someone to Coventry" became an idiom for this trope. During the English Civil War, the highly pro-Parliament population of Coventry got a reputation of being hostile towards the military because they refused to talk to Royalist prisoners of war held in the city.
• In Italy, troublemaking soldiers are commonly threatened with reassignment to Sardinia, where the island is much less developed than mainland Italy and the locals are notoriously distrustful of outsiders.
• Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (often called the "Italian Bismarck") was such a prolific troublemaker in the military that he was assigned to a remote post.
• General Douglas MacArthur, famous for commanding Allied forces in the South Pacific during WWII and UN forces during the Korean War, was first sent to the Philippines as a Brigadier General in 1922 by General Pershing. Rumors at the time attributed this either to his involvement with a woman that the higher-ranking officer had been pursuing, or to a response to his attempts to reform West Point during his two years as superintendent. FDR purportedly kept MacArthur in the Philippines through the 1930s and into the 40s to avoid having to talk to him in person. This turned into a Reassignment Backfire when war broke out with Japan and MacArthur was in the middle of the action. However, MacArthur was such a Miles Gloriosus that he considered his command of the entire South Pacific Theater to be a Reassignment To Antarctica because he thought he should have been put in charge of the whole war (to be fair, he took his duty to the Phillipines very seriously; he had to be threatened with a court martial to get him to retreat with the rest of the US Military. Prior to that, he'd been bound and determined to stay back with the Filipino La Résistance, as a common soldier if need be). Fortunately for the whole civilized world, General Marshal knew better. But this also ended in Reassignment Backfire as MacArthur's role in defeating Japan (and his greater skill with the press than the other generals and admirals involved, making MacArthur's role better known to the public despite many of those others having a larger role in the victory and having displayed greater military skill than MacArthur) and resulting fame gave him a lot of clout he probably shouldn't have had. This, in turn, led to MacArthur's well-publicized confrontation with President Truman over the use of nuclear weapons against China during the Korean War. When Truman had had enough, he prevented further Reassignment Backfire by just firing MacArthur outright.
• Near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, this was the fate of many in the Red Guard, whose rampages were becoming counterproductive and embarrassing the Communist regime. Mao hit upon the idea of sending the mostly urban, intellectual Red Guard youth out to the remotest regions of China to be "reeducated" by the peasantry. The program ended up creating a "lost generation" in China, made up of young people sentenced to internal exile for doing Mao's will too well. Needless to say, many Red Guards felt betrayed and lost their revolutionary ardor.
• It was in the Arctic, not Antarctica, but being sent to a Distant Early Warning Line station surely felt like this.
• The American Civil War saw this in spades, as militarily ineffective but politically connected generals were moved where they could do the least damage to the outcome of the war. In very loose terms: successful generals tended to move east and north, to the high-profile battles around Washington, D.C. and Richmond; unsuccessful generals moved west and south, to the disorganized fighting on the sparsely-populated frontiers.
  • For the Union, Irvin McDowell started the war commanding at the First Battle of Bull Run, was demoted to corps command, then wound up in the Department of the Pacific, hundreds of miles from any fighting. John Pope lost the Second Battle of Bull Run and spent the rest of the war fighting Native Americans in Minnesota. Nathaniel Banks moved from the Virginia theater to Louisiana, where he still managed to botch the Red River Campaign. Ulysses S. Grant, by contrast, exemplified the Reassignment Out Of Antarctica: starting from an Illinois militia unit, he steamrolled Confederate armies in Kentucky and Tennessee, restoring Union access to the Mississippi shipping lane, a massive tactical gain that earned him command of the entire war.
  • The Confederacy typically exiled washouts to the Trans-Mississippi theater, encompassing Arkansas, Louisiana, and Eastern Texas. These included Sterling Price (failed invasion of Missouri), Earl Van Dorn (loser at Pea Ridge and Second Corinth, demoted to cavalry command), Theophilus Holmes (supremely incompetent division commander under Robert E. Lee) and Henry Sibley (failed invasion of New Mexico). Two of the best generals in the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, Richard Taylor and Edmund Kirby-Smith, are the exceptions that prove the rule: they were successful division commanders back in Virginia, so promotion to corps command was a reward even when it meant reassignment to a more obscure unit.
  • Just what is considered "Antarctica" can and will change over time — this is one reason for Reassignment Backfire, after all. From the time the US acquired it in the Mexican-American War through to the construction of the transcontinental railroad, California was seen as a remote deadend where no one in their right mind would want to go. Ulysses S. Grant is often portrayed as a purposeless washout prior to the Civil War because he was posted first to a small town recently renamed from Yerba Buena to San Francisco and then to Fort Vancouver in the Oregon Territory. Today many people born in Ohio would give a lot for such postings; back then, not so much. With nothing else to occupy his time, Grant took to the bottle and gained his reputation as The Alcoholic.
• While many people think that the Second Spanish Republic was caught unawares by the 1936 coup d'état, the government had already realized that Generals Franco and Mola and the exiled General Sanjurjo were likely co-conspirators. So the conspirators were separated by reassigning Franco to the Canary Islands, more than 2000km away from mainland Spain. This was not, however, the best laid of plans as it put Franco only a short flight away from Morocco and control of the Army of Africa, the best, most prepared and most modern troops the Spanish Army had. Meanwhile, the anti-monarchist, revolutionary fascist Mola was assigned to Navarre, which was at the time the stronghold of Carlism, a monarchical absolutist, traditional clericalist movement. But they made do until Mola died in an opportune airplane crash.
• Once in power, Franco would do this to several "allies" before they could garner enough support and become a threat to him:
  • Manuel Hedilla, leader of the Falangists following Primo de Rivera's death, was arrested and sentenced to death on trumped up charges, then "commuted" to exile in the Balearic Islands while Franco usurped the leadership of the Falange and Primo de Rivera's memory. The Falange was then unified with the Carlists in a single movement for the simple reason that they disagreed in everything and would never cooperate to overthrow or conspire against Franco. By the time Hedilla was allowed to return to mainland Spain in 1947, his political influence was nonexitent.
  • Juan Yagüe was relieved from the Airforce command in 1940 and reassigned to Burgos, far from both North Africa (where he had made his career and had more influence) and the French border, as he was suspected to have been approached by the Nazis to stage a coup against Franco.
  • Notorious loose canon Queipo de Llano was sent in a military mission to Germany in 1939, and was later given an ad-hoc diplomatic position in Italy "in support of other ministries", just to remove him from his headquarters in Seville.
  • Millán-Astray was given a similar fictional post in Lisbon in 1942, but this was in punishment for abandoning his wife and impregnating his mistress.
• In the Indian Army, the most inhospitable place a soldier could be assigned to, is actually a plum posting, thus providing a subversion of this trope. The Siachen glacier has important strategic implications, and it actually costs a lot of money to acclimatize a soldier to the high altitude low-pressure low-temperature environment there, so they generally don't send malfunctioning numbnuts there.
• The infamous Yi Sun-sin of Korea was a frequent recipient of this, as despite being an incredibly competent commander, he was none too popular with the royal court due to his refusal to give noble-blooded soldiers preferential treatment. He had a habit of being stripped of his titles, being forced to start over, and then working his way back up the ranks very quickly.
• In the late 1970's, African-American Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth infiltrated the local Ku Klux Klan, as depicted in the movie BlacKkKlansman. His investigation discovered that members included people who worked for NORAD, who were promptly reassigned "somewhere like the North Pole or Greenland".
• Historically, promotion from captain to admiral in the British Royal Navy was done by strict seniority. However, this resulted in many stalled careers because promotions only occurred when a slot in the admiralty opened up and everyone in line duly moved ahead one step. This also led to some incompetence in the admiralty, because even the worst captains could be promoted if they had the patience to wait long enough. To work around this issue, the Royal Navy created Yellow Squadrons (so-named because of the colour of sand not because the association with cowardice) where they could promote senior captains they didn't want making any decisions and free up actual positions of authority to those that who could handle it. Those assigned to a Yellow Squadron usually took the hint and retired as rear admirals at half pay.
• This trope is well-known enough that Lt. Col. Bill Burkett used it as part of the "Rathergate" hoax. He claimed that the documents (later shown to be forgeries) that he gave to Dan Rather, supposedly containing incriminating evidence about George W. Bush and his time in the Texas Air National Guard, were real and that he had been reassigned to an awful post in Panama when he refused to help cover them up.

Politics

• Historically, 'Ambassador to the Russian Empire' served this role for many Western and Central European governments in the 1800s, as it was often only peripherally involved in their diplomatic affairs. The ambassador was still "in politics" but held no real influence at home or abroad.
  • In some cases it could be considered Kicked Upstairs; in the case of Otto Von Bismarck, for example, Russia was one of Prussia's most powerful neighbors, making his reassignment to Russia appear as a promotion. It was really meant to sideline him out of domestic politics.
• Through the late 19th century, US Presidents looking to get troublesome members of their own party out of the country for a few years usually made them Ambassador to Russia. This might sound weird today considering Russia's current position as one of America's major geopolitical adversaries, but at the time, Russia was the weakest and most distant of the major European powers, with few colonial ambitions in the Americas—and none at all after the Alaska Purchase in 1867—giving the ambassadorship prestige but no influence. It wasn't until after World War I that US strategic interests in Russia required more diplomatic competence from ambassadors.
  • In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson appointed James Buchanan to the post, allegedly saying, "If we kept a ministry at the North Pole, I would have sent him there." (Bear in mind that in the 1830s, no human being had ever set foot at the North Pole; the modern equivalent would be the President saying "I would have made him the ambassador to Mars if we had an embassy there.") This backfired spectacularly: later presidents thought this indicated an aptitude for foreign policy and sent Buchanan on many diplomatic missions despite lackluster performance. His extended absences gave him few political enemies and even fewer strong opinions or principles for voters to object to, and in the tumultuous 1856 election that was enough to win him the Presidency. Buchanan then completely failed to address disputes over slavery, territory, and secession that would break open in the American Civil War just weeks after he left office, having given the nation exactly what it asked for throughout his term.
  • In 1862, Abraham Lincoln had had enough of Simon Cameron, his corrupt and incompetent — but politically indispensible — Secretary of War. So he decided to appoint him ambassador to Russia, famously quipping "I know of no further place I could send him." Ironically, Cameron's entry into national politics had been as the successor to James Buchanan's vacant Senate seat, suggesting that perhaps his fellow Pennsylvanians could think of no place further to send him than Washington. (This was certainly the opinion of Cameron and Buchanan's Pennsylvanian colleague, the Congressman and Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens, who when asked about Cameron told Lincoln "I do not believe he would steal a red-hot stove.")
  • The United States Vice Presidency was also used as a political Antarctica from the colonial era through the early 20th century. (Secretary of State, not VP, was the Heir Apparent job in early American history.) In ordinary circumstances, the VP's only real duty is casting a tiebreaking vote in the Senate, so politicians that party officials wanted out of the way but couldn't just ignore were nominated to the Vice Presidency to prevent them from running for any other office — most famously, Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, the problem is that if the president dies or resigns, that dead-end job just turned into Leader of the Free World — most famously, Theodore Roosevelt. This wasn't even that uncommon an occurrence: there were 4 VP successions in the course of the 19th century. Yet it took until Harry Truman assumed power after FDR's death and immediately dropped two nukes that Americans really appreciated the importance of scrutinizing VP candidates before they were elected. There hasn’t been a VP succession since 1974 but there’s still a bit of truth to this idea. In 2016, Mike Pence was picked as the VP nominee by the Republican Party partially to assuage Evangelicals’ fears about Trump and partially because as Governor of Indiana, he’d overseen two catastrophes of his own making^note An HIV outbreak in the far south of the state caused when he made the state shut down Planned Parenthood offices for abortion-related reasons—but the relevant offices in southern Indiana (some of which provided no abortion-related services except maybe having pamphlets available) were the only places in a region with a huge heroin problem where you could do needle exchanges. He was forced to take the Medicaid expansion made available by the Affordable Care Act to get a hold on the situation. The other was a huge economic backlash against a "religion freedom law" that put his re-election bid into question. The GOP didn’t want to risk losing a governorship (which isn’t as partisan of an office) based on unforced errors and presented him as a running mate.
• Similarly to the former example, in the Ottoman Empire, Ambassador to the United States served this measure. And just like Russian ambassador example, it might raise a few eyebrows today seeing how important the Modern Turkey is for U.S. foreign policies, but the States didn't become the super power it is right now until the WWII. And since it was so far away, the Turks didn't even take their diplomatic relations with the US seriously until an Ottoman State was no more.
• Russian governments from the Czars through the Soviet era have used Reassignment To Siberia (or some other remote corner of the empire) to quash dissent and/or get rid of troublemakers. This was particularly effective given Russia's massive yet sparsely populated land area. Josef Stalin used the appointment to ambassadorships or other obscure bureaucratic posts as a punishment for opponents or rivals who didn't warrant execution, assassination, or The Gulag.
  • In Czarist Russia, troublesome aristocrats were often sent to Siberia to live in permanent genteel exile (their standard of living was still far above commoners, who went to straight-up prisons). A popular euphemism for this was "to be sent to count trees", as the exile might be explained away as a bureaucratic posting or scientific expedition. In some cases, counting trees was almost literal. Russian Prince Pyotr Kropotkin — an anarchist philosopher, army officer, and trained biologist — developed his perspective on evolution based on the principle of mutual aid for group survival while on a "science mission" in Siberia.
  • Alexander Pushkin was exiled from the imperial court in St. Petersburg to Kishinev (now Chişinău, the capital of Moldova). Kishinev, which had a large Jewish population, was proverbial in Yiddish slang for "very far away" — if a child was gone for awhile, their parents would ask if they had been in Kishinev.
  • Georgy Zhukov became a decorated Soviet general on the Mongolian frontier after waging an undeclared war against Japanese-occupied Manchuria and gained influence and name-recognition as a prominent and successful commander during World War 2. After the war, Stalin saw Zhukov as a big enough threat to his leadership to reassign him, first to southern Ukraine and then to the Urals, far from Moscow's power politics.
  • Stalin's first and second attempts at neutralizing Leon Trotsky were reassignment away from Moscow and then exile from the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for Stalin, Trotsky turned out to be just as much of a loud, troublesome pain-in-the-arse dedicated to causing grief for Stalin regardless of where he was. Unfortunately for Trotsky, Stalin eventually got so fed up with him that he decided on a more permanent solution to the problem... permanent as in an icepick through the skull.
  • Khrushchev used this as his preferred method for disposing of political enemies as a much more humane alternative to the former Stalinesque method of a show-trial followed by a bullet. After former premier Georgy Malenkov and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov unsuccessfully plotted to kick him out in 1957, Khrushchev appointed Malenkov as a manager of a hydro-electric plant in the grim Kazakh industrial city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, while Molotov was appointed Ambassador to Mongolia. Luckily, Molotov liked the Mongolians and made a big success of his Ambassadorship. Nikolai Bulganin was likewise sent to Stavropol when he fell from power. Khruschev would later be allowed to retire to an out-of-the-way dacha with a car and a comfortable-if-not-particularly-luxurious pension after he was ousted by Brezhnev.
  • Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Communist Party's Department of Ideology and Propaganda, published an article criticizing anti-Semitism in the USSR and was reassigned to Canada. Quiet, boring, faraway Canada. This may have ended up coming back to bite the Soviets in the end: While there, he had an opportunity to meet and strike up a friendship with a visiting Soviet official, one who was willing to listen to Yakovlev's ideas on reform... an official by the name of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
• In the French colonial empire, deadend postings were most often in the barren North African desert.
  • Félix Éboué was a trailblazing Afro-Frenchman who achieved high office in France's 1930s colonial administration, including the post of Governor in the valuable Guadeloupe colony. However, he ultimately pissed off the wrong people and was reassigned to what is now Chad, a sparsely populated desert colony with only the south under de facto French rule. This backfired when World War II started and, perhaps to some extent out of spite, Éboué became the first French colonial governor to refuse to recognize the Vichy regime and throw his support behind Charles De Gaulle's Free French government.
  • When French Lt. Colonel Georges Picquart uncovered evidence that fellow officer Alfred Dreyfus had been framed for the crime of high treason in 1896, he was hastily reassigned to Tunisia in order to keep the matter quiet. It didn't work.
• Emperor Augustus dealt with potential scandals — including within his own family — by banishing the perpetrators to remote outposts of the empire.
  • He exiled the Roman poet Ovid to the Black Sea port of Tomis (modern-day Constanţa, Romania). For a Roman citizen born on the Italian peninsula, Tomis was, if not Antarctica, then at least Alaska.
  • Augustus exiled his daughter Julia (and his granddaughter, also called Julia) to the minute and previously uninhabited island of Pandateria, with no access to men or wine (what he found embarrassing was her constant partying and numerous alleged affairs, including rumors of liaisons in a temple).^note Bear in mind that "she had sex in a temple!" was a standard Greco-Roman slur for women deemed to be sexually inappropriate; this was the offense that brought Athena's curse on Medusa in classical mythology.
  • Notably, Ovid and Julia were exiled at roughly the same time... Nobody knows what he did.
• When Napoleon was first exiled from France, the Sixth Coalition sent him to the island of Elba, a popular tourist destination right off the coast of Southern Italy. When he returned to France to retake power, the British exiled him again within just 100 days, but this time to St. Helena, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, about halfway between the coasts of Southern Africa and Brazil.
  • This is how Napoleon took power in the first place. The Directory wanted to keep Napoleon away from the main front and sent him to Italy where they believed he would be stuck in a sideshow. Unfortunately, he tore their plan to pieces when he defeated the Austrians and forced them to sue for peace. When he proposed the Egyptian expedition, the Directory immediately saw a chance to get rid of him by death, capture or sickness. While the expedition ended in failure, Napoleon managed to overthrow the Directory still easily.
• In 1977, a Russian oil tanker ran aground on the Swedish coast. The Swedish Maritime Administration blamed the captain, but an employee discovered that the maps didn't include that particular shallow. He brought it up to his superiors, but when they ignored it, he took the information to the press. End result? He was reassigned from "cartographer" to "engineer" at a desolate lighthouse◊.
• In 1940 the SS and the Nazi Foreign Ministry were both planning to deport all the European Jews to Madagascar. Earlier Nazi deportation plans had targeted marshy, unproductive areas of Poland for resettlement, but the governor of the occupied territory objected. The French colony of Madagascar was seen as a more desirable destination because it was further from lands the Nazis coveted for their own use and its tropical climate and diseases would result in a higher death rate for deportees. France's refusal to accept deportees and Germany's growing food and labor shortages eventually convinced the Nazis to abandon resettlement in favor of mass enslavement of all able-bodied "Undesireables" and extermination via the Death Camps for the rest.
• Historically, China has a long tradition of using this trope. Imperial officials who fell from favor were often reassigned to posts in Guangdong — or worse, Hainan — at the extreme south of the country: high levels of malaria, a subtropical climate that people coming from Northern China couldn't stand, and tasked with "securing the Chinese fortress so that the indigenous peoples won't rebel" all made this kind of assignment disagreeable indeed. "Exile to Xiamen Island" was an idiom for suffering hardship in a faraway place during the Tang and Sung Dynasties. Not much of punishment now, as Xiamen is one of the richest parts of the country.
  • Post-Chinese Civil War, the Republic of China (a.k.a. Taiwan) had its share of these kinds of "promotions" as well. One notable example is General Wang Sheng, who served as Director of the General Political Warfare Department near the end of the life of "President"/dictator Chiang Ching-Kuo (son of Chiang Kai-shek) in the early 1980s. Chiang sought to shift authority and power within the ROC government away from mainland refugees who fled following the Communist victory and towards the new generation born in Taiwan. When Wang visited the United States in 1983 to seek support for his own succession to the presidency, Chiang seized upon the trip as "secret" and "unauthorized"; by that November Wang found himself the ROC's ambassador to Paraguay (which is literally the furthest away from Taiwan one can get, as they are antipodes of each other), allowing Chiang to pick Taiwan-born Lee Teng-Hui as his new Vice President and successor. Lee went on to lead Taiwan's transition to democracy.
• The former Edward VIII of Great Britain, a.k.a. the Duke of Windsor was living in France when World War II broke out. He was known to have fascist sympathies and had visited Germany against the advice of the Prime Minister before the war. After a German diplomat accused him of leaking plans for the defense of Belgium to the Nazis, the British government began to see the Duke as a major liability. When Germany invaded France, Edward moved to Spain and Portugal and continued to associate with Nazi sympathizers. Fearing that the Nazis would either subvert or abduct the Duke and set up a puppet monarchy, Churchill had him forcibly removed. He spent the rest of the War as Governor of the Bahamas, a non-job thousands of miles from any potential entanglements in Europe.
• The ruling Kim dynasty of North Korea has a history of sending sons not in the line of succession out of the country on diplomatic missions to prevent a power struggle from arising, most notably Kim Pyong-il. Partly because of his womanizing nature and the possibility that he could usurp his brother Jong-il's position, Pyong-il has been shuffled around in various ambassadorial positions since the 1970s until he returned to North Korea after retiring from a long career as a foreign diplomat in November 2019.
• After the Boshin War that paved the way for the Meiji Restoration, the Aizu domain lords — better known as The Shinsengumi's masters — were displaced to Tonami "Just south of the Big Dipper" Domain, which occupied the eastern half of today's Aomori Prefecture. There's a good reason why that nickname stood — it's the northernmost point of Honshu, relatively underdeveloped compared to the rest of Japan even today, and (at a time when Hokkaido/Ezo was more like an autonomous client-state than a province of the empire) as far away from the centers of Imperial power and influence as you could get without actually leaving the country.
• For American legislators, being stripped of committee assignments is the equivalent of being exiled to Antarctica. Committees are where laws and policies are shaped and how members climb the ladder to leadership positions and build a track record to run for reelection or other offices. Most importantly, committees are where members can tack on pet projects and spending proposals that benefit their backers and constituents. Being deprived of this is a death knell for most political careers and results in voters looking toward new candidates.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) used to be a political dumping ground. Because FEMA is only called up occasionally, troublemakers and underperformers were sent there out of the belief that it would keep them out of the way. Mismanagement was made worse by the fact that the upper levels were filled by presidential cronies who wanted fancy titles but would have been liabilities if given more active government roles. This led to bungled responses after major events like Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Andrew. It wasn't until the extreme backlash after Hurricane Katrina that the agency started undergoing structural reforms.

Religion

• Low-ranking Catholic priests who incur the wrath of the Vatican may be sent away to remote "contemplative monasteries" (formerly known as "monastic prisons") or assigned to impoverished rural parishes. Fictional portrayals of this may be seen in Father Ted and The Thorn Birds. Senior church officials may receive a more subtle version of this punishment: Jacques Gaillot's liberal views made him unpopular with the Church hierarchy, so he was demoted from Bishop of Évreux, France to Bishop of the "titular diocese" of Partenia, an Algerian city destroyed in the 5th century. Titular dioceses are usually either assigned to Curia officials who carry the rank of bishop but have no pastoral responsibilities, or to auxiliary bishops who help run larger dioceses (such as Rome, New York, Chicago, or Washington). Similarly, Pope Francis removed the young and healthy Cardinal Raymond Burke from his powerful post as Cardinal Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura and reassigned him as the Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a purely ceremonial position usually given only to elderly retired cardinals. This reassignment is presumed to be a response to the conservative Burke's criticisms of Pope Francis's relatively liberal reforms.
  • Another such priest given this treatment was one Jean Vianney. A lackluster student at seminary, he apparently squeaked by in his grades enough to be ordained. However, his bishop had very little faith in his abilities, and decided to send him to the tiny, insignificant and thoroughly corrupt town of Ars, on the premise that even as seemingly incompetent Vianney was, he'd have to actively work at it to lose any souls in a place like Ars. However as a priest, he found his calling in the confessional and at the pulpit and became renowned as a confessor and preacher. People from all over France would flock to his parish to hear his sermons and have him hear their confessions. He would eventually be canonized a saint and would be named patron saint of parish priests.
  • In modern times, prior to the widespread knowledge of abuse by priests, this was the Catholic Church's preferred way of dealing with priests with...problematic proclivities. A particular rectory on the campus of Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA was later exposed to be the final stop in the game of hot potato.
• During the 14th and early 15th centuries, the Archbishop of Canterbury was one Thomas Arundel, who fell prey to a particularly nasty variant of this trope. Arundel was a fierce opponent of King Richard II, and when Richard eventually tried to purge his more persistent enemies in 1397, Archbishop Arundel was banished from England to Florence. It was then Richard pulled a particularly cruel stunt on the Archbishop. He convinced the Pope in Rome that Arundel would make a superb Bishop of St Andrews in Scotland. There was just one snag: this was the height of the Great Western Schism, and the Kingdom of Scotland, unlike neighboring England, had aligned itself with the Antipopes in Avignon. In short, Arundel had been appointed to a Bishopric in a hostile country, aligned with a hostile Pope, which refused to recognize the authority of the Pope who had appointed him. It's perhaps unsurprising that Arundel became one of the staunchest allies of Henry IV, who eventually overthrew Richard.

Organized crime

• Though many mobsters have been killed by The Mafia over the years, some numbskulls were given a pass but received other penalties for falling out of line. For example:
  • Broken/pulled down. The mobster is demoted in rank, and usually loses a lot of influence and wealth, especially when they're demoted from a powerful underboss to a mere soldier.
  • Put on a shelf. The mobster is made inactive and stripped of his responsibilities, i.e. forced into early retirement, even though he's an official member.
  • Assigned unfavorable rackets or territories. As a sign that the mobster is beginning to fall out of favor from his superiors, they're given dead-end jobs where they won't be making enough money.
  • Chased or stripped of their button. For very severe offenses, the mobster is permanently declared Persona Non Grata within the Mafia and barred from associating or doing business with any made members under pain of death.

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