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Simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur by celebrities and rights activitsts has made the conflict even worse...

Masses of information from the media constantly bombard us. Yet paradoxically often what is most significant goes unreported. Take for instance Tony Blair's recent visit to Africa. Suddenly countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ghana come under the spotlight. But one country which forever remains off the UK/US media map is Chad, lying just to the south of Libya and "over three times the size of California", according to the CIA's official website.  Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, it gained independence in 1960 and since then has been gripped by civil war. In a rare case of coverage, on May 21 1992, the Guardian carried four short paragraphs: 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Chadian president Hissene Habre (1982-1990). A report of the justice ministry committee concluded that Habre had committed genocide against the Chadian people.  Unreported in Britain, two years ago, in a case inspired by the one against General Pinochet of Chile, several human rights organisations, led by Human Rights Watch, filed a suit against Habre in Senegal (his refuge since 1990) arguing that he could be tried anywhere for crimes against humanity and that former heads of state were not immune.  However, on 20 March 2001, the Senegal Court of Cassation threw out the case. Human rights groups are now aiming to secure an arrest warrant and extradition request from Belgium (where one of the victims of Habre's torture now lives) and put him on trial there.  So behind the wall of silence, what precisely has been going on in Chad? In fact, the US and UK have been conducting over the last three decades a massive, secret war against Libya - often using Chad as its base. UK involvement in a 1996 plot to assassinate the Libya leader, President Col Mu'ammar Gadafi, as currently alleged by the maverick M15 officer David Shayler, has been reported as an isolated event. Yet the 1996 plot is best seen as part of a wide-ranging and long-standing strategy by the US/UK secret states to dislodge Gadafi.  Seizing power in Libya by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, Gadafi (who intriguingly had undertaken a military training course in England in 1966) quickly became the target of massive covert operations by the French, US, Israeli and British. Stephen Dorril, in his recently published book on MI6, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in a complete flop. In 1980, the head of the French secret service, Col Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was rapidly suppressed.  Then in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Hissene Habre, with the backing of the CIA and French troops, overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Human Rights Watch records: "Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habre in order, according to secretary of state Alexander Haig, to 'bloody Gadafi's nose'." Bob Woodward, in his semi-official history of the CIA reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that throughout the decade Libya ranked almost as high as the Soviet Union as the "bÍte noir" of the administration.  A recent report from Amnesty, Chad: The Habre Legacy, records massive military and financial support for Habre by the US Congress. It adds: "None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by Amnesty International covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations."  US official records indicate that funding for the Chad-based secret war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, donated $7m to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). But a plan to assassinate Gadafi and take over the government on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.  Frustrated in their covert attempt to topple Gadafi, the US government's strategy suddenly shifted. For 11 minutes in the early morning of 14 April 1986, 30 US Air Force and Navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid code-named El Dorado Canyon.  Backing Reagan came the ecstatic response of the major media in both the US and UK. Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan president. Middle East specialist David Yallop reported: "Nine of 18 F111s that left from the UK were specifically briefed to bomb Gadafi's residence inside the barracks where he was living with his family." In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi's home. Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months, was killed while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.  Following the April 1986 attack, reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media. But away from the media glare, the CIA launched by far its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And, as concern grew in MI6 over Gadafi's alleged plans to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya including the London-based Libyan National Movement.  Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habre and install Idriss Deby as the new president in a secret operation. The French government had tired of Habre's genocidal policies while the Bush administration decided not to frustrate France's objectives in exchange for their co-operation in the war against Iraq. Yet even under Deby the abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.  David Shaylerís original allegations over the anti-Gadafi assassination plot were vigorously denied by the government. But within the broad historical context outlined here, they do, indeed, make sense.  Dr Richard Keeble is director of undergraduate studies at City University's department of journalism and the author of Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey) and Ethics for Journalists (Routledge)  http://www.medialens.org/articles/the ... s_2002/rk_secret_war.html

两本叶芝分析的书评

彼得森国际经济研究所的Arvind Subramanian的新书，该书认为中国经济实力将很快让美国黯然失色——比人们预期的要快。

神圣罗马帝国的约瑟夫二世是个慷慨的音乐爱好者，但不幸的是，当他听完莫扎特的《后宫诱逃》(Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail)，他说了一句：“太多音符了，亲爱的莫扎特”，从此便成为乐盲的永恒象征。

当西方支持的暴君被赶走，政局长远地变化了。但革命到底能传播多远？With western-backed despots being turfed out politics has changed for ever. So just how far can the revolution spread?

本文为《从马克思主义到后马克思主义？》序。作者书中总结“叛逆”与“顺从”、“集体主义”与“个人主义”这两组对立主题：若称社会主义是叛逆的集体主义，新自由主义则可被成为顺从的个人主义。

哈金和戴思杰都是为西方读者写作的，直接来自中国的作品却比较难，比较艰深，比较难以定位和理解。在中国受到喜爱的作家，在德国可不见得会受到读者的青睐。

It is very disturbing to find telegrams signed off by Hillary Clinton which seem to suggest that regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks – such as grubbing around for top UN officials' credit card and biometric details.

Eagleton can, of course, fight back against this kind of rebuttal if he can only show that there is something in theology which undermines the arguments against religion made by the new atheists. And this indeed is what he is up to in Reason, Faith and Revolution when he seeks to show, with the use of the theologian Thomas Aquinas, that the God so readily dismissed by Dawkins and Hitchens is not a god that many theologians, or indeed believers, would recognise.

经典选读。"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

The institutional conditions of practical progress

The complete text of "Plasticity into Power: Comparative Historical Studies in the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success," which forms part of the Politics series. The book was originally published in 1988 and is to be republished by Verso in the near future. It explores, in comparative historical detail, an idea that plays a major role in my social-theoretical writings: the idea of the practical as well as the moral advantages of institutional arrangements and discursive practices that facilitate their own revision.

"Plasticity into Power" was published by Verso in a new paperback edition in 2004 together with "False Necessity" and "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task." To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

Obama demonstrates that [glamor's] magic still exists. What a glamorous candidate he was-less a person than a persona, an idealized, self-contained figure onto whom audiences projected their own dreams, a Garbo-like "impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations," in the words of Time's Joe Klein.

金融时报对巴克莱公司２００８年业绩的报告中说，“银行已确认该公司因复杂债务工具导致的减计损失达８０亿英镑，不过由于它的自身债务减计（１６．６亿英镑），该公司的总损失相应减少。”　

我看过以后的第一个想法就是：这个报告肯定是不对的。如果你的上市交易的债务价值下降，那肯定是因为市场认为你的声望较之先前下降了；市场对你的债务的定价，所反映的是预计中的违约风险上升，这不会增加你的利润，只会更加提高你的信用风险。

Barack Obama’s demand, in his June 15 speech, that the former British Petroleum Company create an escrow account, to guarantee the funds that will be needed to deal with the consequences of the continuing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, should have been made weeks ago, and should surely have been framed more strongly than it was.The President, in this matter, continues to demonstrate the quality, laudable in itself, but in politics extraordinarily dangerous, of assuming that those he is dealing with are as reasonable and well-intentioned as he is himself. In fact they are often driven by ruthlessly self-interested motives that leave him in a position of seeming weakness and unwillingness to defend not only national but his own political interests.At the end of May one saw the President on international television walking on a Louisiana beach, accompanied—off-scene—by hundreds if not thousands of newsmen, broadcasters, and cameramen. He seemed abject. He bent over and picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. He shook his head in concern. A cutaway showed his speeches earlier in this affair declaring that his administration is in charge of the great effort to save America’s coast and waters from the terrible pollution that is spreading as a result of a volcano of oil erupting from the sea’s floor and meeting the sickly-colored, toxic chemicals being mixed into the water that are meant to disperse it.In his June 15 speech, Mr. Obama finally insisted that BP would pay for all the damage and cleanup and would be held responsible for any illegalities; and the next day at the White House BP agreed to an independently administered $20 billion escrow fund, while the full costs to the Gulf region are far from clear.In the press conferences given by the President and the BP chairman that followed the meeting it was clear that the American government still does not control this situation. BP alone will determine what is done with respect to the oil geyser and its promised closure. While it will make available the $20 billion compensation fund, the timing, terms, and ultimate worth of BP’s assurances of compensation and reparation remain open to interpretation and change.Advertisement How can the President possibly say that his administration has “been in charge”? BP has been in charge from the start—it and its contract companies, all of them desperately trying to plug the hole in the bottom of the sea, and all defending corporate and fiscal interests of their own. The President’s associates and advisers have apparently decided that the agencies of the United States government are technically incompetent to give instructions to BP, which seems improbable. But they certainly can and must tell BP what priorities must be set, and they must establish goals to be met, and on what timescale.BP’s lawyers and lobbyists have just as desperately been striving to allow BP to unload responsibility upon anyone or everyone else, including incompetent or irresponsible or compromised federal regulators. Allow me, in the style of the metropolitan columnists who influence Washington, to draft what the President might have said in his June 15 speech:“My friends:“The American nation has suffered a grievous blow from the catastrophe produced in the Gulf by what formerly was known as the British Petroleum Company. This is the latest in a series of major accidents produced in this company’s American operations, causing loss of lives among its workers, unforgivable human suffering by private citizens, and great damage to private and public interests, continuing today in the Gulf.“I have therefore today given orders that the American functions of this company be provisionally seized, or placed in temporary receivership, by the American government, as in recent months we have been forced to seize banks and corporations devastated by economic crisis, such as General Motors, AIG, and certain financial institutions.“BP’s American management will be placed under public authority and will be instructed to terminate the oil emergency as rapidly as possible and in disregard of whatever costs must be incurred by the company. This effort will be conducted by BP through its own best efforts, closely supervised by officers of the United States Coast Guard and Navy, the Energy and Treasury Departments of our government, and will be accompanied by an investigation by the Justice Department and its executive agencies, including the FBI, for any possible evidence of fraud, malfeasance or profiteering, contributing to this disaster. None of these agencies of government will incur any responsibility whatever for the decisions and actions of BP while conducting its operations to terminate the oil blowout.“In no circumstances will company, proprietary, or stockholder interest be given priority over measures to terminate this emergency and to safeguard the assets or interests of the United States public or government. No funds of this company shall be expended on political lobbying intended to influence Congress or the executive agencies of federal government until this emergency has formally been determined to have been ended.“Clearly, losses to British pension funds and other British shareholders of BP should be of concern to the British government. However those individuals and institutions investing in companies with notoriously controversial histories assume the accompanying risks.“The Oil Pollution Act signed into law in 1990 greatly expanded the US government’s ability and resources necessary to respond to oil spills; and it does not preempt state action to impose additional liability, which may be unlimited, with penalties and damages in addition to federal liabilities that may extend to prison sentences.“I am instructing that all BP assets within the United States, or in its surrounding waters, including funds immediately at its disposal, and all other BP funds accessible to the United States government, be temporarily seized and sequestered so as to prevent the transfer of any funds or assets of this company outside United States jurisdiction and access. The disposition of those assets will eventually be determined by the courts or by a new independent federal agency, with priority given to the reimbursement of persons and property-holders victimized by this catastrophe, and the redressment of damage or destruction to public assets and municipal, state, and national interests for which the former British Petroleum corporation is deemed by the courts, or by the independent agency, to have been responsible.” This is what the American people wanted to hear. President Obama wishes to be seen as decisive and a leader? Here was his opportunity. He wants a Democratic Congress elected in the fall? And a second presidential term for himself? This could have made a decisive contribution to those ambitions, as well as assuring necessary help to millions of people and repairing grave damage to the environment.He then could have concluded his speech by saying to his political opponents that any Republican or Democrat who wishes to run for office in November as an opponent of these Obama administration crisis measures—and as a defender of BP corporate and stockholder interests, or its customary executive remuneration and financial practices—as against the national interest of the United States and redress of the damage that continues at this moment to be done to the United States and its citizens, would be more than welcome to do so.—June 16, 2010

介绍分析敦煌千佛洞写本有关汉族佛教（即禅宗）传入吐蕃的历史背景的史料，禅宗是于中印僧诤会之前半世纪时传入吐蕃的，并且在那里与印度佛教有过教派纷争。这些写本史料的长处在于它们都比所有的藏文史料更为古老，而且藏文古代史料又都是在当印度影响最终于吐蕃占据主导地位之后写成的。藏文史料有很多神话传说的内容，这也正是藏文史书的特点。

变化的观念曾在中国起过如此巨大作用，以至于它既触及到了心理范畴、宗教一巫术修持、行为方式和时空观的历史，又涉及到了哲学史。然而，由于中国的意识观念和思想的历史更为复杂，同时既具有千差万别又具有演变性的原因，故它至今尚未被人充分认识。

2010年7月17日，四十余位来自不同学科领域的海内外学者在北大博雅国际会议中心聚会，以“别求新声——汪晖的学术世界与当代中国思想之进路”为题，召开了一次学术座谈会。会议共设立了四个议题：全球化视野下的中国问题、二十年来中国学术思想之变迁、思想论争与超越左右、当代学术生产与现实关注。

该实验完全没有将实验目的、方法和可能的不良结果告诉受试者,没有把他们作为人来看待,而是看作豚鼠一样,完全不符合伦理学。该项目的好处可能是能够获得梅毒螺旋体感染人体的自然过程,为人类认识该病提供资料。患者进行治疗,但在研究中没有考虑给受试者提供治疗。

访谈人：张旭东，美国杜克大学文学博士；纽约大学（NYU）比较文学系教授；东亚研究系教授、系主任。中英文主要著作包括: Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms; Postsocialism and Cultural Politics; 《批评的踪迹》；《全球化时代的文化认同》，等。
采访人：姜异新，北京鲁迅博物馆副研究馆员，北京师范大学文学院博士后，约翰·霍普金斯大学历史系访问学者。（以下简称张、姜）