牢牢把握正確輿論導向

2009年4月23日星期四

外交雜誌聚焦中國

美國《外交》雜誌5-6月刊聚焦中國經濟以及中美關係。
封面標題為《the China Challenge》。
文章一標題為《The G-2 Mirage》,作者Elizabeth C. EconomyAdam Segal。摘要:A heightened bilateral relationship may not be possible for China and the United States, as the two countries have mismatched interests and values. Washington should embrace a more flexible and multilateral approach。
文章二標題為《Deng Undone——The Costs of Halting Market Reform in China》,作者DEREK SCISSORS。摘要稱,Driven by a near obsession with economic growth, Beijing has extended the state’s reach into the economy. Instead of urging the Chinese government to resume extensive market reforms, Washington should encourage it to focus on a narrow range of feasible measures.
文章三標題《Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Crisis? 》作者Minxin Pei。摘要:The financial crisis is challenging Beijing's ability to hold up its end of the deal with the country's elite, leading to a potential threat to the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
值得注意的是,封面還重點導讀另外一篇文章《the End of the Free Market》。

轉折?


藍水海軍的動力與使命

原題:中國經濟崛起催生藍水海軍

英國《金融時報》亞洲版主編大衛•皮林(David Pilling) ,譯者/何黎,2009-04-24

1888年,北洋水師宣告成立。此前中國清政府為此耗費了大約1350噸白銀購置軍艦。幾乎一夜之間,北洋水師成為世界第八大海軍,並且照理也是亞洲最強大的艦隊。但這一幻覺僅在6年後就被戲劇性地擊碎了。這支耀眼的新艦隊在中日甲午海戰中,被更為組織有方的日本帝國海軍打得全軍覆沒。這場恥辱的失敗,加速了中國的衰落和日本的崛起。10年後,日本在日俄海戰中令人震驚地獲勝,鞏固了這一實力轉移。
昨日,中國海軍在青島慶祝成立60周年。現代化海軍的重生,是中國經濟復興的必然產物。中國海軍的實力可能還是比不上日本海軍,儘管有一個更好聽的名字:中國人民解放軍海軍(在英語裏,這聽上去像一家革命性的服裝店),而日本稱作海上自衛隊(Maritime Self Defence Force)。但趨勢是相當明顯的。受戰後和平公約的約束(即便不是法律限制),日本軍費開支最多只能達到國內生產總值(GDP)的1%。而國防分析人士估計,中國軍費開支約占GDP的4%(中國GDP雖小於日本,但增速快得多),海軍在中國軍隊成為日趨顯赫的軍種。
遺憾的是,在應邀訪問青島的14國海軍中,日本被刻意排除在外。去年6月,一艘日本驅逐艦獲准訪問中國湛江港,這是60多年來中國首次允許懸掛太陽旗的海軍艦艇靠近中國海岸線。但在中方看來,讓日本參加紀念中國海軍成立的慶典活動,作為一種和解舉動顯然有點過頭。1949年,一些國民黨軍艦投奔共產黨,由此誕生了解放軍海軍。
美國則得到了更好的對待。儘管由於華盛頓近期決定向臺灣增售武器,兩軍關係有所惡化,但美國海軍作戰部長、海軍上將加里•羅海德(Gary Roughead)仍應邀參加慶典。東道主中國海軍司令員吳勝利甚至邀請他搭乘軍用飛機從北京飛至青島。
但在這些禮遇之外,對於中國構建一支“藍水海軍”的努力,美國已表示焦慮。至少在理論上,這樣的“藍水海軍”將有能力在遠離中國海岸線的地方投射實力。美國國會研究服務部(Congressional Research Services, CRS)去年11月更新的一份報告表示,中國的目標是最早在2010年就達到這樣的軍力,即一旦在北京視為中國一部分的臺灣問題上爆發衝突,中國軍隊能夠嚇阻或防止美軍進入臺灣海峽。該報告還推測,中期而言,中國的其他戰略目標可能包括:“取代美國的區域軍事影響力”,最終目標可能是鼓勵美軍撤離太平洋地區;在海上領土糾紛中捍衛自身利益;為中國進口石油和其他礦物保護海上航道。美日兩國一向對於他們眼中的中國軍費開支缺乏透明度表示憂慮。
美日帶著一定的緊張心情關注中國海軍的崛起,純屬自然。中國可能還要數十年時間才能趕上美國的海軍實力。但是,當那一天逼近時,它將對戰後太平洋地區的均勢提出棘手的問題,迄今這一均勢在很大程度上是由於美軍的存在而得到保持的。美日兩國肯定希望,當那一天到來時,它們面對的會是一個更加民主的中國——即使這是基於一個不可靠的假定,即與威權國家相比,民主國家不太可能濫用武力。
當然,中國堅稱自己絕無好戰意圖。中國國防部外事辦公室主任錢利華少將去年告訴英國《金融時報》:“即便有一天,我們擁有了一艘航空母艦,與別的國家不同,我們不會將其用於推行全球部署或全球影響力。”
人們不必要完全相信這一說法才會承認,隨著中國更深地融入全球貿易,它將感到有必要保護自身利益。
上海政法學院(Shanghai Institute of Political Science and Law)軍事專家倪樂雄告訴《南華早報》(South China Morning Post):“中國已融入全球經濟網路。中國人民解放軍海軍的新職責是保護我們在沿海地區和公海的國家利益,而不是投入軍備競賽。”他表示,儘管一些人仍夢想著中國海軍成為一支世界級海軍,有能力“抹去殖民的恥辱”,但這不是主要目的。
全美亞洲研究所(National Bureau of Asian Research)亞洲能源安全項目主管米克爾•赫伯格(Mikkal Herberg)也承認,中國發展海軍的主要目的,很可能確實是為了保護其貿易流動。“眼下,中國的咽喉為美國海軍所控制,”他表示。戰前日本的例子表明,這絕非好事。正是這種不堪封鎖的脆弱性,至少在一定程度上導致日本走上了悲劇性和殘忍的肆虐亞洲之路。
如果只是為了這個原因,那麼中國海軍的崛起也許真的是件好事。千百年來,中國一直向內看,現在,隨著它把眼光投向海上,如果認為這毫無危險性,那將是愚蠢的。但同樣不明智的是忽視這樣一個事實,即一支更強大的海軍,是中國日益融入全球經濟的幾乎不可避免的結果。這也帶有風險。但總體而言,這無疑是應該受到歡迎的。

聲音收藏之can you stop the rain

http://www.likenote.com/note/2767-can_you_stop_the_rain(peabo_bryson)
http://www.likenote.com/note/13-what_will_be_will_be(doris_day)

是人物


2009年4月22日星期三

男人幫美女TOP10

1 Cheryl Cole
“I wish I was a bloke sometimes. There are a few things I'd like to try out as a bloke.”


Nadine. Kimberley. Sarah. Nicola. The other members of Girls Aloud, in case you've forgotten. But it's a forgivable slice of amnesia, given that 2008/09 has been all about Cheryl - never mind the bandmates. In the last 12 months, thanks to taking The X Factor by storm, the gorgeous Geordie has become Britain's most wanted star. And it's easy to see why. With her flawless skin, high cheekbones, wafer-thin waist, perfect pins and criminally underexposed cleavage, it's like God himself decided her native Newcastle was looking a bit dowdy, and needed a beacon of angel-like beauty at its centre. Add a dirty laugh and ability to repel Simon Cowell, and it's no wonder that the 25-year-old has usurped even the mighty Keeley Hazell as the UK's sexiest female. She's also been named Britain's Best Dressed Woman by Tatler, won a Brit Award, graced the covers of FHM and Vogue, climbed Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief and claimed the title of Heat's 'most fanciable female'.
And now, she accepts perhaps the ultimate accolade for womankind: the wide-eyed, reverential acclaim of FHM's readership. Such was the enormous surge in votes during the early weeks that, within a fortnight of the polls opening, she had an insurmountable lead. Seriously: at this rate of nationwide domination, it can only be a matter of time before the country converts en masse to a new religion: Cherylanity. We're imagining black and white Toon Army monk habits, and prayers that end in "howay". In fact, there may only be one question left: is she perfect? No, she has a flaw. His name's Ashley. Just say the word, Cheryl. Just say the word.

2 Megan Fox
“I have the libido of a 15-year-old boy - my sex drive is so high. ”


After a winning debut in last year's competition, the fire'n'ice beauty has spent the year waltzing, clothes-free, around Simon Pegg in How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, playing a possessed cheerleader in the forthcoming Jennifer's Body and generally making good boys want to be very, very bad: "I like the bad-boy types. The guy I'm attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He's usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar." Well, he sounds like a cock to us.

3 Jessica Alba
“I've said I won't go naked in any of my movies, because I don't want to. But that doesn't mean I don't want to see other people strip off! ”


Motherhood causes strange things to happen. Things like the Razzie-nominated The Love Guru. But, sprog dropped, it's back to business as usual for our 2007 champ. After a guest appearance in the US version of The Office, she'll be dusting down her leather chaps and gyrating her way back into nerdish hearts as Sin City 2's Nancy Callahan. But does she take her work home with her? "Most nights I end up wearing a wife beater T-shirt and boxers." Shame. But at least you've got more in common than you thought.

4 Britney Spears
“I no longer study Kabbalah, my baby is my religion. ”

Like a slightly unhinged chameleon, Britney Spears can change her appearance at the drop of a hat. From schoolgirl to diva, through doting mother to... well, yes, there may have been a slight blip when she and K-Fed split, what with the hair shaving, bingeing and showing off the contents of her 'purse' to all and sundry. But Britney's stormed back up the list and - after a rumoured £60,000 makeover - she's looking, if not her best, then a pretty good approximation of what she once was.

5 Keeley Hazell
“If I'm swimming in a pool and my bikini pops off, I'm not bothered and carry on. ”

It's a mystery of modern times that Keeley, despite consistently featuring in the 100 Sexiest's Top Five, has never nabbed the top spot. Is it because she's too nice? Has her green campaigning diluted the appeal of what is, without doubt, the UK's most revered frontage? Or is she just in limbo? She's overtaken David Beckham as the most Googled Brit in the US. The 22-year-old is taking drama and psychology classes. She's started her own modelling agency. And she's single. Our girl's doing just fine.

6 Adriana Lima
“Sex is for after marriage. [Men] have to respect that this is my choice. If there's no respect, that means they don't want me. ”

Now entering her tenth year on the catwalk, Brazilian supermodel Lima is so perfect that her government uses her picture to make Brazilians not mind about all that City Of God stuff. A strict Catholic, she was believed to be the only 28-year-old virgin left on the planet until she married on Valentine's Day this year. Lima volunteers in an orphanage in her home town where the small boys ask her for cuddles, look down her top and then high-five each other the second that her back's turned.

7 Elisha Cuthbert
“I'm a huge fan of video games and comic books. I'm not die-hard or anything, but I definitely appreciate the art in it, which is really cool. ”


She's been beaten, kidnapped and shot at. Hell, she's even been chased by a cougar. But you can't keep a good girl down, so, come 'Day Seven', Kim Bauer's back, pouting provocatively and running chestily. And, fantastically, 24 isn't this coquettish, Top Ten stalwart Canadian's only showcase. No, the 27-year-old also stars in The Six Wives Of Henry Lefay, a 'comedy' where she juggles six stepmothers at her father's funeral. Hmmm, maybe you should stick to 24, or download The Girl Next Door - Elisha plays an ex-porn star.

8Kristin Kreuk
“Just because I don't do bad things doesn't mean I don't have bad thoughts. ”


Last year's shock entry was Elisha Cuthbert, reaching the No.4 spot simply by dint of breathing. This year, another 26-year-old crashes into the Top Ten - again, it seems, solely on the basis of TV nostalgia. It can't be Kristin's role in Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li. Nope, us neither. So it must be her role as Superman's girl in Smallville driving the votes. Or Superman himself, repeatedly pressing the "submit" button on FHM.com like a demented supersonic jackrabbit.

9 Anna Friel
“For me personally, everything is on a kiss.”


Crashing back into the Top Ten, the 32-year-old star of massive US series Pushing Daisies could never have expected how far she would go after finding fame while lezzing off in scally misery fest Brookside. After a dalliance with a m閚age ?trois alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tribe, Hollywood came calling. Anna is now starring in this summer's big blockbuster Land Of The Lost alongside Will Ferrell.

10 Freida Pinto
“The camera never gave me cold feet.”


I have always felt comfortable in front of it.
This year's highest new entry, the Mumbai model made her film debut in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire last year and rocketed straight into number two on everyone's list of favourite Indians (Sachin Tendulkar remains strong in first position, but she nudged Gandhi down to third, who can only expect to drop further if he continues his stubborn refusal to contemporise his image like Madonna does). Now BAFTA-nominated, the 24-year-old had previously been presenting a television travel show and appearing in Skoda adverts.

Editor Is Leaving the Observer, New York’s Scorecard



By DAVID CARR,紐約時報,Published: April 22, 2009

Peter W. Kaplan, the editor of The New York Observer, announced his resignation on Wednesday and said he would be leaving the weekly in June. For the past 15 years Mr. Kaplan has used tart headlines and talented young writers to create a kind of contemporary municipal history of New York high and sometimes low. The newspaper let those in the know know what else they should know about.
Mr. Kaplan met with his staff at 2 p.m. to inform them of his departure, saying that after almost 800 issues it was time for someone else to perform what some of those who work at the small paper have called a kind of a weekly miracle. “I have been here 15 years,” he said in an interview, pointing out that his third five-year contract is up in June. “I’m 55, interested in a third act, and I’ve had my turn here. I want to take what I have learned and see if there is a way I can help figure out what is next for our business.”
Jared Kushner, 28, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, said, “It’s sad that Peter is leaving the paper. He’s done some wonderful things here at The Observer.”
Although each of the men said nice things about each other, a number of staffers at The Observer, who did not speak for attribution because they didn’t want to be openly critical of the paper’s owner, said in interviews that a push for shorter articles and a desire for cuts in an already small newsroom budget helped Mr. Kaplan decide it was time to go.
He will leave a New York media world that is very different from the one he began covering in The Observer in 1994 — one that is challenged by faltering bottom lines and atomized into dozens of blogs and Web sites. Just last week The Observer broke a story about a Brooklyn con woman, the so-called hipster-grifter, in an article that provided just the kind of New York intrigue and context that had been a hallmark of the newspaper. But Gawker, the Manhattan gossip blog, immediately took custody of the story, annotating it with attitude and reader-submitted sightings of the protagonist that all but obscured where the story came from in the first place.
“We are a newspaper in a time that is fundamentally uncongenial to newspapers, and we are about the reporting at a time when the economics of reporting are very difficult to justify,” Mr. Kaplan said. “There may be some similarities in tone, but we are the diametric opposite of Gawker. We don’t borrow information, we create it.”
Known for his soaring soliloquies about the city he loved but did not live in — he resides in Westchester — Mr. Kaplan is a modern version of the fedora-wearing newsman, a man who saw his paper as a weekly libretto rendered in glamour and noir. During his tenure the longest for an editor in the newspaper’s 22-year history, The Observer played large for its size, catching Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., when he was a presidential candidate, taking the measure of Barack Obama by saying he was “articulate and bright and clean”; getting an interview with Jayson Blair at a time when his reporting for The New York Times was coming apart; and all but creating a television and movie franchise with its “Sex and the City” column.
Mr. Kaplan’s skepticism and manifest enthusiasm have left a footprint on the vocabulary of contemporary journalism. Long before there were tatty, snarky blogs, the voice of amazed, gimlet-eyed hilarity was baked into Mr. Kaplan’s version of the weekly. And dozens of the people annealed in his weekly oven of big ambitions and tiny budgets have graduated onto the Web and into mainstream newsgathering, a diaspora that both widened and diluted its strength as a paper.
The Observer relies heavily on real estate advertising and circulates mostly in Manhattan to about 50,000 readers. It has undergone significant changes since it was sold by the avuncular Manhattan businessman Arthur Carter in 2006, and purchased by Mr. Kushner, the Manhattan real-estate scion. At the tender age of 25 he plunked down almost $10 million for the weekly. The penchant for money losing remained a part of The Observer’s identity, but in 2007 it left behind its broadsheet format and became a tabloid and turned significant attention to its Web site, observer.com. Mr. Kaplan said at the time that part of the gesture was to come up with a paper that its new owner could relate to.
(In some ways Mr. Kushner would appear to be more of an ideal subject than owner of the weekly. On Tuesday night he and his girlfriend Ivanka Trump walked the stairs leading up to the Vanity Fair party celebrating the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival. The photographers went bonkers.)
Observer staffers said the pairing of an editor preoccupied by New York demimondes and the young real estate baron was an odd alliance that was bound to dissolve at some point, but Mr. Kaplan, as is often the case in public partings, had only kind words to offer.
“Jared saved the paper,” he said in the interview. “It would have gone bye-bye in 2006. He is fundamentally a capitalist in a business that needs capitalists, and he is 28 years old in a business that needs 28-year-olds.”
Mr. Kaplan, a former reporter for The New York Times and once the executive producer of “The Charlie Rose Show,” came to The Observer as an editor in the tradition of Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine. He promoted and executed a tough-minded brand of civic hyperbole, a belief that there was and is no other place in the world like New York City. His job, which has previously belonged to Graydon Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, and Susan Morrison, now an editor at The New Yorker, involved the creation of a real-time taxonomy of New York power — not just who was up and down, but who mattered in the first place. Finding oneself depicted in a large-headed caricature in the paper was a totem of arrival in some parts of Manhattan, a sign that one had become worthy of incarceration in the social pantheon defined by its pages.
But The New York Observer has always worked on a less than thin margin. Mr. Kushner may have a small interest in publishing, but his main business is New York real estate, which has been a rugged nexus of the economic downturn.
Despite rumors of disagreements over financing, Mr. Kaplan said Mr. Kushner will continue to support the paper.
“It’s true that he and I are very different creatures, but he is very ambitious, which is The New York Observer’s stock in trade,” he said. “He clearly wants to see this thing through.” Mr. Kaplan, who called the paper his “life’s work” when he was shopping it after Mr. Carter tired of putting tens of millions of dollars into it, said that it will continue in some form, just not with the topspin he put on it every week.
“I bring my own weird cultural framing to this, but I am not immune to the Oedipal triumph of what comes next here from the people at this paper who will take it over,” he said. “It will be a battle on all fronts, but the paper will be freer and faster, moving into the future in ways that I can’t foresee.”
Mr. Kushner said that he and Mr. Kaplan had come to an agreement a month ago that he would be leaving, and that Mr. Kaplan would be assisting him in a search for a new editor.
Former staffers said regardless of who is chosen, Mr. Kaplan’s departure would leave a gap in New York’s media landscape. Jim Windolf, a former Observer reporter who is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, said, “I think it seems depressing that we are living at a time when someone like Peter Kaplan is not running a major publication in New York. That just seems weird to me.”

1919


歷史

寫給5月和6月,以及7月

誰來寫歷史,都不放心。
仇恨太長,筆劃太短。
時間,總有一天封喉。
朋友們寫字,又太多酒氣。
也好,
最後的墓碑
留給愛情。

史達林的幽靈與普京的歷史難題

Putin vs. the Truth
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia

紐約時報書評,Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009,By Orlando Figes

In 1991, during the last days of the Soviet Union, I was working in the Military History Archive in Moscow. The archive complex was in a crumbling state. There were broken windows and stray cats on the staircase to the reading room. The desk lamps had no lightbulbs and there was no heat. Half the archivists had left because of poor pay. In the courtyard of the complex stood, surreally, a Soviet army tank. The director told me he had bought it very cheaply as an attraction: it was part of his "business plan" for the archive. Last year I returned to the archive. The buildings were not much improved, and the staff were just as rude as I remembered them from Soviet days. The tank had gone, but in its place was a shestyorka, a Mercedes S-600, the standard car of the minor oligarchs, brand new with tinted glass. I was told that it belonged to one of the archive's directors.
The collapse of the Soviet regime gave the heads of Russia's archives new commercial opportunities. In the first chaotic years of the Yeltsin government, when they were allowed to run their archives as their personal fiefdoms, there was money to be made from the journalists and publishers who flocked to Moscow (and very rarely to St. Petersburg) in search of secrets and sensations from the vaults. There were tales of Western publishers buying up exclusive rights to the archives, of deals being made to reserve parts of them for certain Western researchers,[1] and even rumors that precious documents were being sold.[2]
For scholars too there were real gains. Intellectually, the end of communism was a liberation for historians. They could travel to Russia, work in the archives freely, and publish what they liked, without fear of retribution from the Soviet authorities.
To understand this liberation, one has to appreciate what it was like to work in the Soviet archives as a foreigner. From 1984 to 1987, I worked in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR), now the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), for my first book, on the peasantry in the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. There were no more than a handful of foreign historians working in the archive at that time. We had no access to the catalogs (it was only in 1986 that they began to be made available) so our only information about the contents of the archive came from the footnotes of Soviet publications. The system worked on the principle of preserving everything but admitting the existence of only those materials cleared for publication by Soviet historians.
All our requests for documents were vetted by a woman from the KGB. As foreigners we had to work in a separate reading room, without access to the canteen, so that we would not come into contact with Soviet historians or archivists, who might help us with our work. There was just one flaw in the system: the reading room for Soviet researchers shared a toilet with the room for foreigners. In those days I was a smoker, so I'd go there frequently and chat with Soviet historians and archivists, who liked my Western cigarettes and were happy to find out for me the numbers of the files I needed for my work.

1.
Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press. In January 1992, he arrived in Moscow for the first time, and with the help of a young American scholar, Jeffrey Burds, he tried to persuade the heads of Russia's most important central archives to do business with him. Brent's plan was to publish a series of volumes of selected documents from the newly opened Soviet archives, employing American scholars and Russian archivists as editors—a project that became the Annals of Communism, of which so far twenty volumes have been published (and another ten are in preparation) on various themes in Soviet history. In the first part of his engaging and well-written memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, Brent tells the story of the project's genesis. He conjures up the Moscow of the early 1990s, a time when the Russians were struggling to recover from the loss of the old certainties following the collapse of the Soviet system and adapt to a market-based economy. On his first visit to the former Party Archive, Brent notices "a small glass vase of fresh violets" at the feet of a statue of Lenin; on a later visit he notices that these have been replaced by plastic flowers; and then the flowers disappear.
There were rival Western publishers who would perhaps pay more for sensational material from the archives. But the affable American was guided well by Burds and his friends in the Russian scholarly community, who advised Brent to emphasize his scholarly intentions and show respect for the Russians. "Don't come on like a conquering hero; don't be a smug American; don't look down on them because their system failed and ours triumphed." Sitting down for his first meeting with the archive officials, Brent did something he had been told to do by Burds: he opened a fresh packet of Winston cigarettes, offered them across the negotiating table, and accepted the counter-offer of a packet of Russian cigarettes as a gesture of respect. And then Brent made a naive speech about how he had "grown up under the sign of the Cold War" and had lived in fear of nuclear attack; how he had also grown up listening to his "father's record of the Red Army Chorus and had marched around our apartment to their glorious melodies"; how he had thought that "people who could sing such songs...could not possibly be my enemy"; and how he had now come to Moscow "with the hope that we could negotiate in good faith and reach an understanding that would enrich both sides of the table."
I may have gone on too long, but I wished to make clear that for me this was not simply a business deal: it was a quest for understanding an enigma that was not a set of academic or political questions but the context of my life experience and that of my generation of Americans.
One can only wonder what the heads of Russia's archives made of such a speech, but what persuaded them to do business with Brent was relatively straightforward: he promised that as editors of the published volumes they would be paid royalties in dollars on equal terms with the Americans. Once it became clear that they would make some money for themselves—and that the researchers of their archives would be paid as well—they readily revealed the riches of the archives and negotiated contracts for their publication in America. Brent's initial list of subjects (the Great Terror, the Church and the Revolution, the Comintern and the repressions of the 1930s) was soon supplemented by other volumes on the Russian Revolution, the last diary of the Empress Alexandra, the murder of the Romanov family, and Soviet espionage in the US. There was not much that Brent was not prepared to buy.
What remained unclear was whether Yale would have exclusive publishing rights outside Russia, as he insisted it should have (in fact, there are lots of cases of the Russian archives selling the same documents to several publishers); whether there would be a Russian publication of all the documents (and, if so, who would pay for it); and whether other researchers, from Russia or abroad, would be allowed to make use of the archives while they were being prepared for publication by the American academics selected as editors by Yale (there were plenty of complaints by scholars on this score). Brent recognized
that it was vital the books be available in Russian for Russian readers; otherwise, was it not some form of plunder? Otherwise, how would this knowledge penetrate Russian society? And without this knowledge, how could a new society begin to be constructed?
This was an important admission to make because at the time there was a widely publicized protest by Russian nationalists and Communists about the "theft" of Russia's archives by foreigners accused of wanting to blacken Soviet history by focusing attention on its darkest spots. As Brent explains, a potential problem was avoided by negotiating subsidies for the Russian publication of the volumes in the Yale series, leaving it to the individual archives to decide what documents to add or take away from each volume, though so far only fourteen of the twenty volumes in the Yale series have been published in Russia.

2.
The Annals of Communism is an admirable enterprise. In it, some of the most important revelations from the former Soviet archives have been published for the first time.[3] Many of the volumes have successfully combined the publication of new materials with original analysis.[4] But others have been less successful, either because the documents themselves are relatively insignificant,[5] or because they include jargon-ridden academic commentaries.[6]
In the second half of Inside the Stalin Archives, Brent gives a summary of some of the books in the series (though without giving any details of their authors or even a list of the titles in a bibliography). The series, we are told, will culminate in the publication of several volumes of documents from Stalin's personal files. In a final chapter, Brent has some interesting reflections on Stalin's notes in the margins of the books in his private library:
As I looked at page after page of Stalin's corrections, annotations, and commentary, I realized that while he professed a worldview set radically against metaphysics and Kantian idealism, Stalin was an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas. This represents a radical, if almost invisible, reorientation and revision of Marx's philosophy and is the key to understanding Stalin's threat to "mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, by his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state."
Stalin's personal archive was opened on the initiative of Alexander Yakovlev, the Party's last propaganda chief and the main intellectual force behind Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program, who after 1991 championed the cause of victims of repression and campaigned for a moral reckoning with the crimes of Soviet history. Until his death in 2005, Yakovlev was the chairman of the International Foundation of Democracy, established by President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, which has so far published no less than eighty-eight volumes of documents from the Soviet archives in its outstanding series Rossiia: XX vek (Russia: The Twentieth Century).
This represents by far the largest and most important series of published documents in Russia, although there are several smaller projects that have also brought to the attention of a Russian academic readership damning new material from the archives on the repressions of the Stalin years.[7] Some of the volumes in the Yakovlev series have been published with the help of Western institutions, including the Hoover Institution and Yale University Press. Unfortunately, Brent does not discuss the impact of these Russian publications on the public debate about Stalinism in Russia, although it was evidently part of his mission (as it was of Yakovlev's) to help Russian society democratize itself through a better understanding of its recent history.
These were very much the goals of Russian democrats in the 1990s, when organizations like Memorial, a human rights and historical research center representing millions of victims of Soviet repression, were at the height of their authority and often discussed in the public media. It was widely assumed that, if Russia was to become a democracy, if it was to renounce the authoritarian habits of its Soviet past, there had to be a genuine cultural and moral reform of the nation that could only start with an unflinching recognition of the crimes committed in its name during the Stalinist era.
In the 1990s this was understood as an act of national repentance, an exorcism of the past, in which it was tacitly recognized that the whole of society had been collectively responsible for the murderous policies of its leaders. As the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter wrote, it was no good blaming everything on Stalin, when the real power and lasting legacy of his reign of terror was "in the Stalinism that entered into all of us."[8]
Many Russians felt uncomfortable about being confronted with these inconvenient truths about their past. They preferred not to think about the past at all, to live their normal lives and think about the future rather than to dwell on what they or their parents might have done to survive the Stalin years: the moral compromises they had made; the people they had lost, forgotten, or renounced; the questions they had never asked. This, after all, was how people had been forced to live in the Soviet Union, and these habits of conformity continued to affect the way they lived after 1991.
Others were resentful about being told they should be ashamed of their country's history. They had been brought up on the Soviet myths: the liberating power of the October Revolution, the great advances of the Five-Year Plans, the victory against Hitler in 1945, Soviet achievements in culture, science, and technology. Why should they feel guilty about what had happened under Stalin? He had made mistakes, but he had won the war and made the Soviet Union a great power. Why should they tolerate the "blackening" of their history by foreigners? These were the sentiments of Russian "patriots," and they are the core of the nationalism that underpins the regime of Vladimir Putin.
From the start, Putin understood the importance of historical rhetoric for his nationalist politics, particularly if it played to popular nostalgia for the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union was felt as a humiliation by most Russians. In a matter of a few months they lost everything—an empire, an ideology, an economic system that had given them security, superpower status, national pride, and an identity forged from Soviet history. Soon after the Soviet collapse, the Russians had fallen into poverty and hunger and become dependent on relief from the West, which lectured them about democracy and human rights.
Everything that happened in the 1990s—the hyperinflation, the loss of people's savings and security, the rampant corruption and criminality, the robber-oligarchs and the drunken president—was a source of national shame. This was the soil in which nostalgia for the Soviet Union grew. Polls in the year that Putin came to power showed that three quarters of the Russian population regretted the breakup of the USSR and wanted Russia to reincorporate "Russian" territories that had been lost, such as the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Putin quickly built up his own historical mythology, combining the Soviet myths (stripped of their Communist packaging) with statist elements from the Russian Empire before 1917. His regime was connected to and sanctioned by a long "Russian tradition" of strong state power—going back to the founder of the empire and of Putin's native city, Peter the Great.
Through this mythology Putin fostered the idea that Russia's traditions of authoritarian rule are morally equal to democratic Western traditions, and that Russia will follow its own path of "sovereign democracy," without lectures from the West. Indeed his supporters often say that Russians value a strong state, economic growth, and security more than the liberal concepts of human rights or democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.

3.
The rehabilitation of Stalin is the most disturbing element of Putin's historical rhetoric—and the most powerful, for it taps into a deep Russian yearning for a "strong leader." According to a survey in 2005, 42 percent of the Russian people, and 60 percent of those over sixty years of age, wanted the return of a "leader like Stalin."[9]
Putin's regime has not denied Stalin's crimes (he has made several speeches acknowledging the victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938) but it has argued for the need to balance them against Stalin's achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past." It is part of the regime's broader struggle to impose its "patriotic" narrative of Soviet history on the nation's historical consciousness and to marginalize the collective memory of the Stalinist repressions, perhaps so that people would not draw from it to question the return of authoritarian rule.
At a national conference of high school teachers in Moscow in June 2007, Putin complained about the "mess and confusion" that he perceived in the teaching of Soviet history and called for "common standards" to be introduced in Russian schools.[10] The following discussion then took place:
A conference participant: In 1990–1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of human values.... It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done....
Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.
Participant: In the past two decades, our youth have been subjected to a torrent of the most diverse information about our historical past. This information [contains] different conceptual approaches, interpretations, or value judgments, and even chronologies. In such circumstances, the teacher is likely to...
Putin (interrupting): Oh, they will write, all right. You see, many textbooks are written by those who are paid in foreign grants. And naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them. Do you understand? And unfortunately [such textbooks] find their way to schools and colleges.
In his concluding speech to the history teachers, Putin said:
As to some problematic pages in our history—yes, we've had them. But what state hasn't? And we've had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt....[11]
Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, empowering the Ministry of Education to decide which textbooks should be published and which should be used in Russian schools.
The history textbook favored by the government was heavily promoted by government officials attending the conference. Indeed it later turned out that The Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006: A Teacher's Handbook[12] had been directly commissioned by the presidential administration itself, which had issued the following guidelines to the textbook's authors about how they should evaluate the leaders of the period:
Stalin—good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); Khrushchev—bad (weakened vertical power); Brezhnev—good (for the same reasons as Stalin); Gorbachev and Yeltsin—bad (destroyed the country but under Yeltsin there was private property); Putin—the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property).[13]
The main author of the textbook is Alexander Filippov, the deputy director of a foreign policy think-tank closely connected to the Putin administration. But the chapter on "Sovereign Democracy" was written by Pavel Danilin, the thirty-one-year-old Kremlin propagandist and editor in chief of www.kremlin.org, a man without a history degree or experience of teaching anything. Danilin said in an interview:
Our goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one's country. It is precisely in this way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud.[14]
In his blog (where he goes by the name of Leteha) Danilin warned any history teachers who might be unhappy about the imposition of this positive message:
You may ooze bile but you will teach the children by those books that you will be given and in the way that is needed by Russia.... It is impossible to let some Russophobe shit-stinker (govniuk), or just any amoral type, teach Russian history. It is necessary to clear the filth, and if it does not work, then clear it by force.[15]
The first use of force in this ideological battle came on December 4, 2008, when a group of masked men from the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office forced their way with police truncheons into the St. Petersburg offices of Memorial, which for twenty years has pioneered the research of Stalinist repressions in the Soviet Union. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St. Petersburg: databases containing biographical information on more than 50,000 victims of repression; details about burial sites in the Petersburg area; family archives, memoirs, letters, sound recordings, transcripts of interviews, photographs, and other documents about the history of the Gulag and the Soviet Terror from 1917 to the 1960s (including the materials I collected with Memorial in St. Petersburg for my book The Whisperers[16]). Among the confiscated items was the entire collection of materials in the Virtual Gulag Museum (gulagmuseum.org), a much-needed initiative to rescue precious artifacts, photographs, and documents from more than a hundred small exhibits under threat across Russia (a country where there is just one substantial museum of the Gulag, Perm-36, in the Urals).[17]
There is no mistaking the intended message of the raid. It took place on the eve of a large international conference in Moscow on "The History of Stalinism: Results and Problems of Study"—the first conference on such a scale—organized by the commissioner of human rights for the Russian Federation, the Yeltsin Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Institute for Scientific Information for the Social Sciences, the publisher Rosspen (which has published many of the document collections from the Stalin archives), and the Memorial Society.
Meanwhile, there were two articles attacking Memorial in the December special issue of Russkii zhurnal (Russian Journal), "On the Politics of Memory," published to coincide with the opening of the Moscow conference, where it was distributed among the delegates. The articles signaled the beginning of an ideological struggle against Memorial and other "anti-patriotic elements" that had tried to "weaken Russia" by burdening it with a sense of guilt over its own history. "Russia has ceased to be the sovereign of its own historical memory, which is now in danger of being taken over by foreign inventions," wrote Gleb Pavlovskii, the journal's editor and an adviser to Putin,[18] in one of the attacks on Memorial, an article entitled "Bad with Memory—Bad with Politics."[19]Russkii zhurnal is closely aligned to the Kremlin's thinking on foreign policy and ideology. Danilin is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His book Vragi Putina (The Enemies of Putin ) was published by Pavlovskii.[20]
Whatever the intentions of this disturbing campaign, it is unrealistic for the current regime in Russia to attempt to alter the historical record of Stalin's crimes. The opening of the archives, the publication of their documents by international initiatives like the Annals of Communism, and the work of organizations like Memorial have made that impossible, and although the archives have begun to close again in recent years, they cannot return to the way they worked in Soviet days. However, as long as the regime continues to supress the collective memory of repression and seeks to replace it with its "patriotic" myth of the Soviet past, there is little hope of Russia confronting its Stalinist inheritance, or becoming a genuine democracy, at peace with its neighbors and the world. For the moment, all the West can do is show support for Russian institutions trying to preserve the memory of repression in the Soviet Union. This year, for the third time in three years, the Memorial Society has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it is time for it to win.
—April 1, 2009

Notes
[1]The best-known case involved Allen Weinstein, who at that time was president of the Center for Democracy, with close ties to the Republicans. For his book The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, coauthored with Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 1999; reviewed in these pages May 11, 2000), his publisher was reported to have paid a group of retired KGB officials a substantial sum (Weinstein talked of $100,000) for "exclusive" access to the relevant KGB documents (see Jon Wiener, "The Archives and Allen Weinstein," The Nation, May 17, 2004). This was a clear violation of the code of ethics of the International Council on Archives, which calls for "the widest possible" access to documents. Despite protests by many scholarly organizations, including the Society of American Archivists and the Organization of American Historians, Weinstein was appointed the ninth archivist of the United States in 2005. He resigned from the post on health grounds in December 2008.
[2]Several times in my recent researches in the Military History Archive I was told by staff that documents containing the Tsar's signature had been lost.
[3]See, for example, Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936, edited by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, and with a foreword by Robert C. Tucker (Yale University Press, 1995), reviewed in these pages, March 6, 1997; The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, edited by Ivo Banac, translated from the German by Jane T. Hedges, from the Russian by Timothy D. Sergay, and from the Bulgarian by Irina Faion (Yale University Press, 2003); The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, edited and annotated by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov, with an introduction by Joshua Rubenstein and translations by Ella Shmulevich, Efrem Yankelevich, and Alla Zeide (Yale University Press, 2005), reviewed in reviewed in these pages, October 20, 2005.
[4]See J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, with translations by Benjamin Sher (Yale University Press, 1999); William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939, with translations by Vadim A. Staklo (Yale University Press, 2001); Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, with translations by Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press, 2007).
[5]See The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, edited by Richard Pipes with the assistance of David Brandenberger, and with translations by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (Yale University Press, 1996); reviewed in these pages, March 6, 1997.
[6]See Stalinism as a Way of Life, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei K. Sokolov, with documents compiled by Ludmila Kosheleva, and with translations by Thomas Hoisington and Steven Shabad (Yale University Press, 2000); reviewed in these pages, November 29, 2001.
[7]For example, the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii ( Documents of Soviet History), established by the late Franco Venturi (Moscow: Rosspen, yr TK), or the five-volume series of documents on collectivization, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: Dookumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–1939, edited by the late Viktor P. Danilov, Roberta Manning and Lynne Viola (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999–2006), which will be published in three volumes in the Annals of Communism.
[8]Mikhail Gefter, "V predchuvstvii proshlogo," Vek XX n mir, No. 9 (1990), p. 29.
[9]Moscow News, March 4, 2005.
[10]What Putin had in mind had been signaled at a meeting with historians in November 2003 when Putin said that textbooks should "cultivate a sense of pride in Russia's history, a sense of pride in the country, especially in young people." Shortly before his speech on that occasion, the Ministry of Education had withdrawn approval from Igor Dolutsky's Otechestvennaia istoriia XX veka dlia 10-11-x klassov (National History of the Twentieth Century for the 10th and 11th Grades), which had sold more than half a million copies in multiple editions since 1994 and served as a textbook in high schools throughout Russia. Dolutsky's textbook was a model of Western pedagogical standards: it used archival documents and presented different views at the end of each chapter. But it drew comparisons between the Stalinist and Nazi systems of repression and invited students to discuss whether Russia had become a democracy after 1991. Such provocative questions had prompted the ministry's ban, with one official quoted as saying that the textbook "encourages contempt for our past and for the Russian people."
[11]Cited from the translation in the excellent article by Leon Aron, "The Problematic Pages," The New Republic, September 24, 2008.
[12]Alexander Filippov, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 1945–2006: Kniga dlia uchitelia (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2007).
[13] Kommersant—Vlast', No. 27 (371), July 16, 2007.
[14]Aron, "The Problematic Pages."
[15]See leteha.livejournal.com; cited from the translation by Leon Aron.
[16]On March 2, 2009, the Moscow publishing house Atticus Group (Inostranka) canceled a contract to publish The Whisperers in Russia.
[17]See my letter on the raid in these pages, January 15, 2009. On January 20, 2009, an appeal against the raid (which was carried out with a number of illegal irregularities) was upheld by the Dzerzhinsky Regional Court, which ordered the return of all the confiscated materials to Memorial; on February 24, this decision was overturned by the City Court of St. Petersburg after an appeal by the Procuracy of St. Petersburg. At the time of writing, the confiscated archive remains in the hands of the police.
[18]In 2005, he was accused by the Ukrainian authorities of organizing the poisoning of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, an accusation Pavlovskii has denied.
[19]Gleb Pavlovskii, "Plokho s pamiat'iu—plokho s politikoi," Russkii zhurnal, December 2008.
[20]Pavel Danilin, Vragi Putina (Moscow: Evropa, 2007).

2009年4月21日星期二

路透社實拍德國妓女

路透柏林4月21日電(記者 Erik Kirschbaum) 世界金融危機在德國沒過多久就衝擊到“世界最古老的行業”。
德國是全球僅有的幾個性服務業合法國家之一,而且該國的這一行業透明度極高。
面對金融危機,德國性服務業也推出自己的“刺激方案”:現代化的行銷手段、打折、以及重振需求的小伎倆等。
部分妓院採取了降價等促銷手段,還有一些採取統一價格的全包服務,另外採用的行銷策略還包括提供免費班車、為年老顧客和計程車司機打折、“全天通行卡”等。
在漢諾威經營"Yes, Sir"妓院的Karin Ahrens表示:“對我們來說,時局也很嚴峻”。
她告訴路透記者,該機構收入已經下降了30%,而其他妓院的營業額有的銳減一半。
“我們明顯地感受到了危機。客戶對錢袋捂的很嚴,他們很擔心,你無法再收取額外費用,降價的壓力很大。特殊的促銷手段現在非常重要。” 德國約有40萬名職業的性工作者。
官方數字並未區分男女,因此男妓的數目尚不知曉,但他們只占總人數的很小一部分,並且在法律上,男妓和妓女的地位是平等的。
德國2002年通過的新法令允許性工作者做廣告,並簽署正式的勞動合同。
這樣,性工作者也有了醫療保險。據Verdi服務聯合會預計,德國色情服務行業每年收入約140億歐元。
色情行業的賦稅是一些城市財政收入的重要組成部分。 色情行業在荷蘭、奧地利、瑞士、匈牙利、希臘、土耳其和澳大利亞一部分地方以及美國內華達州都是合法的。
而在盧森堡、拉脫維亞、比利時和芬蘭,妓女是合法的,但妓院和男妓則是非法的。

“創造性的解決方案”
柏林的"Pussy Club"憑藉其“固定費用”政策而成為媒體關注的焦點。
顧客只需交納70歐元“入場費”,就可以在早上10點到淩晨4點之間不受限制地享用食品、飲料和性服務。
這家俱樂部的老闆Stefan表示:“這樣的情況下你必須採取一些創造性的手法。” Ecki Krumeich是柏林高檔色情場所Artemis Club的老闆,他表示自己拒絕降價,但是在周日和週一為老年人和計程車司機提供半價優惠。
“我們的哲學是:我們提供了一項重要的服務,即使在經濟衰退的時候,人們離不開它。其他一些低檔的場所可能會降價,但我們決定不會這麽做。相反,我們1月份還漲了10歐元。”
曾任德國性工作者協會領導人的Stephanie Klee表示,某些豪華妓院也感受到時局的衝擊,因為其富人客戶群中的很多人也遭遇到經濟難題。
“各行各業都採取了不同的行銷推廣手段,電器賣場和眼鏡店都推出打折和優惠促銷活動,我們為什麽不能呢?”
她和同事們一年前平均每天可能有五六個客戶,但現在每天只有一個,甚至一個都沒有。
她擔心經濟危機會引起一些城市性服務行業的“價格跳水”,許多顧客已經開始討價還價。





















圖片:REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

一頁輕舟

竹葉編的小船,總是容易側翻。孩提時代沒有解決這個技術問題。按照許倬雲先生的說法,中國正如一頁輕舟,沉浮於歷史的三峽。船之於中國,含義深刻。
列強艦隊聚會青島,參加中國海軍盛大派對。我很想知道,他們進入中國領海的路線,是不是與晚清戰時痕跡重合。清國中興,以為海軍能抵禦外辱。今日宣揚海權和海軍,總有一種中興之感。馬漢經典《海權對歷史的影響》提出,海軍的存在主要是為了保護“商業”,即保護資本主義商品輸出。他還主張,發展殖民地和海上戰略據點。也就是說,海軍要將商品押送到銷售地。
“我們曾經主權淪喪、有海無防,而今天,世界各國海軍雲集青島,為中國海軍生日慶典而來,這不能不說是一個重大的歷史轉變。”海軍副司令員丁一平對新華社軍事記者如是說。
大典之前,關於中國造航母的消息鋪天蓋地。江南造船廠公開期盼造航母。“江南造船廠”,又是一個刺激中國國民神經的漢字組合。容易讓人聯想到馬尾之戰,還有甲午戰爭,以及穿越台海的美軍艦隊。
但是,自衛,不是壮大海軍的理由,至少不夠充分。確保商路,這條理由得民心,也是西方容易理解的話語體系。打擊海盜之旅,凸顯的,就是這個含義。
悲情只能淹沒中國海軍,而不是讓其更加剛強。因為,悲情很容易讓人聯想到復仇,以及晚清戰火的起源。這也是海軍紀念典禮傳遞的錯誤以及可怕的信號。
所以,海軍的解決方案,應該是找到重心:我們為全球市場以及資本主義服務,而不是擴充力量抵制列國進入市場。

附林行止專欄:太多富國強兵 世界難有寧日

2009年4月20日星期一

politifact.com是誰

普利策獎首個網路得主的歷史與結構

這是傳媒史上劃時代事件。
2009年普利策獎20日揭曉,St. Petersburg Times旗下網站politifact.com因2008年美國大選報導獲獎。今年首次允許互聯網新聞網站參與角逐。
該網站於2007年8月啟動。大選期間,5名編輯記者以及來自St. Petersburg Times兄弟刊物Congressional Quarterly的研究人員和作家組成報導團隊。
politifact.com日漸成熟,重點報導國會和白宮新聞,新近增加Obameter欄目,追蹤奧巴馬執政。
St. Petersburg Times主編說該獎項“證明網路不是報紙的死刑判決。”
評審團稱St. Petersburg Times“調查記者與互聯網檢驗750個政治立場(真偽)”。(“probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”)

附件一、2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners and Nominated Finalists
Announced at 3:00 p.m., Monday, April 20, 2009 at Columbia University
Click here for finalists, jurors, bios and photos of winners,
winning photos and cartoons, and links to winning stories
JOURNALISM:
Public Service - Las Vegas Sun
Breaking News Reporting - The New York Times Staff
Investigative Reporting - David Barstow of The New York Times
Explanatory Reporting - Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times

Local Reporting –
Detroit Free Press Staff and Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ
National Reporting - St. Petersburg Times Staff
International Reporting - The New York Times Staff
Feature Writing - Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times
Commentary - Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post
Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times
Editorial Writing - Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY
Editorial Cartooning - Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune
Breaking News Photography - Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald
Feature Photography - Damon Winter of The New York Times

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC:
Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
Drama - Ruined by Lynn Nottage
History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)
Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)
Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)
Music - Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA (Boosey & Hawkes)


附件二、Facts about PolitiFact

Launched in August 2007 to fact-check the presidential campaign and then expanded in January 2009 to fact-check members of Congress and the White House. In January, we also launched the Obameter, a new feature tracking President Obama's campaign promises.
Truth-O-Meter -- Checks the accuracy of statements by candidates, elected officials, political parties, interest groups, pundits, talk show hosts. PolitiFact writers research the statements and rate them on the Truth-O-Meter.
Six ratings on Truth-O-Meter - True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire
Every official, group and pundit rated by PolitiFact is building a record of statistics on their own page that shows how many True, False, etc. ratings they have earned. It also shows the ratings on any statements made against them. (For example, here are pages for: Barack Obama, John McCain, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi).
Flip-O-Meter -- Rates when candidates or elected officials have flip-flopped on an issue (No Flip, Half Flip, Full Flop).
Obameter -- Tracks 514 promises made by Barack Obama during the campaign, compiled from position papers, campaign Web sites, debate transcripts, speeches and interviews.
Promises are rated as No Action, In the Works, Stalled, Promise Kept, Compromise, and Promise Broken.
Each time a promise is updated, we publish an article explaining the latest development and the reason for our rating
A Top 25 list shows the progress on Obama's most significant promises
Truth-O-Meter items
865 published since August 2007 (89 of those since the January re-launch)
Breakdown of ratings
26% True
17% Mostly True
18% Half True
13% Barely True
19% False
6% Pants on Fire
Truth-O-Meter ratings are also tracked by subject. The subjects with the most ratings: Taxes (89), Economy (70), Iraq (63).
We just published a special page to mark Obama's First 100 Days, with new charts tracking the Top 25 promises and Truth-O-Meter ratings on the Obama White House.
PolitiFact items are written by reporters for the St. Petersburg Times, with several working full-time for PolitiFact. During the campaign, writers from Congressional Quarterly also contributed.
All Truth-O-Meter, Flip-O-Meter and Obameter items are published on the PolitiFact Web site. Many also appear in the newsprint edition of the St. Petersburg Times. We also send a twice-weekly e-mail to 7,000 subscribers, we have custom RSS feeds and a Twitter feed.
State and local PolitiFact items -- St. Petersburg Times reporters have done more than two-dozen Truth-O-Meter ratings on state and local officials in Florida.
Other Awards - A National Press Foundation award for online journalism, a Knight Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism, a Digital Edge Award for Best Overall News Site from the Newspaper Association of America and first place for Online Political Reporting in the Green Eyeshade Awards.

Expansion plans -- This summer, we plan to expand our coverage of pundits and talk show hosts and our state and local fact-checking.

2009年4月19日星期日

別管成龍,心存自由就好

香港《信報》今天刊登余錦賢文章《成龍又出洋相》。新加坡《聯合早報》報導“成龍‘中國人需要被管’論調引起港臺輿論反彈”。
《信報》社論與此無關,《管治分權清晰 切勿混淆視聽》,由頭是“最近一篇由中聯辦研究部部長曹二寶撰寫的文章,再次引起了有關香港高度自治以及本地的管治問題”。
林行止專欄寫的是《中國崛起勢難改 美國衰落未有期》。
以《信報》為樣本,可以讀出成龍言辭的大背景:第一,香港自治權的爭辯。第二,中國崛起的全球視野。
成龍是以中國電影家協會副主席身份出席博鰲論壇,所言其實有電影這個小背景。他應該是說,電影還是需要管一管,不然會像香港和臺灣一樣混亂。然後,輿論放大到政治層面。何況此時是中國敏感時期,今年也是中國最敏感年份。
曾志偉期間在金像獎後臺閱讀有關成龍的報導後說:“現在好懷念陳自強年代,以前成龍所有事都靠他過濾。大家都知道成龍是很不懂講說話的人,完全是表達能力有問題。其實看完報導都明白他想講什麼,他是想以小時候來比較,現在的小朋友太自由,不像他在七小福時,有師父嚴厲管教,之後出來才這麼好。成龍是講小朋友,但他不可以放到香港人及臺灣人身上,所以是他表達方面有問題。”
成龍說過什麼,倒沒什麼要緊。要緊的是,成龍這句話,引發的兩岸三地,包括海外風暴。這說明,中國人還是不喜歡被管的。如果成龍說中國人應該被管,華人都諾諾稱是,那就完蛋了。
記得去年金馬獎頒獎,李安因《色·戒》哽咽。近日陸川在《南京!南京!》首映禮上哭泣。兩岸電影人的悲情,被成龍這麼一攪,就成了兩岸的悲情。而輿論和民眾的悲情,還有憤怒。這種悲憤,是對不自由,是對管的悲憤。
大陸輿論悲憤,臺灣悲憤,香港也悲憤。這才對得住歷史。