「普世價值」的百萬業務員龍應台女士現在已貴為馬總統內閣的文化部長。

不知道在看了Nunns先生這篇對台灣外交「手法」和「策略」的分析後，龍女士是否該在院會中做個「普世價值」的專題演講，告誡外交部的同仁不要跟一些謀殺犯來往，更不要安排這些謀殺犯跟「不沾鍋」的馬聖人廝混，免得在一些其他高唱「普世價值」的人眼中，馬總統只不過為了搞幾次國際旅遊，不惜成為以砍頭為樂者的幫凶或玩伴。21世紀還有這種娛樂？夭壽阿。

希望龍女士的「良心」還沒有被狗吃掉。不然，有這樣對暴行視若無睹的文化部長，中華文化還需要「共匪」摧殘嗎？

Is Isolated Taiwan Propping Up Dictators?

Taiwan is trying to burnish its reputation as a democracy, why is it cozying up to some of the world's worst dictators? asks Cain Nunns.

Cain Nunns, 07/15/12

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- It was all smiles and “brotherly love” as Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh received full state honors and a 21-gun salute from Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou in Taipei late last month.

Jammeh, making his ninth trip to this diplomatically isolated island republic 100 miles off China’s southern coast, has called Taiwan “one of the best friends Gambia has ever had.”

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent out a press release calling the impoverished West African nation “an important ally” before writing that “the close partnership and brotherly bonds between the two countries remain strong.”

Jammeh, who has presided over a brutal dictatorship since engineering a coup in 1994, has previously called for all gays to be expelled from his country. If they stay, he says, he’ll have their heads “cut off.”

That was just one in a long list of “colorful” behavior from a man who claims to have invented an herbal cure for AIDS that requires sufferers to stop taking drugs prescribed to fight the virus. When the UN representative to Gambia complained that it was a reckless gesture for a country wracked with one of the world’s highest adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rates, he had her expelled.

According to a March 2009 Amnesty International report, up to 1,000 Gambians were abducted by government-sponsored "witch doctors" on charges of witchcraft. Once abducted, they were taken to detention centers and forced to drink poisonous concoctions. Apparently, the former Army lieutenant attributed his aunt’s death to people dabbling in the dark arts.

Jammeh also forbids anybody else from driving through the massive arch commemorating his coup in the crumbling capital of Banjul.

But that’s routine compared to human rights groups’ claims of documented disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the torture and imprisonment of his real or perceived enemies at the hands of his feared security apparatus and shadowy militias with laconic names like Ninjas, Drug Boys and Jugglers.

A Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report linked Jammeh to a 2005 massacre of 50 African nationals, including 44 Ghanaians. The group was

reportedly picked up by Gambian naval boats in international waters, transported to Gambia and hacked up by “security forces with machetes, axes and other weapons.”

But that doesn’t seem to bother Ma.

The China News Agency reported that Taiwan will give Gambia three more patrol boats to “help strengthen its naval defenses.” Apparently one of the four 50-ton

boats earlier donated by Taipei had “suffered serious damage.”

So why would a country that often trumpets its own remarkable democratic achievements be so quick to embrace a brutal regime and pariah of the international community?

The answer is in the numbers – 23 of them to be exact. That’s how many diplomatic allies the Republic of China - Taiwan’s official moniker since Chiang Kai-sheik’s battered troops started arriving on the island in 1945 – has left.

“We need a friend, OK? Everybody does. All presidents, except ours, are traveling worldwide. It’s important to receive friends to get to know us better. We only have 23 allies. But we would like to have more,” says Joanne Chang, a research fellow at the Institute of American and European Studies and former diplomat. “We don’t have the option of friends who can speak out for us. By coming to Taiwan to see our freedom and democracy, and the freedom of the press, we hope it will impress other countries to improve their own political systems.”

That may well be true, but critics claim Taiwanese foreign policy has long been bipolar. Taipei, they say, has turned a blind eye to its despotic allies for decades, a practice that began long before it started to get hammered in its diplomatic race with Beijing following the island’s expulsion from the UN in 1971.

A cursory look at the leaders that Taiwan has armed, funded and provided military training to is a Who’s Who of 20^th century dictators.

Taipei was a strong supporter of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party in Apartheid-era South Africa. In Central America, Taiwan was a chief backer of François Duvalier, or "Papa Doc" who was known for personally watching and participating in torture sessions, and on one occasion communing with the head of a rebel leader he had executed.

Ditto for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay, Dominican Republic and Panama, all home to brutal dictatorships, death squads and bloody civil wars during the late days of the Cold War. It bears mention that the United States, too, supported many of these same regimes.

Perhaps most disturbing was that many of the perpetrators of these abuses had passed through the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in suburban Taipei. The college, reportedly established with U.S. help in the early 1950s, is a Made-in-Taiwan version of the School of the Americas. El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson, or “Blowtorch Bob," was one of the college’s most notable graduates. The Academy is today part of the National Defense University.

More recently, in April of this year, Ma embarked on a three-country African tour, which included a stop in Swaziland to visit Africa’s last absolute monarch King Mswali III, who is gearing up to make his 13th visit to Taiwan.

Mswali, who according to the World CIA Fact Book, presides over the world’s highest adult HIV/AIDS rate at 25.9 percent, thinks branding is a viable cure for the disease.

Despite overseeing one of the world’s poorest countries, Forbes estimated him to be the world’s 15th wealthiest monarch in 2011, with a personal fortune of $100 million. Added to that is some $30 million per year set aside for the royal family

and a multibillion dollar state investment fund that he controls.

Ma and the King had a sit-up competition, and Mswali presented the two-term president with a severed leopard’s head.

In Burkina Faso, Ma was awarded the country’s highest honor, The Grand Cross of the National Order, by President Blaise Campaore.

Campaore seized power in 1987 when his former friend and boss Thomas Sankara was gunned down in his own office. Ma lauded the Muammar Qaddafi's World Revolutionary Center graduate for the country’s sustainable development achievements. Unemployment runs at about 77 percent in Burkina Faso.

While Taiwan has been criticized for checkbook diplomacy, critics say that the island should also be more circumspect when choosing international partners to stump for it in the international arena and downplay the pomp and ceremony of official ties.

It is not uncommon for nations to have diplomatic relations with despotic regimes -- China was cited during the 2008 Olympics not just for its human rights violations in Tibet but also for its business dealings in Darfur, where some alleged genocide was under way. Yet Taiwan's brazen use of them in the international arena suggests a chaotic lack of diplomatic vision at best. In 2007, for instance, Taipei prodded Gambia, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, Sao Tome and Principe and Malawi (which has since jumped ship to Beijing) to issue a joint communique for the island's inclusion in the United Nations based on its democratic credentials.

“If you’re talking about whether they deserve a (21) gun salute, then of course they don’t. However, Taiwan needs to maintain a certain number of diplomatic allies, in order to not be totally isolated from the international arena,” says I-Chung Lai, a former director of the Department of International Affairs with the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. “No western democracy is willing to extend even a little recognition about Taiwan’s democratic status, other than those dictatorships. So what option does Taiwan have?"

But if Taiwan's strategy is to burnish its democratic credentials, one has to wonder if the solitary republic would be better off alone. According to the Guardian, Jammeh once told his constituents in a live television address, "I will kill anyone who wants to destabilize this country. If you think that you can collaborate with so-called human rights defenders, and get away with it, you must be living in a dream world. I will kill you, and nothing will come out of it."

Cain Nunns is a freelance journalist who writes for The Guardian, Monocle and Global Post, among other publications.

http://thediplomat.com/2012/07/15/is-isolated-taiwan-propping-up-dictators/

 Al Yafai先生的文章從另一個角度分析美國(以及「泛西方」國家)外交政策的偽善性。從他的姓氏看來，他是阿拉伯人。自然他的立場以及感受和一般美國「學者」或「前官員」不同。他的論述相當淺顯中肯。

我希望大家能從Fisk和 Al Yafai兩位先生的文章，深入的了解國際事務，尤其是美國的外交政策。當然更希望網友們不要重複以下的幼齒行為：

「只有一些傻瓜或豬仔如李鐵或龍應台之流，還在把明明是顆『羊頭』的『普世價值』當做『神主牌』，高高掛在那裏膜拜。」

West claims moral purpose to justify its interventions

Faisal Al Yafai, 07/03/12

In May, President Barack Obama signed a little-reported executive order authorising sanctions against anyone who interfered in Yemen's transition.

The move was widely thought to have been aimed at Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president who remains in Yemen, trying to exert influence and maintain his family's privileges.

Mr Obama's Yemen order was simultaneous with another example of western involvement in Middle Eastern countries, namely the open call by the US and UK and other western governments for the removal of Syria's Bashar Al Assad.

The Yemen order, however, was not diplomacy by brickbat, but a rather subtle use of power.

Intervention is not always bad, but it is best when it is most open. Why then is the West, especially the US, so silent over Egypt?

The world community has now been involved openly in three of the five Arab Spring uprisings. Western and Arab fighter jets patrolled the skies over Libya; the GCC, with US backing, led negotiations on a political transition in Yemen; and now Arab countries, with the West and Turkey, aspire to bring an end to the conflict in Syria.

Yet over Egypt, the US has been curiously quiet. One could justify this by saying that Egypt is a sovereign country that ought to make its own decisions. But the US has no compunction over calling for changes in other sovereign nations. In recent weeks, it has made clear what it believes Greece, China and even Germany ought to do. And it has no problem dictating what type of government others should have: witness its support for the punishment of Palestinians after Gaza voted for Hamas, of which the US does not approve.

This is doubly mystifying because the US has significant leverage over the generals in Egypt: a public statement from their largest supplier of military aid - to the effect of the US expects a genuine transfer of power to a civilian government - would send a clear message to the junta that the days of military rule are coming to an end. It would also make clear to ordinary Egyptians, and the outside world, that the US is genuinely on the side of democracy. But don't expect it.

The reasons why go to the heart of our confusion over intervention and particularly the difficulty in formulating a coherent policy of outside intervention. American reasons for speaking, or not speaking, are inherently political - wanting to defend their interests and maintain influence - but need to be framed in moral language. It's the moral part that is the problem.

The real question about intervention is not whether it ought to occur, but about its degree and intention. Outside powers are always going to intervene in some way, through military force, or diplomacy, or alliances, diplomatic recognition, trade policy …

The West, with some of the largest militaries and, crucially, a historic propensity to use force for political gain, is often blamed for intervening. Yet the problem is not intervention per se, but its selective usage. Western interventions are usually amoral, but justified in moral terms.

Amoral intervention is common around the world. But the West is peculiar in trying to justify nakedly political actions on moral grounds.

One can read that as a way of creating "soft power" legitimacy for hard power, an attempt to argue for the use of might only when it is right. That is a canny position to take in a world of competing military powers, because it allows the West to appropriate morality as a cover for politics - a process that can be traced to the Cold War, when it was important to prove one's policies were right.

The problem with moral justifications overlaid onto political decisions is that it's very obvious when the morality is spurious.

This was the case with the second Iraq war. Those who wanted to invade Iraq without sufficient cause kept asking opponents: "So do you want Saddam Hussein's regime to continue?" The answer, of course, was no. But the world had lots of political problems requiring urgent solutions: Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, endless wars in central Africa, the brutal Israeli occupation, the treatment of minorities in China, and on and on. Was the US planning to use its military to end all of those? If not, why choose merely one? The insincere underpinning of the policy was quickly revealed.

That's what makes the Egyptian omission so glaring. America and other countries decide on intervention largely for political, rather than moral, reasons. But appeals to morality are used to support either conclusion.

Countries that want to intervene argue that the situation on the ground is so bad they must act, to protect civilians, promote democracy, uphold the rule of law, or for a myriad of other reasons that they are happy to abandon in the case of other, friendlier, countries.

When, on the other hand, intervention is not politically important, the justification is that "we could not possibly intervene in another country's sovereign affairs".

The way out of this hypocrisy is more openness in policy. By doing away with talk of morality and opening up the decision-making to real scrutiny, citizens could evaluate each potential intervention. This would also halt the hypocritical policies that have so damaged the West's credibility. It wouldn't be popular: who wants to hear "We have to support Hosni Mubarak because we need him to keep ordinary people quiet and torture the occasional bad guy for us"?

But in the long-run it would be better. War doesn't have to be just to be justified, and intervention is often not just about war.

falyafai@thenational.ae

Follow on Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai

http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/west-claims-moral-purpose-to-justify-its-interventions#page1

Robert Fisk先生的文章，尤其是我用顏色字體標示的幾段，把西方國家領導人和外交官員的偽善嘴臉拆穿得淋漓盡致。

只有一些傻瓜或豬仔如李鐵或龍應台之流，還在把明明是顆「羊頭」的「普世價值」當做「神主牌」，高高掛在那裏膜拜。不但膜拜，還捧在手上當做「罵漢人」的雞毛或執照。

Western agreement 'could leave Syria in Assad's hands for two more years'

Special Report: Need for oil routes buys time, claims key Damascus figure

Robert Fisk, 06/29/12

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria may last far longer than his opponents believe – and with the tacit acceptance of Western leaders anxious to secure new oil routes to Europe via Syria before the fall of the regime. According to a source intimately involved in the possible transition from Baath party power, the Americans, Russians and Europeans are also putting together an agreement that would permit Assad to remain leader of Syria for at least another two years in return for political concessions to Iran and Saudi Arabia in both Lebanon and Iraq.

For its part, Russia would be assured of its continued military base at Tartous in Syria and a relationship with whatever government in Damascus eventually emerges with the support of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russia’s recent concession – that Assad may not be essential in any future Syrian power structure – is part of a new understanding in the West which may accept Assad’s presidency in return for an agreement that prevents a further decline into civil war.

Information from Syria suggests that Assad’s army is now “taking a beating” from armed rebels, who include Islamist as well as nationalist forces; at least 6,000 soldiers are now believed to have been murdered or killed in action since the rebellion against Assad began 17 months ago. There are even unconfirmed reports that during any one week up to a thousand Syrian fighters are under training by mercenaries in Jordan at a base used by Western authorities for personnel seeking ‘anti-terrorist’ security exercises.

The US-Russian negotiations – easy to deny, and somewhat cynically hidden behind the current mutual accusations of Hillary Clinton and her Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov – would mean that the superpowers would acknowledge Iran’s influence over Iraq and its relationship with its Hezballah allies in Lebanon, while Saudi Arabia – and Qatar - would be encouraged to guarantee Sunni Muslim rights in Lebanon and in Iraq. Baghdad’s emergence as a centre of Shia power has caused much anguish in Saudi Arabia whose support for the Sunni minority in Iraq has hitherto led only to political division.

But the real object of talks between the world powers revolves around the West’s determination to secure oil and particularly gas from the Gulf states without relying upon supplies from Moscow. “Russia can turn off the spigot to Europe whenever it wants – and this gives it tremendous political power,” the source says. “We are talking about two fundamental oil routes to the West – one from Qatar and Saudi Arabia via Jordan and Syria and the Mediterranean to Europe, another from Iran via Shia southern Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean and on to Europe. This is what matters. This is why they will be prepared to let Assad last for another two years, if necessary. They would be perfectly content with that. And Russia will have a place in the new Syria.”

Diplomats who are still discussing these plans should, of course, be treated with some scepticism. It is one thing to hear political leaders excoriating the Syrian regime for its abuse of human rights and massacres – quite another to realise that Western diplomats are quite prepared to put this to one side for the proverbial ‘bigger picture’ which, as usual in the Middle East, means oil and gas supplies. They are prepared to tolerate Assad’s presence until the end of the crisis, rather than insisting his departure is the start of the end. The Americans apparently say the same. Now Russia believes that stability is more important than Assad himself.

It is clear that Bashar al-Assad should have gone ahead with extensive reforms when his father Hafez died in 2000. At that stage, according to Syrian officials, Syria’s economy was in a far better state than Greece is today. And the saner voices influencing Assad’s leadership were slowly deprived of their power. One official close to the president called him during the height of last year’s fighting to say that “Homs is burning”. Assad’s reaction was to refuse all personal conversation with the official in future, insisting on only SMS messages. “Assad no longer has personal power over all that happens in Syria,” the informant says. “It’s not because he doesn’t want to – there’s just too much going on all over the country for one man to keep in touch with it all.”

What Assad is still hoping for, according to Arab military veterans, is a solution a-l’Algerie. After the cancellation of democratic elections in Algeria, its army and generals – ‘le pouvoir’ to Algerians – fought a merciless war against rebels and Islamist guerrillas across the country throughout the 1990s, using torture and massacre to retain government power but leaving an estimated 200,000 dead among their own people.

Amid this crisis, the Algerian military actually sent a delegation to Damascus to learn from Hafez el-Assad’s Syrian army how it destroyed the Islamist rebellion in Hama – at a cost of up to 20,000 dead – in 1982. The Algerian civil war – remarkably similar to that now afflicting Assad’s regime – displayed many of the characteristics of the current tragedy in Syria: babies with their throats cut, families slaughtered by mysterious semi-military ‘armed groups’, whole towns shelled by government forces.

And, much more interesting to Assad’s men, the West continued to support the Algerian regime with weapons and political encouragement throughout the 1990s while huffing and puffing about human rights. Algeria’s oil and gas reserves proved more important than civilian deaths – just as the Damascus regime now hopes to rely upon the West’s desire for via-Syria oil and gas to tolerate further killings. Syrians say that Jamil Hassan, the head of Air Force intelligence in Syria is now the ‘killer’ leader for the regime – not so much Bashar’s brother Maher whose 4th Division is perhaps being given too much credit for suppressing the revolt. It has certainly failed to crush it.

The West, meanwhile has to deal with Syria’s contact man, Mohamed Nassif, perhaps Assad’s closest political adviser. The question remains, however, as to whether Bashar al-Assad – however much he fails to control military events on the ground – really grasps the epic political importance of what is going on in his country. Prior to the rebellion, European and Turkish leaders were astonished to hear from him that Sunni forces in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli were trying “to create a Salafist state” that would threaten Syria. How this extraordinary assertion – based, presumably on the tittle-tattle of an intelligence agent – could have formulated itself in Assad’s mind, remained a mystery.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-western-agreement-could-leave-syria-in-assads-hands-for-two-more-years-7897087.html

我常常說：

一個人需要面對現實和接受現實才能解決現實帶來的難題和困境。

以上轉貼E. O. Wilson和J. Horgan兩位關於人「好戰」(「殺戮」？)傾向的討論，原載於六月份Discover雜誌。不論「好戰傾向」是否源自演化的選擇壓力，Wilson教授從歷史記錄以及人類(實物)考古學兩個角度，論述了「戰爭」在過去近一萬年的人類活動中佔了顯著的地位，其頻繁度和殺戮幅度無可否認。他關於戰爭發生基本原因的推論，支持我的「資源不敷分配論」和「爭奪資源分配權論」。

我認為「文化」是人類求生存的反應和成果。在過去人類活動中，戰爭高度頻繁和殺戮大量發生，人們為了「適應」這個現實環境來生存，從而自然 (必然？)產生了「叢林法則」這個「概念」和行為模式。J. Horgan的「戰爭是文化產物說」有其根據。

「演化」的概念也可以應用到文化發展。人類應該超越或跳脫「叢林法則」的制約是無可爭議的理想。人類是否能夠超越或跳脫「叢林法則」的制約？也是一個需要討論的議題。但在我們人類「文化」發展過程的當下，「叢林法則」仍然左右著政治領袖和一般人民的決策和行動。粉飾太平不只愚蠢，其後果則幾乎是在找死。

No, War Is Not Inevitable

Science writer John Horgan begs to disagree with E. O. Wilson, saying that war is a cultural development, not an indelible part of our evolutionary heritage.

John Horgan

This piece is a response to Edward O. Wilson's argument that war is an unavoidable part of humanity's evolutionary heritage.

There is no scientist whom I admire more than Edward O. Wilson. He is an indefatigable investigator, explicator, and champion of all living things, from ants to humans, and he advances his views in prose more elegant and intricate than that of many accomplished novelists. His new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, eloquently elaborates upon his hope, first expressed in his monumental work Sociobiology, that science can help us achieve self-understanding and even, perhaps, salvation.

I have one serious complaint against Wilson, though. In his new book and elsewhere, he perpetuates the erroneous -- and pernicious -- idea that war is “humanity’s hereditary curse.” As Wilson himself points out, the claim that we are descended from a long line of natural-born warriors has deep roots -- even the great psychologist William James was an advocate -- but like many other old ideas about humans, it’s wrong.

The modern version of the “killer ape” theory depends on two lines of evidence. One consists of observations of Pan troglodytes, or chimpanzees, one of our closest genetic relatives, banding together and attacking chimps from neighboring troops. The other derives from reports of intergroup fighting among hunter-gatherers; our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers from the emergence of the Homo genus until the Neolithic era, when humans began settling down to cultivate crops and breed animals, and some scattered groups still live that way.

But consider these facts. Researchers did not observe the first deadly chimpanzee raid until 1974, more than a decade after Jane Goodall started watching chimps at the Gombe reserve. Between 1975 and 2004, researchers counted a total of 29 deaths from raids, which comes to one killing for every seven years of observation of a community. Even Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, a leading chimpanzee researcher and prominent advocate of the deep-roots theory of war, acknowledges that “coalitionary killing” is “certainly rare.”

Some scholars suspect that coalitionary killing is a response to human encroachment on chimp habitat. At Gombe, where the chimps were well protected, Goodall spent 15 years without witnessing a single lethal attack. Many chimpanzee communities -- and all known communities of bonobos, apes that are just as closely related to humans as chimps -- have never been seen engaging in intertroop raids.

Even more important, the first solid evidence of lethal group violence among our ancestors dates back not millions, hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, but only 13,000 years. The evidence consists of a mass grave found in the Nile Valley, at a location in modern-day Sudan. Even that site is an outlier. Virtually all other evidence for human warfare -- skeletons with projectile points embedded in them, weapons designed for combat (rather than hunting), paintings and rock drawings of skirmishes, fortifications -- is 10,000 years old or less. In short, war is not a primordial biological “curse.” It is a cultural innovation, an especially vicious, persistent meme, which culture can help us transcend.

The debate over war’s origins is vitally important. The deep-roots theory leads many people, including some in positions of power, to view war as a permanent manifestation of human nature. We have always fought, the reasoning goes, and we always will, so we have no choice but to maintain powerful militaries to protect ourselves from our enemies. In his new book, Wilson actually spells out his faith that we can overcome our self-destructive behavior and create a “permanent paradise,” rejecting the fatalistic acceptance of war as inevitable. I wish he would also reject the deep-roots theory, which helps perpetuate war.

This piece is a response to Edward O. Wilson's argument that war is an unavoidable part of humanity's evolutionary heritage.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. His book The End of War was published in January.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/02-no-war-is-not-inevitable

From the Discover, June 2012 issue; published online June 12, 2012