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歷史學 – 開欄文
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我在《 政治學 – 開欄文》一文中提到：年輕時我因為「急功近利」；對政治學的興趣不大。也由於同樣的原因，雖然初、高中時讀過幾篇《史記》的選錄，我對歷史學也一直興趣缺缺。
家父2004年過世後，他的藏書幾乎都捐給了武漢大學圖書館。我保留了20本左右；陳序經教授的《中國文化的出路》之外，大概有10本以「歷史哲學」為主題的著作。我保留和閱讀它們的原因在於：家父雖然以「政論家」聞名，但他把自己定位在歷史學家和歷史哲學家。在他老人家逝世10周年的紀念演討會上，我發表過一篇《胡秋原史學方法論》；可惜文檔不慎遺失。
所以，我在60歲以後才開始重視歷史學。近20年來我發表過關於「歷史」的看法以及轉載過一些史學論文；相形之下，寥寥無幾。
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史達林和歐維爾-Miguel Faria
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我轉載發瑞阿教授這篇大作的主要目的在紀念奧維爾。我只讀過他的《動物農莊》，但印象深刻；此書讓我從初中就開始受到「政治現實主義」的薰染；至今受用。
做為神經外科醫生，發瑞阿教授的偏見相當強烈：“indoctrinated by the progressive academicians”的判斷並無直接依據，不過是「想當然耳」；“with his eyes opened to the realities of socialism and communism.”這句話則明顯的「以偏概全」。
全文報書摘敘述的兩個史實，呈現了政治的陰暗和它操作的無所不用其極。值得玩味。
The “Horrible Secret” and Orwell in Spain
Dr. Miguel Faria, 12/03/24
The Historians Costello and Tsarev contend that Joseph Stalin harbored a “horrible secret,” namely that as a young revolutionary the Red dictator had been an informant for the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. There is some evidence to support the claim that Stalin might have collaborated and informed on fellow revolutionaries prior to the October 1917 Russian revolution but as previously discussed in chapter 1, that contention remains sketchy and not totally convincing.
Suffice to say that as a result of this “secret” becoming known to several top communist Politburo and Soviet military leaders, Marshall Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky, a hero of the Soviet Union, and seven Red Army generals became involved in a plot to overthrow Stalin. In the minds of the conspirators, Stalin’s secret could have provided the needed justification for involvement in a coup d'état.
However, the conspirators were betrayed, and the ill-fated plot was nipped in the bud before it could come to fruition. On June 11, 1937, Moscovites were stunned to learn that Marshall Tukhachevsky and seven other generals had been arrested. Later that same day, a special military tribunal was convened that quickly convicted the “traitors.” On June 12, they were summarily executed for plotting a coup to rid Russia of one of the worst mass murderers in history, Joseph Stalin.
Yet, this episode contains another twist. Although Stalin’s henchmen in the NKVD were credited with unraveling the plot, behind the scenes they may have received assistance or disinformation, depending on one’s point of view, from the Nazi secret service.
Walter Schellenberg, head of the German Secret Service, revealed in his memoirs that SS Chief Reinhard Heydrich learned about Tukhachevsky’s plot to overthrow Stalin. Schellenberg wrote, “Heydrich at once grasped the tremendous importance of this piece of intelligence. If used correctly, a blow could be stuck at the leadership of the Red Army from which it would not recover for many years.” Schellenberg continued:
To unmask Tukhachevsky might be helping Stalin to strengthen his forces or might equally well push him into destroying a large part of his general staff. Hitler finally decided against Tukhachevsky and intervened in the affairs of the Soviet Union on Stalin’s side.
Schellenberg noted that the decision to expose the plot to Stalin was a major turning point in German-Soviet relations until Operation Barbarossa in 1941: “It eventually brought Germany into a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union and encouraged Hitler to attack the West before turning against Russia. Once Hitler made that decision, Heydrich of course supported him.”
For Heydrich, the goal of the destruction of the Soviet military leadership was accomplished. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Heydrich’s gamble paid handsome dividends when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, at least initially.
In Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Montefiore summarized the episode:
The army had been the last force capable of stopping Stalin, reason enough for the destruction of its High Command. It is possible that the generals knew about Stalin’s record as an Okhrana double agent and had considered action. The usual explanation is that German disinformation persuaded Stalin that they were plotting a coup. Hitler’s spymaster, Heydrich, had concocted such evidence that was passed to Stalin by the well-meaning Czech President Beneš. But no German evidence was used at Tukhachevsky’s trial—nor was it necessary.
Stalin needed no evidence. He turned the NKVD loose on the Red Army and the purges escalated. Stalin will pay a price for decapitating the leadership of the Soviet Red Army.
Orwell and Homage To Catalonia
In the meantime, a naïve Englishman turned his attention to the hot issue in the Iberian Peninsula, the tinder box of the Spanish civil war, where many young men indoctrinated by the progressive academicians thought they would be fighting fascism and prop up a republican government.
Homage To Catalonia is George Orwell’s memoir about his involvement in the Spanish Civil War as an English member of the 29th Division of the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)—a radical socialist, internationalist organization, which was soon denounced by the Stalinist communists as being a “Trotskyite organization and Franco’s Fifth Column” because it contained a few internationalist Jewish members that followed Trotsky rather than Stalin in Marxist orthodoxy and world revolution. Orwell noted that “the charge was repeated over and over in the Communist Press, especially from the beginning of 1937 onwards. It was part of the world-wide drive of the official Communist Party against ‘Trotskyism,’ of which POUM was supposed to be representative in Spain,” adding that “anyone who criticizes Communist policy from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Troskyist.”
Orwell wrote about the six-month period from late December 1936 to June 1937. During that time, he fought against Franco’s rebellious “fascist” army in the Aragon front of Catalonia, and he was seriously wounded by a shot fired from a sniper and described the incident: “Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal…” The bullet entered and exited his neck causing considerable damage, and it took many weeks for him to recover. He was taken from the front to one facility and then transferred to another for medical care. After recuperating in various military hospitals, he returned to Barcelona.
In Barcelona, Orwell received his medical discharge papers, but also discovered a very troubling fact. Barcelona was now a changed city. Formerly, when the anarchists had been in power, there had been a jubilant, more relaxed, egalitarian, and revolutionary comradeship among people, army, workers, police, et cetera. Now, the situation had changed for the worse. Orwell stated that,
In Barcelona, during all those last weeks I spent there, there was a peculiar evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred…a perpetual vague sense of danger, a consciousness of some evil thing that was impending.
Former revolutionaries and militia members were being persecuted, accused of being Trotskyites, arrested, and many were being shot by the Soviet NKVD (or the subservient Spanish communist secret police) that were actively operating in “Republican” areas of Spain, prior to Franco’s victory. One of the chiefs of the secret NKVD “flying squads” of professional assassins was none other than Alexander Orlov.
Moreover, some socialist and even diversionary communist leaders were disappearing in dungeons or being executed. “On June 16, 1937, Andreu Nin Pérez and 40 other POUM leaders were arrested, their militia battalions were disbanded and their headquarters at the Hotel Falcon in Barcelona closed…POUM was promptly declared illegal.”
All POUM members were now being rounded up. Orwell was being sought merely for fighting with the socialist POUM battalion. Please note: Orwell was not having to escape from the fascists, but from his former communist comrades, who were eliminating their previous allies, the socialists and anarchists. Orwell related that, “The notion of ‘liquidating’ or ‘eliminating’ everyone who happens to disagree with you does not yet seem natural. It seemed only too natural in Barcelona. The ‘Stalinists’ were in the saddle, and therefore it was a matter of course.”
After a terrible ordeal of being pursued by his former leftist allies, George Orwell successfully escaped to France, and eventually made his way back to England.
Despite the trials and tribulations Orwell experienced during his brief six months in Spain, he made several observations that deserve mention. He noted that while the arrests, “were continuing without pause and the police seized suspected ‘Trotskyists,’ yet, as an Englishman, he maintained the “ineradicable English belief that ‘they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law… a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.”
Thus, the first priority of the Soviet communists controlling the Spanish government was not fighting Franco’s army but the extermination of anarchists and Trotskyites (mostly internationalist, Jewish socialist revolutionaries). The anarchists were considered enemies because their political philosophy was diametrically opposed to that of the communists, and they refused to give up their weapons.
After safely returning to England—that is, southern England and the tranquil environs of his childhood—George Orwell prophetically expressed concerns for coming world events: “Sometimes I fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
It is extremely fortuitous for the ones living in freedom that George Orwell, the author and the participant, survived the conflict with his eyes opened to the realities of socialism and communism. Orwell would go on to write Animal Farm and 1984, denouncing collectivism, totalitarianism, and communism. It was a mistake for the Stalinists to incorrectly label Orwell a Trotskyite merely because he had been assigned to an international socialist POUM battalion—but their mistake was a gain for liberty in general and literature in particular.
This article is excerpted from Dr. Faria’s book, Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024)
Dr. Miguel A. Faria is Associate Editor in Chief in neuropsychiatry; and socioeconomics, politics, and world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the author of numerous books, the most recent, Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage (July 2023); Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024); and Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (in press)— the last four books by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.
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照片顯示的薩爾瓦多內戰 ---- Robert Nickelsberg
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就我記憶所及，討論美國外交/外援政策的人士，評論越戰者眾，提及薩爾瓦多內戰的寥寥無幾。或許，即使是三客流高手(該欄2024/07/07 附註1)，也拉不下臉來替卡特、雷根、老布希等在這個公案上「舔」、「吹」。
顧名思義，下文屬於「看圖說故事」的體裁。我轉載此文只是替那段歷史留個註腳。想進一步了解當時的「冷戰史」或美國政策，可以從《維基百科》入手。
A photographer's devastating documentation of El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s
Robert Nickelsberg, 11/24/24
Guerrillas from the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) speak with residents of San Agustín, Usulután department, on July 5, 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg worked as a Time magazine contract photographer for nearly 30 years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries. His black-and-white images from El Salvador, some of which were unpublished before, are featured in his book Legacy of Lies (published by Kehrer Verlag).
Editor's note: This story contains graphic images of violence and death.
In the early 1980s, there was a troubling energy to the Cold War political developments in Central America.
Following the left-wing Sandinista rebels' overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979, the United States bolstered its support for El Salvador's right-wing military government as a backstop to what the U.S. feared was an ascendant Soviet and Cuban influence and left-wing ideology in Latin America.
The book, Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984, illustrates with black-and-white photographs and descriptive personal essays how U.S. foreign policy played out and fueled a violent 13-year civil war in El Salvador. This work attempts to establish a visual and contextual foundation of the violent early years of the nation's civil war, helping explain the eventual departure of many of El Salvador's citizens to the United States.
An armored Cadillac belonging to the U.S. Embassy pulls up to an arriving U.S. government jet plane in Ilopango, El Salvador, in November 1982. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (center) speaks to the media during a joint press conference with Salvadoran President Álvaro Magaña (center left with glasses) at the presidential palace in San Salvador, El Salvador, on Oct. 13, 1983. Kissinger warned the Salvadoran government that continued support from the U.S. was dependent on improved respect for human rights Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Families congregate on the Pacific coast beach in La Libertad, El Salvador, in April 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Legacy of Lies begins with images of the U.S. diplomatic and military presence, followed by images of El Salvador's military and of left-wing guerrillas, and ends with images of daily life.
It is a portrait of a time, between 1981 and 1984, in which U.S. foreign policy has come under heavy criticism for aiming to direct democratic change yet condoning the brutality and violence exacted by the Salvadoran military and security forces on political opponents and civil society.
A U.S. Army advisor (left) leads Salvadoran army soldiers during an open air class in San Juan Opico, El Salvador, on June 20, 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Salvadoran army recruits hang from a crossbar during a training exercise overseen by U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces at the Ilopango air base in San Salvador, El Salvador, in March 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Salvadoran military commanders and the head of the Treasury Police, Col. Nicolás Carranza (third from the left), sit during a military ceremony at the Escuela Militar Capitán General Gerardo Barrios in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, in May 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Two guerrillas from the Farabundo Martí Popular Liberation Forces (FPL) watch a low-flying Salvadoran military observation plane near the Guazapa volcano on the road to Suchitoto, El Salvador, on Oct. 21, 1983. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
With its Cold War mindset following the failures of the Vietnam War, the U.S. increased its support and training for El Salvador's security forces, which encouraged the annihilation of the political opposition and helped fuel recruitment for the opposing left-wing guerrilla armies.
From 1980 to 1992, El Salvador's civil war resulted in the deaths of as many as 75,000 civilians and other atrocities.
Following the Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992, the U.S. abandoned its focus on El Salvador. The country suffered an immense social and political upheaval it has not since recovered from.
Civilians look over the dead bodies of three civil defensemen killed during an overnight attack by guerrillas from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in Santa Clara, El Salvador, in July 1982.. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
The sister of a civil defenseman (center) faints upon hearing of the death of her brother during an overnight attack on the civil defense post in Santa Clara, El Salvador, in July 1982. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
The images focus on contemporary (當時的) Latin America, a region engulfed in the ramifications of the Cold War, the rivalry between the U.S. government and the Soviet Union. Central America's turmoil began with the 1954 coup d'état in Guatemala orchestrated by the CIA. The consequences resonated for decades and affected all sectors of Latin American life up to the present day.
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《佛德總統就職50周年》有感
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這個人有「總統命」：阿格紐副總統因收賄醜聞下台(以「逃稅」定罪)，讓佛德被「任命」為副總統；尼克森總統遭「彈劾」去職，讓他得以「上位」。
當然，佛德有他被「任命」為副總統的能力、資格、聲望、和經歷。另一方面，阿格紐如果有操守，不但能順理成章的繼任總統，很有可能連選連任。美國政治就不是今天的局面了。
我認為佛德總統就職演說中的這段話：
"Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule."
值得我們深思和玩味。
在中共第20屆三中全會剛閉幕沒多久後看到這句話，我的烏鴉性格又冒出來了(該文第2.3節)：
「『一黨專政』的確完成了和平崛起，但『一黨專政』能夠做到長治久安嗎？」
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佛德總統就職50周年 -- Frank Witsil
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請參見下一篇《有感》。
50 years after Gerald Ford became president, scholars ponder modern parallels
Frank Witsil, Detroit Free Press, 08/09/24
As the nation looks ahead to the upcoming presidential election at a time of political uncertainty, some in Michigan will look back on Friday to the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of a man who became president under extraordinary circumstances.
During a Aug. 9, 1974, ceremony at the White House, Vice President Gerald R. Ford — who had been a long-time U.S. representative from Michigan's 5th district — took the oath of office.
His wife, Betty, held the Bible, which was open to Proverbs 3:5-6, verses that emphasized trusting "in the Lord;" and Ford, who was appointed vice president just eight months earlier, became the first — and only — person to hold both top offices without having been elected to either.
Leading up to Ford's presidency, the nation had faced some dark times, the assassinations of a sitting president and presidential candidate, including racial strife, international conflict, economic hardship, scandal and discord. How would Ford view the juncture America finds itself in now?
"I think Ford would look at this moment and say tumultuous times are part of the long arc of history," Celeste Watkins-Hayes, dean of the University of Michigan's public policy school that now bears Ford's name, said during a recent PBS segment about the anniversary. These times, she added, can feel "very anxiety producing and very worrying," but Ford would likely ask "what are the areas of common ground, what are the areas of common concern, and how do we move forward on the basis of those?"
In many ways, Ford’s inauguration and presidency is a reminder to Michiganders of the place the state holds in history in shaping the only president to come from it. It also is reassurance to Americans that, even in challenging times, the message that Ford delivered in his first presidential address is true: The democratic process works.
After leaving office, Ford, a Republican, also offered some thoughts on women in the White House, which some voters find relevant today.
To mark the milestone anniversary, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids is opening a year-long exhibit, "Ford at 50: Decisions that Defined a Presidency," displaying artifacts and film footage that chronicle some of Ford’s most difficult and controversial decisions.
Moreover, at 6:30 p.m., the museum is sponsoring a variety of activities and tributes at a West Michigan Whitecaps game at the LMCU Ballpark just north of Grand Rapids in Comstack Park. Ford’s nephew, Greg Ford, is scheduled to throw out the first pitch, and the first 1,000 attendees will receive a Gerald R. Ford bobblehead.
But, history shows, Ford was no bobblehead politician.
While in office, one contemporary told Ford he was acting like "too much of a boy scout," taking principled stances on issues. Ford, who was an Eagle Scout, responded that a boy scout was what the American people wanted and he intended to use the aspirations and ideals of scouting as a "guide and compass."
"In a time of ethical relativism and political cynicism, Ford’s personal integrity stood out," Gleaves Whitney, the executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation in Grand Rapids, wrote in a yet-unpublished essay he emailed the Free Press. "His presidency was characterized by transparency and accountability, with frequent news conferences to rebuild trust with the media and the American people."
An office he never sought
Ford’s tenure as president was short — just 2 years and 164 days — but not the shortest in history.
William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after 32 days in office. James Garfield was shot and died after 199 days. Zachary Taylor suffered from a bacterial infection after a year and 127 days. Warren Harding died from a heart attack after 2 years and 151 days.
In many ways Ford's presidency was a test of a peaceful transfer of executive power, which was an area of the Constitution that was clarified by the 25th Amendment and ratified in 1967, Daniel Clark, an Oakland University history professor, explained.
"No one anticipated, when that amendment was passed, it would be put to the test so quickly," Clark said, adding that the question of transfer of power is one of the parallels of what happened then has for today. "Can we continue to rely on peaceful transfers of power?"
Clark, who grew up in Midland and was 15 when Ford became president, recalled that he had gone on a week-long canoe trip up north. When he left, he said, Nixon was president; when he came back home, Ford occupied the Oval Office.
Ford's presidency, Clark also noted, was — and is — a source of pride for Michiganders, who recognized Ford, a son of Grand Rapids, as one of their own, even though he was born in Omaha, Nebraska.
Ford, who was named Leslie Lynch King Jr. at birth after his biological father, ended up in Michigan after his parents separated. Ford said his father was abusive to his mother. To get away, his mother moved them to Oak Park, Illinois. Then they relocated to Grand Rapids, where his grandparents lived.
Ford’s parents divorced and his mother married Gerald Rudolff Ford, a businessman.
Ford adopted his stepfather’s name, becoming Gerald Rudolff Ford Jr. To his friends, he was just Jerry.
As a boy, Ford got involved with sports and scouting, becoming an Eagle Scout, the only president to do so. A standout athlete, Ford went on to play football at the University of Michigan. While on the team, the Wolverines won two national titles.
Ford went on to Yale Law School, where he also coached football and boxing.
Still, Ford loved football and his undergraduate alma mater so much that, as president, instead of "Hail to the Chief," he reportedly would have the band play "The Victors," the U-M fight song.
Ford joined the Navy, served as an officer, and returned to Grand Rapids, where he had a law practice and became active in politics, running for congress. He held the seat for 25 years, with an ambition to become Speaker of the House. Instead, he settled for minority leader.
In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to income-tax evasion and resigned. To replace him, President Richard Nixon selected Ford, which, the congressman from Michigan figured, was the highest political position he would attain, according to Ford’s obituary in the New York Times.
But a few months later, Nixon resigned and Ford became president.
When Ford died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, in 2006, the Times praised Ford, who it said had "gently led the United States out of the tumultuous Watergate era." It noted the 93-year-old former president had a "common touch" and "uncommon virtue."
And yet, the Times obituary also pointed out, Ford was thrust into an office "he had never sought."
Our 'national nightmare is over'
Ford’s inauguration speech — a talk, he called it — was brief.
"I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers," he told the nation, making clear that he had not "gained office by any secret promises."
But in becoming president though a Constitutional process, as opposed to a party nomination and election, Ford reasoned he was not bound by a "partisan platform" nor was he "indebted to no man, and only to one woman — my dear wife, Betty."
During that speech, he also uttered some of the best-known phrases of his presidency.
"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," Ford said, referring to the Watergate office building break-in that had gripped the nation and forced Nixon to resign, the first president ever to do so. "Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule."
A month later, Ford pardoned Nixon, a controversial decision that led to the resignation of the Detroit News reporter Ford had appointed as his press secretary, and, some said, was an act that helped doom Ford’s chances for re-election.
But many historians also recognize Ford's pardon — Proclamation 4311 — was the right decision for America.
Nixon, who, until Ford's pardon insisted he had not committed crimes, released a contrite statement, expressing "regret and pain" at the "anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency."
He added: "I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy."
A woman in the White House
After he left office, Ford put his presidential library in Ann Arbor, honoring his connection to the University of Michigan, and his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, his hometown until he went to Washington D.C. Both are operated as one entity.
And in 1989, Ford was in West Branch, Iowa, where former President Herbert Hoover was from, for a conference for former presidents. Ford spoke to a group of school children, and one of them, a girl, asked him a prophetic question.
"What advice would you give a young lady wanting to become president of the United States?"
Ford’s response, recorded on video, has had some relevance in these past few months, and recently has been circulating on social media. Ford gently told the girl that he hoped that at some point a woman would become president.
"I can tell you how I think it will happen," he said to her, although he added he didn't believe such an event would happen through the "normal course of events." He said he thought a woman might become president "sometime in the next four or eight years."
His prediction:
"Either the Republican or Democrat political party will nominate a man for president and a woman for vice president, and the woman and man will win," he said. "And in that term of office of the president, the president will die, and the woman will become president under the law, our Constitution."
But Ford didn't stop at forecasting how the first woman might become president, he added: "And once that barrier is broken, from then on, men better be careful because they’ll have a hard, hard time ever even getting a nomination in the future."
Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.
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羅伯士皮爾敗亡真相 -- Colin Jones
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法國大革命除了是「人類史」上的大事外，也是造成拿破崙這位「英雄」的「時勢」。由於他是我從小學四年級到初二時最崇拜的人之一，「法國大革命」是我後來唯一下過功夫研究的歷史事件。羅伯士皮爾對我並不陌生。雖然這是40 -- 50年前的事，但我一直對那個時代法國的人和事有著興趣。
我曾拿紅衛兵/文化大革命和法國大革命恐怖時期相比(開欄文2.2節)；或許，晚年的毛主席也跟羅伯士皮爾有類似的人格特質。
The Fall of Robespierre
The momentous final days of Maximilien Robespierre are well documented. Yet many of the established ‘facts’ about the Thermidorian Reaction are myths.
Colin Jones, Published in History Today, Volume 65 Issue 8 August 2015
Tjournée (day of Revolutionary action), right-wing elements within the national assembly, or Convention, organised a coup d’état against Robespierre and his closest allies in the hall of the Convention, located within the Tuileries palace (adjacent to the Louvre). These men at once set out to end the Terror, which Robespierre had conducted over the previous year. They instituted the so-called ‘Thermidorian Reaction’, which moved government policies away from the social and political radicalism espoused by Robespierre‘s Revolutionary Government towards constitutional legalism and classically liberal economic policies. In the hours following the Thermidorian coup, Robespierre's supporters in the Paris Commune (the city’s municipal government, housed in the present-day Hôtel de Ville) had sought to organise armed resistance against the Convention among the city's sans-culottes, the street radicals who had been instrumental in bringing Robespierre to power during the crisis months of when France had been wracked by civil and foreign war. But the Parisian popular movement proved to be marked by political indifference and apathy at this decisive moment. Shortly after 8 pm, some 3,400 sans-culottes, mainly National Guardsmen from the citizen militias of each of the city's 48 sections, along with over 30 of their cannon, had gathered on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville after a call-up by the Commune. Though seemingly at that moment primed for action, by midnight the popular forces had scattered, speeded on their flight by a shower of rain, which dampened revolutionary ardour. The people of Paris preferred to go home to bed, it seemed, rather than stay up and fight for Robespierre’s cause. Shortly after midnight, the Convention’s National Guard, drawn from the bourgeois, western city neighbourhoods, attacked the Hôtel de Ville, in which Robespierre was holed up. In the mêlée accompanying his arrest, Robespierre sought to commit suicide, managing only to blow a hole in the lower part of his cheek. He was guillotined the following evening, July 28th.
Robespierre was certainly overthrown on 9 Thermidor and he was certainly guillotined on July 28th. But most of the other established ‘facts’ in the above account are either completely false or else require substantial qualification. Indeed the above paragraph contains no fewer than six myths about the journée – and one continuing conundrum.
Let us start with the conundrum, namely, of whether Robespierre did attempt suicide. Witnesses to the act either did not live to tell the tale – his co-conspirators were executed alongside him and were never interrogated about the facts of the day – or else are unreliable. The man who led the assault on the Hôtel de Ville, Convention deputy Léonard Bourdon, claimed that National Guardsman Charles André Méda (or Merda, a name he understandably chose to change) had fired the shot that incapacitated Robespierre. Merda is depicted in the most famous engraving of the Hôtel de Ville episode and, long after the event, his memoirs recounted his role in the day. However, that account is so full of self-aggrandising exaggeration that his testimony seems fundamentally untrustworthy. In hundreds of accounts of the day, which I have located in, for example, the Archives parlementaires and the Archives nationales, Paris, as part of a wider project to write the history of the journée of 9 Thermidor, Merda’s name never occurs, save in occasional association with Bourdon. If he really was the day’s hero, as he claimed, one would have expected others to accredit at least part of his story, which seems in fact to be largely fantastical.
Against his candidature must also be weighed the fact that the story on the streets of Paris merely hours after the event was that Robespierre had indeed sought to take his own life. A much more plausible representation of this decisive moment in the Hôtel de Ville is an engraving by the Parisian sans-culotte artist, Jean-Louis Prieur, which was until very recently believed to show the September prison massacres of 1792. On the shooting incident, the jury is still out and the conundrum remains in place, but overall a botched suicide attempt seems the most likely conclusion.
If uncertainty still hovers over this part of the day, we can be pretty sure that most other ‘facts’ about the day in the above account of the day need substantial revision.
The first myth has it that the deputies who toppled Robespierre were from the right wing of the Convention. In fact, the coup d’état was very largely concocted and conducted by the left-wing caucus of the assembly, the ‘Montagne’, as it was known. The ‘Montagnards’ within the assembly were the deputies ideologically closest to Robespierre and by 9 Thermidor, they were feeling threatened by the increasingly erratic behaviour of their colleague. On 8 Thermidor, Robespierre had come into the Convention and made a long and vehement speech. It had been six weeks or so since he had actually attended the assembly (and he had absented himself from the meetings of the Committee of Public Safety for much the same period). The speech was a wild, mildly unbalanced and swinging attack on the way the revolution was going. Robespierre voiced his fears for the revolution's future in such a way that it seemed clear that he wished to conduct a purge of the government and of the Convention itself. When asked to name the individuals that he had in his sights, however, Robespierre airily declined to do so. In this he was ill-advised, for it meant that no-one within the assembly, save a small cohort of his most dedicated supporters, could feel safe. Later that evening, Robespierre repeated his speech in the Jacobin Club, very much his stronghold at this time, and in the ensuing debate named two Montagnard colleagues from the Committee of Public Safety as his principal targets, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne. The two men were present in the club and sought vainly to answer back. Shouted down, they were driven out of the club with cries of ‘To the guillotine!’ ringing in their ears.
It was thus little wonder that both Collot and Billaud should be at the heart of the action in the Convention the next day, as concerted efforts were made to silence Robespierre and to order his arrest. Those who appear to have been most closely involved in the plot alongside them were other radical Montagnards, including Tallien, Fréron and Fouché – men whom Robespierre disliked because of the violent ‘ultra-revolutionary’ repression of provincial dissent that they had conducted in 1793 and early 1794. Right-wing deputies in the Convention had been talking secretly for some time about wanting to get rid of Robespierre, but without much sign of purposive action. It was Robespierre’s wild accusations on 8 Thermidor that drove them pell-mell into the arms of Montagnard deputies, with whom they shared little ideological ground. In all, 33 of the 35 deputies who are known to have spoken on the two sessions of the assembly on 9 Thermidor were in fact Montagnards. Right-wing deputies ensured the success of the Montagnard coup only by allowing events to unfold without protest or intervention. When Robespierre seemed to gesture directly to them for their support, as the attack on him in the Convention hall shaped up, they simply sat on their hands.
Even before Robespierre’s head had hit the guillotine basket at around 7 pm on 10 Thermidor, a further falsehood was visibly taking form. This – our second myth – was that Robespierre had been principally responsible for the Terror through which the Committee of Public Safety had ruled the country. He certainly was a very powerful figure. His chilling rhetoric had been critical in imposing much of the programme of Terror on the Convention, notably the General Maximum on prices, the execution of political opponents including Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Hébert, the notorious ‘Law of 22 Priairial’, which had made it even easier for the Revolutionary Tribunal to convict and the Cult of the Supreme Being. Yet he was not the Terror‘s sole artisan. For the previous year he had been only one among 12 members of the Committee of Public Safety, several of them imposing figures themselves, and all committee decisions were collective. Indeed Robespierre personally signed a relatively small number of the Committee's decrees. As the number of executions ordered by the Revolutionary Tribunal increased in June and July 1794, moreover, Robespierre was actually absent from the Committee’s meetings. On 9 Thermidor he was attacked less as the sole director of Terror than as someone whose prestige and behaviour threatened to spin Revolutionary Government out of control, though in what directions seemed unclear, given his delphic speech on 8 Thermidor. From that moment onwards, however, it suited all sides among his assailants to magnify Robespierre's responsibility, allowing him thus to carry the can for the excesses of the Terror. This helped to explain the creation of a ‘Robespierre-the-dictator’ myth, which has remained surprisingly tenacious.
The fact that the 9 Thermidor coup was led from the Left rather than the Right determined what happened once Robespierre was out of the way. Myth three about the journée has it that the Convention immediately initiated the Thermidorian Reaction, shifting government policy to the Right. In fact, as the composition of the anti-Robespierre plotters suggests, many in government expected the Terror to continue and indeed to proceed more smoothly now that Robespierre’s influence had been removed. Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, for example, stayed at the helm within the Committee of Public Safety. It took time for right-wing reaction to gather speed – a process that was immeasurably helped by the return to the assembly in December 1794 of moderate deputies proscribed by the Montagnards in the course of 1793. The reintegration of these men – roughly 80 in total, all nursing a sense of grievance against the Revolutionary Government – altered the political complexion of the Convention in a way that opened the floodgates of reaction. The component parts of the programme and personnel of the Revolutionary Government had already started to be disassembled and the process accelerated. The extent of the powers of the Committee of Public Safety were reduced and its members purged. The Paris Jacobin Club was closed down altogether and radical sans-culottes driven out of local committees within the city's 48 administrative sections. The Revolutionary Tribunal was closed down. The General Maximum that had kept food prices low was removed, with the deregulated economy creating great hardship for the popular classes. When in March and April 1795 there was armed protest in Paris against the political and economic policies of the Convention – the journées of Germinal and Prairial – the deputies initiated a fierce repression, clearing the way for an even more dogmatic assertion of economic liberalism. By then, deputies saw in Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne less the men who had toppled Robespierre than the guilty souls who had been his accomplices over the previous year of Terror. They were sentenced to deportation to French Guiana.
The Thermidorian Reaction was thus a slow-burning phenomenon which took time to establish itself. Further complicating the steady drift to the Right was the fact that some of the most vocal ‘Thermidorians’ attacking the legacy of Revolutionary Government in Year II were individuals who, on 8 Thermidor, Robespierre had in his sights for being too violently left-wing: individuals like Tallien, Fréron and Fouché. Viewed as extremist (if still Montagnard) radicals before 9 Thermidor, Fréron and Tallien, for example, switched track and led the drift to the Right, marshalling the city's bourgeois youths into the gangs of jeunesse dorée who launched violent street attacks on former Jacobins and ex-sectional personnel. Renouncing the universal male suffrage that had been the crowning institution of the (in fact never-implemented) Constitution of 1793, the Thermidorians accepted for the new Constitution of Year III (1795) a property franchise which would take the vote from most erstwhile sans-culottes.
Had those Parisian sans-culottes been quite such political push-overs on the journée of 9 Thermidor as they are usually accounted? Myth four regarding the day has it that a shower of rain played a key role at a critical juncture in encouraging Robespierre's sans-culottes supporters from staying in the streets late at night and staying loyal to his cause. This story, much repeated in accounts of the day, is simply false. None of the hundreds of micro-narratives of the day that I have consulted mention rain. The meteorological data recorded at the Paris Observatoire (at the southern end of what is now the Boulevard Saint-Michel) is crystal clear. There was a mild westerly wind and the day was rather overcast and warm: 18 oC at midday and almost 15 o at 10:15 pm. But with the exception of a light shower in the morning at 9:15 am, well before even the overthrow of Robespierre, the day was bone dry. No rain fell to test the fidelity of the sans-culottes, save in the imaginations of many of the day’s historians.
This convenient contributing factor to the story of Parisian sans-culottes apathy and indifference on the day can thus safely be discounted. So, indeed, can Parisian popular apathy and indifference, which constitute the 1 about the day. The picture of sans-culottes demobilisation, which appears in almost all accounts, turns out to be false. Doubtless, there were cases of individuals who went off to bars and taverns or back to their homes and beds. But the numerous – and largely neglected – accounts of the day that exist show that the vast majority of the men on the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at 8 pm seemingly in the Commune’s cause stayed on active duty and simply passed over to support the Convention against Robespierre. The city's 48 sections acted, too, as mobilisation centres, drawing additional recruits into the ranks of the pro-Convention National Guard. Orders from the assembly to neighbourhood authorities late in the evening saw half of sectional forces patrolling their neighbourhoods to ensure that law and order were upheld, with the other half detailed to rally at the Place du Carrousel outside the Tuileries palace which housed the Convention. By then the assembly had also placed its forces under the orders of the deputy, Barras. As a result of this impromptu call-up, Barras commanded an active force far larger – certainly by several multiples – than the number of men who had been outside the Hôtel de Ville at 8 pm.
At some time after midnight, Barras determined to use his forces not only in a defensive stance around the Convention but also as an attacking army against the Commune. From 1 am, or just after, two citizen’s armies under Barras' command, each thousands strong, wended their way in a pincer movement from the Tuileries eastward towards the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. They arrived to find it with scarcely an individual to be seen. Not a shot needed to be fired before the advance guard stormed into the Commune itself to confront Robespierre and his allies in their lair.
Myth six about thejournéeof 9 Thermidor has it that Barras’ troops, who seized Robespierre and his accomplices, were drawn essentially from the more prosperous sections of the west of the city. It is certainly true that the propinquity of many of these sections to the Tuileries palace was such that they had been among the first that the Convention mobilised. But the forces that actually launched the attack on the Commune were a cross-city sampling of sections. One of the most prominent delegations, for example, came from the Gravilliers section, one of the poorest, which had always been among the most radical sections in the city. The idea that Robespierre was toppled by a bourgeois militia of prosperous Parisians while depoliticisedsans-culottes slumbered in their beds is simply untrue. Robespierre fell to a socially hybrid army. It would not be wrong to say that it was the massed forces of Parisiansans-culotterie who toppled him.
It is odd that a big political event like the day of 9 Thermidor has attracted so much mythology and misrepresentation. It is all the odder in that the day is exceptionally well-documented. Barras ordered each of the 48 sections to produce multiple accounts of what had happened within them on the days of 8, 9 and 10 Thermidor and these voluminous accounts still exist. So too do numerous individual police dossiers of arrested individuals, plus the background documentation brought together by a Convention committee charged on 10 Thermidor, Year II to produce an official history of the day. Headed by the moderate deputy Edme-Bonaventure Courtois, this official history was presented to the Convention – almost as an anniversary gift – on 8 Thermidor, Year III (July 26th, 1795). Courtois' account is detailed and thorough, but it has a decided ideological parti-pris which is curiously at odds with the documentation that his committee had amassed. One full year after the anti-Robespierre coup d’état, Courtois was evidently endeavouring to tell the Thermidorian reactionaries what he thought by then they wanted to hear. He thus vaunted the role of the Convention as a whole – and almost completely effaced the role of both the people of Paris and the Montagnard deputies in securing the day’s victory. This was quite a rhetorical achievement and, unfortunately, a highly influential one, for Courtois’ official history has guided the pens of generations of historians ever since. If we wish to demythologise the history of one of the most epochal days in the whole Revolutionary decade, we must return to the archives.
Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 2014).
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以色列發現舊約紀載的護城河 - Alex Mitchell
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‘Monumental’ 3,000-year-old discovery with biblical origins found under parking lot
Alex Mitchell, 07/24/24
It’s a new testament to modern technology.
Archeologists in Israel discovered a biblically significant moat that divided Jerusalem into two parts hidden beneath a parking lot in the City of David.
The manmade trench — researchers have sought answers on its existence for 150 years — was “one of the monumental fortifications that protected the kings of Jerusalem,” according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the agency in charge of the dig at the Givati Parking lot.
It is a 3,500-square-foot site that, until about 15 years ago, was used for cars and visitors seeing the Western or “Wailing Wall” of Jerusalem. Other relics spotted at the location span 10 generations of ancient history, including the currency used by the Byzantine Empire of early Anno Domini years.
A pair of recovered, 70-meter sections of moat suggest it was carved to be deep and wide centuries ago, but there are still many mysteries surrounding the significant finding — one that helps put the city’s giant scale into perspective.
“It is not known when the moat was originally cut, but evidence suggests it was used during the centuries when Jerusalem was the capital of the Kingdom of Judah,” said Professor Yuval Gadot and Dr. Yiftah Shalev of the University of Tel Aviv, who led the excavation.
That time period nearly 3,000 years ago began with King Josiah, who took the throne at 8 and ruled in the interest of reform into his early 30s, was believed to have been born around 648 BCE.
The moat — initially believed to be a natural depression when first spotted in the 1960s — is also affiliated with remnants of the ancient, Greek-built Acra Fortress, or Acropolis, previously discovered on the site.
“During those years, the moat separated the southern residential part of the city from the ruling Acropolis in the north — the upper city where the palace and the temple were located.”
A passage from the Old Testament’s Book of Kings depicts King Solomon describing its construction.
The 11:27 verse adds that he “closed up the breach in the wall” and referenced a nearby fortification he erected, called a “millo.”
Solomon, known for his wisdom, is believed to have ruled around 970 B.C.
“Once again, discoveries are being revealed that shed new and vivid light on the biblical literature,” said IAA director Eli Escusido.
When you stand at the bottom of this giant excavation, surrounded by enormous hewn walls, it is impossible not to be filled with wonder and appreciation for those ancient people who, about 3,800 years ago, literally moved mountains and hills.”
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改變歷史方向的政治領袖猝死 - Gabriel Elefteriu
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After Raisi: history’s most consequential sudden political deaths
Gabriel Elefteriu, 05/22/24
The unexpected demise of Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, stoned to death with a mountain by the grace of a US-made helicopter, has opened up speculation as to the political changes that this act of divine justice might trigger in the murderous Islamic Republic and further afield.
High-level political deaths in office, natural or induced, always appear to hold up at least the possibility of radical re-setting of policy and therefore of the course of history itself, even – particularly when they occur without any warning and they involve powerful figures sitting atop autocratic regimes.
This expectation – or, better said, hope – is not at all unreasonable. The modern “Great Man” theory of history, that sees world events as driven primarily by the action of individual leaders rather than by wider “systemic” forces, has been with us since at least the days of Thomas Carlyle. Its roots of course trace back all the way to Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives of great ancient Greek and Roman statesmen and generals – the Bible of classical historical education – presented these heroes (and in some cases, villains) as key shapers of events in their time.
In our age attention is naturally focused on strongman leaders like Putin, Erdogan or Xi; their disappearance from the scene will certainly create some opportunity for change, although of course nothing is guaranteed. Many Western liberals would also add Viktor Orban or Serbia’s Vucic to the list, as well as Slovakia’s Fico who was in fact shot last week.
Reagan was also shot, in 1981, but lived to play the key role in bringing down the Soviet Union; had he died, his unique determination and charisma might well have been irreplaceable, Gorbachev might well have been outmanoeuvred in the end by his enemies at home, and the USSR might well have stumbled on until now like North Korea – or, worse, modernise in the Chinese Communist fashion.
In the end, everybody dies and all reigns or periods of elected office come to a close. But it is one thing when this happens naturally and expectedly at the end of a long time at the helm, usually with rules or succession plans in place; and a totally different thing when the cord of policy and strategy, especially in a highly personalised system, is cut abruptly or without any effective replacements available.
Let’s look at some of the most important leaders of the past, whose unique careers were cut short by fate, with far-reaching consequences for history (as far as it can be reasonably ascertained), primarily in Europe’s part of the world but not only. The focus here is on men who held the place of primacy and the highest authority in their polity at the time.
We shall not be considering deaths of simply “prominent” political figures – whether the Gracchi brothers, Robespierre or even the commendable hard-goodbye given to Bolsheviks like “Red Rosa” Luxemburg – even where they helped push politics as a whole in a certain direction. Nor are we interested in heads of state whose passing did lead to major policy shifts, if this occurred as a natural conclusion of their life and career (whether Louis XIV or Franco) or as a result of revolution (Charles I, Louis XVI, Nicholas II).
So here are, arguably, the top 15 sudden political deaths in history that forced events off their expected course:
Servius Tullius, 535 BC. The popular and well-liked 6th king of Rome was killed by Tarquin who brought in a despotic regime that later led to his own removal and the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. Had Tullius lived, the SPQR might never have featured in the annals of history. (SPQR：古羅馬政府的正式名稱)
Epaminondas, 362 BC. This exceptionally gifted Theban statesman and general brought his Beotian city to the apex of the Greek-world power-structure, defeating even Sparta along the way. Had he not died at the moment of his second great victory, at Mantinea, he could well have managed to consolidate the Theban hegemony and unite the Greeks to thwart Philip II of Macedon’s designs.
Alexander the Great, 323 BC. The greatest conqueror of antiquity died at only 32. Had he lived on, not only would his empire have remained united, but eventually he would have almost certainly turned his attention westward towards Italy – like his great admirer and imitator Pyrrhus did only a few decades later. In that case, the history of Rome as a significant power would have met an early end.
Crassus, 53 BC: The unexpected death of Crassus in the battle of Carrhae against the Parthians shattered the political equilibrium at Rome. The Triumvirate collapsed, leaving Caesar and Pompey to square off against each other in a fight to the finish. Had Crassus lived, the costly Civil War might have been avoided: the rise of Octavian (Augustus) would likely not have happened and the Roman Republic would have continued perhaps for another generation if not longer.
Attila, 453 AD. The most terrible and effective of the near-subhuman Huns – indeed, of all the migrant barbarians invading Europe from the depths of Asia – died suddenly on the night of his wedding, at the height of his and his horde’s powers. He was poised to overrun what had been left of the Roman Empire at the time, with some imperial civilisation perhaps rubbing off on the steppe butchers.
Ögedei Khan (窩闊台), 1241. Under Genghis Khan the Mongols conquered the single largest contiguous empire in history. The next Great Khan, Ögedei, continued the expansion: his generals from hell pushed their brutal invasions and atrocities right into Central Europe. Mongol power seemed unstoppable. A crusader army led by the Knights Templar was almost wiped out in Hungary and the road to Vienna lay open. But then Ögedei died and the Mongol generals halted the campaign and went back to Mongolia to elect a new Khan, never to return. Pure luck.
Richard the Lionheart, 1199. Admittedly a bad king, Richard Coeur de Lion was however an exceptional military leader with an extraordinary chivalric reputation throughout Christendom. At the time of his death on campaign in France he was only 41. Had he lived, he would have been more than capable to create a powerful English kingdom and dominate Western Europe. He might have also organised another crusade and ensured the long-term viability of Outremer, especially with Saladin dead from 1193. At home, his reign might well have prevented the emergence of Magna Carta and subsequent English constitutional tradition, for good or ill. (Outremer：位於東地中海地區的四個天主教行政區)
Henry V, 1422. The victor of Agincourt had France in the palm of his hand when he died at 35, having been named as next in line to the French throne through the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. He didn’t get to exercise his new right in the end, but if he had, the Hundred Years War would have been settled on English terms, and there might have never even been a “France” to speak of, in the following centuries.
Pope Alexander VI, 1503. The infamous Borgia Pope was a master statesman and power-player in the Italy of Machiavelli’s and the de Medici’s time. His son, Cesare, had already become a prominent general and had carved out new states for himself. The Borgia power, both military and financial, was increasing across the peninsula, and it was arguably on track to dominion. But everything collapsed when the Pope and Cesare were poisoned. Italian history would have looked rather different had Alexander survived.
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, 1632. One of history’s great commanders, Gustavus built Swedish power in the 17th century by storming into Germany during the Thirty Years’ War and winning several battles. It looked like he was going to not only win the whole conflict decisively for the Protestant cause, but that he would win territories for Sweden in Germany and make his country a permanent player in Central European politics. None of this came to pass: Gustavus the Great was killed in the battle of Lützen.
Nicholas I of Russia, 1855. The arch-conservative Tsar (apparently Putin’s favourite of them all) ruled with autocratic authority in the old Russian tradition. His reign saw social unrest, including the Decembrist revolt and peasant uprisings. Nicholas pursued an aggressive foreign policy, getting himself into the Crimean war which he continued beyond reason. His untimely death from pneumonia opened the door to peace negotiations.
Alexander II of Russia, 1881. Succeeding Nicholas to the throne, he ended the Crimean war and initiated a programme of reforms – to the point where he acquired the cognomen of “the Liberator”. His assassination at the hands of Russian nihilist terrorists led to a period of repression under his successors and contributed to the revolutionary movements that eventually culminated in the events of 1917. Had he lived, he might well have seen off the revolutionary threat (no Lenin!) and move Russia more strongly towards liberalisation.
Stalin, 1953. Admittedly, Stalin was already in declining health by the time he finally expired but he could have still carried on for a few more years. Had he done so, it’s not at all clear that the Korean War would have ended in 1953 or even that the “reformist” Khruschev would have succeeded him. His reaction to the events of 1956 in Hungary and the Suez Crisis would likewise have been different – or perhaps would have prevented these developments in the first place. De-Stalinisation might’ve had to wait until the 1960s.
JFK, 1962. Had he survived the assassination attempt (which would have increased his heroic aura), Kennedy could have been in power until January 1969. He might have had more political capital to push civil rights legislation earlier and with less disruption. Given his experience with Berlin, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, he might’ve well have avoided escalation in Vietnam. As the ultimate champion of space exploration, he would’ve likely continued to press forward with it and perhaps influence the next administration to keep up rather than defund America’s space efforts – so we might have already colonised the Moon by now. Finally, the Cold War might have ended sooner.
Yitzhak Rabin, 1995. The Oslo Peace Accords, to which he had been instrumental, required strong political leadership and authority to sustain. Only Rabin could provide that within Israel. His assassination set back the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This might have happened anyway, but certainly, had Rabin lived, there would have been a clearer chance at consolidating a long-term solution to this issue.
These brief examples serve as a reminder of how quickly and how much things can change (there are no rules, of course). At each of these points in time, history seemed to flow or at least to point in a particular, well-set direction. The “great men” at the forefront of events were widely expected, for good or ill, to continue their careers at least for a number of years.
It was difficult to imagine the world without them, in that moment, as it is today for us with respect to the likes of Putin or Xi. Yet if anything is constant in this world, it is that things change. So even when our predicaments look truly grim there should be no room for despair: as with the death of Ögedei, we might simply get lucky at the very last moment even if all else fails, including our leaders. Carry on!
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人類史上面積最大的六個帝國 - TOI Lifestyle Desk
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或許在面積上排不上前六位，但是在文化上，應該有羅馬帝國的一席之地。
6 Largest Empires In Human History
TOI Lifestyle Desk, The Times of India, 05/21/24
Empires that changed history
The corridors of history are replete with empires that have, at various times, stretched their dominions across vast swathes of the globe. These empires were not only political entities but also catalysts for cultural, economic, and technological exchanges. They often left a lasting impact on the regions they controlled, shaping the course of history. This article explores six of the largest empires in human history, each unique in its rise to power and influence.
The British Empire
At its zenith, the British Empire was the largest empire in history, governing over a quarter of the world’s land area. It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire, highlighting its global span. Established through trade, colonization, and conquest, the empire facilitated the English language’s spread and various cultural influences. The British Empire played a pivotal role in shaping modern economics, politics, and international relations.
The Mongol Empire
The Mongol Empire, forged by the unyielding will of Genghis Khan, was the largest contiguous land empire. Stretching from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan, it covered significant parts of Eurasia and profoundly influenced the region’s history. The Mongols were known for their military prowess, innovative tactics, and a system of communication that enabled rapid coordination across vast distances.
The Russian Empire
Spanning three continents, the Russian Empire was a formidable force in global affairs. It reached its peak in the early 18th century under the rule of Peter the Great, who sought to modernize Russia and expand its territory. The empire’s vastness contributed to a diverse cultural heritage and played a central role in the geopolitical dynamics of its time.
The Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire was among the first global empires, setting the stage for European overseas expansion. It amassed vast territories in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The empire’s wealth fueled the Spanish Golden Age, a period of flourishing arts and literature. However, its legacy is also stained by the profound demographic loss of natives where Spanish colonization occurred and cultural changes which it brought to the so called "New World" which had already been inhabited.
The Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912. It was the fifth largest empire in history, controlling modern-day China, Mongolia, and Taiwan. The Qing Dynasty was known for its administrative sophistication and for promoting a period of relative peace and prosperity, known as the “High Qing Era.”
The Umayyad Caliphate (奧瑪雅王朝，或譯為伍麥葉王朝)
The Umayyad Caliphate, established after the death of Prophet Muhammad, rapidly expanded across the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe. It was instrumental in spreading Islam and creating and nurturing a golden age of scientific and cultural advancements. The caliphate’s capital, Damascus, became a center for learning and the arts.
The profound influence on civilizations
Throughout history, powerful empires have exerted a profound influence on civilizations as they ascend and decline. Impacting trade routes, cultural evolution, and historical trajectories, their legacy shapes the social fabric of nations, reshaping the global narrative. Essential for understanding the interconnectedness of civilizations, these empires, from the Mongol Empire bridging East and West to the Ottomans' expansive reach, swiftly alter human history, leaving an indelible mark on the world's course of development.
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蘇西迪底斯會怎麼看？--Mark Fisher
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費雪教授應該是政治學學者；下文從馬克思《拿破崙三世的霧月十八日》切入，以蘇西迪底斯《伯羅奔尼撒戰爭史》為主軸，看起來在討論「以史為鑑」或「歷史教訓」的適用性。
我一時三刻還真沒看懂他整篇大作的「意旨」；例如，他在「全文提示」中說的 “the real lessons” 指的是啥子？不過，文風俏皮帶刺之外，費雪教授點出幾個有趣的議題；先行刊出，腦子管用的時候再仔細琢磨、琢磨。
索引：
Ambraciot：屬於古希臘城市Ambracia的
apocryphal：杜撰的，可疑的，不足為信的
bastardise：此處：亂搞，胡亂拼湊
consulting firm McKinsey：世界最大的諮詢管理公司之一；此處為揶揄意
curated：精心策畫的
déjà vu：似曾相識
exegesis：注解，導讀，詮釋
gloss：此處：狡辯，掩飾，花言巧語；光澤
metropole：殖民地的母國：如羅馬帝國的母國為義大利
parse：解析，推敲
shower thoughts：洗澡時冒出來的想法，突發奇想
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte：《拿破崙三世的霧月十八日》(法國共和日曆第八年霧月十八日；對應於公曆11/09/1799。該日曆為法國大革命後所頒布；使用時間為1793 – 1805：巴黎公社於1871年使用了18天。)
unuttered thoughts：言外之意，字裏行間
What would Thucydides say?
In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian.
Mark Fisher, Edited by Sam Haselby, 04/26/24
In the weeks after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power and declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, Karl Marx sat down to write a history of the present. The purpose of this work was straightforward. Marx wanted to understand how the class struggle in France had ‘made it possible for a grotesque and mediocre personality to play a hero’s part.’ Much of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852/69), as the work would be known, accordingly consisted of fine-grained political and economic analysis. But Marx opened in a more philosophical vein. After quipping that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, he reflected upon the role that historical parallelism played in shaping revolutionary action:
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.
This tendency had pervaded European history, Marx thought, and occasionally served the ends of progress. The cloak of Roman republicanism, for instance, had helped French society lurch blindly forward during the revolution of 1789. In the present case, however, the appropriated symbolism of that earlier revolution served no higher purpose than to veil a grifter’s power grab in a more compelling guise.
Marx points toward one of the more paradoxical tendencies of modern political life: the more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels. We do so, however, not only to legitimate new regimes. Just as often, historical analogies are invoked to explain, predict and condemn. The past decade alone offers a trove of examples. Among them, the use of ‘fascism’ to characterise Right-wing populist movements has generated the most heat, giving rise to a multifaceted debate about the legitimacy of historical analogy as a mode of political analysis. But there are others that have occasioned less self-reflection. In reckoning with the possibility of open conflict between the United States and China, for instance, foreign policy experts have routinely likened the escalating tension to the Cold War, the First World War, and even the Peloponnesian War. Similarly, in the early days of COVID-19, many dealt with the uncertainty of the pandemic by turning to the Spanish Flu, the Black Death, and the Great Plague of Athens for guidance. Something of the sort is also happening in real time with generative AI. How we interpret the risk that it poses hinges in large part on which analogy we favour: will it be most akin to the Industrial Revolution, the nuclear bomb, or – perhaps most horrifying of all – the consulting firm McKinsey?
If many of these parallels seem self-evident, one recurring point of reference does not: Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general and author of History of the Peloponnesian War. Though hardly a household name, he has been a favourite of those intent on doom-scrolling the historical record for relevant exempla. In the first month of the COVID-19 shutdown, for instance, so much was written about his account of the Athenian plague that one prominent scholar deemed Thucydides himself to be a virus. Something comparable could be said of Thucydides’ role in the viral discourse surrounding Sino-American relations. Ever since the early 2010s, when Graham Allison began referring to the stress on global order produced by hegemonic rivalry as ‘Thucydides’ Trap’, foreign policy discussions have themselves often appeared trapped by the need to balance geopolitical analysis with exegesis of an ancient text.
However strange Thucydides’ prominence may seem, the tradition of looking his way in moments of existential crisis is well established. During the American Civil War, for example, his ‘Funeral Oration of Pericles’ served as a model for Abraham Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address, while his account of Athenian defeat helped inspire an overhaul of the US Naval War College curriculum during the war in Vietnam. In Europe, both English and German propagandists excerpted History of the Peloponnesian War during the First World War in support of their causes, and soldiers reported reading Thucydides in the trenches. In subsequent decades, prominent writers in both England and Italy used Thucydides to reflect their concerns over the rise of European fascism.
This cultish appeal has nevertheless come at a cost. While many have tried in earnest to wring wisdom from Thucydides’ text, others have sought little more than an ancient authority for their shower thoughts. Careless glosses and misattributed quotes abound, both in the anarchic spaces of social media and in others that should be held to a higher standard: the website for Harvard’s Belfer Center, for instance, which features an apocryphal quote lifted from the first Wonder Woman movie, or on the desk of the late Colin Powell when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If this should seem a sad fate for any writer, it is a particularly ironic one for Thucydides. He was both a vocal proponent of accurately accounting for the past and a careful analyst of the textured nature of historical repetition. Resistant to simplification and rich in ‘unuttered thoughts’ (to quote Friedrich Nietzsche), Thucydides recognised that an effective understanding of the relationship between past, present and future would be both highly complex and absolutely critical for prudent political judgment. This combination did not bode well for the ancient Athenians, who ended up suffering dearly for their mishandling of historical analogies, and it is not clear that we have the resources to do much better. But we stand to learn more by thinking with Thucydides about the role of historical analogy in political life than by simply pilfering his text in search of such analogies. If nothing else, taking such a tack helps to remind us of the risks involved in abusing specious parallels in the way that we are prone to do.
Thucydides was unusual among classical writers in stating directly what he hoped his readers would gain from his work. He would be content, he says, if History of the Peloponnesian War was deemed ‘useful’ by those who wanted ‘to scrutinise what actually happened and would happen again, given the human condition, in the same or similar fashion’ (my translation). The description nevertheless leaves readers wanting. How exactly such knowledge should prove useful is underspecified, and scholars have long disagreed over what Thucydides expected the utility of his text to be.
Most assume that Thucydides tried to offer his reader a type of foreknowledge that could potentially translate into active control over the politico-historical process. Taken to its extreme, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of ‘political systems users’ manual’, as Josiah Ober put it, capable of creating expert political technicians. Recognising regularities in the historical process, it is thought, should lead to predictive capacity, which in turn allows for political mastery. Proceeding in this fashion, Thucydides takes himself to be training master statesmen capable of solving the fundamental problems of political life.
Others detect a more pessimistic outlook in Thucydides’ stated ambition. They suggest that the lessons on offer are insufficient to produce control over events even if they can help the reader detect regularities in the political process. Unexpected events will often upset our expectations, as the plague did in Athens, and the ignorance of non-experts will often disrupt the translation of technical insight into effective policy. This problem will be particularly acute within a democratic context, where a popular eagerness to apply bastardised versions of such insights may even make matters worse. In this interpretation, Thucydides is ‘useful’ to the extent that he can temper the ambitions of those wishing to impose rational order onto political life. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to minimise our self-harm.
At issue between these two interpretive poles is the basic presumption of applied social science: to what extent can the recognition of recurring patterns translate into effective political policy? Yet, Thucydides was not writing social science as we know it. To the extent that his text articulated anything like fundamental laws of political behaviour, it did so through exemplary instances and carefully curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian War served as a paradigmatic event for Thucydides: a particular instance that revealed general truths. It served this representative role, however, not because it was typical. Rather, it was exemplary because it was uniquely ‘great’. The war would prove useful, in other words, not because of history’s strict repetition, but by the pregnancy of similarity and the reader’s ability to parse analogies effectively.
Thucydides schools his readers in just how difficult such acts of analogical interpretation can be. A series of carefully considered verbal parallels, or what Jacqueline de Romilly has called fils conducteurs (‘guiding threads’), extend through Thucydides’ narrative like a web, ensnaring the reader in a constant and, at times, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Sometimes, repetitions point towards important explanatory insights. But they also suggest likenesses that can lead the reader astray. Time and again, Thucydides confounds the expectations he has created. Even upon rereading, one can feel an internal tension between what one knows to be the case and what one is nonetheless led to expect will happen. Whether it is your first or your 15th read, you can still catch yourself thinking: this time surely Athens will win.
The evident lesson behind all of this is that we must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics. But Thucydides also knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is woven directly into the cultural fabric, a product of the contingencies that shape collective memory. We choose them no more than we choose the language we speak. (Once again, Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’) Some events, such as the Persian Wars in Thucydides’ day or the Second World War in our own, simply loom too large to avoid, and we are easily held captive by the emotional weight of their cultural significance. Thucydides measured this gravitational pull also in terms of ‘greatness’, a concept that he identified closely with the production of collective trauma.
The danger inherent in this, of course, is that emotional resonance is often a poor guide to explanatory power. The most immediately compelling analogies can prove deeply misleading. The most haunting Thucydidean parallelism to highlight this point occurs through the phrase ‘few out of many returned home again’. Thucydides repeats this line three times, each to memorialise a harrowing military defeat: two massive Athenian expeditions, first to Egypt and then to Sicily, and a surprise attack that caught an entire army of Ambraciots asleep in their beds. Thucydides’ verbal repetition tempts the reader into seeing these events as an analogous set. Yet the last of these to occur, the Sicilian disaster, could not have been prevented by learning the lessons of the previous two. Quite the opposite. Rather than suffer from neglect by the metropole, as the Egyptian Expedition had, the Sicilian Expedition failed in large part due to the city’s miscalculated interventions. Rather than profit from the creative generalship of Demosthenes, which had proven decisive in the victory over the Ambraciots, his arrival in Sicily only further exacerbated the carnage.
The seductive pull of ‘great’ events is not an incidental danger to the use of historical analogies. If historians tend to debate the appeal of these parallels primarily in terms of their explanatory value, the motive behind their day-to-day use is arguably more visceral. Analogies serve more as vehicles for generating awe and outrage than for unearthing more nuanced understandings. Yet, even when used merely as rhetorical tools, they can carry serious diagnostic implications.
These implications aren’t always detrimental. Figurative rhetoric can use the resources of collective memory to move people toward better policy when explanatory traction aligns with affective resonance. Thucydides’ Pericles appears exemplary of this. Early in the war, the celebrated Athenian leader faces a crowd wearied by plague and the general miseries of war. In an attempt to steel their resolve, he draws on two coordinated analogies. In the first, he describes the Athenian struggle in terms of a Greek hero overcoming labours in the pursuit of glory. In the second, he likens the democracy’s empire to a tyranny that, in defeat, must confront the widespread hatred it has incurred.
In paralleling the Athenians to two of the most provocative figures in the Greek imagination, Pericles goads the people back to their original resolve with the alternating spikes of pride and fear. And he does so perceptively. Thucydides draws on the same analogical models when characterising Athenian power and political culture in the opening pages of History of the Peloponnesian War. It’s to Pericles’ further credit that he doesn’t simply discard the analogies after they’ve served his immediate purposes. Rather, the need to balance the ‘heroic’ and ‘tyrannical’ elements of the imperial democracy serves as a framing priority for his entire war strategy – a strategy that Thucydides himself explicitly praises.
This is not to say that Periclean policy does not prove costly for the Athenians. It serves to enhance the devastation of the plague by demanding that the Athenians crowd together behind their city walls, thereby exacerbating Athenian deaths. But the costs of this policy do not arise from Pericles’ misuse of analogical rhetoric. The experience of the plague only proves a point that should already be obvious, namely, that using analogies well cannot save us from forces beyond our control. Elsewhere, however, Thucydides makes it clear that the misuse of analogies can actually invite catastrophes on par with those suffered by chance.
Nowhere is this message more clearly drawn than in Athens’ climactic defeat in Sicily. The toll of this disaster is hard to overstate: not only did Athenian casualties approach those of the plague, the mishap so shook the city’s faith in popular rule that an oligarchy temporarily displaced the democracy in its aftermath. Many events contributed to this grim result. Yet Thucydides’ own explanation of why the expedition failed began with a story about an event that had occurred nearly a century before the Athenian fleet set sail.
Harmodius and Aristogeiton were towering figures in Athenian civic legend. As ‘the Tyrannicides’, they were credited with putting an end to Athenian despotism and instigating the transition towards democracy. For this, they were heroised and memorialised with unparalleled reverence. And yet, Thucydides tells his reader, their reputation was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what they’d actually done. Far from being civic benefactors or even tyrannicides, Thucydides reveals, they’d murdered the tyrant’s younger brother in a romantic rivalry gone wrong. The consequences of this murder were devastating: the previously beneficent ruler spiralled into paranoia, resulting in increasingly harsh treatment of the Athenian people.
Athenian lore had gotten everything backward: the so-called Tyrannicides, far from saving the city from despotism in an act of self-sacrifice, had caused this despotic turn for eminently personal reasons. Nevertheless, it was this false version of the story that weighed heavily on the minds of the Athenians as they made a series of bad decisions in the early days of the Sicilian Expedition. It did not do so unprompted. Rather, this misunderstanding proved a useful tool among aspiring elite leaders within Athens, each of whom was eager to clear a path for their own ascent. Standing in the way of most, however, was the Sicilian Expedition’s most talented general, a brash and charismatic leader named Alcibiades. When a series of sacrilegious acts occurred on the eve of the expedition, Alcibiades’ rivals pushed the (false) Tyrannicide parallel, suggested a tyrannical coup was afoot, and implicated Alcibiades. There was no evidence for this, but in the resultant hysteria it did not matter. Faced with certain prosecution, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, turning the tide of war against Athens.
This elite manipulation of popular misunderstanding effectively inverts Pericles’ constructive use of heroic and tyrannical parallels. By painting Alcibiades as a potential tyrant, his opponents easily conjured up an exaggerated state of fear that allowed them to achieve their private ends at the expense of the city. In the end, Thucydides shows that the analogy between past and present was indeed illuminating: personal rivalries once again led to civic casualties that resulted in brutal and self-undermining politics. But the cost of this collective delusion would become clear only later. Hindered by increasingly poor generalship and an opponent emboldened by Spartan help, ‘few out of many’ would make it home from Sicily, and Athens would soon devolve into civil war.
In May 1861, Marx found himself increasingly depressed about the American Civil War. The best he could do to mitigate his low mood, he told a friend, was to read Thucydides. ‘These ancients,’ he explained, ‘always remain new.’ They do so, we might add, by forever remaining old, thereby creating the space we need to find ourselves in the contrast.
It is tempting to see Thucydides’ digression about the tyrannicide analogy as the key to understanding his historical method. Had the Athenians only understood the truth of their own history, we might think, they wouldn’t have made such easy prey for self-serving politicians. In this vein, Thucydides’ project may seem to be that of saving future generations from comparable mistakes. As the ‘greatest’ conflict to ever beset the Greeks, unique in both its glory and its trauma, the Peloponnesian War would soon usurp the Tyrannicides and the Trojan War as the privileged source of political analogy. As such, it promised unparalleled resources for anyone trying to persuade others to their cause. It is reasonable to think that Thucydides expected his work to hinder the ability of bad actors to abuse this power. At the same time, it is unclear just how far it was in his ability to do so. The Athenians, after all, had everything they needed to realise the truth about the Tyrannicides. What they lacked was the will to scrutinise something that they felt to be intuitively correct. Thucydides could give posterity an account of the Peloponnesian War that might stop it from becoming fodder for false parallels if considered carefully. But he could not thereby prevent opportunists from constructing misleading analogies on its back.
Approaching Thucydides’ text from the angle of historical analogy does not resolve the age-old disagreement between his optimistic and pessimistic readers. It may nevertheless encourage us to recognise that a more realistic approach to political agency must exist somewhere between these two poles. Thucydides intimates that the careful art of drawing fitting analogies, honed as it may be through the diligent study of political history, will assist some to think more clearly about the present. But mastering this art should not be confused with political mastery. The power of ‘great’ events will remain too easily harnessed, and too hard to control, to serve only those who are clear-headed and well-intentioned. Specious analogies will remain a danger for as long as people stand to benefit from them, and their emotional pull will continue to knock even the most astute off balance. And yet, if there’s little chance that political life will ever be freed from distortive thinking, it may still prove less hazardous for those who look toward history as something more than a sourcebook of convenient parallels.
Mark Fisher is assistant professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His research focuses on the history of democratic thought and, especially, on early attempts to understand and theorise Athenian democracy.
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秦始皇和兵馬俑 ----- Arthur Lubow/Sonja Anderson
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請至原網頁觀看照片；並請參看以下視頻：
秦始皇陵兵馬俑為何都不戴頭盔？
兵馬俑真的不是用來陪葬的？
What You Need to Know About China’s Terra-Cotta Warriors and the First Qin Emperor
The thousands of clay soldiers guarding Qin Shi Huang’s tomb are enduring representations of the ruler’s legacy
Arthur Lubow; 07/2009；Updated by Sonja Anderson, 04/19/24
In March 1974, a group of peasants digging a well in China’s drought-parched Shaanxi province unearthed fragments of a clay figure—the first evidence of what would turn out to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of modern times. Near the unexcavated tomb of Qin Shi Huang—who proclaimed himself first emperor of China in 221 B.C.E.—lay an extraordinary underground treasure: an entire army of life-size terra-cotta soldiers and horses, interred for more than 2,000 years.
The site, where Qin Shi Huang’s ancient capital of Xianyang once stood, lies a half-hour drive from traffic-clogged Xi’an, population nine million. It is a dry, scrubby land, planted with persimmon and pomegranate—bitterly cold in winter and scorching hot in summer—and marked by dun-colored hills pocked with caves. But hotels and a roadside souvenir emporium selling five-foot-tall pottery figures suggest that something other than fruit cultivation is going on here.
Over the past 50 years, archaeologists have located some 600 pits, a complex of underground vaults, across a 22-square-mile area. Some are hard to get to, but three major pits are easily accessible, enclosed inside Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, constructed around the discovery site and opened in 1979 as the four-acre Museum of Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horses. In one pit, long columns of warriors, reassembled from broken pieces, stand in formation. With their topknots or caps, their tunics or armored vests, their goatees or close-cropped beards, the soldiers exhibit an astonishing individuality. A second pit inside the museum demonstrates how they appeared when they were found: Some stand upright, buried to their shoulders in soil, while others lie toppled on their backs, alongside fallen and cracked clay horses. The site ranks with the Great Wall and Beijing’s Forbidden City as one of China’s premier tourist attractions.
An aerial view of a pit filled with terra-cotta soldiers Thierrytutin via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0 請至原網頁觀看照片
Specimens unearthed from the pits in Xi’an have stunned audiences around the world. Between 2007 and 2009, the British Museum, Atlanta’s High Museum, California’s Bowers Museum, the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the National Geographic Society Museum in Washington, D.C. all hosted traveling exhibitions featuring original terra-cotta warriors. More recently, the soldiers have made appearances at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and England’s World Museum Liverpool.
Exhibitions have featured statuary—armored officers, infantrymen, and standing and kneeling archers—as well as terra-cotta horses and replicas of intricately detailed bronze chariots, drawn by bronze horses. These artifacts offer a glimpse of the treasure trove that attracts visitors to the Xi’an museum site, where more than 2,000 of the estimated 8,000 warriors have been disinterred so far.
The stupendous find at first seemed to reinforce conventional thinking—that the first emperor had been a relentless warmonger who cared only for military might. As archaeologists have learned, however, that assessment was incomplete. Qin Shi Huang may have conquered China with his army—believed to consist of 500,000-plus men—but he held it together with a civil administration system that endured for centuries. Among other accomplishments, the emperor standardized weights and measures and introduced a uniform writing script.
Qin Shi Huang's terra-cotta army boasts intricate bronze chariots and sculptures of horses. Zossolino via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 請至原網頁觀看照片
Digs have revealed that in addition to the clay soldiers, Qin Shi Huang’s underground realm, presumably a facsimile of the court that surrounded him during his lifetime, is also populated by delightfully realistic waterfowl, crafted from bronze and serenaded by terra-cotta musicians. The emperor’s clay retinue includes terra-cotta officials and even troupes of acrobats, slightly smaller than the soldiers but created with the same methods. “We find the underground pits are an imitation of the real organization in the Qin dynasty,” says Duan Qingbo, head of the mausoleum excavation team. “People thought when the emperor died, he took just a lot of pottery army soldiers with him. Now they realize he took a whole political system with him.”
Qin Shi Huang decreed a mass-production approach; artisans turned out figures almost like cars on an assembly line. Clay, unlike bronze, lends itself to quick and cheap fabrication. Workers built bodies, then customized them with heads, hats, shoes, mustaches, ears and so on, made in small molds. Some of the figures appear so strikingly individual that they seem modeled on real people, though that is unlikely. “These probably weren’t portraits in the Western sense,” says Hiromi Kinoshita, who helped curate the 2007 exhibition at the British Museum. Instead, they may have been aggregate portraits: The ceramicists, says Kinoshita, “could have been told that you need to represent all the different types of people who come from different regions of China.”
The first emperor’s capital, Xianyang, was a large metropolis, where he reportedly erected more than 270 palaces, of which only a single foundation is known to survive. Each time Qin Shi Huang conquered a rival state, he is said to have transported its ruling families to Xianyang, housing the vanquished in replicas of palaces they had left behind. At the same time, the emperor directed construction of his tomb complex; some 720,000 workers reportedly labored on these vast projects.
A 19th-century portrait of Qin Shi Huang Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. A close-up view of a terra-cotta warrior J. Arpon via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0 請至原網頁觀看照片
Upon the death of his father, Yiren, in 246 B.C.E., the future Qin Shi Huang—then a 13-year-old prince named Ying Zheng—ascended the throne of the Qin kingdom. Celebrated for its horsemen, Qin sat on the margin of civilization, regarded by its easterly rivals as a semi-savage wasteland. Its governing philosophy was as harsh as its terrain. Elsewhere in China, Confucianism held that a well-run state should be administered by the same precepts governing a family: mutual obligation and respect. Qin rulers, however, subscribed to a doctrine known as legalism, which rested on the administration of punitive laws.
In his early 20s, Ying Zheng turned for guidance to a visionary statesman, Li Si, who likely initiated many of the sovereign’s accomplishments. Under Li’s tutelage, Ying Zheng introduced a uniform script (thereby enabling subjects of vastly different dialects to communicate). Standardization, a hallmark of the Qin state, was applied to weaponry as well: Should an arrow shaft snap or the trigger on a repeating crossbow malfunction, the component could be easily replaced. The young ruler also presided over the creation of an advanced agricultural infrastructure that incorporated irrigation canals and storage granaries.
With methodical zeal, Ying Zheng set about conquering the warring states that surrounded him in the late third century B.C.E. As his armies advanced, principalities fell. No one could thwart consolidation of an empire that eventually stretched from parts of present-day Sichuan in the west to coastal regions along the East China Sea. Having unified the entire civilized world as he knew it, Ying Zheng in 221 B.C.E. renamed himself, adopting the title of huangdi, or emperor.
He then invested in infrastructure and built massive fortifications. His road network likely exceeded 4,000 miles, including 40-foot-wide speedways with a central lane reserved for the imperial family. On the northern frontier, the emperor dispatched his most trusted general to reinforce and connect existing border barriers, creating a bulwark against nomadic marauders. Made of rammed earth and rubble, these fortifications became the basis for the Great Wall, most of which would be rebuilt in stone and brick during the 15th century under the Ming dynasty.
As the grandeur of his tomb complex suggests, Qin Shi Huang kept an eye on posterity. But he also longed to extend his life on earth—perhaps indefinitely. Alchemists informed the emperor that magical herbs could be found on what they claimed were three Islands of the Immortals in the East China Sea. The emissaries most likely to gain entry to this mystical realm, they asserted, were uncorrupted children. Around 219 B.C.E., Qin Shi Huang reportedly dispatched several thousand youngsters to search for the islands. They never returned. A few years later, the emperor sent three alchemists to retrieve the herbs. One of them made it back, recounting a tale of a giant fish guarding the islands. Legend has it that the emperor resolved to lead the next search party himself; on the expedition, he used a repeating crossbow to kill a huge fish. But instead of discovering life-preserving elixirs on his journey, the emperor apparently contracted a fatal illness.
As he lay dying in 210 B.C.E., 49-year-old Qin Shi Huang decreed that his estranged eldest son, Fusu, should inherit the empire. The choice undercut the ambitions of a powerful royal counselor, Zhao Gao, who believed he could govern the country behind the scenes if a more malleable successor were installed. To conceal Qin Shi Huang’s death—and disguise the stench of a decomposing corpse—until the body returned to the capital, Zhao Gao took on a cargo of salted fish. The delaying tactic worked. Once Zhao Gao managed to return to Xianyang, he was able to operate on his home turf. He managed to transfer power to Ying Huhai (胡亥), a younger, weaker son.
A kneeling archer featured in a exhibition of terra-cotta warriors at the British Museum in 2007 Leon Neal / AFP via Getty Images 請至原網頁觀看照片
Ultimately, however, the scheme failed. Zhao Gao could not maintain order, and the country descended into civil war. The Qin dynasty outlived Qin Shi Huang by only four years. The second emperor died by suicide; Zhao Gao eventually was killed. Various rebel forces coalesced into a new dynasty, the Western Han.
For archaeologists, one indicator that Qin rule had collapsed suddenly was the extensive damage to the terra-cotta army. As order broke down, marauding forces raided the pits where clay soldiers stood guard and plundered their real weapons. Raging fires, possibly set deliberately, followed the ransacking, weakening support pillars for wooden ceilings, which crashed down and smashed the figures. Some 2,000 years later, archaeologists discovered charring on the walls of one pit.
Throughout recorded Chinese history, the first emperor’s Epang Palace (阿房宫)—located on the Wei River (渭水), south of ancient Xianyang—was synonymous with ostentation. The structure was said to have been the most lavish dwelling ever constructed, with an upper-floor gallery that could seat 10,000 and a network of covered walkways that led to distant mountains to the south.
A view of terra-cotta soldiers in pit one of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum Maros Mraz via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0 請至原網頁觀看照片
“All Chinese people who can read, including middle-school students, believed that the Qin dynasty collapsed because it put so much money into the Epang Palace,” says Duan. “According to excavation work from 2003, we found it was actually never built—only the base. Above it was nothing.” Duan notes that if the palace had been erected and demolished, as historians thought, there would be potsherds (ceramic fragments) and telltale changes in soil color. “But tests found nothing,” he says. “It is so famous a symbol of Chinese culture for so long a time, showing how cruel and greedy the first emperor was—and archaeologists found it was a lie.” Duan also doubts accounts of Qin Shi Huang’s expedition for life-prolonging herbs. His version is more prosaic: “I believe that the first emperor did not want to die. When he was sick, he sent people to find special medicines.”
The emperor’s tomb lies beneath a forested hill, surrounded by cultivated fields about a half-mile from the museum. Out of reverence for an imperial resting place and concerns about preserving what might be unearthed there, the site has never been excavated. According to a description written a century after the emperor’s death, the tomb contains a wealth of wonders, including man-made streambeds contoured to resemble the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, flowing with shimmering, quicksilver mercury that mimics coursing water. (Analysis of soil in the mound has indeed revealed a high level of mercury.)
Answers about the tomb are not likely to emerge anytime soon. “I have a dream that one day science can develop so that we can tell what is here without disturbing the emperor, who has slept here for 2,000 years,” says Wu Yongqi, former director of the original Museum of Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horses. “I don’t think we have good scientific techniques to protect what we find in the underground palace. Especially if we find paper, silk or textiles from plants or animals; it would be very bad if they have been kept in a balanced condition for 2,000 years, but suddenly they would vanish in a very short time.” He cites another consideration: “For all Chinese people, he is our ancestor, and for what he did for China, we cannot unearth his tomb just because archaeologists or people doing tourism want to know what is buried there.”
Whatever future excavations reveal about Qin Shi Huang’s enigmatic nature, some things seem unlikely to change. The emperor’s importance as a seminal figure of history won’t be diminished. And the mysteries that surround his life will likely never be completely resolved.
Arthur Lubow is a journalist who has written for national magazines since 1975 and is the author of Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer.
Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.
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