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歷史學 – 開欄文
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2023/12/28 16:44 瀏覽3,737 |回應24 |推薦3![](https://g.udn.com/community/img/common_all/help.gif) |
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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。
本文於 2025/01/30 23:48 修改第 5 次
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清朝是如何管理南海的? ---- 斟北斗
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2025/02/05 20:19 推薦1 |
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請至原網頁觀看相關照片、地圖等。 清朝是如何管理南海的?巡邏到泰國灣,奠定了中國海疆的基礎 斟北斗,北斗維斟,2025年02月04日 南海到底是什麼時候納入到中國的版圖?這是一個循序漸進的過程。早在元朝時期,就已經在西沙群島設置了天文觀測站。而到了清朝,南沙群島已經在中國水師的巡邏範圍之內,說明南海已經基本納入到了中國的海疆版圖。到了近代,西方殖民者東來,不斷搶佔東南沿海的據點,南海也成為了列強爭奪的地區。那麼,清朝是如何維護南海主權的呢? 一,清朝將南海納入中國版圖之內 在古代,中國人將南海稱為“漲海”。在宋朝之前,人們到南海打漁、制鹽、出海貿易,於是開始在南海的一些島嶼上修建了臨時的住所。不過,當時國家的行政管轄範圍還未涉及南海,周邊其他國家的漁民也同樣可以在南海自由航行、打漁和制鹽,修建臨時住所。因此,這時候的南海處於發現階段。 到了宋朝,開始對西沙群島進行管理,根據《武經總要》記載,北宋的巡邏船隻到達了西沙群島。另外,唐宋時期已經將確立南海的海內和海外的界限,宋代官方繪製的《諸蕃圖》認為交洋與竺嶼是外國之境,“石床、長沙”,便是中國之境,其界限就是竺嶼,也就是納土納群島。周去非《嶺外代答》記載“正北行舟,曆上、下竺與交洋,乃至中國之境。” 元朝時期,在西沙群島了設置了南海測影站。以上的資訊都標誌著南海開始被納入到中國的版圖。不過,宋元時期的國家只能管轄到西沙,對於更加遙遠的中沙、南沙群島則鞭長莫及。到了明朝前期,鄭和下西洋,會在南海一些較大的島嶼上修建補給站,其中最重要的是納土納群島。不過,鄭和下西洋停止後,明朝就沒有管理南海,等於是放棄了。 北緯十三度的大致位置 到了清朝,中國的對南海的管轄得到空前的加強。根據記根據《崖州志》的記載,清朝的南海歸屬於崖州管轄,崖州的水師會定期到南海巡邏,而且巡邏的範圍非常大,北到海南島,南到占城和暹羅,已經超過了今天“九段線”的範圍。 崖州協水師營分管洋面,東自萬州東澳港起,西至昌化縣四更沙止,共巡洋面一千里。南面直接暹羅、占城夷洋,西接儋州營洋界,東接海口營洋界”——《崖州志》
清朝的一些地方誌記載了清朝水師在南海巡邏的事蹟。如《同安縣誌》記載了福建同安人吳陞在康熙年間擔任廣東水師副將,他帶領水師巡邏南海,“調瓊州,自瓊崖,曆銅鼓,經七洲洋、四更沙,周遭三千里,躬自巡視,地方寧謐。”七洲洋,大概在越南以東中南部位置。清朝外交家郭嵩燾記載“在赤道北一十三度,過瓦蕾拉山,安南東南境也,海名七洲洋”。這裡的北緯13度就是一個比較準確的位置了。 大清萬年一統天下全圖》的南海部分 清朝的官方文獻明確記載南海諸島是中國的領土。1731年的《廣東通志》記載就:“萬州三曲水環泮宮,六連山障,州治千里長沙(西沙群島)、萬里石塘(南沙群島),煙波隱見。”可見千里長沙和萬里石塘是歸屬于萬州管轄。在清代官方的地圖中,也明確地把千里長沙、萬里石塘列入清帝國版圖之內。這類地圖有1755年以前的《皇清各直省分圖》、1767年的《大清萬年一統天下全圖》、1810年的《大清萬年一統地理全圖》、1817年的《大清一統天下全圖》等。 二,據理力爭,收回東沙島 東沙群島,是南海四組群島中最靠近大陸的一組島礁,其中東沙島面積1.8平方公里,在南海中僅次於永興島。東沙島古稱“珊瑚洲”,清代時期被稱為“東沙”。東沙群島資源豐富,歷代都有中國漁民在此生活、開發,以此地發現多個王朝的錢幣以及中國人的132座墳墓為證。 甲午中日戰爭後,日本割占了中國臺灣,並試圖以此為跳板繼續向大陸和南海擴張。1901年,日本商人凱撒吉次發現了東沙群島的土壤含有磷質,就開始到東沙島掠取資源。到1907年,凱撒吉次帶領200多名士兵登陸東沙島,驅逐了這裡的中國漁民,毀掉了中國人修建的廟宇,挖掘了中國人的墳墓,企圖毀滅該島屬於中國的證據。 日本人又在島上建設了小碼頭、小鐵路、淡水廠,設電話、吸水管,並立一木牌,一面寫“明治四十年八月”,另一面寫“凱撒島”。可見,日本企圖永久佔領此島,並試圖改名為“凱撒島”。 消息傳出,全國報刊紛紛刊登。兩江總督端方和兩廣總督張人駿得知後,立即商量對策,最終決定派遣一支艦隊到東沙調查一下具體的情況。當時清朝的南洋艦隊正在接待美國艦隊,不能抽身,因此直到1909年,端方才派遣“飛鷹”號輪船到東沙查勘。為了進一步瞭解情況,端方在二月再次派遣輪船到東沙調查,並搜集到了日本欺淩中國漁民、強佔東沙的證據。 1909年2月十六日,兩廣總督張人駿向日本駐粵領事瀨川淺之進提交了照會。日本方面則說該島是“無主荒地”,需要中國提供地方誌來證明該島屬於中國才可以交還。張人駿拿出了日本人拆毀廟宇、毀掉墳墓的證據,但是日本方面堅持要清朝拿出地方誌作為證明。於是,清朝政府開始廣泛地搜集資料,最終在英國官方出版的《中國海指南》中發現證據,該書將東沙島記載為“粵雜澳十三”,也就是屬於廣東管轄的島嶼之一。另外,又在王之春《柔遠記》中發現了證據,並且和《中國海指南》的記載吻合。 日本見清朝拿出了證據,只能承認該島屬於中國,但是卻要求保護島上的日本財產,認為一旦遷走,損失很大。張人駿聽後,嚴厲斥責到: “以我國漁業,無端被逐,傷損甚巨,應作何辦法。”日本方面無言以對,又提出允許日本經營,進行租借。張人駿則強硬要求日本人趕緊撤離,不然就會強制驅逐,並且索要日本造成的經濟損失和運磷肥的賠償。 最終,雙方達成了協議,中國出資16萬元買下東沙島上的日本資產,而日本方面則賠償中國的損失3萬元。11月,日本人正式從東沙島上撤離,清朝開始派遣士兵駐守東沙島。1910年,清朝在東沙島設立“管理東沙委員會”,正式進行行政管理。 清朝收復東沙島發現在清朝末期,這時候距離清朝滅亡已經只有2年了。在這種情況下,端方和張人駿能夠據理力爭,最終收復了東沙島,實在已經不容易,他們的功績無論如何也是不可磨滅的。收復東沙後,清朝也認識到了南海島嶼的重要性,開始組織有計劃、有規模的南海維權活動。 三,清朝加強對西沙群島的管理 1909年三月,張人駿擔心西沙群島會出現類似的情況,於是派遣吳敬榮到西沙群島複勘。吳敬榮這次勘得西沙群島有15個島嶼,認為:“其地居瓊崖東南,適當歐洲來華之要衝,為南洋第一重門戶,若任其荒而不治,非惟地利之棄,甚為可惜,亦非所以重領土而保海權也。” 隨後,張人駿上報清廷,提出設立籌辦西沙島事務處。籌辦西沙島事務處成立之後,擬定了《複勘西沙島入手辦法大綱》,提出了一系列的措施,主要由:(1)對各島的基本資訊進行勘測,並繪製地圖;(2)選擇其中較為適合的島嶼修建廠屋,馬路、鐵軌等;(3)勘察磷質礦藏;(4)勘察海底資源,採取海底珊瑚和各種海石。(5)勘察海產資源,採取玳瑁、龜、蚌及各種魚類。(6)察驗土性,以備種植。 1909年5月,張人駿派遣吳敬榮和水師提督李准、廣東補用道李哲浚等帶領170多人到西沙群島考察、測繪,一共考察了15個島嶼,在6月才返回廣州。此次考察,中國的國旗首次在西沙群島上升了起來,這是中國對西沙群島主權的重申。考察隊按照原計劃繪製西沙群島的總圖和分圖,並進行了重新命名,這些命名基本沿用到了今天。 清朝的此次行動在國際上獲得了認可,“其後航海各書,稱其地為中國領土”。英國出版的文章寫道“西沙群島有兩個主要群島,還有一些小島及暗礁,1909年中國政府將其列入版圖,並經常有船前往巡視。”日本的《帕拉塞爾群島磷礦調查報告》中說:“1909年中國政府把該群島歸於中國所有”。 永興島 中沙群島和南沙群島距離中國大陸較遠,但是清朝也在試圖維護其主權。1867年英國一艘航道測量船到南沙群島考察,記載“俱有海南漁民之足跡,以捕取海參蚧貝為活,頗多長年留居於此”。1883年,德國的船隻到南沙群島進行非法調查,遭到了清朝的抗議。直到從清朝到民國,南沙群島的居民基本都是中國人,西方諸多史料也有記載。 清朝對南海的管理,確立了中國的南海海疆範圍,為民國時期的南海管理奠定了基礎。民國時期的“十一段線”和新中國的“九段線”都在清朝管理範圍之內確定,有一定的法理依據。清朝不僅奠定了中國疆域的基礎,還奠定了海疆的範圍,其歷史貢獻不可遺忘。 本人收集了大量的地圖資源,包括中國歷代古地圖和世界古地圖、中國和世界的歷史地理地圖、中國各省的地圖大全等,總量達到了330G。對地圖感興趣,可以識別以下的二維碼進行瞭解。 北斗維斟 客觀評價歷史,深度解讀文化,歡迎你的關注
本文於 2025/02/05 20:20 修改第 1 次
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撲克牌簡史 -- Paul Lenz
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2025/01/30 16:48 推薦1 |
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有趣的歷史小品。
A history of… playing cards There is a good reason that the Ace of Spades is known as the 'death card'… Paul Lenz, 01/11/25 I have held playing cards in my hands countless thousand times over the decades, but until today it never occurred to me to wonder where and when they came from. It turns out that they have a long and fascinating history which I will share with you now! Mamluk kanjifah playing cards (Wikipedia CC-BY-4.0) 請至原網頁查看圖片 Playing cards were probably invented in China during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) though they were rather different to the ones that we are familiar with today. There is a reference to something called the ‘leaf game’ (葉子戲) being played by Princess Tongchang in 868 CE (同昌公主) but it is unclear exactly what these leaves were. We know that this game often involved drinking – it was reported that the Emperor Muzong went on a 25-day drinking spree in the year 969 and on New Year’s Eve (26th February) “he played the game of leaves with his ministers”. This game would have been yezi ge (Rules of Leaves) but as long ago as 1067 CE it was recorded that there was no one alive who remembered how to play the game. It is thought that these early cards were used in conjunction with dice, or were simply drawn at random and the recipients had to perform the forfeits (generally consuming alcohol) that were indicated upon them. Early in the second millennium domino cards emerged; these were, as the name suggests, paper equivalents of domino tiles, and as such very different from modern playing cards. The true forerunners of today’s cards were most likely Chinese money cards which, significantly, had four different suits: cash (single coins), strings (of cash), myriads (of strings) and tens of myriads. These cards were combined to form a deck of 38 cards: * Cash: 9 cards from 9 to 1 cash * Strings: 9 cards, 9–1 * Myriads: 9 cards, 9–1 * Tens of myriads: 11 cards, from 20 to 100 myriads, plus 1,000 myriads and a ‘myriad myriads’. These were used to play a trick-taking game called Madiao which the scholar Lu Rong (1436–1494) (陸容) recalls being teased about due to his lack of familiarity with the rules when he was a government student in Kunshan. There is something of an annoying lacuna in the history here, for while the earliest Chinese record of such a suited deck is from the 15th century we know that playing cards had spread from China to the Middle East by the 13th century. This does suggest that the cards used in the leaf game or similar pastimes were likely suited too. The earliest surviving playing cards are four Egyptian fragments which date from the 12th and 13th centuries and are known as Mamluk cards as they date from the Mamluk Sultanate which ruled Egypt and the wider Levant from the early 13th century to the mid-16th century. An almost complete deck (actually a number of different packs combined to make a full set after cards had been lost) of very similar design was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and dates from the 15th century. This deck is essentially identical to the ones that we used today. It contains 52 cards, 13 each of four suits: polo sticks, coins, swords and cups. Each suit consists of 10 pip (number) cards and three court cards: malik (king), nā'ib malik (viceroy or deputy king), and thānī nā'ib (second or under-deputy). These cards made their way from Egypt into Europe most likely sometime in the mid-13th century. Most of the earliest references to playing cards in Europe relate to, err, laws banning them! In Florence in 1377 there was an ordinance that refers to “a certain game called nabbie, newly introduced in these parts” and goes on to say that “[playing] cards were to be treated just as strictly as gambling.” The same year in Paris an ordinance prohibited “card-play in contexts clearly directed at the working classes”. Interestingly a similar ordinance from eight years earlier makes no mention of playing cards, which suggests they were relatively new on the scene. The suits of these early European cards were the same as the Mamluk decks, with one tweak – as polo was effectively unknown in Europe at the time1 the polo stick suit was changed into batons or clubs. Now is probably an appropriate time to have a little bit of a diversion about playing card suits. Before researching this piece I assumed, naive anglophone that I am, that everyone used playing cards with the same suits – clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. I was totally wrong. Latin suits with coins, batons (clubs), cups, and swords are still used in Italy, Spain and Portugal. In the 15th century manufacturers in German-speaking countries modified these, specifically Swiss-Germans, who invented their own suits of shield, roses, acorn and bells around 1450 (and again these are still used). Non-Swiss German speakers tweaked these around 1460 swapping out the roses and shields for hearts and leaves. Some time around 1480 the French derived their suits of trèfles (clovers or clubs ♣), carreaux (tiles or diamonds ♦), cœurs (hearts ♥) and piques (pikes or spades ♠), and these ‘French suits’ have been used in the English-speaking world ever since. Another point of variation between countries is the nature of the court (or ‘face’) cards. In the original Mamluk decks these three characters were all male, and this was copied for the early European decks, but tweaked a little so that there was a seated ‘king’ for the highest value card followed by an upper marshal (who held the symbol of the suit upwards) and lower marshal (similarly downwards) – typically these two characters were on foot, rather than seated. These roles still persist in German decks as Ober and Unter cards. The Queen first appeared as a card in Italian tarot decks, and was briefly included in some German decks in the 14th century before being discarded but then fully adopted by the French around 1500. 表單的頂端
Deck celebrating the union of Brittany and France with Spanish suits but has queens instead of knights (Antoine de Logiriera of Toulouse, c. 1500) 請至原網頁查看圖片 Playing cards have been regarded with a degree of suspicion by authorities for much of their history due to their associations with gambling and drinking – it is no coincidence that some of the earliest references to them relate to their prohibition. The English, rather than imposing bans upon the playing of cards, instead saw them as a means of generating money for the government. On 20th July 1615 Sir Richard Coningsby was awarded the right to tax all manufactures of playing cards, as Lord Thomas Howard, first Earl of Suffolk and first Baron Howard De Walde (1561–1626), cheerily reported: After my heartie commendations, whereby it hath pleased his Majestie to direct a Privy Seal to me, touching the imposition of five shillings upon every grosse of Playing Cards that shall be Imported into this Kingdome or the Dominions thereof by vertue of his Majestie’s Letters Patents granted to Sir Richard Coningsby knight under the Great Scale of England. In regard whereof These are to wil and require you to take notice thereof and not to suffer any merchant to make any entry of Playing-Cards until the same impositions be payed according to the same Letters patents Provided that the Patentees give caution for maintayning the Custome and Import according to a Medium thereof to be made as in such cases is used: And so having signified his Majestie’s pleasure to you in that behalfe I bid you heartily farewell. Your loving Friend, Tho. SUFFOLKE. Less than a century later the rate was increased by Queen Anne to sixpence a pack as she sought to raise more income to support the army. This tax was set to run for 32 years, starting on 11th June 1711, and all card manufactures had to register the address of their business operations. Ostensibly this increase was to reduce levels of gambling but not everyone was convinced by the approach:2 If any of your Honours hope by this Tax to suppress expensive Card-playing, It is answered, That the Common sort who play for innocent diversion will by this tax be only hinder’d ; for those sharp gamesters who play for money but do not use the Twentieth part of the Cards sold, will not by this Tax be discouraged; for those who play for many Pounds at a game will not be hindered by paying 12d. per pack. Amazingly the tax on playing cards continued in the UK until 1960! You may think that this was a fairly trivial thing, not taken too seriously, but you would be dead wrong. Initially card printers had to use an official hand-stamp on the Ace of Spades card, but from the mid-18th century onwards the system changed. Manufactures would print decks of 51 cards and then purchase what was termed a ‘Duty Ace’ from the Stamp Office to complete the set. These Aces of Spades had incredibly intricate designs to make them hard to forge – which is why this card is distinct from other aces in the deck to this day. In 1804 an Act of Parliament reaffirmed that forging such cards to evade duty was a felony, and if you were convicted of a felony the punishment was typically… death! And people did receive it, as this article from the General Evening Post for 24th September 1805 recounts: Richard Harding was capitally indicted for forging and counterfeiting certain stamps, or Stamp Office marks, of the Ace of Spades, on playing cards, and vending and uttering the same knowng them to be forged and counterfeited, contrary to the statute of the 44th of the King. This was a trial of considerable interest, carried on at the prosecution of the Commissioners of Stamp Duties. The prisoner was a cardmaker, in a most eminent and respectable line of trade, and carried on his business at two different houses, licensed for the purpose, viz. in Hereford-street, Oxford-road, and in Green Street, Grosvenor-square. The suspicions against the prisoner were excited in the Commissioners by the very small number of stamps he took out, in proportion to the extensive line of business he carried on; in consequence of which they employed persons to purchase different quantities of cards at his house, from the examination of which the forgeries were detected. John Rivett, a Bow Street Officer, deposed, that he went with Carpmeal and Miller, on the 25th June, to Hereford-street, and apprehended the prisoner, his apprentice, and another servant of his. Nothing particular was found there; went to Leadbeater’s, and there found two copperplates of the ace of spades, and some paper, on the top of a rolling press. Went also to Skelton’s, and there found, in the room behind the yard, an iron fly press, two rowllers of a rolling-press, a flannel jacket, a. red-ink ball, and a marble slab; on searching the dust hole below, they found the remainder of the rolling-press, and the plates hid under ground in the garden; in the back room there were three gross of packs of cads made up, but without the aces of spades. On the 9th of July they went again to Leadbeater’s, and found the plates, with aces of spades in the privy. In the house of Mr. Shingler they found, in a box with foul linen, a roll of papers containing impressions of the ace of spades. An Officer of the Stamp Office proved that this parcel contained 3,000 impressions of the ace of spades. The Distributor of Stamps proved that the ace of spaces he delivers out to the card-makers are always twenty on a sheet; and consequently no aces not so printed have been printed at the Stamp Office. Here closed the evidence for the prosecution; the prisoner adduced no evidence to disprove any one of the charges, but a number of most respectable tradesmen from his own neighbourhood, who knew him for a series of years gave him a most excellent character. The Jury, after a short consultation, found a verdict Guilty, Death. —Aged 35. Playing cards also had a criminal association in Japan in the late 19th century. Most form of gambling were banned, but doing so with hanafuda (花札, ‘flower cards’) was permitted and there was a strong demand for these cards from yakuza-run gambling dens. Most card manufactures declined to print these cards, not wishing to be tainted by the association with lawlessness. One company however, founded in 1889, saw this gap in the market as a way to make money and they had a number of very profitable years doing so. They then moved into mass-producing regular cards and in the decades since have diversified their business operations significantly. You’ve probably heard of them – the company is called Nintendo… 1 While today the sport of polo may be considered to be largely the preserve of the British and Argentinian upper-classes, it was invented in Persia more than 2,000 years ago and the British only really started playing it in India in the 19th century. 2 Annoyingly I can’t find the original source for this quote – it is taken from a book published in 1879. 這篇文章被歸類於 “The History of Things”。
本文於 2025/01/30 23:48 修改第 2 次
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美國三大刺殺事件檔案解密 -- Michael Loria
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2025/01/24 17:31 推薦2 |
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調查檔案解密並不等於公佈真相: 1. 官方調查未必觸及到所有相關動機、細節、和案情。 2a. 調查員可能選擇性隱匿上述三者; 2b. 上主管官員可能選擇性刪除上述三者; 2c. 主管官員可能選擇性竄改或無中生有上述三者。 Trump's release of assassination docs opens window into nation's most debated mysteries Michael Loria, USA TODAY, 01/24/25 A trove of long-classified government documents concerning some of the most politically charged killings in modern American history — including the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy — could finally be made available to the public. But that's just the start of the latest saga surrounding the killings, which have sparked fascination, conspiracy theories, and history-changing debate for decades. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at declassifying government documents related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, his brother and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The order essentially requires the nation's security organizations to create plans to release the records.
The full findings of the government investigations into the three killings have been hidden for decades, sparking wide-ranging speculation and preventing a sense of closure for many Americans. All three men were national and international icons whose assassinations — and the theories swirling around them — became the stuff of books, movies, controversy, and the pages of history itself. “A lot of people were waiting for this . . . for years, for decades," said Trump in signing the release of the documents. “Everything will be revealed.” Tragedy in Dallas: JFK assassination on Nov. 22, 1963 The shock of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 still echoes more than half a century later. John F. Kennedy, known for both his glamour and steering the country through the closest it ever came to nuclear war, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. He was shot and killed as his presidential motorcade brought him along a downtown city street and as he waved to adoring bystanders from the open-roofed car. Police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald less than an hour later. But Oswald himself was killed on live TV just two days later as police were transferring him to a county jail. Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, acted alone on an impulse, the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, concluded. The commission ruled that Oswald also acted alone. The JFK assassination sent the nation into mourning and shook it to its core, as Americans searched for answers. Hundreds of books have been written and documentaries produced, with bits and pieces of information emerging to this day. Many regard the commission’s work as a government-orchestrated coverup and doubts have been raised over who killed John F. Kennedy have persisted. Conspiracy theorists lay the blame on everyone from Cuba — at the heart of the nuclear missile crisis — to the CIA itself. The wide-ranging theories over Kennedy’s death - how many shooters were involved, how many bullets - became so ingrained in popular culture that they made it onto the comedy series Seinfeld. MLK assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968 King, whose work furthering the Civil Rights Movement is honored with a federal holiday, was killed on the balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. The Atlanta preacher was visiting the city to march alongside striking workers. On the evening of the assassination, he was preparing to leave for dinner at the home of a local minister. He stepped outside to speak with colleagues in the parking lot below and was shot in the face by an assassin. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. But Ray later tried to withdraw his confession and said he was set up by a man named Raoul. He maintained until his death in 1998 that he did not kill King. A Memphis tavern owner and a former FBI agent both also claimed a figure named Raoul was behind the killing, according to the Department of Justice. Loyd Jowers, a former Memphis tavern owner, claimed 25 years after the murder that he participated in a mafia-linked conspiracy to kill King. Jowers also linked Memphis police and Raoul to the assassination, the Justice Department said. Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent, also claimed in 1998 that after King’s assassination he found some papers in Ray’s car that mentioned Raoul as well as figures linked to the Kennedy assassination. Wilson said the papers were stolen from him by someone who later worked in the White House, according to the Justice Department. RFK killed in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968 Robert F. Kennedy never achieved the political heights of his older brother. But he was no less a beloved figure for his championing of civil rights. He served as his brother’s attorney general and as a senator. He was killed in Los Angeles where he had gone for the California Democratic primary, just months after declaring his presidential candidacy. The younger Kennedy spent the evening of the election at a suite at the Ambassador Hotel awaiting election results. He eventually went down to a hotel ballroom to thank supporters, then went through the hotel kitchen after being told it was a shortcut to a press room. An assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, killed him as he shook hands with a hotel busboy. Sirhan remains in prison. But some believe the same elements behind the older Kennedy’s assassination also killed the former senator. The presidential candidate’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has long maintained that Sirhan didn’t even shoot his father. The Trump cabinet pick believes Sirhan missed and that instead his dad was shot by a man linked to the CIA. Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@usatoday.com, Extra: More details about JFK assassination keep emerging, even 61 years later
本文於 2025/01/24 17:35 修改第 2 次
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印度朱羅王朝簡介 -- Anirudh Kanisetti
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2025/01/18 20:35 推薦2 |
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請參考:朱羅王朝。 Temples, treasures and trade: The astonishing legacy of India's Chola dynasty Anirudh Kanisetti, BBC, 01/18/25 The Brihadishvara temple, built in the 11th Century by King Rajaraja Chola, is a Unesco World Heritage site 請至原網頁觀看照片 It's 1000 CE - the heart of the Middle Ages. Europe is in flux. The powerful nations we know today - like Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that will become France - do not yet exist. Towering Gothic cathedrals have yet to rise. Aside from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few great urban centres dominate the landscape. Yet that year, on the other side of the globe, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the world's most colossal temple. Completed just 10 years later, it was 216ft (66m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tonnes of granite: second only to Egypt's pyramids in height. At its heart was a 12ft tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, sheathed in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls. In its lamplit hall were 60 bronze sculptures, adorned with thousands of pearls gathered from the conquered island of Lanka. In its treasuries, several tonnes of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums torn from defeated kings across India's southern peninsula, making the emperor the richest man of the era. He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most astonishing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas. His family transformed how the medieval world worked - yet they are largely unknown outside India. Nataraja, today a symbol of Hinduism, was originally a symbol of the Chola dynasty in medieval India 請至原網頁觀看照片 Prior to the 11th Century, the Cholas had been one among the many squabbling powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great body of silt that flows through India's present-day state of Tamil Nadu. But what set the Cholas apart was their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the dynasty's public face. Travelling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick shrines in gleaming stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja's great-aunt – effectively "rebranded" the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, winning them a popular following. Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her temples featured him prominently. The trend caught on. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognisable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a symbol of the Cholas. The emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his great-aunt's taste for public relations and devotion - with one significant difference. Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his armies over the Western Ghats, the range of hills that shelter India's west coast, and burned the ships of his enemies while they were at port. Next, exploiting the internal turmoil of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to set up a lasting presence on the island. At last, he broke into the rugged Deccan Plateau - the Germany to the Tamil coast's Italy - and seized a portion of it for himself. The ruins of a small fort built by the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu 請至原網頁觀看照片 The loot of conquest was lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as the Brihadishvara. In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tonnes of rice annually, from conquered territory across southern India (you'd need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today). This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja's vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states in the world could have conceived of economic control at such scale and depth. The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola's successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company - a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India - that was to come more than 700 years later. In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchants' ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices. While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this to be a Chola "conquest" or "colonisation" in Southeast Asia, archaeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas didn't seem to have a navy of their own, but under them, a wave of Tamil diaspora merchants spread across the Bay of Bengal. By the late 11th Century, these merchants ran independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java. The Brihadishvara is one of the grandest Indian temples 請至原網頁觀看照片 In the 13th Century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even erected a temple to Shiva on the coast of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th Century, Tamils made up the largest chunk of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia. Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled south India a cultural and economic behemoth, the nexus of planetary trade networks. Chola aristocrats invested war-loot into a wave of new temples, which sourced fine goods from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. Copper and tin for their bronzes came from Egypt, perhaps even Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were sourced from Sumatra and Borneo. Tamil temples grew into vast complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and endowed with rice-estates. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported populations of tens of thousands, possibly outclassing most cities in Europe at the time. These Chola cities were astonishingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of India's most urbanised. Many of the state's towns grew around Chola-period shrines and markets. A Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva and built by the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu
These developments in urbanism and architecture were paralleled in art and literature. 請至原網頁觀看照片 Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola-period temples, is perhaps the finest ever made by human hand, the artists rivalling Michelangelo or Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure. To praise Chola kings and adore the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sainthood, history and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you'd get if the Renaissance had happened in south India 300 years before its time. It is not a coincidence that Chola bronzes - especially Nataraja bronzes - can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the world, they are the remnants of a period of brilliant political innovations, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; of titanic shrines and fabulous wealth; of merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today. Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, most recently of Lords of Earth And Sea : A History of The Chola Empire
本文於 2025/01/18 20:36 修改第 1 次
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史實與史感 -- Abby Zinman
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2025/01/10 19:25 推薦1 |
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有趣的小知識;某些只限於美國歷史。請至原網頁參看各項史實的相關照片。
36 Historical Facts That Are So Unbelievable, They're About To Completely Change The Way You See The World "If the entire history of life were crammed into an hour, humans only came into existence in only the last second." Abby Zinman, BuzzFeed Staff, 01/09/25 Even if you're not a history buff, you gotta admit: historical facts are downright fascinating. Specifically, the ones that put TIME into perspective are arguably the best, because they're the most mind-boggling So today, I've combed through some Reddit threads and compiled a list of the most unbelievable historical facts I could find. Get ready to be wowed. Fact-checked, of course, by yours truly. Because TBH, it was hard for me to believe many of these. 1. "It took only 66 years to land on the moon after the Wright Brothers made the first successful flight." 2. "Napoleon III installed a fax machine from his palace to his office in Paris." 3. "While the Great Pyramids were being built, Mammoths still walked the Earth." 4. "Nintendo was founded when Jack the Ripper was still on the loose (1889)." 5. "In Switzerland, women received the right to vote the same year NASA astronauts were driving a buggy on the moon." 6. "The last widow of a surviving Confederate soldier in the Civil War died in 2008 — the same year a Black man was elected President of the US." 7. "The distance between 2023 and 1980 is the same as the distance between 1980 and 1937." 8. "Cleopatra lived closer to the modern age of computers than to the building of the pyramids in Egypt." 9. "The guillotine was still in use when Star Wars came out." 10. "Australia's native people have a culture stretching back over 50,000 years. It's the oldest culture on Earth." 11. "People born on 9/11 can now legally drink alcohol." 12. "Betty White was born before sliced bread." 13. "Oxford University existed centuries before the Aztec Empire was founded." 14. "Humans and sabre-toothed tigers existed at the same time and place: 300,000 years ago in Europe." 15. "New Zealand was only settled by humans around the same time the bubonic plague ravaged Europe in the 1300s." 16. "Picasso and Snoop Dogg were alive at the same time." 17. "All humans that lived before the 1820s had never heard of dinosaurs." 18. "America is 248 years old, and Native American tribes were in 'North America' for over 20,000 years before that." 19. "The oldest hand axes (precursor to modern axes with a handle) are from 1.8 MILLION years ago." 20. "Jurassic Park was released 32 years ago." 21. "When Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was alive. When she died, Ronald Reagan was alive." 22. "Martin Luther King Jr and Anne Frank were born in the same year (1929)." 23. "A man who was present at Lincoln's assassination was on a TV game show in 1956." 24. "The Wild West, the Mafia, World War I, World War II and the Cold War all happened in the same century." 25. "Picasso died in 1973. This means there are colour photos of him and there's a chance he saw The Godfather." 26. "We are closer to the time period when T-Rexes roamed on Earth than T-Rexes were to some other dinosaurs that came before them." 27. "Music made by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and all the other bands from the grunge era can now be described as 'oldies.'" 28. "Currently, we are about as far from World War II as people in World War II were from the US Civil War." 29. "There's a picture of Nancy Pelosi meeting John F. Kennedy when she was younger." 30. "John Tyler, 10th President of the United States, born in 1790, has one grandchild still alive today (one died in 2020, at age 95)." 31. "If the entire history of life were crammed into an hour, humans only came into existence in only the last second." 32. "John Mitchell proposed the idea of black holes way before they were actually discovered, back in 1783." 33. "Ludacris and Charlie Chaplin were alive at the same time." 34. "I always imagine the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx as being from the same time era. But nope, the Sphinx is much older and they are not sure by who or when it was built. They can only agree it predates the Giza pyramid complex." 35. "The oldest currently running locomotive in the UK (Furness Railway No 20) was built when slavery was still legal in the USA." 36. And finally: "There are pubs older than the US." Is your mind blown yet? I hope so. And now it's your turn: what's your favourite historical fact? Tell me in the comments below.
本文於 2025/01/10 19:26 修改第 1 次
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史達林和歐維爾-Miguel Faria
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2024/12/09 11:12 推薦1 |
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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.
本文於 2024/12/09 11:13 修改第 1 次
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照片顯示的薩爾瓦多內戰 ---- Robert Nickelsberg
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2024/11/27 15:14 推薦1 |
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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.
本文於 2024/11/28 00:54 修改第 3 次
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《佛德總統就職50周年》有感
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2024/08/11 12:38 推薦2 |
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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?」
本文於 2024/08/11 12:42 修改第 3 次
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佛德總統就職50周年 -- Frank Witsil
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2024/08/10 15:42 推薦1 |
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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.
本文於 2024/08/10 15:43 修改第 1 次
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羅伯士皮爾敗亡真相 -- Colin Jones
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2024/08/02 16:00 推薦1 |
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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).
本文於 2024/08/02 16:02 修改第 1 次
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