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sexta-feira, 23 de maio de 2014

China: 25 anos do massacre da Praca da Paz Celestial, um depoimento ex-post - Murong Xuecun

I, Too, Will Stand Up for Tiananmen

The New York Times, May 22, 2014

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

By MURONG XUECUN

SYDNEY, Australia — On May 6 three of my friends were arrested in Beijing on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They are Xu Youyu, a scholar and former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Prof. Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy, and Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights attorney.

Three days earlier my three friends and a dozen other people had gathered at Hao Jian’s home to discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago, when a huge number of students and other protesters took to the streets calling for democracy and an end to dictatorial rule and official corruption. The peaceful protests lasted nearly two months, but in the end the government sent troops and tanks, killing several hundred — possibly several thousand — unarmed citizens. Hao Jian’s cousin was among the dead.

I wanted to attend the gathering, but I had to travel to Australia, where I am a writer in residence at Sydney University. One of those present read out an essay I wrote about the Tiananmen crackdown. Hard as it may seem to believe — I have a law degree, and I myself can hardly believe it — reciting such an essay at a private gathering can violate China’s laws. By the government’s logic, I too have committed the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

I am going to turn myself in.

For me, the Tiananmen crackdown was the beginning of a gradual awakening. I was only 15 in 1989, a middle school student in a remote mountain hamlet in China’s far northeastern province of Jilin. Everything I knew about the events of that year came entirely from China’s state-run television station, CCTV: The demonstrators were counter-revolutionary rioters. The People’s Liberation Army exercised great restraint and did not open fire, whereas some rioters burned soldiers alive. I believed it all. I was even grateful to the government and the army for rescuing the nation.

Gradually, the events of 1989 receded from center stage. Everyone was busy earning university degrees or getting rich, as if nothing had ever happened. Even today, the Tiananmen crackdown remains one of the biggest taboos in modern China. Beijing has been attempting to expunge our collective memory through the worship of a soaring economy. But this most traumatic of memories has never truly faded. It continues to live among the people, despite Beijing’s determined efforts to suppress its history.

Soon after I entered university in 1992, a senior student came to our dormitory, sat down and demanded a cigarette. He then asked if we knew what had happened at the school in 1989. We said we didn’t know. He took a deep drag, then told us solemnly that during the Tiananmen incident students from our school, the China University of Political Science and Law, were the first to take to the streets. They were, he said, the first to coordinate links with protesters from other universities. The first president of the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation was from our school. Our university, he told us, had “19 firsts.”

Since then, I came to understand what really happened in 1989 and its significance to China and the world. The government may have condemned the participants as “criminals,” but we students considered it a glorious moment. We regard it as a great honor to have had even the slightest connection with the democracy movement.

My university’s “19 firsts” may not have been entirely accurate, but they became a legend, passed down from one student body to the next. In 1994, when I was the wise senior who visited the new students’ dormitory, I too drew deeply on my cigarette and solemnly intoned: “During the Tiananmen incident of 1989 this university had 19 firsts ... ”

By then, all traces of blood on Tiananmen Square had been scrubbed clean and the bullet holes cemented over, but in the nooks and crannies of the city the story passed from person to person. Around 2003, a friend bought a documentary about the crackdown in Hong Kong. In no time we all made copies. One day I watched it with some friends in a bar in the southern city of Guangzhou. One scene in particular struck me. A youth lay prone on a broad avenue amid the sound of intermittent gunfire. We thought he was dead, but then he suddenly began crawling in a circle. He did not dare stand up, but he didn’t want to stay where he was, pretending to be dead. Crawling was better than doing nothing. “If I were there,” said a migrant worker from Sichuan Province who was standing behind us, “I’d have carried him to safety.”

Whenever I’m asked about China’s future I recount this anecdote of the migrant worker from Sichuan.

Now, in the age of the Internet, the government cannot possibly control all information. More and more people hold their own commemorations for the Tiananmen victims. Every year on the 4th of June virtual candles are lit. Photos are circulated online. Government censors put in a lot of overtime as they delete any combination of the numbers 6 and 4, as well as any reference to Tiananmen, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Despite censorship, hundreds of thousands of people persist. If they are unable to include “6/4” in a post they try “5/35.” If the censors block a post with the number “1989,” they change it to “the last year of the 1980s” or “the year before 1990.” Can’t mention “tanks”? Then try “tractors.”

Beijing has been in denial for 25 years, and now President Xi Jinping’s administration appears more paranoid than its predecessors. The gathering in Hao Jian’s home was merely a “June 4th commemoration.” A similar gathering was held five years ago during President Hu Jintao’s reign, but no one was arrested.

On the surface the government appears to be stronger than ever, with over 80 million Communist Party members, millions of soldiers, and nearly $4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves — yet it is actually so fragile that its leaders lose sleep when a few scholars meet and talk in a private home.

After my friends were arrested I announced on the Internet that I would turn myself over to the authorities as soon as I return from Australia in July because I too had participated in “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Most of my friends have warned me to lay low for a while, but I have thought it through: If the situation in China continues to deteriorate, I cannot stand idly by. If I too am arrested, perhaps more Chinese people will awaken to the realities of their situation. My arrest will be my contribution to resisting government efforts to erase the nation’s memory.

I have seen China change. I have seen the Internet awaken its people. In 1989 one person was brave enough to stand before a column of tanks rolling through Beijing. If the same thing happens again, I am certain hundreds of ordinary citizens will defy the tanks, and if they come under fire, there will be thousands of other citizens with the courage to face the guns and say, “I will carry them to safety.”

Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by The New York Times from the Chinese.

Europeus equivocados vao votar pelo novo totalitarismo, ou pelo velho fascismo - Roger Cohen (NYT)

Poor Angry Magnetic Europe

MAY 22, 2014

Roger Cohen

BERLIN — Europe at the centenary of the war that devoured it is voting in elections for the European Parliament that will no doubt reflect the anger, disillusionment and boredom of people inclined to cast their ballots for an array of protest parties, many from the xenophobic right, some from the pander-to-Putin left.

Political sentiment across the Continent has converged at a grumpy and small-minded nadir. There is anger about high unemployment. There is pessimism over the future. There is irritation at immigration. There is alienation from the European Union. What, the chorus goes, has Brussels ever done for me? The answer, of course, is that it has brought peace, removed borders and spread once unimaginable prosperity. But this achievement is no longer enough or no longer deemed relevant.

In some ways Europe’s mood resembles America’s. Focus has narrowed and solidarity atrophied. Europe, like America, does not want to die for anyone else. It has turned inward, wanting its own problems solved, and damn the Libyans and Syrians and Ukrainians and whoever else may be making demands through their plight.

Anyone who believes the spread of freedom, democracy and the rule of law matters is a “warmonger.” The sharing economy is in vogue because it affords a better deal on a car ride or a room. Sharing politics is not because it may involve sacrifice for faraway people with strange names.

So the National Front in France, and the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, and Jobbik in Hungary and Die Linke (the Left) in Germany — parties from right and left that have expressed varying degrees of admiration for President Vladimir Putin and his homophobic irredentism (Russian-speaking gays need not apply for admission to the imperium) — are all likely to benefit from a diffuse anger, in which anti-Americanism mingles with general spleen.

Never have the idea and the ideal of the 28-member European Union been so weakened, at least within its borders, to the point that several fringe parties take Putin’s Eurasian Union with its promise of good times in Belarus seriously. Just outside the Union it is a different story. Europe is magnetic still. The dissonance between the Union as perceived by many of its more than 500 million citizens, and the Union as it is idealized and ached for by millions on its fringes or in faraway lands, is complete.

The European Parliament election coincides with a critical election Sunday in Ukraine, where Putin has created havoc by annexing Crimea, dispatching thugs to stir unrest in the eastern part of the country, and inventing a “fascist” threat in Kiev to conceal his own growing affinities with such politics (his beloved, much lamented Soviet Union of course allied with Nazi Germany in 1939 before Hitler tore up the pact in 1941; attraction to fascism is nothing new in Moscow).

On Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, where Ukrainians died in numbers to escape the rule of an incompetent kleptomaniac backed by Putin, the European Union flag flies in several places. It is equally visible on surrounding streets. It is draped down the facade of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. It stands for something important in Kiev, something that seems almost unimaginable to Europeans in the confusion of their bile: the glowing possibility of freedom and dignity and pluralism, the possibility of a normal life.

“Europe is a promise of liberty,” said Nataliya Popovych, an activist in the Maidan movement. “As for Putin’s Eurasian Union, we have been in that cage before. Why would we go back? Through Maidan Ukrainians killed Homo Sovieticus in themselves. In Russia and some parts of the east of Ukraine, Homo Sovieticus is still alive.”

It is not dead in Western Europe, either. As my colleague Andrew Higgins noted, Aymeric Chauprade, the National Front’s top European Parliament candidate for the Paris region, trooped off to Moscow last year to declare that, “Russia has become the hope of the world against new totalitarianism.” We live in a time when sentences need to be turned on their heads. The “new totalitarianism” is of course emanating from Moscow.

But Europe is suddenly full of what Germans now call the Putinversteher — literally someone who understands Putin, more loosely a Putin apologist. Europeans of different stripes see him standing up to America, incarnating “family values,” countering a loathed European Union, and just being tough. Germans in surprising numbers are discovering their inner sympathy for Russia, a complex emotion in which anti-Americanism, romanticism, guilt and gratitude for Moscow’s acceptance of unification all play a part. The old temptation in Germany to look eastward is not entirely overcome after all.

Europeans would do well to lift their gaze from the small world of their current anger toward those blue and gold flags fluttering on the Maidan, the better to recall what freedom means and with what sacrifice it has been attained.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 23, 2014, in The International New York Times.

No Place to Hidden: a critique of Glenn Greenwald's book - Michael Kinsley (Sunday Book Review, NYT)

Eyes Everywhere

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

By MICHAEL KINSLEY - The New York Times Book Review, MAY 22, 2014

NO PLACE TO HIDE

Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

By Glenn Greenwald

Illustrated. 259 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. $27.

“My position was straightforward,” Glenn Greenwald writes. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them.” You break the law, you pay the price: It’s that simple.

But it’s not that simple, as Greenwald must know. There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the ones you don’t like. Or perhaps you can, but you can’t then claim that it’s all very straightforward.

Greenwald was the go-between for Edward Snowden and some of the newspapers that reported on Snowden’s collection of classified documents exposing huge eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, among other scandals. His story is full of journalistic derring-do, mostly set in exotic Hong Kong. It’s a great yarn, which might be more entertaining if Greenwald himself didn’t come across as so unpleasant. Maybe he’s charming and generous in real life. But in “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is “straightforward,” and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls “the authorities,” who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.

Reformers tend to be difficult people. But they come in different flavors. There are ascetics, like Henry James’s Miss Birdseye (from “The Bostonians”), “who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after 50 years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.”

There are narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that constrain ordinary mortals. Greenwald notes indignantly that Assange was being criticized along these lines “well before he was accused of sex crimes by two women in Sweden.” (Two decades ago the British writer Michael Frayn wrote a wonderful novel and play called “Now You Know,” about a character similar to Assange.)

Then there are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial worldview of a precocious teenager. He appears to yearn for martyrdom and, according to Greenwald, “exuded an extraordinary equanimity” at the prospect of “spending decades, or life, in a supermax prison.”

And Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it. Sounding now like Herbert Marcuse with his once fashionable theory of “repressive tolerance,” Greenwald writes about “the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: Pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience and conformity.”

Throughout “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald quotes any person or publication taking his side in any argument. If an article or editorial in The Washington Post or The New York Times (which he says “takes direction from the U.S. government about what it should and shouldn’t publish”) endorses his view on some issue, he is sure to cite it as evidence that he is right. If Margaret Sullivan, the public editor (ombudsman, or reader representative) of The Times, agrees with him on some controversy, he is in heaven. He cites at length the results of a poll showing that more people are coming around to his notion that the government’s response to terrorism after 9/11 is more dangerous than the threat it is designed to meet.

Greenwald doesn’t seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that “the authorities” brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way. Nobody is preventing the nation’s leading newspaper from publishing a regular column in its own pages dissenting from company or government orthodoxy. If a majority of citizens now agree with Greenwald that dissent is being crushed in this country, and will say so openly to a stranger who rings their doorbell or their phone and says she’s a pollster, how can anyone say that dissent is being crushed? What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers?

Through all the bombast, Greenwald makes no serious effort to defend as a matter of law the leaking of official secrets to reporters. He merely asserts that “there are both formal and unwritten legal protections offered to journalists that are unavailable to anyone else. While it is considered generally legitimate for a journalist to publish government secrets, for example, that’s not the case for someone acting in any other capacity.”

Here at last, I thought, is something Greenwald and I can agree on. The Constitution is for everyone. There shouldn’t be a special class of people called “journalists” with privileges like publishing secret government documents.

But no. Greenwald’s only problem with the idea of a journalist’s privilege is that some people don’t recognize that he’s a journalist. He is right that he is just as entitled to this honor as Bob Woodward. But so is everyone else. Especially in the age of blogs, it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts. And that’s a good thing.

The Snowden leaks were important — a legitimate scoop — and we might never have known about the N.S.A.'s lawbreaking if it hadn’t been for them. Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to have.

The trouble is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to “use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly — but are you? And even if you do trust Greenwald’s judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which,pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald’s notion of what constitutes suppression of dissent by the established media is an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press.” On the show, he is shocked to be asked by the host David Gregory, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, . . . why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Greenwald was so stunned that “it took a minute to process that he had actually asked” such a patently outrageous question.

And what was so outrageous? Well, for starters, Greenwald says, the “to the extent” formulation could be used to justify any baseless insinuation, like “To the extent that Mr. Gregory has murdered his neighbors. . . .” But Greenwald does not deny that he has “aided and abetted Snowden.” So this particular question was not baseless. Furthermore, it was a question, not an assertion — a perfectly reasonable question that many people were asking, and Gregory was giving Greenwald a chance to answer it: If the leaker can go to prison, why should the leakee be exempt? But Greenwald seems to feel he is beyond having to defend himself. Even asking the question, he said, amounts to “an extraordinary assertion” that “journalists could and should be prosecuted for doing journalism.”

Greenwald’s determination to misinterpret the evidence can be comic. He writes about attending a bat mitzvah ceremony where the rabbi told the young woman that “you are never alone” because God is always watching over you. “The rabbi’s point was clear,” Greenwald amplifies. “If you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes.” I don’t think that was the rabbi’s point.

As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck. So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.) This is not a straightforward or easy question. But I can’t see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find. This isn’t Easter and these are not eggs.

Correction: May 22, 2014

An earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to the extent that the journalist Glenn Greenwald, the author of “No Place to Hide,” acted as a “go-between” for Edward Snowden with the newspapers that first reported on various aspects of Snowden’s collection of classified documents. While Greenwald contributed reporting on the story to several of those papers, he did not do so for all of them.

1914: a Europa caminha alegremente para a guerra - Delanceyplace book excerpt

Incrível a inconsciência da maior parte dos dirigentes europeus quanto ao poder absolutamente devastador das novas ferramentas militares, e sua crença numa pequena guerra curta ao estilo napoleônico, ou seja, do enfrentamento de exércitos num terreno delimitado.

Elas não tinham consciência de que estavam iniciando uma guerra total, que depois se tornou global, e quase universal (o que seria o caso da Segunda Guerra), que ademais tinha os componentes ideológicos e raciais do nazismo hitlerista e do fascismo econômico.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Today's selection -- from A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer. World leaders in 1914 did not understand how powerful their armies had become and how much destruction they would cause. In the centuries before the 1800s, world population had grown at a snail's pace. But between 1870 and the beginning of the first World War, the population of Europe had increased by 100,000,000, more than the total world population before 1650, the result of a technological revolution that improved life spans. But this technological revolution also produced unprecedented weaponry, and thus World War I unleashed destruction that would kill 8.5 million and wound in excess of 20 million more, many times the casualties of all the Napoleonic wars combined. As the war started, a young and naive Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, could not contain his excitement:

"Russia's general mobilization ... called up the Russian reserves -- a staggering total of four million men, enough to frighten any nation on earth. ...

"This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled sixty thousand men. ...

"The Germans ... hauled into Belgium ... two new kinds of monster artillery: 305 Skoda siege mortars ... plus an almost unimaginably huge 420 howitzer ... produced by Germany's Krupp steelworks, [that] weighed seventy-five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action.

Austro-Hungarian 30.5 cm siege mortar/howitzer being towed by a motor tractor, together with its complete crew

"Among the holders of high office, one man at least did not share the sense of glum foreboding: the ebullient ... young Winston Churchill ... he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith's wife ... 'I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet -- I can't help it -- I enjoy every second of it.' "

Arial view of the Douaumont French military cemetery, which contains remains of French and German soldiers who died during the Battle of Verdun in 1916

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

Author: G.J. Meyer

Publisher: Delacorte Press a division of Random House

Pages 74, 77, 127, 133

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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