双语达人:1979年 历史的转折点

The 1970s seem destined to be a justly forgotten decade─a time of disco, stagflation and little of the social upheaval that defined the previous decade or the epic global changes of the one that followed. But Christian Caryl sees more than malaise when he looks at the 1970s; he sees one of history's great turning points. 'With the passage of time,' Mr. Caryl writes in 'Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century,' 'the 1970s begin to appear less like a sideshow than the main event.'

1970年代似乎注定要成为一个被人遗忘的十年──一个经济滞胀、流行迪斯科舞的年代，没有之前十年那么明显的社会动荡，也没有之后十年史诗般的全球巨变。然而克里斯蒂安•卡里尔(Christian Caryl)在看待1970年代时，看到的不仅仅是萎靡不振；他看到了历史上最伟大的转折点之一。“随着时间的流逝，”卡里尔在《奇怪的叛道者：1979与21世纪的诞生》(Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century)一书中写道，“1970年代开始显得更像是一场主要赛事，而不是一次穿插表演。”

As the title of Mr. Caryl's book suggests, his focus is 1979─a year that brought Iran's Islamic revolution, the siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the emergence of four leaders who, he argues, changed the course of history: Margaret Thatcher, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping and Pope John Paul II.

正如卡里尔的书名所示，他关注的焦点是1979年──这一年伊朗爆发了伊斯兰革命、美国驻德黑兰大使馆被包围、苏联入侵阿富汗、另有四位改变了历史进程的领导人崭露头角，他们是玛格丽特•撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)、伊朗宗教领袖霍梅尼(the Ayatollah Khomeini)、邓小平和教皇约翰•保罗二世(Pope John Paul II)。

It is hard to imagine figures as different as these or a year quite as grim as 1979, but suspend your disbelief for a moment. Mr. Caryl makes a fairly compelling case that this was a year when history made a sharp turn and that each leader set in motion the seismic changes that came to shape our world today: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China and the emergence of radical Islam. In 1979, Mr. Caryl says, 'the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance.'

很难想象人物身份会有如此差异，也很难想象1979年会如此严峻，但是先把你的怀疑搁置一下吧。卡里尔提出了非常令人信服的观点，他认为这一年历史来了一个急转弯，每一位领导人都开始启动翻天覆地的变革，形成了我们今天的世界格局：苏联的解体、中国的崛起以及激进伊斯兰主义的出现。卡里尔说：“市场和宗教的双重力量在被无视了太久之后开始绝地反击。”

In January of that year, China's new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, made a nine-day visit to the United States. He was not technically China's head of state (he never held that title), but President Jimmy Carter welcomed him to the White House with a state dinner. At the dinner, Deng found himself seated at a table with actress Shirley MacLaine, who had spent time in China working on a documentary extolling the virtues of Maoism during the bloody Cultural Revolution. She told Deng how wonderful it had been for her to meet a professor plowing a field on a collective farm. 'Deng looked at her scornfully . . . ,' Mr. Caryl writes. 'Professors, he told her, should be teaching university classes, not planting vegetables.'

就在那一年的一月，中国新的最高领导人邓小平到美国进行了为期9天的访问。严格意义上说他不是中国的国家元首（他从来没有拥有过那个头衔），但是吉米•卡特(Jimmy Carter)总统在白宫举办了国宴欢迎他的到访。在宴会上，邓小平发现他与女演员雪莉•麦克雷恩(Shirley MacLaine)坐在同一桌。麦克雷恩曾在血腥的文化大革命期间到中国拍摄大力颂扬毛主义的纪录片，她告诉邓小平自己在集体农场见到种田的教授是多么美妙的经历。“邓小平不以为然地看了她一眼……，”卡里尔写道，“他对她说，教授，应该在大学里教书，不应该种菜。”

If Ms. MacLaine had done her homework, she would have known that Deng himself had been effectively banished during the Cultural Revolution and had come to power determined to modernize China. He wanted to affirm the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party─minus the communism. When he returned to China after his U.S visit, Deng said that he couldn't sleep for several nights as he wondered, 'How could China possibly catch up?' His answer was to unleash the market forces that were already transforming the economies of Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. His first moves were to allow private farming (result: a major increase in productivity) and to create special economic zones that would allow private business and even foreign investment.

如果麦克雷恩事前做过准备，她就会知道邓小平自己在文革期间也曾被黜，他上台执政后决心要使中国实现现代化。他想要肯定中国共产党的绝对地位──淡化一点共产主义。当他结束访美回到中国之后，邓小平说他好几个晚上都睡不着觉，因为他在寻思“中国如何才能迎头赶上？”他的答案是释放业已改变着香港、新加坡和日本经济的市场力量。他的第一步棋是放手发展私有农业经济（结果：生产力得到极大提高），创立经济特区，允许在经济特区设立私营企业，甚至允许外商投资。

In May 1979, Chinese officials brought a group of visiting American businessmen to an undeveloped area in China near Hong Kong. The officials gestured out over the horizon to where China was planning to allow its first economic zone. 'All that the Americans could see,' Mr. Caryl writes, 'was the usual South China landscape: there were rice paddies, worked by peasants and their water buffalo.' In fact, the group was viewing a site that would become Shenzhen─today a city of more than 10 million people and home to one of the most lucrative manufacturing centers in the world.

1979年5月，中国官员带领一队到访的美国商人前往距离香港不远的一块尚待开发的地区，官员们指着地平线，用手比划中国计划允许建立首个经济区的地方。“在场的所有美国人能够看到的，”卡里尔写道，“这是典型的华南地貌：到处是农民和水牛耕种其间的稻田。”实际上，这群人目睹的地方后来成了深圳──今天这座城市的人口超过了1,000万，是世界上最赚钱的制造业中心之一。

While Deng was visiting the U.S., Margaret Thatcher was in London preparing to run for prime minister. By then, Britain's economy had slumped so badly that it had become the first developed nation to go to the International Monetary Fund for support. 'This was a humiliation of epochal proportions,' says Mr. Caryl. 'A country that had been at the heart of the Western economic and political system found itself reduced to the status of a banana republic.'

就在邓小平访美的时候，玛格丽特•撒切尔正在伦敦准备竞选首相。当时，英国经济下滑之严重，英国成了第一个向国际货币基金组织(International Monetary Fund)寻求援助的发达国家。“这是一个奇耻大辱，”卡里尔说，“一个曾经是西方政治、经济体制核心的国家发现自己沦落到香蕉共和国的地位。”

Making matters worse, in late 1978 and early 1979 the British suffered through a series of paralyzing labor strikes and high unemployment, giving the grocer's daughter an opening to campaign against Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan with the slogan, 'Labour Isn't Working.' But Thatcher was running against more than her opponent─her platform of privatization, spending cuts and self-reliance was a challenge to the views that had come to dominate both of Britain's political parties and, for that matter, most of the developed world.

雪上加霜的是，英国在1978年底和1979年初经历了一系列让经济瘫痪的工人罢工以及高企的失业率。这给了这位杂货店老板的女儿一个机会，她打出了“工人没有工作（工党没有作为）”(Labour Isn't Working)的口号与工党首相詹姆斯•卡拉汉(James Callaghan)竞选。然而撒切尔不光是在和她的竞争对手较量──她为私有化、削减开支和自主自立搭建的平台对于已经主导了英国两大政党、其实也支配了大多数发达国家的观点提出了挑战。

The reigning ideology favored more government intervention into the economy and an expanding welfare state. 'The aim of the Thatcherite counterrevolution,' Mr. Caryl writes, 'was to dismantle the postwar consensus.' Thatcher's transformational moves─facing down the unions, selling off state-owned businesses─would come later, but the groundwork was laid with her first campaign as Conservative leader in 1979. Her win, Mr. Caryl argues, 'reflected a fundamental shift in British thinking.' As Labour's Peter Mandelson would say years later, 'We are all Thatcherites now.'

当时的执政理念倾向于让政府更多地干预经济并扩大国家福利。卡里尔写道，“撒切尔逆革命潮流的目的是废除战后的共识政治。”撒切尔的转型举措──打压工会、出售国有企业──会在晚一些时候推出，但是在她以保守党领袖初次参加竞选时就已经埋下了伏笔。她的获胜，卡里尔说，“反映了英国思维的根本性转变。”正如工党的彼得•曼德尔森(Peter Mandelson)多年后所说：“我们现在都是撒切尔了。”

Another fundamental shift was under way elsewhere in Europe. With a puff of white smoke at the Vatican on Oct. 16, 1978, a Polish cardinal─Karol Jozef Wojtyla─was chosen as the first non-Italian pope in more than 400 years. Pope John Paul II had nothing to say on the economic theories being put into practice by Thatcher and Deng, but his June 1979 trip to his Polish homeland represented an even greater challenge to a reigning orthodoxy─specifically, the ideas underlying the Soviet empire.

欧洲另一个地方也在发生着根本性的变化。随着一缕白烟于1978年10月16日在梵蒂冈升起，波兰红衣主教──卡罗尔•约瑟夫•沃伊蒂瓦(Karol Jozef Wojtyla)──成为400多年来第一位非意大利教皇。对于撒切尔和邓小平付诸实践的经济理论，教皇约翰•保罗二世没有什么可说的，但是1979年他的祖国波兰之行却是对一个在朝正统思想的更大挑战──具体说来，就是苏联帝国统治下的思想。

Over the course of nine days, the pope gave 39 sermons attended by an estimated 11 million Poles. The church, not the state, organized these vast assemblies─a crucial experience that would be put to use in the Solidarity rallies that led to martial law in 1981 and, ultimately, to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.

在九天的访问行程中，教皇主持了39场布道，参加布道的波兰人估计达1,100万。组织这些大型集会的是教堂而非政府──这是一次十分重要的经验，团结工会(Solidarity) 后来运用这些经验举行集会，导致波兰1981年实施军事戒严，并最终在1989年导致东欧集团的瓦解。

The pope's message was a religious one, of course, but it was also a rebuke to Marxist doctrine. 'Dear brothers and sisters,' the pope said in one sermon, 'do not let yourselves be seduced by the temptation to think that man can fully find himself by denying God, erasing prayer from his life and remaining only a worker, deluding himself that what he produces can on its own fill the needs of the human heart.' As Mr. Caryl points out: 'Never before had a Communist Party in the Soviet bloc endured such a direct public challenge to its ideological and informational hegemony.'

教皇传达的自然是宗教讯息，但它也是对马克思主义学说的谴责。“亲爱的兄弟姐妹，”教皇在一次布道中说，“不要让自己受人蛊惑，认为否定上帝、在生活中消灭祷告、只做一名劳动者人就可以充分发现自我，让自己误以为自己制造的东西可以自动满足人类内心的需求。”就像卡里尔指出的：“在苏联集团里从来没有哪个共产党容忍过对其意识形态和信息霸权这样直接公开的挑战。”

In January 1979, a very different revolution was taking part in Iran. The rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran not only deposed a corrupt American ally─the shah─but also represented the end of the leftist parties in Iran. The ayotallah and his followers had little use for godless Marxism, and the Soviet Union was as much an enemy for the ayotollah's followers as the U.S. A young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was among the radical students who urged, without success, a siege of the Soviet embassy instead of the American one.

1979年1月，伊朗发生了一场迥然不同的革命。宗教领袖霍梅尼的上台和伊朗伊斯兰共和国(Islamic Republic of Iran)的成立不仅废黜了一个腐败的美国盟友──伊朗国王──而且也标志着伊朗左翼政党执政的终结。这位宗教领袖和他的追随者不怎么喜欢无神论的马克思主义，对霍梅尼的追随者而言，苏联与美国一样是敌人。一位名叫马哈茂德•艾哈迈迪-内贾德(Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)的年轻人就是激进的学生之一，他力主包围苏联大使馆而不是美国大使馆，但没有成功。

For the Soviet Union, the Islamic Revolution ushered into power an enemy of its enemy, but not a friend. For the United States, it was a wake-up call that the march of communism was not the only global threat. What nobody could predict was that the new threat would long outlive the old one.

对苏联而言，这场伊斯兰革命(Islamic Revolution)让其敌人的敌人上台执政，但却不是它的朋友。对美国来说，这场革命敲响了警钟，共产主义的蔓延并不是唯一的全球威胁。大家没能预料到的是，新威胁比旧威胁历时更久。

But the broader effect of Khomeini's revolution was on the rest of the Islamic world. For the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire an overtly Islamic movement had seized political power. This achievement reverberated beyond Iran, inspiring even the country's natural enemies in the Arab Sunni world. 'After Khomeini, the Islamists did not just talk,' Mr. Caryl writes. 'They acted. The most potent legacy of the Islamic revolution in Iran was simply to show it could be done.'

然而霍梅尼革命更广泛的影响产生在其它伊斯兰世界。自从奥斯曼帝国覆灭以来，一场公然展开的伊斯兰运动首次攫取了政治权力。这一成果产生的反响超出了伊朗之外，甚至对这个国家在逊尼派阿拉伯世界的宿敌起到了鼓舞作用。“霍梅尼革命之后，伊斯兰教徒不再只停留在语言上，”卡里尔写道，“他们行动了。伊朗伊斯兰革命最有影响的遗产就是向人证明，革命是可以成功的。”

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December was also one of the major stories of 1979 and, like the others chronicled in 'Strange Rebels,' one that was historically significant in ways not apparent until later. The long, costly and ultimately fruitless war pushed the Soviet Union closer to collapse, helping to bring an end to the Cold War. It also helped set the stage for the next global conflict by providing a rallying point and training ground for militant Islam. After all, it was to fight the Soviets that Osama bin Laden first came to Afghanistan.

苏联12月入侵阿富汗也是1979年的主要历史事件之一。就像《奇怪的叛道者》中记录的其它事件一样，它的历史重要性要在事后才显现出来。这场旷日持久、代价高昂、最终无果的战争将苏联进一步推到了崩溃的边缘，促进了冷战的结束。这场战争为伊斯兰武装分子提供了集结点和训练场地，因而为下一场全球冲突创造了条件。毕竟，奥萨马•本•拉登(Osama bin Laden)首次到阿富汗是为了与苏联人战斗。

'Strange Rebels,' though engagingly written, is occasionally repetitive, and Mr. Caryl's effort to craft a coherent narrative out of a series of disparate and chaotic events is at times a bit forced. But the reader comes away convinced that the forces set in motion, for good and for ill, in 1979 set the stage for the world we see today, in ways that were hard to see at the time. We'll no doubt face another turning point (maybe we already have?), and when we do, there is no guarantee that it will be any more obvious than it was in 1979.

《奇怪的叛道者》虽然文笔动人，但是偶尔也有赘述之处，卡里尔力图将一系列互不相关、杂乱无序的事件进行有机连贯地叙述，这个尝试有时有点牵强。但是读者放下书时会相信，1979年启动的大事，不管是好是坏，都为我们今天看到的世界做好了铺垫，而这一点当时是很难看到的。毫无疑问，我们还会面临新的转折点（也许我们已经在面对了？），当我们真的面对它的时候，没人能保证它会比1979年的转折更明显。