作者：Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes
出版社：Allen Lane
1、
While Americans hoist their flag high, Chinese usually work hard to stay invisible, aiming to keep their light under a bushel so long as the surrounding world is dominated by non-Chinese.
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心得：
“美国人爱扯大旗唱高调，中国人更爱少出风头多干活，只要身处的社会不是中国人为主，就韬光养晦。”
P199 / 2020-07-23 21:55
2、
The coming confrontation between China and the US will no doubt reshape the international order in important and dangerous ways. But it remains misleading to see ‘a new economic Cold War’ as a rerun of the original, ideology-obsessed Cold War. This conflict may turn out to be explosively emotional rather than coolly rational on both sides. But it will not be ideological. It will involve instead, bitter struggles over trade, investment, currency and technology, as well as international prestige and influence.
P197 / 2020-07-23 13:21
3、
Exporting made-in-China goods is a priority. Exporting Chinese ideology is not. What this means is that we are not about to embark on a New Cold War and that the current Chinese threat to the West will be unlike the Soviet threat in several fundamental respects.
P196 / 2020-07-23 13:15
4、
As Amin Maalouf has written, “It will always be a serious handicap not to know English, but it will also, more and more, be a serious handicap to know English only.”
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心得：
“不懂英文，绝对是严重缺陷。但以后，只懂英文，一定也是严重缺陷，而且会日益明显。”
P154 / 2020-07-19 15:30
5、
The global spread of democracy signals not the liberation of the enlightened masses from elite domination but the manipulation of the masses by dark forces operating behind the scenes. His efforts have been abetted by radically changing perceptions of the role of social media in politics. If, in the initial euphoric days of the Arab Spring, social media were seen as ‘liberation technologies’ and Facebook, Google and Twitter were signs of the coming democratic future of the world, these same social media are now universally associated with post-truth fragmentation, polarization and the coming end of democracy.
P134 / 2020-07-17 10:48
6、
By clothing its own violent actions in an idealistic rhetoric borrowed verbatim from the US, Moscow aims to unmask the Age of Imitation as an Age of West- ern Hypocrisy. Vaunted Western values, such as the self-determination peoples, are simply Western interests in disguise.
P125 / 2020-07-17 10:07
7、
Political marketing is premised on the insight that sellers can keep the attention of buyers only if the former occasionally offer products that are new or at least repackaged to look new. “People vote for the spectacle, no for the routine,” remarked French marketing guru Jacques Seguela: “All elections are dramaturgical.”
P102 / 2020-07-14 11:07
8、
The Americans justified “interfering in the internal affairs of other countries” by invoking the worldwide desirability and imitability of their own political and economic system. While lecturing the world about human rights, democracy and other lofty values, Western leaders were all the while pursuing their own countries’ selfish geopolitical interests.
P81 / 2020-07-04 17:01
9、
Putin accuses the United States of “globally destabilization” and blatant “disdain for international law”. America’s bid to be the world’s “one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making”, dictating permissible behaviour to other countries, had scandalously backfired.
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心得：
“普京说，美国就是“世界不稳定因素”，恬不知耻地“无视国际法”。美国一意孤行，无所不用其极，试图成为世界的“权力轴心、武力轴心、政策轴心”，要别的国家对它言听计从，但它的行径适得其反，反而自作自受。”
P81 / 2020-07-04 16:58
10、
A characteristic example of the Kremlin’s anti-Western (as opposed to pseudo-Westernizing) resort to mimicry is the way Russian trolls, in the American presidential campaign of 2016, pretended to be Americans online in order to sow confusion, boost Trump’s chances and divide the country against itself.
P78 / 2020-07-04 16:47
11、
“There is something deeply ironic,” as Thomas Bagger observed, about the fact “that from the life-changing experience of an entirely unexpected, non-linear event like the end of the Cold War”, the West “has derived a thoroughly linear expectation of the future”.
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心得：
“托马斯·巴格说，“像冷战结束这种见证历史的时刻，足以改变三观了。但这种事，前无先兆可期，后无规律可循。西方却把这种事奉为金科玉律，以为未来会顺着这个剧情蹚到底。实在是让人咋舌。””
P78 / 2020-04-26 10:24
12、
the imitator’s life inescapably mixes feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity and voluntary insincerity.
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心得：
“邯郸学步的人，毫无例外，个个都觉得自己力有不逮、低人一等、仰人鼻息、随波逐流、虚情假意。”
P71 / 2020-03-28 22:41
13、
Liberalism’s justification of economic inequality by prettying up the myth of meritocracy, moreover, masks the central role of luck in the arbitrary distribution of wealth in society, a masking which is humiliating for the losers of the economic lottery because it encourages the winners to attribute their success to superior talent and greater personal effort.
P66 / 2020-03-28 16:14
14、
Liberals are so blasé about immigration because they divorce citizenship from ethic descent and replace the ideals of substantive justice and the public good with bland and abstract notions of procedural justice, the rule of law and individual utility.
P65 / 2020-03-28 15:42
15、
Liberals are basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.
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心得：
“基本上，自由派并不把祖国的历史和前程放在心上。”
P65 / 2020-03-28 15:39
16、
One-time adherents who have lost their former faith know the enemy well and have strong personal motives for discrediting and defeating the ideology they once so ardently espoused.
P62 / 2020-03-28 14:54
17、
The great French political philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron presciently observes five decades ago that “with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes on the significance that inequality between classes once had.”
P35 / 2020-03-04 14:19
18、
Some commentators have claimed that 1989, by eliminating the Cold War competition between rival universal ideologies, fatally damaged the Enlightenment project itself, in its liberal as well as communist incarnation.
P18 / 2020-03-02 19:01
19、
The capitalist future had arrived, but its benefits and burdens were unevenly, even crassly distributed. After reminding us that “For World War II generation in Eastern Europe, communism was the ‘god that failed’”, Feffer hits upon the thesis this chapter aims to explore: “For the current generation in the region, liberalism is the god that failed.”
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心得：
“资本主义许下的未来已经来临，但利益和成本分得很不公平，简直不可理喻。费冯在论文里说，“在东欧，如果说，共产主义是二战那代人‘破灭的神话’，那自由主义就是现在这代人破灭的神话。””
P20 / 2020-03-02 18:58
20、
Confidence that the political economy of the West was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that Western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obviously that they didn’t.
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心得：
“他们坚信西方政治经济那一套是人类的未来，是因为他们以为西方精英都是行家里手。但突然发现，远不是这样。”
P21 / 2020-03-02 18:47
21、
Mirroring is a way for erstwhile imitators to avenge themselves on their would-be models by revealing the latter’s unattractive defects and irksome hypocrisy.
P15 / 2020-03-01 21:40
22、
(Gabriel Tarde) even reffed to “contagious imitation” as a kind of “somnambulism”, meaning that human beings copy each other spontaneously, without any strategic purpose or plan, as in copycat crimes, and without being forced or compelled in any way.
P8 / 2020-03-01 14:14
23、
Attempts to salvage the good name of liberal democracy by contrasting it favorably with non-Western autocracy have been undercut by the feckless violation of liberal norms, as in the torture of prisoners and the evident malfunctioning of democratic institutions inside the West itself.
P2 / 2020-03-01 14:10
24、
The lack of a plausible alternative to liberal democracy became a stimulus to revolt because, at some elemental level, “human beings need choice, even just the illusion of it”.
P5 / 2020-03-01 11:42