Cause and Defect（因果失调）

International leaders did not crowd the graveside of Odette Helene Prevost last week;no statesman is standing vigil at the bedside of Juan Aliste Fernandez.But every day ordinary men and women like these two share the fate of Yitzhak Rabin.They fall victim to a gundamentalist.

上个星期，普瑞弗斯的墓边并没有国际领袖集结；费尔南德斯的床边也没有政要守夜。可是，每天都有像这两位平凡人一样的男男女女遭遇和以色列总理拉宾相同的命运，成为嗜杀的狂热份子手下的牺牲品。

Unlike the protagonists of those avenger-fantasy movies starring Chuck,Sly or Arnold,the gundamentalist is a real-life robot made of three base（下贱的; 无价值的; 劣等的） materials:a weapon,a mental fixation（病态的固执；偏激） and a list of grievances.He—occasionally she—carries a virus as virulent as AIDS but with precisely the opposite symptom:superimmunity.In the name of a cause,he is inured（习惯于……的） to effect.

不同于罗礼士、史泰龙或阿诺这些复仇科幻片中的主角，嗜杀的狂热份子扮演着真实世界中的机器人，由三种廉价材料组合而成：武器、心理上的偏执狂、加上一长串的愤懑。他——有时是她——带着和艾滋病一样致命的病毒，只是症候完全相反：百分之百免疫。为了达成目标，他可以完全不计后果。

Six days after Rabin died,a cause claimed Odette Prevost in a suburb of Algiers,just before 9 a.m.The 63-year-old French nun was walking with another nun when two men fired on them.Prevost died in the street only meters from the house where she lived with other members of the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart.Police attributed the killing to the same Islamic extremists who have been butchering liberal Algerians and all types of foreigners,most recently to try to wreck last week’s presidential elections.Prevost,who had worked for the Catholic community in Algeria for 35 years,was the 11th member of her church slain there since 1993.

拉宾遇刺后第六天，快到早上九点的时候，普瑞弗斯在阿尔及尔的市郊成了凶手目标底下的牺牲品。这位六十三岁的法国修女和另一名修女走在街上时被两个人枪击。普瑞弗斯当场死亡，距离她和“圣心姊妹”其他修女共住的家只有数公尺之遥。警方表示凶手是一批伊斯兰极端份子。这个组织一直不断屠杀属于开明派的阿尔及利亚人与其他的外国人。他们最近的目标是破坏上周的总统大选。普瑞弗斯修女在阿尔及利亚的天主教界服务了三十五年。她是她们教会自一九九三年以来，第十一名被杀的成员。

A country away,but only a matter of（数量的问题） minutes earlier that same day,Juan Aliste Fernandez,40,dropped off his 12-year-old daughter Leticia at a school in the Spanish university city of Salamanca.Aliste steered his car toward the barracks where he is an army captain.He had traveled about 200 m from the busy school gates when a bomb that had been attached under the driver’s side detonated.Said a Red Cross member who helped remove Aliste from the wreck:“Someone told me to grab his legs,but when I went to do so I saw they had been torn away.”Late last week Aliste,both legs amputated high on the thigh,remained in critical condition.

就在同一天的早几分钟，在另一个国家，四十岁的费尔南德斯送他十二岁的女儿莱蒂西娅到西班牙的大学城莎拉曼卡市的一所学校。然后往军营开去，他在那儿的官阶是陆军上尉。当他驶离繁忙的校门口两百公尺左右时，放在驾驶座下方车底的炸弹爆炸了。一位红十字工作人员帮忙把费尔南德斯从汽车残骸抬下来。他说：“有人叫我抓住腿。当我正要去抓时，才发现两腿都炸掉了。”直到上周末为止，费尔南德斯仍未脱离危险，而且双腿都在大腿较高部位切除。

The particular timing device used to explode the bomb virtually confirmed the handiwork (某人)亲手做的事情of E.T.A.gundamentalists.The Basque terrorist group would no doubt argue that the life of Aliste-who has a wife and two other children-is a mere toll（通行费、代价） to be paid on the long road to separation from Spain.A spokesman for the Spanish Interior Ministry speculated that Aliste,a cavalry officer who has nothing to do with antiterrorist forces,was a target “for being a member of the military.”

引爆这枚炸弹的定时装置相当特殊，几乎可以断定是出自E.T.A.狂热份子之手。这个巴斯克族恐怖份子集团无疑会辩称，在脱离西班牙独立的漫长道路上，费尔南德斯的性命只是一笔过路费罢了。费尔南德斯除了妻子和女儿莱蒂西娅之外，另外还有两个小孩。西班牙内政部发言人猜测，费尔南德斯虽然隶属于骑兵队，和反恐怖份子部队毫无关系，可是却被恐怖分子选为目标，“只因为他是军人”。

Apart from Prevost and Aliste,how many others who never pulled the levers of international power were murdered or maimed（使重伤、残害、使残废） by gundamentalists,from Sri Lanka to Riyadh,in the week after Rabin was killed?

在拉宾遇刺以来这一周，除了普瑞弗斯和费尔南德斯二人之外，从斯里兰卡到利雅得还有多少从来没有掌握国际权柄的人遭到狂热分子残杀或伤害？

Benjamin Disraeli’s claim that “assassination has never changed the history of the world”probably remains true,for all the archdukes大公(1819年前奥国皇太子的称呼),Prime Ministers and Presidents who have been killed in the 130 years since he made it.There is even evidence that if it does have a lasting effect,paradoxically it is often positive,as with the present theory that revulsion（嫌恶、反感） over the killing of Rabin will hasten rather than hinder Middle East peace.Untimely（不到时候的、不适时的、不合时宜的） death has that way of making talismans（能产生奇迹的东西, 法宝）;Martin Luther King’s dream traveled so widely in part because of the impossibility of his ever living it.But political assassination does seem to have changed.While statesmen and tyrants have always needed bodyguards,today hoi polloi（庶民、老百姓） are also “acceptable targets.”If you kill enough of us,the gundamentalist theory must run,we also count as points toward a cause.There is now some unwritten actuarial（保险精算的） formula that gives,say,the victims of a suicide bomber exploding in a crowded commuter bus the same “value”for the cause as a government minister felled midspeech.Maybe downing a 747 with 400 passengers aboard equals assassinating a President or a P.M.?

“曾任首相的十九世纪英国作家”迪士瑞里说过“世界历史从来没有因为刺杀的手段而改变过。”他说这话到现在已经有一百三十年了，其间也真有一些大公、总理与总统遇刺，可是这句话大概还是不假的。甚至有证据显示，如果说刺杀能产生持久影响的话，其影响竟然往往是正面的。就好像现在，有一种说法就说，因拉宾遇刺所导致世人对刺杀案的憎恶会加速而非阻挠中东和平进程。死于非命，往往就能造就神奇的象征。马丁路德金那个“种族平等”的梦之所以广为流传，部分原因即在于他的遇刺，使他有生之年无法圆梦。然而，政治刺杀确实也有了改变。政治家与暴君一向都要有保镖的，可是今天连小老百姓也成了“可接受的靶子”。狂热份子的理论一定是这么想的：如果被他们杀死的小老百姓人数够多的话，也可以算是得了一些分数，进而有助于向目标迈进一步。现在有一条不成文的换算公式，好像保险精算师的算法一样，比如说一个自杀式的炸弹，在拥挤的通勤公车内引爆而造成的死亡，对于达成目标的“值”可以换算成相当于部长级人士在演说中途遇刺身亡。也许炸掉一架747客机上的四百名人员相当于刺杀一位总统或首相？

None of this is to say there aren’t some great causes around.A case can be made for the Basques to secede from Spain（although less than a quarter of them vote for E.T.A.’s political wing in elections）,and the Islamic radicals in Algeria have an argument that they were diddled（欺骗） after the last elections there.But people who unplug their plain human feelings in the name of a cause quickly become unable to distinguish being imbued from being infected.Once contaminated thus,how quickly causes slide into the tyranny they set out to topple.The Bolsheviks reckoned the lives of the Czar and his children were fair exchange for unchaining the masses,but it look only 10 years for Stalin’s “revolution from above”to begin killing more Ukrainian peasants than the grand total of victims in World War I.and for all Stalin’s aberrance（脱离正道, 越轨, 反常）,the grail（圣杯，圣盘） of that cause—communism—has turned out to be tin（劣等的、伪造的）.

这样说并不表示就没有崇高的目标存在。巴斯克族可以为他们的独立提出一套有力的说词（虽然在选举中投票支持E.T.A政党的巴斯克族人还不到四分之一）；阿尔及利亚的伊斯兰极端分子也提出了一套论调，说他们在上一次选举之后受到欺骗。可是，一旦只为目的而置人性情感于不顾，这种人很快就分不清楚什么是理想洋溢、什么是病态。一旦产生这种病态，他们的理想立刻就沦为暴行，和他们当初要推翻的暴行并无二致。布尔什维克党认为用帝俄沙皇与皇子皇孙的性命，做为解放群众桎梏的代价是很公平的。可是，只经过十年的时间，斯大林的“由上发起的革命”就开始大量屠杀乌克兰农民，受害人数比起第一次大战全部死亡的总和还要多。而且，尽管斯大林不惜倒行逆施，但是他所追求的圣杯般的目标——共产主义——事实证明是一文不值。

Keats wrote,“Fanatics（狂热者） have their dreams,wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect（派别，宗派，派系）.”Vengeance（复仇、报仇、报复） belongs to somebody else,but it is hard to resist wishing that those who stole the life of a French nun and those who blew off the legs of a Spanish dad,and all the others of their kind,may one day share the bleak corridors of that false dream.In this “paradise”the air always smells of plastic explosives,all the walls are Kalashnikov-barrel（枪管; 炮筒） gray.The strident（发尖锐声的、刺耳的） noise you hear?That’s the sound of gundamentalists arguing into eternity about means and ends.Notice the froth（泡沫状唾液） flecking（饰以斑点） their lips?Their stained hands?How fixed are their stares?

英国浪漫诗人济慈写道：“偏激者有梦，他们以此来编织少数人的乐园。”复仇原不是我们份内该做的事，可是我们很难不去祈望那些夺取一位法国修女生命，以及炸断一名西班牙父亲双腿的人，还有他们的同类，迟早会走进那个虚伪的梦中的阴暗回廊。在这个“乐园”中，空气永远带着塑胶炸药的味道，所有的墙壁都是俄制制式步枪般的铁灰色。耳朵里听到的尖锐噪音呢？那是嗜杀的狂热份子在争辩目的与手段的声音，直到永恒。有没有看到他们嘴角沾的白沫？血腥的双手？发直的目光？