在考研英语真题中，文章多来源于如《时代周刊》、《经济学人》、《哈佛商业评论》等国外著名杂志、报刊，这已经是考研学子们公认的秘密，我们称 这些杂志、报刊为“同源外刊”。经过都教授研究发现，在The Economist中有一篇名为《选择性记忆》的文章从成为结构、表达方式都与真题相近，值得各位2016考研学子认真“啃”，下面我们来学习一下。

　　Selective memory

　　AS the ghosts of the Pacific war judder back to life in Asia, it seems appropriate to consider how nation states remember, and misremember, the past. Japan’s current tiffs with its neighbours, China and South Korea, are rooted in the march to war and its undigested aftermath, more than 75 years ago. They are inflamed, however, by different narratives of history, and by national media coverage that is often parochial and amnesiac.

　　Conflict and memory are the themes that animate this new collection of essays by John Dower, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning “Embracing Defeat” (1999)， which looked at Japan after the second world war. Mr Dower is particularly interested in Japan’s sanitisation of its military past, but also the way history in general is often a tool used by the powerful.

　　Mr Dower discusses his surprise at hearing his own work cited after 9/11, when American officials evoked the post-war occupation of Japan as a model for post-invasion Iraq. President George W. Bush should have seen that Japan provided “no model” for occupying Mesopotamia, Mr Dower wrote in a strikingly prescient 2002 New York Times op-ed, reproduced here. “To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences, including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris.”

　　He returns to the terrain of “Embracing Defeat”， marvelling at how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific war dissipated so quickly, as though “turned off like a spigot”. The lesson for Mr Dower is not only that reluctant civilians must be mobilised by propaganda to fight and die, but also that new realities force new biases.

　　No side, he argues, launched a more sophisticated propaganda blitz than the Japanese, who saw their “mongrel” enemies as biologically inferior. But they were hardly alone. During the war Americans viewed their Asian rivals as “monkeys” or “rats”， but with the start of the occupation, Japan became an ally. The popular racism in the American media more or less stopped, and stayed buried until the 1970s, when Japan emerged as an economic superpower. This resurrected Japanese stereotypes of “predatory economic animals” in Western suits who were launching a new “financial Pearl Harbor”. The spigot of racial hatred had been turned back on.

　　When the fighting is finished, history is written, inevitably by those in power, observes Mr Dower. The standard American view of the struggle against Japan is that it was just and moral. But this grants little space for the ghastly side of victory, which included the airborne destruction of 66 cities and the incineration of more than half a million civilians. China and Korea’s political elites have found it endlessly useful to bang the nationalist drum to unite potentially fractious populations against their old enemy. Japanese conservatives have made it easy for them, whitewashing the past and attempting to pass off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.

　　Selective memory is often a harmful feature of children’s education. Japanese high-school textbooks devote impressively little space to the war, reflecting official attempts to “downplay the dark aspects of Japan’s modern history,” writes Mr Dower. For its part, China’s government relies on its struggle against Japanese aggression for its historical legitimacy, so memories of wartime atrocities are kept fresh in schools. This helps to explain the strikingly different public reactions to the current island disputes. While the Chinese angrily take to the streets, the Japanese stay at home and watch it on TV.

　　For a solution, Mr Dower looks to the 20th-century views of E.H. Norman, a Japan expert and Marxist historian. Like Norman, he feels that most countries need a “revolution from below” against any system that “represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government”. All citizens should be able to challenge the narratives held by elites. At a tense time of toxic nationalism in Asia, this book is a timely reminder of the uses and abuses of history.

　　文章导读：当日本开始否认其对华对韩的侵略史时，其与邻国的关系也每况愈下。是什么造成了这种局面？这篇文章是对约翰道尔《拥抱战败》一书的介绍，通过介绍本文将简短地揭示冲突与记忆的关系。

　　文章结构：文章第一层即第一段，叙述了日本与邻国的关系紧张是由于他们对75年前的那段日本侵略史的记忆不 同，第二层为第二段，讲述约翰道尔在《拥抱战败》这本书中谈到了日本是如何消除其侵略史的，以及历史是怎样被用来作为权利斗争的工具。第三层是三到六段， 道尔先生用具体的例子来证明历史总是被别有用心地编写以达到政治目的。第四层是第七段，道尔先生指出选择性记忆会对儿童教育产生不良影响。要解决这个问 题，道尔先生指出“自上而下的革命”的重要性，即民众都应该有能力挑战由政治家主导的历史叙述权。

　　核心词汇：

　　judder  颤抖，颤动

　　tiff    口角，争斗

　　undigested  未经消化的，未能忘记的

　　aftermath  后果

　　sanitization 卫生处理，清晰

　　prescient 预知的，有先见之明的

　　retard   阻碍

　　经典例句解析：

　　He returns to the terrain of Embracing Defeat , marvelling at how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific war dissipated so quickly , as though“turned off like a spigot”

　　【翻译】他又重新谈到《拥抱战争》中的内容，惊叹太平洋战争中邪恶的种族仇恨怎能消散的如此迅速，快的就像“水龙头的水被关掉一样。”

　　【解析】句子的主干是He returns to the terrain of Embracing Defeat。紧跟其后的是由现在分词marvelling at 构成的一个伴随状语。在由marvelling at 引导的状语中，how the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific war dissipated so quickly作marvelling at 的宾语，as though“turned off like a spigot”作状语修饰dissipated，这是一个比喻，将种族仇恨主义消失的速度与水龙头流出的水在闸门关闭后停止的速度作对比。