Megan Shank is a freelance writer and Chinese translator living in New York City whose work has appeared in Bloomberg News, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, Archaeology and The Daily Beast, among others. She wrote a chapter for the forthcoming anthology Chinese Characters (University of California Press, 2012), and formerly worked in Shanghai as an editor at the now defunct Chinese-language edition of Newsweek. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know," published this year by Oxford University Press. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, as well as in general interest periodicals such as Time and Newsweek.

As their peers elsewhere, young Chinese readers have devoured the Harry Potter series. They would doubtless flock to see the final film that debuted in dozens of other foreign markets July 13. But in China, the film’s release has been delayed — and not for the usual political reasons. Harry Potter, after all, features a story Chinese leaders should enjoy: a small band of committed followers triumphs over great odds (shades of the Long March and the road to the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China) and a time of chaos gives way to peace and prosperity (reminiscent of China’s Reform era rise to greatness after 100 years of foreign bullying and the ensuing traumas of the Cultural Revolution).

Instead of Harry and Hermione, President Hu and company have made sure that most screen space in China is set aside for one of their latest high-cost pet projects, Beginning of the Great Revival: The Founding of a Party, a star-studded epic commemorating the 90-year anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The film has left audiences cold and full of complaints. For many, it feels like a throwback to more benighted times, of being forced to watch low-quality entertainment to prove one’s political loyalty.

This grumbling was nothing compared to the fury that erupted last weekend in regard to a very different high-cost vanity project — China’s much-vaunted, but trouble-plagued of late, high-speed trains.

On July 23, a high-speed train stalled on a viaduct outside the city of Wenzhou. Another high-speed train rear-ended it. Four carriages fell, and officially 39 people died and about 200 were injured. The Central Propaganda Department demanded the press accept official accounts without question. They advanced the theme “in the face of tragedy, there is great love.” Before the ruined trains had cooled, authorities began burying the wreckage....

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Norwegian right wing Christian terrorist Anders Breivik spoke of being a member of the “Knights Templar,” and if anything is further terrorizing about Friday’s attacks beyond their own horror, it is the possibility that an organization was behind them or that there are other members of it as looney and violent as Breivik himself. Update: : Breivik warned Monday that 2 more cells of “our organization” were organized for further attacks. Is this his “Templars”? The name, of course, refers to the medieval order coming out of the Crusades.

Breivik visited Malta, where the remnants of the real Knights Templar, having turned their resources over to the Knights of St. John the Hospitaller, had run a pirate mini-state for a few hundred years in the early modern period. Breivik, from a Protestant background, advocated a return to Catholicism, but not to the really-existing current church, rather to a pan-Christian revival of a Crusade theocracy.

The Crusade, he insisted, was necessary because in ten years Muslims would be a majority in most of Europe and they were raping Christian girls. The fear of brown men raping Norwegian women is of course the ultimate in iconic racism, redolent of Jim Crow in the Old South.

The myth about rape in Oslo is debunked here. The argument has the form of bad statistics. It is alleged that Muslims are only 4% of the population in Norway but are responsible for almost all the rapes. First of all, the allegation is untrue. But consider this: most rapes happen in big cities, where anonymity affords more opportunity for subsequent escape. Immigrants are mostly in cities and are a bigger proportion of the urban population than they are of the general population. Then, rapists tend to be young, and recent immigrants groups are disproportionately young. Then, rape is more common in low-income areas, and, you guessed it, immigrants are poorer. So if you studied rape among poor urban youth, it may well be that Muslims commit fewer rapes than would be statistically expected, in that demographic group (the relevant one). Moreover, a lot of the victims of rape would also be poor, urban, young immigrant women.

This wicked fantasy that most European rapists are Muslim immigrants is a staple of the far right, and it has contributed to hatred and violence toward European Muslims. This theme, like many Muslim-hating canards, appears to have been started by McCarthyite Daniel Pipes, a far right Zionist who “watches” American academics that do not toe Breivik’s sort of line at an invasion-of-privacy enterprise ominously called ‘Campus Watch’; and given the turn to violence among people of Breivik’s stripe, it is only a matter of time until Pipes’s organization whips some kindred looney into a homocidal frenzy against those liberal, multi-cultural, Muslim-coddling professors– so like the people at the Labor Party meet on Utoya. And why would Pipes be writing about rape in Scandinavia anyway? It is because people who want to steal more Palestinian land think that they can run cover for the often fanatical and violent West Bank settlers by scaring white people into thinking Muslims in general are a threat and should be discounted, and that if they get kicked out of their homes they’re just getting what they deserve....

Dr Tim Stanley is a research fellow in American History at Royal Holloway College. He is working on a biography of Pat Buchanan. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.

America has just edged a little closer to financial disaster. On Friday, Republican House Speaker John Boehner walked out of talks with the President over raising the debt-limit – a little over a week away from the deadline when the US Treasury says the country will no longer be able to pay its bills.

At this stage in the game it’s hard to work out who is being intransigent. Given the severity of the situation, it’s hard to care. Boehner said that Obama pushed an unacceptable tax increase, that, “Dealing with the White House is like dealing with a bowl of Jell-O”. The President insisted that he had offered a fair bargain: cutting $640 billion from entitlements and $1 trillion in discretionary spending, while raising $1.2 trillion in taxes. What is interesting is that Boehner has framed the debate in terms of conflicting ideologies: he said, “In the end, we couldn’t connect. Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.”...

The New York Times recently asked several historians to comment on the crisis, to assess how previous presidents approached their deficits. David Kennedy, a professor at Stanford University, made an interesting point: Franklin D Roosevelt, that Democratic idol, was a budget hawk (or, at least, he thought he was). To quote Kennedy, Roosevelt was “a stubborn fiscal conservative … In only two New Deal years, 1934 and 1936, did the federal deficit, as a percentage of gross national product, exceed the 4.6 percent of [his Republican predecessor] Herbert Hoover’s last year in office. The year 1936 saw the New Deal’s biggest absolute deficit, $4.4 billion, or 5.3 percent of G.N.P., largely because Congress – over Roosevelt’s veto – passed the notorious Bonus Bill, awarding some $2 billion to World War I veterans. The following year Roosevelt warmly embraced the conventional budgetary counsel of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and submitted an austerity budget, sharply contracting government spending and thereby triggering the so-called Roosevelt Recession.” Roosevelt also insisted that his Social Security plan not become a European-style unemployment benefit: “Instead, Social Security was to be funded ever after by matching payroll contributions from employers and employees.”...

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. His most recent book is “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).

Once upon a time, Americans were sturdy and self-sufficient. They didn’t rely on politicians for a handout; instead, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

Then along came the Big Bad Federal Government, with its needless services and regulations, softening a once-proud people into a nation of wimps. And it left us with an enormous unpaid bill, which we’re passing along to our children and grandchildren....

It wasn’t pretty, especially when the economy took its periodic dips. Every student of American economic history has to memorize the dates of these downturns, which have struck like clockwork every two or three decades: 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and so on. And before our own era, every crisis brought with it massive social upheaval, disorder, and violence.

Consider the so-called Panic of 1837, when an estimated one-third of factory workers lost their jobs. With food prices rising – and without any sustained government assistance – Americans took to the streets to demanded “bread, meat, rent, and fuel,” as protesters chanted. And when their pleas fell on deaf ears, they rioted.

In New York, a mob raided the store of a wealthy flour merchant. “Barrels of flour were tumbled into the street from the doors, and thrown in rapid succession from the windows,” one newspaper reported. Women filled their aprons with flour, “like the crones who strip the dead in battle,” the outraged paper added....

Julius G. Getman is a labor law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Yale, the University of Chicago and Stanford. His latest book is "Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement."

The embattled National Labor Relations Board has proposed rules to streamline union representation elections and give unions greater opportunity to contact workers. Employer representatives and conservative commentators have responded with vitriolic attacks. A Heritage Foundation analyst claims that "the NLRB's proposed snap elections [are] another case of the Obama administration putting unions ahead of workers."

These and similar comments reveal a basic hostility to the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act and a misconception, at best, of the NLRB's role in enforcing it. The board's proposed rules, which are the subject of a hearing in Washington this week, are sensible and should be adopted.

The National Labor Relations Act provides for elections, supervised by the NLRB, to determine if employees wish to unionize. In any unionization campaign, the employer, acting through lawyers and management officials, attempts to persuade employees to vote against unionization, while the union, acting through organizers and employee committees, seeks to persuade them of the benefits of union representation. The NLRB referees....

Jim Sleeper, a former editor at Newsday and columnist for New York Daily News, is a lecturer in political science at Yale.

...Thucydides chronicled it in ancient Athens. And in Edward Gibbon’s telling, the Roman republic succumbed to its first emperor, Augustus, because he understood that “the Senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”

The founders of our own republic, reading Gibbon’s account (then hot off the presses), worried that their new republic would end not with a coup but a dictator’s smile and swagger if the people became so tired of the burdens of self-government that they could be either jollied along or intimidated into servitude, or both.

Ben Franklin warned that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

How might that happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty to...slavish subjection have been brought to this unhappy condition by gradual paces,” wrote founder Richard Henry Lee.

And Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post in 1801 because he saw a need for information and commentary to help Americans “decide the important question,” as he’d put it in 1787, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”...

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.  

It took nearly four months, but last week the Obama administration finally did the right thing: It recognized the National Transitional Council as the rightful government of Libya. That will allow the rebels to tap into billions of dollars in frozen Libyan government accounts in the U.S. Access to those funds is crucial not only for furthering the campaign to topple Moammar Gadhafi, but also for constructing a working government in Benghazi that can eventually be expanded to the rest of the country.

Yet the question remains: What took so long? Some two dozen countries—ranging from France to Qatar—had already extended diplomatic recognition to the rebels by the time that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. was joining their ranks. Unfortunately, this tardiness is symptomatic of the administration's conduct of the entire war effort and exemplifies President Obama's puzzling "lead from behind" doctrine.

The administration, recall, did not agree to take military action until March 17, more than a month after the rebellion against Gadhafi had begun. For weeks rebel representatives had been pleading for Western help in the form of a "no-fly zone" to stop murderous attacks by Gadhafi's aircraft. Mr. Obama ignored those entreaties, allowing Gadhafi to regain his footing. Only when the revolt was in danger of being extinguished—with the Libyan army poised on the outskirts of Benghazi—did Mr. Obama finally support Britain and France in calling for action at the United Nations.

The U.N. Security Council passed an open-ended resolution allowing member states to take "all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians" and "to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people." The only step that was forbidden was the dispatch of "a foreign occupation force." Mr. Obama could easily have interpreted Resolution 1973 as a blank check for Gadhafi's removal—something he has called for repeatedly. Instead he has insisted on the narrowest possible interpretation, with the U.S. military playing the smallest possible role in its implementation.

Many snorted in disbelief when Mr. Obama later claimed that American action in Libya does not meet the definition of "hostilities" in the War Powers Act—and hence does not have to be authorized by Congress. But this is such a minimalist war effort that one can almost see the president's point...

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University. His latest book is "Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name."

Britain's drama has penetrated even the carapace of American self-preoccupation.

Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein compares it to Watergate. Hugh Grant appeals to Americans to wake up to Rupert Murdoch's pernicious influence on their own media. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) calls for an inquiry into the activities of Murdoch's parent company, News Corp., and whether Americans' phones were hacked. If it turns out that 9/11 victims were targeted, as suggested by the campaigning British MP Tom Watson, then this will no longer be just a foreign story. Only on Murdoch-owned Fox News is it as if none of this had happened. A clip from "Fox News Watch," filmed during a commercial break, shows the panelists joking about the one story they are not going to discuss. News watch indeed....

I'd put it like this: The Murdoch debacle reveals a disease that has been slowly clogging the heart of the British state for the last 30 years. This is the heart attack that warns you that you are sick but also gives you the chance to emerge healthier than you were before. The root cause of this British disease has been mighty, ruthless, out-of-control media power; its main symptom has been fear....