Portolani Special

PREFÁCIO Á EDIÇÃO ON-LINE

2007-10-05T02:27:00.001Z

Misérias do Exílio. Ós Últimos Meses de Humberto Delgado

Ao longo dos últimos quarenta anos, com intervalos de sensivelmente uma década, tenho tido motivos para revisitar os anos que passei no norte de África entre 1962-66. Quando percorro esse caminho pela memória, apoiada na documentação que consegui acumular, fico cada vez mais impressionada. Ao reler o que escrevi nos anos oitenta sobre O Bando de Argel, e num segundo livro, As Misérias do Exílio, nos anos 90, a minha convicção aumenta de que os acontecimentos de Argel revelaram e continuam a revelar umas profundas verdades sobre a natureza da oposição anti-salazarista. Com efeito, ajudam a explicar a longevidade do Estado Novo. Para quem soubesse interpretá-los esses acontecimentos foram um pré-aviso de dramas futuros. Deviam ter servido como presságio do que viria a acontecer mais tarde depois da queda da ditadura.
É um lugar comum dizer que para compreender o presente temos que entender o verdadeiro significado do passado. Toda a gente concorda mas, na prática muitos ignoram. Se tivesse havido entre 1966 e 1974 um verdadeiro interesse pelos acontecimentos de Argel da parte dos opositores ao salazarismo, talvez não tinham acontecido algumas das desgraças de 1974-75 e a persistente hegemonia até hoje de uma esquerda velha, caduca e desacreditada. Não houve. Ninguém quiz falar desse periodo. Tudo foi varrido por baixo do tapete. A questão entrou no longo rol de tabus: temas que não podiam ser abordados para não perturbar a ‘unidade antifascista’ e hoje precisam de ser escondidos para preservar o status quo. Até os mais recalcitrantes dos maoistas nos conturbados tempos depois do 25 de Abril não queriam ouvir falar em acontecimentos que reflectiam tão pouco crédito nos protagonistas. O muro de Berlim pode ter caído, e os países da chamada ‘democracia popular’ podem ter corrido com os seus regimes comunistas, mas em Portugal em muitos meios—especialmente da comunicalão social e da universidade—continuam de pé os velhos ídolos com pés de barro. Muita gente continua empenhada em esconder a verdade. Não me refiro só ao mistério que rodeia o assassinato de Delgado, embora haja pessoas ainda vivas que não querem levantar o véu sobre o crime.

Independentemente do problema de saber quem mandou matar o general, e seja quem fosse o mandante, o que os acontecimentos de Argel revelam é a incompetência e a patética infantilidade de todos e, pior, a falta de moral de alguns dos actores no drama que se desenrolou na África do Norte. Foi, em boa verdade, um teatro onde todas as tendências da oposição tiveram uma oportunidade, que não existia em Portugal, para mostrar o que valiam. Relendo hoje os documentos tanto de Delgado, como dos comunistas, como da extrema-esquerda, ficamos com a sensação desconfortável de ver e ouvir bonecos de cartão a desempenhar papeis numa farsa e a disputar poderes imaginários no palco dum teatro do absurdo onde não é fácil distinguir entre o cómico e o trágico. É por isso que os comunistas inventaram histórias mirabulantes e o próprio Álvaro Cunhal aifrmou que os documentos eram ‘apócrifos’.

Os actores na peça, afinal, um grupo de quarenta criaturas, a maioria sem preparação política ou militar, e todos divididos entre si, a brigaram sobre o sonho de um confronto com Salazar, a Espanha franquista e a as forças da NATO todos juntos. Na realidade, só Cunhal e os comunistas sabiam que tal projecto seria uma loucura, nunca permitido pelos seus chefes no Kremlin. Mas tinham que preservar o mito do seu empenho revolucionário a todo o custo. Delgado, os seus apoiantes e os maoistas, impulsivos todos eles à sua maneira, viviam no mundo de Sancho Panza.

As divisões políticas e as impotências que observamos no Portugal de hoje derivam em larga medida da persistência obstinada de um mito que alimenta as hostes da esquerda e intimida e culpabiliza a castrada direita. Poucos compreendem realmente o passado. Nem querem compreendê-lo, como ficou amplamente demonstrado durante o famigerado concurso para o maior português; cmo fica demonstrado todos os anos com a benevolência estendida à ‘Festa’ do Avante. O ‘politicamente correcto’ proíbe uma discussão desapaixonada do salazarismo, como impede igualmente qualquer pergunta inconveniente sobre a impotência, baixo nível e em última análise o falhanço da oposição democrática. A continuada influência em dos comunistas alguns sectores cruciais da sociedade portuguesa depende do mito de uma heróica resistência à uma feroz ditadura. Podem os comunistas não apreciar os oposicionistas não-comunistas e não se perderem m de amores pelos herdeiros da Primeira República, mas estão todos de mãos dadas quando se trata de exagerar ao ponto de blasfémia os pecados da ditadura. Escrevo a palavra blasfémia sem ironia. Porque é evidente para um observador desapaixonado que em comparação com as sangrentas tiranias que foram os regimes comunistas ou os actuais infernos das ditaduras do terceiro mundo o salazarismo constituía uma ditadura bastante benevolente. Pretender o contrário é realmente uma blasfémia contra o sagrado dever de respeito pela verdade histórica e uma traição às centenas de milhões de mortos. Censura, partido único, algumas centenas de presos políticos, práticas típicas de um estado policial, obscurantismo no ensino, uma burocracia sufocante e muitas vezes prepotente, ausência dos normais direitos cívicos de protesto e manifestação pacíficas, estatuto subordinado da mulher: todos esses desafios aos princípios liberais existiam no Estado Novo e tinham fatalmente que culminar num desastroso confronto quando eclodiram as revoltas coloniais. Mas um regime criticável e em muitos aspectos condenável não é necessariamente um regime fascista. Confundir categorias políticas leva ao esvaziamento de sentido. É a arma do demagogo, do terrorista do verbo. Na escola é antipedagógico. Na política serve como instrumento de chantagem. É necessário para promover o seu estatuto heroico que os comunistas exagerem vergonhosamente os malefícios do antigo regime. Pena é que muita gente aceite a grande mentira.

É por isso que tudo que tenho escrito sobre Argel ao longo de quarenta anos tem sido bastante mal recebido. Fui avisada continuamente , até hoje, que apesar de minha narrativa ser verdadeira, seria sempre inconveniente. Até os anos 80, disseram-me que só podia ajudar os nostálgicos do fascismo. Hoje dizem-me que estou a prejudicar o bom nome da ‘resistência’ e ‘ajudar a reacção’. Houve só um breve periodo, nos fins dos anos setenta, quando o ambiente era diferente, a comunicação social mais diversificada e havia muito mais debate do que existe hoje. Era o tempo da Aliança Democrática. O meu primeiro ensaio sobre o ‘caso Delgado, foi um best-seller e venderam-se muitos milhares do livro em seis meses. O livro actualmente posto on-line, Misérias do Exílio, cuja apresentação e conteúdo documental é indiscutivelmente superior à primeira versão foi boicotado; não recebeu qualquer promoção ou publicidade e quantos exemplares foram vendidos não sei porque até hoje o editor não me apresentou quaisquer contas.
Foi pena—ou talvez não. Porque agora existe a World Wide Web, e uma audiência potencialmente muito maior e, sobretudo, toda uma nova geração de leitores. E se não tivesse havido o boicote, eu talvez não tinha tido o incentivo para colocar o livro on-line.
O valor histórico do livro consiste sobretudo na reprodução na totalidade de todos os documentos na minha posse referentes aos acontecimentos narrados. A primeira edição, por pressão de tempo, só trazia extractos de alguns. Também esta edição reproduz alguns comentários curiosos incluindo um de Álvaro Cunhal e outro de Pedro Ramos de Almeida. São curiosos porque descaradamente mentirosos, revelando mais uma vez a natureza dessa famigerada ‘superioridade moral dos comunistas’. Cunhal falou de ‘documentos apócrifos’. Ramos de Almeida mentiu descaradamente sobre o meu passado político e alegada pertença ao Intelligence Service. Quem mente tema a verdade. Porquê? A verdade sobre Delgado ainda está para provar e talvez nunca será conhecida. A verdade sobre a moralidade e as características de muitos opositores ao Estado Novo já se sabe. Resta agora tirar as conclusões. A minha esperança é de que os textos publicados neste site sejam de alguma ajuda nessa penosa tarefa.
Algures no Alentejo, 15 de Setembro de 20007

O texto integral encontra-se em:

http://lanca.patricia.googlepages.com/home

ADVERTÊNCIA

2007-08-08T18:34:00.000Z

Transferência de Textos

Alguns textos que foram publicados neste blogue, foram transferidos para um local menos efémero: Portolani Books que não é um blogue e não comporta comentários.

Os textos transferidos são os seguintes:

David Stove against Darwin and Popper
O desenvolvimento do capitalismo na Inglaterra
An Ignoble Nobel
In Defence of Reason
The Pope and the President
Evolution, Hayek and Scientific Progress
O Anti-semitismo como Doença da Alma

ZITA SEABRA (1) 1988

2007-08-07T16:34:00.000Z

Como as memórias são curtas, publica-se a seguir um artigo meu escrito em Novembro de 1988 sobre o primeiro livro da Zita Seabra. O que penso sobre o seu segundo livro, Foi Assim, e algumas conclusões sobre os dois, irei escrever dentro de poucos dias.

Por agora, e para os mais jovens convem lembrar das 'coisas' da década de 1980.

O NOME DAS COISAS

(Artigo publicado no semanário O DIABO de 29 de Novembro de 1988)

No próprio dia da publicação comprei e li o livro de Zita Seabra, O Nome das Coisas. Li o livro e fiquei na mesma! 0 que escreveu Zita Seabra näo nos traz nada de novo, nada que não tenha sido já dito ou escrito noutros lugares. Tem a publicação, porém, a virtude de reunir convenientemente os argumentos da ex-deputada no seu contencioso com a direcção do PCP. Assim temos facilmente à mão a corroboração do que escrevi a semana passada, a saber: que Zita Seabra não deixou de ser comunista e que o que ela quer é um PCP melhorado, modernizado e mais eficaz. 0 que ela lamenta é que o presente estado avançado de esclerose do partido enfraquece a causa do comunismo e da Esquerda em Portugal. Esta é a posição declarada dela! Se estiver a ser sincera então Zita Seabra revela-se bastante menos inteligente do que se alega por al.

E isto porque, apesar de ainda se considerar comunista, Zita Seabra reúne no seu livro citações da imprensa soviética contendo admissões gravíssimas. Entre estas figuram as seguintes:

• 0 facto que grandiosas obras em Moscovo e outros sítios foram realizadas com mão-de-obra de prisioneiros de guerra soviéticos libertados ou fugidos de campos de concentração nazis, os quais eram enviados para trabalhos forçados por se terem ‘deixado’ fazer prisioneiros... Os barcos que circulam nas águas de determinados canais navegam por cima dos ossos de centenas de milhares de infelizes que fizeram os canais a mão sob o olhar atento dos guardas armados. (p. 140).

• Pormenores sobre o destino da maioria dos revolucionários bolcheviques, devorados (como acontece habitualmente) pela própria revolução. A Enciclopédia Filosófica Soviética, admite a ex-deputada, acaba de revelar uma lista verificada dos membros do Comité Central do PCUS vítimas de repressão, mortos ou que se suicidaram, entre o XVII Congresso (1934) e o XVIII Congresso (1939). Tiveram trágico destino 98 dos 139 membros efectivos e suplentes do Comité Central do PCUS. (p. 140).

• A tragédia de Kuropaty, perto de Minsk onde foi descoberto um lugar de execuções maciças. Nesse lugar, de 1937 a 1941, foram fuziladas e enterradas, todos os dias, centenas de pessoas. 0 total calculado pelas autoridades soviéticas atinge o número de 102.000 (p.141).

E, mais! Zita Seabra reconhece que estes factos eram conhecidos há muito tempo pelos ‘inimigos do partido’ Perguntamos: Então, quais serão os atractivos do comunismo? Qual a superioridade do ‘socialismo real’ sobre o capitalismo ou o que os comunistas gostam de chamar ‘a social-democracia .de direita’? É aqui que reside o essencial da questão. E é porque Cunhal e os seus homens percebem isso que eles perseguem a ex-deputada. Os crimes do estalinismo (e do pós-estalinismo) não causam nenhuma indignação no seco coração de Cunhal. 0 que ele sente é só e simplesmente a inconveniência de revelar esses factos.

Os Soviéticos nunca pouparam comunistas estrangeiros
0 comunismo só tem qualidades atractivas enquanto vestido de roupagens que escondem a sua fealdade essencial. Antes das revelações de Gorbachev quanto ao atraso e ineficácia da economia soviética, o militante simplório era facilmente consolado pelos dirigentes. Até admitiam ‘urna certa falta de liberdade e alguma repressão’ nos países de leste ‘contra o inimigo de classe’ porque essas eram necessárias para garantir as tais conquistas sem preço:
1. A vitória triunfante do socialismo, que na URSS já estava próxima da fase do próprio comunismo onde a exploração do homem pelo homem teria deixado de existir.

2 O fim desses flagelos característicos do capitalismo, a saber:
• a inflação
• o desemprego
• a prostituição
• a criminalidade
• a droga
• o alcoolismo

3. O florescimento da criatividade cultural e científica.
4. Serviços sociais (de Saúde e de Educação) de alto nível.
5. Alta produtividade e inovação tecnológica.
6. Um campesinato contente e produtivo labutando alegremente nos campos colectivizados.

Através das revelações de Gorbachev os militantes comunistas ficaram a saber que nada disto era verdade! Ficaram a saber, afinal, o que os não-comunistas (os desprezados leitores das Selecções do Reader’s Digest) sabiam já há muito tempo.
Gorbachev, ao revelar a outra face da lua, não estava certamente a pensar nos partidos comunistas estrangeiros. Estava, sim, a pensar no grande público internacional não-comunista. Gorbachev sabia que esse público ficaria bem impressionado com a candura das auto-críticas do dirigente soviético. Porque esse público já sabia que o comunismo não constituía a utopia em que Zita Seabra até há pouco tempo piamente acreditava. 0 que o dirigente soviético, sendo um homem inteligente, pretendia era modificar na medida do possível a péssima irnagem que tem o regime e a sociedade soviética no Ocidente, e que um estilo de propaganda caduco não conseguia mais esconder.

Pretendia criar em Margaret Thatcher, em Ronald Reagan, e nos outros dirigentes ocidentais uma impressão favorável e uma disposição mais amigável para com a URSS. E conseguiu. Este objectivo era muito mais importante do que o risco de semear confusões no meio dos comunistas ocidentais. E isto porque Gorbachev precisa de implementar projectos de redução nas despesas militares, essenciais para permitir algum melhoramento nas baixas condições de vida da população soviética. Como disse Sakharov nos Estados Unidos, a URSS tem actualmente mais elementos nas forças armadas do que quaisquer três países ocidentais em conjunto. Só uma détente palpável nas relações internacionais permitiria essa redução. E o melhoramento da economia soviética é tão indispensável para a sobrevivência do regime como para a sobrevivência da URSS como grande potência.

Quer isto dizer que para Gorbachev e a sua estratégia os reflexos desagradáveis para os ‘partidos irmãos’ são pouco significativos. A URSS nunca hesitou quando parecia necessário sacrificar comunistas, nacionais ou estrangeiros. A história está plena dos cadáveres de ‘partidos irmãos’ e dos seus militantes imolados no altar dos interesses imperialistas de Moscovo: desde o PC espanhol, ao polaco ou ao cubano. Estes casos são meros acidentes de percurso.

No caso de Portugal, Cunhal sabe que a sua sobrevivência depende do isolamento de Zita Seabra. 0 ideal para esta direcção do PCP seria empurrá-la para fora da Esquerda, para que ela e os outros dissidentes não conseguissem o apoio de Moscovo. Mas Gorbachev não está preocupado nem com Cunhal nem com Zita Seabra. Se a sua politica vencer, surgirão mais cedo ou mais tarde outros ‘amigos da URSS’ tanto em Portugal como nos restantes países não-comunistas.

De qualquer modo, Cunhal está, a médio prazo, condenado; e, quando se diz Cunhal entende-se a sua equipa, por que ele próprio, pela natureza das coisas, não pode reinar muito mais tempo. Zita Seabra, como ser politico que é, tem várias opções. Uma é a de prosseguir na via de comunista profissional e era capaz de ter algum sucesso. Outra alternativa, intelectualmente mais honesta, era de escolher o longo caminho da autocrítica às suas próprias posições ao longo dos anos e às do seu partido. Pode não haver no passado do PCP nem gulags nem fuzilamentos em massa (mas só encobrimento dessas monstruosidades cometidas por outros!).

Mas haverá, talvez, outras culpas relacionadas com a história de Portugal durante muitas décadas deste século. E isto porque não há acção sem reacção. Podemos, com alguma justificação, perguntar: Se, sem o fanatismo pró-soviético do PCP, o Estado Novo teria sido, a seguir a Segunda Guerra Mundial, tão ditatorial? Ou se, sem a actuação do PCP como filial estrangeira do Ministério de Negócios Estrangeiros Soviético, teria havido a polarização dos campos quanto a questão colonial e a tragédia que se seguiu?

O espírito do mal
O que Zita Seabra devia colocar como questão é, afinal, quais as realizações benéficas do comunismo. Tanto no Leste como em Portugal?

É perfeitamente plausível que a Rússia, sem a Revolução Bolchevique de 1917, sem gulags, sem ditaduras do proletariado, fosse hoje uma grande potência industrializada e moderna—até democrática. Não aconteceu a industrialização, a modernização—e, ate, a democratização—do Japão sem qualquer intervenção de partidos socialistas ou comunistas? E quanto a Portugal podemos colocar semelhante pergunta. O que de bom tem trazido o PCP ao nosso país? A existência desse partido impediu ou travou a democratização que podia ter acontecido, talvez com Norton de Matos, em 1948?

Nem foi o PCP que acabou com o Estado Novo mas sim um movimento eminentemente sindicalista de militares. A melhoria dos níveis de vida e de cultura dos portugueses, já visível antes do 25 de Abril, não foi certamente obra do PCP.

Afinal, o que valeram tanto sacrifício, tanta militância, tanta obediência? A tragédia de Zita Seabra, como de todos os comunistas dissidentes que deixam inacabada a sua reconversão, é a de ter adorado deuses com pés de barro sem o perceber.

E Cunhal? Não será ele também uma figura trágica?
Não no rnesmo sentido. Zita Seabra está chocada com os crimes no leste e os atropelos a justiça cometidos pela direcção de Cunhal. Porque, para ela e outros cornos ela, o comunismo é um ideal—o tal deus com pés de barro. Cunhal, pelo contrário, não está chocado com os crimes da União Soviética, e a sua revelação constitui urna simples inconveniência. Para Cunhal o comunismo não é um ideal. Tornou-se uma doença psíquica, que antigamente teria sido classificado como um caso de possessão. Reagan, quando falou no império do mal, estava a referir-se a urna grande verdade. Corno podemos comemorar as vitimas do nazismo (que durou 14 anos) com sinceridade, ignorando as vitimas (quiçá mais numerosas ainda) dum regime que dura há setenta anos? Quem se indigna selectivamente corre o risco de ver postas em causa as suas motivações. No caso de Álvaro Cunhal, não é de facto um deus de pés de barro que ele adora mas sim o espírito do mal. E é isso que está patente no seu discurso, quando aparece nas câmaras de televisão. É isto que a maioria do povo português pressente. Estão afinal a ver e ouvir o apologista e o encobridor do gulag.

UM NOVO SITE

2007-07-22T02:12:00.000Z

Novidade

Os meus caríssimos leitores são convidados a visitar o meu novo site:

PORTOLANI REDUX

Este site será dedicado exclusivamente a assuntos relacionados com o
que na anglosfera se chama 'Gender Studies', e assuntos relacionados como
a legislação sobre o aborto, o casamento, a adopção e a família. Os textos
são inspirados por uma óptica estritamente liberal e sociológica, sem recurso à argumentação religiosa. Numa sociedade pluralista é ainda mais importante distinguir entre o científico e o sagrado. Presume-se sempre que todas as pessoas instruidas serão sensíveis a argumentos científicos. Onde existe uma pluralidade de confissões, ou nenhuma, torna-se difícil argumentar num espaço aberto sem bases comuns. Quanto aos leitores católicos, aconselha-se a leitura dos textos do Papa Bento XVI sobre a necessidade de distinguir o científico do divino. Os comentaristas, evidentemente, estão inteiramente livres a esse respeito. Se eles quizerem empregar argumentos religiosos, não haverá da minha parte qualquer oposição tipo jacobino.

Agradeço a todos os comentaristas que mostraram interesse pelos meus textos. Aos outros só posso desejar ainda mais divertimento com a leitura de PORTOLANI REDUX.

AYAAN A GRANDE LUTADORA

2007-07-12T20:06:00.000Z

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, autora de Infidel, Free Press, New York, 2007

Ayaan, filha de Hirsi que era filho de Magan: ainda em criança sabia recitar os nomes dos oito séculos de antepassados da linha paterna. Se não memorizava a bem, então era a mal e sempre às mãos da implacável avó. Lembra o Livro de Génesis e o recital dos descendentes dos patriarcas. Quando Ayaan conta a história da sua infância em Mogadishu na Somália e mais tarde na Arábia Saudita, na Etiópia e no Quénia, somos transportados para a época bíblica onde a tribo e o clã estão omnipresentes e a vida individual não conta. Apesar de haver camiões e carros, telefones e rádios, é um mundo muito distante do nosso.

É um mundo onde a mulher é totalmente subordinada ao homem; onde a sua virgindade é garantida com a faca através da mutilação genital em criança; onde é obrigada a casar com um homem escolhido pelo pai; onde uma palavra ou um olhar trocado com um homem que não seja pai ou irmão, pode trazer a pena de morte. Um mundo onde a mulher violada é castigada e não o violador. Um mundo onde as mulheres, desde uma tenra idade, terão que tapar o rosto e o resto do corpo, para não provocar os (aparentemente) incontroláveis apetites dos homens. Um mundo em que aprender os dogmas do Islão consiste em decorar o Alcorão em Árabe, muitas vezes sem conhecer essa língua. Um mundo em que uma das doutrinas decoradas é do direito do marido de bater na mulher.

Foi esse o mundo em que Ayaan cresceu. Ela conta tudo, com uma candura quase compulsiva, não omitindo nada. Conta os horrores, mas também as benesses, Lembra-se da tirania da família e do clã, mas também da solidariedade e generosidade deles em tempos difíceis. Fala da ternura dentro da família, ternura que, apesar, da crueldade, também existia. Fala, sobretudo do pai que adorava, e que relativamente ao obscurantismo generalizado na Somália, era um homem moderno e esclarecido, e que queria que a filha tivesse acesso ao ensino. Ele não concordava com a mutilação genital das raparigas mas a avó, na ausência dele, obrigou a mãe a cumprir com a tradição. Tanto a Ayaan como a irmã foram excisadas, com consequências lamentáveis para a irmã. O pai era um político perseguido pelo regime de Siad Barré, e muitas vezes ausente do lar, ou fugido ou na prisão. Dele ela recebeu os primeiros exemplos de militantismo político e uma certa introdução à política. No entanto o modernismo do pai era muito relativo e foi ele que, mais tarde, obrigou-a a casar e provocou a fuga da Ayaan de África.

A política repressiva de um comunismo africano na Somália seguido por mais de uma guerra civil, a fuga dela com os irmãos e a mãe para a Arábia Saudita, e mais tarde para a Etiópia e o Quénia, forneceram oportunidades para conhecer outros povos e outros costumes e, sobretudo, de comparar a vida dos muçulmanos com a dos povos cristãos. Como Ayaan, desde pequena infância fora um ser cheio de curiosidade, todas as experiências a fizeram reflectir. Observava, apontava na memória e reflectia. Observou a terrível animosidade e ódios entre os diversos grupos e clãs, o não menos intenso desprezo de todos os somalis para com os etíopes e os quenianos. Por estes não serem muçulmanos? Só em parte, porque o desprezo e o ódio aos árabes, especialmente os de Meca onde Ayaan e a família se refugiaram durante algum tempo, são constantemente expressos pela mãe, muito consciente do seu estatuto social entre os somalis.

A autora tem o dom de narrar os pormenores da vida quotidiana com a mesma objectividade que dedica aos grandes acontecimentos das fugas como refugiada de um país africano, para outro, as mudanças de uma escola e uma língua para outras. Conta sem inibição a sua conversão para o islamismo militante da irmandade muçulmana e o curto percurso pelo fundamentalismo. Tapou a cara e o corpo, dedicou-se aos estudos corânicos, ansiosa para uma vida espiritual e uma orientação ética certa e coerente. A sede da Ayaan lembra as crises espirituais das adolescentes cristãs atraídas para a vida religiosa. Ela descreve o seu combate com a fé e a tradição com tal vivacidade que o leitor esquece a sua própria cultura e consegue identificar-se com a jovem muçulmana.

É esta identificação provocada pela autora o grande mérito do livro. Quando foge do casamento imposto e finalmente chega à Holanda, continuamos a partilhar as reacções da Ayaan face ao novo mundo livre que ela encontra. Partilhamos o seu espanto perante a ordem e a civilidade das pessoas, a gentileza de gente desconhecida, a pontualidade e limpeza dos transportes, o facto que tudo funciona, depois da anarquia, desordem e arbitrariedade da vida que ela conhecia em África.

Afinal o percurso da Ayaan é a passagem da vida fechada, a closed society, da vida tribal para a sociedade aberta da democracia liberal do mundo industrializado. Muitos imigrantes têm essa oportunidade mas a maioria não tem nem a inteligência nem a curiosidade da Ayaan e acabam por recusá-la, e alguns de tentar destrui-la. Ela passa maus momentos na Holanda e também triunfos, do estatuto de refugiada ao de cidadã e deputada no Parlamento holandês. Trabalha em vários ofícios desde operária fabril à mulher de limpeza e à intérprete. Tem ampla oportunidade para observar os outros refugiados da sua terra, sobretudo as mulheres e verifica que a grande maioria fica no gueto, fechadas na concha criada pela sua religião. E chega à conclusão que é a política do multiculturalismo da esquerda europeia que reforça os mais retrógrados aspectos do islão. A jovem africana recusa a concha. Trabalha e estuda, estuda e trabalha. Conhece e convive com os holandeses. Consegue com imenso esforço superar todas as dificuldades e acaba por entrar na melhor universidade do país para estudar Ciências Políticas. Está determinada a conhecer a razão de ser deste mundo novo. Quer saber como os europeus conseguiram sair do obscurantismo. Quer estudar a Idade das Luzes e os filósofos. Quer saber o que é o liberalismo.

Sobretudo Ayaan quer falar em nome da mulher muçulmana, quer denunciar a sua situação de oprimida. Ao pôr em prática o que sente ser a sua vocação Ayaan torna-se um alvo a abater. Theo Van Gogh, o produtor de um filme escrito por ela sobre a sujeição da mulher muçulmana, é assassinado e ela ameaçada de morte. É empurrada para a clandestinidade na livre Holanda e finalmente para fora do país. O livro acaba com a chegada da Ayaan nos Estados Unidos, país que ela, em África, tinha odiado como opressor imperialista.

A autobiografia de Ayaan Hirsi Ali é um case study da problemática de toda uma geração de jovens muçulmanos confrontados com a contradição entre dois mundos: o mundo da liberdade e o mundo da servidão. A autora é uma verdadeira heroína dos nossos tempos. A sua autobiografia devia ser lida por todos os adolescentes perplexos perante o mundo moderno e todos os adultos confusos com os lugares comuns do multiculturalismo.

COMENTÁRIO SOBRE AS DECLARAÇÕES DE UM SHEIKH

2007-06-30T18:05:00.001Z

Este artigo, publicado na revista australiana, Quadrant, aparece no site

de Roger Sandall

Sexualizing everyday life

from Mann and Nabokov to Sheik al-Hilaly

Roger Sandall

My first question is this: was the mad Mufti right?

When Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly said that half-clothed Australian women went around like “exposed meat” inviting rape there was an immediate uproar from all enlightened opinion. Unbelievable! How could anyone say such a thing? Shock-horror was general, and the ugly imagery confirmed a growing suspicion that our Islamic leadership is stuck in the Dark Ages.

But it’s less clear that the Sheik was entirely wrong. Perhaps he could even be seen as a kind of messenger bringing bad news. What he was complaining about, if we’re honest, was a process that has been going on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from any known culture in the past, in which everyday activities like buying a paper or visiting a supermarket continually present us with acres of erotica and exciting flesh—along with once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires now normalized and routine.

My second question is this: Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes, the erstwhile custodians of civil order and decency, in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the sensation-mongering media at the bottom, to our most celebrated cultural paragons at the top? Recently the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus. Have the works of even our most gifted artists and exalted writers contributed to a climate in which this too has become inevitable? The Sheik’s comments were tasteless. His language was brutal. But can we truly say he was unprovoked?

Art and innocence

“The kingdom of art increases and that of health and innocence declines.”

So wrote Thomas Mann, and he knew what he was talking about. Moral degeneration and civilisational decline, he argued, come with the ascendancy of the modern artist and the subversive role of art in modern life, a doctrine fully explicit in his novella Tonio Kröger. There he tells us that today’s artists are estranged from life, pursue goals hostile to life, work continually to subvert and destroy the bourgeois firmament, and jeer when it comes tumbling down.

The weird thing is that nobody saw what was happening. The middle classes thought Communist revolution in Russia was out to ruin them—and it certainly made every effort to do so. But capitalism proved more easily debauched than overthrown, and the western bourgeoisie more vulnerable to moral than political subversion. The possibility that the libertine values of artistic bohemia might be more dangerous in the long run, however, never seems to have entered their giddy heads. Artists were exciting. Artists were creative. Artists were free and uninhibited, and art was a raison d’etre much more noble than trade and commerce. As part of this delusion the bourgeoisie came to believe that the counter-cultural creators of beautiful paintings and music must also have beautiful souls.

But this was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen were reliable friends. But artists were the enemy. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

* * *

Thomas Mann was a towering figure, intellectually in touch with the major currents of thought in his time, and to try and reduce him to his erotic interests would be ridiculous. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a “wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes.” In his entry for December 15, 1933, Mann reported Max Planck’s meeting with the Führer:

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that. And we might note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slight and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Mann and Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolita had been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems—and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets. The self-conscious complexities of literary style alone would exclude all but the most determined reader from the experiences Mann and Nabokov publicise.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with bohemian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

The sexualising of everyday life

Our culture is deeply divided. Should we be in favour of public copulation or might that be OTT? If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t our very own Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick with thigh-high boots who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-colour cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need. This illustrated a contribution by Mr David Marr.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

* * *

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Greek Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and decorum, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the Sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly may be a boor and a pest. He doubtless has a wider political agenda. But I ask you: if these are not examples of white western women aggressively calling for action, what exactly are they?

Philip Rieff has suggested that we ourselves are the counter-culture now. If that is true, with the values of bohemia saturating the mass media and barely distinguishable from those of the general populace, then we can probably find the reasons for the Mufti’s outburst by gazing thoughtfully in the nearest mirror.

Civility and common sense

Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn’t been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the one; some to the other. Alexander Pope saw this perplexity as part of Man’s condition. Created half to rise and half to fall,

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much;

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and the Marquise du Deffand—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

* * *

Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms. You didn’t publish entertaining accounts of oral sex provided by female teachers for their male pupils in family magazines. You didn’t have leading novelists advertising the joys of paedophilia. Though one should expect, in a free country, that such matters may be discussed and argued about—the pros (few) and the cons (many)—it has usually also been assumed that this would be constrained by a thoughtful choice of time, place, and occasion.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken Sheik really is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

END

O DEBATE CONTINUA E ATINGE A CASA BRANCA

2007-06-29T17:39:00.000Z

Para ler o que diz a 'oposição'

'Homosexuality Isn't Natural or Healthy'

Bush's Choice for Top Doc Compared Human Genitalia to Pipe Fittings and Said Homosexual Practices Can Cause Injury or Death

By JAKE TAPPER

June 7, 2007 —

President Bush's nominee for surgeon general, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., wrote a paper in 1991 that purported to make the medical argument that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy. Doctors who reviewed the paper derided it as prioritizing political ideology over science, and Democratic aides on Capitol Hill say the paper will make his confirmation hearings problematic, if not downright bruising.

Holsinger, 68, presented "The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality" in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church's committee to study homosexuality. (Read the paper here.) The church was then considering changing its view that homosexuality violates Christian teaching, though it ultimately did not do so. Relying on footnotes from mainstream medical publications, Holsinger argued that homosexuality isn't natural or healthy.

"A confirmation fight is exactly what the administration does not need," said David Gergen, a former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, who predicted the paper would cause a "minor storm" among Democrats on Capitol Hill.

"You have to wonder given the quality of some of the nominations that have gone forward recently, whether the selection group in the White House has gone on vacation," Gergen said. "There has been a growing criticism the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that."

White House Avoids Direct Response to Paper

In its response to the controversy Thursday, the White House avoided directly discussing the controversial paper.

"Dr. Holsinger has dedicated his life to the care of others and public service and his respect for all is evidenced by his actions and his career ," said White House spokesman Emily Lawrimore. "On numerous occasions, he has taken up the banner for under represented populations and he will continue to be a strong advocate for these groups and all Americans. Dr. Holsinger is a highly respected, well-qualified physician and educator. His impressive medical background, which includes leading one of the Nation's largest healthcare systems, decades of service in the armed forces, along with his commitment to combating childhood obesity, will serve him well as Surgeon General. We urge the Senate for a swift confirmation."

HHS: Paper Not Reflective of Holsinger's Thinking

But Holly Babin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Heath and Human Services -- the agency that will take the lead on trying to achieve Holsinger's confirmation -- insisted that the paper was by no means reflective of Holsinger's thinking.

"That paper was a survey of scientific peer-reviewed studies that he was asked to compile by the United Methodist Church, it's not that he was saying 'this is what I believe,'" Babin said. "It's a reflection of the available scientific data from the 1980s. It should be noted that in 1991, homosexuals were banned from the military and several years before that, homosexuality and Haitian nationality were considered risk factors for HIV/AIDS. Over the last 20 years, a clearer understanding of these issues has been achieved.

Asked about medical experts who disputed that Holsinger's paper expressed opinions timely in 1991 and pressed to explain what Holsinger's views on homosexuality are currently , Babin said, "we look forward to the confirmation process, where we can share Dr. Holsinger's qualifications and views."

Advocacy Groups Protest Nomination

Those answers will likely not quell the controversy. Critics say the paper certainly seems to be written from Holsinger's point of view.

Noting that Holsinger also belongs to a church that offers a ministry to "cure" gays of the sexual orientation, gay and lesbian rights advocates immediately protested Holsinger's nomination. "His writings suggest a scientific view rooted in anti-gay beliefs that are incompatible with the job of serving the medical health of all Americans," said the Human Rights Campaign in a statement. "It is essential that America's top doctor value sound science over anti-gay ideology."

Democrats will likely be sympathetic to such arguments. Holsinger's confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled, will be heard by the Senate Health Committee, chaired by longtime gay rights advocate Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Members of the committee include three Democratic presidential contenders -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Barack Obama, D-Illinois -- eager to prove their bona fides during the primary season to the gay and lesbian community.

Holsinger, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, did not return calls for comment.

When announcing his nomination on May 24, Bush said that as "America's chief health educator, [Dr. Holsinger] will be charged with providing the best scientific information available on how Americans can make smart choices that improve their health and reduce their risk of illness and injury."

What Holsinger's Paper Argues

Holsinger's paper argued that male and female genitalia are complementary -- so much so "that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other." Body parts used for gay sex are not complementary, he wrote. "When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur."

Holsinger wrote that "[a]natomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis" while the anus and rectum -- which "contain no natural lubricating function" -- are not. "The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage ... can result if objects that are large, sharp or pointed are inserted into the rectum," Holsinger wrote.

The cardiologist details many different diseases gay men can catch, and several sexual practices they may engage in, including "anal eroticism," which can lead to injuries and even death. "From the perspective of pathology and pathophysiology, the varied sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma ?"

In the context of the larger argument in his church as to whether homosexuality should be accepted, Holsinger presented a medical and scientific argument that anal intercourse was not natural.

"It is absolutely clear that anatomically and physiologically the alimentary and reproductive systems in humans are separate organ systems, i.e., the human does not have a cloaca," he said, referring to the posterior orifice that serves as the one opening for genital, urinary and intestinal tracts in amphibians, birds and reptiles. The surgeon general nominee wrote that "even primitive cultures understand the nature of waste elimination, sexual intercourse and the birth of children. Indeed our own children appear to 'intuitively' understand these facts."

A Political Agenda?

Professor Eli Coleman, Director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota Medical School said that the paper seems to have a pre-1970s view of human sexuality. "I an't imagine that any scientific journal would be able to publish this material because of its very narrow views of homosexuality," he said.

In fact, if one of his students handed the paper in, Coleman would give it a failing grade, he said. "I find it rather outdated in terms of its scientific knowledge and also narrow in its view of homosexuality," Coleman said. "It concerns me because I think our public policy really should be based upon best available science."

"It's a totally faulty paper. The man doesn't know anything about human sexuality," said June M. Reinisch, Ph.D., director emeritus of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender & Reproduction. "There's clearly a political agenda in this paper. This is not a scientific paper."

Paragraph by paragraph, Reinisch said Holsinger presents faulty arguments. Many homosexuals do not engage in the sexual act he criticizes; 40 percent of heterosexuals do. "It seems to me he's arguing the only way reproduction happens is in a loving heterosexual environment which is of course not true," Reinisch said, noting artificial methods, rape and one-night stands.

Reinisch, who was director of the Kinsey Institute when Holsinger wrote this paper, said that if Holsinger "is going to come up with this position in 2007 I think I can clearly say that he is not qualified to be surgeon general."

Holsinger holds a doctorate in anatomy and physiology and an M.D. from Duke University. He spent much of his career working for the Veteran's Health Administration. From 2003 to 2005 he was Kentucky's secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

2007-06-29T17:21:00.001Z

PATHOPHYSIOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

Prepared for the
Committee to Study Homosexuality of The United Methodist Church
by James W. Holsinger Jr., M.D.
Committee Member
January 14, 1991

During the course of the meetings of the Committee to Study Homosexuality, biology has come to mean the nonpsychological causation of homosexuality. However, biology also means “the division of physical science which deals with organized beings or animals and plants, their morphology, physiology, origin, and distribution” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). I believe that we must seriously consider the scientific disciplines of anatomy (structure or morphology), physiology (function), pathology (abnormal anatomy), and pathophysiology (abnormal function). Not to do so would simply fail to be true to our charge as a committee.

There is absolute consensus in the scientific community concerning the structure and function of the human alimentary [pertaining to the digestive tract] and reproductive systems. These two systems are absolutely separate since the human does not possess a cloaca. Reproduction can occur only by utilizing the reproductive system, requiring both the female ovum (egg) and the male sperm. Ova are fertilized naturally in the fallopian tubes of women following sexual intercourse by the sperm which transits through the vagina and uterus following release from the penis. Although artificial methods are available and used, the anatomy and physiology of humans have resulted in a natural means for conception.

The structure and function of the male and female human reproductive systems are fully complementary. Anatomically he vagina is designed to receive the penis. It is lined with squamous epithelium and is surrounded by a muscular tube intended for penile intromission. The rectum, on the other hand, is lined with a delicate mucosal surface and a single layer of columnar epithelium intenuea primarily for the reabsorption of water and electrolytes. The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum (Agnew, 1986).

The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function. Thus insertion of unlubricated objects or inadequate dilation of the anus before insertion of a large object can result in tissue laceration. “The internal and external anal sphincters are elastic rings of muscle which generally remain tightly constricted except during defecation. The anal sphincters are also intended for material to pass through them in a direction that leads out of the body. When an attempt is made to insert something in the reverse direction, the muscles of the sphincter constrict” (Agnew, 1986).

From the perspective of pathology and pathophysiology, the varied sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma. “Four general groups of conditions may be encountered in homosexually active men: classical sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhea, infections with chlamydia trachomatis, syphilis, herpes simplex infections, genital warts, pubic lice, scabies); enteric diseases (infections with Shigella species, Campylobacter jejuni, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia lamblia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis non-A, non-B, and cytomegalovirus); trauma (fecal incontinence, hemorrhoids, anal fissure, foreign bodies, rectosigmoid tears, allergic proctitis, penile edema, chemical sinusitis, inhaled nitrite burns, and sexual assault of the male patient); and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)” (Owen, 1985).

A study of sexually transmitted diseases in heterosexuals, bisexuals and homosexuals reported from Copenhagen in 1988 (Christopherson), demonstrated that the profile of diseases was strongly correlated to sexual lifestyle. “Amoebiasisa and giardiasis were found respectively in 31.9% and 13.8% of homosexuals. None of the heterosexuals had pathologic protozoa … Among males with homosexual partners, 14% had rectal infections. Gonococcal and chlamydial infections were equally frequent. Three percent had symptomatic anorectal herpes simplex infection and 11% anal warts…Urethral gonorrhea and/or chlamydia infections were diagnosed in 39% of heterosexuals compared to only 10% of homosexuals and bisexuals. Twelve percent of the homosexuals had untreated early syphilis, whereas syphilis was exceptional among heterosexuals. The total burden of infections expressed as the actual number of infections was largest among homosexuals, 40.4%, 22.4%, and 5.3% having one, two, and three infections respectively.”

In addition to infection, trauma and tumors are the primary problems related to the anorectum in homosexual men. “Consensual penile-anal intercourse can be performed safely provided there is adequate lubrication. Few anorectal problems and no evidence of anal-sphincter dysfunction are found in heterosexual women who have anal-receptive intercourse. However, forceful anal penetration without lubrication against a resistant sphincter will result in abrasive trauma, causing fissures, contusions, thrombosed hemorrhoids, lacerations with bleeding, pain, and psychic trauma” (Bush, 1986). The most severe type of anorectal trauma follows fist fornication which during the 1970s was practiced by approximately 5% of the male homosexual population (Geist, 1988). It should be noted that this activity is occasionally practiced by heterosexual and lesbian couples. This technique of anal eroticism involves having the partner insert their hand and forearm into the rectum for erotic stimulation. “The insertion of such a large object as a hand or fist creates the potential for rupture of the rectum or severe damage to the anus or rectal walls” (Agnew, 1986). “Participants frequently use drugs to produce inhibition or relaxation, thereby clouding appropriate responses to painful stimuli. Injuries sustained in this sexual activity generally tend to be severer and account for most sphincter injuries, as well as a disproportionate number of the lacerations, perforations, and deaths seen in connection with anal eroticism” (Geist, 1988).

In addition to infections and trauma, tumors are a definlte rlsk for homosexual men. “Homosexual behavior in men is a risk factor for anal cancer. Squamous-cell anal cancer is also associated with a history of genital warts, an association suggesting that papillomavirus infection is a cause of anal cancer” (Daling, 1987). Anal warts are commonly found among individuals who practice anal intercourse and only rarely found among heterosexuals practicing vaginal intercourse. “In one series of 260 homosexual men seen by proctologists, 134 (51.5 percent) had anal warts. They may occur anywhere in the anal-genital area but are particularly common in the anus of homosexual men” (Quinn, 1984). This infection appears to be correlated with the higher incidence of anal cancer in homosexual men.

At our Boston meeting, we spent some time discussing the complementarity of the human sexes. Although one could gather from the discussion of the consultants in scripture, theology, and Christian ethics that there may be some lack of assurance that the human sexes complement each other, I believe that it is possible to argue succinctly from an anatomical (structure) and physiological (function) point of view that the human sexes are indeed complementary.

It is absolutely clear that anatomically and physiologically the alimentary and reproductive systems in humans are separate organ systems; i.e., the human does not have a cloaca. Likewise it is clear that even primitive cultures understand the nature of waste elimination, sexual intercourse, and the birth of children. Indeed our own children appear to “intuitively” understand these facts. I think we should note that these simple “scientific” facts are the same in any culture — patriarchal or matriarchal, modern or primitive, Jewish or gentile, etc. The anatomic and physiologic facts of alimentation and reproduction simply do not change based on any cultural setting. In fact, the logical complementarity of the human sexes has been so recognized in our culture that it has entered our vocabulary in the form of naming various pipe fittings either the male fitting or the female fitting depending upon which one interlocks within the other. When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above.

Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself!

January 14, 1991

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agnew, Jeremy, Hazards Associated with Anal Erotic Activity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15:307-314, 1986.

Barone, James E. and Nealon, Thomas F., Jr., Management of Foreign Bodies and Trauma of the Rectum. Surgery,Gynecoloqv and Obstetrics, 156:453-457, 1983.

Busch, David B. and Starling, James R., Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature. Surgery, 100:512-519, 1986.

Bush, Robert A., Jr., and Owen, William F., Jr., Trauma and Other Noninfectious Problems in Homosexual Men. Medical Clinics of North America, 70:549-566, 1986.

Christopherson, Jette, et al, Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Hetero-, Homo- and Bisexual Males in Copenhagen. Danish Medical Bulletin, 35:285-8, 1988.

Daling, Janet R., et al, Sexual Practices, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the Incidence of Anal Cancer. New England Journal of Medicine, 317:973-977, 1987.

Eckert, William G., And Katchis, Steven, Anorectal Trauma. American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Patholoqy, 10:3-9, 1989.

Elam, A.L., and Ray, V.G., Sexually Related Trauma: A Review. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 15:576-584, 1986.

Geist, Richard F., Sexually Related Trauma. Emerqency Medicine Clinics of North America, 6:439-466, 1988.

Patton, Harry D., et al, Textbook of Physiology, 21st ed., Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Co., 1989, pp. 1263-1460.

Quinn, Thomas C., and Holmes, King K., Proctitis, Proctocolitis, and Enteritis in Homosexual Men. IN: Sexuallv Transmitted Diseases, ed. by Holmes, King K.,
et all New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984, pp. 672-691.

Torre, Carlo, Delayed Death from “Fisting.” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 8:91, 1987.

Williams, Peter L., et al, Gray’s Anatomy, 37th ed., Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone, 1989, pp. 1369-77, 1424-47.

Zinner, Stephen H . , Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexuals. Chapter 8 , IN: STDs: Sexually Transmitted Diseases, New York, Summit Books, 1985, pp. 102-114.

COMPORTAMENTO SEXUAL E SAÚDE

2007-06-27T13:59:00.000Z

SODOMY: A PUBLIC HEALTH RISK

MEN:

- A 1997 study in British Columbia found the life expectancy of men who engage in sodomy to be comparable to that of the average Canadian man in 1871. Researchers estimate thatnearly half of the 20 year old men currently engaging in sodomy will not reachtheir 65th birthday.1

- Ninety-five percent or more of the AIDS infections among gay men result from receptive anal intercourse.2

- The risk of anal cancer "soars" by nearly 4,000% for men who have sex with men. The rate doubles again for those who are HIV positive. A Michigan homosexual newspaper admits there is no such thing as "safe sex" to prevent this "soaring" cancer risk. Condoms offer only limited protection.3

- Homosexual men face a significantly higher risk of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, anal cancer, gonorrhea and gastrointestinal infections as a result of their sexual practices.4

- Men who engage in sodomy are 860% more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD), increasing up to 500% their risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. Men who commit acts of sodomy with men have large numbers of anonymous partners, which can result in rapid, extensive transmission of STDs. Control of STDs is a central component of HIV infection prevention in the United States; resurgence of bacterial STDs threatens national HIV infection prevention efforts.5

- Anal Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infection is nearly universal among HIV-positive homosexual or bisexual men and about 60% in HIV-negative men exhibiting the same sexual behavior.6

WOMEN:

- Many innocent victims suffer the health consequences associated with sodomy as a result of blood transfusions, rape and having normal sexual relations with those who have committed unnatural relations with others. While men of all ages who commit sodomy with other men remain at an alarming risk, young bisexual men are said to be a significant "bridge" for HIV transmission to women.7

- Women who commit sex acts with other women face a significantly higher risk of bacterial vaginosis, breast cancer and ovarian cancer than heterosexual women.8

- The spread of Human Papilomavirus (HPV) is not prevented by condoms. The persons most susceptible to cancer associated with HPV are young women (under 20) and people who practice anal intercourse.9

- Women who engage in receptive anal sex are at a higher risk for contracting anal cancer. In fact, in the U.S. general population, anal cancer is more prevalent among women than men — between 1.5 and 2 times more common, perhaps because more women than men engage in receptive anal sex.10

- The following chart provides a broad synopsis of medical problems related to sodomy:11

Sex Practice:	Potential Consequences:
1. Close Body Contact	1. Pubic lice 2. Scabies (mites) 3. Fungal Infections
2. Performer of Oral Sex	1. Oral gonorrhea 2. Oral lesions from herpes, HPV (warts), chancroid, lymhogranuloma venereum, or granuloma inguinale. 3. Nongonolococcal pharyngitis from chlamydia, other STD's 4. Syphilis 5. Hepatitis B 6. Enteric (intestinal) infections
3. Receptive Anal Intercourse	1. Traumatic proctitis 2. Rectal gonorrhea 3. Anal warts 4. HIV/AIDS 5. Nonspecific procitis (from chlamydia and other STDs) 6. Anorectal herpes 7. Anorectal syphilis 8. Hepatitis B 9. Rectal trichomoniasis 10. Lymphogranuloma venereum 11. Anorectal granuloma inguinale 12. Anorectal chancroid 13. Cytomegalovirus 14. Anorectal candidiasis
4. Receptive Manual-Anal Intercourse	1. Enteric (intestinal) infections
5. Receiver of Oral Sex	1. Physical abrasions 2. Bites 3. Herpes 4. Urethritis from various STDs
6. Insertive Anal Intercourse	1. Nongonococcal urethritis 2. Genital herpes 3. Molluscum contagiosum 4. Genital warts 5. Syphilis 6. Trichomoniasins 7. Epididymitis and/or proctitis 8. Fungal infections 9. Lymphogranuloma vencreum 10. Granuloma inguinale 11. Chancroid 12. Hepatitis B 13. HIV/AIDS
7. Oral-anal Intercourse	1. Enteric (intestinal) infections 2. Shigellosis 3. Campylobacter fetus (bacteria) 4. Enterogenic E. coli bacteria 5. Hepatitis (A, B, and others) 6. Amebiasis 7. Giardiasis 8. Salmonellosis 9. Enterobius vermicularis (parasite) 10. Oral warts 11. Oral gonorrhea 12. Syphilis 13. Lymphogranuloma venereum 14. Oral granuloma inguinale 15. Oral chancroid 16. HIV/AIDS 17. Herpes 18. Anorectal meningococcal infection

1. International Journal of Epidemiology, Vol 26, 657-661, "Modelling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men.""
2. Michael Fumento, "AIDS: Are heterosexuals at Risk?" Commentary 84, (November, 1987) pp. 22-23.
3. Between the Lines, "Anal Cancer and You," Sept. 29, 2000.
4. Medical Institute of Sexual Health, "Health Implications Associated with Homosexuality," 1999.
5. Centers for Disease Control, "Resurgent Bacterial Sexually Transmitted Disease Among Men Who Have Sex With Men," September 10, 1999.
6. Infectious Disease News, "Because of HPV, anal cancer screening indicated for certain high-risk groups," October, 1997
7. Manila Bulletin (Philippines), "Bisexuals Serve as 'Bridge' Infecting Women With HIV," July 30, 2000
8. Medical Institute of Sexual Health, "Health Implications Associated with Homosexuality," 1999.
9. WebMD Forum: "HPV and Cervical Cancer with John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D.," April 7, 2000.
10. Infectious Disease News, "Because of HPV, anal cancer screening indicated for certain high-risk groups," October, 1997
11. DG & Altman Ostrow, "Homosexual Behavior and Sexually Transmitted Diseases." New York: McGraw Hill, 1990. pp. 61-69.

Family Policy Network: http://familypolicy.net/us

CASO PARA RIR? OU MATA MESMO?

2007-06-26T17:29:00.001Z

O artigo aqui reproduzido trata da questão levantada no meu comentário n'O Insurgente ao post de Pedro Sette Câmara, 'Bem No Alvo'. Explica em mais pormenor porque o comportamento da maioria dos homosexuais constitui um perigo para eles próprios e para a saúde pública.

STRATEGY in the TRENCHES

The following was written as a response to a response to an email on hate-crime laws.

If you are one who supports homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, please tell the public just what that lifestyle entails. The attached *.pdf article gives a shot at it. Also available in *.html at http://theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/22SxSo/BroSx/Html/Strtgy1pg.htm

The article notes sexual behaviors typical of homosexual persons:

Around 99% of homosexual males engage in oral sex;

91% engage in anal sex;

82% engage in 'rimming', touching the anus of one's partner with one's tongue and inserting the tongue into the anus;

22% engage in 'fisting', inserting one's fist into the rectum of the partner;

23% engage in 'golden showers', urinating on each other;

4% engage in 'scat', the eating of feces, and in 'mud rolling', rolling on the floor where feces have been deposited.

These above figures are from one of the largest studies on the subject by two homosexual authors, not by rigid, right-wing, fundamentalist Christians.

Some, perhaps all, of these listed behaviors are being taught openly in Massachusetts public schools to children as young as 14, and maybe younger -- proving that all this is not just about what happens in someone's bedroom. It is about what happens in lots of public places.

Visit http://www.article8.org/ and http://www.parentsrightscoalition.org/ for more details. Search, e.g., for 'fistgate'.

The goal of homosexual activists is that of Alfred Kinsey and SIECUS, unlimited sexual freedom cradle-to-grave.

I understand that homosexual persons engage in many activities other than these, but it is only the sexual behaviors that are in question.

Love is not an issue between us, neither is compassion or inclusiveness, if defined consistently with the law and grace of God. Only specifically sexual behavior. I applaud that homosexual men form choirs, have clubs, eat meals together, and love each other. I love my father and my brothers, and they love me. None of those is the issue at stake if they are not sexualized.

Clarity always favors truth, unclarity always favors falsehood. The public must have clarity on the item homosexual persons want the public to approve (in this case homosexual behavior) or the public discussion cannot proceed (and has not proceded) either rationally or compassionately.

So please tell the public whether these are the behaviors you understand to be more or less typical of homosexual persons. If this list is not accurate, please supply the public with the accurate list, and explain why the two authors noted above gave us this one (for starters).

And, please tell the public which of these behaviors you think God wants to bless, and which you think the Church ought to bless.

If the above list is accurate, can you tell the public what the health consequences are of relating sexually in these ways?

And concerning hate-crime laws, the law is engineered to make it illegal to have an honest discussion of the issues. One cannot challenge the homosexual agenda without having the enforcing gun of the law pointed at one. That is commandeering the law of the land in a treasonous manner -- to subvert our constitution and the most precious aspect of a democratic republic -- the protection by law of open, honest, uncoerced public discussion of public issues. The homosexual agenda is all about public policy, and hardly at all about one's bedroom.

If the facts show that I am wrong, I will change my mind.

I offer a challenge to homosexual supporters: You and I are on opposite sides of the homosexual issues. But if the evidence should show that God approves of homosexual behavior, and that that is a safe way to engage sexually, then I will stand with you. On the other hand, if the evidence should show that God does not approve of such behavior, or that such behavior is health-eroding, not health-promoting, I ask, would you be willing to reconsider your position?

You can read much more at http://theroadtoemmaus.org/EM/ShpMl/WinSxWrs.htm

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

SOBRE A FALSA CLIMATOLOGIA

2007-06-22T23:55:00.000Z

THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM (Reprinted from Melanie Phillips’ Diary, by permissio and with thanks)

You know how we’re told sixty times per minute that man-made global warming is no longer just a theory but it’s now demonstrable fact, and that anyone who contradicts this is clinically insane because there’s a consensus of all scientists that it’s happening and only about 2.5 scientists on the entire planet disagree and they’re in the pay of Big Oil anyway so we can forget about them; and so the debate is TOTALLY OVER, says the BBC, which has been told that it is authoritatively by Very Important Scientists, so that the ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ BBC says that it no longer needs to give us a balanced argument about climate change because there just isn’t any reputable scientific opposition to the proven facts about seas rising and ice melting and hurricanes happening, all because of the human race and its foul and filthy habits of combustibles, cars and capitalism?

Well, read this remarkable article in Canada’s National Post by R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University. This is what Prof Patterson says:

In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more. The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales. In some fields the science is indeed ‘settled.’ For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that ‘the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.’ About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all. Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada.

When you’ve digested that, allow your gaze to settle mid-text on the list of previous Post articles in its series about the ‘deniers’, the scientists who are outside this fabled ‘consensus’ on global warming. Read those articles and you will discover, as did to his astonishment the journalist who wrote them and who had previously accepted the ‘consensus’ as true and settled fact, that more and more of the most distinguished names in climate science around the world are saying that the theory is total junk — and who, moreover, have given devastating evidence of the way the global warmers have falsified the evidence to create an entirely spurious, anti-scientific and deeply dishonest panic.

There’s this article , for example, about Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London and Director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling.

Last summer, Dr. Wingham and three colleagues published an article in the journal of the Royal Society that casts further doubt on the notion that global warming is adversely affecting Antarctica. By studying satellite data from 1992 to 2003 that surveyed 85% of the East Antarctic ice sheet and 51% of the West Antarctic ice sheet (72% of the ice sheet covering the entire land mass), they discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing at the rate of 5 millimetres per year (plus or minus 1 mm per year). That makes Antarctica a sink, not a source, of ocean water. According to their best estimates, Antarctica will ‘lower [authors’ italics] global sea levels by 0.08 mm’ per year.

Then there’s this article on Christopher Landsea of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. Chair of the American Meteorological Society’s committee on tropical meteorology and tropical cyclones and a recipient of the American Meteorological Society’s Banner I. Miller Award for the ‘best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting’, Landsea was a lead author on the subject for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — until he discovered that that the IPCC was falsley stating that global warming was causing hurricanes to happen. He wrote:

Where is the science, the refereed publications, that substantiate these pronouncements? What studies are being alluded to that have shown a connection between observed warming trends on the earth and long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity? As far as I know, there are none.

But since the IPCC

seems to have already come to the conclusion that global warming has altered hurricane activity and has publicly stated so. This does not reflect the consensus within the hurricane research community

Landsea resigned.

Then there is this article on Professor Paul Reiter, head of the Insects and Infectious Disease Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, an officer of the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the World Health Organization’s Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, and lead author of the Health Section of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. This was his experience with the IPCC’s handling of his special area of expertise:

In one of the IPCC’s most egregious errors, in its Second Assessment Report chapter on human population health, it created the scare — repeated by scientists with a popular following such as David Suzuki — that global warming could lead to 80 million additional cases of malaria per year worldwide. The IPCC scientists’ ‘glaring ignorance’ dumbfounded Prof. Reiter and his colleagues. For example, the IPCC claimed that malarial mosquitoes cannot ordinarily survive temperatures below 16C to 18C, not realizing that many tropical species do and that many temperate species survive temperatures of –25C. Likewise, IPCC scientists didn’t know at what altitudes mosquitoes can be found. As Prof. Reiter testified to a U.K. parliamentary committee in 2005, ‘The paucity of information was hardly surprising: Not one of the lead authors had ever written a research paper on the subject! Moreover, two of the authors, both physicians, had spent their entire career as environmental activists. One of these activists has published “professional” articles as an “expert” on 32 different subjects, ranging from mercury poisoning to land mines, globalization to allergies and West Nile virus to AIDS. Among the contributing authors there was one professional entomologist, and a person who had written an obscure article on dengue and El Nino, but whose principal interest was the effectiveness of motorcycle crash helmets (plus one paper on the health effects of cellphones).’

Then there’s Dr Claude Allegre. In 1967 Dr Allegre became director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre; in 1971, he became director of the University of Paris’s Department of Earth Sciences; in 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science. Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,’ a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming’s ‘potential risks are very great’ and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe’s fragility in order to stave off ‘spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.’ He was therefore part of the fabled Consensus. But now look at what Dr Allegre is saying, as a result of looking at the evolving scientific evidence:

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ in L’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. ‘The cause of this climate change is unknown,’ he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the ‘science is settled.’… Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change ‘simplistic and obscuring the true dangers’, Dr. Allegre especially despairs at ‘the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.’

If I were part of the man-made global warming ‘consensus’, right now I’d be fingering my professional collar.

ANTI-SEMITISM AS A DISEASE OF THE SOUL

2007-06-17T00:00:00.000Z

VINTE CONSIDERAÇÕES SOBRE UMA DOENÇA DA ALMA

O anti-semitismo como defeito moral e intelectual

TWENTY PROPOSITIONS ABOUT A DISEASE OF THE SOUL

Anti-semitism as a moral and intellectual defect

Publicado primeiro em O INSURGENTE do 25 de Abril de 2007

First published in O INSURGENTE on April 25, 2007

Now available here with English translation

__________________________________________________

1. O anti-semitismo, como qualquer outra obsessão xenófoba é uma doença da alma, porque corrói e subverte os nossos sentimentos de solidariedade humana.

Anti-semitism, like any other xenophobic mania, is a sickness of the soul because it corrodes and undermines our feelings of human solidarity.

2. O anti-semitismo, porém, é a pior dessas doenças porque é a mais antiga e a que mais estragos e sofrimento têm causado tanto às vítimas como aos perseguidores.

Anti-semitism is, however, the worst of these sicknesses because it is the oldest and the one which has caused the most damage both to its victims and to its authors.

3. O preconceito contra os judeus tem a sua origem no ódio persistente da sociedade pré-industrial ao capitalismo.

Prejudice against the Jews originates in the persistent hatred of pre-industrial society for capitalism.

4. Os judeus, tendo sido expulsos da sua terra pelos romanos como castigo pela sua revolta contra o império, espalharam-se por todo o mundo conhecido e sobreviveram através do comércio.

The Jews, having been expelled from their land by the Romans in punishment for revolting against the empire, spread all over the known world and survived through trade.

5. Sendo um povo em que todos eram alfabetizados, foram muito bem sucedidos nos negócios.

Being a literate people they were very successful in commerce.

6. Sendo um povo monoteísta e com as suas sagradas escrituras tinham um cimento poderoso para conservar a sua identidade e as ligações entre as suas comunidades.

Being a monotheist people with their divine scriptures they had a powerful cement for conservating their identity and links among their communities.

7. Os camponeses de maneira geral odeiam e invejam os mercadores e os intrusos.

Peasants generally hate and envy traders and intruders.

8. Os nobres improdutivos e dedicados à caça e à guerra sempre procuraram empréstimos onde havia dinheiro, quer dizer entre os judeus.

Unproductive nobles devoted to hunting and war always sought loans where there was money, that is to say among the Jews.

9. O devedor de maneira geral não gosta do credor.

The debtor generally dislikes the creditor.

10. A melhor maneira de liquidar as dívidas era de incitar os camponeses (que também tinha as suas próprias dividas) a pilhar os bens dos judeus e correr com eles. Daí a frequência dos pogroms.

The best way to liquidate debts was to incite the peasants (who also had their own debts) to plunder and expel the Jews. Hence the frequency of pogroms.

11. Foi o próprio Marx quem disse que os judeus sentiram no capitalismo como peixes na água.

Marx himself said that the Jews took to capitalism like ducks to water.

12. Foi o florescimento do capitalismo que trouxe a emancipação dos judeus.

It was the flowering of capitalism that brought emancipation to the Jews.

13. O saudosismo dos tempos medievais pré-capitalistas anda muitas vezes em paralelo com o anti-semitismo.

Nostalgia for the pre-capitalist Middle Ages often goes hand-in-hand with anti-semitism.

14. A expulsão dos judeus da península ibérica foi uma das principais causas da decadência das outrora grandes potências: foi a expulsão da sua classe média. Quem veio a beneficiar foram os países baixos e a Inglaterra.

The expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was one of the main causes of the decay of the two once-great powers: it signified the expulsion of its middle class. Those who benefited were the Netherlands and England.

15. As contribuições materiais, morais, culturais e científicas dos judeus para o progresso de humanidade, proporcionalmente ao seu número excedem de longe as contribuições de qualquer outro povo.

The material, moral, cultural and scientific contributions made by the Jews to the progress of humanity in proportion to their humber far exceeds that of any other people.

16. A doença do anti-semitismo, quando encontrada em gente culta tem geralmente a sua origem no sentimento de inveja e a consciência de mediocridade. São estes impulsos atávicos que explicam o histerismo antijudaico dos islamistas.

The disease of anti-semitism, when encountered among educated people usually has its origin in a sentiment of envy and consciousness of mediocrity. These atavistic impulses explain the anti-Jewish hysteria of islamists.

17. A expressão anti-anti-semitismo é um nonsense. O que existe é a aversão ao anti-semitismo, uma posição perfeitamente fundamentada e partilhada por todas as pessoas sensatas. O que não quer dizer que seja desejável que essa aversão fosse traduzida em legislação. Não se pode legislar sobre os preconceitos ou a imbecilidade.

The expression anti-anti-semitism is nonsense. What exists is aversion to anti-semitism, a perfectly justified position and one that is shared by all people of good sense. Which is not to say that it is desirable that this aversion be translated into legislation. It is impossible to legislate about prejudice and imbecility.

18. Em toda a parte os judeus são os melhores imigrantes, com a mais baixa taxa de criminalidade e das mais altas de produtividade.

Jews everywhere are the best immigrants, with the lowest rates of criminalitiy and the highest of productivity.

19. Israel é uma pequena ilha ocidental e de progresso num oceano medieval.

Israel is a tiny island of the western world in a medieval ocean.

20. O dever de todas as pessoas de bem é de defender Israel e o seu povo.

It is the duty of all people of good will to defend Israel and its people.

PRUDENTIAL RELATIVISM

2007-06-09T01:42:00.000Z

Prudential Relativism and the Problem of Ignorance

Roger Sandall

(Talk at Warrane College Easter Seminar on “Relativism and Human Rights”, April 7 2007.)

What do I mean by Prudential Relativism? To start with, what I have in mind is the old adage “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” In Nero’s time, presumably, some visitor to Rome failed to do as the Romans did, and ended up thrown to the lions. That it is prudent to trim one’s ethical sails to the wind was the conclusion quickly drawn by his surviving friends—and they were not just being opportunistic. Prudence is admittedly only a contingent virtue, what Immanuel Kant might have called a “maxim”, not an imperative, but in certain contingencies it may indeed help you survive.

Next, what do I mean by “the problem of ignorance”? Here we might also put ourselves in Rome in Nero’s time. And also in the shoes of a visitor. The year is about 50AD. Let’s say our visitor has just arrived in Rome from some barbarous place like Siberia or Scotland, he has not heard the aforementioned famous adage, he is deeply ignorant, and so he asks someone along the Appian Way: What DO the Romans do? Let us also assume that this visitor has heard about the lions, and he wants desperately to do the right thing. Trouble is, he doesn’t know what the right thing is.

Something like this same problem of ignorance arises today, and arises in numerous contexts in our multicultural world, when we have newcomers from cultures A and B and C who quite simply don’t know what the right thing in the host culture is. Originally, say 50 years ago, most immigrants wanted to know what the right thing was and made efforts to find out. Recently, however, another complexity has been added, with entire government departments set up to tell them that their thing is the right thing, whatever sort of a thing it might be, and they should do their thing willy-nilly, and, indeed, that they have an internationally certified human right to do so... But of course that’s another story. Or not really the story I’m telling here.

So back to my argument… which involves a little thought experiment trying to compare and contrast a pure condition of ethical knowledge, on the one hand, and of ethical ignorance, on the other, and trying to see how and when prudential relativism becomes a part of our moral environment.

First, let’s imagine a small village in the jungle where everyone knows the rules. Or a medieval village in the 12^th century. In this ethical universe there are three absolutely binding commands: do not lie, do not kill, and do not paint graffiti on your neighbor’s walls. Not only are they absolutely binding, everyone knows them, everyone respects them, and everyone obeys them. Just as economists propose states of perfect equilibrium between economic demand and economic supply, what I am here proposing is a state of stable equilibrium in which ethical demand (the law) is in perfect equilibrium with ethical supply (lawful human conduct). And this could of course be any small and virtuous community in times gone by.

[Or for that matter it might be a monastic community today. I saw an ABC documentary about New Norcia in WA last evening. They have a Benedictine monastery there, and this kind of closed religious community exemplifies the sort of indissoluble combination of law and conduct I am talking about, where rules that are known are dutifully and invariably performed.]

But now let us consider the opposite case. Not a universe of knowing ethical agents in stable equilibrium. Instead, a situation where nobody knows what the rules are—and chaos threatens. A primeval tribal world where man is wolf to man. A world so unstable that at any moment the air may become thick with arrows, spears, clubs, flying stones and profanity. Not a village, either—and certainly not a monastery—but a path through no-man’s land in the jungle. So there is territorial uncertainty too: nobody is quite sure whose turf it is. This sort of situation is found not only in parts of the Persian Gulf, as we have seen in the past few days, where marine boundaries are notoriously hard to see: it can also be found in parts of the Amazon and in places like Papua New Guinea, when tribesmen of one group encounter men of another group, and are uncertain about each other’s rules of engagement.

* * *

But first a little digression… There’s a recent book on ethics by the very aggressive unbeliever Anthony Grayling with the challenging title “What is Good?” This is a perfectly reasonable question, with a lineage going back to Socrates and I suppose before him too, and it’s just the sort of question academics love to ask. But in the primeval world another question of much greater urgency must usually be dealt with first—especially if you are on the trail, and you dimly see a party of strange warriors with bows and arrows coming toward you.

That question is, “What is Safe?” Having first established What is Safe, you can draw up a chair beside the fire, and get out the port, and discuss “What is Good?” later.

End of digression. Now it happens that a recent BBC documentary about West Papua actually showed a situation of primeval uncertainty of the kind I was talking about a moment ago. And to cut a long story short, when they had overcome their initial fear and suspicion—we’re talking about different tribal groups intermittently at war—each man embraced his opposite number, hugging him firmly, and smiling determinedly, smiling incessantly, smiling desperately and smiling non-stop. Because that was the safe thing to do. They were obviously reluctant to stop hugging each other, because it was only while being hugged that they felt secure.

Not having a common language in which to explain their particular ethical systems, or comfortable chairs in which to sit around arguing after dinner about “What is Good?”, they resorted to the universal symbolism of the embrace, and the friendly facial signification of the smile. All this, as I think I said, was in West Papua, where they also produced a continuous sound a little like an unbroken ululation, “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa”, on and on and on, a vocal reiteration to strengthen the expressive symbolism of the smile. It was not clear to me whether they did or did not have a common language; but both parties did understand that “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa” was a friendly noise, and that as long as you kept it up you meant well and would come to no harm.

* * *

Here we might add an anecdote from the past. This one from Mexico 500 years ago. Cortes and his chaplain Father Olmedo were on their way to conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, when along the way they came to a large and impressive Indian town. Cortes was not a conquistador for nothing: and he didn’t mess about when it came to conversion. Through his all-purpose Indian factotum, mistress, and interpreter Marina, he informed the Indian governor of the town—the ‘Cacique’—that human sacrifice was atrocious, that the stench near the sacrificial pyramid was disgusting, that the Indian idols were contemptible, and that the Indians were sunk in iniquity of the darkest and foulest kind. He had a statue of the Virgin Mary ready, and was about to climb the pyramid and place it on top. Prescott tells us that

The Cacique listened with civil, but cold indifference. Cortes, finding him unmoved, turned briskly round to his soldiers, exclaiming that now was the time to Plant the Cross! They eagerly seconded his pious purpose (but at this point) Father Olmedo, with better judgment, interposed.

He represented that to introduce the Cross among the natives, in their present state of ignorance and incredulity, would be to expose the sacred symbol to desecration, so soon as the backs of the Spaniards were turned.

The only way was to await patiently the season when more leisure should be afforded to instil into their minds a knowledge of the truth.

Prescott writes approvingly that

the sober reasoning of the good father prevailed over the passions of the martial enthusiasts.

I think we may take it for granted that Father Olmedo was in some sense sympathetic with the modern ideal of human rights. Certainly he felt that Aztec human sacrifice was a denial of just about everything human—or divine—that you can think of. He certainly did not believe that when in Mexico you should do as the Mexicans did. But, at the same time, he saw that a too peremptory policy would be counterproductive. The Indians were “ignorant”, and until their understanding and “knowledge” were improved, they could hardly be expected enthusiastically to embrace the faith. At the same time we can see that Cortes, although he clearly understood the horrors of Aztec human sacrifice, could himself be said to be deeply ignorant of many aspects of a civilization that had a number of other and more meritorious features.

* * *

What conclusions about “prudential relativism” can we draw from all this? From the examples of this moral dichotomy? On the one hand the closed village or closed community where there is perfect knowledge of a particular ethical universe, and everyone knows how to behave. On the other hand, the more open and anarchic condition of dangerous ignorance we have now in many places, resulting in a state of deep ethical uncertainty, instability, and inevitable compromise.

Well, I suppose the first and obvious thing to say is that most of us live today somewhere in between these two worlds, compromising one way or another. I fear there’s no going back to the world of solidary unity, of symmetrically matching belief and conduct, of the medieval village or the jungle tribe. All of us today—especially as we move from one country and one continent to another—find ourselves from time to time having to follow that wise travel advisory: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” As an initial guide, as a precautionary rule, it is prudent to do so, and, moreover, it may be regarded as basically safe.

On the other hand, it would be entirely erroneous to draw the conclusion drawn by professional relativists that different truths, different views, different values and different laws, are all “equally valid”—Aztec human sacrifice alongside the teachings of Jesus—and that this ridiculous dogma of ethical equivalence constitutes a rule we should all respect today.

Once again, only intellectuals in universities could ever believe this sort of thing. Father Olmedo knew it was rubbish. And every Papuan tribesman knows it is rubbish too. For consider what happened in the tribal situation I described. They did not in fact behave as if man is wolf to man. Both sides tacitly recognised the universal value of human life to human individuals; each side recognised that they had a common interest in survival, whatever his particular tribal beliefs; no man wanted to die unprepared, unconfessed, “unhouseled” and far from home. Both sides probably included men with families they wanted to see again.

Looking a little more closely at the Papuan case, what probably happened was a compromise of a deeply human kind. On the one hand the tribesmen would have had the normal human instincts of qualified benevolence toward other men—even other men who may have trespassed on their territory. Aboriginal tribes had a keen sense of tribal territory: a keen sense of mine and yours. But transcending this were the sentiments emphasized by David Hume, who thought that human nature was much the same the world over (a view I, and I suspect most old-time Aborigines, happen to share). So if there was a severe drought and food shortage across wide areas of the Australian desert, Aboriginal territorial “rights” might be relaxed somewhat to allow the occasional starving or thirsty stranger to eat and drink.

On the other hand, in addition to a qualified benevolence of the sort Hume understood as universal, there would also be an element of calculation of a more harsh and Hobbesian kind, and a rational estimate of the costs and benefits of dealing civilly with strangers. We might note that, in the case of the Papuan tribes in the BBC movie, where both were in a kind of ethical no-man’s land, the men resorted to a universal language. They were smiling, hugging, and making reassuring friendly noise—wa wa wa wa wa. In this way they were communicating with each other, stranger to stranger, creating a safe environment where, whatever their differing beliefs about God and creation and the answer to the philosophical question “What is Good?”, they could live for the time being safely side by side.

* * *

90% of the anthropologists you hear from are relativists of one kind or another. But to me the really interesting thing has always been that although there is indeed an amazing diversity of customs and beliefs, this variety is only superficial. Overall, the human picture is one where universals, categorical imperatives if you like—respect for truth (do not lie), respect for property (do not steal, or paint other people’s houses with graffiti), and respect for life (do not kill)—are an underlying moral foundation that can usually be found everywhere, in every culture, whatever the visibly colourful diversity of dress and cuisine displayed.

Roger Sandall é autor do The Culture Cult e o seu site é aqui

VACLAV KLAUS SOBRE AMBIENTALISMO

2007-06-08T19:47:00.000Z

UMA VOZ LUCIDA NO MEIO DA CACAFONIA
Extracto do discurso do Presidente da República Checa Vaclav Klaus perante a comissão American Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce em Março deste ano.
See: http://www.vaclavklaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek

The so called climate change and especially man-made climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world.

My ambition is not to bring additional arguments to the scientific climatological debate about this phenomenon. I am convinced, however, that up to now this scientific debate has not been deep and serious enough and has not provided sufficient basis for the policymakers’ reaction. What I am really concerned about is the way the environmental topics have been misused by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles underlying free society. It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of views about human freedom.
As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.

The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an undisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and PR campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making. To use the words of Friedrich Hayek, they try to stop free, spontaneous human action and replace it by their own, very doubtful human design.
The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc.

They neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate fluctuations even in known and documented history. Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw. They neglect the complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental risks.

By concentrating on the human contribution to the climate change the environmentalists ask for immediate political action based on limiting economic growth, consumption, or human behavior they consider hazardous. They do not believe in the future economic expansion of the society, they ignore the technological progress the future generations will enjoy, and they ignore the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society is, the higher is the quality of the environment.

The policymakers are pushed to follow this media-driven hysteria based on speculative and hard evidence lacking theories, and to adopt enormously costly programs which would waste scarce resources in order to stop the probably unstoppable climate changes, caused not by human behavior but by various exogenous and endogenous natural processes (such as fluctuating solar activity).

Thanks to Melanie Phillips for this link. See her comments at: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p =1544

COMO DESCONSTRUIR UMA NAÇÃO

2007-06-05T20:03:00.001Z

COMO DESCONSTRUIR UMA NAÇÃO

por Patrícia Lança

Mais sobre o Reino Unido

Publicado n'O Insurgente de 27 de Fevereiro de 2007

O PRIMEIRO ALVO do multiiculturalismo da extrema-esquerda britânica não foi a imigração mas a classe operária indígena. Aproveitando as marcadas diferenças de classe que existiam tradicionalmente na Inglaterra, os sociólogos esquerdistas dirigiram a sua militância ao ensino básico e secundário. Na formação de professores para as escolas do Estado, a atenção principal deixou de ser a preparação na matéria a ensinar. Agora o que importava era transformar as atitudes dos candidatos a professor. Eram acusados de pertencerem a classe média e serem preconceituosos. Tinham que mudar. A sua tarefa não era de inculcar os modos da classe média nos alunos. Não deviam corrigir nem a gramática, nem o vocabulário, nem as maneiras dos alunos. Gritar e falar alto, interromper, chamar nomes, e todo o resto que o professor tradicional não tolerava, agora tornou-se aceitável.

Porque, diziam os professores de Sociologia da Educação, era assim a cultura da classe operária. Tentar mudar o que os alunos aprendiam em casa constituía uma forma de repressão inadmissível numa democracia. Quanto a corrigir os hábitos ou a fala dos imigrantes das Caraíbas, nem pensar. Até era bom que os manuais escolares fossem escritos em crioulo. Esta iniciativa naufragou nas rochas da diversidade dos dialectos das várias ilhas, facto que os sociólogos só constataram mais tarde.

O fim das sanções
O mais fácil então era simplesmente desistir de ensinar inglês à esta gente difícil. Paralelamente com o laissez faire na sala de aulas, houve o total abandono da aplicação de sanções. Deixou de haver qualquer tipo de castigo. Os ingleses, antes peritos na deplorável prática de castigos corporais, deixaram simplesmente de punir mesmo os piores abusos. Quando um professor era agredido fisicamente só restava a sua expulsão. Quarenta anos da prática desta filosofia nas escolas britânicas agora deram o seu fruto. Os piores números de insucesso escolar da Europa; hooliganismo de crianças nas ruas, a tal ponto que os adultos têm medo das crianças e dos adolescentes; as cidades à noite cheias de jovens agressivos e bêbedos; e um governo desesperado a produzir novas leis que visam, em vão, ensinar respeito. As mudanças de comportamento provocadas pelas políticas delirantes da esquerda foram muitas. Entre elas dois pequenos mas desagradáveis fenómenos: a generalização dos hábitos de urinar e de cuspir na rua. Antigamente isto só acontecia, diziam os ingleses, no outro lado da Mancha. Agora são os ingleses que ficam surpreendidos com a boa educação dos continentais.

Evidentemente que estou a referir as escolas do Estado (onde leccionei durante uns dez anos e sei do que estou a falar). Os colégios particulares (chamados, com essa típica perversidade britânica, “public schools”), muitas vezes internos, beneficiaram com a degradação do ensino estatal. As elites, incluindo muitos ministros de Tony Blair, continuam a enviar os filhos para os colégios particulares. E são estes que continuam a ter maiores possibilidades de entrar no ensino superior e nas melhores universidades. É assim a ‘sociedade sem classes’ do New Labour. E foi esse o modelo de ensino que o Portugal de Abril escolheu.

A chamada filosofia de educação que inspira os educratas que impuseram esta política educativa em diversos países ocidentais, incluindo PORTUGAL, é analisada no texto IN DEFENCE OF REASON. Clicar neste tíitulo na caixa do Arquivo ao lado direito.

SOCIALISMO AFRICANO NO SÉCULO XVIII

2007-06-03T18:04:00.000Z

Fantasias socialistas

É salutar para a nossa própria auto-estima ler, de vez em quando, sobre as fantasias absurdas elaboradas por pessoas com fama de estudiosos, e cujas obras continuam a ser recomendadas nas faculdades anglo-americanas, e não só. Uma dessas figuras é Karl Polanyi (não confundir com o irmão, o admirável Michael Polanyi). Karl converteu-se cedo ao marxismo e dedicou a vida académica à pregar as virtudes do planeamento económico. A obsessão subiu-lhe à cabeça e transformou um homem inteligente num fantasista sem escrúpulos. Reproduz-se no Portolani Special um texto do antropólogo heterodoxo, Roger Sandall, tirado do seu livro The Culture Cult, e também publicado no seu site do mesmo nome: http://www.culturecult.com/farce/dahomy.htm

Amazing Dahomey

From "What Karl Polanyi found in Dahomey", Chapter 5 of The Culture Cult.

(By kind permission of Roger Sandall)

The role of state officials

The famous economist Karl Polanyi believed in the need for strong, centralized, state-managed economies. He promoted this in much of his writing, and toward the end of his life made a remarkable discovery-that the arrangements to be found in ancient, blood-stained, slave-trading, war-making West African Dahomey (now Benin) amounted to a wisely ruled Welfare State. He described its features in a book, Dahomey and the Slave Trade, and we describe below some of the things Polanyi thought he had found.

Right from the start he assumes that in 18^th-century Dahomey economic activity only takes place because it is "implemented by state officials", all the way from the king at the top down to the subsistence farmers planting their crops. It is a fact of common observation that interference by the state in the decision-making of small farmers about what to plant and when has time and again produced disasters. In Russia, China, Cambodia, and Ethiopia famines resulted. Yet Dahomey was spared such misery: it had only one recorded famine throughout its history. How could this be?

According to Polanyi the reason is not what you'd expect-that its rulers had the good sense to leave the farmers alone. Instead it was because the king and his ministers were telling them what to do. "The King of Dahomey enforces cultivation over all his dominions", he quotes approvingly from a 19th-century source, while "the permanent administration of agricultural affairs was in the hands of the 'Minister of Agriculture', the Tokpo". Beneath him were other administrative assistants, and "it was the duty of the agricultural officials to insure a balanced production of crops and adjust resources to requirements. If there was overproduction or underproduction of any crop, the farmers were ordered to shift from one crop to another."

No-one knows how far Dahomey's bureaucracy actually succeeded in achieving any of these goals. But Polanyi clearly believes that it did, seizes enthusiastically on any evidence of "an extensive apparatus of planning and administration", and jubilantly hails the taxes imposed to provide state revenue. He is particularly excited by a report that when the king was "about to set a new price for pigs" (did the Royal Personage have nothing better to do?) "a complicated system of controls was set in motion". The slaughter of sows, the movement of livestock, and both production and transportation, were monitored by state officials throughout the land.

Of hoes, Amazons, and IBM

Could a peasant who wanted a hoe just sit down and make one? No way. "Twelve forges throughout the country were designated to make hoes; and production of hoes was limited to these forges, each of which was under the watchful eye of an official charged with supervising production." Polanyi sees nothing wrong in the king having some 4,000 women attached to the court, 2,000 of them wives and the rest a regiment of female soldiers known in the literature as the "Amazons". That "people of rank engrossed the major part of the women" was not a worry, since other women were appointed by the king to provide sexual services to the public at large. Plainly, no detail of public welfare was overlooked. Security was attended to by a system of state spies.

But how were numerical records kept of all the taxes paid, the numbers of livestock, the men available for the annual war, of births and deaths and marriages? Here we come to Polanyi's remarkable claim that Dahomey possessed a system of enumeration representing, for its time, "an advance in communication comparable to IBM". It seems that when a citizen wanted to count he put pebbles one by one into raffia bags, the annual census-taking conducted before the slave-raiding wars being the main occasion for this, and the time when hundreds of bag-carriers bearing pebbles converged on the capital.

Because there was no way of indicating percentages of a total, each tally in the census-of women, of men, of male and female births during the year, of male and female children below the age of thirteen, of male and female deaths from natural causes during the year, of deaths in war, of the number of captives taken, and finally the number of slaves available for sale (a secondary matter compared to the number of captive "heads" or prisoners for sacrifice to the ancestral gods)-was conveyed independently in separate bags of pebbles.

As one tries to visualise the lines of porters toiling uphill under the blazing African sun, day after day and week after week to the capital city, with their burdensome raffia bags slung from their shoulders, and the innumerable pebbles they must contain . . . it is impossible not to become suspicious. Perhaps Herskovits did too. The arithmetic itself seems odd. And where are the earlier reports corroborating the account Herskovits obtained in the 1930s? There are none. To his credit Herskovits admits to finding "the system of bureaucratic control" he describes as "bordering on the fantastic". And when one considers all the complications it is not surprising to find it has been described by another authority on Dahomey as "almost incredible".

Cut the "almost". It was indeed entirely incredible. About the kindest thing that can be said about Karl Polanyi's credulity is that only someone of the type set before us in Peter Drucker's biographical note, with "a naive belief in the cunning, cleverness, and foresight of our rulers", filled with that sacred hate of the market system so admired by his wife, convinced of the impending downfall of modern capitalism, and simple-minded enough to see pebble-counting with raffia bags as analogous to the achievements of IBM-only someone like this could have possibly fallen for it in the first place.

Academic delusions

But let us try and be sympathetic. Consider the ageing scholar's situation in New York. Sitting in his "tiny faculty apartment on Morningside Heights, each of its grimy and ill-maintained rooms piled from floor to ceiling with books and pamphlets, articles and letters", never having done an actual day's fieldwork in Africa in his life, and with everyone talking up its prospects, it was perhaps understandable for him to wildly idealize this 18th century state so long ago and far away-a despotic kingdom set before us as a model for the modern age. Seldom can the delusions of romantic primitivism have put a man so completely out of touch.

When Karl Polanyi moved west from Hungary he carried some of the worst ideological baggage of eastern Europe with him. He never learnt to appreciate the principles of democratic government which defended his existence. He never understood the economy which fed him, and gave him the freedom to work. While Michael Polanyi deepened our understanding of civilization in The Logic of Liberty, Karl Polanyi was preparing a book which might have been called The Logic of Slavery.

In one place he casually mentions that after a military victory 4,000 captives were sacrificed to Dahomey's gods. How would Polanyi have felt if he had witnessed these killings? He was hardly a family man, but his relationship with his daughter seems to have been close. What would he have thought of the training procedure for future Dahomeyan executioners, where girls and boys were given knives to hack at the heads of their living victims?

In the 18th century thousands of slaves and prisoners were killed each year in Dahomey. At the only place in his book where he shows any concern about this Polanyi writes that "admittedly, acts of repulsive cruelty, religious mass murder, and endemic techniques of treachery in the political field were the accompaniment of its high achievements. Nevertheless, Dahomey's was an unbreakable society, held together by bonds of solidarity over which only naked force eventually prevailed."

That only naked force could break this culture is presented as its vindication. As much might be said of Hitler's Germany. Such are the priorities of those who believe that the primitive moral claims of solidarity outweigh all others-simple humanity included.

Referências em Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult, Designer Tribalism and Other Essays

Ibid, pp 38-39

Ibid, p 46

Ibid, p 51

W. J. Argyle, The Fon of Dahomey, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, p 94. A somewhat fuller description of the census tallies, and of the circumstances in which Herskovits got his data, may be found in Roger Sandall, "Herskovits' Last Day in Dahomey", Anthropology Today, Vol. 15 No 6, December 1999, pp 18-20

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander, p 138

Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: an Analysis of an Archaic Economy, p 9

In West Africa scarcely imaginable brutalities were routine. Visiting

Benin

in the1860s, Sir Richard Burton saw a slave lashed to a keg of dynamite and blown up. "'When he descended,' Burton wrote, 'his brains were beaten out with clubs and sticks, even the women and children joining in the pastime gleefully, as boys killing a rat.'" In Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live: a Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton, Little, Brown and Company, 1998, p.389

EURABIAN NIGHTS

2007-06-02T01:55:00.000Z

EURABIAN NIGHTS*

An essay on 'integration'

By Srdja Trifkovic**

France
THOUSANDS OF YOUNG Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, ‘Allahu akbar!’ riot and force the police to retreat. Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched. Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address; or Tripoli during the Danish cartoons fury; or Karachi, Kabul, Gaza, and countless other cities in Dar al-Islam heartland, on any number of occasions. Yet a year ago, such scenes were unfolding, for weeks on end, in places with such names as Clichy-sous-Bois, Argenteuil, and La Courneuve. The trouble in the banlieus finally ended, as various Muslim ‘community leaders’ had claimed, only when various levels of French officialdom quietly accepted that there were defacto no-go areas within the country, mini-Islamistans run by the dominant local majority. Mon Clichy a moi, c’estça! ‘just about sums it up, on the official website of Clichy-sous-Bois, whose population is 80 per cent Muslim. In practice, this means that local groceries refrain from selling wine, and young Muslim men feel emboldened to use violence against ‘sluts’ women who do not follow Islamic ways. Many more French-born Arab girls wear the hijab today than did so a year ago. It is their protection against mutilation and gang rape. Failing to do so makes them fair game for both. A knife slash across the scarfiess girl’s cheek from the lip to the ear is especially common and known as a ‘smile’.

Dutch Christian Democrat minister thinks sharia demand should be met
The demand for communal self-rule is not new, and it will be made with increasing frequency in the future. Most of the 25 million Muslims in Western Europe already consider themselves autonomous, a community justifiably opposed to the decadent host society of infidels. This demand is but the first step: it will lead to the clamouring for the adoption of sharia within segregated Muslim communities and, finally, for the imposition of sharia on the society as a whole. Europe’s elite class is prepared for this challenge. Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hem Donner a Christian Democrat sees the demand as perfectly legitimate and argues that sharia could be introduced ‘by democratic means’. Muslims have a right to follow the commands of their religion, even if that included some ‘dissenting rules of behaviour’. ‘It is a sure certainty for me: if two thirds of all Netherlanders tomorrow would want to introduce sharia, then this possibility must exist. Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say “this isn’t allowed!” The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy.’

Sweden shows tolerance
The same ‘essence’ was reiterated in similar terms last July by Jens Orback, the Swedish Integration (sic) Minister, who declared in a radio debate: ‘We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.’ Yes, when we become a minority; the fact that, four months later, both Orback and his Social Democratic government remain in power aptly illustrates Sweden’s political and cultural scene.
Until a generation ago, Sweden was one of the safest and most law-abiding countries in the world. Today, in the southern city of Malmö, the authorities are no longer able to deal with crime among Muslim immigrants, 90 per cent of whom are on welfare. They make up one third of the city’s 300,000 people; at the city’s Rosengrad School, of 1,000 students, only two were Swedes last year. ‘If we park our car it will be smashed so we often have to go in two vehicles, one just to protect the other’, says policeman Roif Landgren. Both vehicles are needed to escort Swedish ambulance drivers into certain neighbourhoods. Robberies of all sorts increased by 50 per cent in 2004 alone, with gangs of young Muslims specializing in mugging old people visiting the graves of relatives. Thomas Anderberg, head of statistics for the Malmö police, reported a doubling of ‘rapes by ambush’ in 2004. Nearly all of the increase is caused by Muslim men raping Swedish women. Next door in Norway and Denmark, two thirds of all men arrested for rape are ‘of non-western ethnic origin’ the preferred euphemism for Middle Eastern and North African Muslims—although they account for under five per cent of their residents. The number of rapes in Oslo in the summer of 2006 was twice that of the previous summer. All ‘gang rapes’ in Denmark in 2004 were committed by immigrants and refugees.
Swedish courts are adapting by introducing sharia principles into civil cases. An Iranian man divorcing his Iranian wife was ordered by the high court in the city of Halmestad to pay Mah, r Islamic dowry ordained by the Koran as part of the Islamic marriage contract.

The British model
In the judicial sphere, Britain has gone even further, legitimizing sharia compliance even in criminal cases. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them; and this has been upheld by Peter Beaumont, QC, senior circuit judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. Before the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, a preacher accused of soliciting the murder of ‘unbelievers’, Judge Beaumont announced that, ‘for obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.’ (One can only speculate what would be the reaction if equally ‘obvious reasons’ were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from the trial of BNP Chairman Nick Griffin for ‘Islamophobia’.)

The legitimization of sharia has also penetrated culture—both high and popular. In the Autumn of 2005, British audiences enjoyed a widely acclaimed production of Tamburlaine the Great, Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century classic. Few noticed, however, that several irreverent references to Muhammad had been deleted. An essential scene in the play, in which the Koran is burned, became the destruction of ‘a load of books’ relating to any culture or religion. Director David Fan and Simon Reade, the Old Vic’s artistic director, said that, if they had not altered the original, it ‘would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions’. Both agreed that the censored version, produced partly with public funds, was better than the original, making the play more powerful and relevant. The British Council sacked one of its press officers, Harry Cummins, for publishing four articles in The Sunday Telegraph. British Muslims took exception to his observation that Muslims had rights to practice their religion in the United Kingdom that were not enjoyed by Christians in the Islamic world, ‘even though these Christians are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of almost every Muslim land’. His cardinal sin was to note that ‘it is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object’. Abdul Ban, deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, welcomed Cummins’ firing but expressed ‘dismay’ that the publishing company had not taken action against the editor of The Sunday Telegraph as well. Public funds were also used to build state-of-the-art senior housing in London’s East End. This housing is to be reserved strictly for Muslim ‘elders’—English and other white pensioners need not apply. Sirajul Islam, in charge of social services at the local borough of Tower Hamlets, responded to the journalists’ questions about racial and religious equality by stating that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to public services was no longer acceptable in 21st-century Britain: Tower Hamlets is fortunate to have a diverse mix of communities, and the council strives to ensure that its services are responsive to the differing and changing needs of its residents.’

That these and other misfortunes are befalling Britain under ‘New Labour’ is perhaps to be expected, but the revamped Tory Party hardly offers an alternative. David Cameron’s colleague, Francis Maude, claims that immigration has been ‘fantastically good’ for the United Kingdom. Such inanities are light years away from Churchill’s warning over a century ago that: ...no stronger retrograde force exists in the world’ than Islam... Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

One quarter of German teen-agers are Muslim
In Germany, Muslim immigrants already account for about one quarter of all teenagers and ten percent of the population as a whole. But mention ‘integration’ to Evelyn Rahie, a teacher in Wedding, a predominantly Turkish suburb of Berlin, and she will murmur, ‘disintegration, more likely,’ with a sad smile. Her students’ Muslim parents routinely demand the separation of girls and boys in sports and take their children out of biology classes. Most students speak poorer German than immigrant children did 20 years ago. Their extracurricular activities are limited to attending Koran classes, and many speak only Turkish or Arabic at home.
The growth of digital television has made a host of Turkish and Arabic-language channels available, intensifying language problems and nurturing identities that are informed more by the situation in Lebanon, Gaza, or Iraq than by the events in Paris, Berlin, or London. Millions of Muslim youths all over Europe live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Italy follows suit
The elite class responds to hostility with ever-greater inclusiveness. Giuseppe Pisanu, Italy’s former minister of the interior, who is responsible for controlling the country’s borders, declared three years ago that the high fatality rate of North African illegals on the high seas en route to Sicily was ‘a dreadful tragedy that weighs on the conscience of Europe’. His reaction was paradigmatic of the utopian liberal mind-set. If ‘Europe’ should feel guilty that people who have no right to come to its shores are risking their lives while trying to do so illegally, then only the establishment of a free passenger ferry service between Africa and Southern Europe with no passport or customs formalities required upon arrival, and a free shuttle to Rome or Milan would offer some relief to that burdened conscience. Now that Sr Pisanu and his boss, Silvio Berlusconi, have been replaced by a leftist government even more deeply committed to tolerance and diversity, this solution may finally become a reality. The tangible results in Italy are as devastating as the moral and spiritual ones. In Venice, the invaders have taken over the Piazza San Marco. In Genoa, the marvellous palazzi that Rubens so admired have been seized by them ‘and are now perishing like beautiful women who have been raped’. In the late Oriana Fallaci’s native Florence, a huge tent was erected next to the cathedral to pressure the Italian government to give immigrants ‘the papers necessary to rove about Europe’, and to ‘let them bring the hordes of their relatives’ to Italy.

As Fallaci described it: A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of w4er they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors Thanks to a tape player, the uncouth wailing of a muezzin punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells ... And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore a! Vescovo: that exquisite Rornanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse.
Europe is increasingly populated by aliens who physically live there but spiritually belong to the umma. They do not want to ‘adapt’ to Florence or any other new abode they conquer; offended and intimidated by beauty and order, they instinctively want to remake it in the image of Anatolia, Punjab, or the Maghreb. Their influx, made possible by the Pisanu malaise, is making the transformation irreversible.

A century ago, Pisanu’s class shared social commonalities that could be observed in Monte Carlo, Carlsbad, or Paris, depending on the season. Their lingua franca was French. Englishmen, Russians, and Austrians shared the same outlook and sense of propriety, but they nevertheless remained rooted in their national traditions, the only permanent vessels in which Weltanschauung could be translated into Kultui Today’s ‘United Europe’, by contrast, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores, inherited values, and ‘traditional’ culture. It creates a cultural similarity that has morphed into the dreary sameness of antidiscriminationism.

Secular theocracy rules Europe
The Continent is ruled by a secular theocracy focused on the task of reforming and reshaping the individual consciences of its subjects. The fruits are greeted with haughty arrogance by Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and a grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by ‘common values’ but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others. Muslims in non-Muslim countries should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says while, ‘under the terms of Western liberal tolerance’, society as a whole should be obliged to respect that choice. If such respect continues to be extended, by the end of this century, there will be no ‘Europeans’ who are members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking populations will be indoctrinated into believing or else simply forced into accepting that the demographic shift in favour of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The ‘liberal tolerance’ and the accompanying ‘societal obligation’ that Tariq Ramadan invokes are key. ‘No other race subscribes to these moral principles’, Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, ‘because they are weapons of self-annihilation’. They need to be understood and discarded. The upholders of those principles must be removed from all positions of power and influence if Europe is to survive.

* Published by permission of The Salisbury Review, London, where it appeared in June,2007. **Srdja Trifkovic is Foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles, and the author, most recently, of Defeating Jihad

THE CRUSADES IN CONTEXT*

2007-05-30T16:27:00.000Z

THE CRUSADES IN CONTEXT

Paul Stenhouse PhD

CURRENT WISDOM would have it that ‘five centuries of peaceful co-existence’ between Muslims and Christians were brought to an end by ‘political events and an imperial-papal power play, ’that was to lead to á ‘centuries-long series of so-called “holy-wars” that pitted Christendom against Islam, and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and mistrust’.1

A school textbook, Humanities Alive,2 for Year 8 students in the Australian State of Victoria, carries the anti-Christian/anti Western argument further: 'Those who destroyed the World
Trade Centre are regarded as terrorists... Might it be fair to say that the Crusaders who attacked the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?'3

Muhammad died in Medina on June 8, 632 AD. The first of the eight Crusades to free the Holy Places in Palestine from Muslim control, and offer safe passage to the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims, was called only in 1095. At the risk of sounding pedantic, the period in question is not ‘five centuries,’ but fourhundred and sixty-three years; and those years were not characterized by ‘peaceful coexistence’. For the Christian states bordering the Mediterranean, it was a four-hundred and sixty-three year period of regular, disorganized [and occasionally organized] bloody incursions by Muslim–mainly Arab and Berber-land and sea forces. These came intent on booty-gold, silver, precious stones and slaves-on destroying churches, convents and shrines of the ‘infidels,’ and on the spread of politico-religious Islam throughout Europe from their bases in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.

At the time of Muhammad’s death there were flourishing Christian and Jewish communities in Arabia, and throughout the major centres of the Persian Empire. The whole of the Mediterranean world on its European, Asian and African sides, was predominantly Christian. It had taken only a few years for Muslim tribesmen from Arabia, inspired by Muhammad’s revelations and example, to invade the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire whose emperors devoted more time to religious disputation than to defending their empire. In 633 Mesopotamia fell. After a few years the entire Persian Empire fell to the marauding Arab tribesmen who drove the young Persian emperor Yazdagird into the farthest reaches of his empire, to Sogdiana [Uzbekistan], where he was eventually murdered by his Tartar bodyguard in a miller’s hut.

One thousand years of Hellenic civilization ends.

Damascus fell in 635, and Jerusalem capitulated five years after Muhammad died, in February 638. The fall of Alexandria in 643 sounded the death knell of more than thousand years of Hellenic civilization that once enriched the whole of the Near East with its scholarship and culture. Henri Daniel-Rops claims that from the point of view of the history of civilization, Alexandria’s fall was as significant as the fall of Constantinople to the Turks eight-hundred years later.3 Cyprus fell in 648-9 and Rhodes in 653. By 698 the whole of North Africa was lost. Less than eighty years after Muhammad’s death, in 711, Muslims from Tangiers poured across the 13 km-wide strait of Gibraltar into Spain. By 721 this motley Arab-Berber horde had overthrown the ruling Catholic Visigoths and, with the fall of Saragossa, set their sights on southern France.

By 720 Narbonne had fallen. Bordeaux was stormed and its churches burnt down by ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abdullah al-Ghafiqi in early spring 732. A basilica outside the walls of Poitiers was razed, and ‘Abd al-Rahman headed for Tours which held the body of St Martin [who died in 397] apostle and patron saint of the Franks. He was to be defeated and killed by Charles Martel and his Frankish army on a Saturday in October, 732, one hundred years after Muhammad’s death, on the road from Poitiers to Tours – a defeat that was hailed by Gibbon and others as decisive in turning back the Muslim tide from Europe.

Attacks on France, however, continued, and in 734 Avignon was captured by an Arab force. Lyons was sacked in 743. It wasn’t until 759 that the Arabs were driven out of Narbonne. Marseilles was plundered by them in 838. Muslim incursions into Italy had been a feature of life from the early 800s. The islands of Ponza [off Gaeta] and Ischia [off Naples] had been plundered, and then, in 813 Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, whose harbour had been constructed by Trajan, was sacked by the Arabs.

In 826 the island of Crete fell to Muslim forces which retained it as their base until 961. From around 827 they then began nibbling at Sicily. They captured Messina and controlled the Strait of Messina by 842, and finally took the whole island in 859, after Enna fell to them.

In 836 the Neapolitans self-interestedly invited the Muslim forces to help them against the Lombards and set the stage for more than a century of Muslims raids along the Adriatic, involving the destruction of Ancona, and Muslim progress as far as the mouth of the Po. ‘Saracen Towers’ south of Naples, built in the ninth century to warn locals of the approach of Arab fleets from Sicily and Africa still charm visitors to the Neapolitan coast.

Bari, now home to the relics of St Nicholas of Myra, the original ‘Father Christmas,’ fell to Khalfun, a Berber chieftan, by another act of treachery in 840. From 853-871 the notorious Muslim brigand al-Mufarraj bin Sallam, and his successor, another Berber named Sawdan, controlled all the coast from Bari down to Reggio Calabria, and terrorized Southern Italy. They even plundered the Abbey of St Michael on Mt Gargano. They claimed the title of Emir, and independence of the Emir in Palermo.

Naples herself had to beat off a Muslim attack in 837. But in 846 Rome was not to be so fortunate. On August 23rd 846, Arab squadrons from Africa arrived at Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth. There were 73 ships. The Saracen force numbered 11,000 warriors, with 500 horses.4

The most revered Christian shrines outside the Holy Land, the tombs of Sts Peter and Paul, were desecrated and their respective Basilicas were sacked, as was the Lateran Basilica along with numerous other churches and public buildings. The very altar over the body of St Peter was smashed to pieces, and the great door of St Peter’s Basilica was stripped of its silver plates. Romans were desolated and Christendom was shocked at the barbarism of the Muslim forces.

Three years later Pope Leo IV [847-855] formed an alliance with Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, and when a Saracen fleet again appeared at the mouth of the Tiber in 849, the Papal fleet joined forces with its allies and they repelled the Muslim fleet which turned, and ran into a violent wind-storm that destroyed it, like Pharaoh’s army long before

Survivors were brought to Rome and put to work helping to build the Leonine Wall around the Vatican. Twelve feet thick, nearly forty feet in height and defended by fortyfour towers, most of this wall, and two of the round towers, can be seen still by visitors to the Vatican. These defensive walls were finished and blessed by Pope Leo IV in 852.

Taranto in Apulia was conquered by Arab forces in 846. They held it until 880. In 870 Malta was captured by the Muslims. In 871 Bari, the Saracens’ capital on mainland Italy, was recaptured from the Muslims by Emperor Louis II, who in 872 was to defeat a Saracen fleet off Capua.6

At this point in our examination of the ‘peaceful coexistence,’ which is made much of by Muslim apologists, we are still two-hundred and twenty-three years away from the calling of the first Crusade. Perhaps readers may better understand, now, why Emperor Louis II, grandson of Charlemagne was absolutely convinced, in the ninth century, of the need for a Crusade. ‘He quite sure that Islam must be driven right out of Europe.’5 But still there was no call for a Crusade.

I haven’t spoken of Muslim attacks against the Byzantine Empire even though these, too, played a part in setting the stage for the Crusades. The much vaunted military might and political power of the Eastern Roman Empire carried with it responsibility for protecting the West from Muslim invaders. This it generally failed to do.

Constantinople had been attacked in 673, and then for the next five years Arab armies and fleets attempted unsuccessfully to break through the Byzantine defences. ‘Greek Fire,’ that mysterious substance that burned on water, destroyed the Muslim fleets and won the day for the defenders.

Then, in 717, the Muslims returned to the attack, emboldened by their successes in Spain. Fate intervened, and like Charles Martel and his Franks at Poitiers in 732, emperor Leo the Isaurian [717-740] turned back the Muslim tide. Constantinople was saved – for a time. Leo, for all his military skills, was a usurper, and an iconoclast. Despite defeating the Muslims, his policies ultimately further weakened both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.

In 870, when Bernard the Wise from Brittany wanted to visit Palestine he had to obtain a laissez-passer from Muslim authorities in Bari, on the Adriatic Coast.6 In 873 the Muslim forces devastated Calabria in southern Italy to the point that it was reduced to the state ‘in which it had been left by the Great Flood’ and the Saracens expressed their intention of destroying Rome, the city of the ‘Petrulus senex,’ ‘the ineffective old man, Peter’.7
In 874 Pope John VIII did all he could to dissuade Amalfi, Naples, Benevento, Capua, Salerno, and Spoleto from forming a pragmatic alliance with the Saracens. Amalfi, Capua and Salerno alone heeded his pleas for Christian solidarity.

From the close of 876 Pope John VIII had been sending letters in all directions to obtain help against the Arab forces which were devastating southern Italy and even threatening Rome itself. He sought the aid of Duke Bosone of Milan whom Emperor Charles the Bald had appointed his legate in Northern Italy – to no avail. He wrote for cavalry horses to Alfonso III, king of Galicia in Spain; and for warships to the Byzantines, and from 876 until May 877 he sent numerous letters to the Frankish Emperor begging him to aid the Catholics in Italy. The Emperor proved to be a frail reed, and in 879, upon his death, the Duke of Spoleto turned on the Pope. John VIII, unable to cope with both Saracens and Spoleto, at once, had to pay tribute of 25,000 mancuses annually to the Arabs. A silver mancus was worth roughly AUD$25. This situation lasted for two years.

In 881 the Muslim allies of the Neapolitans captured the fortress on the Garigliano [the ancent Liris] 14 km east of Gaeta close to Anzio, just north of Naples, and plundered the surrounding countryside with impunity for forty years. Returning from a synod at Ravenna [February 882] Pope John VIII found, as he put it, that ‘the Saracens are as much at home in Fundi [close to Rome, in Latium] and Terracina’ [80 km SE of Rome] as in Africa. ‘Though we were seriously unwell,’ wrote the Pope, ‘we went forth to battle with our forces, captured eighteen of the enemy’s ships, and slew a great many of their men’.8 Six hundred captives of the Saracens were liberated.

Syracuse fell to the Muslims in 878 after a nine-month siege from which few escaped alive. The Byzantine city was pillaged and destroyed. Its collapse freed-up more numerous bands of marauding Muslims to harry the Italian towns and cities. 880 saw victory over Saracen forces at Naples by Byzantine Commanders and also the arrival in waters off Rome of warships sent by the emperor Basil to give the Pope the means of defending ‘the territory of St Peter’.9

Meanwhile, the Saracens had turned their attention again to southern France and northern Italy. They had taken Avignon in 734 and Marseilles in 838 and they were ravaging Provence and North Italy from their bases in the Alps. The most important of these bases was Fraxineto or Fréjus, not far from Toulon, which they captured in 889. They were displaced temporarily from their base in 942 by Hugh of Arles who had a Byzantine fleet harry them from the sea, while he attacked from land. Horace Mann comments10 that it is symptomatic of the kind of pragmatic leaders who controlled the destiny of Europe at that time, that instead of wiping out this bloodthirsty band of Muslim invaders, Hugh allowed them to stay where they were on condition that they did all they could to prevent his rival as ‘king of Italy,’ Berengerius Marquis of Ivrea, from returning to Italy.

The latter managed to return from Germany to Italy in 945, and the Muslims were not to be expelled completely from their lair until 972 – almost one-hundred years after capturing Fraxineto – by a league of Italian and Provençal princes.

In the meantime they infested the passes of the Alps, robbing and murdering pilgrims on their way to Rome. In 921 a large band of Englishmen, on pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, were crushed to death under rocks rolled down on them by Saracens in the passes of the Alps.11

At this point in the alleged peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Christians, we are still one-hundred and seventy-four years away from the calling of the first Crusade to free the Holy Places.

Meanwhile, Muslim fleets sacked and destroyed Demetrias in Thessaly, Central Greece, in 902, and Thessalonica the second city of the Byzantine Empire fell to them in 904. Muslim armies took Hysela in Carsiana in 887, and Amasia, the metropolitan city of Pontus in Asia Minor. The bishop of Amasia named Malecenus wanted to ransom those of his people who had
been captured but knew that the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI would not help; so he appealed to Pope Benedict IV in Rome.

The Pope received him kindly, and gave him an encyclical letter addressed to all bishops, abbots, counts and judges and to all orthodox professors of the Christian faith asking them to show Malacenus every consideration, and to see him safely from one city to the next.

In 905 Pope Sergius III helped Bishop Hildebrand of Silva Candida restore some of the damage done to his See by the ravaging Saracens who had devastated the Church of Silva Candida in the neighbourhood of Rome.

In 915 Pope John X successfully created a Christian League with the help of Byzantine Admiral Picingli and his fleet. Even the bickering princes of southern Italy joined forces against the Saracens, along with King Berengarius and his armies from North Italy. The enemy were holed-up in their fortresses on the Garigliano near Gaeta, north of Naples.
After three months of blockade, they tried to fight their way out only to be repelled by a victorious Christian force.

In 934 the Fatimid imam al-Ka’im planned an audacious invasion of Liguria led by Ya‘kub bin Ishaq. The latter attacked Genoa that year, and took it in 935. It wasn’t until 972 that Duke William of Provence succeeded in driving the Saracens finally from the fastnesses of Faxineto. In 976 the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt had sent fresh Muslim expeditions into southern Italy. Initially the German emperor Otho II, who had set up his headquarters in Rome, successfully defeated these Saracen forces, but in July 982 he was ambushed and his army was almost cut to pieces.

In 977 Sergius, Archbishop of Damascus, was expelled from his See by the Muslims. Pope Benedict VII gave him the ancient church of St Alexius on Rome’s Aventine hill, and he founded a monastery there and placed it under Benedictine rule, with himself its first abbot.

The pontificate of Pope John XVIII [1003-1009] was marred by famine and plague and by marauding bands of Saracens who plundered the Italian coast from Pisa to Rome from bases on Sardinia.

By 1010 they had seized Cosenza in southern Italy. Then Sardinia fell to the Arabs in 1015, led by a certain Abu Hosein Mogehid [thus the Latin Chronicles]. I take this person to be Mujahid bin ‘Abd Allah whom Arab sources credit with the invasion. The Saracen force based on Sardinia, over the next few years, torched Pisa, seized Luna in northern Tuscany, and ravaged the land. Pope Benedict VIII managed to assemble a fleet and challenged the Saracen chief who turned tail and fled to Sardinia, leaving his fleet at the mercy of the papal force which was victorious.

Mujahid bin ‘Abd Allah then sent the Pope a bag of chestnuts and a message that he would arrive in the following summer with as many soldiers as there were nuts in the bag. Benedict accepted the chestnuts and sent back a bag of rice: ‘If your master,’ he said to the astonished messenger, ‘ísn’t satisfied with the damage he has done to the dowry of the Apostle, let him come again and he will find an armed warrior for every grain of rice’.

The Pope did not wait for an answer but carried the war into the enemy’s territory. He coopted the combined fleets of Pisa and Genoa and they sailed for Sardinia in 1017 only to find Mujahid in the act of crucifying Christians on Sardinia. The Muslim leader fled to Africa, and Sardinia was occupied by the Pisans. Mujahid kept trying to re-take Sardinia until 1050 when he was captured by the Pisans and the island was made over to them by the Pope.

Muslims from Spain sacked Antibes in 1003. They sacked Pisa in 1005 and 1016, and Narbonne in 1020. Sometime around 1025 Pope John XIX granted the pallium [sign of Ecclesiastical jurisdiction] to Archbishop Peter of Gerona in northeast Spain, on condition that he redeemed Christian captives of the Saracens as he had promised the Pope when he had
come on his ‘ad limina’ visit.

The four-hundred and sixty-three years that elapsed between Muhammad’s death in 632 and the calling of a Crusade to free the Holy Places in 1095 was not a time of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between Muslims and European or Byzantine Christians. Nor was it, for Christians living in Muslim-occupied territories. They enjoyed ‘peace’ only by keeping the lowest possible profile, paying the jizya, or head-tax, and accepting non-person status in lands that had been Christian before the Muslim invaders arrived.

The new millennium saw the situation go from bad to worse. In 1009 the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, abu-‘Ali Mansur al-Hakim, ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The edict of destruction was signed by his Christian secretary ibn-‘Abdun. The Muslims destroyed the Tomb of Jesus, the Dome and the upper parts of the Church until their demolition was halted by the great mound of debris at their feet. For eleven years Christians were forbidden even to visit the rubble or to pray in the ruins. Shocked by the destruction of Christendom’s holiest Shrine, Pope Sergius IV appealed for help to go to Palestine to rebuild it. His appeal fell on deaf ears.

At the beginning of the fifth century, two hundred years before Muhammad appeared, there were seven-hundred Catholic bishops in Africa.12 Two-hundred of them attended the Council of Carthage in 535 AD. By the middle of the 900s there were forty left. By 1050, as a result of ‘peaceful coexistence,’ there were only five left.

In 1076 there were two.

We learn this from a letter that Pope Gregory VII, ‘Hildebrand,’ wrote to Cyriacus, Archbishop of Carthage in June 1076. As three bishops are needed for the valid consecration of another bishop Gregory asked him to send a suitable priest to Rome who could be consecrated assistant bishop, so that he [Cyriacus] and Servandus, bishop of Buzea in Mauritania, and the new bishop could consecrate other bishops for the African Catholics.13

Gregory VII, on his deathbed in 1085, dreamt of forming a Christian League against Islam and said, ‘I would rather risk my life to deliver the Holy Places, than govern the Universe’.14

It seems to have been the Seljuk Turkish capture of Jerusalem in 1076 that finally swung the balance, exhausted the patience of the European Christians, and fulfilled Gregory’s wish. Pilgrimage to the Holy Places had became more difficult; a poll-tax was imposed on visitors. Those who dared journey there were harassed, robbed and some even
enslaved.

At the Council of Piacenza summoned by Pope Urban II and held in March 1095, Byzantine delegates emphasized the danger facing Christendom from Muslim expansion, and the hardship facing Eastern Christians until the infidel be driven back.15 They repeated an appeal made by Emperor Alexius to Robert of Flanders asking him to return to the East with some knights to assist the Byzantines in their struggle with the Muslims.

Towards the end of that same year, Urban II, at another Council held at Claremont in France, took up the suggestion, and urged Europe’s Christians to ‘Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre… let each one deny himself and take up the Cross’. The Assembly rose to its feet and shouted ‘God wills it’.

Muhammad died on June 8, 632 AD.

It had taken four hundred and sixty-three years for Europe’s Christians to combine their forces and rise up in defence of themselves and of their Faith.

*Reproduced by kind permission of the Reverend Paul Stenhouse

NOTES
1 John Esposito, Islam: the Straight Path, 3rd ed. OUP, 1998, p.58.
2See ‘Civilizing influence of previous wars fought between East and West,’ The Weekend Australian, March 18-19, 2006.
3 The Church in the Dark Ages, J.M.Dent and Sons, London, 1959, p.336.

4 Letter from Adelbert, Marquis of Tuscany and protector of the Papal territory of Corsica, to Pope Sergius II in Liber Pontificalis, n.xliv, ed. Farnesiana.
5 Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Dark Ages, J.M.Dent and Sons, London, 1959, p.472.
6 Quoted Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Cambridge University Press, 1951, vol.i, p.43.
7 See Horace Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, 12 vols Kegan Paul, London, 1906,
vol. iii, p.321.
8 Epistle 334 – fragment of a letter to the Emperor.
9 Epistle 296 to the Byzantine Emperor Basil, August 12, 880 AD.
10 Op.cit. vol.4, p.10
11 Flodoard [894-966] Chronique de France 919-966, entry for
921.
12 ‘H. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Dark Ages, J,M,Dent and Sons, London, 1959, pp.340, 344.
13 Register of Gregory VII, III, 19.
14H. Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade, J.M.Dent and Sons, London, 1957, p.434.
15Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Cambridge University Press, 1951, vol.i, p.105.

A OPOSIÇAO PORTUGUESA DEPOIS DA MORTE DE HUMBERTO DELGADO

2007-05-29T17:44:00.011Z

Patrícia McGowan Pinheiro

A OPOSIÇÃO PORTUGUESA DEPOIS DA MORTE DE HUMBERTO DELGADO (1)

Este artigo não pretende tratar do problema da revolução colonial nos territórios portugueses de África. Porém, toda a nossa análise é baseada num postulado: a entrada em cena das massas africanas e, em particular, das massas angolanas foi o elemento motor que determinou a evolução política dentro de Portugal nestes últimos quatro anos. São as únicas massas populares que, sob o domínio de Salazar, entraram em luta aberta contra a ditadura. As manobras de todos os grupos políticos portugueses— governamentais, reformistas, oposição de direita ou de esquerda—devem ser compreendidas como reacções das classes privilegiadas de uma nação dominante cuja supremacia é posta em xeque pela ‘revolução’ colonial.

O DESAPARECIMENTO DO general Humberto Delgado e da sua secretária Arajarir Campos, em Fevereiro passado, a descoberta dos seus cadáveres semanas mais tarde em Vilanueva del Fresno, perto de Badajoz, favoreceram as especulações mais diversas e mais contraditórias. Um homem de 59 anos e uma mulher ainda jovem foram selvaticamente assassinados. Os amadores de histórias macabras dão livre curso à imaginação: fala-se de três e mesmo de quatro cadáveres, descobertos num calmo recanto da fronteira portuguesa. Quanto à polícia espanhola, tem sido tão discreta que nem se sabe ainda em que data precisa tomou conhecimento da presença de Delgado em Badajoz.

Noutras regiões do mundo, mais conturbadas, a morte violenta, o assassínio político, os massacres, são moeda corrente. Mas o carácter aparentemente parado da vida política portuguesa, a passividade e a mediocridade da oposição antifascista, dão relevo impressionante ao fim dramático da única figura exaltante dessa oposição. O militar ingénuo, que execrava os intriguistas e os políticos, acabou sendo vítima de uma conjura cujos instigadores, tal como os executantes, continuam desconhecidos.

Quem tem medo da verdade?

Primeira hipótese e a mais evidente: Delgado foi assassinado pela polícia política portuguesa ou pelos ultras do regime, com ou sem a cumplicidade dos serviços espanhóis. A falta de prudência do general, o seu soberano desprezo pelas regras de segurança mais elementares (falava a toda a gente dos seus projectos, exibia os seus passaportes falsos, recrutava para a sua organização as personagens mais duvidosas, mais irresponsáveis, mais indiscretas) faziam dele um alvo ideal para os seus inimigos.
Segunda hipótese: que vinha muito naturalmente ao espírito dos anticomunistas profissionais, é que Delgado fora assassinado pelos seus adversários políticos no seio da oposição anti-salazarista. As suas denúncias impiedosas, os mordentes insultos com que os fustigava, lançaram sérias dúvidas sobre a honestidade moral e política de quase todos os dirigentes exilados. Outras figuras, bem mais ardilosas do que Delgado, foram liquidadas noutros sítios por motivos bem menores.

Os partidários das duas versões calculam que os assassinos montaram uma encenação que comprometesse o campo adverso: os salazaristas teriam morto Delgado, ao mesmo tempo que tentavam responsabilizar os adversários anti-salazaristas do general; os seus adversáriostê-lo-iam morto e, por seu turno, acusam os salazaristas.

Terceira hipótese: o general foi ‘oferecido’ pelos seus adversários à PIDE e esta assassinou-o. Deste modo, os seus inimigos, ficando com as mãos limpas, conseguiram com uma cajadada matar dois coelhos: eliminar um adversário político e marcar um ponto, no plano da propaganda, contra o regime de Salazar.

Quarta hipótese: o general foi entregue à PIDE pelos seus íntimos, ambiciosos, que queriam tomar o seu lugar, ou, ainda, por agentes da polícia política, infiltrados na sua própria organização.

Os delgadistas admitem, entre si, a hipótese número três, mas a maioria, à parte o seu representante em Marrocos 2, considera que é mais oportuno sob o ponto de vista político, publicamente denunciar a PIDE.

A Frente Patriótica de Libertação Nacional (FPLN) começou por dar força à hipótese número quatro. Manteve este ponto de vista nas emissões de rádio, denunciando como principal suspeito o representante de Delgado em Marrocos. Hoje, a FPLN tende a abandonar esta versão, temendo que o argumento que utilize contra os seus adversários políticos se possa voltar contra ela.

Mas tentar aprofundar estas diferentes hipóteses entra no domínio do romance policial. Enquanto não se chegar ao resultado de um inquérito imparcial, a nível internacional, tais especulações só servem para obscurecer ainda mais o contexto político do caso Delgado.

Isso, no entanto, não significa que se deva aceitar a atitude virtuosamente ultrajada dos principais suspeitos, sem interrogações. Que pessoa sensata pode admitir o argumento seguinte, defendido pelos diferentes grupos da oposição: quem quer que seja o culpado, há que acusar a PIDE, a fim de salvaguardar a unidade das fileiras anti-salazaristas?

Não houve nunca unidade nas fileiras anti-salazaristas e quem quer que fosse o assassino, a morte de Delgado é uma consequência directa dessa falta de unidade.

Há que entender dois pontos importantes. As motivações, os meios de acção e a experiência não faltam, nem aos salazaristas, nem aos adversários de Delgado. A PIDE já matou. O que voltará a fazer, sem dúvida. Quanto a certos militantes do PC de Álvaro Cunhal, já liquidaram outros membros da oposição e nada prova que não voltarão ainda a fazê-lo 3.

Segundo aspecto importante do problema: os três grupos--salazaristas, adversários de Delgado e delgadistas-- esforçam-se por manter o silêncio sobre o contexto político do crime. Os partidários de Delgado pensam poder assim esconder a fraqueza da sua organização e a sua própria incompetência. Burilam e retocam, a seu bel prazer, a lenda de Delgado, agora que desapareceu essa personagem incómoda, de reacções imprevisíveis. Os antidelgadistas tentam, desesperadamente, consertar o mito carcomido de uma oposição democrática unida. Esperam, sobretudo, abafar as terríveis revelações sobre as suas actividades e as suas personalidades contidas numa série de documentos explosivos publicados pela vítima. Esta história complicada, plena de querelas políticas estéreis, de recriminações, de vendetta, tão característica dos grupos de exilados, a poucos mais interessaria do que aos estudantes de Psicologia, se ela não tivesse relações directas com a política actual do regime fascista.

Finalmente, os próprios salazaristas não têm qualquer interesse em que se faça luz sobre os seus assuntos ou sobre os da oposição e, especialmente, sobre a impotência da FPLN. Receiam perturbar o actual equilíbrio de forças, despertando outras forças menos facilmente controláveis.

A operação reconversão

Com efeito, o regime de Salazar prepara-se para realizar a operação mais delicada da sua longa história. Esta operação que, para ser levada a bom termo, exige um clima político pacifico, é a da liberalização do regime, acompanhada do apagamento do ditador. O êxito desta manobra, a instalação de um regime conservador «respeitável» que garantisse às colónias uma certa autonomia, aceitável pela maioria da opinião africana, necessita da canalização do descontentamento para vias pacíficas e verbais tanto na metrópole como nas colónias. Dentro desta óptica, é igualmente necessário para o regime conseguir uma maior docilidade dos grupos de ultras, como os «centuriões», que querem manter o regime custe o que custar.

A conjuntura internacional, o alinhamento cheio de zelo do PCP com a política soviética de coexistência pacífica, têm sido até aos últimos tempos os melhores aliados da classe dirigente portuguesa. Mas as divergências ideológicas no campo socialista e o crescente descrédito da política soviética ameaçam perturbar tão agradável estado de coisas.

Quando Delgado acusou a FPLN e o PCP—que constitui a sua principal força—de cumplicidade táctica com Salazar por causa da sua sabotagem de toda e qualquer tentativa de acção armada contra o regime, sem o saber ele pôs o dedo num ponto sensível—sensível para a FPLN e para o regime. Delgado pensava que os seus adversários se enganavam por incompetência e por cobardia; estava bem longe de pensar que a política deles fazia parte de uma estratégia bem determinada. Porque o êxito da operação reconversão depende, em primeiro lugar, do factor tempo. Muitas vezes evocada nos meios dirigentes, uma tal operação foi sucessivamente adiada, devido à ausência de uma base económica e social suficiente. Só um país que possui um certo nível de forças produtivas pode oferecer-se o luxo de uma democracia burguesa. Quatro anos de guerra colonial, acompanhada pelo enfraquecimento da oposição na metrópole, contribuíram para a formação dessa base.

Vejamos rapidamente o que se passou durante esses quatro anos.

Se pelas suas estruturas sociais e económicas havia um país europeu perfeitamente maduro para uma revolução, esse país era Portugal nos primeiros meses de 1961. Faltava-lhe porém, uma única coisa: uma direcção revolucionária consequente. Tudo o resto parecia existir: uma ditadura fascista odiada, o desemprego, a miséria esmagadora, uma massa de camponeses pobres ansiosos por uma reforma agrária e, por cima de tudo isto, a guerra. A insurreição armada que acabara de estalar contra um Estado fraco e retardatário nas colónias africanas, poderia dar origem, não a um fosso intransponível entre o país opressor e o país oprimido, mas, pelo contrário, a uma revolta simultânea na metrópole.

Eis o que acima de tudo o regime temia; eis o sonho de alguns raros antifascistas idealistas. Quanto ao resto da oposição e alguns outros, tudo fizeram para que esse sonho não se tornasse realidade.

A solidariedade africana, desejada e prometida, deveria facilmente compensar os fracos recursos dos nacionalistas angolanos. A amplitude da resistência popular contra o fascismo em Portugal deveria impedir o regime de mobilizar as massas, na base do chauvinismo. A resistência à guerra, sendo Fidel Castro o herói da juventude portuguesa, estalaria rapidamente numa revolução. As despesas militares incidiriam pesadamente sobre estruturas económicas caducas e, sob os golpes repetidos da revolução no interior e no ultramar, o regime e o seu velho império sucumbiriam.

Assim parecia em 1961 e ainda em 62. As grandes manifestações de massas que tiveram lugar na Primavera destes dois anos, levavam a crer numa tomada de consciência revolucionária. Depois, inexplicavelmente, o barómetro começou a descer. Em 1963-64 somente umas centenas de manifestantes desceram à rua pelo 1º de Maio. Em 1965 não havia ninguém. No exército colonial as deserções ascenderam, quando muito, a umas duas dúzias em quatro anos de guerra. Contam-se cerca de 200 refractários no mesmo período. Pelo contrário, o alistamento no exército de repressão, com o seu vencimento elevado e os seus privilégios, as promessas de atribuição de terras nas colónias uma vez cumprido o tempo de serviço, tornou-se para os futuros oficiais—os jovens da classe média—o equivalente da emigração para França, dos desempregados das cidades e dos trabalhadores agrícolas.

Os créditos dos países da NATO e os investimentos privados nos territórios portugueses não só compensaram as despesas militares mas deram também à expansão industrial um impulso sem qualquer comparação com a letargia anterior. Podemos certificar-nos disso facilmente se consultarmos os números do Plano Intercalar que está actualmente a decorrer. A prosperidade do Mercado Comum e as suas necessidades em mão de obra forneceram emprego aos portugueses sem trabalho; o dinheiro que enviam para Portugal representa, ao mesmo tempo, um subsídio às famílias e novas divisas para o Estado. Orçam pelos 200 000 os emigrantes (legais e clandestinos) na Europa Ocidental; são 150 000 homens os efectivos do exército de repressão; as indústrias de guerra e os novos empregos trouxeram uma solução temporária aos problemas sociais mais urgentes. O último número da revista da OCDE sobre a economia portuguesa comenta favoravelmente o facto de ter sido afastado qualquer risco sério de inflação.

Assim, a conjuntura económica actual, ao esvaziar os campos, eliminou efectivamente essa base social essencial para uma luta armada de tipo castrista: o campesinato pobre e sem esperança.

À regressão do desemprego corresponde uma baixa de combatividade das massas. A oposição portuguesa no interior está hoje reduzida a fracos protestos sob a forma de intermináveis e verbosas cartas, emanando das habituais personalidades da oposição e ao trabalho clandestino de um punhado de militantes do PCP. Apesar dos presos políticos, das detenções arbitrárias, dos casos de maus tratos e torturas, a repressão e os protestos são insignificantes à escala de Portugal, se pensarmos nas colónias portuguesas e em outros países como a Coreia do Sul, Japão, certos países da América Latina ou a África do Sul, para não falar senão de países que estão em paz. E apesar dos romances da oposição portuguesa, há que reconhecer que abrandou consideravelmente o rigor fascista em relação aos rebeldes das classes privilegiadas e aos grupos políticos inofensivos 4.

As autoridades concedem passaportes aos portugueses desejosos de visitar parentes que habitam em países africanos que cortaram relações com Portugal. Jornalistas soviéticos visitaram oficialmente as colónias portuguesas 5. Professores portugueses, adeptos do regime, foram convidados a fazer conferências em Moscovo. E aceitaram 6. No plano político constata-se um degelo entre a esquerda tradicional e o regime, um certo afrouxar da censura. Os Condenados da Terra, de Fanon, foi publicado em português, em Lisboa 7 .

Por outro lado, a diminuição do desemprego forneceu, naturalmente, novos meios de pressão à classe operária e as reivindicações salariais (apresentadas pela FPLN como protestos contra o fascismo) têm-se multiplicado. No interior, o cenário está pronto para um regime conservador moderno de tipo gaullista, liberal em relação aos intelectuais, tolerante a críticas formais e pronto a aceitar, talvez, um partido social-democrata ‘respeitável’.

Nas colónias é a ‘pacificação’. Os oficiais portugueses da acção psicológica tiraram lições da guerra da Argélia durante as suas missões no exército francês. Os nacionalistas sem armas, mais traídos pelas promessas não cumpridas do que ajudados pela solidariedade africana, não puderam impedir o estabelecimento de uma versão portuguesa do plano de Constantine, de que um dos aspectos é uma campanha de alfabetização intensiva e a promoção acelerada de quadros africanos 7. Se este plano tiver êxito, poder-se-á, até, evitar o fenómeno OAS, pois a mentalidade de muitos colonos modificou-se desde o primeiro ano da guerra de Angola, graças à propaganda da metrópole sobre a 'igualdade racial' e ao medo de tudo perderem.

Um pano de fundo, mesquinho e incolor, foi assim pintado para a ocidentalização de Portugal, que ambiciona, como o seu vizinho espanhol, abrigar-se no pórtico da Europa ocidental industrializada. Deste modo, reinando a paz social no interior e estando a autonomia interna estabelecida no Commonwealth lusitano, Portugal poderia ascender, dentro de alguns anos, a um nível de vida próximo ao da Itália.

A gangrena

Estas perspectivas brilhantes encontram, evidentemente, um grande número de adeptos. Interesses poderosos estão aqui envolvidos. Os Estados Unido, a NATO e os diferentes interesses imperialistas em Portugal e nas colónias; a classe dirigente portuguesa e a pequena burguesia; a União Soviética, interessada em eliminar todas as zonas de conflito com o imperialismo, tem os olhos postos nas importantes riquezas, em matérias primas, da África portuguesa; os brancos da África do Sul, e da Rodésia do Sul, decididos a bloquear a revolução africana e, enfim, certos países africanos como os de OCAM, que Salazar felicitou recentemente, e que temem a aparição da luta armada em qualquer ponto do continente africano.

Na realidade, a repressão silenciosa da revolução em Portugal e nas colónias aproveita praticamente a toda a gente, excepto às massas populares desses países. Mas, para todas as tendências da oposição portuguesa, as massas têm sido desde sempre, instrumentos. O que hoje resta da oposição organizada a Salazar quase perdeu toda a audiência junto das massas. Este isolamento foi consumado, com a eliminação de Delgado, cuja popularidade não se pode contestar. As células operárias do PCP foram quase todas desmanteladas ou tornaram-se inactivas. Não tem havido trabalho de organizações entre os camponeses, excepto em certas regiões do Alentejo e, mesmo aí, verifica-se hoje, uma paragem. Uma dezena de funcionários do Partido Comunista, clandestinos, mantém-se em contacto com os militantes pequeno-burgueses. A sua acção resume-se a salvaguardar, a todo o preço, a unidade com a burguesia liberal e a condenar os ‘aventureiros’ e os ‘sectários’. Os quadros mais experientes do partido estão na prisão ou no exílio. A FPLN, à parte meia dúzia de indivíduos, é inteiramente composta por elementos do PCP. Em definitivo, não é mais do que um grupo de exilados cujas actividades se limitam a emissões de rádio, apelos à amnistia ou denúncias contra os outros grupos da oposição.

Qualquer que seja o julgamento que se faça sobre as intenções subjectivas da FPLN, a sua função histórica terá sido a de quebrar toda e qualquer tentativa de verdadeira revolta, de lançar a confusão sobre a questão colonial e de tentar colocar, sob a sua direcção, o movimento nacionalista das colónias 9.

Mas Delgado, o anti-ideólogo, nada sabia de tudo isso, quando aceitou a presidência da FPLN.

A seguir ao caso do Santa Maria, que a opinião pública atribuía a Galvão mais do que a Delgado, a ala esquerda da oposição começou a manobrar, de forma a atrair Galvão para o seu campo. Decidira que Delgado era demasiado popular em Portugal, para poder servir de instrumento: devia deixá-lo cair no esquecimento. Mas Galvão recusou todas as alianças. Denunciou publicamente os movimentos de libertação nacional e o comunismo. Uma pequena brochura que redigiu, neste sentido, foi até prefaciada por Delgado. Este último afirmava o seu completo acordo com as ideias expressas por Galvão. Esta brochura foi publicada no Brasil e quase não teve impacto fora deste país. No entanto, no Outono de 1961, Galvão visitou a Europa, a Suécia em particular, e em declarações aos jornais e à rádio reafirmou as suas posições.

Foram, com efeito, os grupos nacionalistas congregados na CONCP (Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas da Colónias Portuguesas), que fizeram a escolha para a oposição. Os seus representantes encontraram-se com Delgado em Marrocos e julgaram-no um líder possível para a oposição, e muito mais conveniente do que Galvão. Tiveram conversações privadas com ele e verificaram que a sua posição era menos rígida do que a de Galvão. Tinha ‘evoluído’. Estes nacionalistas pressionaram a oposição portuguesa a agrupar-se em torno dele, e convenceram, nomeadamente Álvaro Cunhal, com quem falaram em Moscovo, quando da conferência mundial da Paz, em 1962.

A FPLN foi enfim constituída em Dezembro de 1962, numa reunião em Roma e foi virtualmente admitido que Delgado presidiria ao novo organismo. Ao começo, o PCP mostrou uma certa relutância por esta solução, assim como hesitava em estabelecer o quartel general da FPLN em Argel. Mas, em nome da unidade, tinha que fazer certas concessões aos activistas. Senão, eles já não seriam controláveis e existia o risco de se apropriarem tanto da Argélia como do próprio Delgado. No entanto o PCP continuou a procrastinar durante algum tempo e Delgado ficou ainda no Brasil.

Todavia, em 1963, após uma viagem a Marrocos, Itália e Praga, Delgado decidiu deixar definitivamente o Brasil aliciado pelas garantias que recebera do PCP e pelas promessas dos activistas.

Nos finais de 1963, abandonou o seu emprego e a sua habitação e dirigiu-se, primeiro a Moscovo e depois a Praga, onde assistiu à segunda conferência da FPLN. Foi eleito presidente. Contou mais tarde que a essa reunião assistiram ao todo nove pessoas, sendo três do PCP e quatro que não representavam ninguém, senão eles próprios. A maior parte das organizações da oposição não estava presente.

O PCP operou um volta-face completo em relação àquele a quem antes chamava ‘agente americano’10. Alguns militantes de boa fé que duvidavam que Delgado se tornara um anticolonialista convicto, foram informados de que o general, outrora fascista, ‘evoluíra’ imenso...que se tornara praticamente um comunista convicto…que, de facto, era um membro clandestino do Partido’.

Aqueles que continuaram a crticar a escolha de Delgado foram condenados como ‘sectários e esquerdistas’. O partido não tinha qualquer interesse em deixar os militantes de base aproximar-se de Delgado; não tinha tão pouco qualquer interesse em conceder a Delgado a liberdade de movimento de que ele gozaria inevitavelmente na Argélia. Em vez de seguir da Checoslováquia para a Argélia, imediatamente após a conferência, Delgado foi persuadido de que devia dar entrada no hospital para sujeitar-se a um tratamento. Sofreu várias intervenções cirúrgicas e passou intermináveis semanas de cama. Na Primavera de 1964, estava quase esquecido.

Ao mesmo tempo, em Argel, a FPLN começava a estalar por todas as costuras. A dissidência instalava-se entre os exilados do PCP. A maior parte podia ler, pela primeira vez na sua vida, livremente, toda a espécie de literatura; tomava conhecimento, com espanto e consternação, das divergências ideológicas sino-soviéticas e de certos factos extremamente interessantes da história recente dos partidos comunistas, assim como da apregoada solidariedade soviética com as lutas de libertação nacional.

A JAP (Junta de Acção Patriótica) local, organismo de base da FPLN, entrara em conflito com os dirigentes. Desejavam estes, verdadeiramente, organizar uma revolução armada em Portugal, ou eram as suas declarações somente uma cobertura que mascarava a sua adesão profunda a uma política de evolução pacífica? Esses dirigentes apoiavam na prática os povos colonizados? Ou estavam mais interessados em fazer a unidade com os liberais e os fascistas dissidentes?

A FPLN chegava ao ponto de ruptura e arriscava-se a revelar toda esta gangrena aos argelinos. Havia querelas sobre o conteúdo das emissões e lutavam pelo controlo da rádio; não se entendiam sobre os meios de propaganda; discutiam sobre o estatuto da colónia portuguesa de Argel. E Delgado parecia definitivamente exilado em Praga. Para acabar com tal situação, um pequeno grupo no seio da FPLN, os futuros delgadistas, tomaram uma decisão. Organizaram, apesar da oposição dos dirigentes da FPLN, uma colecta para pagar o bilhete de avião a Delgado e telegrafaram-lhe pedindo que viesse com toda a urgência. O intrépido general, pensavam eles, traria os pacifistas ao bom senso e imporia a unidade e uma política revolucionária.

Assim, no final de Maio de 1964, Delgado, ainda mal refeito da sua operação, chegou finalmente a Argel. Perante o facto consumado, os dirigentes da FPLN mudaram de táctica. Prepararam, com as autoridades locais, a sua recepção; divulgaram uma versão adaptada da sua biografia e apresentaram-no, nos seus comunicados, como o líder antifascista por excelência, ‘de uma singular representatividade» e como um 'anticolonialista sem mácula’.

O Rei Louco

Começaram então os problemas.

O próprio Delgado era autoritário, mas o que ele odiava na FPLN era a utilização de meios tirânicos para fins inconfessáveis: o nepotismo, o abafamento da revolução, a eliminação de quantos criticavam esse nepotismo e esse abafamento.

Detestava a hipocrisia, a demagogia, a duplicidade. Incomodava-o esse disfarce anticolonialista que lhe vestiram contra sua vontade e nunca chegou a compreender perfeitamente. A África portuguesa era para ele uma coisa muito boa; por essa África tinham combatido, ele e os seus antepassados. Do que não gostava era da África portuguesa de Salazar. Além disso, compreendia que os seus novos aliados sustentavam as mesmas concepções, mas que as escondiam por táctica. Além de tudo, Delgado recusava o papel de ‘jarrão’ que lhe queriam fazer desempenhar num movimento que, por sistema, travava toda e qualquer acção. Ora, se ele aceitara a presidência da FPLN, fora precisamente para conduzir a acção. Aceitara a colaboração com o Partido Comunista porque a sua psicologia conservadora o levava a pensar que, se os comunistas representavam alguma coisa, era precisamente a revolução, a acção. Por esse objectivo estava pronto a romper com o passado e com os seus amigos conservadores. Perdera todas as ilusões sobre o resto da oposição.

Centenas de jovens compatriotas entusiásticos esperavam-no em Argel, pensava ele. Seria o seu chefe. Descreveu assim o que encontrou à sua chegada 12. (*Os documentos de Delgado são citados na integra em Misérias do Exílio, a publicar brevemente neste blogue.)

Os dirigentes da FPLN quiseram censurar as suas declarações; se falasse abertamente, podia embaraçá-los; aquele que designavam por ‘anticolonialista sem nuances’ poderia fazer declarações chocantes, que teriam feito cair a máscara. Os dirigentes da FPLN interceptavam o correio de Delgado, fiscalizavam os seus movimentos; no entanto, sobre a preparação da luta armada, nem palavra.

Delgado queria utilizar as emissões de rádio para apelar à insurreição, à luta armada, para lançar mensagens secretas a eventuais grupos armados existentes em Portugal. Mas o pior, é que ele queria falar, em pessoa, ao microfone com una regularidade inquietante. Começou a conhecer os seus novos colegas, na intimidade. Ficou muito ofendido com as modificações feitas à sua biografia, que ele próprio escrevera, e onde recordava com orgulho as condecorações recebidas dos governos inglês e americano, as suas missões nas colónias, as suas actividades na NATO.

Pouco a pouco, começou a aperceber-se que o tinham enganado, que o preço de todas essas honras—honras que nenhum dirigente anti-salazarista, nenhum nacionalista das colónias portuguesas jamais conhecera—que o preço de toda essa pompa era a submissão absoluta aos que o tinham ungido como rei. O preço do seu reino era a aceitação de uma constituição que ignorava, de ministros que não designara e de uma política que não aprovava. O mais grave era que esse reino não tinha exército, nem espingardas, nem a menor intenção de fazer a guerra 12.

Um exílio dourado não interessava a Delgado. Tinha uma ideia e só uma: fora escolhido pelo povo português para presidente; seria presidente e eliminaria o primeiro-ministro Salazar. Quanto ao resto, Deus saberia reconhecer os seus.

Falava da reforma agrária; dizia que nesse ponto era mais revolucionário do que o secretário geral do PCP, Álvaro Cunhal. O que entendia Delgado por reforma agrária? Ninguém o sabe. Mas não precisava de programa. Tinha dado a sua palavra de que voltaria. ‘Voltarei’, escrevera nos selos que mandou imprimir com o seu retrato. Se pusesse os pés em Portugal e se possuísse o mínimo núcleo de organização, as massas aclamá-lo-iam como já o tinham aclamado às centenas de milhares em 1958.

Não fazia uma ideia muito clara de como as coisas se iriam passar. Nas conversas particulares gostava de se comparar a Robin dos Bosques. De volta a Portugal viajaria disfarçado, revelando subitamente a sua presença ao povo, e desapareceria também num abrir e fechar de olhos. O país inteiro ficaria electrizado e quando o seu grupo de companheiros fiéis atacasse ‘o combate duraria algumas horas ou, quando muito, alguns dias’, mas o regime fascista seria varrido e Salazar derrubado.

Uma vez presidente, restabeleceria a democracia e o povo poderia escolher o sistema que quisesse. Diria aos africanos das colónias, seus filhos, que tinham agora um bom pai e que tudo correria pelo melhor. Delgado considerava-se um moderno mas vitorioso D. Sebastião, o jovem rei louco que, no século XVI, levou 50 000 soldados à derrota e à morte em Alcácer Quibir, em Marrocos, e depois desapareceu no nevoeiro; mas que assombra ainda as serras e vales do seu país natal e voltará um dia para guiar o seu povo cada vez que este precisar dele.

Tal era a concepção simplista da revolução e da política deste militar primário e exuberante. A opinião que tinha sobre os homens era igualmente simplista. Um homem era um homem, um ‘macho’, não se confundindo com a mulher. Falava uma linguagem de caserna, que chocava advogados, professores e respectivas esposas.

Era um militar de carreira, embora sem nunca ter andado na guerra. Jovem oficial, participara no golpe de Estado de 1926 que levara ao Poder o regime que deu origem ao salazarismo. Foi o seu único encontro com a violência.

A captura do Santa Maria, levada a efeito por Galvão, encontrou Delgado em terra firme, no Brasil. O ataque ao quartel de Beja, em 1962, foi decidido sem ele e, quando chegou ao local, já era demasiado tarde, tudo estava terminado e perdido.

Depois de beber, declamava com prazer versos obscenos, glorificando a sua virilidade, que admiradores lhe tinham dedicado. Contudo, a sua última obra literária foi um estudo sobre Mariana Alcoforado, a religiosa portuguesa, cuja história romântica e cartas de amor são bem conhecidas.

Na realidade, Delgado perdera logo de entrada. Absurdamente pródigo, sociável até a inconsciência, de uma loquacidade sem limites, fanfarrão e fátuo, Delgado era o protótipo de uma espécie desaparecida: o ‘caudilho’, produto típico de uma sociedade de militares feudais de um outro tempo.

Em 1965, representava um anacronismo grotesco e indivíduos mais realistas do que ele decidiram eliminá-lo. A esquerda (e a maioria da direita) da oposição detestou-o sempre. Em Fevereiro último, quando se soube do seu desaparecimento e que podia estar em perigo, os dirigentes da FPLN recusaram-se a protestar, dizendo tratar-se de um ‘indivíduo cuja pessoa não interessava ao futuro democrático do país’13.

Mas o caso já lhes escapou das mãos. O escândalo da morte de Delgado é o dobre a finados da oposição anti-salazarista tradicional. Esta já não tem razão de existir. Durante quarenta anos, cerca de meio século, não soube compreender a natureza do sistema que pretendia combater.

A revolução industrial, que nem a burguesia liberal nem a classe operária foram capazes de realizar, foi obra do fascismo. Amanhã uma liberalização pode ser concedida, sem perigo, pela classe dominante—pelo menos, por algum tempo. Derrubar esta classe implica objectivos e métodos inteiramente novos. Mas esta é outra história.

Saberemos talvez um dia quem são os assassinos de Delgado, porém já conhecemos o verdadeiro culpado. Essa oposição, que deu a prova da sua impotência perante a História, tem a responsabilidade total: culpada do assassínio de Humberto Delgado e de uma jovem brasileira, devotada e indefesa; culpada da morte lenta de milhões de camponeses portugueses e africanos; culpada do assassínio de 100 000 africanos e da fuga para Congo de um milhão de refugiados angolanos. Delgado foi o último dos bravos. O futuro agora pertence aos precavidos.

Notas: A actualização de algumas notas é indicada por asterisco

1. Traduzido do original francês, publicado no nº 21 da revista Partisans,Junho-Julho-Agosto, 1965.

2. Henrique Cerqueira. *Depois de 1974 publicou Acuso, Editora Intervenção, (1976) em dois volumes. Cerqueira recorda os acontecimentos, cita muita documentação e faz graves acusações. Comunistas e socialistas, sem produzirem prova alguma, sempre acusaram Cerqueira de ser agente da PIDE.

3. O caso do capitão Almeida Santos é significativo. Em 1960 descobriu-se o cadáver enterrado na areia da Praia do Guincho. O PCP acusou a PIDE de o ter assassinado. Mais tarde, o verdadeiro assassino, um membro do PCP que tinha estado ligado a Almeida Santos numa tentativa abortada de putsch e que com ele esteve preso evadindo-se na sua companhia, admitiu no julgamento ter eliminado o seu companheiro, cujo aventureirismo ameaçavaapopulação inteira. (^*Tratava-se do dr. João Jacques Valente, militante do PCP, responsável por numerosas prisões a 28 de Setembro de 1974. cf. António Maria Pereira. A burla do 28 de Setembro, 1976, que publica na íntegra o ‘Acórdão do Supremo Tribunal de Justiça no caso da Praia do Guincho’. Numa típica manobra comunista de branqueamento, o caso foi depois deformado num filme: A Balada da Praia dos Cães . No que se refere à denúncia de camaradas antifascistas à PIDE, basta citar a edição de Dezembro de 1964 do Avante, órgão do PCP, distribuído no interior de Portugal. Um artigo, com o título ‘Cuidado com eles’, denuncia pelos seus nomes dois membros da FAP e põe de sobreaviso os ‘democratas’ (e incidentalmente a PIDE) contra as suas perigosas actividades.

4. A maioria dos participantes na revolta de Beja, em 1962, foi amnistiada. Por outro lado, o Portugal Democrático (São Paulo), de Maio de 1965, anuncia a libertação de dois quadros do PCP, Aida Paulo e Manuel Guedes.

5. Segundo o jornal A Província de Angola, de 24 de Março de 1965, dois jornalistas soviéticos, Mikhail Domogatschitch e Tomas Kolesnichenko, visitaram oficialmente Moçambique no mês de Março. O jornal levanta protestos contra as objecções feitas por certos meios conservadores relativamente a esta visita.

6. No domínio do desporto, estabeleceram-se relações com certos países socialistas. No mês de Abril, equipas desportivas participaram oficialmente em, pelo menos, quatro encontros na Europa Oriental: Alemanha de Leste, Hungria, Checoslováquia e Jugoslávia (cf. O Primeiro de Janeiro de 5 de Maio de 1965). Tais relações seriam inimagináveis há quatro ou cinco anos. Hoje são correntes, apesar da guerra colonial e do boicote de Portugal pelos países africanos.

7. Lisboa, Ulisseia Editora, 1965. O texto sofreu uma única modificação, significativa: o corte da passagem que mencionava o dirigente angolano Holden Roberto. Contudo, a libertação intelectual tem os seus altos e baixos. No final de Maio de 1965, a Sociedade Portuguesa de Escritores foi dissolvida e três autores, democratas conhecidos, presos por terem concedido esse ano o Prémio de Novelística os três contos Luanda, 1964, do escritor angolano Luandino Vieira, que cumpria na altura uma pena de 14 anos de prisão por colaborar com os nacionalistas do seu país.

8. Um exemplo recente que demonstra bem esta nova orientação política é a nomeação, como Procurador da República em Angola, do advogado africano Boavida que acaba de passar dois anos na prisão por actividades nacionalistas e cujo irmão é um membro importante do MPLA.

9. O PCP conduz, desde o começo da guerra de Angola, uma intensa campanha de denegrição contra a FLNA, dirigida por Holden Roberto, enquanto apoia abertamente o movimento rival. Em Novembro do ano passado, Álvaro Cunhal, numa entrevista à Pravda, precisou quais os movimentos nacionalistas que, em cada colónia, gozavam do apoio do PCP (cf. Alger Républicain, 24 de Novembro de 1964).

10. Um comunicado do Comité Central do PCP, antes do seu apoio de última hora a Delgado, nas eleições de 1958, descreve o general como «candidato fabricado pelas embaixadas britânica e americana».

11.*Ver Misérias do Exílio, Apêndice Documental B, ‘doc. nº 12’, extractos (alíneas 2, 3 e 4 e 6) do Comunicado da Junta Revolucionária, emitido em Argel, 5 de Dezembro de 1964.

12. *Ver ibid. no Apêndice Documental B,’«doc. n.º 13’, extractos (alínea 2) do Comunicado da Junta Revolucionária de Delgado, Argel, 18 de Dezembro de 1964.

13. Comunicado da FPLN, Argel, 3 de Março de 1965. Este mesmo comunicado emite dúvidas sobre a possibilidade de Delgado estar em perigo e considera a declaração de 23 de Fevereiro, feita pelo representante do general em Marrocos acerca do seu desaparecimento, como suspeita e vinda de uma pessoa sem representatividade política. O comunicado da FPLN foi difundido numa das suas emissões, com destino a Portugal, no dia 7 de Abril. * Está reproduzido na íntegra ref. Nota 12 no Apêndice Documental B, ‘doc. nº 19’.

SHOWBIZ

2007-05-27T13:42:00.003Z

A view from Australia but it could easily be about Portugal

Visto da Australia, mas podia muito bem ser de Portugal

SHOWBIZ

And the Theatrical-Industrial Complex

by Roger Sandall

A talk given at a private gathering in Sydney, May 2007.)

Our general subject this evening is the health of society and the place of the arts. So let’s begin where we have to begin, with Plato. At a time when today’s showbiz celebrities are doing what they do best—extending the boundaries of outrageousness in speech and conduct, defying convention and thumbing their noses at community standards—serious criticism has to begin where this puzzling tendency was first noticed: in The Republic.

Some of you may remember that Books Two and Three of The Republic contain Plato’s thoughts on education and the role of poetry and drama (Plato also returns to the topic in Book Ten). Let me remind you what Socrates says.

“It is not only to the poets therefore that we must issue orders requiring them to represent good character in their poems or not write at all; we must issue similar orders to all artists and prevent them portraying bad character, ill-discipline, meanness, or ugliness in painting, sculpture, architecture, or any work of art, and if they are unable to comply they must be forbidden to practise their art.”

Plato doesn’t want to be destructive. Unlike me, he doesn’t dislike actors on principle. He finds many redeeming features in the arts. In a note contrasting the simplicities of peasant life in the countryside with civilization, he explicitly includes in his vision of a healthy society “artists, sculptors, painters, and musicians… poets and playwrights with their reciters, actors, chorus-trainers, and theatrical producers…”

But the role of the arts was to assist in harmonizing reason and passion, thought and instinct, the best things of the mind and the irreducibles of animal appetite. And as Plato saw it, this was not what was happening in Athens—any more than it’s happening in Sydney today. This led him to a severe editorial decision: “Most of today’s stories must be rejected.”

His reason is that they do not build character—they corrupt and weaken it, and they encourage impiety. Plato complains that Homer impiously misrepresents God. (According to Francis Cornford Plato “uses the singular ‘god’ and the plural ‘gods’ indifferently”.) Poets who do this will be refused permission to produce their plays or educate children, for the main purpose of education is to raise men and women who “grow up godfearing and holy, so far as that is humanly possible.”

This was unlikely to happen, he felt, from immersion in the old Greek legends—for example, Atreus making a tasty stew out of his brother Thyestes’ children, and serving heaped platefuls to Thyestes himself. Plato considered misbehavior of this kind deplorable. What he finds additionally objectionable about Athenian youth playing the part of profligates and murderers is that they are being induced by their elders to act, to impersonate, to physically represent on stage and to incarnate in performance, despicable social types.

True, Plato had some funny ideas about families and what he called ‘community of women.’ He seems to have been overawed by Spartan communism. But when it comes to showbiz most of what he says is common sense. He disagreed with the Greek practice of encouraging schoolboys to recite Homer “delivering their speeches with the tones and gestures of an actor.” Plato says that encouraging children to behave like trashy people doing trashy things—the Kylie-ization of the world—is deeply wrong. Imitating Kylie or Madonna brings an inevitable decline in manners, speech, and conduct. What schools should be trying to do, he says, is exactly the opposite. Children in school

“must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation.”

* * *

Plato lived from 427BC to 347BC. Socrates was forced to drink hemlock in 399BC. The Academy was founded in 386BC. How, one wonders, have we got from there, and from Plato’s common sense educational proposals, to where we are now? Plato understood that some artistic values—some products of the artistic imagination, playing heedlessly in the fraught domain of ethics—were clearly inimical to social health. But when Plato was writing the showbiz demographics were different. Most people farmed the land, they did not live in towns, and they were certainly not actors. What would he have made of a country where nearly half a million people out of 20 million work in the Theatrical-Industrial Complex sharing and promoting the louche values of the lumpenartistry—the values of our “celebrities” and the vast and cynical apparatus that manufactures them?

In banning evil from literature Plato was being perhaps a touch unrealistic. For grownups, drama lacking both sin and redemption cannot adequately portray God’s will and man’s fate. Mature audiences require something else. But young people? Most of us can only feel that given the inexpressibly sordid media environment in which children are being raised today, he was pointing in the right direction. It is more than likely that under Plato’s educational program the two teenage girls who hanged themselves in Melbourne might still be alive.

In Book Ten he returns to his earlier argument. Here he points to a ubiquitous aspect of theatre. Showbiz, he says, necessarily avoids the ordinary, the normal, the calmly reasonable, and always goes for the extraordinary, the abnormal, the outrageous. For, says Plato, “the reasonable element and its unvarying calm are difficult to represent on the stage in an appealing way, and difficult to understand if represented, particularly by the motley audience you find in a theatre.”

For that reason, he argues, playwrights who want to be popular avoid the normal, the calm, and the stable, preferring characters who are gross, violent, deranged and murderous. He was probably thinking of the violence in Homeric myths and legends; but looking at present trends today we note that where only fifty years ago, in the movies, one saw actors like Gregory Peck or Trevor Howard embodying calm reasonableness and social responsibility, we must now endure Russell Crowe.

But let’s move on. For the last forty years the most common way of getting an edge in both showbiz and shopping has depended on breaking sex taboos. This first took place with the production of Kenneth Tynan’s series of nude sketches Oh! Calcutta! in 1969. It’s opening run was long, and its revival in 1976 was longer: it ran 13 years. According to Wikipedia, knowing allusions to Oh! Calcutta! may occasionally be found in the children’s show The Simpsons. We’ve certainly come a long way from Peter Rabbit. Those working in today’s Theatrical-Industrial Complex now feel free to parade their values in the Children’s Hour.

* * *

So much for Greece. After Greece came Rome. I was planning to skip Rome entirely, partly because you all know well enough that a deep moral revulsion against Roman spectacle and the degradation of the arena was a powerful element in the rise of Christianity. But of course we can’t skip Rome, for the parallels between the celebrity culture of gladiatorial Rome, and the world of Madonna and Russell Crowe and the Mad Maximizing of our own arenas are unignorable. What I call the Theatrical-Industrial Complex, shorthand for the various employments that supported the world of the gladiatorial games and their degrading displays, comprised a huge and depraved occupational segment of Roman society with obvious modern parallels.

We need first to understand its economic basis. For there are parallels here too. The games developed in Imperial Rome as the employments of the arena expanded to fill the void left by the disappearance of more ordinary livelihoods. The curse of slavery meant that no sober and industrious middle class ever arose in Rome. By the end of the Republic the rural yeoman class of small farmers was being destroyed: grain was no longer produced locally—soon it was all imported from North Africa. As for the urban working class, in the words of the historian W. E. H. Lecky,

The poorer citizen found almost all the spheres in which an honorable livelihood might be obtained, wholly or at least in very great degree occupied by slaves, while he had learnt to regard trade with an invincible repugnance. Hence followed the immense increase of corrupt and corrupting professions—actors, pantomimes, hired gladiators, political spies, pimps and prostitutes, astrologers, religious charlatans, pseudo-philosophers… Meanwhile the mass of the people were supported in absolute idleness by the public distribution of corn from North Africa, given without any reference to desert, and received, not as a favour, but as a right; while gratuitous public amusements still further diverted them from labour. — History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, Part One

The free “public amusements” Lecky speaks of were the gladiatorial games. We need not dwell on them—but we have to note them. They had a long history. Of Etruscan origin, gladiatorial games were first introduced to Rome in 264BC. They survived formal prohibition 90 years into the Christian era, the last taking place in Rome in 404AD. Around 100AD, at a festival staged by Trajan, ten thousand men fought and died over a period of three months, before an estimated five million spectators. Around 250AD Galerius liked to see men torn to pieces by wild beasts as he ate his dinner. It was said that Galerius “never supped without human blood.” The emperor Claudius aestheticised the games: he delighted in watching men die, “for he had learnt to take an artistic pleasure in observing the variations of their agony.”

Lecky, in the middle of the 19^th century, writes as follows: “It is well for us to look steadily on such facts as these. They display more vividly than any mere philosophical disquisition the abyss of depravity into which it is possible for human nature to sink. They furnish us with striking proofs of the reality of the moral progress we have attained, and they enable us in some degree to estimate the regenerating influence that Christianity has exercised in the world. For the destruction of the gladiatorial games is all its work.” W. E. H. Lecky was a 19^th century rationalist openly hostile to the Catholic Church. But history obliged him to truthfully honour the indispensable role of Christianity in rescuing Europe from Roman decadence and ruin.

And there we might leave the Romans, except for one last thing. It is part of my argument that once diabolism takes over and any sense of limits are lost, once what Lecky calls an “abyss of depravity” looms… As I say, when the degradation of showbiz is far advanced, then the universal coarsening of taste brings a demand for more and more brutishness at any price. In Ancient Rome, the taste for blood and spectacle had a similarly coarsening effect. Lecky writes that

One of the first consequences of this taste was to render the people absolutely unfit for those tranquil and refined amusements which usually accompany civilisation. To men who were accustomed to witness the fierce vicissitudes of deadly combat, any spectacle that did not elicit the strongest excitement was insipid.

* * *

Our next stop is Rousseau. Jean-Jacques should be read with discrimination. His ideas about noble savages are ridiculous. But his ethical critique of theatre contains much truth. In his First Discourse he had expressed doubts about the value of literature in general. These doubts are not at first easy to understand, but they become clearer if we look more closely at Rousseau’s main concern. This is not simply a matter of morality, per se. As Lionel Trilling explains in his book Sincerity and Authenticity, it has to do with the psychological foundations of morality, in a markedly Protestant form. Only fully autonomous individuals, who freely make their own decisions, employing private reason as the supreme arbiter, receive Rousseau’s approval as truly moral agents in a moral world.

It follows that virtually any social influence brought to bear on the autonomous conscience may be undesirable; influence constricts free choice in this libertarian world; literary influence in the form of stories and characters and imitations of life—and the literal meaning of influence is “in-flowing”—pours over the helpless reader/viewer both young and old until (adapting Hamlet), the will is puzzled, it’s hard to tell right from wrong, and moral enterprises of great pitch and moment run awry. (‘Pith’ and moment if you prefer.)

“Have you read the novels of Philip Roth or John Updike?” you may be asked at a party. Let us say that you haven’t read them. Rousseau would say good for you—in that case you’re much better off. Because reading them, the prestigious influence of “society”—of the status groups and peer groups and critics and reviewers and weekend magazines and literary intellectuals and cultural authorities and political panjandrums who, as we know to our cost, really matter in today’s world—these will eventually force you into a corner, silent and ashamed. You are not a prude. You take a wide and forgiving view of humanity. Your own judgment tells you unmistakably that 99% of Roth and Updike is little but clever writing and socially malignant tripe. Rousseau recommends that you should hold fast to that opinion if that’s what your conscience says. But the influence of society, and elite opinion, tells you otherwise and leaves you with a lingering unease.

It’s in the Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758), however, that Rousseau’s thoughts on showbiz itself are set out. (This is an extended essay published in book form, not just a letter.) D’Alembert had written an article in Diderot’s Encyclopaedia suggesting that although the city of Geneva was a very fine place, adding a theatre would make it even better. Rousseau replied “You’ve got to be joking!” Instead of moral enlightenment the general effect of the theatre is “to augment the natural inclinations, and to give new energy to all our passions”—sexual passions most of all. Does the theatre purge the passions, as Aristotle claimed? Rubbish! What it mainly does is inflame passion, introduce innocent audiences to vice, habituate them to horrors, and coarsen their moral response. And, of course, broadly speaking Rousseau is right. Most showbiz is directly opposed to moral order. The beguiling actors we admire in musicals on stage or screen are often a pleasure to watch, and like the rest of us I have often enjoyed their performances. And I suppose they have to earn a crust some way. But we should also be realistic about the effects. Showgirls are to morality what advertising is to thrift.

Moreover, modern plays, in Rousseau’s opinion, are worse than ancient plays. The ancients generally wrote on heroic themes; modern playwrights write about love and sex. As for actors, “in general the estate of the actor is one of license, bad morals, and disorder.” If a theatre were opened in Geneva, wrote Rousseau, the effect of actresses on Genevan society would be dire. The menfolk of the city would be at their feet, so that candidates for public office would have to seek their patronage and “elections would take place in their dressing-rooms.” What their effect might be on the judiciary he does not say.

But the issue goes beyond social order and public morals. Plato had argued that the actor’s character deteriorates as he identifies with depraved characters onstage. Rousseau—taking his cue from Plato, and much concerned with sincerity—claims that the very act of impersonation diminishes an actor’s existence as a fully human being. An actor counterfeits himself; he insincerely puts on another character than his own.

One might object that this shows a misplaced fastidiousness. Much public life involves the playing of roles. It is not entirely unreasonable to ask: In which role is a man most truly ‘himself’? (The American sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a number of interesting books in answer to that question.) But if we look at the cases where men and women on the modern stage are asked to simulate sexual activity, or publicly exhibit sexual congress, the argument becomes more exigent: may it not be true, as Rousseau argues, that this role diminishes their existence as persons, and that this diminishment lastingly degrades their human standing in the world?

Publicly performing sexual acts defiles the humanity of the actor, and exalts the beast in man, legitimating it first in the world of theatrical mimesis—the stage, and next in ordinary life. Rousseau may be seen as presciently describing the pioneering pantlessness of Ms Paris Hilton and Ms Britney Spears on the World Wide Web, and predicting the likely consequences for the teenagers who idolise them, and who emulate their public depravity.

* * *

Now let’s see what Rousseau would make of Australia today. Let’s fly him out and ask what he thinks. Naturally enough he wants to know if his recommendations for Geneva have been followed, and if Australia has banned theatres and actresses. He is therefore astonished to learn that we have 435,000 people employed in the performing arts, 300,000 of them women. (From ABS publication Work in Selected Culture and Leisure Activities, April 2004, Catalog Number 6281.0.)

I hope that from these figures you will understand that when I speak of the “Theatrical-Industrial Complex” as a major social and economic force I’m not kidding. No doubt many of these people are sewing costumes, rigging microphones, and so on. But it is equally obvious that the overall moral direction of the stories being told, the narratives of human aspiration, are increasingly sordid.

This is driven by the showbiz need for ratings, and I shouldn’t need to spell out the fact that it is not merely the owners of television channels that have an economic interest here. Most of the 435,000 employees have rents and mortgages and cars to pay off and petrol to buy… and therefore a stake in the show. They are inevitably in a weak position to resist the debauching of their own professional and personal lives. Other things being equal, outrageousness increases ratings. And it is the profit motive in the generally amoral world of showbiz that mainly drives sexual outrageousness today. (I say mainly: our modern heroines of self-exposure, like Ms Paris Hilton, don’t need the money. In the sick minds of sexual exhibitionists notoriety is sufficient reward in itself.)

* * *

In all of this, one category of interest is music. Each day as I walk along the promenade at Bondi scores of joggers pass by ostentatiously NOT listening to the sound of the sea and the cries of the gulls. They’re plugged into rock stations and iPod downloads. Plato wanted music to inspire good behavior and stiffen morale. He had no truck with gloom, self-pity, or despair. Feeling that the Lydian mode of harmony expressed these moods, and that it encouraged unhelpful attitudes, he banned it from his Republic. It is I suppose possible that the stalwart young men and women springing along the strand are listening to music of a spiritually uplifting sort. It is equally possible that they are listening to the foul language and debased imaginations of rappers and hip-hoppers—indeed, more than possible I fear.

Be that as it may, The ABS report tells us that in Australia some 166,000 men and 140,000 women are warbling away, or otherwise engaged producing music. Looking on the web for something to listen to during my morning ablutions, I thought I’d check the number of music “streams” internationally available. I found that my computer offered me 1,419 channels—102 channels of pop music from the 70s and 80s, 150 channels of electronic music, 88 channels of the hideous world of rap and hip-hop… Anyway, as I say, 1,419 channels, with almost uncountable tracks, most of this available 24/7.

We noted earlier that in the Roman Empire, as worthwhile and honorable occupations dried up, more and more citizens were sucked into a multitude of worthless and dishonourable occupations that took their place. Is a similar process occurring today? At first glance one might think not: an enormous range of employments are available in the modern world of a perfectly respectable kind. But there’s a catch. Today’s occupations require, increasingly, high levels of attainment. What happens when educational levels fall below the standard required? When a pupil’s history, or English, or science, or math falls short? Then the Theatrical-Industrial Complex lies waiting, and the burgeoning of Song Contests is a symptom of this state of affairs. At first such competitions might have been seen in a positive light: girls or boys whose minds were not strong enough to compete academically could choose a career requiring only strong lungs and vocal chords. But as a ruined school system produces more and more vocationally disabled students, many incapable of qualifying for more serious work, singing and dancing come to be seen as worthy endeavours in themselves. You don’t have to pass exams in history of English. You don’t need to know how to write. You don’t have to know anything. You just open your mouth and wail.

The German writer Thomas Mann made an acute observation about music and thought. Music, he said—in the rambling disquisition of Memoirs of an Unpolitical Man—music displaces articulate thought; and although he lived too early to see what we see today, it follows that given enough time and space and sheer volume, music will effectively extinguish articulate thought. Looking back a million years into the Stone Age, when hunting took up most of men’s time, one assumes that the incessant uproar of stamping and yowling that filled whatever time there was left over prevented the rise of articulate thought in the first place. No-one could hear themselves think. Anyway that’s the sort of loud and mindless inarticulacy we seem to be going back to. You cannot escape it in bars, in cafes, at sports meetings, or at a hundred forms of assembly in public places. Even weather reports on television are now 50% showbiz with song and dance. Where formerly there was relative peace there is now universal din. I don’t think it unreasonable to claim that we live today in a culture where articulate thought, the calm and critical thinking about human affairs necessary for informed discussion by an informed citizenry, is increasingly threatened by a tsunami of musical noise.

But that’s enough. This is beginning to sound uncomfortably like Savonarola. I originally intended to say rather more about the phenomenon of sexual outrageousness in itself, and apologise if the notice advertising this talk aroused false expectations. But if I have managed to throw some light on the larger problem of the effects of theatrical representation—the problem of the foetid amoral underworld of showbiz that is invading every last corner of our lives—perhaps it will have been useful after all.

END

ISRAEL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

2007-05-25T20:27:00.000Z

Os inimigos de Israel continuam a negar o direito de Israel de existir, re-escrevendo a História e mentindo sobre as hediondas culpas dos que manipulam os palestinianos e outros povos árabes, e sempre com a ajuda dos idiotas úteis europeus.

Israel and international law

Posted By Melanie Phillips On May 24, 2007 @ 12:05 pm In Diary

A helpful reader has drawn my attention to a second brilliant summary of the legality of Israel’s presence in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria under international law. This pamphlet contains extracts from Israel and Palestine - Assault on the Law of Nations by Julius Stone. The late Professor Stone was recognised as one of the twentieth century’s leading authorities on the Law of Nations, and Israel and Palestine, which was published in 1980, presented a detailed analysis of the central principles of international law governing the issues raised by the Arab-Israel conflict. I recommend reading the whole thing; as with the pamphlet written by Eli Hertz which I reported here, the discrepancy between the solid legality of Israel’s position in the ‘occupied territories’ and the venomous hysteria with which this occupation is regarded throughout the west – not to mention the wretched UN — with the repeated mantra that it is ‘illegal’, is truly mind-blowing.

I would draw your attention to these passages in particular in the Stone pamphlet:

By contrast, Israel’s presence in all these areas pending negotiation of new borders is entirely lawful, since Israel entered them lawfully in self-defence. International law forbids acquisition by unlawful force, but not where, as in the case of Israel’s self-defence in 1967, the entry on the territory was lawful. It does not so forbid it, in particular, when the force is used to stop an aggressor, for the effect of such prohibition would be to guarantee to all potential aggressors that, even if their aggression failed, all territory lost in the attempt would be automatically returned to them. Such a rule would be absurd to the point of lunacy. There is no such rule….

International law, therefore, gives a triple underpinning to Israel’s claim that she is under no obligation to hand back automatically the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan or anyone else. In the first place, these lands never legally belonged to Jordan. Second, even if they had, Israel’s own present control is lawful, and she is entitled to negotiate the extent and the terms of her withdrawal. Third, international law would not in such circumstances require the automatic handing back of territory even to an aggressor who was the former sovereign. It requires the extent and conditions of the handing back to be negotiated between the parties.

Lauterpacht has offered a cogent legal analysis leading to the conclusion that sovereignty over Jerusalem has already vested in Israel. His view is that when the partition proposals were immediately rejected and aborted by Arab armed aggression, those proposals could not, both because of their inherent nature and because of the terms in which they were framed, operate as an effective legal re-disposition of the sovereign title. They might (he thinks) have been transformed by agreement of the parties concerned into a consensual root of title, but this never happened. And he points out that the idea that some kind of title remained in the United Nations is quite at odds, both with the absence of any evidence of vesting, and with complete United Nations silence on this aspect of the matter from 1950 to 1967?…

In these circumstances, that writer is led to the view that there was, following the British withdrawal and the abortion of the partition proposals, a lapse or vacancy or vacuum of sovereignty. In this situation of sovereignty vacuum, he thinks, sovereignty could be forthwith acquired by any state that was in a position to assert effective and stable control without resort to unlawful means. On the merely political and commonsense level, there is also ground for greater tolerance towards Israel’s position, not only because of the historic centrality of Jerusalem to Judaism for 3,000 years, but also because in modern times Jews have always exceeded Arabs in Jerusalem. In 1844 there were 7,000 Jews to 5,000 Moslems; in 1910, 47,000 Jews to 9,800 Moslems; in 1931, 51,222 Jews to 19,894 Moslems; in 1948, 100,000 Jews to 40,000 Moslems, and in 1967 200,000 Jews to 54,902 Moslems.

Whether the doctrine is already a doctrine of international law stricto sensu, or (as many international lawyers would still say) a precept of politics, or policy, or of justice, to be considered where appropriate, it is clear that its application is predicated on certain findings of fact. One of these is the finding that at the relevant time the claimant group constitutes a people of nation with a common endowment of distinctive language or ethnic origin or history and tradition, and the like, distinctive from others among whom it lives, associated with particular territory, and lacking an independent territorial home in which it may live according to its lights…

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders have frankly disavowed distinct Palestine identity. On March 3, 1977, for example, the head of the PLO Military Operations Department, Zuhair Muhsin, told the Netherlands paper Trouw that there are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese:
‘We are one people. Only for political reasons do we carefully underline our Palestinian identity. For it is of national interest for the Arabs to encourage the existence of the Palestinians against Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestine identity is there only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian State is a new expedient to continue the fight against Zionism and for Arab unity.’…

The myth of the 1966 Palestinian Covenant that the Palestinian people was unjustly displaced by the Jewish invasion of Palestine in 1917 is widely disseminated and unquestioningly and dogmatically espoused in studies from the United Nations Secretariat. However, it is necessary to recall, not only the Kingdom of David and the succession of Jewish polities in Palestine down to Roman conquest and dispersion at the turn of the present era, but also that the Jews continued to live in Palestine even after that conquest, and were in 1914 a well-knit population there.

Will all those who so shrilly insist that international law must prevail in the Middle East now apply the conclusions of that very same international law, and declare Israel’s inalienable right to the ‘occupied territories’?

Once again: this material should be disseminated widely. Assuming that none of the benighted media will pick up on it, it should be circulated to every MP, editor and foreign desk journalist. It is much, much harder to regurgitate lies when the truth is blazing away in your in-tray.

URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1528