The Spectator - Why are Parisians so awful?

 

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Why are Parisians so awful?

Failure to live up to Parisian standards is a punishable offence

Alexander Larman25 February 2026, 5:00am

I have recently returned from a fleeting visit to the City of Light. As usual, Paris itself was a delight. It is an architectural and historic marvel that nevertheless manages to offer the best food and wine in the world at all kinds of prices, and somehow also has a respectable number of quirky and interesting independent shops and boutiques amidst the more anticipated international names. In other words, any trip to the French capital should be an alloyed pleasure. So why, when I arrived back at St Pancras, did I all but sink to my knees in gratitude that I was once back in rainy old Blighty, and that the land of the Belle Époque was a distant memory?  

The answer, as usual, comes in the extraordinary awfulness of the inhabitants of the world’s finest city. Other similar places have their flaws. New Yorkers are brusque, Romans prone to lascivious wolf-whistles, and Londoners are a grim, glum bunch on the whole, until you steer them into the nearest pub and watch them light up. But it is hard to think of any bunch of types as rude, arrogant and generally obstreperous as the Parisians. If you do not live up to their self-appointed standards of beauty, sartorial chic and – this is the crucial part – fluency in their native language, then you will be treated with as much disdain as la merde beneath their ever-elegant chaussures.  

Sometimes, this just takes the form of straightforward hostility. I attempted to visit a brasserie for lunch one day, on the tourist hellhole that is the Boulevard de Sébastopol. My presence was noted, I was brusquely sent to a table in a miserable, practically Arctic corner of the room, and then that was the end of that. The closest that the staff came to communicating was when one waiter dropped a fork on my wife’s face, an outrage for which no apology was forthcoming. Instead, when she tried to pick up the offending item, he waggled a finger at her, as if she were a naughty child, and said ‘Non!’. We left shortly afterwards, unfed and insulted.  

But then this was the same trip as when, after queuing for half an hour in the rain to see the glories of the Louvre, we were denied entry because we had booked le mauvais billet, and would have been sent back to the ticket desk, there to shell out another thirty-odd euros and to queue, in the rain, for another half an hour or more. Even the Mona Lisa isn’t worth that amount of effort. If this information had been communicated with the slightest kind of compassion, or even a shrug, a smile and a ‘desolé’, then the disappointment might not have been so grave. But instead, it was presented with a sneer and a look of contemptuous incredulity at how un rosbif could have been quite so stupid to fall foul of the institution’s byzantine website.  

On and on it went. We stayed at a hotel with a swimming pool, which was located on the top floor. (There was no view but never mind.) In order to visit the swimming pool, you had to leave your room, head down to the reception, obtain another ticket from the sullen receptionist, head back to another floor, get changed, leave, and then head two floors up to the pool. It was a staggering task, and I am afraid to say that, when the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest broke, I simply abandoned the idea of a relaxing dip altogether and instead immersed myself in an altogether different kind of deep water.  

Paris is a city where those who live and work there seem to take a perverse pleasure in making the lives of tourists and visitors less pleasant. There are endless queues, countless miserable examples of pettifogging bureaucracy that make no sense – on my way out of Gare du Nord, I counted no fewer than three separate queues at one point, none of which were making any progress – and a pervasive sense that the Parisians would be perfectly happy if they never had to speak to anyone who was not French ever again. If they deign to utter a few words to you in English, it is done with the withering disdain of someone lowering themselves to vulgarity. It comes as a faint surprise that they do not spit at you in the process.  

I shall, of course, be back before too long. The awfulness of the locals cannot take away the great aesthetic, artistic and culinary glories of Paris, and even if, like a character out of the Wodehouse novel, I must adopt the look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French, I shall bone up on Duolingo and attempt to take on the escargot-munchers on their own turf. But the next time I visit, it will be with a sense of grim determination to restore British honour in a fashion not seen since the glory days of Agincourt. The Louvre, and that mediocre little bistro on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, had better watch out. 

Observador - A culpa é sempre de Israel… e já agora dos EUA (Rodrigues do Carmo)

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https://observador.pt/opiniao/a-culpa-e-sempre-de-israel-e-ja-agora-dos-eua/

A culpa é sempre de Israel… e já agora dos EUA

Para estes comentadeiros e especialistas parece que a gramática depende da direcção do míssil. Se vem de Teerão é resistência. Se vai para Teerão é agressão, escalada, crime de guerra, quiçá genocídio

José António Rodrigues do Carmo 

09 mar. 2026, 00:21

Há teses do comentariado televisivo português   que, pelos seus méritos, entram directamente, para a grandiosa antologia do disparate nacional.

PUB • CONTINUE A LER A SEGUIR

A guerra em curso no Médio Oriente tem o imenso mérito de expor a curiosa cosmovisão de boa parte dos comentadores nacionais. Uma cosmovisão que mistura sociologia de café com geopolítica às três pancadas, da qual resulta uma simples e reiterada ideia: a culpa ontológica de qualquer conflito no Médio Oriente é sempre de Israel ou dos Estados Unidos ou, na linguagem do mexerico coscuvilheiro de uma certa “especialista” da SIC, do “Bibi” e do “Trump”. Idealmente dos dois, para não haver dúvidas.

O país dos aiatolas pode bombardear vizinhos, financiar milícias, promover atentados, construir milhares de mísseis, procurar activamente a bomba atómica e jurar a destruição de um Estado inteiro. Nada de especial. A verdadeira questão é sempre a resposta de Israel e dos EUA.

A fascinante e revolucionária tese central repete-se com hipnótica regularidade. Israel está a cometer “genocídios” e crimes de guerra, a provocar escaladas “desproporcionais” que ameaçam a paz regional e outras infindáveis maldades. Já um regime de alucinados, cujo objectivo é destruir Israel e mandar na região para preparar a vinda do Mhadi está, no fundo, apenas a participar num sofisticado exercício diplomático ligeiramente mais barulhento.

As “escaladas incontroláveis” começam apenas quando Israel opta por não morrer educadamente ou os EUA por acabar com a baderna. Ou seja, os primeiros murros não contam, o problema são os socos de quem se farta de servir de saco.

Mas há mais. Segundo alguns analistas televisivos, o plano militar contra o Irão já estaria a falhar antes mesmo de começar. Passou uma semana e Teerão vai disparando cada vez menos mísseis e drones, depois de ter esguichado centenas sobre os vizinhos do lado. Naturalmente, isto é apresentado pelos suspeitos do costume como prova de que a operação está a correr mal. É como opinar que um incêndio está fora de controlo porque as chamas estão a diminuir. Ou que uma intervenção cirúrgica falhou, porque o paciente ainda tem a barriga aberta. De alguma maneira, isto parece fazer sentido nas estranhas cabecinhas opinadoras.

O comentário ganha então um tom quase ansioso, ai Jesus, afinal a campanha que estava prevista para quatro semanas pode demorar cinco. Que horror! Que falhanço! O tempora! O mores!

 Os EUA, garantem-nos estes génios, sem se rir, foram surpreendidos pelos fantásticos drones iranianos, uma espécie de maravilha tecnológica com motor a dois tempos que, pelo menos em estúdio, parece capaz de derrotar metade da NATO.

E, claro, surge sempre a afirmação indispensável, pescada na vala comum dos tesourinhos deprimentes do antissemitismo: Israel controla os Estados Unidos! Trata-se de uma velha teoria da conspiração, constantemente reciclada e muito popular em certos círculos da cretinice, onde a geopolítica é explicada com a mesma convicção do terraplanismo.

Nada disto estaria completo sem a referência contumaz ao direito internacional, essa entidade metafísica que sofre “violações grosseiras” sempre que Israel dispara um míssil e desaparece misteriosamente, assobiando para o ar, quando o Irão dispara 100 e mata milhares com galhardia e intenção.

Mas mesmo neste fértil ambiente de criatividade analítica, alguns comentadores conseguiram elevar o debate a um nível superior. Um deles, figura larga e omnipresente numa televisão, decidiu explicar ao público português que as manifestações no Irão e na Europa, de um lado meia dúzia de alegados apoiantes do regime, do outro multidões que protestam espontaneamente contra a repressão, seriam, no fundo, equivalentes. A simetria perfeita, tudo perfeitamente normal e democrático. Garantiu aliás que o processo de escolha das lideranças iranianas decorre num ambiente institucional perfeitamente regular. Uma vulgaríssima assembleia parlamentar com um ligeiro toque teológico.

Convém recordar alguns pormenores. O sistema político iraniano é uma teocracia onde o poder simbólico último pertence a um aiatola vitalício. Os funcionários do regime são previamente filtrados por um conselho clerical e por sombrios círculos da Guarda Revolucionária, organização militar, terrorista, repressiva e económica que combina devoção religiosa com pistolas, mísseis e uma apreciável vocação para o negócio de petróleo, narcóticos e bombas. Descrever este mecanismo como um processo político banal é mais ou menos como descrever a Inquisição como um simpático tribunal administrativo.

Ainda assim, houve quem conseguisse ir mais longe. O general Agostinho Costa, entre dois gargarejos, três visões de russos em Kiev, e dez F-35 abatidos em Teerão pela “melhor defesa aérea do Médio Oriente” ( sic), decidiu oferecer ao público uma analogia histórica de assinalável subtileza: matar o aiatola seria equivalente a matar o Papa! A comparação tem o seu “je ne sais quois” de não sei quê. É verdade que o Papa não dirige um regime que financia terroristas no Médio Oriente, não dispara mísseis balísticos sobre os países vizinhos e não possui uma guarda encarregada de matar a própria população com pundonor e exportar revoluções religiosas à bomba. Mas, tirando esses insignificantes detalhes, a analogia é praticamente perfeita.

O teatro moral do absurdo está montado. Ditaduras teocráticas surgem como actores políticos normais. Grupos terroristas transformam-se em heroicas forças de resistência. Ataques contra Israel são interpretados como episódios compreensíveis de frustração geopolítica. Até o Engenheiro António Guterres, somou o seu peso, quando lembrou ao mundo que certos ataques, como os massacres de milhares de civis israelitas por um grupo terrorista às ordens do “Papa”, “não surgem no vazio”. Foi uma observação profunda. De facto, nada surge no vazio. Nem sequer as inanidades que sistematicamente saem da boca do Secretário-Geral das Nações Unidas. E, já agora, os entusiasmados parabéns ao aiatola, perdão, papa, pelo aniversário da Revolução.

Para Israel fica reservada uma posição singular na moral internacional: é o único país do planeta que só pode responder a ataques com comunicados diplomáticos, gestos penitenciais e um suspiro resignado. Se possível acompanhado por uma declaração de boas intenções e uma sessão de auto-crítica.

Talvez seja apenas uma questão de geografia moral. Para estes comentadeiros e especialistas, aparentemente a gramática depende da direcção do míssil. Se vem de Teerão é resistência. Se vai para Teerão é agressão, escalada, crime de guerra, quiçá genocídio e certamente criminosa violação do direito internacional.

No meio de tudo isto, o público português tem o privilégio de assistir ao espantoso espectáculo de comentadores que falam de estratégia militar como se fosse filosofia moral de cordel e de regimes autoritários e assassinos como se fossem juntas de freguesia com problemas de gestão. O mais notável é a solenidade com que tudo isto é apresentado. Há mapas, gráficos, vozes graves e um ar catedrático de quem está a revelar ao país os segredos mais profundos da geopolítica mundial.

Na verdade, o que os telespectadores presenciam nada tem a ver com comentário geopolítico, e tudo a ver com um forma particularmente sofisticada de entretenimento pelo ridículo. Uma mistura de catequese ideológica, má-fé e ignorância confiante.

O curioso é que muitos destes comentadores parecem sinceramente convencidos de que estão a explicar o mundo quando, na realidade, estão apenas a demonstrar, em directo e ao vivo, até que ponto paramos para ver um desastre.

The Spectator - It’s all been downhill since Concorde

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https://spectator.com/article/its-all-been-downhill-since-concorde/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND++20260121++HOUSE+ADS++AG+CID_97ce114859ec0cdc50223899129fa1c7

It’s all been downhill since Concorde

There’s no glamour in the era of economy air travel

21 January 2026, 5:00am

[Alamy]

Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it was a lunch that cost more than £1 billion to serve up. It was the first meal on board the very first scheduled flight on Concorde – the plane that, for close to three decades, made it possible to have breakfast in Belgravia, a meeting in Manhattan and still be home for supper in Soho. 

That’s not a schedule that appeals to me (there’s nowhere decent to eat of a morning in Belgravia). But thinking of Concorde, 50 years on from it going supersonic on its first flight to Bahrain, is one of the few elements of the past which trigger a deep and irritable jealousy. 

I’ve worked as a travel journalist for the past 20 years and, in that time, I’ve been lucky enough to have secured more than my fair share of complimentary flights, many of them in the relative sanctuary of business class. But I’ve also taken hundreds and hundreds of economy flights. Even on so-called legacy carriers, I’m hardly stepping on heterodox territory by declaring that the standard of service, comfort and, yes, food, has markedly declined across the board since the millennium. The nadir came for me when I put down my tray table on a Royal Air Maroc flight a few years back, only to have a child’s soiled nappy slide on to my lap. I didn’t much fancy the pasta after that.

I do find myself wondering if there should be a shift in my Overton window. Is flying the exception where I should depart from my usual bromide that for every one joyful thing about the past compared to now, there was always something else that was comparatively worse? 

Concorde, and flying in the 1970s in general, seems, to a 47-year-old who was only born at the fag end of the Callaghan era, to have been a truly glorious exercise in glamour, style and copious daytime drinking. Cigars were handed out on the first Concorde flight after that blow-out meal and, although I imagine the smell on board must have been mephitic to non-smokers (few as they were in number back then), I assume that I would have gratefully inhaled the odour of a lit Cohiba if pressed to choose between that and the septum-burning whiff of a modern-day on-board chemical toilet.

So this is an open call to all readers who were regular flyers on Concorde, or any airline, in the era of Wombles, wedge shoes and Rick Wakeman. Can you tell me if jetting off anywhere from Lagos to Los Angeles really was a more pleasant experience 50 years ago?

I’ve tried hard to think of the negatives. If you forgot to bring your paperback (I imagine The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth and anything by Tom Robbins would have been an appropriate in-flight read in that era) then there would be little to do on board except get monumentally drunk – no bad thing of course. 

And what if the sybaritic menus of the era didn’t actually taste as good when flying at supersonic speed? The New York Times story from 22 January 1976, detailing the maiden flight, reported that passengers weren’t asked if they would like their steak rare or medium; every one came out overcooked, according to the reporter on board. And they say nurses have it tough…

Concorde wasn’t perfect, of course. From the outset, travellers complained that the extra speed did not make up for the small seats and narrow aisle space. But who cares about supreme comfort when you could be on the other side of the world in the time it takes to watch Oppenheimer? 

My favourite story about the first Concorde flight all those years ago concerns a passenger called Philip Croucher. He took on board 6,000 first-day covers in order to get them stamped in Bahrain before flogging them back in the UK. He told reporters he expected to make £12,000 in profit, an ambition that rendered him more than happy to pay £200 in excess baggage charges.

What happened to Mr Croucher’s scheme? These are the kind of tales from the ‘golden age of travel’ which make me feel resentful that my parents didn’t bother having me until 1978. By the time I came of age and took to the skies on a regular basis in my mid-twenties, the caviar had been replaced by crisps and I was more likely to have an actor from Hollyoaks than Anthony Hopkins as an on-board companion. Concorde was retired in 2003 without me ever getting the chance to try it for myself. 

‘The past is a foreign country,’ wrote L.P Hartley. And it seems, as far as flying is concerned, they didn’t just do things differently there. They did them a whole lot better. 

The Spectator - The gangs terrifying the countryside

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The gangs terrifying the countryside

Rupert Hawksley

Sergeant Rob Goacher was on patrol recently when the radio crackled with a tip-off. Two men were hare coursing – chasing and killing hares with greyhounds or lurchers – in the fields near Winterbourne Monkton, a small village in Wiltshire. When Goacher arrived, a silver Subaru with the exhaust hanging off edged out of a field and accelerated through the country lanes, hitting 60mph before reaching the M4.

‘The driver then suddenly decided to exit the motorway,’ says Goacher. ‘Over a verge, through a fence, and out through the farm. The field was full of cattle, which could have easily escaped onto the motorway. Then we’d be looking at a massive pile-up and fatalities.’

‘I still have nightmares about that,’ says Constable Simon Gomm, as the three of us look out over Salisbury Plain on a freezing February night. This was just one incident in a chaotic ten-day period when Wiltshire Police seized ten cars linked to hare coursing, which is banned under the Hunting Act 2004. ‘We got invaded,’ says Goacher.

Back in the police station at Trowbridge, Inspector Andy Lemon, head of Wiltshire Police’s rural crime team, shows me a video of a local farmer surrounded by a group of hare coursers. His truck gets catapulted and rammed and a car is driven directly at him. ‘Get straight to him,’ shouts one of the men. He was lucky. A few years ago, a gamekeeper in Hampshire was dragged behind a vehicle and broke both his legs after confronting trespassers. ‘The level of hostility can be extreme,’ says Lemon. ‘They’re coming out here with machetes and air rifles,’ adds Goacher.

These are not local lads out for a night of cheap entertainment. Hare coursing is linked to criminal gangs and can be big business. The chase is often livestreamed to illegal gambling sites, with tens of thousands of pounds wagered on which dog will catch the hare. ‘I am told that you can even watch hare coursing being live-streamed into China and people there bet huge amounts on it as it is happening,’ says Philip Wilkinson, Wiltshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner.

The recent spike in hare coursing across Wiltshire – up 21.8 per cent between September 2024 and August 2025 – forms part of a bleaker picture. Rural crime, from machinery and livestock theft to badger baiting and fly-tipping, is scarring the countryside. Any quaint ideas of England’s green and pleasant land are slowly being eroded.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) estimates that the cost of rural crime in 2024 was £44.1 million, but the real figure is likely to be far higher, as the police struggle to keep up. ‘There are many crimes that don’t get reported because farmers are basically shrugging their shoulders and asking: “What’s the point?”’ says the NFU vice president Rachel Hallos. ‘And were the farmer to go out with a shotgun, it’s likely to be them who ends up in court, not the people responsible for the original crime.’

Rural crime was once largely opportunistic. A quadbike or a trailer might occasionally go missing. Increasingly, however, it is the work of organised crime groups (OCGs), many with links to eastern Europe and China, who are stealing farm machinery and GPS systems on an industrial scale. Tractor thefts were up 17 per cent in 2024; trailer thefts up 15 per cent.

OCGs will often use drones to recce an area and can export even the heaviest machinery out of Britain within hours. Tractors, quad bikes and combine harvesters stolen in the south of England have been traced, within 24 hours, to eastern Europe and Africa. ‘Back of a lorry, straight through the ports,’ says Inspector Lemon. ‘Straight across the Channel and into mainland Europe.’

The war in Ukraine has also seen a surge in demand for machinery parts. ‘It’s very organised, very cross-border,’ says Deputy Chief Constable Nigel Harrison, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for rural and wildlife crime.

The incentives are obvious. The price of a tractor ranges from £25,000 to £100,000; a combine harvester could be four times that. ‘Traditionally, OCGs would focus on drug running,’ says Harrison. ‘But you’re definitely seeing them move into theft of farm machinery.’ Security measures ‘can be quite lacking’ in rural communities, he explains, and ‘before you know it, you’ve got a rash of crime. A lot of the time it’s easy pickings.’ The effect is devastating for farmers: -‘Ultimately, they might not be able to harvest that year.’

Most of these thefts are done to order. The problem for the police is finding out who is directing the OCGs. ‘A combine harvester takes some getting rid of,’ says Hallos. ‘So if you’re going to steal one, you’ve got a home for it already. The plan to get it out of the country is there.’

A feeling of helplessness is seeping into many rural communities. Eighty-six per cent of those surveyed for the latest NFU Rural Crime Report said they knew farmers who had been repeat victims; 96 per cent stated that rural crime was negatively affecting farmers’ mental wellbeing. ‘They feel isolated and afraid,’ says Hallos. ‘The farm is their family home.’

In the time I spent on patrol with Wiltshire Police, it was clear how determined they are to put a stop to rural crime. We drove for hours, checking in on farmers, speaking to local people and looking for signs of hare coursing. The police here are trying to rebuild trust with a community that feels forgotten. When a man called in to say his dog had killed a sheep, Constable Gomm immediately knew which shepherd it belonged to, and the situation was resolved amicably.

But the reality is that three patrol vehicles and a handful of officers simply cannot cover the whole of Wiltshire at any one time. It is a crisis mirrored across the countryside, as already stretched resources are sucked into towns and cities.

‘It’s down to underinvestment in policing,’ says Lemon. ‘You can write white papers and have all the rhetoric around bringing police into your communities. Absolute rubbish. [The government] is not funding the police adequately. So [police chiefs] are having to make cuts to meet the financial pressure they’re under, which means centralising everything and taking officers further away from the countryside. It’s easy for a criminal to come into our county and not get caught.’

The Rural and Wildlife Crime Strategy, led by DCC Harrison, is an ambitious attempt to change this. It is hoped that gr(eater intelligence-sharing between forces will disrupt OCGs, while investment in technology such as drones and thermal cameras will help to identify criminals operating in some of the remotest parts of the UK.

Harrison has also introduced increased DNA analysis to support investigations. ‘It’s a constantly changing war,’ he says, ‘and one we’re trying to keep pace with.’ Rural affairs minister Angela Eagle is optimistic: ‘New powers to seize stolen assets, improved access to data and technology, and increased collaboration will help police forces in Britain’s rural communities [in the fight] against organised crime.’

Fine words. But for the officers on the ground it can feel futile. They know they are outnumbered and, in the vast expanses of countryside across Britain, criminals are making hay.

Livro - Ensaios Escolhidos (António Sardinha)

 

Observador - Exijam ter um Primeiro-ministro (Gonçalo Poças)

 

(sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/exijam-ter-um-primeiro-ministro/

Exijam ter um Primeiro-ministro

Passos tinha razão: o Governo não tem agenda de reformas, não tem uma ambição e nenhum projecto, nem uma estratégia partidária.

Nuno Gonçalo Poças 

10 mar. 2026, 00:23

Na hora da despedida de Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, o País político não escondeu um facto inegável: de certa forma, Marcelo venceu. Não deixa um legado substantivo enquanto Presidente, mas antes uma herança que o antecede no exercício do cargo. Marcelo triunfou depois de anos como comentador político, função que cumpriu com zelo e diligência em Belém. Sucede que o comentário político marcelista nunca foi substantivo. Depois de cinquenta anos de frequência contínua e assídua do espaço público, liderando audiências, opinando sobre tudo, não sobra de Marcelo uma ideia. Tornou-se uma presença constante, uma sombra permanente sobre a política portuguesa, deixando a todo o tempo a sua visão não sobre o conteúdo das políticas, mas sobre a forma como os actores políticos poderiam ou não ser interpretados pelos portugueses em função daquilo que diziam, quando diziam, como diziam, a que horas diziam. O País político, dos novos protagonistas ao jornalismo e ao comentariado, seguiu-lhe os passos e parece, hoje, só conseguir olhar para a política sob a marcelista forma. Só isso pode justificar o deslumbramento com que durante tanto tempo uma santola oca como António Costa foi, e é, admirado por tantos, elevado ao patamar do génio político. Ou, por outro lado, que Pedro Passos Coelho continue ainda hoje a deixar confusos todos aqueles que o ouvem.

Passos, depois de uma série de intervenções públicas e de uma longa entrevista onde tocou vários temas, deixou atónitos os observadores da política portuguesa. O que quererá ele? Quando? Como?, pergunta-se, numa sucessão de cenários hipotéticos elaborados que só adensam dúvidas e a nenhum dos problemas levantados pelo ex-Primeiro-ministro respondem. Passos Coelho disse coisas concretas, susceptíveis de debate, naturalmente. Pode concordar-se ou discordar-se do que ele disse. O seu próprio partido podia, e devia, ter agradecido as sugestões – eu acho, até, que Passos deu o sinal claro de como o PSD pode voltar a ser um partido maioritário e arrumar o Chega no balcãozinho do protesto, mas o País político pode não estar preparado para essa conversa. Ao invés, o partido do Governo começou por colocar o líder parlamentar a sugerir que Passos estava errado na crítica, numa posição que seria também legítima e justa se fosse suportada por factos e evidências. Não foi. Hugo Soares provou que Passos tinha razão: o Governo não tem agenda de reformas, não tem uma ambição e nenhum projecto, nem uma estratégia partidária que pudesse estar ao serviço dele. A táctica é tudo, princípio, meio e fim, serve o propósito da conquista e manutenção do poder, não serve para mais nada, acenando-se, aqui e ali, com promessas de reformas para deslumbramento de algum eleitorado mais fiel, sempre inconsequentes e absolutamente presentistas.

Ora, aborrecido e incomodado com a sombra de um líder, o chefe em exercício, Luís Montenegro, tirou as garras de fora. Não demonstrou que Passos estava errado. Não provou, com factos, que o Governo não se encontra num marasmo. Não agradeceu a crítica. E também não a ignorou, como podia ter feito. Montenegro, sinal bastante de que o País se encontra num pináculo de deselitização, de supremacia da banalidade e da mediania, reagiu como um velho cacique de concelhia e convocou eleições no PSD. Na sua cabeça de contador de votos e listagens, não compreendeu que não vai resolver problema algum. Um líder confirmado por eleições internas perante um aparelho canino e por si controlado pode, em teoria, reconquistar legitimidade e pôr fim a um desafio. Não percebeu que as críticas se manterão no ar, sem resposta, porque eleições internas não são resposta a argumentos, não explicam decisões, não resolvem défices de políticas públicas, não geram estratégia, servindo apenas para assegurar que o chefe da turma continua a mandar na manada partidária. Será útil para quem cresceu politicamente a ganhar eleições internas. É ligeiramente insuficiente para quem quer liderar um País. Passos Coelho teve de esclarecer tudo e todos, mandando o Luís trabalhar. O que resta de tudo isto é que ficou evidente para quem quis ver que, perante o aparecimento de um homem com a autoridade que lhe é dada pela história e pelas ideias que tem na cabeça, o que temos no lugar de Primeiro-ministro é uma mão cheia de coisa nenhuma. Não sei se perceberam, mas parece-me evidente que, neste momento, o País tem formalmente um Governo, mas materialmente ele acabou.

Youtube - Conversa acabada ( Como Preparar o País para Catástrofes - Conversa Acabada

Entrevista de Camilo Lourenço ao eng. Fernando Santo sobre os recentes acontecimentos (fenómenos atmosféricos) em Portugal, sobretudo na zona de Leiria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoyWfe3Z09k

The Spectator - Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

 (personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/arctic-role-what-does-trump-really-want-from-greenland/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260122%20%20AL+CID_8f6de313bfa0717d568bff1da25ac1d4

Arctic role: what does Trump really want from Greenland?

Paul Wood

Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any of this in his attempt to intimidate Denmark into handing over Greenland. 

Why does Trump want Greenland? A clue lay in his meeting at the White House last week with the Florida Panthers ice hockey team. The team lined up for a photo: red ties and muscle-bound torsos bursting out of suit jackets, Trump in front of them at a lectern. ‘Good-looking people, young, beautiful people, I hate them. You hate standing here with all this power behind you.’ He went on: ‘But I got power too, it’s called the United States military. I don’t care.’

Trump saw one of the team hovering with gifts, a hockey shirt – with ‘Trump 47’ on the back – and a gold hockey stick: ‘Ooh, that looks nice. I hope it’s a stick and not just a shirt. That stick looks beautiful… Maybe I get both. Who the hell knows. I’m President, I’ll just take them.’ Whatever rationalisations Trump’s officials come up with, there’s a similar reason he wants to take Greenland: because he can.

Thomas Dans, the US Arctic commissioner, told USA Today that some kind of American action could happen within ‘weeks or months’. Dans said he hoped a deal could be done, so it may be just a coincidence that the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska, has been put on a few hours’ notice to move. The public story is that they may be needed to help immigration agents in Minneapolis, but they are trained in Arctic warfare and are the closest American unit to Greenland. Sending them to the US base there would ratchet up the pressure on Denmark. 

Rasmus Jarlov, chairman of the Danish parliament’s defence committee, believes an American invasion can’t be ruled out. ‘We wake up every morning to new threats and new false accusations from the US administration,’ he says. ‘Very little would surprise me at this point.’ Danish politicians give off an air of befuddlement. They are hurt to be treated this way after years as one of America’s most loyal allies, shoulder to shoulder in Iraq and Afghanistan, and think American officials have taken leave of their senses.

Jarlov tells me: ‘We’re struggling to understand. We keep asking the Americans why they want Greenland and we’re not getting logical answers. If they would tell us what it is that they would gain from annexation, then we could talk about how we could achieve that in other ways. But they’re not. They’re not really coming up with a reason. We’re willing to give them access to what they think they need, but we can’t do that if they don’t tell us what it is.’

According to Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser, what they want are rare earth minerals. Greenland certainly has a lot of them, but getting them out of the frozen ground is difficult and expensive. American companies can already buy mining rights, but there’s been no rush to do this because it’s far from certain they would make any money: there’s a reason rare minerals are not yet being mined in Greenland. Even if they were to be extracted, they would have to be sent to China to be processed.

Trump’s declared rationale is national security. He has said: ‘Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.’ It is possible, however, that he is muddling up different parts of the Arctic.

Professor Elana Wilson Rowe, of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, tells me the real worry for the US ought to be the Bering Strait, just off Alaska, 8,000 miles from Greenland. Russia and China have carried out joint naval exercises there on America’s northern doorstep. ‘For sure, the Arctic is a strategic location,’ she says, but Trump and his officials were ‘transposing’ the threat from their own bit of the Arctic to Greenland. ‘The idea of an immediate threat [there] is significantly exaggerated.’

If there is a new Arctic ‘Great Game’, it is around, not on, Greenland. As polar ice melts, new shipping lanes are opening. Chinese vessels have started to make voyages between China and Europe, and China and Russia, using this northern sea route. They may want to do much more of this in years to come, a polar Belt and Road strategy. But despite claiming to be an Arctic power, China is 1,000 miles distant. It has no permanent military presence in the Arctic.

It’s a different story with the Russians – and here the real danger lies. They have even planted a Russian flag, made from titanium, on the seabed at the geographic North Pole. The Danish government has repeatedly pointed out that Nato would break if the US invaded Greenland. But there is another way Trump might destroy the alliance. Moscow has been militarising its Arctic coast. As the ‘rules-based international order’ melts like the polar ice, Vladimir Putin might decide to seize the Norwegian territory of Svalbard.

Svalbard is an archipelago of islands about 500 miles off Norway. Russia has long coveted it. The islands would be part of Russia’s ‘Bastion Defence’, giving Moscow the kind of ‘strategic depth’ used as the justification to invade Ukraine. Svalbard controls the Bear Gap, the chokepoint that Russian submarines must cross to reach the Atlantic. It is the gateway to Russia’s submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula, and in a war could be critical for protecting its nuclear deterrent.

Russia already has two settlements on Svalbard, under a 100-year-old treaty. In normal times, if Putin flooded the islands with ‘little green men’, Norway would invoke Article 5 of Nato’s founding treaty and call for US help. It’s hard to see Trump sending that help now, as Europe confronts him over his threats to Denmark. Putin – always a gambler – might take a chance on this. 

Cracking open the Nato alliance has been a Russian goal since Soviet days. But Putin could never have imagined this happening because of something so outlandish as American threats to seize Greenland. Perhaps the end of Nato wouldn’t bother Trump. He has never much liked the alliance. He could certainly get everything he wants in Greenland by asking the Danes nicely.

One of the wilder theories is that Trump has been persuaded of Greenland’s potential as the base for a massive bitcoin mining operation (which doesn’t involve any actual mining). Trump was initially sceptical of cryptocurrency, calling it a scam, but he’s since been converted, making as much as $1 billion from his own meme coin. He got big campaign contributions from new tech money, some of which is also behind a scheme to set up a libertarian ‘network’ state somewhere in the world, possibly Greenland.

In November Dryden Brown, a twentysomething crypto bro, went to Greenland to try to buy it. He posted photos on X of himself swimming in the near-frozen waters there. This might be the place, he said, where the West could achieve its destiny, ‘reaching ever higher towards spiritual heights and physical mastery’. It would be ‘a society of portly merchants, muscular warriors, and very thin priests… a heroic society reminiscent of Rome, Athens, and Sparta, but with spacefaring ambitions’. He went on: ‘If humanity is going to build Terminus on Mars, we should practise in Greenland.‘

It would be easy not to take this seriously. But Brown claims to have $525 million in initial funding from, among others, Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s leading Silicon Valley backers. Brown believes that Greenlanders haven’t achieved independence – despite ‘97 per cent’ of them wanting it – because Denmark pays half a billion dollars a year in salaries for government officials. He would replace that money with Thiel’s and build Eden in the Arctic.

Trump has never given any hint of buying into this. Seizing Greenland isn’t about the 22nd century but the 19th. He has his version of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, which claims a sphere of influence in America’s backyard. Professor Klaus Dodds says Trump wants the whole western hemisphere, including Canada and possibly Iceland too. Dodds has written a book, Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, but thinks psychology, not strategy, explains much of what the US government is doing.

‘This isn’t geopolitics – it’s ego politics,’ he says. ‘He wants to be the president who has expanded the United States.’

A huge factor is Trump’s volcanic resentment over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. On Sunday, he sent Norway’s Prime Minister surely one of the strangest messages ever written from one nation’s leader to another: ‘Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be pre-dominant.’ He concluded: ‘The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT.’

But a takeover of Greenland isn’t a new idea for Trump. In his first term, he pointed at it on a map and said to his staff: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ As he told two US writers, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, this was his background in New York real estate. ‘I love maps. I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, “I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building”… It [Greenland] is not that different.’

At 836,000 square miles, Greenland is about a quarter of the size of the continental United States. It would be an impressive addition to anyone’s real estate portfolio. In that first term, Trump suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico and using it to buy Greenland. He also suggested trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. It’s not clear if Puerto Rico is still on the table. 

One repercussion for Keir Starmer’s government is that Trump has withdrawn his support for the expensive and bad deal to give Mauritius the Chagos archipelago, which includes the US military base at Diego Garcia. He posted on Truth Social this week that the UK was doing this ‘FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER… There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness. These are International Powers who only recognise STRENGTH’.

He added: ‘The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.’

On Tuesday, asked how far he was willing to go to get Greenland, Trump said: ‘You’ll find out.’ Thomas Dans told the FT: ‘It may sound like American chauvinism… and it is. We’re done apologising about that.’

Trump revealed the thinking that underpins this new age of American imperialism at his photo-op with the hockey team: a foreign policy based on ‘STRENGTH’ – naked power shorn of hypocritical moralising. British readers might understand the current moment using a different sport, football. You could call it the Millwall approach to foreign policy: ‘Nobody likes us – we don’t care.’

The Spectator - Has Trump gone mad?

 (personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/has-trump-gone-mad/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260108%20%20AL%20%20KYN+CID_8568c993f1c29281f86996c5494dd1b5

Has Trump gone mad?

Rod Liddle

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas Maduro and she replied: ‘I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?’ This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about seeing her panties. I dunno, perhaps I should accede in case there is some hidden wisdom written on them, possibly in code.

I realise that AI girlfriends are largely aimed at the booming incel-perv market but I expected a little more depth than this. Incidentally, some women writers have begun to complain that AI girlfriends aren’t like real women at all and give men the wrong impression. Indeed, ladies – that’s the whole point, thank the living Christ. The problem with AI though, aside from it being unintelligent, is that it is utterly incapable of taking a view and in even advanced examples only regurgitates information we might have discovered anyway, and is able to draw no conclusions from it.

The answer to the Trump/Maduro question is, of course, ‘no’. One might admire the military panache and rejoice with the Venezuelans that they have had ridden from their shores at least one tyrannical, thieving Marxist halfwit, but the answer is still ‘no’, just as it would be ‘no’ to Xi Jinping bombing Taipei and installing his own government, or Vladimir Putin perhaps overstepping the limits of his remit somewhere in eastern Europe. But the issue is less the example it sets to these totalitarian thugs than what, given his success – temporary or permanent – Trump might do next.

We are all familiar with the nonce term Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is a certain truth about it. But increasingly it seems we have to deal with its antithesis, Trump Infatuation Syndrome (TIS) – a condition occasioned in many because their delight in seeing him smite the wokies, the European Union, the Mexicans and the lefties has suffused them with the belief that he can do no wrong. So they support him whatever he does. But he can do wrong, can’t he?

My graver worry is that he has gone doolally. There was always a capriciousness about the man, of course, which made him entertaining viewing from the sidelines, but that penchant for caprice has teetered over into a trigger-happy megalomania, which I fear may not end well for us all. Remember that this is an administration which acceded to power on a promise of its isolationism, a disdain for patrolling the beat as the world’s policeman and for getting involved in disputes in places the majority of Americans have never even heard of. It was there in the America First pledge that Trump made when he won the presidency in 2024 – his would be an administration that put a stop to the ‘endless wars’ in which his country had been embroiled under Democrat (and previous Republican) governance. Excellent, I thought – because while the overwhelming majority of terrorism in the world is caused by Islamists, no institution has killed more people in the name of bringing peace than the USA (usually with our craven support).

Trump excuses himself from breaching the isolationist pledge by insisting that he is merely rewriting the Monroe Doctrine – that the USA will confine itself to military meddling only in its own backyard, i.e. the western hemisphere. But the contradiction to that pledge comes in the actions he has undertaken abroad in the past few months. There was the Christmas Day bombing of supposed Islamic State terrorist cells in the Tangaza area of Sokoto state in Nigeria – a ‘Christmas present’, according to Trump, which may well have killed a few jihadis but will surely have no lasting impact on the violence in that region. He has bombed Syria and of course Iran, as well as launching more bombing raids in Somalia last year than were carried out by presidents Biden, Obama and Bush put together in their 20 years of running the White House. Yemen and Iraq have both been the recipients of American high ordnance in the past year, too, bringing the total to a remarkable 622 bombings in just 12 months. Now it is Venezuela – which was immediately followed by dire warnings to Colombia that it might well be next.

Oh – and of course there is Greenland. Now, I dislike Danish people with as much avidity as the next fellow, but the threats to a Scandinavian ally and Nato fellow member are as worrying as they are obnoxious.

What we have, then, is a leader who will bomb whoever the hell he wants whenever he likes and for whatever reason, confected or otherwise. I remember how we used to sneer about George W. Bush’s Manichean divide of the world into places which were ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – but even that is preferable to a leader who makes no such distinctions.

Those suffering from the more extreme ravages of TIS are apt, at this point, to argue that there is a definite – and largely benign – method in this seeming madness, but the only method I can see is to demonstrate to the world that if you have enough military hardware, you can do exactly what you want to whoever you want without any great fear of reprisal. This strikes me as edging a little close to what we might call bullying and even cowardice. He has never threatened the Russians or the Chinese, has he?

In the meantime, regarding Venezuela, he might recall his statement from 2016: ‘The current strategy of toppling regimes with no plan for what to do the day after only produces power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.’

Observador - Viriato Soromenho-Marques e Os Protocolos dos Sábios de Sião (Rodrigues do Carmo)

 (sublinhados pessoais)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/viriato-soromenho-marques-e-os-protocolos-dos-sabios-de-siao/

Viriato Soromenho-Marques e Os Protocolos dos Sábios de Sião

Pode discutir-se a eficácia, o momento, e outros pormenores de intendência; o que não se pode é fingir, com má-fé, que o agressor crónico é uma vítima cândida e que quem lhe responde é o incendiário

José António Rodrigues do Carmo 

04 mar. 2026, 00:23

Há criaturas que, não fora o hábito nacional de tratar a mediocridade  doutorada com reverência, passariam por aquilo que são: profissionais do ressentimento, da indignação selectiva, e da duplicidade moral. Viriato Soromenho-Marques (VSM, daqui em diante) é um desses espécimes que só vê o mal quando ele é judeu ou americano.

Em entrevista à CNN Portugal, VSM, sem corar de vergonha, brindou o público com a tese de que “é Israel quem domina os EUA”.

A frase, que alguns incautos tomaram por análise geopolítica, é apenas a reciclagem de um libelo antigo e viscoso, que os Protocolos dos Sábios de Sião, fabricados pela polícia secreta da Rússia czarista, deram à estampa: a ideia, velha, feia e estúpida  de que os governos são marionetas manipuladas por judeus:  «Controlaremos os governos … e os chefes de Estado serão nossos instrumentos.»

Adolf Hitler, no seu Mein Kampf, desenvolveu exactamente o mesmo argumento, atribuindo aos judeus o controlo dos Estados através do domínio económico e mediático: «O judeu tornou-se senhor do aparelho económico das nações e, através dele, domina os Estados.»

Quando um professor universitário do século XXI repete, sem pudor,  esta cavalidade conspirativa, estamos já no domínio do transtorno mental.

Mas o cardápio não ficou por aí. Houve ainda o “terrorismo de Estado israelita e norte-americano”, a previsão de que o Irão seria lançado no “caos, fragmentação e guerra de consequências incalculáveis”, e outras hipérboles próprias de quem a razão já deserdou e, em  desespero, transforma cada acção militar de Israel e dos EUA numa miniatura do Apocalipse.

O que não houve foi uma linha, uma vírgula, um suspiro sequer sobre a natureza do regime iraniano, e sobre a sua culpa e o karma, no que lhe está a acontecer.

Convém recordar aquilo que VSM omite descaradamente:

– O regime saído da revolução de 1979  é teocrático, repressivo e milenarista; financia, arma e orienta grupos terroristas como o Hezbollah no Líbano, o Hamas em Gaza, os Houthis no Iémen, e uma constelação de milícias xiitas no Iraque e na Síria; transformou o Líbano num país refém; atacou quase todos os países vizinhos desde o Paquistão a Chipre; promoveu atentados contra civis israelitas, desde a  Argentina à Austrália; proclama, com regularidade  que o “pequeno Satã” deve ser apagado do mapa; acumula milhares de mísseis balísticos, como instrumento de chantagem regional, e lança-os sobre cidades; desenvolve um programa nuclear que visa obter armas nucleares; reprime mulheres que ousam mostrar o cabelo; enforca dissidentes; dispara sobre manifestantes.

Tudo isto é factual, verificável, documentado. No entanto, para VSM, a culpa pelo que lhe está a acontecer é de quem lhe responde e pretende pôr fim a isto de uma vez por todas, depois de décadas a encaixar golpes.

Contrariamente à miopia mental de VSM, que só vê judeus e americanos, há  razões objectivas pelas quais um ataque às capacidades militares iranianas faz todo o sentido.  A primeira é que  regimes ideológicos que proclamam a destruição de outros Estados como condição para a vinda do Mhadi,  não podem ser deixados  acumular meios para o fazer. Segundo, cada míssil destruído é um míssil a menos sobre Telavive, Riade, ou outros povos. Terceiro,  a protecção de aliados e rotas energéticas é vital para a estabilidade global e também para a vidinha tranquila e confortável do Sr. Marques, a cantar de galo enquanto outros fazem o que tem de ser feito.

Pode discutir-se a eficácia, o momento, e outros pormenores de intendência  que escapam à alegada sageza da criatura.  O que não se pode é fingir, com má-fé, que o agressor crónico é uma vítima cândida e que quem lhe responde é o incendiário.

Há, além disso, outras contradições na postura de VSM. O mesmo indignado que denuncia a “submissão europeia” aos EUA engole, sem pestanejar, a narrativa de um regime que mata milhares de pessoas por causa de um lenço. O crítico do “imperialismo” teórico, fecha os olhos ao imperialismo real que lhe entra pelos olhos dentro . O alegado defensor dos direitos humanos reserva a sua eloquência para a democracia imperfeita e silencia-se perante a brutalidade de uma teocracia que massacra milhares dos seus cidadãos em meia dúzia de dias.

Para mim, VSM é apenas um paladino de salão, armado de citações e abstrações, combatendo dragões que só ele vê,  enquanto ignora o incêndio real à porta. E repetir insinuações sobre o “controlo” judaico dos EUA é apenas o velho demónio do  antissemitismo, a mostrar a cauda de forma despudorada.

Como é que tal conjunto de asneiras passa por sofisticação? Desde quando é virtuoso desculpar a tirania e a malvadez em estado puro?

Mas a verdade paira sobre a VSM, mesmo que ele a tente enxotar com repescagens dos Protocolos e do Mein Kampf: a  instabilidade no Médio Oriente não nasce das respostas israelitas ou americanas, mas  de décadas de agressão sistemática, de financiamento de proxies, de uma ideologia que glorifica o martírio e promete a aniquilação do outro. A responsabilidade primeira não é de quem se defende; é de quem, ano após ano, construiu um arsenal com a intenção declarada de o usar.

Se VSM quer falar de caos e fragmentação, que comece por olhar para os seus bem amados aiatolas e o que fizeram ao Irão. Se quer denunciar terrorismo, que olhe para  o patrocínio de milícias que transformam bairros civis em escudos humanos e lançam milhares de mísseis sobre povoações. Se quer brandir a moral, que comece por olhar a sua no espelho.

Porque é profundamente hipócrita  acusar o bombeiro de piromania enquanto se oferece gasolina ao incendiário. E alguém que  debita a retórica venenosa de VSM,  não se limita a errar, já abdicou há muito da  lucidez.

Observador - O dia em que o liberalismo morreu (Miguel Morgado)

 (sublinhados pessoais, elogios silenciosos)

https://observador.pt/opiniao/o-dia-em-que-o-liberalismo-morreu/

O dia em que o liberalismo morreu

O cidadão “abstracto” inventado pelo liberalismo foi o artífice da sociedade onde os sofrimentos associados à condição humana são aliviados até onde é politicamente possível aliviá-los

Miguel Morgado 

01 mar. 2026, 00:23

À superfície, e ouvindo os seus principais agentes políticos, as sociedades europeias ainda se regem por grandes consensos. Não falo aqui, evidentemente, dos “consensos” de trazer por casa como os que são invocados a propósito das necessárias mudanças do SNS ou da mais recente iniciativa para reconstruir o centro do País da calamidade a que foi sujeito, o ainda por nascer PTRR. Falo dos consensos fundamentais, constitucionais – civilizacionais em alguma medida. Por enquanto parece que todos, sem excepção, e apesar da “polarização”, ainda valorizam as maravilhas que as sociedades europeias operaram e levaram ao mundo: o Estado de Direito, o regime das liberdades, incluindo a liberdade de consciência e de expressão, a escolha livre dos governantes, o escrutínio do poder, os direitos individuais, a igualdade das mulheres, a prosperidade material, a erradicação da pobreza e uma lista de transformações infindável sem quaisquer precedentes na história da Humanidade.

Mas arranha-se a superfície e descobre-se que esses consensos estão perigosamente a desmoronar-se. É verdade que ouvimos os protagonistas de um extremo da esquerda até ao outro da direita, passando por todos os pontos intermédios, e não há um que não reivindique estas benfeitorias. Aparentemente, só criticam o estado de coisas na medida em que querem mais, não menos, delas. Sucede que todas estas maravilhas assentam em bases espirituais – morais, institucionais, intelectuais – específicas, que não podem ser substituídas por outras sem caírem no chão e se estilhaçarem, como estátuas de ídolos derrubados.

Um pouco por toda a Europa têm surgido partidos e movimentos novos, a par de partidos velhos que na sua decadência acompanham a mesma marcha, que apesar da sua retórica estão a propor novas bases e, com elas, consciente ou inconscientemente outras concepções de sociedade. Quando, para traçar linhas de conflito partidário, se convocam as velhas categorias da raça, da religião e da etnia, e se mobiliza o voto em conformidade, apela-se à destruição de um modelo de cidadania onde assenta tudo o resto. Não existe Estado de Direito, nem regime de liberdades, nem nenhuma das outras maravilhas correlacionadas com estas, sem a formação de um cidadão “abstracto”, que se relaciona com os outros concidadãos através da lei igual para todos (imparcial e também ela “abstracta”) e das instituições fundadas no direito – que ignoram, ou não reconhecem, essa condição “prévia” de cada indivíduo. Essa “ignorância” é indispensável para criar o tal “chão comum” de que tantos agora falam sem saberem o que o sustenta. A proposta política e ideológica de identificar e “reconhecer” acima de tudo diferenças “não-negociáveis” entre as pessoas destrói a imprescindível comunicação cívica e conduz direitinha à guerra civil. Por isso é que a “abstracção” que caracteriza o cidadão do regime de liberdades nunca foi um capricho ideológico arbitrário, nem uma distração de má-fé forjada pelos poderes fácticos. Sem essa “abstracção”, a regressão aos ódios mortais e violentos das diferenças humanas é apenas uma questão de tempo.

Ao longo dos últimos duzentos anos, atacado pela esquerda totalitária e pela direita fascista, como um ser artificial desencarnado incapaz de vitalidade, um boneco vulnerável à exploração e ao embuste politicamente organizado, o cidadão “abstracto” inventado pelo liberalismo foi o artífice da sociedade onde os sofrimentos associados à condição humana são aliviados até onde é politicamente possível aliviá-los. Construiu os regimes que tornavam, e tornam, imediatamente reconhecível a diferença entre, por um lado, a vida humana confortável, livre, moralmente consciente da dignidade dos restantes seres humanos, e, por outro, a barbárie, as ruínas, a fome, a violência gratuita, o exercício mais cruel do poder levando à generalização da escravatura, da submissão e da desigualdade absoluta.

Os partidos e os movimentos que pretendem, em nome de moralismos falacciosos, modas intelectuais, neuroses colectivas ou patologias ideológicas reintroduzir a coberto de uma retórica da “paz”, do “humanitarismo” ou da “justiça”, a validação política das fronteiras de sangue do sectarismo e perseguição religiosa, da categorização individual por raças e etnias, do separatismo existencial por razões de memória histórica, devem saber – ou alguém tem de lhes dizer sem rodeios – que conspiram para a destruição da sociedade livre. Mesmo enquanto permanecem movimentos de franjas ultra-minoritárias não é menos urgente expor os seus malefícios. Quando vemos a dificuldade actual de explicar e justificar direitos e práticas que até há poucos anos não careciam de explicação nem de justificação; quando nos apercebemos que o apelo corrente à remoção de instituições e valores e memórias cívicos vitais para um regime de liberdades encontra com facilidade aplauso e apoio dos seus mais directos beneficiários; percebemos que a principal tarefa dos próximos tempos é reaprender, e voltar a defender, as maravilhas que a última geração tomou como definitivamente salvaguardadas e as bases onde elas encontram suporte. A semente maligna desse esquecimento germina mesmo que tais partidos não vençam eleições. Para a dissolução do regime de liberdades basta que alcancem uma certa escala e uma certa preponderância. Nesse dia, o liberalismo que edificou o regime das liberdades morreu.

The Spectator - Britain’s right is falling into the same trap as the left

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/britains-right-is-falling-into-the-same-trap-as-the-left/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260219%20%20AL+CID_809095871f6dcf239aafa1d82b267714

Britain’s right is falling into the same trap as the left

Douglas Murray

As I have suggested here before, there are few joys in life equal to that of watching the left fall out among itself. Whatever your political views, the whole Judean People’s Front vibe of the parties to the left of the Labour party brings a special type of comedy. If anybody remembers the recent Your Party conference they will know what I am talking about. In fact if anybody still remembers Your Party, they deserve a box of chocolates.

But something similar now seems to be happening on the political right. And the Gorton and Denton by-election has brought it into a clearer light.

As well as the Reform candidate, Matt Goodwin, being on the ballot, there is also Nick Buckley of Advance UK. This is a party set up by Ben Habib after he fell out with the Reform party leader Nigel Farage. Then this past weekend another person who fell out with Nigel Farage – Rupert Lowe MP – formally launched his Restore Britain party. Lowe has promised to make Restore a national party. And now the parties to the political right seem to be entering a similar spiral to those on the political left.

It is possible to see all of this as nothing more than the result of personal fall-outs – and what fall-outs they have been. You may remember that when Lowe and Farage fell out, Reform reported Lowe to the police and tried to have him arrested, which is the sort of thing that can cause a certain animus among former friends. This week Farage told a press conference: ‘I think, in terms of the way we dealt with that, we were probably more brutal than the other parties. But you know what? That’s the way it’s going to be.’

Beyond the personal, there are substantial disagreements here as well. Lowe managed to make some advances into Farage’s political territory after Farage gave an interview in 2024 in which he said that it was a ‘political impossibility’ to arrange the mass deportation of illegal migrants in the UK.

If you are going to have a party to the right of the Conservative party, there is not much point in echoing the Conservative party’s past rhetoric on this. After all, it was Boris Johnson who said before becoming prime minister that the British public should accept that mass immigration was something that had just happened and that all efforts should be put into integrating the people already here – only for him to become prime minister, increase the wave of migration several-fold and then make that integration exponentially more difficult.

To be fair to Farage, there are two caveats to his stance that are worth noting. The first is that in his 2024 interview he said that mass deportations of illegals was a political impossibility ‘at the moment’. Since that interview he has suggested that he is in fact open to the possibility of deporting people who have broken into the UK, although this has been met with the usual fatalistic claim that the country is in no position to deport anyone even if the general public did want it to happen.

It has to be noted that the issue of whether or not illegal migrants can be deported has opened up other schisms, some of which risk sending the political right into the kind of purity spiral that tends to be more common on the political left.

Following the divide over whether illegal migrants should be deported, there is another over whether or not people who are technically British but have no love for this country (who are involved with child-rape gangs, for instance) should be deportable. This in turn has opened up a schism over who counts as being British. And this is where a significant fork in the ideological road occurs.

Because on the one hand this issue risks descending into a racial purity game, something which it is hardly desirable to open up. On the other hand, it is frustrating to many people to continue to be told by parties of the political right that they have the same definition of Britishness as those concocted in the 2000s by the Blairite left.

This is the definition that anybody is British so long as they sign up to ‘British values’. A set of values which defines Britishness as – for instance – mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs.

The problem with such definitions is that they present Britain as little more than a sort of international airport terminal where, so long as you promise not to blow up the terminal, everyone can get along. And if you do try to blow up the terminal then you get to stay too.

Yet Britain was until quite recently something rather more specific and unique than that. We had a distinctive culture of our own. It was different from other cultures. You don’t need to think that it is better than all other cultures, but it was a culture which we loved because it was ours.

Reducing this culture to nothing, pretending it never existed, or was not created by a specific group of people or was in fact created by all cultures, is not a polite fiction. It is in fact a very impolite fiction. Not least because it is impolite to the people who did build this country.

There is never an easy way to heal personal differences between people who have personally fallen out, but there is a way to resolve these ideological differences that persist on the right.

The first would be to agree that things that have been done to the country which are harmful can be undone. The second would be to agree that culture and background are important but cannot become absolutely every-thing. Anyone who is interested can take these observations copyright free. Anyone who wants to continue the infighting can of course, equally freely, ignore them.