A INTELIGÊNCIA ECONÓMICA 

E A CONSTRUÇÃO DA EUROPA

Para Alain Juillet, o "patrão" francês da Inteligência Económica francesa, ex-dirigente de empresas e também dos serviços secretos franceses e que depende agora do Primeiro-Ministro, a I.E. é indispensável e decisiva na actual « paz quente » desta economia globalizada e desta idade da informação. Juillet explica que "en permettant d'identifier les opportunités de marché dans tous les coins du monde et les menaces pesant sur nos entreprises et notre marché intérieur, elle nous rend plus efficace, développe notre compétitivité intrinsèque et concurrentielle, et sécurise l'emploi de demain. Les stratégies d'influence en font pleinement partie, car on est obligé aujourd'hui de préparer les esprits, d'accompagner le déploiement des produits, et se défendre des attaques indirectes des concurrents de manière quasi permanente. L'époque où une bonne stratégie garantissait la victoire est révolue. Aujourd'hui il faut expliquer qu'elle est bonne et pendant son déploiement contrer les agressions en tous genres voulant la déstabiliser."

Juillet mostra ainda como os vários estados europeus têm, nesta matéria, posições muito assimétricas, o que torna bastante difícil a colaboração entre os europeus. O resultado é uma grande assimetria que prejudica ainda mais a convergência europeia. Com muita finesse, Juillet considera que :

O SISTEMA AMERICANO DE

INTELIGÊNCIA ECONÓMICA

Desde 1994, quando o presidente Clinton decidiu apostar a fundo e muito sério na inteligência económica, com a alocação de 12 mil milhões de dólares por ano para a promoção da I.E., que o sistema tem vindo a afirmar-se, a apresentar resultados e a desenvolver-se. O "Intelligence on Line" mostra como esse sistema se estrutura e articula.

QUANDO O "COMPLEXO"

PRESSIONA SÓCRATES...

O "complexo económico neo-corporativo e salazarento" perdeu de tal maneira os modos e a vergonha que faz pressão pública sobre o Primeiro-Ministro e que   se deixa ver e mesmo se exibe em toda a sua dimensão e esplendor... Resultado: até Miguel Sousa Tavares, no Expresso, o topa e nota!

PSF: UM PARTIDO ARCAICO,

DESFASADO E FEITO EM CACOS

A gestão de François Hollande reduziu o PS Francês a uma expressão muito simples e fragmentou o partido como não se via desde os anos sessenta, antes do congresso de Epinay. O resultado está à vista e os olhares viraram-se para ele agora por ocasião da tradicional "universidade de verão", realizada em La Rochelle:

" La Rochelle, port de l’angoisse socialiste

«Leur discours est vieillot, leur propositions sont vieillottes, ils n’ont pas changé depuis plusieurs années sur un petit peu tous les sujets.»

Le diagnostic de cet étudiant de 18 ans sur l’état du Parti socialiste est sévère. Mais à peine plus que celui de ce cadre de 35 ans : «Il faut que la gauche se modernise. On dirait qu’on est encore dans les années 70, dans les idées du XXe siècle.»

Et une ouvrière de 20 ans de trancher : «Personne n’incarne la gauche.» Alors que les socialistes se retrouvent à partir d’aujourd’hui et jusqu’à dimanche à La Rochelle pour leur université d’été, Libération et l’institut LH2 ont «sondé», via des entretiens qualitatifs, les états d’âme de personnes se disant proches de la gauche "

 

" O INFERNO "

ou a descida de Portugal ao dito

Quadro de mestre português desconhecido, do início do século XVI, talvez 1515, "O Inferno" é uma das obras da pintura portuguesa que mais aprecio e mais me impressionam. Quadro complexo, merecedor e exigente de vários níveis de leitura. Obra também muito irónica numa leitura que destaque as contradições que se estabelecem entre os vários níveis de leitura... 

De aparência muito piedosa, ela denuncia o ambiente do estabelecimento dos domini canis e sua mafia santa - a Inquisição. O terror, um aviso de atenção ao terror que aí se instala, um aviso de o fogo espreita-vos, é a mensagem imediata, mascarada, porém, pelo título "O Inferno" que permite ao mestre seu autor dizer que apenas está a ser bom cristão e avisar para a necessidade de se portar bem para não ser castigado mais tarde nos infernos.

Mas é, na sua linguagem, também  o primeiro quadro (óleo sobre tábua de carvalho) a mostrar a nudez humana (Nuno Gonçalves, décadas antes, mete uma tanga no seu S. Vicente...) e, sobretudo, o nu feminino. E não mostra um nu feminino escondido e disfarçado algures... Não, mostra vários e um deles bem destacado no primeiro plano.

Isto faz dele um caso pioneiro e único na pintura portuguesa de quinhentos (e dos séculos seguintes...) que será aniquilada pela estética de Trento e pelo index e as fogueiras da santa mafia dos domini canis que excluem tudo o que o que não seja a pieguice santanária, transformando a pintura portuguesa (tal como o País...) numa galeria de horrores que durou séculos... Aqui tão bem anunciados por este mestre que ficou desconhecido. Ou melhor, se manteve oculto.

Esta obra, sob a capa de crítica aos sete pecados, sempre me pareceu representar e anunciar (no início do século XVI) a descida de Portugal a "O inferno"... de onde já tentámos algumas vezes mas ainda não conseguimos realmente sair.

Que te parece, Rui...?

The Teenage Millionaire

“ A Scandal-Scarred G.O.P. Asks, ‘What Next?’

sem comentários... 

"You can’t make this stuff up. And the impact this is having on the grass-roots around the country is devastating. Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country."
SCOTT REED, a Republican strategist, after Senator Larry Craig of Idaho pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after being arrested in an airport bathroom.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: August 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 — Scott Reed, a Republican strategist, was at a dinner in Philadelphia on Monday night when his cellphone and Internet pager began beeping like crazy. Only later did he learn why. His party was buzzing with news of a sex scandal involving a Republican United States senator — again.

Just when Republicans thought things could not get any worse, Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho confirmed that he had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer accused him of soliciting sex in June in a Minneapolis airport restroom. On Tuesday, Mr. Craig, 62, held a news conference to defend himself, calling the guilty plea “a mistake” and declaring, “I am not gay” — even as the Senate Republican leadership asked for an Ethics Committee review.

It was a bizarre spectacle, and only the latest in a string of accusations of sexual foibles and financial misdeeds that have landed Republicans in the political equivalent of purgatory, the realm of late-night comic television.

Forget Mark Foley of Florida, who quit the House last year after exchanging sexually explicit e-mail messages with under-age male pages, or Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whose dealings with the old Republican Congress landed him in prison. They are old news, replaced by a fresh crop of scandal-plagued Republicans, men like Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, whose phone number turned up on the list of the so-called D.C. Madam, or Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Representative Rick Renzi of Arizona, both caught up in F.B.I. corruption investigations.

It is enough to make a self-respecting Republican want to tear his hair out in frustration, especially as the party is trying to defend an unpopular war, contain the power of the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and generate some enthusiasm among voters heading toward the presidential election in 2008.

“The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness,” said Mr. Reed, sounding exasperated in an interview on Tuesday morning. “You can’t make this stuff up. And the impact this is having on the grass-roots around the country is devastating. Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country.”

Then again, Washington does not have a monopoly on the latest trend among Republicans. Just ask Thomas Ravenel, the state treasurer of South Carolina, who had to step down as state chairman of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign after he was indicted on cocaine charges in June.

Or Bob Allen, a state representative in Florida who was jettisoned from the John McCain campaign last month after he was arrested on charges of soliciting sex in a public restroom.

Mr. Craig, for his part, has severed ties with the Mitt Romney campaign, despite his public declaration on Tuesday that “I did nothing wrong.”

In an interview Tuesday on “Kudlow and Company” on CNBC, Mr. Romney could not distance himself fast enough. “Once again, we’ve found people in Washington have not lived up to the level of respect and dignity that we would expect for somebody that gets elected to a position of high influence,” Mr. Romney said. “Very disappointing. He’s no longer associated with my campaign, as you can imagine.”

Republicans, of course, do not have an exclusive hold on scandal. As Democrats accused Republicans of engaging in a “culture of corruption” during the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans eagerly put the spotlight on Representative William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who stashed $90,000 in his freezer — ill-gotten gains, the authorities said.

Still, there is a sort of “here we go again” sense among Republicans these days, especially since news of the Craig arrest broke on Monday afternoon. It is tough enough being in the minority, weighed down by the burden of the war in Iraq. Now Republicans have an even more pressing task: keeping their party from being portrayed not just as hypocritical and out of touch with the values of people they represent, but also as a laughingstock — amid headlines like “Senator’s Bathroom Bust,” which ran all Tuesday afternoon on CNN. The story also ran at the top of all the network evening newscasts on Tuesday.

“I’m hoping it’s a big mistake,” said one of Mr. Craig’s Republican colleagues, Senator Lamar Alexander, traveling Tuesday in Tennessee, his home state. “But it certainly does nothing to increase confidence in the United States Senate.”

With President Bush hobbled by his own political difficulties, the party can hardly look to him to lead them out of the morass. “If we had a coach,” said John Feehery, who was press secretary to Representative J. Dennis Hastert when Mr. Hastert was the House speaker, “the coach would take us in the locker room and scream at us.”

Some Republicans are indeed screaming, particularly the party’s social conservative wing, which places a high priority on ethics and family values. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, said the elections of November 2006, in which Republicans lost control of the House and the Senate, proved that voters want politicians in Washington to clean up their act.

“Exit polls show that was the No. 1 factor in depressing Republican enthusiasm,” Mr. Perkins said in an interview Tuesday. “There is an expectation that leaders who espouse family values will live by those values. And while the values voters don’t demand perfection, I do believe they want leaders with integrity.”

The perception that Mr. Craig is not living up to his own values is causing problems for him, and after his appearance on Tuesday, with his wife standing by his side, some Republicans confessed they did not know what to think.

“He sounded almost as convincing as, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ ” said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative and onetime Republican presidential candidate, reprising President Bill Clinton’s remark initially denying involvement with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Mr. Craig is up for re-election next year and has promised to announce next month whether he is running again. Some, like Mr. Bauer, say he is unlikely to survive the current scandal; others, noting that Senator Vitter seems to have weathered his storm, say Mr. Craig might be able to tough it out. And at the rate things are going, says Mr. Reed, the Republican strategist, it might be only a matter of time before a new scandal pushes Mr. Craig’s woes off the front page.

“I’m a little afraid to say anything, because you don’t know what happens tomorrow,” Mr. Reed said. “That Vitter thing, that’s like ancient history now.”

Carl Hulse in Nashville contributed reporting. ”

" Turkish Official With Islamic Ties Wins Presidency
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU

Abdullah Gul’s victory breaks an 84-year grip on power by the secular establishment. "

continua Aqui 

.

Le pari difficile d’Abdullah Gül à la tête de la Turquie

mercredi 29 août 2007 - 06:00

.

Pour la première fois, un ancien islamiste accède à la présidence de la République.

continua Aqui

"TERROR AND LIBERALISM"

OU QUANDO OS OCIDENTAIS

 SE ENGANAM DE INIMIGO...

.

Debate, num blog do Le Monde, à volta de Paul Berman ( “one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East”) e do seu interessantíssimo livro "Terror and Liberalism":

http://jcdurbant.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/07/03/islamisme-quand-les-ennemis-de-la-raison-ne-peuvent-etre-ennemis-de-la-raison-the-folly-behind-the-logic/

"(...) Petit retour à nouveau sur l'un des rares intellectuels (de gauche, de surcroit) à avoir bien saisi (dans son magistral livre "Terror and liberalism - présenté ci-dessous dans une conférence pour la Fondation Carnegie en pleine guerre d'Irak au printemps 2003) la vérité du terrorisme et du totalitarisme qui le secrète mais aussi justement de l'aveuglement quasiment inhérent à l'intelligentsia à son égard, l'essayiste américain Paul Berman. A savoir, le fait, notamment, que des peuples entiers (allemands, russes, chinois, cambodgiens, etc.) puissent s'emballer pour des mouvements de pure irrationalité. Mais aussi justement l'incapacité, pour une société possédant une aussi grande foi dans la rationalité universelle que la nôtre et en son sein tout particulièrement pour ceux dont celle-ci est à la fois la raison d'être et le gagne-pain, de l'accepter.

D'où, à l'instar de ces libéraux des années 30, cette volonté si bien intentionnée et inextinguible de refuser de condamner et de vouloir comprendre, voire de justifier l'injustifiable (N'y avait-il pas un peu de vrai dans les critiques nazies des Juifs ? Ne devait-il pas être possible de les critiquer sans pour autant être antisémite ?) qui finira, on le sait, par leur faire voter massivement les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain.

Extraits (traduits au babelfish):

Le progrès du totalitarisme dépend et est inséparable de ce genre de naïveté libérale. Sans coopération des compagnons de route avec Staline, sans les socialistes pacifistes français dans le cas d'Hitler, sans la naïveté de toute une série de conservateurs et de membres de la droite démocratique pour tout un ensemble de fascistes et de Nazis, sans la naïveté même des Etats-Unis en ce qui concerne Hitler lui-même dans les années 30, on a du mal à imaginer que ces mouvements auraient été très loin.

Ainsi c'est une erreur de penser les mouvements totalitaires comme des mouvements isolés. Ils ont existé à l'intérieur d'une dynamique, et une partie de cette dynamique est la naïve réticence des libéraux à les identifier pour ce qu'ils sont.

Le succès du totalitarisme musulman dépend pour une bonne part de la naïveté libérale - et d'ailleurs de sa cécité. Le monde a tout simplement détourné son regard de ces millions qui en ont été les victimes ces vingt dernières années.

Jamais les libéraux où qu'ils soient n'ont renoncé à vouloir décrire ces mouvements comme en un sens raisonnables et ordinaires, comme des mouvements basés sur de réelles revendications - "ces mouvements sont antisionistes, et Israël n'a-t-il pas souvent été en tort?" "ces mouvements sont anti-américains, et les Etats-Unis n'ont-ils pas souvent des choses à se reprocher?" (...)"

Terror and Liberalism
Paul Berman, Joanne J. Myers
Carnegie Council
April 15, 2003

Introduction

JOANNE MYERS: On behalf of the Carnegie Council I would like to welcome members and guests to our Author in the Afternoon program.

Today we are delighted to have Paul Berman, a writer who has been especially recognized for his penetrating philosophical perspectives on a vast array of social and cultural topics. His latest work, Terror and Liberalism, focuses on a subject that is generating a great deal of interest, as it is the first book to address the political/philosophical dimensions of the current conflict found in Islamic fundamentalism and on the War on Terror.

I have asked Jack Diggins to introduce Mr. Berman. Jack is a Distinguished Professor of American History at the City University of New York. He has also taught at Princeton, Cambridge, and the University of London. Jack has published a number of books dealing with American politics and history, including Up From Communism: The Liberal Persuasion; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past; The Promise of Pragmatism; The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and The Proud Decades, America in War and Peace, 1941-1960. Just by listening to these titles you can easily conclude that Jack has concerned himself with, among other things, American intellectual history, liberalism, pragmatism, and the American past and its influence on the present, which makes him the ideal person to introduce our guest today.

JACK DIGGINS: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here and to introduce my old friend, Paul Berman.

I came to know Paul many years ago when I was living on the West Coast and there was an essay in the Village Voice on the philosopher Sidney Hook. I thought I was the only person in the United States who admired Sidney Hook, but there was one other, Paul Berman. Hook was a leading philosopher of pragmatism and Marxism and became an ardent anti-communist, which in the 1960s was not politically correct, at least on the campuses.

And then, watching television, the Iraq war, the aftermath of the war, and seeing the scenes of fists in the air and anti-American statements and rumors of Baath police being lynched and the scenes of looting, I said to myself, "This is not going to bother Paul."

Many years ago Paul was with me in California and said, "I'm going to take a trip to Tijuana." At that time, if you went to Tijuana and parked your car for ten minutes, the tires were gone. But Paul came back just smiling and praising it as a land of moral solidarity and all the people with hearts of gold. I couldn't help remember the last time I was there I was taken to the police station because I refused to pay a cop a $50 bribe for crossing the street the wrong way. But Paul is so much more optimistic than I am, and maybe he is right.

With the fall of Communism, he and I would debate every day, and I would side with Gorbachev and he would side with Yeltsin or anyone who let the whole system come down. Paul describes himself as a democratic socialist, but deep down he has an anarchist impulse and he does think that out of chaos will come freedom. I am a little bit more cautious.

But the fall of Communism was, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, the greatest peaceful transfer of power in modern history, and Paul was right about it, and perhaps he will be right about his position on the Iraq war.

Some people will be curious why I dedicated a book that is about the great prudent conservative President-statesman John Adams to a radical activist from the 1960s. People wonder if there is an incongruence there. But I would like to read you the last sentence of my acknowledgement: "In the 1790s John Adams reflected on events in France, in the 1980s Paul Berman on events in Nicaragua. Both faced the wrath of some of their own friends for telling us that a revolution without representation is destined to devour itself. Truth dared to speak before its time."

Remarks

PAUL BERMAN: I'd like to thank the Carnegie Council for inviting me to speak and my dear friend, the slyly brilliant Professor Diggins, for this introduction.

I would like to offer ten propositions with which our present crisis could be observed.

1) In the nineteenth century, the belief arose that the secret of human progress had been discovered and had been proved to be correct. This secret was thought to be a belief in the many instead of the one, a belief that each aspect of life should be allowed to remain in its own sphere — the public and the private, the state and society, the religious and the civil. There was a belief that society ought to govern itself through rational analysis.

Many different philosophies and political movements expressed this idea. None of them, none of the large ones, expressed it fully consistently. Marx had some aspects of this idea. The French Revolution stood for some aspects and could not quite get the other aspects right. Thomas Jefferson stood for a very pure version of this idea and yet couldn't quite straighten out the part regarding human slavery. Each separate movement in the nineteenth century, or in the early eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, had some aspect of it and some contradiction which was yet to be worked out.

And yet, in spite of the contradictions, there was consensus about general principles which were seen to be working in some of the societies that we think of as the West and which were regarded by some people in all regions around the world as the secret of human progress universally, not just in the places where they were seen to be prospering at that moment.

There was among a very large number of people, a general feeling of underlying optimism, which you can see in many of the writers of the nineteenth century, in many of the doctrines that came to dominate political movements.

2) At the same time, there was reason to be suspicious of these doctrines. There was a whole series of criticisms about hypocrisies or inconsistencies or lies that were concealed within it. Marx was the great prophet of this.

But beyond these doctrines of suspicion, there were also some elements that not even Marx discussed, something that went beyond exploitation and hypocrisy. This could be seen by the late-nineteenth century in King Leopold's war in the Congo or in German Southwest Africa at the turn of the century, where the very countries, Germany and Belgium, who were among the principal exemplars of the doctrine of human progress, were in some other aspect of their national activity somehow engaged in the most grotesque genocide. The combination of the sense of optimism and the genocidal atrocities, seemed to be beyond the capability of the liberal imagination to conceive.

In the First World War, these darkest aspects, which had already been visible in the Congo and in Southwest Africa, finally rolled back across Europe. What had been unimaginable throughout the nineteenth century finally took place in Europe itself, which was mass death on the most colossal scale, nine or ten million people killed for reasons that were ultimately unintelligible. Each country went into the war with a logical set of reasons instead of treaties and alliances. The final outcome was a catastrophe beyond that which anyone would have or did predict.

3) From the nineteenth century and onward, a series of rebellions against this prevailing liberal optimism arose. Some of these rebellions are particularly worth observing.

First, there was a rebellion within the romantic literary tradition, in romantic poetry. An important sign of this was Victor Hugo's verse play Hernani in 1830, which already broached certain themes. The play ends with the attempted assassination of the King of Spain and a triple suicide. The theme of murder and suicide in the context of rebellion had already been broached.

Baudelaire picks up the same theme. In the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, the inscription mentions enrolling in the rhetorical school of Satan.

And, in fact, there is a religious subtext that underlies this notion of rebellion, which is the romantic cult of Satan, which, within the literary tradition, begins to mean a cult of murder and suicide as literary postures.

Later in the nineteenth century among the poets, the religious aspect of this rebellion, of this notion of transgressive rebellion against the existing order, takes a new form. You can see it in Rimbaud and in a marvelous version in the greatest of the turn-of-the-century Spanish-language poets, Ruben Dario.

This new version is not the cult of Satan. It is a series of images that come out of the Book of Revelation. There is a Millenarian idea, of an impending calamity, that something unspeakable is about to occur. You can see it in Yeats. This idea emerges as the new religious underpinning.

There is something self-ironic about the writers who were writing about Satan but there is nothing ironic or self-ironic about the writers who were drawing on images from the Book of Revelation.

At the end of the First World War, these currents in poetry, from the romantic to the symbolist poets at the end of the century and the beginning of the new century, finally convert themselves into a series of political movements, which are mass movements against the idea of liberalism. They are movements of rebellion against the belief in the many instead of the one, against the idea that life should be divided into a series of spheres — the public and the private, the state and society, the civil and the religious — and at some level, in different ways, they are movements of rebellion against the idea of rational analysis. Instead, they are movements in favor of the one, the solid, the granite, of authority, as opposed to rational analysis — sometimes of mysticism, but in any case of authority.

These movements were founded by Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, the leaders of the Iron Guard in Romania, various figures from the extreme right in France, and through every single country in Europe in some version or another — the Bolshevik movement on the Left, all of the other movements on the Right.

The movements were utterly different one from the other, and the Left and the Right hated each other, and sometimes the Right and the Right hated each other. But what I am struck by is the similarities.

4) In all of these cases, the similarities consisted of a belief in a deep myth, the Ur myth of the twentieth century and into our own time. The name of this myth is the Book of Revelation.

It is a variation on the themes of the symbolist poets. It takes the idea of transgressive rebellion, which the earlier Romantics had already come up with, of murder and rebellion as satanic acts of rebellion against liberal society, the conversion of this idea into the mythology that you see in the Book of Revelation, and then finally these political movements convert that same notion into political doctrines in this way.

The story in the Book of Revelation says: There is a people of God; the people of God are being afflicted and polluted by forces from within their own society, who worship at the synagogue of Satan. At the same time, the people of God are being afflicted by cosmic foes from abroad.

The people of God who are oppressed rise up in rebellion against these polluting forces from within and against the cosmic forces from abroad. The name of this war is Armageddon, and it lasts, according to St. John, the author of Revelation, one hour.

And at the end of the war, with all of those foes dispatched, the reign of Christ is established and lasts a thousand years. It is a perfect, stable society with no polluting elements. It is the millennium.

Each of the movements that arose in the period after World War I found a new way to tell this story. There was always a people of God. The people of God were proletariat. The people of God were the children of the Roman wolf, the Italian people. The people of God were the Catholic warriors of Christ, according to the King in Spain. The people of God were the Aryan race.

There were always polluting elements from within society, such as the bourgeoisie, or the Trotskyite wreckers, or the Jews, or the Masons, or the Communists.

There were always external foes from abroad. These were the forces of capitalist encirclement, or Anglo-American imperialism, or what Heidegger described as the "pincer pressure" of the United States and the Soviet Union pressing on the people of Germany.

There was always going to be a war, which would be a war of extermination against these external and internal foes. This war would be the class war, or the crusade in Franco's version, or the biological war in the Nazi version.

At the end was always the perfect society, which was pictured either as a sci-fi leap into the future or as a return to the golden age of the past, usually as some version of both.

The Communist version was a leap into the future, though if you read your Marx carefully, you understand that this is also a leap into the primitive Communism of the past. And in the Soviet version there are many references to the primitive Communist traditions of the Russian peasants.

All of the right-wing versions were variations of a slightly different sort.

Mussolini was going to recreate the Roman Empire, and when he marched on Rome in 1922, he organized his followers into legions. They were centurions marching on Rome. The Roman Empire was going to be recreated in a modern version. They weren't going to go back to the ancient version. It was would be a modern version of the Roman Empire.

Franco was going to recreate the medieval Crusades of Spain at its greatest. He would do this in a modern version.

Hitler was also going to recreate the Roman Empire. The Third Reich meant the new Reich after the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He would recreate the Roman Empire, but in an Aryan version instead of an Italian version.

And likewise, this cult of the ancient, the reestablishing of the ancient, was a leap into the future at the same time, a modernism.

The symbolist cult of the Book of Revelation is also a cult of ancient myth, which is a cult of modernism at the same time. If you want to see that artistically, picture some of Picasso, where he is evoking the ancient myths of the Mediterranean but in the most modern of ways.

5) All of these movements proposed impractical programs which were unachievable except in one way, which was through mass death. Mass death showed that these were movements of transgressive rebellion, not movements of reform, not conservative movements of reform or social democratic movements of reform, Left or Right, but movements that would break through the ordinary morality of behavior, thus would break through the existing world view.

The reassuring demonstration that one had really gone beyond the ordinary was a commitment to mass death. All of these movements failed completely in achieving what they stated to be their worldly aims, and in achieving mass death.

6) The liberal society which in its weaknesses and contradictions and inability to conceive of the dark in human nature, the liberal society which in some way had inspired these movements and against which these movements now arose in rebellion, also had a great deal of trouble in identifying what these movements were.

We are all too familiar with the failures of the left-wing Fellow Travelers, who could not understand Stalinism and could only understand it as an exceptionally advanced form of social democracy. But you can take examples of this kind of error across the spectrum.

I write about the French socialists of the 1930s, who were a deeply democratic and liberal, in my sense of the word, movement with an impeccable record of liberal democratic credentials going back into the nineteenth century, without any of the aspects of Bolshevism, Marxism, or Leninism. One has to remember that in the 1930s, the French socialists were the enemies of Nazism and of the Right.

And yet, the majority of the French socialists finally voted for Marshall Pétain because they could not get themselves to understand the nature of Nazism. They managed to tell themselves that Nazism was a legitimate movement, that the Germans did have grievances, that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust, that Hitler might be raving but he was stating truths.

The French socialists in their majority faction certainly did not regard themselves as anti-Semites, and yet they asked themselves: "Every time somebody rails against the Jews, is it always an example of anti-Semitism?" The French socialists were, by definition, the enemy of financiers — "and weren't some of the financiers Jewish?"

The French socialists finally thought that the great danger to France was represented not by Hitler and the Nazis but by the hawks in their own society. And who was the leading hawk? Unfortunately, it was their own leader, the leader of the minority faction, who had managed to get himself elected Prime Minister, Léon Blum, whose ethnic identity now became itself a source of much speculation.

With this kind of reasoning, the French socialists in the majority faction not only managed to vote for Pétain, but quite a few ended up joining his government, and in this way the impeccable liberal democrats of the French Left managed to convert themselves into fascists.

7) The progress of totalitarianism depends on and is inseparable from this kind of liberal naïveté. Without the cooperation of the Fellow Travelers with Stalin, without the French anti-war socialists in the case of Hitler, without the naïveté of any number of conservatives and democratic right-wingers in the case of a variety of fascists and Nazis, without the naïveté even of the United States with regard to Hitler straight through the 1930s, it would be inconceivable to imagine that these movements would have gotten very far.

So it is a mistake to think of the totalitarian movements as isolated. They existed in a dynamic, and part of the dynamic is the liberal naïve unwillingness to recognize them as what they are.

8) Totalitarianism arose in Europe in the fifteen years after the First World War. In the first twenty-five years, similar or identical movements arose on the other side of the Mediterranean too, in the Muslim world.

One of these movements was certainly Muslim Communism, which everyone forgets about. In the interpretation of the clash of civilizations, one would imagine that a Western movement like Communism would be inconceivable in what is called a non-Western society. In fact, Communism was a large and lasting movement.

But the totalitarian ideal also arose in two other versions, which were distinctly not European. The radical Islamist movement — that is, the notion of Islam as a revolutionary political movement, not just as a religion — was founded in 1928 with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Pan-Arabist movement in its most radical version, the Baath, was founded formally in 1943 in Damascus.

These movements are conventionally seen as opposites. If you turn on the TV, you will see any number of people automatically saying that these movements have nothing in common; one is religious, the other is secular; they despise each other. And it is true that they have despised each other and have committed mutual massacres on a gigantic scale.

It is useful to point out the ways in which these two movements resemble each other. The totalitarian movements in Europe also were different one from the other, and sometimes were at war with one another, and yet there were underlying similarities.

In the case of Baathism and Islamism, these similarities are easy to see. There is a people of God. The people of God should be described as the "true Muslims" in the case of the Islamists, or as the "true Arabs" in the case of the Baath. The people of God are afflicted by internal corruptors within Muslim society. These internal corruptors are the Jews or the Masons or the Muslim hypocrites.

The people of God are afflicted by sinister external foes, Western imperialists or the worldwide Zionist conspiracy. The people of God will resist these internal foes and external foes in a gigantic war of Armageddon. This war will be the liberation of Jerusalem or it will be the jihad.

Afterwards the reign of purity will be established and this reign of purity is described in the case of both of those movements in the same way: it is the re-resurrection of the Caliphate of the seventh century in the years after the Prophet Mohammed. The Caliphate is described by each of these movements in a slightly different way. For the Islamists, it means the reinstating of Shar'iah or Qur'anic law. For the Baathists the emphasis is secular; it is the recreating, the resurrecting, of the Arab empire when the Arab empire was on the march.

Finally, these two movements have lacked for nothing in the realm of practical achievement – killing millions. In the last twenty years, several million people have been killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq war, which pitted one of these movements against the other — the mass human wave suicide attacks on the part of the Iranian Islamists against the cult of cruelty, and of chemical weapons on the part of the Baathists. It is estimated that between one and a half million and two million people were killed in Sudan; 100,000 are thought killed in Algeria over the last several years.

It is conventionally said that in these movements today we face nothing like Hitler or Stalin, but statistically this is not true.

9) The success of Muslim totalitarianism has depended on liberal naïveté — in fact, blindness. The eyes of the world have not been on these millions who have been killed in the last twenty years.

Always the liberals all over the world have wanted to describe these movements as in some way rational and conventional, as movements based on grievances — "The movements are anti-Zionist, and isn't it the case that Israel has often been at fault?" "The movements are anti-American, and isn't it the case that the United States has often been at fault?"

And these grievances do exist, but the effort to take them seriously tends often to distort their madness in such a way as to make it unrecognizable, for totalitarian doctrines are always mad. The Nazis thought they were engaged in a biological struggle. The Stalinists thought they were the proletariat and their enemies were the bourgeois exploiters. The Baathists and Islamists see a cosmic Zionist-Crusader conspiracy.

It is important to keep a sense of the madness in these ideas, even if it is true that in the years after World War I some Germans were oppressed outside of the borders of Germany, and Israel and the U.S . have done bad things.

10) All of the totalitarian movements were at bottom ideological movements, not based on a normal sense of grievances of political claims or expression of real-life interests, but movements based on ideological visions.

Each of these movements in the past was defeated not militarily but ideologically. World War II was violent and military, but although D-Day was important, de-Nazification was the actual victory. The defeat of Nazism militarily would not have been all that helpful if Germany, which is inherently an extremely wealthy and powerful society, had continued to remain a society of millions and millions of convinced Nazis.

The same is true now. The struggle we are involved in now has, had, and will continue to have a military aspect, but this aspect must be secondary to the ideological aspect, to the war of ideas.

The basic danger we are facing now is not weapons of mass destruction, per se, because we know very well that box cutters can be lethal weapons of the worst sort. The danger that we face is not inherently military; it's not armies in the conventional sense. It is above all ideological. As long as millions of people are committed fanatically to doctrines that are ultimately mad and that follow in the tradition of the totalitarian madnesses of Europe in the twentieth century, the danger persists.

I maintain that the struggle we are involved in is, or ought to be, ultimately a war of ideas.

Thank you. "

Paul Berman:

L'islamisme est un totalitarisme comme les autres

(Why Bush was right about Saddam)

Au moment où, avec la complaisance des médias, la pathologie terroriste semble sur le point de se démocratiser au point que le premier imbécile venu (voir les zozos – n'ayant heureusement pas fait de victimes - des derniers jours à Londres et Glasgow) se sente obligé d'y sacrifier et de s'y sacrifier …  Petit retour sur l'un des rares penseurs américains de gauche à avoir pris la mesure des attentats du 11/9 et d'avoir, en bonne logique, soutenu à la fois les interventions alliées en Afghanistan et Irak, à savoir "le faucon de gauche" comme il a été surnommé et membre du comité de rédaction de la revue de gauche Dissent, Paul Berman.

Et sur le livre qu'il en a tiré ("Terror and Liberalism", 2003 - "Les habits neufs de la terreur", en français), où il démontre brillamment à la fois la parenté idéologique du totalitarisme islamique (comme du panarabisme ou du baasisme) avec ses prédécesseurs bolchévique, fasciste et nazi et (même s'il sacrifie encore au dénigrement, à notre avis exagéré, du président Bush) l'aveuglement de la gauche progressiste, incapable de reconnaître ce retour de la pathologie du massacre.

Procédant à une véritable typologie de ces différents mouvements, il les décrit comme autant de variations d'un même thème (en gros le Millénium de l'Apocalypse biblique).

Où un peuple d'élus (le prolétariat, les enfants de la louve romaine, les soldats du Christ guerrier franquistes ou la race aryenne) menacé par des ennemis de l'intérieur (bourgeoisie, francs-maçons, cosmopolites ou juifs) eux-mêmes appuyés par des ennemis extérieurs (capitalistes et bien sûr le complot juif mondial) est appelé, via une lutte finale (Armageddon ou le bain de sang de l'extermination totale), à accéder ou à revenir à un nouveau royaume ou Règne de Dieu (l'âge du prolétariat, la grandeur de l'Empire romain ressuscité, le Royaume du Christ ou la pureté raciale du Troisième Reich).

Avec toute une panoplie telle que les chemises monochromes (rouges, noires, brunes et maintenant… vertes !), les phalanges, les grandes foules hystériques, mais aussi et surtout le culte de la mort, c'est-à-dire à la fois le massacre et le suicide ("Viva la muerte !").

Mais aussi toute la complaisance des autres mouvements de droite ou la naïveté et l'ignorance des opposants de gauche (compagnons de route et autres idiots utiles ou pacifistes comme les paul-fauristes du socialisme français des années 30 qui ont fini par voter les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain et à flirter avec l'antisémitisme), incapables avant comme maintenant d'en discerner le totalitarisme.

Et notamment une Europe qui, après n'avoir pas su protéger chez elle ses juifs (il y a 60 ans) puis les populations de sa partie orientale (pendant la Guerre froide) et enfin ses musulmans (Bosniaques et Kosovars) il y a 10 ans, continue aujourd'hui à refuser de voir que les premières victimes du totalitarisme islamique sont les musulmans eux-mêmes (Algériens, musulmans modérés ou femmes d'Afghanistan et d'autres pays musulmans, Kurdes ou arabes des marais irakiens, non-Arabes du Darfour), pour qui d'ailleurs les Etats-Unis, dénoncés unanimement par tous, ont fait la plupart de leurs guerres récentes (Liban en 83, Koweit en 91, Irak à partir de 91 pour les Kurdes et les Chiites, Somalie en 98).

Extraits de son entretien sur Salon à la veille même de l'Opération "Liberté pour l'Irak" (traduits au babelfish):

Nous imaginons, parce que la Guerre froide est finie en Europe, que toute la série de luttes qui ont commencé avec la Première guerre mondiale et qui sont passées par différents mouvements totalitaires — fasciste, nazi et communiste — était finalement terminée.

Hors de la Première guerre mondiale est venue une série de révoltes contre la civilisation libérale. Ces révoltes accusaient la civilisation libérale d'être non seulement hypocrite ou en faillite, mais d'être en fait la grande source du mal ou de la souffrance dans le monde.

[Avec] une fascination pathologique pour la mort de masse [qui] était elle-même le fait principal de la Première guerre mondiale, dans laquelle 9 ou 10 millions de personnes ont été tués sur une base industrielle. Et chacun des nouveaux mouvements s'est mis à reproduire cet événement au nom de leur opposition utopique aux complexités et aux incertitudes de la civilisation libérale. Les noms de ces mouvements ont changé comme les traits qu'ils ont manifestés – l'un s'est appelé bolchévisme, et un autre s'est appelé fascisme, un autre s'est appelé nazisme.

À un certain niveau très profond tous ces mouvements étaient les mêmes — ils partageaient tous certaines qualités mythologiques, une fascination pour la mort de masse et tous s'inspiraient du même type de paranoïa.

Mon argument est que l'islamisme et un certain genre de pan-arabisme dans les mondes arabe et musulman sont vraiment d'autres branches de la même impulsion. Mussolini a mis en scène sa marche sur Rome en 1922 afin de créer une société totalitaire parfaite qui allait être la résurrection de l'empire romain. En 1928, en Egypte, de l'autre côté de la Méditerranée, s'est créée la secte des Frères musulmans afin de ressusciter le Califat antique de l'empire arabe du 7ème siècle, de même avec l'idée de créer une société parfaite des temps modernes. Bien que ces deux mouvements aient été tout à fait différents, ils étaient d'une certaine manière semblables.

Le fascisme en Italie est arrivé au pouvoir en 1922 et il est demeuré puissant jusqu'à ce qu'il soit renversé par les Américains et les Anglais. L'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir en divers endroits, commençant en 1979 avec l'Ajatollah Khomeini en Iran. Le baasisme est encore une autre variante de la même chose, et probablement que dans les jours à venir, en Irak, il sera renversé par les mêmes Américains et Anglais qui ont renversé Mussolini. L'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir en Iran en 1979, et la révolution islamique en Iran était une vraie force mondiale. Alors l'islamisme est arrivé au pouvoir au Soudan et en Afghanistan, et pendant un moment il a semblé progressé tout à fait bien. Les Iraniens sont chi'ites et les autres pays sont sunnites, donc ce sont des dénominations différentes de l'Islam. Mais, cependant, c'était un mouvement qui jusqu'à récemment semblait avancer d'une manière traditionnelle — c'est-à-dire par la capture d'Etats.

Ce qui s'est produit avec Al-Qaida est une situation compliquée parce que l'slamisme force politique de capture d'états est sur le déclin parce que les Taliban ont été défaits militairement. En outre, nous pouvons voir les commencements d'une révolution libérale prenant si tout va bien racine en Iran. L'islamisme au Soudan est tombé. Mais malgré cela, Al-Qaida représente une structure extrêmement puissante avec des bases sociales multiples et le soutien de banques et d'associations caritatives et de grands intellectuels, bien qu'il ne commande plus un Etat. Malgré tout, il est devenu évident qu'Al-Qaida est soutenu ou à demi soutenu par une variété d'états et d'élites régnantes.

Leur désir est très clairement de régner sur le monde. Ce n'est pas un grand secret. Un grand philosophe du radicalisme islamiste, Sayyid Qutb, qui a été pendu par [le président égyptien ] Nasser en 1966, ne s'en est pas caché. Le but de l'islamisme est de recréer ce que Mahomet avait fait au septième siècle, c'est à dire de fonder un état islamique et de l'imposer au monde entier. Le but de l'islamisme n'est pas de résoudre un problème social particulier ici ou là, ou de régler un certain conflit de frontières entre Israel et la Palestine ou entre le Pakistan et l'Inde ou le Tchéchénie et la Russie, bien que ce soit des questions réelles. Le but est absolument grandiose et global.

Le baasisme est peu un plus modeste parce que c'est explicitement un nationalisme arabe. Ainsi le baasisme veut recréer l'empire arabe du septième siècle dans une certaine version moderne mais il n'est pas tout à fait aussi global et grandiose que l'islamisme. En outre, le baasisme est dans un état d'affaiblissement profond. Il ne rend pas Saddam Hussein moins effrayant parce qu'un état d'affaiblissement profond peut être extrêmement dangereux…

La doctrine islamiste est que l'Islam est la réponse aux problèmes du monde, mais que l'Islam a été la victime d'une conspiration cosmique géante pour la détruire, par les Croisés et les sionistes. (le sionisme dans la doctrine de Qutb n'est pas un mouvement politique moderne, c'est une doctrine cosmique se prolongeant tout au long des siècles.) L'Islam est la victime de cette conspiration, qui est également facilitée par les faux musulmans ou hypocrites, qui feignent d'être musulmans mais sont réellement les amis des ennemis de l'Islam. D'un point de vue islamiste, donc, la conspiration la plus honteuse est celle menée par les hypocrites musulmans pour annihiler l'Islam du dedans. Ces personnes sont surtout les libéraux musulmans qui veulent établir une société libérale, autrement dit la séparation de l'église et de l'état.

De même que les progressistes européens et américains doutaient des menaces de Hitler et de Staline, les Occidentaux éclairés sont aujourd'hui en danger de manquer l'urgence des idéologies violentes issues du monde musulman.

Les socialistes français des années 30 (…) ont voulu éviter un retour de la première guerre mondiale; ils ont refusé de croire que les millions de personnes en Allemagne avaient perdu la tête et avaient soutenu le mouvement nazi. Ils n'ont pas voulu croire qu'un mouvement pathologique de masse avait pris le pouvoir en Allemagne, ils ont voulu rester ouverts à ce que les Allemands disaient et aux revendiquations allemandes de la première guerre mondiale. Et les socialistes français, dans leur effort pour être ouverts et chaleureux afin d'éviter à tout prix le retour d'une guerre comme la première guerre mondiale, ont fait tout leur possible pour essayer de trouver ce qui était raisonnable et plausible dans les arguments d'Hitler. Ils ont vraiment fini par croire que le plus grand danger pour la paix du monde n'était pas posé par Hitler mais par les faucons de leur propre société, en France. Ces gesn-là étaient les socialistes pacifistes de la France, c'était des gens biens. Pourtant, de fil en aiguille, ils se sont opposés à l'armée française contre Hitler, et bon nombre d'entre eux ont fini par soutenir le régime de Vichy et elles ont fini comme fascistes! Ils ont même dérapé vers l'anti-sémitisme pur, et personne ne peut douter qu'une partie de cela s'est reproduit récemment dans le mouvement pacifiste aux Etats-Unis et surtout en Europe.

Un des scandales est que nous avons eu des millions de personnes dans la rue protestant contre la guerre en Irak, mais pas pour réclamer la liberté en Irak. Personne n'a marché dans les rues au nom des libertés kurdes. Les intérêts des dissidents libéraux de l'Irak et les démocrates kurdes sont en fait également nos intérêts. Plus ces personnes prospèrent, plus grande sera notre sécurité. C'est un moment où ce qui devrait être nos idéaux — les idéaux de la démocratie libérale et de la solidarité sociale — sont également objectivement notre intérêt. Bush n'a pas réussi à l'expliquer clairement, et une grande partie de la gauche ne l'a même pas perçu.

Ce dont nous avons besoin est un nouveau radicalisme contre le prétendu réalisme cynique du conservatisme américain et de la politique américaine traditionnelle, dans lequel les idées libérales sont considérées non pertinentes pour la politique étrangère. Et également contre la cécité et la tête-dans-le-sable d'une grande partie de la gauche américaine, qui peut seulement penser que tous les problèmes de par le monde sont provoqués par l'impérialisme américain et qu'il n'y a rien d'autre dont il faudrait s'inquiéter.

Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam
Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.

By Suzy Hansen
Salon
March 22, 2003

On Sept. 11, Paul Berman, political and cultural critic and author of "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968″ watched from his roof as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. That day, Berman says, he "woke up" to the threat of what he calls Islamic totalitarianism. Berman lives in Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue where a Yemeni cleric was recently convicted of funneling $20 million to Osama bin Laden.

During the last year and a half he has picked his way through the Islamic bookstores in his neighborhood, hunting down volumes by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual whose "In the Shade of the Qur'an" is the groundwork for Islamic fundamentalism. Berman finds Qutb's analysis of the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society "rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt." Qutb's work also convinced Berman that in Islamism we face a threat not unlike such 20th century totalitarian movements as fascism and communism. Berman feels similarly about Baathism, the nationalist ideology of Iraq's ruling party.

In fact, Berman believes that Islamism and Baathism emerged from the same great rift in liberal society, the First World War. "Terror and Liberalism," Berman's bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.

The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America's New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration — actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns "we will pay for it" — he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world.

We spoke with Berman in New York, before and after bombs started falling on Baghdad.

Had you been interested in Islamism and Baathism before Sept. 11?

No. Yes, in a general way, but I hadn't paid special attention to it. Then it became obvious to me on Sept. 11 that the giant screw-up by the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon was also a giant screw-up by the journalists and intellectuals and everyone else. We too hadn't been paying attention.

Why do you think it was easy for all of these people to miss the idea, which becomes the central argument of your book, that these Arab movements are extensions of totalitarianism?

A lot of people have misunderstood the nature of Islamism for a whole series of reasons. The biggest and most important of those reasons is Eurocentrism, which prevented people from looking at these movements at all. And the Eurocentrism has a flip side, a soft-headed multiculturalism in which movements in other parts of the world are regarded as hopelessly and wonderfully exotic and not to be judged or analyzed. In the last 20 years literally millions of people have been slaughtered by these movements and the wars they've begun. All of this has received a shockingly small amount of attention.

Another reason that these movements have received very little attention has to do with anti-Zionism, the true origin of which is anti-Semitism, the assumption that the Jews are the center of the world and therefore the center of the world's evil. So the problems of the Muslim world in the Middle East can be located in the tiny issue of a border dispute in a place the size of Connecticut. Across the world people are convinced of this. It's a preposterous idea, but this idea is really widely shared. Anybody who holds this idea therefore has carte blanche to ignore the fact that the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people or that Islamism in the Sudan has killed between 1.5 million and 2 million people, or that 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria.

So you're saying that we're likely to ignore these forms of Islamist violence because we're consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

No, I've outlined three reasons. These series of attitudes have flowed together to make it respectable or normal for intellectuals and journalists to pay no attention at all to these vast tragedies deploying across huge parts of the world. Only when these vast tragedies came and hit us in the face did a lot of people wake up. Among those people was me.

Does this also have to do with this idea that we think history ended in 1989?

Yes. It absolutely does. This is part of the Eurocentrism. We imagine that because the Cold War ended in Europe that the whole series of struggles that began in Europe with the First World War and then went through the different totalitarian movements — fascist, Nazi and communist — had finally come to an end. Many people were so caught up in the more or less victory of liberal democratic ideas and institutions that there was a tendency to imagine that problems in other parts of the world were just going to be regional problems that really weren't deeply going to affect us. All that was a scandalous delusion.

And in fact you're arguing that Islamism and Baathism grew out of the First World War in the same way that communism and fascism did?

It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock — eternal and perfect.

These new ideas were in a sense utopian, but they were also very bloody. Behind all the movements that made these proposals was a pathological fascination with mass death. Mass death was itself the principal fact of the First World War, in which 9 or 10 million people were killed on an industrial basis. And each of the new movements proceeded to reproduce that event in the name of their utopian opposition to the complexities and uncertainties of liberal civilization. The names of these movements varied and the traits that they displayed varied — one was called Bolshevism, and another was called fascism, another was called Nazism.

So you're saying these movements are similar to Islamism and Baathism, but on a very deep level. You're drawing specific parallels — what are they?

At some very deep level all these movements were the same — they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.

My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse. Mussolini staged his march on Rome in 1922 for the purpose of creating a perfect totalitarian society that was going to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire. In 1928, in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed for the purpose of resurrecting the ancient Caliphate of the Arab empire of the 7th century, likewise with the idea of creating a perfect society of modern times. Although these two movements were utterly unalike, there was some way in which they were alike.

Fascism in Italy came to power in 1922 and it remained in power until it was overthrown by the Americans and the British. Islamism came to power in various places, beginning in 1979 with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Baathism is yet another variant of the same thing, and probably in the next few days it will, in Iraq, be overthrown by the same Americans and British who overthrew Mussolini.

Next page: Osama is no Hitler — or is he?
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It seemed to me that what's different about Islamism is that there isn't a country really leading this fight. There's Osama bin Laden, but that's quite different from Hitler.

That's true and it's not true. Islamism did come to power in Iran in 1979, and the Islamic revolution in Iran was a real world force. Then Islamism came to power in the Sudan and Afghanistan, so for a while it was looking like it was advancing quite well. The Iranians are Shi'ite and the other countries are Sunni, so these are different denominations of Islam. But, still, this was a movement that until recently looked like it was advancing in a traditional way — that is, capturing states.

What's happened with al-Qaida is a complicated situation in which Islamism as a political force capturing states is on the decline because the Taliban was defeated militarily. Also, we can see the beginnings of a liberal revolution hopefully taking root in Iran. Islamism in the Sudan fell. But in spite of that, al-Qaida represents an extremely powerful institution with multiple social bases and banks and charities and great intellectuals behind it, although it doesn't control a state anymore. Still, it's become obvious that al-Qaida's been supported or semi-supported by a variety of states and ruling elites.

And you see the same desire to rule the world in the way that Hitler or Stalin wanted to?

The desire is absolutely to rule the world. That's not a great secret. A great philosopher of Islamist radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged by [Egyptian president] Nasser in 1966, said that all plainly. The goal of Islamism is to recreate what Muhammad did in the seventh century, which was to found an Islamic state and bring that state to the entire world. The goal of Islamism is not to resolve some particular social problem here or there, it's not to straighten out some border conflict between Israel and Palestine or between Pakistan and India or Chechnya and Russia, although those are genuine issues. The goal is absolutely grandiose and global.

Do you see that same goal in Baathism?

No. Baathism is a little more modest because Baathism is explicitly an Arab nationalism. So Baathism wants to recreate the Arab empire of the seventh century in some modern version but it's not quite so global and grandiose as Islamism. Also, Baathism is in a state of deep decay. It doesn't make Saddam Hussein any less scary because a state in deep decay can be extremely dangerous, but it's hard to imagine that Baathism has inspired enthusiastic idealism, although it used to.

But you did say in your book that after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he captured the imagination of the Arab world.

When it looked like he was winning, he had a lot of support. That's probably the danger with him now. If he does get his weapons, if he got the atom bomb, if he was able to fend off the U.S. and Britain, he would certainly gain a lot of followers. It's just that the doctrine of a radical pan-Arabism has become a little tired. Islamism is more of a happening thing.

You argue that secularism is the most terrifying issue to the Islamists.

The Islamist doctrine is that Islam is the answer to the world's problems, but that Islam has been the victim of a giant cosmic conspiracy to destroy it, by Crusaders and Zionists. (Zionism in Qutb's doctrine is not a modern political movement, it's a cosmic doctrine extending over the centuries.) Islam is the victim of this conspiracy, which is also aided by false or hypocritical Muslims, who pretend to be Muslims but are actually the friends of Islam's enemies. From an Islamist point of view, then, the most heinous conspiracy of all is the one led by the Muslim hypocrites to annihilate Islam from within. These people are, above all, the Muslim liberals who want to establish a liberal society, which means separation of church and state.

The first and most grievous step toward the annihilation of Islam is taken by the Turks in 1924, when Kemal Ataturk created a secular Turkey and abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient Caliphate. This was a devastating blow and the whole goal of the Islamist movement has been to undo that.

What does it mean to Islamists to see Turkey as a Western ally?

From their point of view, to see the Turks line up with the U.S. now must be enraging. And the fact that Turkey is led by an Islamist party which appears to have become a liberal party in its principal instincts, this fact must be enraging beyond words.

Well, these passages in your book about anti-secularism in the Arab world really struck me. It seems that this whole neoconservative theory — the democracy domino theory, arguing that if we bring down Saddam we're going to bring democracy to the entire Middle East — is countered by the firm-rooted hatred of secularism. Why would we think anyone in the Muslim world would welcome democracy or this liberal secularism that you're talking about?

I don't think that that idea is so preposterous, necessarily. Bush is not proceeding in a way that instills any confidence in me that he's going to pull it off. But the notion of overthrowing Baathism — a rival/cousin totalitarian movement of Islamism — and being able to help the Iraqis replace it with some aspect of a liberal society would hearten liberals, people with rationalist ideas and the notion of liberal rights and separation of church and state, throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. If a liberal Iraq could be made a success, that would be hugely encouraging. Whether it could be a success is contingent on what a lot of people do. And I fear that the people who ought to be doing what they can for this are not. Bush is hugely at fault here.

Next page: Trying to save the world, Bush terrifies it

It seems that you are more critical of what Bush says — how he presents the war on Iraq — than what he's actually doing.

Well, I thought I was criticizing what he's doing.

You do think there are reasons for going to war, though.

Yes.

So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.

Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do — overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons — is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.

Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?

One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

Do you believe Bush has such motives?

It's not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.

In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven't been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.

Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women's rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women's rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women's rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.

He's unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he's also unable to do that, I'm sure, because he's confused ideologically about whether he's really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it.

He hasn't given us much of an indication that he's preoccupied with these humanitarian issues. Maybe he simply isn't.

He hasn't straightened it out in his mind. His initial instinct was to oppose this sort of thing. He was against nation-building. Events have driven him to engage in nation-building, but he's done it in a halfhearted way. Although he's done some of these things which are admirable, he has not been able to enlist the world's sympathy or support. He's left people all over the world in a position where they have no way to regard his motives as anything other than the most cynical.

But I should add that although Bush is hugely to blame for this — it's just tragic that the United States is led by such an inarticulate and intellectually confused and unattractive figure who personally makes me cringe — other people should be standing up and trying to fight for issues of humanitarianism and social solidarity, of women's rights and liberal freedoms.

One of the scandals is that we've had millions of people marching through the streets calling for no war in Iraq, but we haven't had millions of people marching in the streets calling for freedom in Iraq. Nobody's marching in the streets on behalf of Kurdish liberties. The interests of the liberal dissidents of Iraq and the Kurdish democrats are in fact also our interests. The more those people prosper, the safer we are. This is a moment in which what should be our ideals — the ideals of liberal democracy and social solidarity — are also materially in our interest. Bush has failed to articulate this, and a large part of the left has failed to see this entirely.

Next page: We are all Noam Chomsky

Tony Blair, who is more articulate and charming and smarter, has also failed to make a case to the public. Doesn't this suggest that perhaps their ideals are not in the right place?

Yes. I admire Tony Blair but I imagine that he's hobbled by the Bush policy. Bush has confused the whole situation by saying that the goal of the war in Iraq is disarmament. Disarmament has nothing to do with the establishment of liberal freedoms.

He was trying to scare us into this.

He's made it very difficult to present the war as an extension of the liberal and humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s in which Tony Blair played a distinguished and honorable and brave role.

But when did you formulate these opinions on Iraq? Was it during the war on Afghanistan? After 9/11? Have you always been concerned about the liberation of the Iraqi people or is there some threat from Iraq that suddenly became more serious to you in the last year and a half?

I formed these opinions on Iraq in 1990 when I began to pay attention to Saddam Hussein, and then when he invaded Kuwait. I came to the conclusion then that Saddam Hussein was a fascist maniac and that we had every reason to be frightened of him and act against him. I am a man of the left and I was then one of the very few people on the American left to support the Gulf War in 1991. So I have a long history of being worried about this guy.

Am I more worried about him now? Yes. One of the things that hasn't gotten through to many people is that the Sept. 11 attacks broke a taboo. There had been a taboo before against staging random massacres against the United States. Now that it's been successful, it is certainly the case that other people are going to want to do the same. So we have a lot of reasons to be much more worried than we have been in the past.

The problem of weapons of mass destruction is certainly a real problem, although as our experience with box-cutters shows, weapons of mass destruction are hardly necessary for random massacres. But we have every reason to be much more alarmed than before. Those of us who consider ourselves on the left now have to consider national security issues in a way which has never been our habit in the past. The response of many people on the left is to think that if the United States will just withdraw its troops here and there and bury its head in the sand, everything will be OK. That's delusional.

I'm sure this one line in your book will infuriate some and surprise others — especially Europeans. You wrote: "In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky." What do you mean by that?

Chomsky is a man who thinks the entire world operates on simple and rational principles. The reason he's able to crank out these thousands of pages a year on all subjects is because he has an extremely simple analysis: Evil American corporations are acting in their own self-interest and trying to increase and spread their exploitation around the world. The American government is in their hands and is acting to expand its nefarious control over the world. The press has been corrupted by the wealth and power of corporations and spreads the propaganda messages required by the corporations. American claims to ever do any good around the world are merely hypocritical mendacities uttered for the purpose of advancing the larger cause of exploitation and oppression. And the response of other people in the world is that of resistance as inspired by an instinct for human freedom, even if the resistance sometimes takes a perverse and unfortunate form. Therefore, from Chomsky's point of view, all events are rationally explicable according to one or two tiny little factors: the self-interest of American corporations and the urge to resist the American corporations.

It's a very simpleminded view in which nothing inexplicable ever occurs. And yet although Chomsky is regarded by some people as the great anti-American, this kind of thought is entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have emerged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed. Finally, even the FBI and the CIA have obviously thought along these lines because it never crossed these people's minds — not seriously anyway — that somebody was going to be so mad to attack the United States directly. Sept. 11 revealed many shocking things and the most shocking was that the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. In that sense, everybody in the United States, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, everybody is a simpleminded fool.

All this is part of your belief that good people can end up supporting horrible movements if we're not vigilant.

People ought to think coldly about it. There really is a long history of excellent people with the best of hearts and the best of intentions ending up inadvertently collaborating with the worst of totalitarians. There's a long history of this. To look into your own heart and ask yourself if you're good and honest and to examine yourself to see if your own analyses are moral and well-intended is not enough. You may have the best of intentions and the purest of hearts and the warmest of feelings of solidarity for other people and yet be led by some failure of imagination to end up more or less aligned with the baddest of bad guys.

Example?

There's a long history of this kind of thing. The simplest history is of the fellow travelers of Stalin. But there's even more grotesque examples of it — that of the French socialists in the 1930s. They wanted to avoid a new outbreak of the First World War; they refused to believe that millions of people in Germany had gone out of their minds and supported the Nazi movement. They didn't want to believe that a mass pathological movement had taken power in Germany, they wanted to be open-minded to what the Germans were saying and to the German grievances of the First World War. And the French socialists, in their open-minded, warm-hearted effort to avoid seeing anything like the First World War occur again, went out of their way to try and find what was reasonable and plausible in the arguments of Hitler. They really did end up thinking that the greatest danger to world peace was not posed by Hitler but by the hawks in their own society, in France. These people were the antiwar socialists of France, they were good people. Yet one thing led to another, they opposed France's army against Hitler, and many of them ended up supporting the Vichy regime and they ended up fascists!

Where's the parallel to today?

It's not impossible to see something like that today. People want to avoid a war in the Middle East, they say they're not for Saddam but yet they don't really want to do anything against Saddam. They see Iraqi liberals and Kurdish democrats struggling against Saddam, and they really don't want to help these people. They see pathological movements in Palestine and elsewhere engaging in acts of random murder for the purest of irrational reasons and these people, the warmhearted, good-souled antiwar socialists of the Western countries, fall all over themselves in finding ways to justify the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and find ways to prevent themselves from showing solidarity with the victims.

We do see some of the same things. With the French socialists of the 1930s, there was even a slippage into outright anti-Semitism, and no one can doubt that some of that has been occurring in the antiwar movement in the United States and above all in Europe. Of course most people in the antiwar movement are against that. But signs of it exist and it would be foolish to close your eyes to that.

So what should the left's position be today? If your argument is that we are facing a totalitarian threat similar to those of the first part of the 20th century, what do you suggest?

The true model of what the left should be doing here is shown by the other wing of French socialism, that of Léon Blum, an antifascist who was willing to fight and did fight. This ought to be the real goal of the left in the Western countries — to be antifascist, to be in favor of liberating the people who are suffering under these regimes which are threats not only to their own citizens but to us.

Instead, we have the Bush administration's "realist" approach, which is propelling us to war.

Yes, it's the so-called realist policies of the American conservatives that ultimately got us into this situation. We, the United States, have followed the most cynical policies in the Middle East. We've aligned with reactionary feudal monarchies of the worst sort, backing the most horrendous right-wing tyrants and dictators, thinking that liberal values ought to play no role at all in formulating American policy. All this has especially been the doctrine of American conservatism. It's what I call the Nixonian tradition. It was certainly the policy of Bush the elder and it was the original instinct of the present Bush, although now he appears to be confused.

This has simply been catastrophic for people in the Middle East and ultimately for ourselves. What we need is a politics as I describe in my book, a new radicalism which is going to be against the cynical so-called realism of American conservatism and traditional American policy, in which liberal ideas are considered irrelevant to foreign policy. And also against the head-in-the-sand blindness of a large part of the American left, which can only think that all problems around the world are caused by American imperialism and there's nothing else to worry about.

What we need is a third alternative — a politics of liberal solidarity, of anti-fascism, a politics that's willing to be interventionist when tyrants or political movements really do threaten us and the people in their own countries, a politics that's going to be aggressive in spreading and promoting liberal ideas and values in regions of the world where people who hold those values are persecuted. A politics of active solidarity, not just expressions of solidarity, but actions of solidarity with liberal-minded people in other parts of the world.

It's scandalous to me that large parts of the political spectrum aren't acting on this now. Where are all the universities and human rights foundations and trade unions and all the other civic associations in the United States? Where are those groups now? Why aren't those groups acting now to establish links of solidarity with people of the Middle East and Muslim world? To try to foment movements, or even revolutions, on behalf of liberal ideals?

But it seems impossible to work for such ideals under the current administration.

We don't need Bush to lead us to do that, we can do that without him. Even if Bush does the wrong thing, which he's bound to do, we can act on those ideas ourselves. The notion that we, the high-minded people of the left, ought to confine ourselves to marching against Bush is a very foolish idea. There's much that we can do.

That's what I call for. It's vastly needed in Europe too. Why aren't the Germans doing this? The Germans are pacifist-minded, they don't want to participate in the war, but there's a lot Germany could do. They should have people all over the Middle East promoting liberal ideas, they should be spending billions of dollars to engage in solidarity with the liberal movements in those countries. They are not doing that. All they appear to be doing is opposing Bush but not taking on a very large role themselves, though they do have peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and Kosovo. But there's much more that Germany and France could be doing.

Even people who think that Bush is making a blunder with his military approach can try to undo that blunder themselves in some way by going ahead and doing the things that ought to be done — promoting liberal ideas. Promoting liberal ideas, finally, is the only real way to oppose the totalitarian movements that threaten us and threaten people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, whether they're Baathist or Islamist.

I want to be clear on something. Do you support this military invasion?

I can certainly imagine how the whole thing can be done better. Bush is probably the most inept president we've ever had in regard to maintaining foreign alliances and presenting the American case and convincing the world. He's failed in every possible way. The defeat and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is in the interest of nearly the entire world and although it is in the interest of nearly the entire world, nearly the entire world is against Bush. That situation is the consequence of Bush's ineptness.

At the same time, I think that getting rid of Saddam is in our interest and in the interest of Iraq and in the interest of the Arab world. Saddam is a mad tyrant.

So I wish Bush had gone about it differently. But now that the thing is getting under way, I fervently hope it goes well. And I think that the attitude of everyone with the best of motives who have opposed the war, should now shift dramatically. The people who have demanded that Bush refrain from action should now demand that the action be more thorough. The danger now is that we will go in and go out too quickly and leave the job half-done. The position of the antiwar movement and of liberals should be that the United States fulfill entirely its obligations to replace Saddam with a decent or even admirable system. We've done this in Afghanistan but only in most halfhearted way. We should now do more in Afghanistan and do a lot in Iraq. The people who've opposed the war should now demand that Bush do more.

Are you apprehensive?

I'm scared out of my mind! Only a lunatic could be calm and confident at such a moment.

But you do think we're doing the right thing this week?

You're trying to pin me down. I'm not going to endorse Bush's policy. I'm saying that he went about it in the wrong way but I want the U.S. to do it thoroughly. No goodhearted person should imagine that it would be a bad thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But we have to do it well.

Have you been watching the war coverage on the news?

A little bit. I can say that there was something truly pathetic in seeing antiwar demonstrations denounce the war at one moment and then in another moment seeing grateful Iraqis welcome their British and American liberators. If I were a member of the antiwar movement, I would have felt a moral shudder at that experience.

But we can imagine the devastation in Baghdad as well.

We have no idea what it is. Like anybody I'm hoping for the least amount of suffering. The war could certainly end up achieving the opposite of what its goals should be. History offers more than one example of that.

By which you mean? Is this campaign what you expected, for the most part? War is war?

Well, no. If it turns out that our bombs have ended up slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians, that would be a horror. But we don't know what's happened. We won't know for a while.

So what's particularly struck you has been some of the protests.

Yes, because the role of the left ought to be to express solidarity with the Iraqi people, to hope for the defeat of the fascist tyrant and to see their freedom and our own self-defense. This in fact became visible today, when some Iraqis at least, celebrated their liberation. “

 02 juillet 2007 Publié Histoire, Islam et Occident, Irak, terrorisme, guerre & paix | Lien permanent |

OS PILARES E O BETÃO DO

COMPLEXO SALAZARENTO

"Os pilares e o betão" é o tema do ARF hoje no "CM". Com um olhar muito claro e o seu habitual poder de síntese, ARF acerta, num texto notável, um tiro em cheio no "complexo salazarento e neo-corporativo":

• " (...) os raquíticos 233 mil euros pagos ao PSD são obviamente a ponta de um enorme icebergue, de um sistema que vive há muitos anos de financiamentos de empresas que precisam do Estado e dos partidos para serem beneficiadas em negócios e protegidas da concorrência interna e externa. O complexo empresarial salazarento nasceu e cresceu na ditadura, sobreviveu à revolução e está como peixe na água nesta democracia.
  
  O silêncio é a arma fundamental dos negócios e da corrupção. E, mais do que nunca, o silêncio dos partidos continua a valer ouro. "

António Ribeiro Ferreira, Jornalista "

TECHNORATI FAZ FLOP

"Après la crise boursière, une crise des éditeurs ?

Deux grands signaux ont fait leur apparition ce mois-ci : d'abord Technorati avec son flop (départ du patron et de 8 autres employés) et ensuite Fast avec l'annonce de licenciement de près de 150 personnes . Personnellement, je m'attendais à ce que Technorati rencontre ce genre de situation puisqu'à mon avis il n'a pas su se forger une place de leader sur le marché, et a vu Google et d'autres concurrents lui piquer sa place sans réagir.Avec le modèle économique actuel, Technorati n'a pas les moyens de survivre ni même de rebondir, même s'il se fait racheter par un big comme Yahoo ou Microsoft. (...) "

via Vtech

Ler Jornais... Qualquer altura é boa!

foto picada aqui

SUBPRIME: ANÁLISE GEO-POLÍTICA

A crise do "subprime" analisada de um ponto de vista geo-político... Uma abordagem (infelizmente!)pouco comum mas (felizmente!) inteligente, profícua e enriquecedora. Por George Friedman, da Stratfor:

" Subprime Geopolitics

The subprime crisis is worth analysis in its own right, though it also gives us the opportunity to discuss our own approach to economic issues. Stratfor views the world through the prism of geopolitics. In geopolitics, there is no such thing as separating a country's economy from its national security or its political interests. A nation is a nation. Academic departments divide themselves nicely into areas of study. In the real world, things are much too intertwined and sloppy for that. Geopolitics views the international system and nations as consisting of a single fabric of relationships, with economics being one of the elements.

Not all events have geopolitical significance. To rise to a level of significance, an event -- economic, political or military -- must result in a decisive change in the international system, or at least a fundamental change in the behavior of a nation. The Japanese banking crisis of the early 1990s was a geopolitically significant event. Japan, the second-largest economy in the world, changed its behavior in important ways, leaving room for another power -- China -- to move into the niche Japan had previously owned as the world's export dynamo. The dot-com meltdown was not geopolitically significant. The U.S. economy had been expanding for about nine years -- a remarkably long time -- and was due for a recession. Inefficiencies had become rampant in the system, nowhere more so than in the dot-com bubble. The sector was demolished and life went on. Lives might have been shattered, but geopolitics is unsentimental about such matters.

The Russian default of 1998 was a geopolitically significant event. It marked the end of the post-Cold War period and the beginning of the new geopolitical regime that is increasingly showing itself in Russia. The global depression of the 1920s and 1930s was enormously significant, transforming the internal political and social processes of countries such as the United States and Germany, and setting the stage for political and military processes that transformed the world. The savings and loan (S&L) crisis of the 1980s had no real geopolitical effect, and the collapse of Enron meant nothing. However, the consolidation of Russian natural gas exports under Gazprom's control is certainly a major change.

The measure of geopolitical significance is whether an event changes the global balance of power or the behavior of a major international power. Looking at the subprime crisis from a geopolitical perspective, this is the fundamental question. That a great many people are losing a great deal of money is obvious. Whether this matters in the long run -- which is what geopolitics is all about -- is another matter entirely.

The origins of the crisis seem fairly clear. Traditionally, when banks look at mortgages on homes, they carefully study the likelihood that the loan will be repaid, as well as the underlying collateral. Their revenue and profits come from the repayment of the loan or the ability to realize the value of the loan through the forced sale of the house.

Two things changed this simple model. The first started a long time ago. Encouraged by the federal government, banks that issued mortgage loans began selling those loans to other entities. This, then, created a large secondary market in bundled mortgages -- huge numbers of mortgages grouped together and sold and traded as if they were simply financial instruments, which, of course, they are.

As a result, banks began to view mortgages less as long-term investments than as transactions. They made their money on closing costs, rapidly selling the mortgages to aggregators, which in turn passed them on to others. The banks then loaned the money again. The more mortgages banks racked up, the more money they made. The risk was transferred to others.

In the past few years, two new groups of players entered the scene, one on either end of the spectrum. The first group comprised mortgage companies and brokers, nonbanking institutions whose business model was built primarily around the transaction. The brokers in particular had no skin in the game. Every time they executed a mortgage, they made money. If they didn't execute one, they didn't make money. The role of evaluating the borrower increasingly fell to these entities, neither of which was going to hold on to the debt instrument for more than a moment.

The second group was the final buyers of bundled mortgages -- increasingly, hedge funds. Hedge funds are monies gathered from various "qualified" investors -- otherwise known as rich people and institutions. They are private partnerships, so what they do with their money is between the managers and partners. No federal agency is responsible for protecting the private placement of money by the wealthy.

In a world of relatively low interest rates, wealth-seeking investors flocked to these hedge funds. Some of the older ones were superbly managed. The newer ones frequently were not. With a great deal of money in the system, there was a restless search for things to invest in -- and the secondary market in subprime mortgages appeared to be extremely attractive. Carrying relatively high rates of return, and theoretically collateralized by fairly liquid private homes, the risks of these deals appeared low and the returns on the mortgages -- particularly when you looked at the contracted increases -- seemed extremely attractive.

The fact is that no one really worried about defaults. The mortgage originators that prepared the documentation for these riskier loans certainly didn't care. They just wanted the mortgages to go through. The primary lenders didn't worry because they were going to resell them in hours or days anyway. The mortgage aggregators didn't care because they were going to resell them, too. And the final holders didn't worry because they assumed the system would permit easy refinancing of loans at sustainable interest rates, and that -- in a worst-case scenario -- they at least owned a portfolio of houses that they could bundle and sell to real estate companies, perhaps even at a profit.

The final owner of the mortgage, of course, is the loser. The assumption that subprimes could be refinanced if need be failed to take into account that higher interest rates priced these people out of the market. But the worst part is this: Many hedge funds leveraged their purchase of mortgages by using them as collateral to borrow money from the banks.

That was the tipping point. When the subprime defaults started to hit, the banks that had loaned money against the mortgage portfolios re-evaluated the loans. They called some, they stopped rollovers of others and they raised interest rates. Basically, the banks started reducing the valuation of the underlying assets -- subprime mortgages -- and the internal financial positions of some hedge funds started to unravel. In some cases, the hedge funds could not repay the loans because they were unable to resell their subprime mortgages. This started causing a liquidity crisis in the global banking system, and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank began pumping money into the system.

Told this way, this is a story of how excess emerges in a business cycle. But it is not really a very interesting story because the business cycle always ends in excess. As economic conditions improve, more people with more money chase fewer investment opportunities. They crowd into investments that seem to guarantee vast or sure returns -- and they get hammered. The economy contracts into a recession, as it tends to do twice every decade, and then life goes on.

There currently are three possibilities. One is that the subprime crisis is an overblown event that will not even represent the culmination of a business cycle. The second is that we are about to enter a normal cyclical recession. The third, and the one that interests us, is that this crisis could result in a fundamental shift in how the U.S. or the international system works.

We need to benchmark the subprime crisis against other economic crises, and the one that most readily comes to mind is the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. The two are not identical, but each involved careless lending practices that affected the economy while devastating individuals. But looking at it in a geopolitical sense, the S&L crisis was a nonevent. It affected nothing. Bearing in mind the difficulty of quantifying such things because of definitions, let's look for an order of magnitude comparison to see whether the subprime crisis is smaller or larger than the S&L crisis before it.

Not knowing the size of the ultimate loss after workout, we try to measure the magnitude of the problem from the size of the asset class at risk. But we work from the assumption that proved true in the S&L crisis: Financial instruments collateralized against real estate, in the long run, limit losses dramatically, although the impact on individual investors and homeowners can be devastating. We have no idea of the final workout numbers on subprime. That will depend on the final total of defaults, the ability to refinance, the ability to sell the houses and the price received. The final rectification of the subprime will be a small fraction of the total size of the pool.

Therefore, we look at the size of the at-risk pool, compared to the size of the economy as a whole, to get a sense of the order of magnitude we are dealing with. In looking at the assets involved and comparing them to the gross domestic product (GDP), the overall size of the economy, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. estimates that the total amount of assets involved in that crisis was $519 billion. Note that these are assets in the at-risk class, not failed loans. The size of the economy from 1986 to 1989 (the period of greatest turmoil) was between $4.5 trillion and $5.5 trillion. So the S&L crisis involved assets of between 8 percent and 10 percent of GDP. The final losses incurred amounted to about 3 percent of GDP, incurred over time.

The size of the total subprime market is estimated by Reuters to be about $500 billion. Again, this is the total asset pool, not nonperforming loans. The GDP of the United States today is about $14 trillion. That means this crisis represents about 3.5 percent of GDP, compared to between 9 percent and 10 percent of GDP in the S&L crisis. If history repeats itself -- which it won't precisely -- for the subprime crisis to equal the S&L crisis, the entire asset base would have to be written off, and that is unlikely. That would require a collapse in the private home market substantially greater than the collapse in the commercial real estate market in the 1980s -- and that was quite a terrific collapse.

Now, many arguments could be made that the estimates here are faulty or that different concepts should be used. We will concede that there are several ways of looking at this crisis. But in trying to get a handle on it strictly from a geopolitical perspective, this gives us a benchmark with which to analyze the mess.

Can it balloon into something greater? The big risk is that the weak hands in the game, the hedge funds, are suddenly coming into possession of a great number of houses that they will have to put on the market simultaneously in fire sales. That could force home prices down. At the same time, most homes are not at risk, and their owners are not hedge funds. Moreover, it is not clear whether most of the hedge funds that own subprime mortgages will be forced to try to monetize the underlying assets. It is far from clear whether the crisis will affect home prices decisively. If home prices were to collapse at the rate that commercial real estate collapsed in the 1980s, we would revisit the issue. But, unlike commercial real estate, in which price declines force more properties on the market, home real estate has the opposite tendency when prices decline -- inventory contracts. So, unless this crisis can pyramid to forced sales in excess of the subprime market, we do not see this rising to geopolitical significance.

From this, two conclusions emerge: First, this is far from being a geopolitically significant event. Second, it is not clear whether this is large enough to represent the culminating event in this business cycle. It could advance to that, but it is not there yet. We cannot preclude the possibility, though it seems more likely to be a stress point in an ongoing business cycle.

Apart from discussing the subprime issue, this crisis offers us an opportunity to explain how we view economic activity. First, we try to understand, at a fairly high level, what exactly happened, much as we would approach a war or a coup. Then we try to compare this event to other events whose outcomes we know. And, finally, we try to place it on a continuum ranging from fundamental geopolitical change to normal background noise. This is more than normal background noise, but it has not yet risen even to the level of a routine, cyclical shift in the business cycle."

UM CIGARRINHO CALMO...

Este blog entra nuns dias de velocidade reduzida, de sonolência, mesmo... Sem horários e nem grandes stresses, os dias vão passar mais devagar e ser mais compridos e, claro, haverá menos posts no Claro. Mas não faltará tempo para uns cigarrinhos tranquilos e bem fumados... Bom Agosto e até breve!

A foto da pin-up é de Madame Jynx

PORTUGAL EM RISCO DE PERDER

A SOBERANIA SOBRE O SEU MAR

alerta do prof. Brotas em carta aberta a José Sócrates e a Luís Amado

“ Exmos Senhor Primeiro Ministro e Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros,

O nº 1 do Artigo I-13 do projecto de Tratado de Constituição Europeia que foi rejeitado pela França e pela Holanda em 2005 tinha a redacção que a seguir transcrevo da versão francesa que tenho na frente:

«  ARTICLE I – 13

Les domaines de compétence exclusive

L’Union dispose d’une compétence exclusive dans les domaines suivantes:

l’union douanière;

l’étabissement des règles de concurrence nécessaires au fonctionnement du marché intérieur;

la politique monétaire pour les États membres dont la monnaie est l’euro;

la conservation des ressouces biologiques de la mer dans le cadre de la politique commune de la pêche;

la politique commerciale commune.”

A alínea d) está nitidamente deslocada no meio das outras. Aparentemente, só foi incluída no domínio das competências exclusivas da União desta versão antiga do tratado por desatenção dos negociadores portugueses.

É com efeito estranho, por um lado, que a União exija uma competência exclusiva no campo da conservação dos recursos biológicos do mar e não noutros, como é o caso, por exemplo, do das aves no âmbito de uma política de caça comum.

Por outro, é estranho que a alínea de um tratado retire competências e poderes a um Estado, como é o caso de Portugal, para os atribuir a um conjunto de Estados em que alguns nada têm a ver com o mar, como é o caso da Áustria.

Portugal tem negociado e continuará a negociar arduamente com a Comunidade os seus direitos e competências relacionados com a conservação dos recursos biológicos das suas águas territoriais. A sua aprovação da alínea d) tornará muito mais difícil a actuação de negociadores portugueses em todas as questões relacionadas com o assunto.

Formalmente, ela retira a Portugal toda a competência na matéria. Numa interpretação à letra, a autorização para pescar à linha na costa portuguesa passa a ser da competência exclusiva da Comunidade. De facto, esta alínea retira a Portugal uma parcela de soberania sem lhe dar nenhuma contrapartida.

O que agora está em discussão é uma versão reduzida do tratado inicial que certamente será aprovada. Parece-me evidente que Portugal tem todo o interesse em que a referida alínea d) nele não figure. Possivelmente já estará suprimida. Caso não penso que ainda será possível aos negociadores portugueses consegui-lo. Não vejo com que argumentos outros Estados possam insistir na sua inclusão.

Apresentando as minhas desculpas no caso deste texto ser de todo inútil por o assunto já estar tratado, subscrevo-me com os melhores cumprimentos

António Brotas “

A ESCALA IBÉRICA DO PROF. BESSA

ou os desastres provocados pela falta de inteligência… económica e estratégica

Em recente crónica no Expresso, o prof. Daniel Bessa, um economista do Porto que se deu mal em Lisboa como ministro da Economia de Guterres, notava que “falta ao nosso futebol, como a tantas outras actividades no nosso país, dimensão massa crítica, internacionalização, competitividade, organização e profissionalismo”. Podia ter acrescentado o essencial: falta-lhe inteligência, ao futebol, ao país e, sobretudo, às sucessivas camadas de governantes que nas últimas décadas temos tido. Falta-lhes em inteligência económica e estratégica o que lhes sobra em elucubrações balofas.

Na dita crónica, acrescentava o prof. Bessa que as falhas por ele referidas se devem a uma questão de escala e que o futebol (como o resto) teria esse problema de escala resolvido “se quatro ou cinco clubes portugueses pudessem integrar uma liga ibérica”.

O homem não percebe que a decisão de criar essa liga ibérica não depende da vontade dele mas da decisão de Madrid e como tal nem percebe que está a pôr a resolução dos problemas portugueses num quadro de decisão espanhol, unicamente espanhol! O prof. Bessa está a propor a Portugal que assuma o estatuto de estado residual ou de “principado do Mónaco” e entregue a resolução dos seus problemas à decisão de Madrid…

Homem do Porto, o prof. Bessa talvez tenha já ido de fim de semana a Amsterdão ou a Copenhaga, cidades de países de menor dimensão e de menor potencial geo-político do que Portugal. Se voltar a uma destas cidades, ele que experimente propor a holandeses ou dinamarqueses que entreguem a resolução dos seus problemas ao grande vizinho alemão e assumam o estatuto de países residuais… Ele que experimente!

Bessa tem direito a qualquer opinião sua por mais deficitária que seja em inteligência e tem direito a propalá-la (foi para isso que fizemos a democracia). O que me preocupa é que gente assim ocupe cargos ministeriais e seja colocada em lugares maiores da decisão política! Por que raio de gente é que temos andado a ser governados…?

Quanto à elucubração da crónica do Expresso, Bessa está totalmente enganado. A “escala mínima” da “Península Ibérica”, de que ele fala, é uma escala fatal! Não dá quadro, nem know-how, nem, dimensão, tem péssimo e distorcido ambiente concorrencial e o seu carácter radicalmente assimétrico constitui uma fatalidade assassina. Em tempos de globalização, só uma dimensão pode interessar: a global. Bessa que pergunte a Belmiro de Azevedo o porquê destas duas coisas… Ele explicar-lhe-à. Há várias empresas portuguesas (mesmo pme não é só a Sonae…) presentes com sucesso nos mercados de dezenas de países de três, quatro ou cinco continentes. Dessas, sobretudo das tecnológicas, quase nenhuma consegue penetrar no blindado mercado espanhol… E quando penetram há que ver em que condições e em que quadro!

Bessa poderá ser um grande economista da FEP, mas na prática a teoria é outra… E de empresas e de estratégia empresarial o homem não percebe mesmo nada! À “escala ibérica” os Bessas desapareceriam… essa seria, aliás, a única vantagem de tal escala, mas seria como matar moscas usando as bombas “margaridas” da US Air Force… Desaparecia a mosca e a cidade onde ela estava!

IRAQUE: PONTO DA SITUAÇÃO

Muito interessante análise da recente evolução extraordinária e ponto da situação diplomática e estratégica, entre os “major powers with intense interest in the future of Iraq: the United States, Iran and Saudi Arábia”, neste Verão 2007, pela sempre bem informada Stratfor:

“The Major Diplomatic and

Strategic Evolution in Iraq

By George Friedman

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker met Aug. 6 with Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi Qomi and Iraqi National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie. Separately, a committee of Iranian, Iraqi and U.S. officials held its first meeting on Iraqi security, following up on an agreement reached at a July ambassadorial-level meeting.

The U.S. team was headed by Marcie Ries, counselor for political and military affairs at the embassy in Baghdad. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who handles Iraq for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, led the Iranian team. A U.S. Embassy spokesman described the talks as "frank and serious," saying they "focused, as agreed, on security problems in Iraq." Generally, "frank and serious" means nasty, though they probably did get down to the heart of the matter. The participants agreed to hold a second meeting, which means this one didn't blow up.

Longtime Stratfor readers will recall that we have been tracing these Iranian-American talks from the back-channel negotiations to the high-level publicly announced talks, and now to this working group on security. A multilateral regional meeting on Iraq's future was held March 10 in Baghdad, followed by a regional meeting May 4 in Egypt. Then there were ambassadorial-level meetings in Baghdad on May 28 and July 24. Now, not quite two weeks later, the three sides have met again.

That the discussions were frank and serious shouldn't surprise anyone. That they continue in spite of obvious deep tensions between the parties is, in our view, extremely significant. The prior ambassadorial talk lasted about seven hours. The Aug. 6 working group session lasted about four hours. These are not simply courtesy calls. The parties are spending a great deal of time talking about something.

This is not some sort of public relations stunt either. First, neither Washington nor Tehran would bother to help the other's public image. Second, neither side's public image is much helped by these talks anyway. This is the "Great Satan" talking to one-half of what is left of the "Axis of Evil." If ever there were two countries that have reason not to let the world know they are meeting, it is these two. Yet, they are meeting, and they have made the fact public.

The U.S. media have not ignored these meetings, but they have not treated them as what they actually are -- an extraordinary diplomatic and strategic evolution in Iraq. Part of the reason is that the media take their cues from the administration about diplomatic processes. If the administration makes a big deal out of the visit of the Icelandic fisheries minister to Washington, the media will treat it as such. If the administration treats multilevel meetings between Iran and the United States on the future of Iraq in a low-key way, then low-key it is. The same is true for the Iranians, whose media are more directly managed. Iran does not want to make a big deal out of these meetings, and therefore they are not portrayed as significant.

It is understandable that neither Washington nor Tehran would want to draw undue attention to the talks. The people of each country view the other with intense hostility. We are reminded of the political problems faced by Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and U.S. President Richard Nixon when their diplomatic opening became public. The announcement of Nixon's visit to China was psychologically stunning in the United States; it was less so in China only because the Chinese controlled the emphasis placed on the announcement. Both sides had to explain to their publics why they were talking to the mad dogs.

In the end, contrary to conventional wisdom, perception is not reality. The fact that the Americans and the Iranians are downplaying the talks, and that newspapers are not printing banner headlines about them, does not mean the meetings are not vitally important. It simply means that the conventional wisdom, guided by the lack of official exuberance, doesn't know what to make of these talks.

There are three major powers with intense interest in the future of Iraq: the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The United States, having toppled Saddam Hussein, has completely mismanaged the war. Nevertheless, a unilateral withdrawal would create an unacceptable situation in which Iran, possibly competing with Turkey in the North, would become the dominant military power in the region and would be in a position to impose itself at least on southern Iraq -- and potentially all of it. Certainly there would be resistance, but Iran has a large military (even if it is poorly equipped), giving it a decided advantage in controlling a country such as Iraq.

In addition, Iran is not nearly as casualty-averse as the United States. Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that cost it about a million casualties. The longtime Iranian fear has been that the United States will somehow create a pro-American regime in Baghdad, rearm the Iraqis and thus pose for Iran round two of what was its national nightmare. It is no accident that the day before these meetings, U.S. sources speculated about the possible return of the Iraqi air force to the Iraqis. Washington was playing on Tehran's worst nightmare.

Saudi Arabia's worst nightmare would be watching Iran become the dominant power in Iraq or southern Iraq. It cannot defend itself against Iran, nor does it want to be defended by U.S. troops on Saudi soil. The Saudis want Iraq as a buffer zone between Iran and their oil fields. They opposed the original invasion, fearing just this outcome, but now that the invasion has taken place, they don't want Iran as the ultimate victor. The Saudis, therefore, are playing a complex game, both supporting Sunni co-religionists and criticizing the American presence as an occupation -- yet urgently wanting U.S. troops to remain.

The United States wants to withdraw, though it doesn't see a way out because an outright unilateral withdrawal would set the stage for Iranian domination. At the same time, the United States must have an endgame -- something the next U.S. president will have to deal with.

The Iranians no longer believe the United States is capable of creating a stable, anti-Iranian, pro-American government in Baghdad. Instead, they are terrified the United States will spoil their plans to consolidate influence within Iraq. So, while they are doing everything they can to destabilize the regime, they are negotiating with Washington. The report that three-quarters of U.S. casualties in recent weeks were caused by "rogue" Shiite militia sounds plausible. The United States has reached a level of understanding with some nonjihadist Sunni insurgent groups, many of them Baathist. The Iranians do not want to see this spread -- at least not unless the United States first deals with Tehran. The jihadists, calling themselves al Qaeda in Iraq, do not want this either, and so they have carried out a wave of assassinations of those Sunnis who have aligned with the United States, and they have killed four key aides to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a key Shiite figure.

If this sounds complicated, it is. The United States is fighting Sunnis and Shia, making peace with some Sunnis and encouraging some Shia to split off -- all the time waging an offensive against most everyone. The Iranians support many, but not all, of the Shiite groups in Iraq. In fact, many of the Iraqi Shia have grown quite wary of the Iranians. And for their part, the Saudis are condemning the Americans while hoping they stay -- and supporting Sunnis who might or might not be fighting the Americans.

The situation not only is totally out of hand, but the chance that anyone will come out of it with what they really want is slim. The United States probably will not get a pro-American government and the Iranians probably will not get to impose their will on all or part of Iraq. The Saudis, meanwhile, are feeling themselves being sucked into the Sunni quagmire.

This situation is one of the factors driving the talks

By no means out of any friendliness, a mutual need is emerging. No one is in control of the situation. No one is likely to get control of the situation in any long-term serious way. It is in the interests of the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia that the Iraq situation stabilize, simply because they cannot predict the outcome -- and the worst-case scenario for each is too frightening to contemplate.

None of the three powers can bring the situation under control. Even by working together, the three will be unable to completely stabilize Iraq and end the violence. But by working together they can increase security to the point that none of their nightmare scenarios comes true. In return, the United States will have to do without a pro-American government in Baghdad and the Iranians will have to forgo having an Iraqi satellite.

Hence, we see a four-hour meeting of Iranian and U.S. security experts on stabilizing the situation in Iraq. Given the little good will between the two countries, defining roles and missions in a stabilization program will require frank and serious talks indeed. Ultimately, however, there is sufficient convergence of interests that holding these talks makes sense.

The missions are clear. The Iranian task will be to suppress the Shiite militias that are unwilling to abide by an agreement -- or any that oppose Iranian domination. Their intelligence in this area is superb and their intelligence and special operations teams have little compunction as to how they act. The Saudi mission will be to underwrite the cost of Sunni acceptance of a political compromise, as well as a Sunni war against the jihadists. Saudi intelligence in this area is pretty good and, while the Saudis do have compunctions, they will gladly give the intelligence to the Americans to work out the problem. The U.S. role will be to impose a government in Baghdad that meets Iran's basic requirements, and to use its forces to grind down the major insurgent and militia groups. This will be a cooperative effort -- meaning whacking Saudi and Iranian friends will be off the table.

No one power can resolve the security crisis in Iraq -- as four years of U.S. efforts there clearly demonstrate. But if the United States and Iran, plus Saudi Arabia, work together -- with no one providing cover for or supplies to targeted groups -- the situation can be brought under what passes for reasonable control in Iraq. More important for the three powers, the United States could draw down its troops to minimal levels much more quickly than is currently being discussed, the Iranians would have a neutral, nonaggressive Iraq on their western border and the Saudis would have a buffer zone from the Iranians. The buffer zone is the key, because what happens in the buffer zone stays in the buffer zone.

The talks in Baghdad are about determining whether there is a way for the United States and Iran to achieve their new mutual goal. The question is whether their fear of the worst-case scenario outweighs their distrust of each other. Then there is the matter of agreeing on the details -- determining the nature of the government in Baghdad, which groups to protect and which to target, how to deal with intelligence sharing and so on.

These talks can fail in any number of ways. More and more, however, the United States and Iran are unable to tolerate their failure. The tremendous complexity of the situation has precluded either side from achieving a successful outcome. They now have to craft the minimal level of failure they can mutually accept.

These talks not only are enormously important but they also are, in some ways, more important than the daily reports on combat and terrorism. If this war ends, it will end because of negotiations like these. ”

OS HORRORES DA CHINA

VISTOS PELO L'EXPRESS

Poluição, corrupção, nepotismo, fortes tensões... Eis o que o L' Express descobre ao inquirir no terreno sobre a realidade do organizador dos próximos Jogos Olimpicos, Pequim 2008. As traseiras do mal chamado "milagre chinês" são, de facto, uma espécie de pátio dos horrores...

" JO DE PÉKIN
L'envers du miracle Chinois 

A un an, jour pour jour, des Jeux Olympiques de Pékin, la Chine se prépare à offrir, à coup de cérémonies officielles, son meilleur profil au reste du monde. Pourtant l'incroyable success story économique dissimule une réalité beaucoup moins reluisante: pollution, corruption, népotisme, tensions... Notre enquête. " Continua  Aqui

Entretanto, o  China Confidential  denuncia o irrespirável ambiente da China e a continuação da sistemática violação dos Direitos Humanos pelo governo de Pequim:

"Some Chinese Cities Have World's Worst Air

Chinese officials are still seething over a July report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that said air pollution in some of China's cities had reached the world's worst levels.

In June, the Beijing clean air index met city health criteria on just 15 days, nine days fewer than the same month the previous year, as well as the lowest number in seven years.

Joint research by Chinese and Japanese academicians reveals that Beijing's annual average density of soot particles from car exhaust is about six times higher than Tokyo.

Air pollution in the Chinese capital is similar to early-1970s Japan, when environmental contamination became a serious social problem.

" Human Rights Watch: No Progress in China

A dire human rights record and a renewed crackdown on media freedom may spoil China's hopes of a successful “coming out party” at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

A year ahead of the August 8, 2008 opening ceremonies, the China shows no substantive progress in addressing long-standing human rights concerns. Instead, apparently more worried about political stability, Beijing is tightening its grip on domestic human rights defenders, grassroots activists and media to choke off any possible expressions of dissent ahead of the Games.

“Instead of a pre-Olympic ‘Beijing spring’ of greater freedom and tolerance of dissent, we are seeing the gagging of dissidents, a crackdown on activists, and attempts to block independent media coverage,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The government seems afraid that its own citizens will embarrass it by speaking out about political and social problems, but China’s leaders apparently don’t realize authoritarian crackdowns are even more embarrassing.”

China has a well-documented history of serious human rights abuses, including widespread torture, censorship of the media and internet, controls on religious freedom, and repression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang.

In addition, China continues to lead the world in executions. The government classifies the number of people executed as a state secret, but it is believed that China executes many more people than the rest of the world combined each year. Most trials are deeply flawed, as the accused often do not have access to adequate defense counsel, trials are usually closed to the public, evidence is often obtained through torture, and the appellate process lacks needed safeguards. China’s courts lack independence, as they remain controlled by the government and ruling Chinese Communist Party.

But the staging of the Olympics is exacerbating problems of forced evictions, migrant labor rights abuses, and the use of house arrests to silence political opponents. The government is continuing its crackdown on lawyers, human rights defenders and activists who dedicate themselves to rule of law and the exposure of rights abuses. Fear of citizen activism has led to government obstruction of local activists and grassroots organizations working to stem China’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Fears of harm to China’s national image have even led Chinese officials to stop prominent activists from leaving the country. Among them, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan, a husband-and-wife team of human rights activists, have been clamped under house arrest and travel restrictions since May on unsubstantiated suspicions of “harming state security.”

The victims of government retribution against perceived “troublemakers” often include those who devote themselves to defending some of China’s most marginalized and vulnerable citizens.

Chen Guangcheng, a blind, self-educated lawyer who documented abuses of China’s family planning law, was convicted in August 2006 of instigating an attack on government offices in a sham trial in which his lawyers were physically attacked and then detained by police to prevent them from attending.

Gao Zhisheng, an outspoken advocate of the rights of human rights abusers said in April 2007 that he agreed to write a confession to charges of sedition leveled at him in December 2006 only after he had been tortured and security officials had threatened his wife and children.

“Political repression is not in keeping with the behavior of a responsible power and Olympic host,” said Adams. “The Chinese government shouldn’t waste this unique opportunity to use the 2008 Games to demonstrate to the world it is serious about improving the rights situation in China.”

Human Rights Watch said that China’s close relationship with dictatorships and rights- abusing governments in places like Sudan, Burma, Cambodia and Zimbabwe will also come under close scrutiny in the coming year.

With one year to go before the Olympics launch, “The starting gun has been fired on the assessment of China’s commitment to rights at home and abroad,” said Adams. “Just as Chinese citizens will be rooting for their athletes to win medals, we are rooting for the Chinese government to move up in the league tables on rights protection.”

More background on major areas for human rights reform in the Olympic run-up:

1. Forced evictions and school closures. The construction of facilities for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing has involved forced evictions of thousands of citizens in and around Beijing, often without adequate compensation or access to new housing. The pre-Olympic “clean-up” of Beijing has resulted in the closure of dozens of officially unregistered schools for the children of migrant workers.

2. Labor rights. Thousands of migrant workers employed on Olympic and other construction sites across Beijing do not receive legally mandated pay and benefits including labor insurance and days off, and are often compelled to do dangerous work without adequate safeguards.

3. Repression of ethnic minorities. China continues to use the “war on terrorism” to justify policies to eradicate the “three evil forces” – terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism – allegedly prevalent among Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Uighurs who express “separatist” tendencies are routinely sentenced to quick, secret and summary trials, sometimes accompanied by mass sentencing rallies. The death penalty is common. In Tibet, Chinese authorities still view the Dalai Lama, in exile in India since 1959, as central to the effort to separate Tibet from China and view Tibetan Buddhist belief as supportive of these efforts. Suspected “separatists,” many of whom come from monasteries and nunneries, are routinely imprisoned.

4. Religious freedom. China does not recognize freedom of religion outside the state-controlled system in which all congregations, mosques, temples, churches and monasteries must register. The government also curtails religious freedom by designating and repressing some groups as “cults,” such as the Falungong.

5. Death penalty and executions. The government does not publicize figures for the death penalty, but it is mandated for no fewer than 68 crimes. Though the exact number is a state secret, it is estimated that as many as 10,000 executions are carried out each year.

5. HIV/AIDS. Measures to address China’s HIV/AIDS crisis are hampered as local officials and security forces continue to obstruct efforts by activists and grassroots organizations to contribute to prevention and education efforts and to organize care-giving.

6. House arrests. Numerous human rights defenders and government critics have been harassed, detained and subject to house arrest. If today’s pattern holds, a pre-Olympic clampdown in the weeks and months before the Games is likely.

7. Foreign policy. China’s close relations with countries linked to severe, ongoing human rights violations are also a serious source of concern. China maintains relations with and provides aid to regimes including Sudan, the site of egregious human rights violations in Darfur, and Burma, whose military junta violently suppresses civilians. China has also not ratified the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, which it signed in 1998.

Plano B da Opus

O "Código Caixa"

A operação "Código BCP" pode correr mal. Pode escapar ao controlo da Opus e terminar num caos ou terminar com o banco e os seus activos nas mãos de raiders. Num tal caso, em caso de insucesso na operação "Código BCP", e posto que a Opus não sabe viver sem bancos, qual é o plano B da companhia do padre Escrivá? Tomem nota,  o plano B, certamente, existe e, certamente, chama-se CGD, isso mesmo, Caixa Geral de Depósitos...

A Caixa já era o grande financiador (frequentemente, contra toda a racionalidade de gestão dos seus próprios interesses...) do BCP, já estava no radar da Opus, agora, pode chegar o momento de alguns passos em frente... Por mim, aposto que nos próximos meses, o banco de Carlos Santos Ferreira vai entrar em zona de turbulência. Comece-se a estudar os timings, as datas de final do mandato, as equipas em preparação, as pressões para manter Carlos Santos Ferreira, os que querem entrar, os que a Opus se prepara para afastar...

O que teria mais graça aparente (mas que realmente não tem qualquer carácter inédito) seria que a Opus para garantir o êxito deste plano B, o "Código Caixa", fizesse uma aliança com a reactivada rede do KGB (agora muito under control de Putine), que há muito virou o olhar guloso para o edifício da João XXI (uma avenida também com nome de Papa!)... Claro que a pergunta é óbvia: com toda esta agitação perigosíssima (para os equilíbrios financeiros e económicos do País posto que Caixa e Bcp hegemonizam o sistema financeiro português), que andam a fazer os serviços tutelados pelo ministro Rui Pereira? Ao menos têm capacidade para saber o que se passa e se prepara? E mantêm o ministro informado?

Como é que José Sócrates, Pedro Silva Pereira e Armando Vara poderão reagir é o que se verá. Vai uma aposta...? E quanto a Dan Brown, depois do  milagre dos computadores, ou anda distraído ou já está, clandestino, em Lisboa…

ROCARD, BAUER, FOUKS E VALLS

uma foto histórica do ex-grão-mestre do GOF, do patrão de Euro RSCG, do antigo primeiro-ministro Michel Rocard e do próximo premier secrétaire do PSF Manuel Vals... O Jean-Claude devia estar a fazer a foto.

Fotografia do Verão de 1985, há 22 anos, portanto, o primeiro-ministro Michel Rocard acompanhado da então sua guarda pretoriana - Alain Bauer, Manuel Valls e Stephane Fouks... Na foto, só falta mesmo o comandante da guarda (talvez ocupado a fazer a foto), o director de gabinete do primeiro-ministro, o Jean-Claude Petitdemange... Manuel Valls, aqui à direita de Rocard, parece estar agora a começar a sua campanha para conquistar o PS, depois de ter recusado um assento no governo de Sarkozy. Força, Manuel, bonne chance!

SISTEMA DE VELA ESTRATÉGICA

Catalães, Franceses e Marroquinos marcam encontro em Marraketch

Em Marrakech e já em Novembro, sob patrocínio da Universidade de Marrakech (bem à frente da universidade portuguesa...), vão ter lugar as Jornadas de Vela Estratégica, Científica e Tecnológica, organizadas pela Universidade Politécnica da Catalunha, pelo Instituto de Pesquisa em Informática de Toulouse e pela Sociedade Francesa de Bibliometria Aplicada... Sem alardes e nem discursos para a plateia, o vizinho de baixo desenvolve mesmo o seu "choque tecnológico". O "Aujourd'hui" dá mais pormenores (embora não muitos... et pour cause!):

« Des recherches sur le système de veille stratégique

" Marrakech abritera les cinquièmes journées de la veille stratégique scientifique et technologique du 21 au 25 novembre 2007. Organisée par l’Université Polytechnique de Catalogne (UPC), l'Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) et la Société française de bibliométrie appliquée, cette manifestation a pour objectif de présenter des travaux de recherche et de développement industriel particulièrement innovants dans le domaine des systèmes de Veille stratégique, scientifique et technologique. L’évènement est placé sous le patronage de l’université de Marrakech associée à différentes entités scientifiques françaises. A citer la Mairie de Toulouse,  le Conseil régional Midi-Pyrénées,  Inforsid,  l’Université Polytechnique de Catalogne,  l'Université St Jérôme de Marseille,  l’Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse et l’Université de Marne la Vallée. »

SOBRE SWINGERS E CRIMES DE VERÃO

no  "Macroscópio"

“ (…) Estas linhas não se reportam a esse caso concreto, mas inscrevem-se num quadro mais alargado que aqui simulamos para efeitos meramente especulativos e operacionais, como se mais um exercício da razão se tratasse.

Dito isto, e porque o crime sempre preferiu a sombra à luz, facto que forçou os criminólogos a privilegiarem a descrição, imaginemos agora a seguinte moldura de relações humanas que se encontra de férias em busca de prazer.

Vejamos este cenário sinistro (mas plausível): três casais, todos adeptos e praticantes de swinger (intimidades sexuais entre casais diferentes que trocam de parceiros em tempo real) resolvem iniciar essa prática num espaço comum. Entre eles há já animosidades anteriores, mitigadas com sentimentos complexos de ódio e prazer. Poderá, nesse grupo, haver acertos de contas antigos por fazer, recriminações, ressentimentos, ódios e rancores. Coisas do passado que só eles sabem..

Em rigor, essa prática sexual-grupal, pode representar uma terapia para acalmar esses ressentimentos, mas também pode servir para atear esse fogo e essas pulsões sexuais que existem entre os elementos desses casais, já velhos conhecidos doutros carnavais.

Imaginemos agora uma pequena surpresa: um dos filhos desses casais, acordado pelos barulhos provocados pela prática sexual-grupal, acorda e dirige-se para a sala onde essa actividade tem lugar, surpreendendo tudo e todos. Vamos também admitir que essa menina não é filha legítima de um dos casais, mas filha de outro pai - que no momento também se encontra alí, em plena carburação sexual - para desequilíbrio e desgoverno de todos.

Num ápice, aquilo que supostamente deveria ser um momento de puro gozo sexual, uma órgia romana com uvas e tudo, transforma-se num inferno, num desgoverno de emoções plurilocalizadas, sem que ninguém ao certo consiga raciocinar. Homens e mulheres em transe são piores do que adolescentes alcoolizados conduzindo o carro dos pais.

Um desses elementos masculinos, e porque o crime é sempre uma paixão levada ao extremo, deita as mãos a essa miúda (que interrompeu o seu momento de prazer supremo, registe-se que algumas dessas pessoas têm também disfunções sexuais, o que os torna mais agressivos e violentos) e joga-a frenéticamente conta a parede, batendo com a nuca essa criança acaba por morrer, diante daquela órgia desgovernada e com as pulsões ao rubro.

Repito que esta descrição não se reporta ao caso que está a chocar o mundo há meses a esta parte, mas poderá já ter acontecido mais vezes noutros casos sem que as autoridades disso tenham dado conta.

O que pretendo significar é o seguinte: o homem cede sempre à tentação da violência movido por ímpetos passionais (…)

 

E quando o homem não consegue fazer Justiça, convoca-se Deus, mas quando Este também é surdo e nada faz, o que nos cabe fazer?!

 

PS: Por vezes, pela pátria e pelos altos valores de Humanidade e de Justiça em que (ainda) acreditamos, teremos de dar uma "mãosinha" à PJ que parece anda perdida na selva que ela própria criou. Está na hora de limpar a lente, polir a razão e deixar de ser lerdinho das ideias. A investigação sempre foi para gente inteligente e perspicaz e não para mangas-de-alpaca, esses já colonizaram os partidos.

 

posted by RPM at Terça-feira, Agosto 07, 2007 links to this post ”

COMO A COREIA DO NORTE

APAGA O RESTO DO MUNDO

o depoimento espantoso de Shin Dong-hyok

São as declarações políticas mais espantosas que alguma vez li. As mais reveladoras. As mais genuínas. As mais didácticas. As mais espantosas. Nada melhor do que lê-las. Só uma coisa, antes disso, como é o nome daquele alarve que considera a Coreia do Norte um paraíso democrático...?

C’est incroyable, mais c’est ainsi : le nucléaire est redevenu tendance. Mieux (ou pire) même, certains n’hésitent plus à ranger l’atome parmi les énergies «vertes», voire «renouvelables», ce qui fait rire jaune les Verts de tous horizons, notamment en Allemagne où les Grünen avaient, à la fin des années 90, réussi le tour de force, accident de Tchernobyl aidant, de pousser le pays à se désengager du nucléaire.

A GLÓRIA DO MARINHEIRO GLENN

  MCDUFFFIE, EM AGOSTO DE 1945

Agosto de 1945, momento da rendição japonesa aos americanos, o marinheiro Glenn McDuffie está a entrar no metro em Times Square quando ouve a notícia da rendição. Volta a sair ou como ele diz "fiquei tão feliz que saí para a rua. Quando vi a enfermeira, corri para ela e beijei-a. Depois do beijo, voltei para o metro e segui para Brooklyn"...

Hoje, com 80 anos e doente,  o marinheiro McDuffie, com o seu boné da US Navy na cabeça, mostra nostálgico as suas recordações "desse belo tempo"... A foto, de Alfred Eisenstaedt, foi capa da Life, correu mundo e ficou celebérrima.

O HAMBURGER DE JOE BERARDO

homem sempre prático e pragmático, Berardo não perdeu tempo, depois das avarias na informática do BCP, e lá foi (abençoado por Deus e seus banqueiros) papar o seu hamburger... A foto é picada do Diário Económico.

QUEM TE AVISA (A TEMPO)... TEU AMIGO É!

pequena mas sincera homenagem à lucidez, à clareza e frontalidade de Vasco Pulido Valente

Código BCP

DEUS QUER, A OPUS SONHA, A AVARIA NASCE

síntese possível do golpe tecnológico ontem no BCP

Como poderiam resistir os computadores à vontade de Deus em proteger Paulo Teixeira da Cruz, após todas as rezas da Opus? Não podiam... E foram-se. Foram-se abaixo. Só quem nunca leu a Biblia (Velho Testamento, sobretudo) é que não está a par destes divinas golpadas tecnológicas (no Velho Testamento o sol chega a parar para garantir a luz necessária à vitória dos protegidos de Deus...). 

E quem manda os "berardos" e outros "amorins" meter-se com os "banqueiros de Deus" e aí meter o seu dinheiro? Só Deus, certamente, e eles vão descobrir que são apenas instrumentos em mãos divinas... E os simples mortais comprarem acções do BCP? Bom, estão a fazer, certamente, a vontade de Deus e vê-las-ão todas descontadas a bem dos seus pecados...

E o Vaticano que diz a isto...? Certamente, apoiará Castela (velho, mesmo velho, este eixo Roma-Castela que tantos estragos já fez nesta península...), a Castela praça-forte dos banqueiros de Deus...

Qual Dan Brown, qual P2, qual ponte de Londres, qual Marcinkus, tudo isso eram pequenas patetices ou ensaios... A peça é mesmo o BCP! Dan Brown que compre já o seu bilhete para Lisboa e reserve um hotel para várias semanas... Verá, o êxito será estrondoso. O "Código BCP" arrasará todos os records de vendas... 

O RACISMO ÀS AVESSAS

.

in thisislondon.co.uk

O racismo do “anti-racismo” pode tornar-se o ácido mais corrosivo da coesão social e dar origem a fenómenos e reacções incontrolados, senão incontroláveis. O frequente “non-sense” do “politicamente correcto” (a injustiça que ele comporta) pode, portanto e de um momento para o outro, criar as maiores… incorrecções. Para o perceber, veja-se este caso reportado por  “This Is London”  (sendo que dá vontade de perguntar se é mesmo “London”…) e que dá xeque-mate ao "p.c." multiculturalista:

“ English girl barred from Government job...because she is wrong kind of white

A teenage science student has been banned from applying for a training programme with the Environment Agency because she is white and English.

The recruitment agency handling the scheme told Abigail Howarth, 18, that there was no point in her submitting an application because of her ethnic background.

But bizarrely she could have applied if she had been white and Welsh, Scottish or Irish.

Abigail, who wanted to join the Agency's flood management programme, saw an advert in a local newspaper offering positions in the Anglia region where she lives, complete with a £13,000-a-year tax-free grant.

It made no mention of the ban on white English applicants, merely noting that candidates from ethnic minorities, such as "Asian, Indian' and "White Other, e.g. Irish, Welsh, Scottish', were encouraged to put themselves forward.

Abigail, of Little Straughton, Bedfordshire, said: "I was really disappointed. To be told being "White English" ruled me out in my home county shocked me. I know why there are positive action training schemes to assist those who are genuinely discriminated against but when it's broken down to this level it seems crazy to me.

"I really wanted to work for the agency and I was very excited - followed by feeling very disappointed.

"I would not have minded had I been beaten for the position by somebody better able than me."

Abigail, who is awaiting the results of A-Levels in environmental science, geography and geology, emailed PATH National Ltd, the company handling applications.

She asked: "Am I correct in assuming that as I am English (White) I need not apply as the preference is for the minorities you have listed, or can I apply anyway?'

Three days later, PATH recruitment officer, Bola Odusi, replied: "Thank you for your enquiry unfortunately the traineeship opportunity in <\[>sic] targeted towards the ethnic minority group to address their under representations in the professions under the Race Relations Act amended 2000."

Such a policy may breach Race Relations legislation as employers must prove ethnic groups are under-represented before using positive discrimination strategies.

The Environment Agency admitted it had 'no evidence that white Welsh, Scottish or Irish workers were under-represented' in the Anglia region.

South West Bedfordshire Tory MP Andrew Selous said: "I think this is complete nonsense and the Environment Agency should be taking the best people, irrespective of their background.

"This is obviously borne out of some idiotic quota system. Abigail should have been able to apply and been judged on her own merits. I will raise this when I have a meeting with the Environment Agency next month."

PATH National's organisational development manager, Mary McDowell, said: "The "White Welsh", "White Irish" and "White Scottish" is a technicality in law - if they are a minority, they are entitled to places on these schemes - they are not part of the majority group, which is "White English".

"The "White English" in this area are the majority group and hence could not apply.

"That is the way the law is laid. This is a chance for people who might be less employable to gain experience, just experience. Public-sector organisations have a duty to ensure they reflect the make-up of the society they serve."

The Environment Agency says 387 of its 12,000 workers claim BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) status. A spokesman added: "The Commission for Racial Equality has confirmed we are acting legally."

A CRE spokeswoman said: "The Commission will be checking with the Environment Agency to clarify the current situation regarding their positive action initiatives.

"Positive action can only be used to encourage or train particular under-represented groups."

Reader views (31)                                          Add your view | Show all  ”

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’

grande bernarda! afinal, os ecologistas são uns preguiçosos que não sabem matemática (em Portugal, de resto, isso não admira nem é novidade dado o sistema de ensino que os iluminados impuseram há uns trinta anos às criancinhas e que só serve para as tornar analfabetas encartadas e impedir a ascensão social dos "mais desfavorecidos" e garantir assim os privilégios das "élites fidalgas" e impedir o aparecimento de qualquer meritocracia....). Como não sabem matemática, não sabem fazer contas um pouco mais complexas. Não sabendo matemática também não sabem raciocinar e muito menos integrar as várias componentes de um problema. Quando olham para qualquer coisa, o seu olhar deixa de fora a maior parte das componentes da questão e acabam por só dizer disparates, como agora o Times bem mostra e demonstra:

VAI AÍ GRANDE GUERRA

NAS "CONTRAPARTIDAS"

Helena Loureiro, a adjunta de Manuel Pinho que foi demitida por alegadamente se dizer "vice-presidente da Comissão Permanente de Contrapartidas (CPC)", um cargo inexistente no estatuto da CPC, resultante do novo quadro legal daquela "comissão, foi realmente vítima de uma guerra de lobbys na área das "contrapartidas", área que vale milhares de milhões.

A historieta do cartão de "vice-presidente" foi uma armadilha para uma naive, a querer jogar e a intrometer-se num tabuleiro de mais de três mil milões de euros e povoado por tubarões dos mais malignos...

Helena Loureiro tinha sido indicada para vice-presidente da CPC por um homem do BES, Manuel Pinho, e tinha-se tornado, ao que dizem as nossas fbi (fontes bem informadas) uma empata negócios da ESCOM, uma empresa do BES... E como era ela que coordenava o Grupo Técnico de Apoio (GTA) que acompanha e monitoriza os vários programas de contrapartidas geridos pela CPC ou seja cinco grandes contratos: submarinos, viaturas blindadas, torpedos, aviões de transporte C295 e modernização dos caças F16... Pinho deixou-a cair!

Há mesmo quem diga que a senhora tinha sido colocada na CPC para "controlar" o então presidente, Rui Neves, um homem de inquestionável e inquebrantável dedicação ao interesse público. Conmo escreve o "Correio da Manhã", a ex-adjunta de Pinho é apontada por várias fontes como “séria e rigorosa” e de uma “integridade e impecáveis qualidades morais”, como diz o actual presidente da CPC, embaixador Pedro Catarino.

A área das compras da defesa esteve durante as ultimas décadas submetida à lógica das "comissões", num esquema de matriz semelhante à de qualquer país sub-desenvolvido de África ou da América Latina. O "complexo neo-corporativo e salazarento" reinava sobre os milhões das compras a fornecedores estrangeiros, aptravés de esquemas de intermediação e de representação... Nos últimos anos, a essa lógica terceiro-mundista, uma outra se tem imposto: a das parcerias, transferências de tecnologia e contrapartidas. É a forma do País transformar em investimento a despesa com a Defesa e fazer o tecido económico português beneficiar disso. Mas esta evolução não agrada mesmo nada ao "complexo" que tudo faz para não ser afastado... Desenrola-se, portanto, toda uma surda guerra de retaguarda e de defesa de posições e dos milhões.

Entretanto, com a saída de Helena Loureiro, o actual presidente, embaixador Pedro Catarino, ficou sózinho na "Comissão" pois os restantes lugares previstos na lei, publicada em Diário da República a 7 de Agosto de 2006, ainda esperam que os senhores ministros tenham tempo para indicar os nomes dos vogais que lhes corresponde apresentar. Nestes últimos doze meses ainda não tiveram tempo... De facto, mais de três mil milhões de euros é um naco que o "complexo neo-corporativo e salazarento" não pode deixar de escapar e para o abocanhar não deixará nada por fazer do que considerar necessário...

Esta demissão acaba por constituir uma excelente oportunidade de José Sócrates dar um murro na mesa e tratar do assunto... Afinal, parece que só ele está interessado em que a CPC funcione e não os seus ministros!

Entrevista ao embaixador do Irão

UM GRANDE TRABALHO

DE MÁRCIA RODRIGUES

Ela vestiu o necessário para entrar na toca do lobo (camuflou-se...), enfrentou-o e, como se pode ver, não se calou, nem o deixou conduzir as coisas, fez-lhe uma faena, colocou-o onde o queria e, com um sorriso, deu-lhe a estocada fatal... Veja o vídeo, para perceber como alguns opinion-makers e certos bloggers podem ser, realmente, uns ceguetas patetas:

Lembrete a certos "distraídos": o território de uma embaixada é, convencionalmente, território do país que ela representa. Portanto, a Márcia estava... no Irão.

Nota final: E como era gentil o seu sorriso e como o preto fica bem a esta loura inteligente e de coragem... Good shot, Márcia... Parabéns!

Márcia Rodrigues, Repórter

UMA GRANDE JORNALISTA 

DE CORAGEM E INTELIGÊNCIA

COISAS NO VERÃO

O string de Bento XVI foi severamente censurado. Ninguém o vai ver, embora o Claro o mostre aqui mais abaixo. Começa a ser mania esta coisa da censura, começou com Alá e Maomé há uns meses e já vai no Papa e até os Bourbons de Madrid se passaram com o El Jueves (que sai à quarta...) por os cartoonizar numa pose pouco ortodoxa.

Enquanto esta tentação censória não se abate sobre os romances e outros livros, vale a pena ler  (embora melhor seja fazer...) as mulheres adúlteras... pelo menos, algumas. Cuidado com os entusiasmos!

A mulher desta promessa de amor impossível mostra sinais positivos. Levo-a não de férias, que não tenho, mas de fim de semana... E recomendo-a!

Se repararem bem e estudarem melhor, verão que a pose dela é muito salutar. De facto, as burkas, tchadors e outros véus causam o cancro. Falo a sério. E provocam ainda problemas de visão e várias outras maleitas, como problemas pulmunares e a asma.

Creio que os hábitos especiais dos talibans e outros que tais são a explicação para o facto de eles as quererem de burka: será essa a única maneira de eles as ouvirem gemer... com a asma, é claro, que quanto ao resto eles são mesmo "especiais".

Especial também, embora de outro modo, é a elegância do sr. dr. Júdice, o grande abastecedor deste estado em pareceres e estudos afins e para os fins considerados necessários. Muito considerados, aliás. Note-se, nestas suas declarações pescadas na "Única" do Expresso e aqui reproduzidas, o finíssimo recorte literário, muito Coimbra do século XVII. Um homem que escreve e se expressa asim tem toda a legitimidade para nos cobrar as centenas de milhões que ele cobra. Se isto é assim nas declarações públicas e (pensamos) gratuitas, o que será nos seus pareceres que vendidos a peso são muito mais caros que o ouro?!

 Coisas destas é que fazem a diferença. Marcam. Indicam uma educação esmerada. Um intelecto superior. Com gente desta categoria, com um tal tipo de gente abancada no lugar da élite, como é que Portugal poderia não ser o país tão desenvolvido que é...? Sim, como?! É esta gente que torna o nosso superior desenvolvimento numa autêntica fatalidade...

Abençoada pátria que tais júdices tem! E que elegância eles irradiam... E ainda ele revela "pulsões escatológicas" com Marques Mendes e Paulo Portas (seja lá isso o que fôr)! Em verdade vos digo que nenhum carroceiro faria melhor!

Também o olhar de Walter Veltroni, o António Costa de Roma e a fazer tudo para ser vizir no lugar do Romano Prodi, é de uma elegância infinita... Mas, se este Veltroni esconder "pulsões escatológicas", ao menos não é com Portas nem Mendes! E a senhora é, de resto, muito boa actriz!

E termino com uma nota refrescante, aquática e muito pintura naive, sem, porém, esquecer de referir que uma crica, em linguagem de marinheiro e de pescador, é uma pequena enseada... Pensavam em quê?

Bom Verão e boas coisas no Verão!

Gen. Patton &.... Patton's New

 Speech-Iraq & modern world

..

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GEOPOLÍTICA DA TURQUIA

analisada pela Stratfor

A Turquia tem de um lado a Europa e do outro o Médio Oriente, a norte o universo de hegemonia moscovita e abre-se a sul para o Mediterrâneo. É de dominância islâmica mas encerra lugares, vestígios e gentes que vêm dos primeiros tempos do cristianismo. É um estado unitário mas composto por um mosaico de povos. É um estado laico governado por prosélitos islâmicos "temperados" pela força e presença de umas Forças Armadas depositárias da herança do laicismo kemalista. Não é produtor de petróleo mas tem geografia (para pipe-lines) e controla as linhas de água que abastecem produtores de petróleo, como a Síria e outros. Fronteira do Iraque, partilha o problema curdo, que é uma das suas dores de cabeça permanentes. Análise da sempre muito bem informada Stratfor:

“ The Geopolitics of Turkey

By George Friedman

Rumors are floating in Washington and elsewhere that Turkey is preparing to move against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an anti-Turkish group seeking an independent Kurdistan in Turkey. One report, by Robert Novak in the Washington Post, says the United States is planning to collaborate with Turkey in suppressing the PKK in northern Iraq, an area the PKK has used as a safe-haven and launch pad to carry out attacks in Turkey.

The broader issue is not the PKK, but Kurdish independence. The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group divided among Turkey, Iran, Iraq and, to a small extent, Syria. The one thing all of these countries have agreed on historically is they have no desire to see an independent Kurdistan. Even though each has, on occasion, used Kurdish dissidents in other countries as levers against those countries, there always has been a regional consensus against a Kurdish state.

Therefore, the news that Turkey is considering targeting the PKK is part of the broader issue. The evolution of events in Iraq has created an area that is now under the effective governance of the Iraqi Kurds. Under most scenarios, the Iraqi Kurds will retain a high degree of autonomy. Under some scenarios, the Kurds in Iraq could become formally independent, creating a Kurdish state. Besides facing serious opposition from Iraq's Sunni and Shiite factions, that state would be a direct threat to Turkey and Iran, since it would become, by definition, the nucleus of a Kurdish state that would lay claim to other lands the Kurds regard as theirs.

This is one of the reasons Turkey was unwilling to participate in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Americans grew close to the Kurds in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, helping augment the power of an independent militia, the peshmerga, that allowed the Iraqi Kurds to carve out a surprising degree of independence within Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Turks were never comfortable with this policy and sent troops into Iraq in the 1990s to strike against the PKK and pre-empt any moves toward more extensive autonomy. Before the war started in 2003, however, the Turks turned down a U.S. offer to send troops into northern Iraq in exchange for allowing the United States to use Turkish territory to launch into Iraq. This refusal caused Turkey to lose a great deal of its mobility in the region.

The Turks, therefore, are tremendously concerned by the evolution of events in Iraq. Whether northern Iraq simply evolves into an autonomous region in a federal Iraq or becomes an independent state as Iraq disintegrates is almost immaterial. It will become a Kurdish homeland and it will exist on the Turkish border. And that, from the Turkish point of view, represents a strategic threat to Turkey.

Turkey, then, is flexing its muscles along the Iraqi border. Given that Turkey did not participate in the 2003 invasion, the American attitude toward Ankara has been complex, to say the least. On one hand, there was a sense of being let down by an old ally. On the other hand, given events in Iraq and U.S. relations with Iran and Syria, the United States was not in a position to completely alienate a Muslim neighbor of Iraq.

As time passed and the situation in Iraq worsened, the Americans became even less able to isolate Turkey. That is partly because its neutrality was important and partly because the United States was extremely concerned about Turkish reactions to growing Kurdish autonomy. For the Turks, this was a fundamental national security issue. If they felt the situation were getting out of hand in the Kurdish regions, they might well intervene militarily. At a time when the Kurds comprised the only group in Iraq that was generally pro-American, the United States could hardly let the Turks mangle them.

On the other hand, the United States was hardly in a position to stop the Turks. The last thing the United States wanted was a confrontation with the Turks in the North, for military as well as political reasons. Yet, the other last thing it wanted was for other Iraqis to see that the United States would not protect them.

Stated differently, the United States had no solution to the Turkish-Kurdish equation. So what the United States did was a tap dance -- by negotiating a series of very temporary solutions that kept the Turks from crossing the line and kept the Kurds intact. The current crisis is over the status of the PKK in northern Iraq and, to a great degree, over Turkish concerns that Iraqi Kurds will gain too much autonomy, not to mention over concerns about the future status of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The United States may well be ready to support the Turks in rooting out PKK separatists, but it is not prepared to force the Iraqi Kurds to give them up. So it will try to persuade them to give them up voluntarily. This negotiating process will buy time, though at this point the American strategy in Iraq generally has been reduced to buying time.

All of this goes beyond the question of Iraq or an independent Kurdistan. The real question concerns the position of Turkey as a regional power in the wake of the Iraq war. This is a vital question because of Iran. The assumption we have consistently made is that, absent the United States, Iran would become the dominant regional power and would be in a position, in the long term, to dominate the Arabian Peninsula, shifting not only the regional balance of power but also potentially the global balance as well.

That analysis assumes that Turkey will play the role it has played since World War I -- an insular, defensive power that is cautious about making alliances and then cautious within alliances. In that role, Turkey is capable of limited assertiveness, as against the Greeks in Cyprus, but is not inclined to become too deeply entangled in the chaos of the Middle Eastern equation -- and when it does become involved, it is in the context of its alliance with the United States.

That is not Turkey's traditional role. Until the fall of the Ottomans at the end of World War I, and for centuries before then, Turkey was both the dominant Muslim power and a major power in North Africa, Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Turkey was the hub of a multinational empire that as far back as the 15th century dominated the Mediterranean and Black seas. It was the economic pivot of three continents, facilitating and controlling the trading system of much of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Turkey's contraction over the past 90 years or so is not the normal pattern in the region, and had to do with the internal crisis in Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans, the emergence of French and British power in the Middle East, followed by American power and the Cold War, which locked Turkey into place. During the Cold War, Turkey was trapped between the Americans and Soviets, and expansion of its power was unthinkable. Since then, Turkey has been slowly emerging as a key power.

One of the main drivers in this has been the significant growth of the Turkish economy. In 2006, Turkey had the 18th highest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, and it has been growing at between 5 percent and 8 percent a year for more than five years. It ranks just behind Belgium and ahead of Sweden in GDP. It has the largest economy of any Muslim country -- including Saudi Arabia. And it has done this in spite of, or perhaps because of, not having been admitted to the European Union. While per capita GDP lags, it is total GDP that measures weight in the international system. China, for example, is 109th in per capita GDP. Its international power rests on it being fourth in total GDP.

Turkey is not China, but in becoming the largest Muslim economy, as well as the largest economy in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus and east to the Hindu Kush, Turkey is moving to regain its traditional position of primacy in the region. Its growth is still fragile and can be disrupted, but there is no question that it has become the leading regional economy, as well as one of the most dynamic. Additionally, Turkey's geographic position greatly enables it to become Europe's primary transit hub for energy supplies, especially at a time when Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on Russia.

This obviously has increased its regional influence. In the Balkans, for example, where Turkey historically has been a dominant power, the Turks have again emerged as a major influence over the region's two Muslim states -- and have managed to carve out for themselves a prominent position as regards other countries in the region as well. The country's economic dynamism has helped reorient some of the region away from Europe, toward Turkey. Similarly, Turkish economic influence can be felt elsewhere in the region, particularly as a supplement to its strategic relationship with Israel.

Turkey's problem is that in every direction it faces, its economic expansion is blocked by politico-military friction. So, for example, its influence in the Balkans is blocked by its long-standing friction with Greece. In the Caucasus, its friction with Armenia limits its ability to influence events. Tensions with Syria and Iraq block Syrian influence to the south. To the east, a wary Iran that is ideologically opposed to Turkey blocks Ankara's influence.

As Turkey grows, an interesting imbalance has to develop. The ability of Greece, Armenia, Syria, Iraq and Iran to remain hostile to Turkey decreases as the Turkish economy grows. Ideology and history are very real things, but so is the economic power of a dynamic economy. As important, Turkey's willingness to accept its highly constrained role indefinitely, while its economic -- and therefore political -- influence grows, is limited. Turkey's economic power, coupled with its substantial regional military power, will over time change the balance of power in each of the regions Turkey faces.

Not only does Turkey interface with an extraordinary number of regions, but its economy also is the major one in each of those regions, while Turkish military power usually is pre-eminent as well. When Turkey develops economically, it develops militarily. It then becomes the leading power -- in many regions. That is what it means to be a pivotal power.

In 2003, the United States was cautious with Turkey, though in the final analysis it was indifferent. It no longer can be indifferent. The United States is now in the process of planning the post-Iraq war era, and even if it does retain permanent bases in Iraq -- dubious for a number of reasons -- it will have to have a regional power to counterbalance Iran. Iran has always been aware of and cautious with Turkey, but never as much as now -- while Turkey is growing economically and doing the heavy lifting on the Kurds. Iran does not want to antagonize the Turks.

The United States and Iran have been talking -- just recently engaging in seven hours of formal discussions. But Iran, betting that the United States will withdraw from Iraq, is not taking the talks as seriously as it might. The United States has few levers to use against Iran. It is therefore not surprising that it has reached out to the biggest lever.

In the short run, Turkey, if it works with the United States, represents a counterweight to Iran, not only in general, but also specifically in Iraq. From the American point of view, a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq would introduce a major force native to the region that certainly would give Iran pause in its behavior in Iraq. This would mean the destruction of Kurdish hopes for independence, though the United States has on several past occasions raised and then dashed Kurdish hopes. In this sense, Novak's article makes a great deal of sense. The PKK would provide a reasonable excuse for a Turkish intervention in Iraq, both in the region and in Turkey. Anything that blocks the Kurds will be acceptable to the Turkish public, and even to Iran.

It is the longer run that is becoming interesting, however. If the United States is not going to continue counterbalancing Iran in the region, then it is in Turkey's interest to do so. It also is increasingly within Turkey's reach. But it must be understood that, given geography, the growth of Turkish power will not be confined to one direction. A powerful and self-confident Turkey has a geographical position that inevitably reflects all the regions that pivot around it.

For the past 90 years, Turkey has not played its historic role. Now, however, economic and politico-military indicators point to Turkey's slow reclamation of that role. The rumors about Turkish action against the PKK have much broader significance. They point to a changing role for Turkey -- and that will mean massive regional changes over time.”

"Congress Backs Tighter Rules on Lobbying

          TOP STORIES

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By JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE

The Senate approved a bill Thursday that would improve policing of the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists. (...)"  Continua Aqui

KYOTO E A COMISSÃO EUROPEIA

PROVOCAM REVOLTA NA EUROPA

A Letónia é o sexto estado da "Europa" a colocar a Comissão Europeia em tribunal por discordância radical sobre a forma de gerir as quotas de emissão de CO2... Hoje, na EuroActiv:

" Changement climatique

La Lettonie se joint aux révoltes contres les limites de CO2

Le petit Etat baltique est désormais le sixième Etat-membre à engager un recours en justice contre la Commission européenne, suite à sa décision de couper les allocations de quotas d'émission alloués par les Etats-membres à leurs entreprises sous le système européen d'échange de quotas d'émissions (ETS). "   Continua Aqui

A ler também:

LinksDossier:   Le système européen d'échange de quotas d'émissions (ETS) [FR]

News:   CO2 : La Hongrie envisage une action contre la Commission [FR]

News:   Plafonds de CO2 : Pologne et Rép. tchèque entament les poursuites [FR]

Sexo Tântrico com Ana Anes

Diz a  Ana   e pede que se divulgue: "Sem saber o que fazer nas quentes noites de Verão na cidade? Porque não tentar sexo tântrico? Com as Sensações Periódicas, claro está! A fechar com chave de ouro esta segunda série das Sensações Periódicas, vamos ter a sessão sobre Sexo Tântrico. Aquele que serve para se ter sexo por horas e horas e horas... Ah é isso que pensam sobre o sexo tântrico? Então precisam mesmo de vir assistir connosco e aprender algumas coisas interessantes...

IMPOSTOS OU A DRENAGEM DA RIQUEZA

A evolução (sustentada ou seja muito mal sustentada...) das curvas do PIB e da receita fiscal mostram a existência de um gap (cuja dimensão duplicou entre 1994 e 2006 !) fatal para qualquer crescimento sustentado. A evolução das curvas mostra que a punção fiscal se transforma em autêntico saque.

Saque porque a lógica interna desta punção fiscal obedece às necessidades de financiamento de um aparelho de Estado atacado de elefantíase (de facto, tem 30 e tal por cento de funcionários a mais que os que pode sustentar... E nem se fala daqueles que tem a mais em relação aquilo que seria ideal!) e ignora soberbamente a lógica de crescimento da economia, em bom vernáculo, está-se nas tintas para isso, tem é de sacar a massa necessária às suas crescentes necessidades de financiamento da elefantíase que contamina todos os recantos deste arcaico e salazarento-cunhalento aparelho de estado, de facto, o estado do complexo salazarento e neo-corporativo, 

Face à crueza gráfica destes malditos números (que mostram como a riqueza produzida em Portugal é crescentemente drenada para fora do campo económico e retirada à sociedade por um voraz e devorista aparelho de estado) compreende-se imediatamente como, sem uma corajosa cirurgia, toda a esperança está banida e o futuro é o colapso, destino fatal, a breve trecho, se não fôr feito aquilo que tem de ser feito !

" Distrações secretas na inteligência lusa. O SIS de férias no "Allgarve"...

"Agente do SIS distraído não viu ladrão levar-lhe o carro

Susana Otão

OTA - " O pecado original

Publicado por tomas vasques at 30.7.07   "

Oh, Tomás, mas que faz...!?

" Citação.

(...) Ler Aqui

Publicado por tomas vasques at 28.7.07  

Etiquetas: citação "

Do meu amigo João Coimbra, comandante piloto-aviador e formador, recebi este estudo de sua autoria. Por se tratar de tema com grande actualidade de que tanta gente fala sem nada perceber do assunto, achei por bem partilhar este trabalho do João Coimbra. 

.
"O novo "Terminal 2" do Aeroporto Internacional da Portela/Lisboa, cujas obras decorrem em ritmo acelerado, será aberto no próximo mês de Agosto.
A partir de Agosto deste ano, os passageiros dos voos domésticos das companhias nacionais que realizam voos regulares de Lisboa para as Regiões Autónomas - TAP, PGA e SATA Internacional - passarão a embarcar no novo Terminal 2, que terá acesso pela Segunda Circular.
No entanto, aquilo que parece tratar-se de uma boa solução para aliviar o tráfego nacional, promete ser um transtorno importante por vários motivos.
Primeiro porque o novo Terminal não reúne as comodidades a que estavam habituados os utentes destas linhas, nomeadamente no que se refere às condições de embarque e de permanência no Terminal.
Segundo não terá mangas telescópicas para acesso directo às aeronaves, pelo que os passageiros terão de embarcar através de transbordo em autocarros, ou até mesmo a pé, já que a placa de estacionamento dos aviões que se destinam às linhas domésticas ficará mesmo frente ao novo Terminal (embora ainda consiga viver com isto).
Para mim o pior problema é o acesso a essa nova aerogare. Para além de não possuir parque de estacionamento, as pessoas que se destinam a esses voos, em horas de ponta, serão obrigadas a circular numa das vias de Lisboa com tráfego mais intenso - a segunda circular - o que dificultará (e de que maneira) a nossa vida!
Embora a ANA diga que esta situação é transitória, já que prevê que os voos domésticos possam voltar ao Terminal 1 logo que as obras de ampliação do actual sector de embarque e desembarque estejam concluídas em 2010. Contudo, atendendo ao crescimento do movimento de passageiros no Aeroporto de Lisboa (em 2006 teve 12 milhões, prevendo-se que em 2010 possa receber, pelo menos, 15 milhões), o mais provável é que os voos domésticos fiquem no Terminal 2 até que o aeroporto seja deslocalizado, o que poderá acontecer apenas entre 2017 e 2020.
Só uma curiosidade: em princípio só as companhias portugueses serão "movidas" para o Terminal 2, enquanto que os passageiros das companhias "low cost", de registo estrangeiro, que eventualmente venham a voar para a Madeira, no próximo Inverno, num cenário de liberalização da linha, irão utilizar a Terminal 1 com mangas. O que não deixa de ser caricato, já que os passageiros que pagarem menos usufruirão de melhores comodidades..."

Publicada por Helder de Sousa em 11.7.07 0 comentários

A Guerra Millennium BCP 2007

ou a maior golpada de sempre

E se a guerra Millennium BCP, se toda esta crise (Paulo Teixeira Pinto incluído) não fosse senão uma montagem da Opus Castela para entregar (por uma meia dúzia de patacos) o maior banco privado português e o mais ancorado no tecido empresarial português ao Banco Popular espanhol (controlado pela Opus Castela)...? Seria a maior golpada de sempre...

A fonte muito, mesmo muito, bem informada ouvi eu, há dias, dizer que se tal "não é verdade, poderia muito bem ser...".

O SIS, a secreta militar e a "inteligência" do gabinete do primeiro-ministro têm nesta crise (ou pseudo-crise...) a primeira grande prova de fogo, neste século, das suas capacidades em matéria de inteligência ecnómica e estratégica... Para se saírem bem vâo precisar de mais do que os "astrólogos" do costume...

" Cartas a um jovem democrata

Sinais dos tempos que correm e que o Claro destaca

" Depois de um período pós-PREC ideologicamente marcado e de dezenas de anos de luta contra a ditadura de gente que tinha tudo a perder e nada a ganhar, os velhos esquemas que sustentam os partidos parlamentares, particularmente os alternantes na governação, e mesmo os laivos corporativistas da ditadura, voltaram ao de cima.

O carreirismo mais desavergonhado, a ideologia da gestão do poder, a permissividade aos grupos de interesses com capacidade fática, voltaram a dominar as elites dos partidos parlamentares. Isso é hoje visível na trajectória de muitos protagonistas e nos ziguezagues dos governos seja qual for a cor. Muitos desses protagonistas perderam mesmo a vergonha.

Os compromissos eleitorais efectivamente realizados são uma minoria das acções e o manto da “pose de Estado” (uma indecência para deitar fora o que ontem se defendia) rapidamente liquida ideais, ideias, independência de espírito, sentido crítico, correcção atempada dos erros, etc..

Os papeis são rapidamente trocados – e os de ontem no governo armam-se hoje, com todo o descaramento, em moralistas e críticos, e os de ontem na oposição vestem, sobranceiramente, a pose de gestores do bolo. Uma pouca vergonha.

Daí o descrédito sobre a moralidade do que dizem e fazem. Esta corrosão da moral de quem governa é das pestes mais terríveis para as sociedades democráticas.

Só os muito fanáticos na militância ou muito dependentes dos tais esquemas podem não sentir nojo e revolta no estômago sempre que tais palhaçadas irrompem do écran televisivo.

O nosso país não soube ainda criar um sistema de pesos e contrabalanços a este estado de coisas que mina a nomenclatura partidária e as carreiras politicas. A justiça deveria actuar de outra forma e a punição ética e moral pela sociedade civil deveria ser clara...."

SEXO: FRANCESES CAMPEÕES...

Uma vez cada três dias é a resposta dos franceses, a um estudo do L'Express, que os coloca à frente de ingleses, alemães, italianos e americanos. É claro que as respostas de uns e de outros são inverificáveis...  Curiosamente, a jornalista francesa autora do texto sobre o estudo parece duvidar do bom fundamento dos números. Ela lá terá as suas razões... Outra conclusão do estudo, para cada vez mais gente, a net conduz à... cama! Nós, portugueses, bem sabemos, desde há muitos séculos, que as navegações são sempre um caminho para a cama ou para a areia da praia... Veja-se o estudo do L'Express:

"Sexe

Les Français jouent les champions

Estelle Saget

Une fois tous les trois jours! Au palmarès (déclaratif) de l'amour, l'Hexagone est en première position des six pays sondés pour France 24 et L'Express. Autre confirmation: bien des rencontres passent, aujourd'hui, par le Net.

Les Français sont-ils toujours les champions de l'amour? C'est en tout cas la conclusion de l'étude sur la sexualité qui vient d'être réalisée pour L'Express et la chaîne France 24 (*). Selon cette enquête, les Français devancent les Allemands, les Italiens et les Américains pour la fréquence de leurs relations sexuelles. A raison d'un rapport tous les trois jours, ils distancent aussi les Britanniques, qui ne pratiquent, eux, que tous les cinq jours. Ces chiffres confirment ceux d'enquêtes plus anciennes, mais ne permettent pas de trancher entre deux hypothèses: les Français sont-ils les plus actifs ou les plus vantards? Pour le psychiatre Philippe Brenot, président de l'Observatoire international du couple, la cause est entendue: «Les individus répondent en fonction d'une représentation idéale de la sexualité dans leur pays et non de leur vie intime.» En clair, le rythme de deux fois par semaine serait jugé, en France, comme le minimum honorable. Répondre «une seule fois par semaine», ce serait donner l'image du couple plan-plan, limité au «câlin» du samedi soir. Même si les Français enjolivent la réalité, ils font preuve d'une belle constance: ils n'ont pas varié dans leurs réponses depuis 1972, l'année de publication du rapport Simon, le premier du genre! (...)

Un autre sujet transcende les rivalités nationales: les rencontres par le biais d'Internet. Le phénomène, mondial, progresse à vue d'œil. Les chiffres révélés par la dernière étude sont les plus hauts jamais enregistrés. Ainsi, 22% des Français qui fréquentent la Toile disent avoir eu des rapports sexuels avec une personne connue de cette façon. Presque autant qu'aux Etats-Unis (25%), le pays qui a vu naître Internet!"     Ver  aqui

Nota ao inquérito:

Vale a pena olhar, com olhos de ver, para as respostas de Itália. Os italianos não deixam créditos por mãos alheias e apresentam um dos mais altos índices (8,8 por mês, logo a seguir ao 8,9 dos franceses) mas e as italianas...? Que dizem elas? Uns parcos 5,8 por mês... Bom, decididamente, italianos e italianas têm camas diferentes!

Claro que este lugar de campeões dos franceses deve-se apenas ao facto dos portugueses não terem sido inquiridos (eles, os franceses autores, bem sabem porquê...). Se os portugas tivessem rerspondido a este inquérito o mundo teria ficado a saber que os campeões da cama somos nós: pelo menos, cinco vezes por dia, portanto, bem à frente dos pobres franceses que apresentam esta miséria de uma vez em cada três dias!