Já existiu uma Reforma

Estará o Rui A. ali em baixo a sugerir outra Reforma na Igreja e por causa do seu alegado igualitarismo? Mas será igualitarismo ou universalismo?

O padre citado provavelmente quererá dizer algo mais completo e personalista que o marxismo ideológico em si. Talvez o carácter revolucionário de um Deus feito homem que viria a morrer fraco e sem qualquer expressão de poder (nem deslumbramento pelo poder) na cruz, depois de exaltar os pobres e fracos. E existe um elemento pacifista em Jesus Cristo. Talvez o padre visse em alguns marxistas, nos sinceros e apóstolos da causa, pessoas com um traço similar, acho que já todos os conhecemos num dado momento. Maiores que Marx e o comunismo. Zeca Afonso?

Mas como disse Rothbard sobre Marx, a primeira coisa que é preciso compreender em Marx é que este... era um comunista. 

Existe um elemento teológico no marxismo similar a muitos protestantismos, e sobre isso escreve Rothbard:

"Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History was the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history.

And just as for postmillennial Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for premillennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age of peace and harmony, of the reign of justice, will be installed upon the earth.

Marx emphatically rejected those utopian socialists who sought to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. Instead, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the postmillennial coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the 16th century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of premillennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the Last Days, before the millennium could be established.

Indeed, since the apocalyptic post-mils refused to wait for a gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate mankind, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent, apocalyptic, final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could usher in the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx's version to be made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the inevitable instrument for the advent of his millennium, communism."

Ler em "Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist", http://mises.org/daily/3769

Mas tudo isto é estranho ao pensamento católico (o catolicismo é a-miléniista).

Velhos são os trapos!

"Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She's not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, "A Monetary History of the United States" (1963). It's the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. Since 1941, Ms. Schwartz has reported for work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where we met Thursday morning for an interview. She is currently using a wheelchair after a recent fall and laments her "many infirmities," but those are all physical; her mind is as sharp as ever. She speaks with passion and just a hint of resignation about the current financial situation. And looking at how the authorities have handled it so far, she doesn't like what she sees."

(...)

In the 1930s, as Ms. Schwartz and Mr. Friedman argued in "A Monetary History," the country and the Federal Reserve were faced with a liquidity crisis in the banking sector. As banks failed, depositors became alarmed that they'd lose their money if their bank, too, failed. So bank runs began, and these became self-reinforcing: "If the borrowers hadn't withdrawn cash, they [the banks] would have been in good shape. But the Fed just sat by and did nothing, so bank after bank failed. And that only motivated depositors to withdraw funds from banks that were not in distress," deepening the crisis and causing still more failures. But "that's not what's going on in the market now," Ms. Schwartz says. Today, the banks have a problem on the asset side of their ledgers -- "all these exotic securities that the market does not know how to value." "Why are they 'toxic'?" Ms. Schwartz asks. "They're toxic because you cannot sell them, you don't know what they're worth, your balance sheet is not credible and the whole market freezes up. We don't know whom to lend to because we don't know who is sound. So if you could get rid of them, that would be an improvement." The only way to "get rid of them" is to sell them, which is why Ms. Schwartz thought that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's original proposal to buy these assets from the banks was "a step in the right direction." The problem with that idea was, and is, how to price "toxic" assets that nobody wants. And lurking beneath that problem is another, stickier problem: If they are priced at current market levels, selling them would be a recipe for instant insolvency at many institutions. The fears that are locking up the credit markets would be realized, and a number of banks would probably fail. Ms. Schwartz won't say so, but this is the dirty little secret that led Secretary Paulson to shift from buying bank assets to recapitalizing them directly, as the Treasury did this week.

(...)

The house-price boom began with the very low interest rates in the early years of this decade under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. "Now, Alan Greenspan has issued an epilogue to his memoir, 'Time of Turbulence,' and it's about what's going on in the credit market," Ms. Schwartz says. "And he says, 'Well, it's true that monetary policy was expansive. But there was nothing that a central bank could do in those circumstances. The market would have been very much displeased, if the Fed had tightened and crushed the boom. They would have felt that it wasn't just the boom in the assets that was being terminated.'" In other words, Mr. Greenspan "absolves himself. There was no way you could really terminate the boom because you'd be doing collateral damage to areas of the economy that you don't really want to damage." Ms Schwartz adds, gently, "I don't think that that's an adequate kind of response to those who argue that absent accommodative monetary policy, you would not have had this asset-price boom." Policies based on such thinking only lead to a more damaging bust when the mania ends, as they all do. "In general, it's easier for a central bank to be accommodative, to be loose, to be promoting conditions that make everybody feel that things are going well." Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, of all people, should understand this, Ms. Schwartz says. In 2002, Mr. Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve Board governor, said in a speech in honor of Mr. Friedman's 90th birthday, "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." "This was [his] claim to be worthy of running the Fed," she says. He was "familiar with history. He knew what had been done." But perhaps this is actually Mr. Bernanke's biggest problem. Today's crisis isn't a replay of the problem in the 1930s, but our central bankers have responded by using the tools they should have used then. They are fighting the last war. The result, she argues, has been failure. "I don't see that they've achieved what they should have been trying to achieve. So my verdict on this present Fed leadership is that they have not really done their job."

Entrevista do WSJ à Senhora Anna Schwartz na edição do último fim de semana.

Ozymandias

Of course, in the long run nothing lasts. But history is lived in the here and now. The Soviets had only 70 years, Hitler a mere twelve. Yet it was enough to murder millions and rain ruin on entire continents. Bashar Assad, too, will one day go. But not before having killed at least 100,000 people.

All domination must end. But after how much devastation? And if you leave it to the forces of history to repel aggression and redeem injustice, what’s the point of politics, of leadership, in the first place?

The world is aflame and our leader is on the 14th green. The arc of history may indeed bend toward justice, Mr. President. But, as you say, the arc is long. The job of a leader is to shorten it, to intervene on behalf of “the fierce urgency of now.” Otherwise, why do we need a president? And why did you seek to become ours?

Charles Krauthammer

don't know

The twentieth century qualifies as the most violent century in human history. Such violence arose from two powerful intellectual and political movements - nazism and communism - which had both originated in Germany. I have been trying to show in my latest posts that both movements had their roots in the ideas of Kant.

What Kant did was to take morality out of God's hands and put it in the hands of the crowd. This was a most dangerous move, as the history of Germany in the twentieth century abundantly shows, and the history of the USA is showing in the twenty-first century. The US preemptive war on Iraq is a typical case of Protestant or Kantian morality: the crowd decided it, therefore it is morally right.

What really puzzles me is the standing of Kant in modern philosophy. Thus, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy concludes its entry on Kant saying: "In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kant, made worse for his penchant for scholastic systematization and obscure terminology, his place as the greatest philosopher of the last three hundred years is well assured".

I believe this is real bullshit and it only confirms the attraction and admiration the crowd usually feels for what it does not understand. In my view Kant did not write clearly for the same reason any vulgar man does not write or speak clearly and that is when what they have to say is mostly intellectual fraud or they simply don't know what they are talking about (for an example see here Kant on the principle of duty)

history

In the study referred to below, it is interesting to note how the Portuguese people rated the factors that make them proud of being Portuguese. The percentage of answers rating those factors as "Important" or "Very important" are the following:

History 91.8%
Sports 86.5%
Literature and Arts 84.8%
Science and Technology 52.9%
Armed Forces 52.5%
Influence in the World 39.4%
Democracy 38.7%
Fair treatment of citizens 35.2%
Economy 21.5%
Social Security 18.9%

I would like two make a couple of comments on these results.

The first is that the topics which are most discussed in the media, blogosphere included, such as politics, are the least valued by the population. By contrast, history, which includes the study and discussion of our traditions, seldom appears in the media (actually, it seldom appears now in educational curricula) and yet it is the most valued by the population as a source of their pride in being Portuguese.

Second, it is clear that the Portuguese people are not very proud of their political and economic systems which, at present, are the systems of democracy and the free market. This does not surprise me at all. As I argued earlier, the natural systems of political and economic organization of a predominantly Catholic society like Portugal are aristocracy and corporativism.

miracles of God

Historian Paul Johnson once wrote that sometimes the most important events in history are not those that happen but those that do not happen. From this point of view, he argues, the greatest event of twentieth century history was the failure of God to die.
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Closely related to the refusal of God to die, there is another great twentieth-century historical event: the failure of the Catholic Church to fold. One interesting research topic for historians would be to investigate all the abuses that fell on this battered institution over the last three hundred years: the lies, the myths, the discriminations, the insults, the calumnies, the neglect, the hate, the exaggerations, the persecutions, the robberies. The fact that the Church survived all this and is showing renewed signs of vitality might well go down in history as one of the greatest miracles of God.

beyond imagination

Salazar, the former Portuguese dictator, once remarked that the Portuguese tend to learn rapidly - so rapidly that they do not feel the need for detailed, long term, study of any issue. Their opinions are thus frequently superficial and based on hearsay, even among educated people. Their preconceptions about their own history, often rooted on ideological disputes, are beyond imagination. It may be because - as Einstein once said -, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Recently, I gave an interview to Visão magazine in which I said what any person with a little care for reality, and a little time to search statistics - they are available on the internet - is supposed to know, namely, that the regimes of Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chile were true economic miracles. In 1973, for example, one year before Salazar´s regime fell, the Portuguese economy grew by an astounding 11.2%, making the front page of the Financial Times as an economic miracle.

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I knew beforehand how polemical my statement would be. There is nothing more polemical in this country governed by ideology, rather than fact, than simple truths about its own history, even recent history. Thus, in the current issue of Visão, in a letter to the Editor, a reader, after calling me fascist (The Portuguese like to classify people and put labels on them), states categorically that everybody knows that Salazar was responsible for the impoverishment of the country. (During Salazar´s regime Portugal came from about the 50th position in the World to the 24th. It is now 29th, as measured by ONU´s Human Development Index).

o génio é uma forma de insanidade

" There never was a liberal idea," wrote Flaubert," which has not been unpopular; never an act of justice which has not caused scandal; never a great man who has not been pelted with potatoes or struck by knives. The history of human intellect is the history of human stupidity, as M. de Voltaire said."

In this persecution, men of genius have no fiercer or more terrible enemies than the men of academies, who possess the weapons of talent, the stimulus of vanity, and the prestige by preference accorded to them by the vulgar, and by governments which, in large part, consist of the vulgar. There are, indeed, countries in which the ordinary level of intelligence sinks so low that the inhabitants come to hate not only genius, but even talent.

Cesare Lombroso

Comentário: "O Homem de Génio", uma obra do meu colega Lombroso, publicada em 1891 e que ainda é uma delícia de ler. Reparem como o autor identifica os académicos como os principais inimigos do génio e os governantes com os "vulgares".

Ainda a epistemologia em economia

Mises sobre Friedman:

“Friedman is not an economist. He’s a statistician.” 

No seu tratado diz:

 a “statistician” was someone “who aim[s] at discovering economic laws from the study of economic experience.” 

 E

"Statistics is a method for the presentation of historical facts concerning prices and other relevant data of human action. It is not economics and cannot produce economic theorems and theories. The statistics of prices is economic history. The insight that, ceteris paribus, an increase in demand must result in an increase in prices is not derived from experience. Nobody ever was or ever will be in a position to observe a change in one of the market data ceteris paribus. There is no such thing as quantitative economics. All economic quantities we know about are data of economic history." 

Via http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/

É muito interessante que diga: "The insight that, ceteris paribus, an increase in demand must result in an increase in prices is not derived from experience." Compreender esta simples afirmação é entrar na praxeologia.

Catolicismo e ingleses

No The Telegraph. O artigo é para ler na totalidade mas fica aqui o início e fim.

The story of the Reformation needs reforming
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9350681/The-story-of-the-Reformation-needs-reforming.html

"For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.

To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. (...)

Historians no longer take that venerable Protestant version for granted, but it is still alive and well in the wider culture. It underpins, for example, Shekhar Kapur’s biopic Elizabeth. It was reiterated recently by the journalist Simon Jenkins when he wrote that “most Britons had, by the late 15th century, come to regard the Roman church as an alien, corrupt and reactionary agent of intellectual oppression, awash in magic and superstition. They could not wait to see the back of it.

But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. (...)

The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have."

origens da ética IV

A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the dilemma. Two gang members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The evidence against them is strong but not irrefutable. The first gang member believes that if he turns state's witness, he will be granted immunity and his partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his partner has the same option, and that if both of them exercise it, neither will be granted immunity. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members independently defect, so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. The gang is a society of sorts; its code is the same as that of a captive soldier in wartime, obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number.

In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money, status, power, sex, access, comfort, or health. Most of these proximate rewards are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness: greater longevity and a secure, growing family.

And so it has most likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic band of five hunters. One considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful, he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide -- five times as much as if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows from experience that his chances of success are very low, much less than the chances of the band of five working together. In addition, whether successful alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share equitably the animals they kill. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners in doing so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned, because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.

Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are empathy with the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitude add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole.

Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to moral sentiments. With the exception of psychopaths (if any truly exist), every person vividly experiences these instincts variously as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption.

The dark side of the inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. Because personal familiarity and common interest are vital in social transactions, moral sentiments evolved to be selective. People give trust to strangers with effort, and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes cooperate only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. They are quick to imagine themselves the victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict. They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies. Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies.

lord acton: liberdade e cristianismo

"Nos tempos da Conquista, quando os normandos destruíram as liberdades da Inglaterra, as rudimentares instituições herdadas dos saxões, dos godos e dos francos, desde os bosques da Germânia, começaram a desintegrar-se, e o novo elemento constituído pelo governo popular, que posteriormente seria introduzido pelo crescimento das cidades e a formação de uma classe média, todavia não estava activo. A única autoridade capaz de opor resistência à hierarquia feudal era a eclesiástica; e ambas hierarquias entraram em colisão quando o desenvolvimento do feudalismo ameaçou a independência da Igreja, subordinando os prelados àquela forma de dependência pessoal para com os reis que era característica do Estado teutônico.

A este conflito, que durou quatrocentos anos, devemos o surgimento da liberdade civil. Se a Igreja se tivesse submetido aos tronos dos reis que ungia, ou se a luta tivesse terminado rapidamente com a inequívoca vitória de um dos lados, toda a Europa teria ficado sob um despotismo de tipo bizantino ou moscovita. Com efeito, o objectivo de ambas as partes em luta era o poder absoluto. Mas, se a liberdade não era o fim por que combatiam, ela era certamente o meio pelo qual os poderes temporal e espiritual pediam o apoio dos povos. Como consequência das alternadas fases do conflito, as cidades de Itália e da Alemanha obtiveram as suas cartas de franquia, a França teve os seus Estados Gerais e a Inglaterra o seu Parlamento: e enquanto duro o conflito, este impediu que se afirmasse o direito divino dos soberanos. (...)

O resultado político da Idade Média foi um sistema de estados cujo poder estava limitado pela representação das classes mais fortes, por associações privilegiadas, e pelo reconhecimento de deveres superiores aos impostos pelos homens. (...)

Quanto mais se reduzia o ascendente da religião [no Renascimento], tanto mais o Estado reclamava em interesse próprio o privilégio de tratar os seus inimigos segundo os seus princípios de excepção. (...)

O clero, que tinha servido de tantos modos a causa da liberdade durante a sua prolongada luta contra o feudalismo e a escravidão, associou-se aos interesses da realeza. (...)

A idéia da liberdade religiosa é o princípio gerador da liberdade civil, e de que a liberdade civil é a condição necessária para a liberdade religiosa, foi uma descoberta do século XVII. (...)

Esta grande idéia política, que santifica a liberdade e a consagra a Deus, e que ensina os homens a valorizarem a liberdade alheia como se fosse a própria, e a defender os outros por amor à justiça e à caridade mais do que por uma reclamação de direitos, foi a alma de quanto de bom e de grande há no progresso dos últimos duzentos anos. (...)

Por volta do ano de 1770 [em Inglaterra] a situação tinha regressado quase as condições que se esperava a Revolução superasse para sempre. Foi a partir da América que as ideias de que os homens devem tratar dos seus próprios assuntos e de que o povo é responsável perante o céu pelos actos do seu Estado irromperam como um conquistador sobre os lugares que estavam destinadas a transformar, com o nome de Direitos do Homem."

Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity and the History of Freedom in Christianity, 1987.

o fim do fim do fim

No seu livro “The End of History”, Fukuyama argumentou que a História tinha chegado ao fim com a queda da URSS. História com H, Fukuyama não se referia ao fim dos eventos históricos, mas sim ao fim do debate ideológico sobre a melhor forma de organização política. Na sua tese, Fukuyama sustentava que o fim da História eram as sociedades organizadas como democracias liberais e capitalistas. Fukuyama juntou-se a assim a outros destacados finalistas da História, como Hegel (em quem se inspirou) e Marx, mas com uma visão própria.
Robert Kagan, no seu último livro, “The Return of History”, não toca sequer na tese de Fukuyama (que entretanto o próprio já renegou), apenas demonstra que a história, com h, continua. Ora isto nunca esteve em causa. O livro é, contudo, indispensável para quem se interesse por geopolítica.
Link para artigo de Robert Kagan, no The New Republic, com os seus pontos de vista sobre o fim do fim da história.

no humorist

The Anglican Church is falling apart. British freedom might be next.

This reminds me of a prophetic statement by American historians Will and Ariel Durant in their 1968 book The Lessons of History:

"(...) just as the defeat of the Moslems at Tours (732) kept France and Spain from replacing the Bible with the Koran, so the superior organization, discipline, morality, fidelity and fertility of Catholics may cancel the Protestant Reformation and the French Enlightenment. There is no humorist like history".

a melhor forma de governo

Pope flattered tyrants too much when he said,

“For forms of government let fools contest,
That which is best administered is best.”

Nothing can be more fallacious than this. But poets read history to collect flowers, not fruits; they attend to fanciful images, not the effects of social institutions. Nothing is more certain, from the history of nations and nature of man, than that some forms of government are better fitted for being well administered than others.

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahomet, not to mention authorities really sacred, have agreed in this.

Mais John Adams

a conservative doctrine

Rui has been writing extensively with some regret about the lack of a genuine right-wing political party in Portugal. I believe he means a mostly conservative party, a party whose doctrine is in conformity with Portuguese history and traditions and capable of opposing the social constructivism, the egalitarianism, the statism, the crude rationalism and, may I add, the self-styled liberalism of existing left-wing parties.

I am not sure a new party is needed in the country. There are already enough parties, specially parties in need of a doctrine like PSD and CDS. What is needed is a doctrine at which both failed miserably. Between the two, PSD seems to me the best positioned to act as an alternative to PS.

In my view, a conservative political doctrine in Portugal cannot overlook at least two men: Alexandre Herculano and Salazar. The trouble is that Salazar is still a proscribed name among Portuguese intellectuals (although not among the Portuguese population) and Herculano does not fare much better. The reason might be that both men were not great enthusiasts of irrestricted democracy. In this regard, it must be said that some modern intellectual liberals, such as Hayek, were not either.

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Herculano and Salazar are, to the best of my knowledge, the two modern Portuguese intellectuals who better understood the Portuguese people - their history, their culture, how they think and behave, their qualities and shortcomings - and could project that knowledge into the choice and design of actual political institutions.

little Pedro

When I recently attended a conference by the Brazilian ambassador to CPLP on the origins of Brasil I was quite impressed with a small detail that has to do with Portuguese history.

Contrary to the huge Spanish colony of Latin America which upon independence split in several countries like Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Perú, etc., the Portuguese colony kept its territorial unity so that Brasil is today the biggest country in South America. Why?

The reason is that after his departure back to Portugal in 1821, Portuguese king D. João VI left his successor in Brasil. It was the successor to the Portuguese throne, later king D. Pedro IV, who proclaimed the independence of Brasil, becoming Emperor D. Pedro I of the new country. This fact might be unique in history: the independence of the colony is proclaimed by the successor to the throne of the imperial power.

There is more to it, though. When D. Pedro IV returned to Portugal upon the death of his father he left his five-year old son Pedro in Brasil. As the mother of the child had already died this might have been a very difficult decision for his father to take. Neverthless he took it. When little Pedro got to the age of fourteen he was proclaimed Emperor D. Pedro II of Brasil and he ruled for fourty-nine years in a row. The unity of Brasil was granted thanks to Portuguese political ingenuity and sense of duty.

What a coward this man was

Dear súbditos,

Now that in my previous two posts I have identified, I believe, one of the most important traits of your culture that make democracy a difficult prospect in your country, let me move to the second one. That is the relationship that you have to political power and, generally, to all forms of power.

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I have observed that Portuguese people can be very determined, courageous, bold, even tough, provided they feel power is on their wings. On the contrary, if they are not in a position of power or associated with power, I often find their civic behaviour towards political power as being marked by an outrageous cowardice.

There is a man in your history who illustrates neatly what I mean, probably with some exaggeration. That is Marquis de Pombal. This was a determined, courageous, bold, tough man, even to the point of cruelty. He was by far the most cruel of rulers in the long history of your country; in his 28 year rule he ordered more than three thousand people to be killed, mostly for political reasons. He was all of these things, though, only as long as he remained in power. For, when he fell from power and was tried he behaved like a real coward: he was too tired and ill to stand questioning by justice, he did not assume responsibility for any one of his acts, everything he did was acting upon orders of the King (whom, you guess, by that time was already dead). What a coward this man was. It is too bad he is still today one of your heros.

As I see them, the Portuguese are people who, individually, can support and endure an inordinate amount of abuse by those in power without being able to confront them and drawing a line between what is acceptable and what is sheer abuse. As a result, day after day, each one of them is victim of a small government or bureaucratic abuse which, taken in itself, is not a great loss to their civic rights and freedoms, but when taken together make them súbditos of government, rather than citizens and sovereigns in their own, nominally free and democratic country.

When the day comes that they decide to do something about it, it is always as a crowd, never as individuals. Then, they react with the sentiment of revolt that is proper of people who have been repeatedly abused for a long time. The revolt becomes highly emotional, rather than rational, occasionally involving violence. Most likely, it will fix a couple of the most prement abuses by government or the administration. The following day, though, eveything returns to normal, the multitude of other small abuses that make them a people of súbditos, rather than citizens, stay where they are.

Would you expect?

Would you expect to be free in a society where the people who make the laws and the constitution, who interpret them and apply them for you see you as a súbdito? Suppose the government or the administration abuses you; would you expect the courts in this country to acknowledge that you are right and they are wrong? Are you surprised that the people in government and administration claim for themselves privileges that they are not prepared to extend to you? You should not be. After all, they are the masters and you are the súbdito.

Súbditos do revolt from time to time and the history of this country over the last two or three hundred years is a history of periodical revolts. Actually, only súbditos (and slaves) do revolt. Free people never revolt, for they would revolt against whom or what? There is talk again in the country about a silent revolt against the status quo and it is generals who are talking about it. In a country of súbditos (or slaves) generals usually have the last word.

Not so in a free country. Here, it is citizens who have the last word. In a free country citizens are the masters whereas those in government and public administration are their súbditos. These men and women in positons of power are supposed to serve the citizens and that is why they are called public servants in anglo-saxonic countries. You see, in your country it is the other way around. Public servants are the masters, citizens are the súbditos. Would you really expect free, independent men and women to emerge in this society?

Who is to blame, people who are presently in power, or even those Law professors who teach students at universities that citizens are súbditos of power? I do not think so. I have lived long enough under democracy in this country to have observed that people who criticize those in power, once they get themselves to positions of power, actually do the same, if not worse, than their predecessors. In other words, do not blame others. The chances are that if you occupy a position of power you will do as others did in the past, no better nor worse.

For the real difficulty is not with this or that person, but with your culture. Your culture is not fit to produce freedom under democracy. It cannot, when citizens are regarded as súbditos and those in power as their masters. Within such culture democracy is more likely to produce all sorts of abuse and oppression. Until the day you get fed up and revolt - a typical reaction, may I say it again, of a súbdito, not of a free man.

had never seen, before or since

The thesis of the book is that nations and empires rise and fall mostly because of taxes. Chapter 16 is titled "The collapse of the Hercules of Europe". Charles Adams, the author, opens the chapter writing: "No nation in history better illuminates the thesis of this book than Imperial Spain".

The author is referring mostly to seventeenth Century Spain. It should be recalled that for half of that period, until 1640, Portugal was part of the Spanish Empire: "In the 17th Century this vast empire started to desintegrate. The English like to think the defeat of the Armada was the cause. That view is good for Anglo Saxon egos but it is not good history. Two thirds of the ships in the Armada managed to sail back to Spain. Furthermore, the Armada was defeated by weather more than English seamanship".

"The Duke of Wellington remarked that ´Spain was the only country in the world where twice two did not make four´. What really makes no sense is how a nation with the greatest military and naval forces in the world (...) could collapse for no apparent reason."

The reason, Adams argues, was taxes with their three usual consequences: fight (tax rebellion), flight (emmigration to avoid them) and fraud (or tax evasion): "The most hated of all Spanish taxes (...) was the alcaballa, a 10 p.c. excise on the transfer of all real and personal property (...) "

"Spanish taxpayers did not sit still and accept their burdens. Since they had no legal recourse and the Cortes was corrupt, they turned to extra-legal defenses - they went against the system (violence), underneath the system (evasion) and away from the system (flight). In their endeavours they were successful; the world had never seen, before or since, such defiance (...)".

"In the early 17th Century a Spanish writer called attention to the depopulation of Castille by flight to avoid tax (...) Where did the taxpayers go? (...) most of them fled to the New World (...)".

In the Netherlands, then under Spanish rule "the alcaballa was instituted, to be collected by force through a Council of Blood. (...) A prolonged civil war followed dominated by guerrila warfare. Even Dutch women took up arms (...)".

"A government study in 1619 concluded that the provinces must pay more taxes and share revenue burdens of Spain´s unwieldy empire. (...) Shortly thereafter the Crown triggered a war in Catalonia that many historians believe mortally wounded the empire. This revolt was triggered by taxation in its most odious form - the quartering of troops without means of support (...)".

"When the civil war in Catalonia was raging, the Crown instituted a 5 p.c. alcaballa in Portugal, contrary to the charter between Portugal and Spain. A ruthless Portuguese Quisling was appointed to collect this excise. Angry Portuguese attacked the palace, seized the governor and escorted him to the border; the ruthless tax administrator was lynched, and the Portuguese people have been independent ever since ".

"Excises on food set off revolts in Sicily and Naples (...)"

"The collapse of Spanish power abroad from tax rebellion at home permitted the British to seize Jamaica and other Spanish colonies. The Dutch took over the East Indies. From that time forth the rich fruits of Spanish imperialism became ripe plums for easy picking. Stealing the colonies of Spain became an international sport (...)"
(Charles Adams, Fight, Flight, Fraud - The Story of Taxation, Curacao: Euro-Dutch Publishers, 1982, pp. 143-148)