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Bedlam Por Gerald Vouga In the 1970s Current developments
in The Like the rest of
Europe Britain is a strange place nowadays. Earlier this year a lad of eleven
was brought before a In an unusual display
of common sense, the judge dismissed the case and denounced the Crown
Prosecution Service and the police for devoting their attentions to childish
misdemeanours instead of attending to car-theft, burglary and assault. In his
day, said the judge, the matter would have been dealt with by a timely clout.
The judge’s decision was then indignantly condemned by teachers’ unions and
has gone to appeal. * * * The extraordinary
attention paid by the authorities to one small boy is in sharp contrast to
the carelessness shown by former Home Secretary Clarke, who mislaid over a
thousand dangerous foreign criminals that should have been deported after
serving their sentences. Instead they were released into the community and
some of them went on to commit further violent crimes including rape and
murder. Adding to the scandal,
a Court has ruled that Afghan hijackers who have been in custody for several
years cannot be deported. This is because of EU Human Rights provisions
governing asylum seekers. No matter that As his reign draws to
a close Blair seems to be at sixes and sevens. Contradictions crowd in thick
and fast. After a recent cabinet re-shuffle, Ruth Kelly has been named
Minister of Equality. (Yes, believe it or not that is what her portfolio is
called. Is there perhaps the sign of a guillotine over the ministerial
door?). She is a practising Catholic and a member of Opus Dei, well-known for
being one of the most orthodox and traditional of the Church’s religious
orders. Its social project
roundly condemns all the Left’s pet gender options: contraception, abortion,
homosexuality and gay marriage. How Ms. Kelly will act or speak on these
matters is anyone’s guess. In a recent TV
programme a British Moslem leader enunciated Islam’s well-known position on
homosexuality by condemning it. He was then investigated by the police but
has so far not been prosecuted for a hate crime, though this could happen any
day. The British media are naturally agog to find out whether (a) Ms Kelly
can be provoked into making her views on these controversial matters known,
(b) whether, if she does so, she also will be investigated, and (c) whether,
in the latter case, she might end in jail. Across the channel the
prophecy that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s
nomination last year would soon bring people out into the street turned out
to be over-optimistic. Instead of three months, we had to wait until April
this year, when large numbers of ethnic French decided to exercise their
time-honoured prerogative. What began as a student protest lasted for over
three weeks and at one point there were a million demonstrators all over What made these events
strikingly different from earlier resort to the barricades was that this time
the demands were in support of the status quo. Prime Minister de Villepin had angered the young, their mainly middle-class
parents and the unions by proposing mild reforms in These laws, which make
it almost impossible to fire unsatisfactory staff—even youngsters in their
first jobs—have long been blamed for France’s high unemployment rate of more
than 10 percent, which has persisted for over a decade and accounts in part
for the nation’s declining economic growth. The students and their union
allies (mainly public-sector workers) wanted no such reform. But no attempt
to explain the unsustainability of The French Prime
Minister is a bureaucrat who has never stood for office, and was appointed to
his job after his predecessor Raffarin had been
forced out following We might note in
passing that bureaucratic ossification and blocked job opportunities have
been a feature of French society for a very long time. In the revolutionary
and Napoleonic period there had been major upheavals, and numerous young men
found political and administrative posts. But thirty years later
they still held them, preventing the next generation from finding employment.
A Genevan author wrote a pamphlet in 1828 with the
title On Gerontocracy, or the Abuse of the Wisdom of Old Men in the
Government of Yet today the streets
are filled with young people demonstrating in favor
of these same rigidities, besotted with lifelong security and jobs from the
cradle to the grave. * * * Monsieur Villepin has had a difficult year. Last autumn there were
smaller but much more violent demonstrations during a long hot month in the
ghetto suburbs where largely Moslem youth vented their anger against French
society, burning cars and destroying property. Though everybody knew the
origins of these demonstrators it was some time before the Press referred
openly to the fact that they were Moslems and mostly North African.
Heart-searching followed, and it was revealed that more than half these young
ghetto-dwellers are unemployed. Now whether or not
racism might be a factor, most of these youngsters are school dropouts so
they are not easily employed. The labor law reforms
were aimed precisely at encouraging employers to take such people on by
making dismissal easier. Youth unemployment overall is around 25 per cent,
but as so much of it is concentrated among Moslem youth, it is clear that the
demonstrating students knew what they were doing. They had the most to lose
from reform: neither they nor their parents wanted it to be easier to sack
them from their first jobs. But Villepin’s troubles have not ended. At present he is
involved in an altogether different kind of scandal, the so-called Clearstream Affair, in which he is accused of conspiring
against Interior Minister Sarkozy in a
Machiavellian plot to involve the latter in corruption charges. These concern
deposits in a Luxembourg bank account resulting from the sale of French
frigates. It is alleged that both Villepin and
Chirac were keen to smear Sarkozy in an attempt to
eliminate him as a candidate in the next presidential election. Who is conspiring
against whom, and who is smearing whom, is not entirely clear; but it is
plain that what is at stake is who is to be the Right’s candidate in the next
presidential election, and therefore who will have the chance of reforming
France’s Welfare State, and averting both looming bankruptcy and the collapse
of the social security system, not to mention dealing with acute immigration
problems. President Jacques
Chirac continues in office and his inborn chauvinism remains impermeable. At
a recent EU meeting he walked out in protest against the French chairman’s
use of the English language for the proceedings. It was explained that
English was the language of business. The purpose of the meeting was to
discuss the dangers of nationalism in EU affairs. In Italy Silvio Berlusconi, after three weeks resistance, at last
reluctantly conceded. The recent general election was described as one of the
roughest episodes in However his rude
speeches and rowdy departure from TV debates failed to win him a clear
majority. Romano Prodi, notable for his ineffectual
performance as president of the European Union, is now One consequence of this
excessive reaction to a few rude caricatures of the Prophet is that artists
everywhere now think twice before taking up pens or brushes. The other is
that people are at long last beginning to challenge the taboo on discussing
Moslem intolerance. Most of these events
have attracted international headlines. Not so with what has been happening
in another Scandinavian country. Hardly anybody has commented on the extremes
to which political correctness has been leading the Swedish model of social
democracy. As long ago as 1973 family legislation decriminalized incest
insofar as half-siblings are concerned, by permitting marriage between
half-brothers and half-sisters. In 1987 a husband’s special responsibility to
support the family was ended. In 1995 homosexual unions were recognized but
this received little attention. More recent changes in
family law have similarly passed unnoticed. In 2002 gay and lesbian couples
gained the right to adopt children. And now a Swedish court has recognized
polygamous marriage among Moslem immigrants, a judgment welcomed by family
reform groups who now foresee that polygamy for all will be legalized by
2010. The more hopeful of these declare that they will be lobbying for
similar measures to be adopted by the EU for all its members. In It is not clear as yet
whether the unfortunate child is itself to be described as an “A” or a “B”.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church is protesting these measures, while the State
is prosecuting those State officers who refuse to comply with the new
regulations. Dutch commentators say
Voltaire and Erasmus must be turning in their graves. After the murder of
Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic fanatic for directing “Submission”, a film about
the treatment of women in a Moslem country, there is today a new victim—Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the
screenplay. A woman from Now Even if widespread
protests against the treatment of Ayaan are
successful she is not interested in staying in the In Meanwhile the press
prefers to divert attention to the forthcoming World Cup. There is ongoing
coverage of the preparations being made to build brothels and stock them with
thousands of women. What feminists or A draft report on
alcohol consumption has been leaked. It is to be published in June, and the
report’s lead author, Dr Peter Anderson of the World Health Organization, is
an enthusiastic hunter of tobacco addicts. He described in an interview how a
similar strategy to that which has made smoking socially unacceptable ought
to be followed with wines and spirits. Reporters were told
that a concept resembling that of “passive smoking” should be popularised.
Alcohol consumption, he declared, caused enormous costs to society and
non-drinkers were adversely affected through no fault of their own by the
drinking of others. He did not mention whether any Islamic lobby had
influenced the authors of the report. There is no news as yet of reactions
from famous toper Jacques Chirac, * * * In normal times
everybody would agree that this catalogue of European aberrations provides a
treasure house for humor factories everywhere. TV
and radio shows, films, newspapers and books would be inundating us with
their products. But in Instead the situation
is increasingly like that in the old Soviet bloc where humour became
subversive and confined to samizdat publications and word of mouth. Not quite
as bad admittedly. The Mohammed cartoon affair was adequately covered and
duly, if nervously, ridiculed in some countries. In Nevertheless, here and
there the new iron curtain is being dented and some hardy souls are daring to
speak out. One who has never been silenced is the doughty Italian journalist Oriana Fallacci. Now over seventy
and ill with cancer, she lives in Having risked her
professional life in places like Someone far more
powerful than this frail woman (and one of her regular readers) is Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. He and Marcello Pera, a philosopher who is an enthusiastic fan of Karl
Popper and President of the Italian Senate, have been collaborating for some
time on an analysis of the European crisis. It is worth noting that Ratzinger, the head of Christendom and regarded as
incurably reactionary by progressive Catholics, is perfectly at ease with
self-confessed atheists like Fallacci and Pera. When the late Pope John Paul II was still a
Cardinal and facing up to Communist domination of his Polish homeland, he
could scarcely have dreamed that his successor would be called upon to play a
similar role against the dominion all over the continent, not of communists,
who were after all generally sane, but of madmen in the service of false gods
bent on destroying European civilization. Gerald Vouga is a long-time observer of the
European scene. June 2006 *Bedlam, como era conhecido o Royal Bethlehem Hospital fundado em Londres no século treze, era e continua a ser um asilo para doentes mentais. O nome de Bedlam tornou-se sinónimo de bagunça. * Originalmente publicado na Culture Cult |