Flight to Freedom Noted

When they aren’t generally howling about American “shredding the constitution” the proclivities of those societies that wallow in that kind of criticism of America is almost too predictable to be believed.

Former Portuguese air force officer and professor Vasco de Castro sees in his Portugal a corruption so pervasive that he names his critique of it "Tudo em Família" or “All in the Family.”

So corrupt, in fact, that he didn’t feel comfortable publishing in on the continent:

That’s why, many people, if not all the people, will wonder why this book is being published in the USA and by an American publisher, when it’s written in Portuguese, about Portugal’s social-political matters and obviously addressed to a Portuguese speaking audience?

Although this unreal situation could also lead to a confusing answer, the explanation is in fact quite simple and understandable: censorship in Portugal is a common procedure to silence criticisms that aren’t based in speculations or general accusations which do not identify anyone in particular, as frequently done by the media in general. Indeed, even if Portuguese law condemns today any form of censorship, it’s a known fact that censorship still exists, although by less frontal means and ways than those used during Salazar’s dictatorship.

Ask any responsible and honest publisher and they will tell you how it’s almost impossible to survive in this poor and still illiterate country, without the contracts with sponsored government institutions, the cultural subsidies, etc.

As sad as it is, it would matter little to the larger world were it not for the way a patronage culture of censorship and corruption could not readily find itself at the center of a budding political power that is the EU, one given to lauding it’s implausible and unproven infallibility in so many for a where it stacks the deck with its’ numerous now-statelets maintained on the thin logic that the member states remain sovereign when it suits them.

Unfortunately the events related in this book did not take place in USA, where a judge who is found guilty of a crime is judged and punished as any other citizen.

No, in Portugal, to even think possible that a former President could be subjected to an investigation for so serious an accusation as diamond trafficking - as a Minister of Angola charged M. Mário Soares - is almost as unimaginable as to realize that President Clinton risked impeachment, just because he lied about his own and private sex life.

Something we are still told is a prudish reaction and “no big deal”, when it was about the core of all flaws that make trusted elected leaders into untrusted “overseers”... lie-ing to the public and to institutions of justice, as if those things that could be thought to be small crimes were not crimes at all. The principal of right and wrong is in jeopardy.