"TAP não sobrevive se se mantiver pública", garante Pinto Luz

[Ming]

Bom, na realidade, não tenho a certeza se estas coisas são tão off topic assim:

A verdade é que para nós a Espanha é especialmente importante (até em termos de economia) e que para tomar decisões de investimento com base em fundamentais (e se calhar tambem em algums vertentes de AT mais dependentes de aspectos psicológicos) é necessário conhecer o funcionamento e a forma como o mundo evolui...

[Ming]

Um artigo longo mas que me parece magnífico.
(Em especial, a parte final é excelente, mas acho que para ser percebida implica que se leia tudo...)

Pity Spain. It's been less than 70 years since its proud, vivacious, and creative people went through one of the worst civil wars in history, one that took the lives of a million people, maimed numerous others, and left the entire country licking its wounds for another four decades.

Worse yet, when the fighting was over the Spaniards learned that unlike most neighboring countries, theirs had been condemned to remain an international pariah - due to Generalissimo Franco's wartime cooperation with Hitler and Mussolini - even after World War Two had finally ended.

To make things even worse, Franco first had parliament appoint him in 1942 leader for life, then imposed a disastrous autarkic economic policy that brought the country to near starvation, and finally refused to die (they say that even on his deathbed he was wondering aloud where those coming to bid him farewell were traveling), making his 36-year reign of terror, clericalism, ineptitude, and corruption one of the longest in modern history.

Fortunately for Spain, the morning after Franco's death in 1976 it embarked on a rapid process of democratization, in the aftermath of which it became a beacon of freedom, growth, and optimism.

Unfortunately, last week that age of optimism was brought to an abrupt end.

SURELY, THE 20th century's traumas of fratricide and dictatorship did not befall the Spanish people out of the blue. Rather, they followed, and arguably resulted from successive monarchs' brazen rejection of the promise that came coupled with the dawn of the modern ages.

Back then, when Italian artists, thinkers, and bankers were heralding the Renaissance; when German theologians were about to shake an ossified Vatican; and when Iberian explorers were linking the Old World with the New, Spain itself launched one of history's most misguided, brutal, and disastrous exercises in governmental immorality, when it systematically chased Islam and Judaism beyond its horizons.

England and Holland - which eventually embraced tolerance and actually welcomed the Jews - soon eclipsed Spain's empire economically, defeated it militarily, and succeeded it politically. One can only wonder what course history would have taken if Spain's leaders in the 15th century had been as tolerant as the Dutch proved to be in the 16th century and the British in the 17th century, instead of offering a contemporary version of Osama bin Ladin.

Understandably, then, modern-day Spaniards preferred to turn their backs on their nation's inglorious history of crime, failure, and affliction, and sought instead comfort in the warm bosom of the New Europe. There, one could seek material benefits, nurture cultural harmony, and do political group therapy with nations whose future had prosperity written all over it and whose pasts were no more morally impressive than Spain's.

And so, in one of history's fascinating quirks of attitude the nation that once evicted, convicted and burned thousands of infidels at the stake before taking to the high seas in order to forcibly convert, enslave and also butcher entire Indian tribes - now became so fiercely antiwar that some 90% of it vehemently opposed their government's modest participation in the Iraq War.

This is nothing to scoff at.

If only our forefathers - whether those who were ethnically cleansed out of Spain or those who lost their lives in its psychopathic clergy's executions of heathens - had lived to witness this transfiguration of the nation that had turned Jewish life into hell and Jewish death into a form of salvation.

If one still needed proof of the sincerity and scope of this transition from bloodlust to pacifism, all one had to do was roam post-Franco Spain's cities and countryside, and get a load of the enthusiasm with which it was embracing life.

As Time magazine pointed out in a particularly poorly timed cover story about Spain, published on the very eve of the Madrid Massacre, Spaniards are shining internationally in anything and everything from film and dance to business and architecture.

With Spain's economy now the world's eighth largest, with Spanish athletes among the world's best, and with Madrid's and Barcelona's night lives among Europe's most exciting, Spain has become the epitome of all that was right about the European Union's vision of regional harmony and local creativity. Indeed, al-Qaida's written message to the Spanish people - "you love life and we love death" - could hardly have been better put.

The Spaniards really have learned to love life and detest violence, so much so that one could see in their new diplomatic vegetarianism the realization of Isaiah's promise, that once the Messiah arrives leopards, bears, and rattle snakes would lose their appetites for human prey.

Yet while embracing all that was right about the New Europe, Spaniards also gulped much of what was wrong with it, most fatefully the illusion that the time had indeed arrived for lambs to dwell with wolves and for children to play at snake pits.

It hadn't.

AS THIS newspaper cautioned already on the eve of Spain's election this week, the outgoing Spanish government's hasty, stubborn and baseless insistence that the train bombings were committed by the Basques was part of a denial syndrome. We went through that ourselves last decade, when several Palestinian shooting attacks were initially described as criminally rather than ideologically motivated. It is - don't we know - very difficult to concede that someone is actually out to kill you, your spouse, your mother and your kids. Now, Spanish voters seem to have engaged in a denial exercise of their own, as they suggest that their victimization was their own fault.

In reality, al-Qaida attacked America before it invaded Iraq. Spain, too, was a target regardless of its role in Iraq, because to Islamist fanatics it is exactly what its Muslim-ruled parts were for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella: occupied territory.

The Spaniards' revulsion for war is admirable, but ultimately they will learn that just as it was wrong to have one tyrant at home, it was wrong to have another abroad, and that just as it was wrong 500 years ago to kill good people in the name of one faith, it is now wrong - in the face of another faith's barbarism - to turn the other cheek.