quarta-feira, dezembro 20, 2006

Cumplicidades...

Agitam-se as águas nas hostes insurgentes por causa das cumplicidades de Hayek e Friedman com o regime de Pinochet.
Os artigos sucedem-se em catadupa, num esforço para resgatar a memória daquelas duas personalidades, que não hesitaram em dar a sua caução (intelectual) à ditadura militar chilena.
Entre os tais artigos, há um inenarrável, da autoria do prof. José Manuel Moreira, que enferma da mais pura desonestidade intelectual (fala o aludido professor catedrático em “liberdade absoluta” para absolver a Hayek. Mas este senhor quer remeter-nos para o romantismo ou para o idealismo alemão? Está a enganar quem?) e que além do mais constitui um ataque soez à jornalista do PÚBLICO São José de Almeida, que ousou quebrar o tabu (infeliz/ não está disponível o link para o artigo dela).
É do domínio da evidência histórica que estes senhores fizeram do Chile um campo privilegiado de experimentação das suas teorias económicas. Campo privilegiado, porque expurgado das impurezas que afectam o imaculado reino do mercado ou da “ordem espontânea” em democracia. Sem sindicatos e partidos políticos iliberais.
Sobre Friedman e o Chile deixo aqui estes excertos, bem elucidativos:

“Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered "the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment." But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé. Allende's downfall came because he refused to betray Chile's long democratic tradition and invoke martial law, yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered "more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life" and thus a greater "chance of a return to a democratic society." It was pure boilerplate, but it did give Friedman a chance to rehearse his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.”
“While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled "The Fragility of Freedom" where he described the "role in the destruction of a free society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state." Chile's present difficulties, he argued, "were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom." The Pinochet regime, he argued, represented a turning point in a protracted campaign, a tearing off of democracy's false husks to reach true freedom's inner core. "The problem is not of recent origin," Friedman wrote in a follow-up letter to Pinochet, but "arises from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical and terrible climax in the Allende regime."