Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week July 17, 2016
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
Sheer nonsense this week from a certain prominent columnist
My few bob on Portugal was based not on football form, but on two traits in the Portuguese national character which I admire greatly for two reasons.
First, the Duke of Wellington, not easily impressed, praised the stoic character of Portuguese troops under fire.Second, thanks to the dictatorial Salazar, Portugal was one of the few countries to reject anti-Semitism at a time when European democracies were willingly rounding up Jews.
Say what now?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Of course the Brits had screwed the Portuguese over in the Methuen Treaty about a century before Wellington. This was a kind of ‘free trade’ agreement. Britain got to export its textiles to Portugal duty free while Lisbon was able to export its wine to Britain needing only to pay a third of the duty imposed on French wine. Maybe this was the real reason Welllington liked the Portuguese. David Ricardo developed a justification for free trade based on the ‘law’ of comparative advantage using Britain and Portugal as his examples but not mentioning the lopsided Methuen treaty at all…
Salazar also tortured his own citizens. The wife of the American ambassador complained of hearing sreaming to the authorities- whe lived near the HQ of Salazar’s secret police, her complaint was heard- the screams were not screams at all but just the screeching of the early morning trams. If I needed to pick a European country that really stood up for its Jewish citizens I’d pick Denmark all the time.
Three questions for all CedarLoungers on Brexit(three people were adamant about theses points to me this week)
1 That 40% of all hospital patients in Britain are health tourists!!
2 That British ex- pats in Sapin, France etc don’t cost the local health system a bean as all the costs are met by London?
3 That no other health system in Europe is as generous as the NHS- that in any other EU country you have to be in the sustem to avail of it and it’s not free whereas in Britian it’s free for everybody- so you have Romanians with various conditions flying in to Britain to be treated.
Answers?
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Which European democracies were rounding up Jews??
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Finland, a democracy, ended up (reluctantly) fighting with the Axis in WWII, and they didn’t hand any of the native Finnish Jews over to the Nazis. But Jewish refugees and Soviet Jews
who were Finnish POWS were handed over:
http://jcpa.org/article/finlands-tarnished-holocaust-record/
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After September 1939, HMG in London introduced internment for enemy aliens. Among the ‘enemy aliens’ scooped up by the order were some German Jewish refugees from the Hitlerite regime.
Funny how no one talks about that.
I doubt though that this is what the bould ex-senator EH is talking about. It’s more a question of what he it talking through – his fundament, in this case.
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Not sure we mortals am fit to comment on these insights. He’s a real intellectual, no doubt about that. Next up: Gareth Bale and the geo-spiritual impact of Edward II’s castle-building policy.
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Some might enjoy the reddit ‘bad history’.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/
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Aristedes de Sousa Mendes might have had a few things to say about that. One of the 20th-century’s forgotten heroes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides_de_Sousa_Mendes
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“Irish politicians have a duty to make sure that the Ibrahim Halawa campaign is not allowed to be manipulated so as to damage relations between the Irish and Egyptian governments.”
Echoes of the Birmingham Six et al and the British Government?
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“Renowned folk musicians the Black family, and most notably sisters Mary and Frances, are Rathlin’s closest thing to royalty. Recently made a member of the Irish Senate, loosely based on the House of Lords, Frances Black has spoken of the “devastating” impact of Brexit, hailing the impact of the EU on Rathlin’s revival”
From the Sunday herald in Scotland. ‘Loosely based on the HoL?!
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The Dáil, I suppose, is ‘inspired by actual parliaments’.
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