Between the ephemeral vertigo of everyday life and the thunderous declarations that have very little substance, the last few days have been abundant in news that highlights various vulnerabilities, but, at the same time, challenges us to a new world that seems to have already arrived.
We were filling the country with buses, which we neither manufacture nor produce, when Norway came to say that the manufacturer had installed a remote control system in some of these buses. Of course, the first explanation for this was quite prosaic. The system aimed to identify possible faults. It turns out that, all things considered, the manufacturer ended up recognizing that the system made it possible to remotely stop vehicles or prevent them from running.
We were still trying to understand the modernity of remotely controlled buses, when the news hit us that the ancient relationship between Portugal and Brazil had been used to, in a long and thoughtful process, convert Russian spies into Portuguese of original nationality. Perhaps inspired by the policy of secrecy that dominated the Portuguese discoveries…
Between Franciscos, Pereiras or Camilos, how many “Portuguese” people will, at Putin’s command, deliver documents to our Consulates so they can get to know us better?
And we were still wondering if we had some distant cousin who turns out to be Russian, when the Polish authorities identified a couple of Russians who, political exiles in Poland after being persecuted in Russia, were, after all, Russian spies.
This vulnerable West in which we live seems to not understand, or doesn’t want to understand, or someone doesn’t want us to understand, that the world is different today.
And the most attentive common citizen always gets the feeling that they won’t be telling him everything.
This is how, more or less out of nowhere, and in an interview with a public manager, we learned that Sines will, after all, have a pier with military capacity. The manager candidly says that he will have civil and military capabilities. The lack of mandatory military service…
Interestingly, we learned about the construction of this capacity in the same week that, at least partially, the operation Influencer was “archived” with the festive inauguration of the data center from Sines.
Portugal, like the rest of the world, seems to be faced with new challenges, new dangers, new threats and new opportunities, and one gets the strange feeling that everything is happening and the citizens are kept in a certain ignorance.
As several episodes in the history of humanity demonstrate, wars cannot be won without mobilizing the people.
There is no citizenship in ignorance and there is no legitimacy when we all do not participate on equal terms.
Perhaps for this reason, the exercise of power, of any power, is today more demanding on its holders than it was in the past.
Lawyer and manager