For Ramalho Eanes, if Portugal reaches a limit situation in which there are not enough fans for everyone, the older ones – like him, who is 85 years old – should set an example and give in to the younger ones, from the outset “to the man who has women and sons”.
The statement of the former President of the Republic was made in an interview with RTP. Recalling that “the crisis will not end now, because a vaccine is needed – and even if it appears at best at the end of the year, it will take half a year later [ou] a year to be produced in quantity ”-, Ramalho Eanes appealed to his elders:
We – and I speak because I am an old man, I am 85 years old… we old people must think that our situation is the same as that of others. And if anything, it is the additional obligation to tell others that this has already happened, that it has been overcome, that [esta crise] it will be overtaken, ”he began by saying, then reinforcing the appeal:“ We, the old people, will be the first to set an example. We do not leave the house, we systematically resort to the care indicated to us and more, when we arrive at the hospital, if necessary, we offer our ventilator to the man who has a wife and children ”.
“We, the old people.” pic.twitter.com/9f1IAc3AVN
– Carlos C Carapinha, worshiper (@ macguffin_69) April 1, 2020
Before this appeal, Ramalho Eanes had remembered: “In Italy and Spain, and here, too, the doctor often has to choose between the one to whom he applies the ventilator and the one to whom he does not apply. The one to whom you can provide life and the one to whom you take life. It is a situation that they would never want to be in ”. Even so, he noted: “It is evident that it is possible to quickly build fans, as happens in that research center in Matosinhos, which at the end of May will have 400 and at the end of the year if necessary, there are 100 thousand”.
The former President of the Republic left, in the interview with RTP, a critical warning: “The man thought he was capable of everything, that he could dominate everything. This pandemic situation shows that, after all, it remains the fragile, fallible being, who must be in permanent connection and communion with others ”. For Ramalho Eanes, the current crisis of the new coronavirus “will make us rethink the State itself, the State’s own functions”.
The state cannot be a minimum state, as they say. The State must be the necessary State and a State that does not just look at the present situation, the elections and the result, but looks at the future and the future of its community. And a State that seeks to do what is indispensable for that future to be viable ”, he noted.
Also defending that Portugal “should have used the Armed Forces sooner” in order not to overwhelm so much and in the first phase health professionals, which he considers “extraordinary”, Ramalho Eanes opened the door to possible nationalizations – “perfectly permissible and natural that may happen ”- and called for Germany’s mistake not to be made in the early 1930s, where“ a policy of financial rigor ”resulted in“ a catastrophic situation, an unthinkable social situation and a political crisis that led to Nazism ”.
The successor of Francisco da Costa Gomes and predecessor of Mário Soares in the Presidency of the Republic also admitted that “confinement is unnatural, antisocial and certainly leads to complicated situations”, because “there will be a need for psychiatric and psychological support”, but asked: “It is it is necessary for people to become convinced that they have an increased responsibility not only in relation to the present but in relation to the future. They have to stay at home as long as necessary ”.
To “win this battle with the new coronavirus” – and the former general is convinced “that we can win it” – “co-responsibility and solidarity” will be necessary, the former PR also defended. Ramalho Eanes also criticized the lack of solidarity between countries: he defended that “globalization has brought interdependence, but not solidarity that is indispensable” and that the pandemic “shows the evidence that no country can solve its problems”. He also recalled: “China itself, powerful, received support from France and Italy at the beginning of the crisis.
Regarding the way in which Portugal has fought the outbreak of the new coronavirus, Eanes said that the state of emergency – and the measures associated with it – could have been taken earlier, but he said: it is always easier to make comments after the fact.
“Maybe it would have been better for us to do that [decretar o Estado de emergência] in advance. Although it is very easy to say what was best after things happened, ”he said.
In combat there is always a first line and a second line. The first line should not be hospitals, but politics and security forces, parties, the police, the Armed Forces and all of us. (…) Hospitals should be a second line, there should only be those who were in the first line and who need to be supported.
Why, because hospital units need to have “the capacity to breathe”, their staff cannot be exhausted, so that they remain available to take care of those in need.
Even so, evaluates the ex-President, “we did well, the institutions, the President of the Republic, the Government, the parties, the social forces, the PSP, the GNR, the Armed Forces”. And those yes, they should have been called earlier.
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