"Repúblicas das bananas"

The American Conservative publicou um artigo com algum interesse sobre Airey Neave, um militar e político conservador inglês, assassinado (provavelmente por uma das cisões do IRA) em 1979.

No essencial, parece-me a biografia típica de um politico conservador inglês da velha guarda (de família aristocrática, aluno de Eton e Oxford, passou pelo exécito e foi uma espécie de herói de guerra da II Guerra Mundial, usualmente vestido a rigor, etc.).

No entanto há uma passagem que me despertou particular interesse, sobre os anos imediatamente anteriores à sua morte (e à subida de Thatcher ao poder):

Neave saw socialism as destroying Britain and didn’t see the Tory party of Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, and Edward Heath as much of a bulwark against the tide. By the early 1970s the country had reached a state it is now difficult to imagine. In the final days of the Heath government inflation was running at more than 30 percent and rising fast. The pound had lost 70 percent of its value on the international exchanges in just three years. Basic living standards were deteriorating badly. Thanks to a protracted miners’ strike, at one point the entire country went onto a three-day work week in order to conserve electricity, and even then we all too often sat up at night in frigid rooms eating tinned Spam and reading flimsily printed newspapers by candlelight. There may have been no village in the Carpathians more primitive than London in the hangover years following the Swinging Sixties.



Airey Neave was not one to embrace the view that there was anything inevitable about Britain’s decline to banana republic status. Although a certain amount of educated guesswork has to apply here, it’s reasonably safe to say that he never fully abandoned his connections to the intelligence services, and he actively explored with a few like-minded individuals the possibility of engineering a limited right-wing coup in the years immediately before the Thatcher revolution. This went under the codename “Northern Command,” and Neave once allowed that there had been “some talk” of raising a private militia in order to enforce a “patriotic agenda … something to kick the political elites up the arse.”

Isso faz-me pensar o que é que as pessoas querem dizer quando usam a expressão "república das bananas", porque na verdade (pelo menos, de acordo com o significado original do termo) um "limitado" golpe de direita (mesmo que feito com o objetivo de travar o "Britain’s decline to banana republic status") seria exatamente a consagração da Grã-Bretanha como uma "república das bananas" (ou um "monarquia das bananas"...).