Snitching
I READ an interesting Portuguese article about the effects of PIDE, or International and State Defense Police, on the lives of ordinary people during the time of António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) and the Estado Novo regime. It related especially to the network of informers that was operating at the time.
Subsequently, during a telephone call, I was discussing the behaviour of the modern-day snitch with a Portuguese friend and he rightly observed that the Covid-19 situation brought out the worst in people and that some individuals here were informing on one another for bending the rules. I mentioned that in England there has been a culture of snitching/grassing since the end of the Second World War and that such people are motivated, not by a sense of moral outrage, but pure jealousy over the fact that someone is getting away with something and they are not. Working and claiming benefits at the same time, for example, a form of ‘moonlighting’ which leads many people to inform on their neighbours when they see them being picked up in a van by their secret employer. The media even encourages this nasty behaviour as it is a useful distraction from the criminal activities that take place at the higher end of the social spectrum.
Returning to the point about the so-called ‘pandemic’ bringing out the worst in people, I truly believe that this is due to a lack of authentic suffering. People are still far too comfortable and telephoning the authorities because a hair salon is operating behind closed-doors is something of a luxury. If the situation worsened, on the other hand, I think people would actually begin to stick together far more and then we might see them at their best.
In relation to the article about PIDE, in the final years of the regime people were not living under the kind of repression that the Left likes to imagine. I do not support Salazarism, of course, it was a blend of mild clerico-fascism and petty national-capitalism, but it is clear to me that the period in question has been exaggerated beyond all comprehension and history, as we know, is always written by the victors. After all, surely a lack of snitches would imply that a system is opposed by an extremely large number of people and vice versa? Similarly, in the present climate there is no true dissatisfaction without things degenerating to the level of ‘us and them’ rather than the current war of all-against-all.
This seems correct. The mother of one of our neighbours was the young daughter of a Pastor in Germany during the WWII in a small village. Though one or two small time members of the Nazi party were snitches, there was a large amount of silent sticking together - her parents were part of a Freedom Railroad for Jews, hiding them out en route in their secret rooms, etc. Her uncle, another pastor, when riding through the village, used to th equivalent to a v sign to Nazis who gave him the heil hitler salute. If a stupid-supporting Nazi janitor hadn't clocked the White Rose chucking leaflets around - a freak incident that was not planned - they might have got through the war without being discovered. On the other hand, Spanish workers living in Eng;and in 1960 told us that in Spain at that time if you casually criticized the Church or Franco, you could disappear in the night. Quite a few writers I have read have said that the lack of real daily risk - ie risk one has to take to get food, etc.in modern society has crippled us physically, psychologicvally, and spirtually. Jams Baldwin Jnr. said that white Americans needed to learn from black Americans that life was always poyenyially tragic every day, that the sun might not come up fro them toorrow. Risk aversion is now pathological.