How Portugal respects human rights like an oil slick on water
It could begin with Julius Caesar or whoever wrote for him “De Bello Gallico” (in current Portuguese “About the Gallic War”, or the war in Gaul), with the famous — for those who know it — phrase “Gallia est omnis divisa in parte tres”, that is, “Galia is all divided into three parts”. So it was, in fact, with Marcelo’s Homeric speech in Doha, Qatar, on Human Rights: the entire lecture was divided into three parts (for what he suspected, for three reasons, of having been inspired by Luís Marques Mendes, who divide all arguments into three parts). If I wanted to make it a cult, which I don’t need, because I am in fact, I could say that this idea, of subdividing everything into three parts, has to do with rhetoric. Even with pre-Christian rhetoric, it is not by chance that in Christianity everything has three parts — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; or Faith, Hope, and Charity; or again, the seven mortal sins, which are two times three plus the One of the Trinity; or again the ten commandments, which are seven plus three. This idea developed into several other cosmogonic and transcendental visions, such as the French trilogy Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which the freemasons used (and use), or the declaration of witnesses in American courts: “I swear to tell the truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth.” Other interpenetrations exist between rhetoric and common speech, such as “One, two, three, little Chinese monkey” or “Mr.
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