The importance of principles and the role we citizens have in defending them

Every night I sit here to think about what I will write the next morning, often focusing on current events.

The cost of staying true to your principles and the price you pay for betraying them
Principles versus fashions: the lesson offered by a man who folded his arms

However, today I want to talk about one of the functions of this blog. A function it has been fulfilling for almost 22 years, certainly not always with the necessary precision (after all, I'm a disaster), but with one idea in mind: this blog is here to defend principles, not acronyms or trends. This sounds very cool written like that, but in practice it's not as easy to do as it is to write, as I've had the opportunity to discover many times.

Being true to one's principles means, for example, defending life from conception even if it means clashing with political agendas that consider this a settled debate (as if the massacre of thousands of innocents each year in the womb could be silenced) or that it should be put aside because there are other priorities that bring in more votes.

That loyalty also means continuing to defend Ukraine's cause against the Russian invasion, just as we did on the first day of that aggression, because ultimately, Vladimir Putin's dictatorship still hasn't left the country it invaded. This means having to deal with the frustration of people who yesterday claimed to be defending Ukraine and today believe it's better to abandon that stance for whatever reason, while Ukrainian citizens, including children, continue to die in Russian terrorist attacks against civilian targets.

That loyalty implies never forgetting the defense of a limited state, a defense of the limits of political power that lies at the very heart of democracy. That defense implies the need to always maintain a critical attitude toward our leaders, regardless of their political affiliation, an attitude that is difficult to sustain if your media outlet is lavished with subsidies from certain governments. Subsidies that Contando Estrelas neither requests nor receives from anyone.

Having principles means rejecting any alliance with totalitarians and not forgetting, for example, the crimes of communism, while some try to build bridges with Stalin nostalgics using Hispanicity as a pretext or even invoking lies such as "Yankee imperialism" or "Anglo-Zionism," in a new attempt sponsored from Moscow and Beijing to break ties between Western countries, as already happened during the Cold War years.

A matter of principle is also not to forget that the 20th century witnessed the horror of the Holocaust, the planned genocide of millions of people at the hands of the Nazis, and that eight decades after that wave of terror, the West is once again witnessing the rise of the anti-Semitism that caused that massacre, a hatred driven from both ends of the political map and which currently concentrates all its fury on the State of Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East.

I could continue talking about more issues here, but I think the ones I have just presented serve to remind us that having principles nowadays means finding yourself alone too often, because for many people it is more important to defend a political party than to be loyal to one's ideas, simply because parties have the bad habit of changing their ideas for mere electoral opportunism.

For many years now I have been defending the importance of civil society in politics, because ultimately, ordinary citizens should be the first to demand that politicians respect the principles they pledged to uphold before their voters. That remains the role of this little blog today, which I personally see as a simple candle, because it has never aspired to be a brilliant flare: only to keep alive the defense of causes that others have abandoned. Keeping that small candle lit remains my daily challenge, although it is not always easy.

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Image: Grok.