Fernando Savater after his dismissal from El País: the most controversial paragraphs of the philosopher’s new book

“Repenting is not my habit,” says the philosopher Fernando Savater on the opinions he carved in Carne governoda – his latest book, in Spanish bookstores from Wednesday – and on why the newspaper El País decided to dissociate him after almost half a century of consideration for him one of his most prestigious pens.

“What I wrote was done sincerely and with my best intentions. I have never fallen behind“I’m not one of those who kneel before their boss and then criticize him behind his back,” says the philosopher devoted to Borges.

The governed meat is defined, on the back cover, as “the human and intellectual biography of Fernando Savater in which he explains the political journey from his youthful left to an enlightened right-wing constitutionalism”.

That was sincericide it cost him the space that El País I booked it weekly.

It was the current director of the newspaper, Pepa Bueno – at the helm of the newspaper since July 2021 – who called Savater to inform him that I wouldn’t write anything else on the back cover of Saturdays.

“We talked for a while in a friendly tone,” the philosopher told the online publication El Confidencial. “There are 50 years of my life that I leave behind. But you have to assume that as you get older you’re constantly locking doors and this is a door that closes”.

Clarion He tried to contact the management of Grupo Prisa, of which El País is part. Neither Bueno nor anyone from Prisa made any statements.

Asturian stew

For years Savater, who is now 76 years old, has wanted to title one of his books “Governed Flesh”, which It is an Asturian dish.

This is how its definition appears, according to Wikipedia, in the first pages of the book: “Governed meat is a traditional dish of Asturian cuisine. It is a meat dish that is prepared very slowly. Nowadays it is rare to find this dish.”

“The Saturday column I started in El País (…) suited my style particularly well: a three-hundred-word column on the last page of Saturday, the day I could have the most readers. Of course, I used that platform for expose the new rescuers to the best of my ability that had fallen on our country,” Savater said sincerely in his intellectual memoirs.

In those pages it was as politically incorrect as possible. Like when, for example, not content with having already said it last year in the digital newspaper L’Obiettivo, he reproduces in his book a fragment of the article he published there in September 2023: “The media like El País or La Ser ( radio station), who may one day call themselves heirs of the Enlightenment, but today they are simply governmentthey baptize the wicked amalgam between opportunistic socialists, fanatical separatists or profiteersdebtors of foreign money that comes from the most repugnant financed, etc.”

And he elaborates on it in Carne governoda: «From a progressive centre-left newspaper, with its merits and defects, it has become a spokesman for the government. of the worst government that Spanish democracy has had since the death of the dictator”, underlines Savater on page 129 of his book.

«This naturally undermined the prestige of the newspaper, which went from a reference newspaper to a reference newspaper ridiculous epitome of the press at the service of politics”, he underlines below.

Your reasons

“In the first years my newspaper maintained the usual social democratic line (…) But there was a turning point in the socialist party and in the end the worst thing that had happened to it in its long and controversial history occurred: it found itself subject to leader of the caudillo of Pedro Sánchez”writes Savater.

“Several factors intervene in the evident decline of EP (El País). In my opinion, the first is the same one that has broken down the PSOE in its best essence: the ideological colonization by the PSC (Socialist Party of Catalonia), which is a carcinogenic element in which it is implanted”, believes the philosopher.

And then he takes aim at his fellow editorialists: “Another element that worsens this once prestigious newspaper is an unfortunate female invasion -points out-. In a moment like the current one, in which the best editorialists of all media are women and some of us hardly read anything else (…) in EP we had to the less brilliant lot“Both those at home and those imported, except for the honorable and rare exceptions of rigor, are as sectarian and boring as the men with whom they compare themselves.”

«There are issues that should only be talked about with a sincerity that damages us, without covering our backs», says Savater in the pages of the book whose prologue he finished in Madrid on 14 October 2023. As if it had been a premonition