Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's Behind the Bastard's a podcast that gets behind
Speaker 2: the bastards. You know what this is. You know what
Speaker 2: it means. We talk about bad people, the worst in
Speaker 2: all of history, and today.
Speaker 3: Start this with a very tony soprano.
Speaker 2: Oh oh is that a tony soprano? I never watched
Speaker 2: the Sopranos. Here to be angry at me about that
Speaker 2: is post Sophie licker Litman, my producer and Jeff May.
Speaker 4: Haven't you had Matt Leeb on this show and yet you.
Speaker 2: Still have not seen the Sopranos.
Speaker 3: What's wrong with you?
Speaker 4: That's an act of aggression.
Speaker 3: Can you can you spend this weekend at least watching
Speaker 3: the book?
Speaker 2: No, I'm sorry. I'm an Italian American. I was raised
Speaker 2: in the Sopranos, you know, like got mobbed up family.
Speaker 3: You need this down the list?
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 3: All right, you need you.
Speaker 4: We had to change our last name.
Speaker 3: You need to watch the Sopranos this year. That is
Speaker 3: your goal for the first year of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: I'm disgusted with you right now.
Speaker 4: It's okay.
Speaker 2: I can use the Italian slurs. You can't, Sophie.
Speaker 3: I'm horrified by your behavior.
Speaker 4: I can use those slurs too. You can't tell you
Speaker 4: absolutely can.
Speaker 2: I'm not Italian, but I know you're a but you
Speaker 2: were a boxer, so it counts. Uh yeah, Jeff, how
Speaker 2: are you doing, Jeff May.
Speaker 4: I'm good. It's been it's been a while. It's been
Speaker 4: a while.
Speaker 5: It's been a long while since I visited. The embargo
Speaker 5: is lifted, which is nice.
Speaker 4: Yes, thank you.
Speaker 5: After those crime I so sorry for saying all those
Speaker 5: really a horrible thing.
Speaker 4: I don't even know what I was thinking that.
Speaker 2: It's okay, it's okay. DEI is over. We can say
Speaker 2: those things. Oh finally, the woke mob they came for
Speaker 2: Jeff May. No, Jeff, you're one of our I mean
Speaker 2: you're you're my old friend from back in the day,
Speaker 2: by which I mean the time when I worked at
Speaker 2: Cracked uh and lived in Los Angeles. And you're also
Speaker 2: one of our favorite guests. And this is this is fun.
Speaker 2: You and I have both seen the movie Ghost Dog,
Speaker 2: featuring the magnificent Forest Whitaker American Samurai himself. You know
Speaker 2: that's in the Criterion collection now. It should be, it
Speaker 2: should be. It's perfect.
Speaker 4: It's a beautiful movie. I will say.
Speaker 5: I have bonded over my love of Ghost Dog Wave
Speaker 5: Warrior with more than just you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an incredible film. I've been bringing up now
Speaker 2: that and Or's out and everybody's talking about Sager Aar,
Speaker 2: I'm like, you guys need a motherfucking see ghost Talk. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: if you like that, you need to see ghost Talk.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah you kind of do you should anyway, you
Speaker 4: should anyway.
Speaker 5: In the Criterion closet, so like Mark Hamill could grab
Speaker 5: it on an Instagram reel or something, you don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's perfect. So today we're talking about a dictator
Speaker 2: who was, unfortunately maybe the best at being a dictator
Speaker 2: on like a technical level, right, like if we're giving
Speaker 2: technical awards on the actual like craft of dictatoring.
Speaker 4: So like the dictator oscars that they don't show on television.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, the Dictator oscars that don't make because
Speaker 2: they're kind of boring, right like.
Speaker 4: They did it like last night we had the Dictator Oscar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the Dictator Oscar for like, yes, set
Speaker 2: dressing or whatever. It goes to Antonio Crazy here. Yeah yeah, yeah, great,
Speaker 2: great audio editor we're talking about. Have you did you
Speaker 2: know that Portugal had a dictator at the same time
Speaker 2: that like Germany and Italy had dictators in Spain.
Speaker 5: I mean I have to say yes because of my
Speaker 5: history degree and all that, but like you know, I
Speaker 5: forget shit.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So Antonio Salazar was the dictator of Portugal from like
Speaker 2: the thirties up to the seventies. Right, So he is
Speaker 2: he has a very long run. It's a short yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: like twice he's got he's like two, he's like more
Speaker 2: than two. He was like three Hitler's right, three almost
Speaker 2: four Hitlers.
Speaker 4: Oh look at this guy, he's like four Hitlers.
Speaker 2: Like he's like a four Hitler run. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: I gotta be honest, though he was did he did
Speaker 4: he up Hitler numbers? That's why he lasted?
Speaker 5: Yeah, It's like I guess Hitler would be like the
Speaker 5: the bo Jackson of dictators. Like it's like it's like
Speaker 5: a very very bright burn. You don't mind me saying
Speaker 5: such a terrible way to describe that. No, but then
Speaker 5: a fizzle out after he had that hip injury.
Speaker 2: Right, and Salazar has a hip injury in like sixty
Speaker 2: eight that takes him out. You know, Salzar just gets long,
Speaker 2: he's got the longevity, but he's in there a long time.
Speaker 2: He's like that guy who was with the Patriots.
Speaker 4: Fuck, what's his name?
Speaker 2: Everybody hates him, Tom Brady, Tom Brady Brady. Antonio Salazar
Speaker 2: is the Tom Brady of dictators.
Speaker 5: Tom Brady is single handedly responsible for stopping a lot
Speaker 5: of domestic violence in New England. So I'm going to
Speaker 5: actually say, you know, if you really think about it,
Speaker 5: it's a garbage fan base full of terrible people.
Speaker 4: It is. It is the Patriots the worst.
Speaker 5: And when he came in, we were like, I don't
Speaker 5: know about okay, we love this guy.
Speaker 4: He's keeping things safe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to say that about Antonio Salazar,
Speaker 2: but he does have the staying power, right, and he's
Speaker 2: one of these guys. He gets called a fascist a lot,
Speaker 2: and there's an argument to be made for that. He
Speaker 2: gets called a fascist generally because you know, he comes
Speaker 2: up around the same time Hitler does, around the same
Speaker 2: time Franco does a little bit after Mussolini, and they're
Speaker 2: all kind of simpatico for a while. So there's this
Speaker 2: this argument that like, well, Salazar was like a fascist
Speaker 2: dictator as well, and you can kind of debate that.
Speaker 2: But you know, I think if we want to put
Speaker 2: it in like Beatles terms, right, Hitler's the John Lennon
Speaker 2: of fascism and Mussolini's the George Harrison, and you know,
Speaker 2: they kind of clock out first, which leaves Franco as
Speaker 2: the ringo. And I think we've got to say that
Speaker 2: maybe Salazar is the Paul McCartney fascism.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean, that's that's pretty good. Also,
Speaker 4: Europe was a vibe huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they were not doing well right after that
Speaker 2: World War.
Speaker 4: They were certainly going for it. You know, I got it,
Speaker 4: you gotta hand. They took big swings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like, well, we're in our big swing
Speaker 2: period to day and we didn't even have a World
Speaker 2: War One over it, right, So who are we to judge?
Speaker 5: We can judge a little, I mean, to be fair,
Speaker 5: we've had we've had we've had a few.
Speaker 2: We've had a couple. Yeah, we've taken our swings. This
Speaker 2: is in our first set, so as we'll discuss. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of debate as to whether or not
Speaker 2: you should call Salazara fascist. He certainly uses a lot
Speaker 2: of fascism tools like there's aspects of it that he utilized,
Speaker 2: and he has good relationships with all of the fascist
Speaker 2: powers during his days, he's going to intervene to help
Speaker 2: Franco win his civil war in Spain. But ideologically he's
Speaker 2: not someone who's like super on board, especially with all
Speaker 2: the weird Hitler stuff. Like he's not a cult to
Speaker 2: personality guy. He's not a big ideology a fascism guy,
Speaker 2: Like he thinks that stuff's kind of weird, and he's
Speaker 2: above all, like an economics professor and a Catholic conservative
Speaker 2: who's just kind of like, I'm the only guy smart
Speaker 2: enough to run Portugal and all torture as many people
Speaker 2: as I have to do in order to keep the
Speaker 2: economy running, right, Like he has a balan. It's the budget,
Speaker 2: no matter who has to die. Kind of motherfucker.
Speaker 4: I guess it really depends on like if fascism is
Speaker 4: decided on at the start of the journey, yeah, or
Speaker 4: just summed up at the end of the journey, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm not doing a fascism and then at the end
Speaker 4: you're like kind of seems like you might have been Yeah,
Speaker 4: with him, it would be.
Speaker 2: I think it looks at the start a lot like
Speaker 2: a fascism, and then at the end it's like, well,
Speaker 2: you were just kind of a garden variety dictator, like maybe,
Speaker 2: but you never did any of the weird cult to
Speaker 2: personality shit, like you were never like that kind of
Speaker 2: stuff was sort of absent.
Speaker 4: But we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2: At the end, we could kind of say, where do
Speaker 2: we want to where do we want to land on
Speaker 2: this motherfucker on a fash scale, Yeah, on the fash scale.
Speaker 2: But either way, he sucked, right, we're not debating that
Speaker 2: part of it.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 2: Antonio de Olivera Salazar was born on April twenty eighth,
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty nine, in a small house in the village
Speaker 2: of Vimiro. His parents were kind of odd ducks for
Speaker 2: their era. His father Antonio, married his mom in eighteen
Speaker 2: eighty one, when they were forty and thirty five. And
Speaker 2: this is a lot older than people tend to It's
Speaker 2: older that it's like pretty old for getting married now,
Speaker 2: like back in the eighteen eighties, the average lifespan in
Speaker 2: Portugal for men is forty six point five years. Right now,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean people died at forty seven, but it
Speaker 2: means that, you know, infant mortality was so high that
Speaker 2: those averages are low a lot. And this is still
Speaker 2: pretty weird for you to wait this long to get married.
Speaker 2: And it's also it's hard to conceive right when you're
Speaker 2: when both parties are over thirty five years old, it's
Speaker 2: relatively difficult, especially with eighteen eighties, you know, obstetrics technology.
Speaker 2: The other thing that makes his mom and dad weird
Speaker 2: is that they can read, which is not normal for
Speaker 2: Portuguese peasants.
Speaker 4: Were modern Americans?
Speaker 2: If you're modern Americans, yes, thanks to chat GPT.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, sorry, how we ruined education? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Can we just say that the least surprising piece of
Speaker 5: news just dropped and that people that use chat GPT.
Speaker 2: Or morons right right right, that it breaks their brains.
Speaker 2: That it's like atrophying you because you're not thinking about
Speaker 2: how to put words together.
Speaker 4: Bad for you.
Speaker 1: That story this week about the guy that proposed to
Speaker 1: his Ai girlfriend and then cried when she said yes.
Speaker 2: And then it breaks out that he's got like his
Speaker 2: he's a human partner.
Speaker 4: I don't think they're married, but they have a kid together,
Speaker 4: they have a child.
Speaker 2: I just yeah, oh fuck, so that's not Salasar's parents, right,
Speaker 2: we're cooked.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All the other Portuguese peasants are using eighteen eighties chat GPT,
Speaker 2: which I guess is just being too busy to learn
Speaker 2: how to read. But his mom and dad know how
Speaker 2: to read now everyone else in their village, most of
Speaker 2: the people living in this village who are because these
Speaker 2: are again like all peasants, even though it's the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2: Outside of a couple of maybe aspects of modernity that
Speaker 2: have crept in, most of the people in these villages
Speaker 2: are living lives that like if you go back three
Speaker 2: or four hundred years, there's more in common than there
Speaker 2: is different, right, which we can't say about nobody, even
Speaker 2: like the poorest rural people in the US today do
Speaker 2: not live life that are similar to rural Americans in
Speaker 2: the seventeen hundreds in a lot of ways. But that
Speaker 2: is kind of the case in Portugal in this period,
Speaker 2: a lot more so than it's going to be in
Speaker 2: any later period. His village does have kind of one
Speaker 2: thing going for it, which is that Vimiro, when he
Speaker 2: is kind of a little kid, is chosen to be
Speaker 2: the site of a railway station, right, which is going
Speaker 2: to ensure that while a lot of small rural towns
Speaker 2: kind of die out as modernity comes to Portugal. Vermiro
Speaker 2: is going to continue to be like relevant, you know,
Speaker 2: because there's this this connection to the rest of.
Speaker 4: The World's going to become the tombstone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's a tombstone, a Portugal type situation.
Speaker 4: It's going to be dressed like undertakers with big black
Speaker 4: mustaches and stuff. It's going to that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: And yeah, Doc Holliday is going to show up with
Speaker 2: fucking consumption. It's going to be incredible. Val Kilmer, Oh
Speaker 2: my god.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, so good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, especially if you've seen that movie Val, He's
Speaker 2: filmed as he was dying. Incredible stuff. Great movie. So
Speaker 2: his mom is kind of the Val Kilmer of Miro,
Speaker 2: and like Val Kilmer, she's a small business owner. I
Speaker 2: don't actually know if that's true a Val, but it's
Speaker 2: true of his mom.
Speaker 4: He was rolling.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's doing great. She's going to become an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2: She's going to open like a tavern in this town
Speaker 2: with like some rooms to rent, and that's going to
Speaker 2: help the family rise up to what's effectively the Portuguese
Speaker 2: middle class. While Antonio Salazar is like a kid to
Speaker 2: an adolescent. Right, His family is going from we're kind
Speaker 2: of near the bottom rong to we're actually doing pretty
Speaker 2: well because there's this railway station picked for our town
Speaker 2: and my mom knows how to capitalize on it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: His mom gets the money to start this business because
Speaker 2: his dad also does okay for himself. He's an estate manager,
Speaker 2: which means you've got these rich families who have like
Speaker 2: generational wealth because their ancestors four hundred years ago plundered
Speaker 2: the New World and they have big estates, but they
Speaker 2: don't they're not going to take care. They don't want
Speaker 2: a garden, they don't want to farm, they don't want
Speaker 2: to do anything with them. So they hire a guy
Speaker 2: like Antonio are Antonio's dad to take care of the
Speaker 2: properties while they're away being rich, hanging out in their
Speaker 2: other houses in Lisbon or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: Hell yeah, man, capitalist feudalism.
Speaker 2: Right, right, that's kind of what's going on here, and
Speaker 2: that's the world his parents inhabit, and that's the world
Speaker 2: Antonio kind of comes up in. Portugal is not a
Speaker 2: healthy country as Salazar is growing up. Right, if you
Speaker 2: remember the early period of colonialism, right after Columbus, you know,
Speaker 2: quote unquote discovers the New World. The two powers that
Speaker 2: are first like really expanding around the world and taking
Speaker 2: a lot of colonies and taking advantage of you know,
Speaker 2: Europe beginning this colonialization process are Spain and Portugal. And
Speaker 2: Portugal is for a couple one hundred years a major
Speaker 2: world power. They have colonies all over the planet because
Speaker 2: they're just very early successful in the age of Sale,
Speaker 2: and they rapidly take a lot of colonies, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, Portugal is not a big country, so in
Speaker 2: very short order, their colonial possessions are dozens of times
Speaker 2: the size of the actual country itself. And this does
Speaker 2: pretty well for them for a while. But like Spain,
Speaker 2: they kind of also burn out quickly, right like as
Speaker 2: the British Empire is starting to really pick up steam
Speaker 2: as king shit, Portugal's kind of the sick man of colonialism,
Speaker 2: or at least Portugal and Spain are both kind of
Speaker 2: the sick men of colonialism.
Speaker 5: It's actually really funny because one of the three dates
Speaker 5: that I told my students they would have to know
Speaker 5: was fourteen ninety two, and it's I'm like, it's not
Speaker 5: for who you think, Yeah, like it's not Columbus, but
Speaker 5: it is his bosses. Because one of the reasons that
Speaker 5: they really flopped super hard was they basically were like,
Speaker 5: we're gonna make a Christo state, basically like an entirely
Speaker 5: and they kicked out all the all the Jews and
Speaker 5: the Muslims.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, And so that basically.
Speaker 5: Means they kicked out their most educated and wealthy members
Speaker 5: of their society and we're just like, we'll do it normally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll figure this out. You kicked out the banks
Speaker 4: and the universities basically, and so they just started crumbling
Speaker 4: and they started building and then they were just they
Speaker 4: couldn't keep going. So these help. It's very funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a lot to say about like taking
Speaker 2: all of these you know, suddenly flooding their market with
Speaker 2: precious metals too, and like that does with the value
Speaker 2: of these things. Like there's a lot that goes on.
Speaker 2: But Portugal is like not a wildly dissimilar story and
Speaker 2: that kind of by the time the seventeen eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: are creeping around, things are starting to like look kind
Speaker 2: of shitty, even though they still have massive overseas possessions,
Speaker 2: which they're going to maintained until the middle late middle
Speaker 2: of last century. So the fact that they've got all
Speaker 2: these colonial territories Portugal is going to come in a
Speaker 2: handy when Napoleon invades in eighteen oh seven and the
Speaker 2: royal family of Portugal has to flee to Brazil, which
Speaker 2: declares it's independence not long after this fact, So that's
Speaker 2: no longer going to be a case for Portugal, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of after this period, as is often the case
Speaker 2: with royal families, Portugal's royal family not good at ruling.
Speaker 2: The Catholic Church, which held tremendous power, coveted its position
Speaker 2: as the sole provider of social services and the cultural
Speaker 2: power that that brought. Very similar to Spain, you get
Speaker 2: a lot of similar things with like basically Carlists, like
Speaker 2: people who believe in the Catholic Church is the soul,
Speaker 2: like legitimate sort of you know authority, you know, pushing
Speaker 2: against these kind of republican ideals in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: nineteen hundreds, as modernity comes out.
Speaker 5: I mean, it is funny how much plague beat the
Speaker 5: shit out of the Church. Oh yeah, after people came out,
Speaker 5: they're like, these guys weren't doing shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Wow. It turns out they were wrong about a lot.
Speaker 5: Turns out the pope in France. Yeah, surrounded himself in
Speaker 5: a wall of fire. That doesn't seem good.
Speaker 4: We do that.
Speaker 2: I've done that before. It's not the worst thing to do.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean it's cool, it's cool, It looks great.
Speaker 4: It is cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also check out the movie, the new Paul Verhoven movie,
Speaker 2: Bernadotta or something like that. It's about this nun in
Speaker 2: Italy during the plague years. Fucking wild shit.
Speaker 4: She becomes a robot cop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, it is cool, classic Paul Verhoven movie. So,
Speaker 2: as a result, very little changes in Portugal and almost
Speaker 2: nothing gets better until the king is ousted during a
Speaker 2: civil war in the eighteen thirties. This is not going
Speaker 2: to last super long, but for a period of time
Speaker 2: there's this like liberal kind of party backed by Great Britain,
Speaker 2: and they win and they see some property in the
Speaker 2: church from the church and from the nobility, but they
Speaker 2: also don't do much to fix the larger issues the
Speaker 2: country has, and most Portuguese people still can't read. The
Speaker 2: country has bent over under the weight of these Titanic
Speaker 2: debts that have been accrued to from generations of overspending
Speaker 2: and the country kind of continues to hobble along. Monarchists
Speaker 2: are able to get like a weak king you know,
Speaker 2: in there, and they quarrel with Republicans who are trying
Speaker 2: to support like a new electoral system that also isn't
Speaker 2: very sturdy. And it's into this kind of fucked up
Speaker 2: and failing nation that Salazar grows up. Right, So this
Speaker 2: is also what's happening, is he's watching both this increasingly
Speaker 2: like sclerotic and ineffective, like royal family fail to hold power,
Speaker 2: and he's also watching these gasps of republicanism that aren't
Speaker 2: really fixing things either.
Speaker 5: And we've never seen this in the background, right, dictator, Yeah,
Speaker 5: this has never a failing place and learn how to
Speaker 5: how to play certain people chords in order to get
Speaker 5: what they want.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, never before.
Speaker 2: But yeah, nothing's working for him, except for he sees
Speaker 2: his parents like succeeding, right, because they're unusually educated and
Speaker 2: ambitious and they want more for their kids. His older sister,
Speaker 2: Marta becomes a school teacher. His parents seem to have
Speaker 2: been the normal amount of strict for their era, but
Speaker 2: a biographer, Tom Gallagher notes that as the youngest child
Speaker 2: and only boy, Antonio Salazar was babied and quote received
Speaker 2: none of the punishments that his mother occasionally meet it
Speaker 2: out right, so he's kind of by the time he
Speaker 2: comes along, his sisters have sort of gotten all of
Speaker 2: the spankings, right, not an uncommon youngest kids story where yeah,
Speaker 2: my parents were way bigger dix when I was a kid.
Speaker 4: What happened. What you need, though, is you need that gap.
Speaker 4: You need a bigger gap between the siblings, the top
Speaker 4: sibling and the younger, the oldest thing, because if it's
Speaker 4: too close, you just get the beatings.
Speaker 2: Any Yeah, you just get the beatings. But if it's
Speaker 2: long enough, your parents are tired, their arms don't work
Speaker 2: as well, especially when there's old as Antonio.
Speaker 5: My brother and I were two years apart, so he
Speaker 5: would beat me and then I would I would get
Speaker 5: something there you go.
Speaker 4: But then, like I know, people lay it on my
Speaker 4: little brother's fifteen years younger than me. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: that kid's not getting hit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're not going to hit your fifteen years Yeah,
Speaker 2: then you're just beating a child, right, But we're all perfect, yeah,
Speaker 2: as opposed to kids beating each other the way God intended,
Speaker 2: so he's the favorite of the family, not just of
Speaker 2: his parents, but of his sisters too. His mom's going
Speaker 2: to become obsessed with setting him up for success. For
Speaker 2: his part, Antonio never seems to have sought the limelight.
Speaker 2: He is a quiet kid. Gallagher's biographer posits that he
Speaker 2: was kind of overwhelmed by his mother's personality, but also
Speaker 2: kind of in awe of her capabilities, because she's just
Speaker 2: this very competent woman. She's, you know, raising her kids.
Speaker 2: She's helping to farm, you know, because they have to
Speaker 2: grow food for their own survival. And she's a small
Speaker 2: business owner right, and is kind of single handedly raising
Speaker 2: the family's position in society. While he's not helping her
Speaker 2: at the family business or helping in the fields, young
Speaker 2: Antonio spends his time alone with his dog in the woods.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't have had a lot of free time by
Speaker 2: our standards, and much of his learning had to be
Speaker 2: self directed, right, because the Portuguese education system is not good.
Speaker 2: His parents kind of help him learn to read, and
Speaker 2: then he's on his own for a lot of his
Speaker 2: early education. Outside of that, by the time he's ten,
Speaker 2: his mother had convinced his father that he's not getting
Speaker 2: enough attention or challenge in what education he is receiving.
Speaker 2: So he is enrolled in a seminary in the north
Speaker 2: of the country, right, And this is the normal story.
Speaker 2: If you grow up in a very Catholic place in
Speaker 2: this time and you're a really smart kid, but your
Speaker 2: family's poor, basically your only option is will enroll you
Speaker 2: in seminary and they will teach you stuff on the
Speaker 2: expectation that you'll become a priest, right, which is like
Speaker 2: half the time they were like, psych, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 2: doing that, No, thank you.
Speaker 4: I'm just kidding.
Speaker 5: And then and then there's like nine months left that
Speaker 5: I guess I'll write all the books.
Speaker 2: Then yeah, I guess I'll be the one who keeps
Speaker 2: remembering how to read for this town.
Speaker 4: Time to illuminate some more fucking manuscripts. I guess. Great.
Speaker 4: I'm not tired of that at all.
Speaker 2: So he is, as you state, it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where he's technically training to be a priest, but
Speaker 2: you don't have to. You're not like locked in and
Speaker 2: Salazar he's a good little Catholic boy, and he initially
Speaker 2: seems to have adopted this as an ambition for himself
Speaker 2: where he's like, well, yeah, I guess being a priest
Speaker 2: is the thing I'm going to do that's not going
Speaker 2: to last super long, and he's going to stop wanting
Speaker 2: to be a priest. Probably we don't know this perfectly,
Speaker 2: but the likeliest reason why he stops wanting to be
Speaker 2: a priest is the normal reason young boys stop wanting
Speaker 2: to become priests started and oh he starts fucking right,
Speaker 2: he starts fucking you know, he's like, oh, you know what,
Speaker 2: being a priest might suck ass?
Speaker 4: Actually, heaven sounds cool, but is busting and not? Is
Speaker 4: it is cool? Yeah? Cool? Is getting laid? Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: I can give myself heaven whenever I want, right, right, right,
Speaker 2: as long as I'm able to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have heaven at home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've got heaven at home, or at least in
Speaker 2: my next door neighbor's house. So he meets a girl.
Speaker 2: He actually meets several girls. His first is you know,
Speaker 2: she's sixteen, so is he. And she'll remain Maria di Figurito.
Speaker 2: She'll remain a friend and a political advisor for the
Speaker 2: rest of their lives.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This kind of first girl that he hits it off
Speaker 2: with is going to be she'll be influential politically in
Speaker 2: Portugal while he's the ruler, because she'll send him letters
Speaker 2: about like how this is how this is working, so
Speaker 2: this is working, and he'll kind of continue to trust her.
Speaker 2: The second girl he falls for is Philismina the Olivera,
Speaker 2: and she's two years older than him. Right the two
Speaker 2: meet at a railway station and, according to some accounts,
Speaker 2: begin a love affair that is what primarily derail Salazar's
Speaker 2: ambitions of priesthood. There's some dispute in this. Tom Gallagher
Speaker 2: argued that Salazar kind of keeps true to his vows
Speaker 2: for a while and then gives up the seminary later
Speaker 2: for another reason. But there are other arguments that I
Speaker 2: find really credible that it's probably a liaison with this girl,
Speaker 2: even though it takes a while that makes young Antonio realize,
Speaker 2: oh fuck, I'm not going to take a vow of celibacy.
Speaker 2: Peter Booker, who's co founder of the Algarve History Association,
Speaker 2: writes an article about Salazar's alleged romantic history for Portugal Resident,
Speaker 2: and he noted Salazar was studying to be a priest
Speaker 2: at the time and attended the seminary, but that fact
Speaker 2: did not prevent him from beginning a love affair. She
Speaker 2: was a friend of Marta, one of Salazar's sisters, and
Speaker 2: during the young holidays, Phillismina would say at the Salazar
Speaker 2: family home, they exchanged in numeral letters. Philismina began to
Speaker 2: have problems of conscience regarding her relationship with Salazar. She
Speaker 2: was a devout Catholic and did not want him to
Speaker 2: renounce the priesthood because of her Little did she know
Speaker 2: that not only was Salazar already thinking about abandoning his career,
Speaker 2: but he was also about to dump her. And this
Speaker 2: seems plausible, right, It's not just this girl, but it's
Speaker 2: in general. He's starting to get laid and he's like,
Speaker 2: I don't need to stay with this lady. But also
Speaker 2: the priest's clearly not for me because I kind of
Speaker 2: like fooling around, right.
Speaker 5: Okay, So we are sort of avoiding the five hundred
Speaker 5: pound gorilla in the room, which is that those vows
Speaker 5: have never mattered on the Catholic clergy. If you want
Speaker 5: to know how many popes had illegitimate children.
Speaker 4: Oh man, google clearly all of them. Oh you can
Speaker 4: get up to pope and still be.
Speaker 2: Fucking oh yeah, oh yes, So the norm is for
Speaker 2: popes to get laid, which is part of the problem, right,
Speaker 2: one of many, but yeah, it's it's uh, that's kind
Speaker 2: of what's happening with him.
Speaker 4: But he's also like.
Speaker 5: It's very important to note that this is the church
Speaker 5: and this is the steeple, right, open it up and
Speaker 5: fuck all the people.
Speaker 2: Right, That's kind of where Salazar's got to take it,
Speaker 2: except for like, I don't even need the church, I
Speaker 2: don't need the steeple. I've just got to fuck I'm
Speaker 2: the people. I'm just gonna fucking become an economist. So
Speaker 2: he's a bookish Catholic boy, and he like, yeah, he
Speaker 2: starts figuring out, like this is not the future for me.
Speaker 2: So he leaves the seminary. In nineteen oh eight, this
Speaker 2: is a big year for Portugal. It's the same year
Speaker 2: King Carlos and the crown Frince Louis Philippe are assassinated
Speaker 2: while they drive through Lisbon in an open coach. So
Speaker 2: this is like a daring. It's called the Lisbon regi Aside,
Speaker 2: and it's a very famous like moment in the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century, there's a lot going on behind this assassination.
Speaker 2: It gets blamed by some people. Tom Gallagher, who's kind
Speaker 2: of a more conservative guy, this biographer whose book I
Speaker 2: read on Salazar, blames it on anarchists. Much as I'd
Speaker 2: like to take credit or anarchists take credit for Killege King.
Speaker 2: That's not really what's happening here. These guys are like
Speaker 2: radical Republicans, right, I don't mean in the modern term,
Speaker 2: I mean like people who support a.
Speaker 5: Republican except the right public. Yeah, yeah, like I think
Speaker 5: we I mean, I know, we conflate them. But the
Speaker 5: difference between Republicans and Democrats and then liberal and conservative, like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it all depends on labeling, right.
Speaker 2: And these guys are like radical, like we want to
Speaker 2: be able to vote and fuck having a royal family. Right,
Speaker 2: that's the kind of radicals they are as opposed to,
Speaker 2: like being radical in favor of the abolition of the state,
Speaker 2: which is more of an anarchist thing. That's not really
Speaker 2: what's going on with these guys. There's a lot else
Speaker 2: that's happening behind this region side, right, that kind of
Speaker 2: helps inspire it. The Portuguese government has just conducted negotiations
Speaker 2: with great Britain over the extent of Portugal's African territory,
Speaker 2: and Portugal makes a lot of compromises and how much
Speaker 2: of Africa they're going to continue to hold, and this
Speaker 2: is seen as disastrous by many nationalists, and there's a
Speaker 2: lot of Republican nationalists who are like, well, the crown
Speaker 2: just gave up a lot of our overseas empire. Another
Speaker 2: thing that's going on in the background is that, as
Speaker 2: is often the case with Portugal, they're terrified that Spain
Speaker 2: is going to invade, right, because if you look at
Speaker 2: a map, Spain is a lot of Iberia and Portugal
Speaker 2: is pretty small.
Speaker 4: So how did they.
Speaker 5: Avoid unification that in the late fourteen hundreds it's Granada, Nevada,
Speaker 5: Castile and Aragon. I mean Aragon Castille were obviously the marriage,
Speaker 5: but then they sucked in Navarre and Grenada.
Speaker 4: Let's go get Portugal, man.
Speaker 2: There's a period of time where they are occupied by Spain, right,
Speaker 2: but there's also like reasons of natural defensiveness, and just
Speaker 2: like the power of a Portuguese state in that period
Speaker 2: that Portugal, but the Portugal doesn't you know, wipe up
Speaker 2: obviously unified, but that is constantly a fear going on
Speaker 2: in the background, and it's one of those things. It's
Speaker 2: not really a thing in modern Portuguese politics, I don't think,
Speaker 2: but it's like a huge factor in everybody's thinking right now.
Speaker 2: Is that, like Spain is right next to us, and
Speaker 2: they're much bigger, and they were going and they're goblin
Speaker 2: shit up, and there's this broader fear that like Portugal,
Speaker 2: we used to be great and we're being sidelined by
Speaker 2: greater powers because we've kind of slid into citizens. Right,
Speaker 2: we're old and we're tired, and we don't have the
Speaker 2: juice we used to have, and we're going to get
Speaker 2: eaten up entirely if we're not careful, right, Like, that's
Speaker 2: a major political factor in everything that's going on here anyway.
Speaker 2: You know what else is a major political actor advertising.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 2: So the Republican movement is starting to pick up steam
Speaker 2: in Portugal kind of in the period when the king
Speaker 2: is assassinated. Yeah, because the railways there's steam.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: The king gets kind of politically active in politics, which
Speaker 2: makes things even more chaotic and inefficient because it's like
Speaker 2: it's not great, he's not good at it. The King's
Speaker 2: not really good at much. And the king who gets
Speaker 2: assassinated has appointed this guy to act as his minister,
Speaker 2: who's widely seen as like a dictatorial figure. And eventually
Speaker 2: two Republicans with rifles decide, like, enough of this bullshit,
Speaker 2: We're going to take matters into our own hands. And yeah,
Speaker 2: these guys are kind of radical Republicans, and one of
Speaker 2: them has some history of anarchist sympathy. He's part of
Speaker 2: an anarcho syndicalist organization in his youth. But they're they're militant,
Speaker 2: like republican activists with rifles. One of them's in the
Speaker 2: art Army, and yeah, they shoot and kill the king
Speaker 2: and his heir, and the Lisbon Regiside becomes kind of
Speaker 2: a seminal moment for right wing politics in Portugal. Salazar,
Speaker 2: who's a young man at this point, he's leaving the
Speaker 2: seminary this year. He's livid when he finds out what's happened.
Speaker 2: Now he is starting to get political. At this point,
Speaker 2: he's been elected the president of his student body association,
Speaker 2: and in the spring of nineteen oh eight, he publishes
Speaker 2: a column attacking his fellow Catholics because it become so
Speaker 2: politically separated from the shocking violence in the capital that like,
Speaker 2: we Catholics need to get more political in order to
Speaker 2: save our country from this sort of radical republican sentiment
Speaker 2: that's going to destroy like force us into anarchy. Salazar's
Speaker 2: thinking here is probably influenced by the writing of a
Speaker 2: far right propagandist from France named Charles Morris, who wrote
Speaker 2: for France's most popular proto fascist newspaper, Action Francais. Salazar's
Speaker 2: argument is that democracy cannot maintain order and separation of
Speaker 2: church and state as a calamity for stability in public
Speaker 2: order right, which is very much like taken from Marris's
Speaker 2: the stuff that Mars is writing in France at the time.
Speaker 4: I would like to also add that Action Francis is
Speaker 4: my favorite rapper.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, probably politically different than the original newspaper.
Speaker 2: These are the guys like Action Fransei and Mars are
Speaker 2: gonna have a big role in like the far right
Speaker 2: French coup attempt that's gonna happen kind of right before
Speaker 2: World War Two, Like they're kind of a major inciting
Speaker 2: factor to it. And these are the guys that Salas are.
Speaker 2: So that's part one of the reasons why people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: is this guy fascist? It is like he's definitely very
Speaker 2: influenced by some proto fascist thinkers.
Speaker 4: Could you imagine de gaull Of trying to run France?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, could you imagine? I mean, yeah, in
Speaker 2: the post war period. Share it doesn't go great.
Speaker 4: Could you imagine de Gaulle. Uh, it's we got we
Speaker 4: like that. It's a history pun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good history pun. It's also just his
Speaker 2: last name.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, Hey, I'm gonna go. I'm sorry about that, guys,
Speaker 4: I'm going to take off.
Speaker 2: It's okay. We can forgive like one French pun. But
Speaker 2: that's all. No more so Salazar. He starts making some
Speaker 2: stabs at politics, right, you know, kind of in this
Speaker 2: post regis side period, but he's not fully committed to it.
Speaker 2: Part of this is that the wind is kind of
Speaker 2: blowing against the right wing, you know, after that king
Speaker 2: gets assassinated, the sort of left is looking like they've
Speaker 2: got the wind behind their sales. So he's like, I
Speaker 2: don't want to take a.
Speaker 4: Big, big move. It's a pretty big move shooting the
Speaker 4: king and his son. Yeah, quite literally a coup.
Speaker 2: Yeah, try it in your own monarchy triumph.
Speaker 4: You know, a rifle, a couple of small pieces of lead.
Speaker 2: Get you to the game, Yeah, get you right in
Speaker 2: really changes the ground. So he's like, I don't feel
Speaker 2: like this is a safe time to be like a
Speaker 2: far right Catholic activist, So I'm just going to take
Speaker 2: a teaching job and like lecture talking about the economy.
Speaker 2: He graduates from his second area vucation in nineteen ten,
Speaker 2: he opts to leave the church, and you know, one
Speaker 2: of the practical reasons behind this is that the church
Speaker 2: is kind of losing power. So Salazar winds up attending
Speaker 2: the prestigious University of Cuimbra as a law student in
Speaker 2: October of nineteen ten, thanks to the financial support of
Speaker 2: a family that his dad works for. This is like
Speaker 2: the family his dad is, you know, taking care of
Speaker 2: their grounds, and Salazar tutors like the mistress of this
Speaker 2: wealthy family, like he tutors her kids in exchange for
Speaker 2: financial support. So he teaches her kids to be less stupid,
Speaker 2: and they pay for him to go to this fancy college,
Speaker 2: this university, which is going to really change his life.
Speaker 2: It's going to give him an opportunity to become someone
Speaker 2: in politics. And this change in his life where he
Speaker 2: starts going to the school and his options start to
Speaker 2: open up companies. Another dramatic change in Portuguese government, because
Speaker 2: the Republicans revolt and they force the monarchy entirely out
Speaker 2: of the country. Right, they'd killed the king and his heir,
Speaker 2: but you know, you've still got kind of a weak
Speaker 2: monarchy in there. And then there's a revolt a little
Speaker 2: while later, and now Portugal is just a straight up
Speaker 2: republic for a little while.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Salazar bides his time as the republic tries to consolidate
Speaker 2: his power, and he works towards an advanced degree. He
Speaker 2: gets into academic tutoring as a side business, and it
Speaker 2: proves to be very lucrative. Like he's teaching a lot
Speaker 2: of kids. He's making good money, and he's investing it,
Speaker 2: and he proves to be very good investing money. Right,
Speaker 2: He's just one of these guys that understands how to
Speaker 2: turn a dollar into a couple of dollars and then
Speaker 2: a couple of more dollars and so on and so forth.
Speaker 5: I'm always weirdly jealous of those people. Yeah, Yeah, they're
Speaker 5: just really good at making money.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And also I'm just like yeah, but that must be
Speaker 5: like a if you care about money, that must be miserable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and he's not like a super happy person.
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like he doesn't have outside of like
Speaker 2: constantly sleeping around and investing his money and writing economic treatises.
Speaker 2: That's pretty much his whole life at this point, and
Speaker 2: being really angry that the Catholic Church isn't more powerful.
Speaker 2: Those are his hobbies, right, I mean, some of those
Speaker 2: hobbies are cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah. One of those hobbies is cool. One of those
Speaker 4: hobbies is just cool man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the other hobbies kind of lame.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Then dudes rock and then sometimes dudes do not rock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And he's more on the dudes not rocking side
Speaker 2: of things. But he does accept for a while that like,
Speaker 2: I can't fight democracy right now, and the monarchy's too weak,
Speaker 2: so it's not really worth me fighting for. So he
Speaker 2: kind of pivots and he starts, you know, coming up
Speaker 2: with his own theories about how to reform things. His
Speaker 2: attitude is that the republic is going to fail, and
Speaker 2: so he's trying to figure out like what systems should
Speaker 2: replace it, and he does a lot of reading on
Speaker 2: the encyclicals of Pope Leo the eighth, who had encouraged
Speaker 2: Catholic organization and power under a democratic system, right, which
Speaker 2: had Leo the eighth had been like a democracy probably
Speaker 2: here to stay. What we shouldn't fight to have like
Speaker 2: kings under the Catholic Church anymore. We should organize instead
Speaker 2: to legislative power in democratic systems for Catholicism.
Speaker 5: That was like a millennium afterwards, right, like Leo the
Speaker 5: eighth that if I recall, he's from like before one thousand,
Speaker 5: isn't he?
Speaker 2: There's an anti pope named Pope Leo the eighth who
Speaker 2: was around the one thousands. But this Pope Leo the
Speaker 2: eighth that we're talking about was head of the Catholic
Speaker 2: Church from February eighteen seventy eight until nineteen oh three.
Speaker 4: Oh oh, so recent.
Speaker 2: It's complicated. There's another earlier Leo the eighth, you're right,
Speaker 2: who's around nine. Yeah, he's an anti pope from nine
Speaker 2: sixty three to nine sixty five who's election was debated.
Speaker 5: Wasn't he the one that was like they were all
Speaker 5: excommunicating each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was during the anti pope period. But
Speaker 2: there's another Leo the Eighth who's the head of the
Speaker 2: and who's an official pope from like eighteen seventy eight
Speaker 2: to nineteen oh three, right man, yeah.
Speaker 4: Pope's right, why would you take that name?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with papistry to give you
Speaker 2: a whole like why he just I had to take
Speaker 2: that kind of cursed name. But he's he's the pope
Speaker 2: who like writes an encyclical being like, we Catholics should
Speaker 2: just find a way to kind of make democracy work
Speaker 2: for Catholicism, right, we should organize and find ways to
Speaker 2: gain power in democracies.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: That's kind of like one of the things he writes.
Speaker 2: And this has a really big impact on salas Ar.
Speaker 2: But no, good, good point. This is not that the
Speaker 2: pope from the nine sixties. Okay, that guy was debatably
Speaker 2: not the real pope. I didn't mean to derail the pod,
Speaker 2: but I'm just like, wait, I know it's always hard
Speaker 2: with the anti popes, Right, there's a lot of names
Speaker 2: where you're like wait a second, yeah, yeah, no, no.
Speaker 4: And I'm sure you guys have talked about it before.
Speaker 5: But just this idea that there was like at one point,
Speaker 5: like just a bunch of popees excommunicating and we.
Speaker 2: Could get there again. That's my dream for Catholicism. Yeah,
Speaker 2: fuck it. Are you not happy with the current pope?
Speaker 2: Go to Avignon and have a new pope made, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, I do like really fighting. Yeah, a Chicago
Speaker 2: it's nice to have a Chicago Pope, but I think
Speaker 2: we could get a Boston pope and really just have
Speaker 2: a battle of the accents, you.
Speaker 4: Know, one hundred percent honest. We don't have a great
Speaker 4: track record.
Speaker 2: We probably shouldn't have a Boston pope.
Speaker 5: Cardinals have done some stuff. I mean, to be fair, most,
Speaker 5: if not all, cardinals have done some stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very few clean cardinals out there, you know what.
Speaker 5: I like the idea of a Boston pope though, because, like,
Speaker 5: that's the first hope that would be willing to fight
Speaker 5: you in a toll booth.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 2: Let's just give it to Ben Affleck. See if he
Speaker 2: could take.
Speaker 4: It so he can do a bad accent of his
Speaker 4: own town.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Pope Affleck the first.
Speaker 4: Let's let it happen. Yeah, Pope Benedick kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Salazar, Who's who's you know? Starting to accept like, okay,
Speaker 2: maybe we should find a way to organize under democracy.
Speaker 2: He joins a school association while he's in college, the
Speaker 2: Center for Christian Democracy, which when the Republicans had come
Speaker 2: to power they'd like banned for a couple of years,
Speaker 2: but ultimately allowed to reform in nineteen twelve. And it
Speaker 2: was for this group that Salazar gives his first public speech,
Speaker 2: where he describes himself as a Christian democratic soldier. Two
Speaker 2: years later, he leads a delegation to Lisbon which protests
Speaker 2: an attempt to turn a local church building into a museum.
Speaker 2: His academic career flourishes around this time. He receives awards
Speaker 2: from his liberal and conservative teachers alike because his economic
Speaker 2: papers are, in their eyes, like so brilliant and well
Speaker 2: thought out. And he opens a consulting firm that gives
Speaker 2: out financial and legal advice to companies and whatnot that
Speaker 2: are trying to figure out how to get by. And
Speaker 2: this very chaotic time in which the Portuguese economy is
Speaker 2: not doing well, and he's good enough at this per
Speaker 2: Tom Gallagher quote, he now had enough money to augment
Speaker 2: his wardrobe with elegant clothes. He attended soirees and receptions,
Speaker 2: and his circle of friends widened Catholics and conservatives predominated,
Speaker 2: but not all of them were from such backgrounds. So
Speaker 2: he's making money, he's starting to enter high society. He's
Speaker 2: becoming a known man, and he's becoming a known like
Speaker 2: kind of firebrand right wing intellectual type. Right, he's a
Speaker 2: little bit of like a Jordan Peterson figure, if Jordan
Speaker 2: Peterson had been good at something. And he continues to
Speaker 2: work as a tutor, which seems to still have been
Speaker 2: his kind of bread and butter. He would later claimed
Speaker 2: tutoring did two things for me. It kept me in
Speaker 2: the university and it kept me out of trouble. But
Speaker 2: this is not exactly true, right, he's like sleeping around.
Speaker 2: He is still fucking right, and he's kind of noteworthy
Speaker 2: as a figure in this period. Most of his earliest
Speaker 2: friends are women and girls, including sixteen year old Julia Parastrello,
Speaker 2: who's the daughter of his godmother and the wealthy benefactors
Speaker 2: of his family. Right, so this is the daughter of
Speaker 2: the family that's like paying for him to go to college,
Speaker 2: that like his dad, is employed by he.
Speaker 4: Falls How old is this man? Again?
Speaker 2: Very good point. She is sixteen and he is twenty
Speaker 2: three years old. So that's a bit of an age.
Speaker 4: Gap, it is, and that's uncomfortable period for the.
Speaker 2: Era's It's not like it wouldn't have been if he
Speaker 2: had have been from the same social strata as she,
Speaker 2: it wouldn't have been noticed in the era, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's kind of one of those things where like you're
Speaker 5: looking back and you're like, you know what, Yeah, that's
Speaker 5: age appropriate for the time.
Speaker 2: It would it wouldn't have been wild like people would
Speaker 2: if he'd been rich. If he'd been rich, it wouldn't
Speaker 2: have been weird. But because he's from a poor background,
Speaker 2: her parents are like absolutely not. And we look at
Speaker 2: the age gap and go like, oh, yeah, that's not inappropriate,
Speaker 2: but they're just being like, well, but his parents aren't rich,
Speaker 2: so this is an inappropriate match, right, that's the only
Speaker 2: real issue they have.
Speaker 4: He's like, don't worry, Yeah, I'll take care of that.
Speaker 5: It's sort of like the Doctor Pepper guy named doctor
Speaker 5: Pepper after the dad that said he'd never amount to anything.
Speaker 4: That's that?
Speaker 5: Is that the story of doctor Pepper. I it might
Speaker 5: be apocryphal, but I'm pretty sure it's. Doctor Pepper was
Speaker 5: the guy that wouldn't allow a dude to marry the
Speaker 5: creator wanted to marry the guy's daughter.
Speaker 2: And he said, no, that sounds accurate as the for
Speaker 2: the official soda of Texas. At that, that sounds like
Speaker 2: the kind of cod man origin story.
Speaker 4: I don't like that. The official soda of Texas is
Speaker 4: my favorite soda.
Speaker 2: Oh it is, unfortunately, But let's turn to a more
Speaker 2: comfortable subject than Texas. This twenty three year old hitting
Speaker 2: on a teenager that much better. He decides to hit
Speaker 2: on her in the most appropriate manner for the time,
Speaker 2: which is he writes an article about how hot he
Speaker 2: is for this girl in a Catholic magazine. He had
Speaker 2: contributed to this publication before, but he'd mostly written like
Speaker 2: serious articles about Catholicism and democracy and like scholarly studies
Speaker 2: about like how what the Catholic Church, what role it
Speaker 2: should have in a modern society. And so he kind
Speaker 2: of changes up on his normal publication by writing a
Speaker 2: column that's just titled she, and in it he's describes
Speaker 2: it as like it's kind of written as a fictional piece,
Speaker 2: and he's writing as sort of like an anonymous author
Speaker 2: who's in love with a girl who lives in a
Speaker 2: wealthy manner, but is financially out of his league, and
Speaker 2: it's written in such a way that the subject of
Speaker 2: his affections is anonymized, and he can argue, like, this
Speaker 2: is not a literally true article. It's like I'm I'm writing,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: It's like I'm a plagiarizing Lady in the tramp.
Speaker 2: But it's it's it's very clear that like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is Salazar writing about a teenager that he's hot for. Right,
Speaker 2: that's too that's from a family that's too rich for him.
Speaker 2: And I can't imagine what must have been going through
Speaker 2: his head to make him write this thing, let alone,
Speaker 2: Like his editor is like, well, you mostly write about
Speaker 2: the pope, but yeah, this article about how you you've
Speaker 2: got a crush out a thirteen year old girl sounds great. Man,
Speaker 2: let's uh thought she was sixteen? Wait or sixteen? Sorry, sorry,
Speaker 2: sixteen year old girl. He's like, yeah, why not, let's
Speaker 2: let's publish this fucker.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did.
Speaker 5: I did need to clarify, specifically because I previously had
Speaker 5: gone on record and be it saying that wasn't that
Speaker 5: bad for the time.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, this is it's sixteen and twenty three, Okay,
Speaker 2: So I don't I can't get into the head of
Speaker 2: this editor who's like, yeah, this sounds like a good
Speaker 2: article for you to publish, Antonio. And I can't get
Speaker 2: into Antonio, who is like, yeah, this, this will clearly
Speaker 2: work for me, right and unfortunately for him, fortunately probably
Speaker 2: for that girl his the girl like her mom, who's
Speaker 2: again the patron of Salazar's family, she catches onto this
Speaker 2: like she reads this magazine because she is from a rich,
Speaker 2: conservative Catholic family, and she sees, Oh, this tutor we've
Speaker 2: hired to tutor our teenage daughter is writing an article
Speaker 2: about how he's got a crush on a teenage girl
Speaker 2: who lives in a manner and who's much richer than him.
Speaker 2: I wonder if it's Antonio, we should probably start watching them, right, Like,
Speaker 2: we should keep an eye on these two. This does
Speaker 2: not sound good.
Speaker 4: That seems pretty chills. Really, hey, should should we paying
Speaker 4: attention to this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should probably keep an eye on what's happening
Speaker 2: with this kid and our daughter.
Speaker 4: If a Facebook dad saw this, he'd be like, touch
Speaker 4: my family, and they'll be two hits, me hitting you
Speaker 4: and you hitting the ground.
Speaker 2: But they don't have Facebook, so they're their only option
Speaker 2: is to like keep an eye on her homework. So
Speaker 2: they're like paying attention to the homework he's giving her.
Speaker 2: And Antonio gives Julia some suspicious homework, right, He tells
Speaker 2: her to write an essay on love. And so this
Speaker 2: this really gets their their guard up and they're like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's definitely hitting on our daughter. And then her mom
Speaker 2: cut finds like she's there. They start monitoring Julia's male
Speaker 2: and they find a letter that Salisar sends Julia, which
Speaker 2: is to be blunt, very inappropriate, right, and the paristrella
Speaker 2: is again their primary problem is that he's poor and
Speaker 2: she's rich. And so after they catch this letter, they
Speaker 2: just make sure he's not going to be tutoring her
Speaker 2: anymore and he's never going to get any unobserved access
Speaker 2: to their daughter again. Right, So they lock this down
Speaker 2: because she's supposed to marry a rich guy, right, That's
Speaker 2: that's their reasoning.
Speaker 4: Yeah no, no, no, no no no no no no no
Speaker 4: no no no.
Speaker 2: Yeah absolutely heard the song. Yeah. Now, one of Salazar's
Speaker 2: mentors in the church, who's like one of these fathers
Speaker 2: who's kind of taking this kid under his wing, finds
Speaker 2: out about this. I think Julia's mom comes to him
Speaker 2: and is like, you need to talk to this boy,
Speaker 2: and so he sits down with Salazar and they have
Speaker 2: like a literal come to Jesus moment where he's basically like, hey,
Speaker 2: you're one of the best minds that are The Catholic
Speaker 2: conservative movement has what the fuck are you doing pining
Speaker 2: over a teenager in the goddamn newspaper? Are you out
Speaker 2: of your mind?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Like, this is not smart behavior? And this warning. Salazar
Speaker 2: never stops socializing with women and girls, right. He will
Speaker 2: continue to do that for most of the rest of
Speaker 2: his life, but he is going to get a lot
Speaker 2: more careful about it, and he's going to learn how
Speaker 2: to like hide this in a much better way than
Speaker 2: writing newspaper articles about his crushes. So he takes that warning.
Speaker 2: And you know what else our listeners should take is
Speaker 2: the advice of these products and services.
Speaker 4: Take note of what we're about to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, take note, and you give some companies your
Speaker 2: credit card information. It never works out badly, no breaches,
Speaker 2: it's never happened.
Speaker 4: And we're back. Ah.
Speaker 2: So Salazar is kind of establishing himself as an intellectual.
Speaker 2: He's learning how to flirt sometimes even with adults. And
Speaker 2: while this is going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if he had a nickname, can we call him
Speaker 5: the sexual intellectual?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you could call him that. I'm going to
Speaker 4: for the rest of the show.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't, but that's yeah, that's what he's doing, right,
Speaker 2: And the new Republican government of Portugal is kind of
Speaker 2: shitting the bed as he is coming up and becoming
Speaker 2: more prominent and learning how to kind of keep a
Speaker 2: lid on some of his proclivities. And part of why
Speaker 2: the Republican government shits the bed in this period is
Speaker 2: that World War One happens and Portugal does not have
Speaker 2: a dog in that fight, right, they shouldn't have. There
Speaker 2: is no reason. You just look at the map. There's
Speaker 2: no fucking reason for Portugal to get involved in World
Speaker 2: War goddamn One.
Speaker 4: Like we're gonna go swimming, Yeah, go swimming. You're live
Speaker 4: in Portugal, enjoy the beach. What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2: Don't send soldiers to die in the Western Front, you know.
Speaker 4: On some teenager to get wrapped up in barbed wire
Speaker 4: waiting to kill Kaiser. Get out of here. Come on,
Speaker 4: what are you doing? You got a couple of frisbees,
Speaker 4: some sketch balls, you know.
Speaker 2: You have a there's a couple of there's a lot
Speaker 2: of smaller European countries like this that are like, you
Speaker 2: have no you have no reason to get involved, and
Speaker 2: they do and it goes badly for everyone who's like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe if we get involved in World War One, we
Speaker 2: can help tip things and we can get some shit
Speaker 2: in the in the peace negotiations after. And the Republican
Speaker 2: government they largely get involved in World War One because
Speaker 2: they've got all these African colonies and they're worried that
Speaker 2: if there's like a negotiated peace, England might give away
Speaker 2: some of Portugal's African possessions to the Kaiser in exchange
Speaker 2: for like a better peace deal, and so we don't
Speaker 2: really want to risk that. So we'll send some men
Speaker 2: off to die in the Western Front and fighting in Africa,
Speaker 2: and they wind up losing like ten thousand soldiers and
Speaker 2: just pointless battles. Right in World War one terms, they
Speaker 2: get off pretty light, Like, that's not a lot of
Speaker 2: guys to lose in World War One by the standards.
Speaker 4: Also, ten thousand people, right.
Speaker 2: It's still ten thousand people who absolutely didn't need to
Speaker 2: be involved in that stupid fucking war and it costs
Speaker 2: a shitload of money. And just the fact that they've
Speaker 2: gotten involved in this disastrous war and they don't get
Speaker 2: really shit in the piece. It rattles the new regime's
Speaker 2: public support. People are like, well, fuck, this Republican government
Speaker 2: doesn't seem a whole lot better than the one that
Speaker 2: it replaced, right, pointless wars, wasting money on stupid bullshit?
Speaker 2: Did we just replace one set of assholes with another
Speaker 2: set of assholes? And sallazz pretty much mystery politics. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the world, right, It's like, yeah, which set of assholes?
Speaker 2: You know, maybe they suck a little less?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's like I wouldn't mind an asshole
Speaker 5: that's not trying to like destroy the lives of every
Speaker 5: person in the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, maybe we can get a slightly better asshole
Speaker 2: who's just.
Speaker 4: Corrupt and incompetent.
Speaker 5: And if we've got to throw some adrinochrome at him
Speaker 5: to keep it, let's do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Keep the peace, you know.
Speaker 2: Keep the peace and keep the adrenochrome flowing.
Speaker 4: Sally Man, I got to try that stuff because.
Speaker 2: It sounds it's good, it's great. You got to get
Speaker 2: it from the brain of somebody who's had it really harvested,
Speaker 2: you know before that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you don't want like the fake no no, no,
Speaker 5: true blood adrenochrome.
Speaker 2: No, no, you want you want the really good ship.
Speaker 4: From the source, directly from the source. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4: This episode brought to you by ass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, use a promo code.
Speaker 4: Uh uh.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm not going to make a Jeffrey Epstein joke here.
Speaker 2: What I am going to say is that Antonio Salazar,
Speaker 2: in this period when people are starting to get angry
Speaker 2: at the Republic, he becomes a very popular lecturer. And
Speaker 2: he's also he's working as an economics professor right now,
Speaker 2: so he's lecturing about how fucked up the system is,
Speaker 2: how the right and the conservative Catholics need to come
Speaker 2: into power, and he's also writing studies on like wheat
Speaker 2: reform and the role of gold and finance, and he's
Speaker 2: repeatedly arguing Portugal's government is spending too much money, which
Speaker 2: it is. Like he's not wrong about his fundamental economic conclusions,
Speaker 2: and his economic work is widely applauded. And in July
Speaker 2: of nineteen eighteen, he appears on the Color of Catholic
Speaker 2: illustrated as an up and coming thinker. Yeah, the swimsuit edition.
Speaker 2: He's naked, he's got one of those you know, Italian
Speaker 2: banana hammic.
Speaker 4: Tasteful. Yeah, it's very tasteful, right, but you know they're
Speaker 4: like Portugal. You know, he's right there on the water,
Speaker 4: like it's natural. Yeah, yeah, the lighting's perfect. So by
Speaker 4: this point a new group of anti government rebels is ascendant.
Speaker 4: They're called the integralists, and these are members of the
Speaker 4: wealthier classes who had sought a break from the republic
Speaker 4: and returned to a more authoritarian government, if not a monarchy,
Speaker 4: you know. So they're like, we.
Speaker 2: Probably can't go all the way back to the way
Speaker 2: things used to be, but we could. We should have
Speaker 2: a system where the rabble have less power, where like
Speaker 2: regular people have less ability to like influence the government.
Speaker 2: And a lot of folks in Portugal, especially in like
Speaker 2: the middle class and upper middle class, are more sympathetic
Speaker 2: to these aims because in the aftermath of the war,
Speaker 2: Portugal is in chaos. The new government is running up
Speaker 2: tremendous debts, and even though they're on the winning side
Speaker 2: of the war, they're not spared the unrest that hits
Speaker 2: in places like Germany, there's an open civil war in
Speaker 2: the north of the country and a monarchist coup in
Speaker 2: nineteen nineteen that gets suppressed, and in that same year
Speaker 2: as there's this civil war in this coup, four different
Speaker 2: governments come and go and Lisbon right, this is like
Speaker 2: a parliamentary system where if the government can't form a coalition,
Speaker 2: it gets dissolved, and so there's just constant turnover in chaos.
Speaker 4: I like the idea that they attempted a coup in
Speaker 4: nineteen nineteen. It's like, which, where'd you get that idea? Guys?
Speaker 2: Yeah, wow, no one else was doing coups in nineteen
Speaker 2: nineteen Creative Portugal.
Speaker 4: Wow, i'ly going for it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the same year that that's all going on, nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: Salazar gets suspended from his job for spreading monarchist propaganda,
Speaker 2: although he argues in court that he's not political, he
Speaker 2: has only involvement in politics as voting, and he publishes
Speaker 2: an article defending himself widely in which he argues, I
Speaker 2: am convinced that politics alone can never solve the great
Speaker 2: problems that demand solution, and that it is a grave
Speaker 2: mistake to expect everything from their evolution or from an
Speaker 2: arbitrary departure from their normal course. I'm sure that the
Speaker 2: solution is to be found more in each one of
Speaker 2: us than in the political color of a ministry. So
Speaker 2: far as I can, I try to make my students
Speaker 2: men men in the best sense of the word, and
Speaker 2: good Portuguese of the type which Portugal needs to make
Speaker 2: her great.
Speaker 4: Right now, let me tell you about this girl I love. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, let me tell you about this teenager that I
Speaker 2: got the huts for.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Now.
Speaker 2: The reality is that Salazar is very political, right He
Speaker 2: gets his PhD after the war ends, and he is
Speaker 2: actively as a teacher trying to cultivate this new generation
Speaker 2: of conservative activists. He helps found the Catholic Center Party
Speaker 2: and in nineteen twenty one he's one of three of
Speaker 2: their members to be elected to the Parliament. He actually
Speaker 2: only gets to go to work at the Parliament for
Speaker 2: two days, and he hates it, right because there's these
Speaker 2: all these constant debates over what to do, and he
Speaker 2: can't just tell people, this is what you're going to
Speaker 2: do to fix the economy, this is what we're going
Speaker 2: to do to get things on the right course. He
Speaker 2: gets really angry, and he's like, I don't want to
Speaker 2: do this fucking job. Even though he gets elected to
Speaker 2: several important financial committees, but he starts whining to his
Speaker 2: mentors and the Catholic clergy and the university that he
Speaker 2: doesn't want to do this job a campaigned to get
Speaker 2: it's too hard, he's stuck.
Speaker 4: In the mud.
Speaker 2: And his mentors are like, but you're in power. You
Speaker 2: have a chance to put your theory into practice, and
Speaker 2: they accuse him of not taking the work seriously.
Speaker 5: I would like to add that this is the most
Speaker 5: relatable man we have ever covered on this show, right right.
Speaker 2: And just the terms like, yeah, it sucks to be
Speaker 2: in politics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a guy that wanted a job. And then
Speaker 4: he's immediately like I immediately regret wanting this job. My god,
Speaker 4: what have this job you wanted? Yeah? And I fucking
Speaker 4: hate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's terrible. And he gets really lucky that in October,
Speaker 2: like he only ever does like two days actually doing
Speaker 2: this job in parliament, and in October the Conservative government
Speaker 2: and coalition collapses because left wing militants assassinate the Prime
Speaker 2: Minister and a number of their other con served with
Speaker 2: political enemies. So he's like, well, I guess I'm not
Speaker 2: going to continue trying to be in the government seems dangerous.
Speaker 2: Right now, I'm going to go back to being a teacher.
Speaker 2: And all this violence, which isn't limited to the assassinations
Speaker 2: or to the left, there's just a lot of political violence,
Speaker 2: largely in Lisbon. And you know, it's happening as they're
Speaker 2: going through multiple governments every single year. There's all this conflict.
Speaker 2: The economy is in the shitter, the currency is worth nothing,
Speaker 2: the republic is obviously weak, and people are tired of
Speaker 2: just this constant turnover of nothing working. And as they're
Speaker 2: continuing to be exhausted, in nineteen twenty two, they watch
Speaker 2: fascism come to Italy and they also watch this right
Speaker 2: wing military dictatorship takeover in Spain under Primo di Rivera
Speaker 2: the following year, and they're like, well, maybe, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it's not exactly Italian fascism, maybe it's not exactly
Speaker 2: what the Spanish you're doing, but some sort of like
Speaker 2: authoritarian right wing regime. Maybe that'll fix all of our problems, right,
Speaker 2: that's always yeah, that historically fixes probably, Yeah, historically seems
Speaker 2: like the right idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, nascism, primavera or whatever the hell is.
Speaker 2: Yah, primo di rivera, Yeah, we'll take it. So by
Speaker 2: this point the right is a scendant across Portugal. Young
Speaker 2: military officers who had been radicalized during the war link
Speaker 2: up with youth organizations, a lot of which had been
Speaker 2: inspired by Marris's movement in France and the writing of
Speaker 2: guys like Salazar. Right, he's not like leading directly, but
Speaker 2: he has been the intellectual father of a lot of
Speaker 2: these kind of right wing youth organizations, and you know
Speaker 2: they are starting to gain power, even at the same
Speaker 2: time as he can barely keep himself together, Like he
Speaker 2: is scared by number one. It's dangerous to be a
Speaker 2: public conservative intellectual in this period, dangerous to be anyone
Speaker 2: who's public and political in this period.
Speaker 4: And he's intellectual in any period.
Speaker 2: Right, it's never super safe, and he is. He's kind
Speaker 2: of crippled by panic attacks and psychosomatic illnesses, right, Like,
Speaker 2: he can't really keep himself together, even though his side
Speaker 2: of things seems to be doing well. He runs for
Speaker 2: office in nineteen twenty five, and he does does not
Speaker 2: do a great job of it, right, His heart really
Speaker 2: isn't in it. And then in May of nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 2: without Salazar's help, the Republican government falls to a military
Speaker 2: coup by these right wing military officers. Now by this point,
Speaker 2: the economy is in the shitter completely, which is a
Speaker 2: big part of why the coup succeeds. Like the old
Speaker 2: government hadn't been keeping things together and they don't have
Speaker 2: much support. The generals who'd overthrown the Republican government know
Speaker 2: they can't just sit back and hope for things to
Speaker 2: get better. Right, They had like the military might to
Speaker 2: take over, but they don't know how to run an economy, right.
Speaker 2: They're generals and they're Portuguese general so they barely know
Speaker 2: how to run a military, right, And I'm going to.
Speaker 4: Quote what a win?
Speaker 2: Then you know, yeah, it's not hard to take over
Speaker 2: from the guys without guns, right, Yea.
Speaker 4: I guess I guess that's right.
Speaker 5: But it's just very funny that they're like, look, they're
Speaker 5: bad at pretty much everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't know how to know, yeah, how bad
Speaker 2: the previous guys were previous, and so they're going to
Speaker 2: be like, we need someone to help us figure out
Speaker 2: how to actually fix things. Otherwise we're just going to
Speaker 2: get overthrown in short succession. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 2: an article in the New York Times by Aldin Whitman. Here,
Speaker 2: the victorious generals asked Salazar, then reputed to be an
Speaker 2: economic wizard, to take over the Ministry of Finance. He
Speaker 2: demanded a free hand to execute his reforms, and this
Speaker 2: being refused, he went back to teaching. And this is
Speaker 2: what's so interesting to me about Salazar is he's he's
Speaker 2: not in a lot of ways like a guy like Hitler,
Speaker 2: like a guy like Mussolini. He obviously he's interested in power,
Speaker 2: or he wouldn't have gotten into politics at all or
Speaker 2: entertained the idea, but it's not his primary motivating force
Speaker 2: in life. He actually does have a plan B, and
Speaker 2: he would have been somewhat content just continuing to be
Speaker 2: an intellectual. So, like, taking power, being a dictator is
Speaker 2: an option for him, but it's not his only option,
Speaker 2: and it's not the one he's putting most of his
Speaker 2: effort and time into.
Speaker 5: Right up in that he's just playing hard to get. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he's like buying a car right right, and he's like
Speaker 5: this is what I want and like, well, we can't
Speaker 5: do that. He's like well, and I'm gonna walk away.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that I'll walk away. You can move some numbers
Speaker 4: around here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and that that's kind of what happens here, right,
Speaker 2: is that he shows that, like, I'm not obsessed with
Speaker 2: taking this position unless I can really get a free
Speaker 2: hand in things, and the generals are desperate enough that
Speaker 2: like eventually they agree to do that, I'm gonna quit.
Speaker 2: You learned this from all the fucking right, Yes, this
Speaker 2: is the hard Gues's what taught him how to how
Speaker 2: to win the dictatorship of Portugal.
Speaker 5: There it is, you show too much interest, you say,
Speaker 5: you write an essay about it, that's not going to
Speaker 5: go great.
Speaker 2: You've got to nag the military dictatorship in order to
Speaker 2: be appointed the dictator, right, That's how it always works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, i'd you know, I would be your dictator if you,
Speaker 4: if you know, wore makeup.
Speaker 2: Or somethyeah, if you wore if you dress up a
Speaker 2: little bit. Come on, how many medals have you guys
Speaker 2: even won here?
Speaker 4: Even shaving our country's legs anymore? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like, what's going on Portugal military? Yeah, get some better
Speaker 2: cannons or something. So I'm going to quote from Whitman's
Speaker 2: article again here. Two years later, General Antonio Oscar de
Speaker 2: Fragosa Carmona engineered his election as President of Portugal, and
Speaker 2: he promptly puts Salazar in charge of the nation's per strings.
Speaker 2: By cutting public spending and by judicious taxation, Salazar succeeded
Speaker 2: within a year in balancing the budget for the first
Speaker 2: time since nineteen ten. Shortly too, he liquidated the foreign
Speaker 2: debt and lifted the escudo, the monetary unit, to a
Speaker 2: premium on foreign exchanges. Yeah, that's the end of the story.
Speaker 4: He's a great man. He gets his.
Speaker 2: Free hand in managing the economy, and he's really good
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: He manages to do what his predecessors could never do.
Speaker 2: He balances the budget and he takes the escudo had
Speaker 2: been like a laughing stock in European finance for years,
Speaker 2: and he restores stability in a way that just hadn't
Speaker 2: existed for a long time. His popularity grows and it
Speaker 2: becomes very clear to the military that Salazar is indispensable
Speaker 2: in politics. Right, like, we have the guns, but we
Speaker 2: don't know how to manage an economy. We're certainly not
Speaker 2: any better at it than the people that we deposed.
Speaker 4: They have the plans, but we have the power, right, yeah,
Speaker 4: you just like yeah, just like in The Simpsons.
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty two, Salazar becomes the President of the
Speaker 2: Council of Ministries, which effectively puts him in charge of
Speaker 2: the country. Right, So he's kind of like because he's
Speaker 2: so good at this. These generals, all they know how
Speaker 2: to do is, you know, control the guys with guns.
Speaker 2: But Salazar knows how to make the economy stable, which
Speaker 2: allows him to keep the wealthy and the powerful on
Speaker 2: his side and keep the people from rioting too much.
Speaker 2: And so he just keeps demanding more and more power,
Speaker 2: and the military is like, I guess, yeah, you can
Speaker 2: have it, right, I guess you can have some more.
Speaker 2: I guess you could have some more, yeah, exactly, And
Speaker 2: kind of, bit by bit he winds up the absolute
Speaker 2: dictator of Portugal, and he's like starts to sideline the
Speaker 2: military and kick guys out who are threats to his power.
Speaker 2: As he gains more and everyone's too scared of him
Speaker 2: because they can't keep the economy going on their own right,
Speaker 2: which is such a different way from these other fascists.
Speaker 2: He's not brought to power by a populist uprising. He
Speaker 2: doesn't like win mass votes in an election. He's not
Speaker 2: like Mussolini or like Hitler. He keeps showing results in
Speaker 2: the economy and demanding more control in the military. Is like, well,
Speaker 2: no one else has had to steer this thing, right,
Speaker 2: so I guess sure. I found a write up in
Speaker 2: the textbook Portuguese Studies by Paul Santos and Luciano de LaRue,
Speaker 2: and it describes what happens next. Within four short years,
Speaker 2: Salazar had so enhanced his prestige and developed his political
Speaker 2: power that he was nominated Prime Minister. The army had
Speaker 2: no desire to govern and no plan for government anyway,
Speaker 2: so they handed power back to civilians, whom they regarded
Speaker 2: as trustworthy enough to protect their honor and keep this
Speaker 2: position secure. Therefore, while the military had brought Salazar to power,
Speaker 2: the regime that he molded, the Estado Novo after the
Speaker 2: return to barracks, was very largely civilian. And the Estado
Speaker 2: Novo is proclaimed in nineteen thirty three. It means new
Speaker 2: state right, so Salazar he's kind of officially in full
Speaker 2: power in thirty three, the same year that Hitler rises
Speaker 2: to power and he says, like we've got a new state, right,
Speaker 2: and there's a new deal almost for portis enter government.
Speaker 4: That's where FDR got it. That's where FDR took it from.
Speaker 4: You should see FDR.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or FDR should Yeah. So sala is Our cribs
Speaker 2: a lot from Hitler, and you know, which is part
Speaker 2: of why he gets keeps. Yeah, but he just it's
Speaker 2: just sort of the aesthetics, right, Like you can see
Speaker 2: he sees that like, okay, there's some value in some
Speaker 2: of these fascist aesthetics. But that's not how he gains power, right.
Speaker 2: He doesn't take power the way that Hitler does. He
Speaker 2: kind of like almost infects the coup that took power
Speaker 2: and then like takes over it. He's like one of
Speaker 2: those bugs that gets inside a wasp's brain if the
Speaker 2: wasp is the.
Speaker 4: Poetry military like a zombie buger.
Speaker 2: Right right, That's how he does it, which is very
Speaker 2: different from the other fascists.
Speaker 5: It kind of seems like he's just using the Hitler
Speaker 5: stuff as like flourishes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like, oh I could dress it up a little.
Speaker 2: This is working right now, this is the new hotness. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: up a little bit. Yeah, let's put it sprinkle a
Speaker 2: little bit of Hitler around the edges. Yeah, you're a
Speaker 2: little Hitler in there. Yeah, a little bit of Hitler
Speaker 2: in there for some spice, just a dash of Hitler. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he uses he's going to he has a secret
Speaker 2: police state, as we'll talk about, and he's going to
Speaker 2: use force and violence, and he's going to crib from
Speaker 2: the Nazis very directly in several ways as to how
Speaker 2: his secret police works. But he doesn't have a cult
Speaker 2: of personality like Hitler does. And he's actually kind of
Speaker 2: he has some respect for Hitler in the early period,
Speaker 2: but he's also like he's looking at all these weird
Speaker 2: esoteric aspects of Hitler's fascism, like his beliefs and race scigens,
Speaker 2: and he's like, this guy is just kind of weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I'll also add that, like, not calling attention to it
Speaker 5: is a pretty good way to have a forty year
Speaker 5: reign instead of shoot yourself in a bunker rain right exactly.
Speaker 2: Salazar doesn't want to be a shoot himself in the
Speaker 2: bunker guy.
Speaker 4: No, man, he's spoiling the frog in the slow way.
Speaker 2: You know what's interesting about him, and the smartest thing
Speaker 2: about him is he understands there's a limit to how
Speaker 2: much power you should seek. Salazar is never going to
Speaker 2: be a what if I tried to take all of
Speaker 2: Europe guy? He's like, I'm content with Portugal, you know,
Speaker 2: and all of her African properties, which are much larger
Speaker 2: than Portugal, right but as well as we'll talk about
Speaker 2: that's a big deal.
Speaker 4: But he's not.
Speaker 2: He's never going to be a gamble too much to
Speaker 2: keep power sort of guy. He's smarter than that. He's
Speaker 2: probably the smartest of these kind of right wing dictators
Speaker 2: in Europe in this.
Speaker 4: Power that some of those Hitler Germans are going to
Speaker 4: be learning Portuguese, if you know what I.
Speaker 2: Mean, They sure are. Salazar is a diet in the
Speaker 2: wool corporatist. His charter for the Estado Nova, which is
Speaker 2: approved by plebiscite in nineteen thirty three, which is ostensibly
Speaker 2: a public vote but is not really a free one.
Speaker 2: This new state is described in the plebiscite as a
Speaker 2: unitary and corporative state. Only one party is allowed in
Speaker 2: the Assembly, and the premier, who's appointed by the president,
Speaker 2: is unaccountable. Salazar is the premier in the early days
Speaker 2: as well as the finance minister, and over the years
Speaker 2: he's going to serve as foreign Minister and Minister of
Speaker 2: War and Minister of the colonies. Kind of whenever he
Speaker 2: wants to assert direct control, he'll just have himself made
Speaker 2: the minister of that thing. Right, But he's always the dictator, right,
Speaker 2: He's always kind of the guy where the buck stops.
Speaker 2: And one of the first big things he cracks down
Speaker 2: on once the Estado Novo is declared the law of
Speaker 2: the land is women's rights. Salah's our rights that because
Speaker 2: women are so key to the structure of the family,
Speaker 2: they shouldn't be voting as a general rule. Now, because
Speaker 2: he's this guy, he's got a lot of close female
Speaker 2: friends who he takes very seriously. He's not completely against
Speaker 2: women having the vote, so he's letting he wants rich
Speaker 2: women to be able to vote. If you've got university education,
Speaker 2: then you can vote as a woman, which you don't
Speaker 2: necessarily need as a man, even though nobody's vote really
Speaker 2: matters all that much, right, And his argument is that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: a few women have the rights to vote, but most
Speaker 2: women should be forced to maintain a sort of femininity
Speaker 2: that he argues as conducive to the Catholic norms of
Speaker 2: family life.
Speaker 4: Now this is where he's yeah, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's modern in that way, right, And like all
Speaker 2: of these modern guys we have who say the same shit,
Speaker 2: he doesn't follow any of these rules in his normal wife.
Speaker 2: He never marries, and he never has kids, and he
Speaker 2: maintains this carousel of powerful women as lovers and advisers.
Speaker 2: He's willing to make exceptions for women that he personally respects,
Speaker 2: but he's not willing to live like the idolized Portuguese citizen,
Speaker 2: nor does he want to have a family of his own.
Speaker 4: Catherine the great energy coming off of him, very much so, right.
Speaker 2: Per an article on Portugal dot com, financial abuse against
Speaker 2: women was institutionalized. The law allowed husbands to prohibit wives
Speaker 2: from working outside the home. Women were not allowed to
Speaker 2: access certain professions diplomacy, the military, etc. And certain professions
Speaker 2: like nursing had limited rights, such as the right to marry.
Speaker 2: A wife needed the consent of her husband to travel
Speaker 2: to another country. Contraceptives were only allowed for health reasons,
Speaker 2: and even so the husband would need to give consent.
Speaker 2: Abortion was illegal in all cases, with a prison sentence
Speaker 2: of up to eight years, and so he cracks down
Speaker 2: on women's rights, and alongside this comes to crackdown in
Speaker 2: the right to dissent in any way that might force
Speaker 2: a change in the Estado Novo. Salazar never tries. This
Speaker 2: is not a totalitarian state in the same way that
Speaker 2: is attempted in like Germany. But this is very likely.
Speaker 2: The fact that he's not trying for complete control is
Speaker 2: not that he doesn't want it or is a better guy.
Speaker 2: It's that he's smarter. He knows that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: if you grasp too tightly, shit slides through your fingers.
Speaker 4: Right. You know, we all know our Star Wars, Right,
Speaker 4: we all know Prince Organa talking to ramof Tarkin on the.
Speaker 2: Yeah Star and he's like, yeah, there's that's not really
Speaker 2: worth investing in. Right, There's an amount of force that
Speaker 2: is worthwhile to deploy against the people to stop things
Speaker 2: from getting too far along. But there's an amount of
Speaker 2: force that is going to like be dangerous to me
Speaker 2: and will drive up like support for any kind of
Speaker 2: like rebellious movement, and I'm not going to play into that.
Speaker 2: So the new constitution makes place for a new secret
Speaker 2: police force, the PVDE, which in English stands for the
Speaker 2: State Surveillance and Defense Police, and the PVDE is going
Speaker 2: to go under a couple of different names over the
Speaker 2: course of the Estado Novo. We're going to call them
Speaker 2: the PVDE right now for the sake of going forward,
Speaker 2: and to be fair. He didn't start Portugal having a
Speaker 2: secret police This is always the case with these things.
Speaker 2: This starts in the Republic. The Republic began having a
Speaker 2: secret police force, and under the Republic, this secret police
Speaker 2: force starts maintaining a prison called the al Ube in Lisbon.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from an article in the newspaper
Speaker 2: Portugal Resident here. The building is close to the cathedral
Speaker 2: in the center of Lisbon and has a long history
Speaker 2: of imprisonment, firstly until eighteen twenty for those condemned by
Speaker 2: the ecclesiastical courts, and for the next hundred years for
Speaker 2: women convicted of common crimes. The word alube comes from
Speaker 2: the Arabic and means either a well or cistern, and
Speaker 2: by extension a dungeon. So starting in nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 2: the military dictatorship began building a network of informants through
Speaker 2: the PBDE and started the practice of sending them to
Speaker 2: al ude to be tortured. Salazar turns up to speed
Speaker 2: on this process, and under his new state, creative new
Speaker 2: torture methods are introduced.
Speaker 4: Hell man, it's called innovation.
Speaker 2: It's called innovate. We're gonna beat people and we're gonna
Speaker 2: sleep deprive them. But we're also going to introduce something
Speaker 2: new called the statue, which is where a prisoner is
Speaker 2: forced to stand with his arms extended without moving for
Speaker 2: hours or even days at a time.
Speaker 4: And if you wait for.
Speaker 5: Better tell you though, that's really great for your shoulders.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, incredible shoulder extras. What you're doing is instead
Speaker 5: of building bulk, you're actually building a more tight, striated muscle.
Speaker 4: It's really really good if you're like a fighter.
Speaker 2: Now, the downside of this is you get beaten senseless
Speaker 2: by the guards if you move your arms at all,
Speaker 2: which is not so good for building up good straight coaching.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's called coaching.
Speaker 2: It's called coaching, trying to make you stronger. I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's not to me that I'm like, yeah, that sounds
Speaker 2: a pretty standard dah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's what brings the regime down is they make too
Speaker 2: many great boxers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, too many powerful tight course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the name of the game in this new
Speaker 2: state is maintaining a sense of quiet, respectability, and not
Speaker 2: freaking out the regular citizenry too much. Right, this is
Speaker 2: while torturing anyone who's like too much of a communist
Speaker 2: or a Republican activist, so that you're still kind of
Speaker 2: it's not an accountability would be the wrong term. But
Speaker 2: Salazar is scared of being too publicly brutal, and in fact,
Speaker 2: once the neighborhood complains about the constant screaming coming from
Speaker 2: the Alude prison, the PVDE moves their torture operations to
Speaker 2: a more secluded environment. So there's like a we're not
Speaker 2: going to be better, but we will be quieter because again,
Speaker 2: we don't want to we don't want to be too
Speaker 2: over the line here, otherwise that's going to like spark
Speaker 2: the kind of rebellion we don't want to deal with.
Speaker 4: I like that. It's just like a noise complaint.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a noise complaint. You gotta be quieter
Speaker 2: with the torture guys, and you keep the suffering down
Speaker 2: a little bit. Yeah, you're freaking out the neighbors, and
Speaker 2: some of them have real money, like they're taxpayers, right,
Speaker 2: we don't want to make them uncomfortable. So the new
Speaker 2: state has begun at this point by like the mid thirties,
Speaker 2: and for the next four decades, Antonio Salazar will rule
Speaker 2: Portugal with an iron fist, and we'll talk about what
Speaker 2: he does in power in part two. But first, Jeff,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk ab about where the audience can
Speaker 2: find you on the internet. Oh God, that's where I live,
Speaker 2: that's where you do, That's where we all live.
Speaker 5: I do a lot of stuff and it's really fun
Speaker 5: and it's all very different, So you're welcome to check
Speaker 5: out any or all of these things. First and foremost,
Speaker 5: I have a show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, where
Speaker 5: I interview just people that I think are in my
Speaker 5: life that I find very interesting. Sometimes they are famous celebrities,
Speaker 5: and sometimes there are people that went to high school with.
Speaker 5: But I just it's really fun. It's a really fun
Speaker 5: way to sort of learn more about people and.
Speaker 4: Stuff like that. I do that show.
Speaker 5: I also do a show called Nerd on that same
Speaker 5: network as well, the Jeff Has Cool Friends sort of brand.
Speaker 5: That's with my friend Dre Alvarez, and I also do
Speaker 5: a monthly show called the Monthly Flow with Andrea Gazette.
Speaker 4: You can get those.
Speaker 5: All early uncensored bonus stuff at Patreon, dot com, slash
Speaker 5: Jeff May you can get nerd and Jeff has cool Friends.
Speaker 4: For free everywhere else later.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do Tom and Jeff watch Batman with our
Speaker 5: friend Tom Ryman on Gamefully Unemployed. I do lots of
Speaker 5: great shows with Adam Todd Brown on that you don't
Speaker 5: even like podcast network. I also open cards on camera
Speaker 5: and I send them to people on the at Jeff
Speaker 5: has Cool Cards Network and you can actually get cards
Speaker 5: in the mail like a care package from me over
Speaker 5: on the Patreon. So lots of really cool stuff and
Speaker 5: you can find me at Hey there jeffro two on
Speaker 5: Instagram because they booted my last one because they accused
Speaker 5: me of selling sex, which I did not do.
Speaker 4: No, I do not have the confidence to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unlike Antonio salasar Oh, he didn't have to sell it.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, he was giving that shit away.
Speaker 4: And if if you're in Burbank or the southern California area,
Speaker 4: I do a great comedy show the second Friday of
Speaker 4: every month at Last from the Past on Magnolia and
Speaker 4: it is called Mint on card. It's a comedy in
Speaker 4: a toy store.
Speaker 2: Comedy in a toy store. Well, everybody check out Jeff,
Speaker 2: find him on the old Internet, and find us on Thursday,
Speaker 2: which is like two days from now, talking about the
Speaker 2: rest of Antonio Salazar's life.
Speaker 4: All right, that's it fine see.
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