Speaker 1: Also media, Hey, everybody, it's Behind the Bastards the podcast
Speaker 1: that you know what it is because you're listening to it,
Speaker 1: and you're listening to part two of our episodes of
Speaker 1: Antonio Salazar, so you're probably not tuning into the show
Speaker 1: for the first time, going, I wonder what this series is.
Speaker 1: I'm going to click on an episode. I got a
Speaker 1: guy I've never heard of that's that's clearly labeled as
Speaker 1: part two. Like, no one who would do that?
Speaker 2: Are tuning in? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly who would do like? No one?
Speaker 3: No, I liked it.
Speaker 1: It's okay, it's okay. The water bottle, so our guest today,
Speaker 1: Jeff may rhymed, but I didn't mean for it to look.
Speaker 2: Man, I have a very rhymable name.
Speaker 1: You do you do?
Speaker 2: It's useful.
Speaker 1: It's like it was useful in this exactly one instance.
Speaker 2: It's a month like people love. Some teachers saw my
Speaker 2: name and they never stopped.
Speaker 1: No, no, they Yeah, that you can vamp on that
Speaker 1: for solid fifteen minutes of what's supposed to be math class.
Speaker 1: Was great, Jeff may If you were Jeff April, we
Speaker 1: would not have had you on the show. Oh I
Speaker 1: get it, fat Yeah, absolutely not. Jeff Jeff June. Maybe
Speaker 1: that that actually has a kind of nice ring to it,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, like June on the show. Yeah, Jeff July. No,
Speaker 1: it's still illiterative. But I don't like it. I don't
Speaker 1: know why.
Speaker 2: I almost stated a girl named Mazie.
Speaker 1: She went by mazy May.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, and then she quickly pumped.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, yeah, you can't get in. You can't get
Speaker 1: too serious with that one.
Speaker 2: I was like, but come on, I was like, this
Speaker 2: is it's just not gonna work.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna work. There's one one reason for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: All right, So we're back and we're talking about part two.
Speaker 1: In the end of part one, Antonio Salazar had established
Speaker 1: his new state and established a secret police force with
Speaker 1: a torture prison that occasionally had to deal with noise
Speaker 1: ordnance violations in allow to allow yeah, a little loud,
Speaker 1: a little loud. They had to quiet it down a
Speaker 1: little bit.
Speaker 2: Can you just bring it a little Yeah on the torture.
Speaker 1: Guys, we love the torture prison. We're yimbi's when it
Speaker 1: comes to torture prisons. But they have to abide by
Speaker 1: like the neighborhood noise ordinances.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we have quiet hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah we've got quiet hours. No, no torturing after nine pm.
Speaker 1: Come on, how hard is that?
Speaker 2: You know this?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So Salazar's first actions after coming to power are
Speaker 1: all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't mean to confuse this with prosperity or even
Speaker 1: the kind of fraudulent economic boom that the Nazis manufactured
Speaker 1: after Hitler's return. Right, Portugal never really thrives to a
Speaker 1: massive extent during Salazar's reign. It will remain, per capita,
Speaker 1: one of the poorest nations in Europe. But the economy
Speaker 1: stops cycling right where's there's these deep troughs and these recoveries.
Speaker 1: It kind of stays on an even keel. And even
Speaker 1: though that's still not very good for most of the people,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more stability. So, first off, the people
Speaker 1: with money, the capitalist class, are a lot happier because
Speaker 1: stability means you can make predictable investments and whatnot and
Speaker 1: get predictable returns. And the regular people at least aren't
Speaker 1: dealing with these sudden, drastic downturns every couple of years
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right, and so things are a lot more
Speaker 1: stable now. This allows him One of his first measures
Speaker 1: taken in office was to take and he's you know,
Speaker 1: Salasar isn't coming out. He launches an austerity program, a
Speaker 1: very radical, cut to the bone austerity program. And this
Speaker 1: is not entirely his own devising. There have been recommendations
Speaker 1: the League of Nations had made to Portugal, and he
Speaker 1: takes those recommendations. And under this austerity program, the poor
Speaker 1: and the peasant classes in Portugal suffer mightily. And again
Speaker 1: that should tell you. Despite a lot of the sympathies
Speaker 1: between him and you know, Hitler and whatnot, this is
Speaker 1: not a populist movement, right.
Speaker 2: Woodrow Wilson blew it right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he really did. The League of Nations just about
Speaker 1: as big a fuck up as it could possibly have been,
Speaker 1: despite being a much cooler name than the United Nations.
Speaker 1: Who wouldn't rather be in a league talk about a one.
Speaker 2: To eighty on that guy?
Speaker 1: Oh boy, yes.
Speaker 2: Like we're not going to talk to anybody. But also
Speaker 2: what if we had a justice.
Speaker 1: Leagbe but we should, we should have like an international order. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's able to balance the budget, right, which makes
Speaker 1: him popular among the people who are holding power, who
Speaker 1: see this as the fastest route to stability. As the
Speaker 1: writer Alan K. Smith noted, this was often a brutal
Speaker 1: process for regular people.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: The principles which guided him were the elimination of wastefulness,
Speaker 1: the reduction of spending to a minimum, and complete control
Speaker 1: over every aspect of life which involved governmental expenditure. No
Speaker 1: matter how pressing their needs. Areas such as rural development,
Speaker 1: the health services, and IT education would have to wait
Speaker 1: until the necessary surplus was at hand. So Salazar is like,
Speaker 1: fuck you, I'm not doing anything to help people until
Speaker 1: we've got enough spare money to afford it. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to go into debt just to take
Speaker 1: care of people. Like we're going to cut it to
Speaker 1: the and whatever suffering the peasantry has to make. It's
Speaker 1: necessary as long as we can kind of keep the
Speaker 1: economy and the wealthy on track.
Speaker 2: Right. Rude, it's a little rude.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a dick.
Speaker 2: It's a rudy Huxtable, we like to say.
Speaker 1: And he's not at all. He's not even going to
Speaker 1: play at being like I'm speaking for the people. I'm
Speaker 1: the representative of the people. You know, the people like,
Speaker 1: there's not even that kind of like that, like guys, right,
Speaker 1: he would state directly that his philosophy of leadership was
Speaker 1: quote the Portuguese must be treated as children too much,
Speaker 1: too often would spoil them. He added quote.
Speaker 2: I say the same thing though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're always saying that, and it really pisses off
Speaker 1: our Portuguese listeners.
Speaker 2: People know this about me and the Portuguese.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, those wind bags quote from one of our
Speaker 1: other bastards. The truth is that I am profoundly anti parliamentarian.
Speaker 1: I hate the speeches, the verbosity, and the flowery, meaningless interpolations,
Speaker 1: the way we waste passion, not around any great idea,
Speaker 1: but just around futilities, nothingness from the point of view
Speaker 1: of the national good. So he's very much this like, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not giving anybody anything, but at least I'm not
Speaker 1: like grand standing about some bullshit while failing to deliver, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm an asshole and I'm not handing you anything nice,
Speaker 1: but I'm also keeping the economy from crashing, right Like.
Speaker 1: That's his argument for why he should stay in power,
Speaker 1: and it works surprisingly well. Part of why is that
Speaker 1: while he gets the credit for his economic policies and
Speaker 1: the way that they do work. He's almost invisible outside
Speaker 1: of them. He is not doing mass rallies. People are
Speaker 1: not marching in the streets as he likes, stands in
Speaker 1: a reviewing stand and gives some sort of weird little
Speaker 1: salute he invented. He'd avoids any mass public displays, right,
Speaker 1: which leads to as arrant belief. Internationally, people will say that, oh, Portugal,
Speaker 1: they got so lucky. They have a dictatorship without a dictator,
Speaker 1: which is nonsense. That's not what's happening. He's very much
Speaker 1: a dictator. But there's this desire, especially from a lot
Speaker 1: of international capitalist conservatives, to be like, oh, Portugal has
Speaker 1: really figured it out. They've got all the benefits of
Speaker 1: a Hitler without having Hitler. You know what, maybe we
Speaker 1: could do what they're doing right, And that's not the case.
Speaker 1: That's not an accurate way to describe Salazar's regime or
Speaker 1: any regime that's ever existed. The reality is that very
Speaker 1: few of the twentieth centuries authoritarians exercised more direct control
Speaker 1: over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar.
Speaker 1: You could argue Salazar is much more of a dictator
Speaker 1: in the direct literal sense that even Hitler was right.
Speaker 1: Hitler is a delegator, right, He has his things, he's
Speaker 1: interested in. He mostly lets other people handle most things,
Speaker 1: in part because you can, like defray blame for shit
Speaker 1: it that way. Salazar is kind of the opposite of
Speaker 1: a lot of these guys, and that he's all about
Speaker 1: direct personal control of especially economic policy, but a lot
Speaker 1: of other government policies. And he doesn't want to do
Speaker 1: the other crap, right. He doesn't want to do the
Speaker 1: big reviewing stand marches, he doesn't want to do the
Speaker 1: military adventurism. So it's less accurate to say Portugal is
Speaker 1: a dictatorship without a dictator, and more Salazar is a
Speaker 1: dictator without a cult of personality.
Speaker 2: Right. What a waste?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what a waste. You could add so much more
Speaker 1: fun with it. Man, Oh my god. You know Hitler
Speaker 1: had his flair. Where's your Salazar flair?
Speaker 2: Come on an awesome man?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Blew it tragic, especially with a name as cool
Speaker 1: as Salazar. Oh my god, it's a good name. It's
Speaker 1: a solid dictator name. Yeah, man, what a waste, but
Speaker 1: it is better for political stability, and as dictator, Salazar
Speaker 1: is all about stability, and this is going to be
Speaker 1: the thing that ultimately saves him where his peers get
Speaker 1: led to ruin. Right. Unlike Hitler, he doesn't whatever he
Speaker 1: says about helping return Portugal to greatness, He's not really
Speaker 1: interested in returning his nation to some false prelapsarian version
Speaker 1: of greatness, or even erasing the humiliations of the past.
Speaker 1: He wants to bring stability and then hold the line, right,
Speaker 1: That's the kind of guy he is.
Speaker 2: Also, that's the best song by Toto.
Speaker 1: That is the best song by Toto. Hold the line
Speaker 1: and Salazar would have agreed with you. And I think, well, no. No. Seven.
Speaker 1: He passes in seventy four, so he couldn't have heard total.
Speaker 2: I think he would have liked Africa to be one
Speaker 2: hundred pou liked it, Unfortunately history one of his downfalls
Speaker 2: is that he likes Africa way too much. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's just like all these other casuals that think Africa
Speaker 2: is the best song by Toto.
Speaker 1: I know, I know. That's his big problem. The fucking
Speaker 1: casual Toto fan is what he is. That's what brings
Speaker 1: about the revolution against him is the fact that he's
Speaker 1: a fake Toto fan. And everyone knows it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like, come on, man, the revolution isn't always
Speaker 2: on time.
Speaker 1: No no, no again, no no no, That's why we
Speaker 1: brought you in, Jeff.
Speaker 2: That's why I get brought in for all the hottest,
Speaker 2: hottest takes on Toto current musical hits, because I.
Speaker 1: Only know how to make two jokes about Toto and
Speaker 1: we already ran through them. So Salazar, he's the only
Speaker 1: dictator kind of in this period who is going to
Speaker 1: really perfectly jink and run and like avoid kind of
Speaker 1: the different sort of dangers of this this moment in
Speaker 1: European history.
Speaker 2: The pitfalls, if you will.
Speaker 1: The pitfalls right, Like, he's never going to be an
Speaker 1: invade Russia guy, and he's going to play a big
Speaker 1: role in helping his peer in Spain, Francisco Franco, avoid
Speaker 1: some of these same pitfalls. Unfortunately, now Portugal has a
Speaker 1: complex history with Spain. They'd been invaded and occupied in
Speaker 1: the past. You know, he's he's super worried, like every
Speaker 1: Portuguese leader is that Spain is going to come for
Speaker 1: Portugal at something. Just looking out the blinds, Yeah, look
Speaker 1: at out the blinds, being like a Spain out there. Fuck,
Speaker 1: they always they're doing out there. So you've got this
Speaker 1: civil war that get started in Spain between these Republicans
Speaker 1: and Franco, and Salazar sees the Republic, which looks like
Speaker 1: it's going to win at first, as a threat to
Speaker 1: his continued independence. Right, if the Republic wins the war,
Speaker 1: maybe they'll come for us, and then maybe my regime
Speaker 1: is doomed and Portuguese independence is doomed, and Salazar extends
Speaker 1: his support to Franco. Right, so he backs Franco. During
Speaker 1: a crucial early stage in the civil war, he allows
Speaker 1: Germany in Italy to use his territory to transfer troops
Speaker 1: and materiel to Franco's army, which is a critical aspect
Speaker 1: of like how Franco is able to get enough military
Speaker 1: aid to win. Salazar allows Portuguese volunteers to fight for
Speaker 1: the fascists in Spain, and he uses his secret police
Speaker 1: and security forces to raid and arrest Republican sympathizers and
Speaker 1: refugees in his own territory. And these are the years
Speaker 1: because he's letting Italy and Germany in, because he's helping Franco,
Speaker 1: these are the years in which his movement most resembles
Speaker 1: the other fascist movements in Europe. Salazar deliberately cribs from
Speaker 1: Mussolini and Hitler in particular, per right up in the
Speaker 1: New York Times quote, he created a youth movement to
Speaker 1: long Hitlarian lines, principally to prepare the younger people for
Speaker 1: military service, and the Portuguese Legion, which was dedicated to
Speaker 1: combating internal communism. These organizations with the army proved useful
Speaker 1: in putting down a popular outbreak in Lisbon just prior
Speaker 1: to World War Two. So not only does he kind
Speaker 1: of ally with the fascists in this period, is he
Speaker 1: starts putting out these kind of like trappings of fascism
Speaker 1: where it's like, well, let's get a youth fighting movement
Speaker 1: in the street. We need in addition to the military,
Speaker 1: we need these these civilian combat organizations, these paramilitaries that
Speaker 1: are sort of given a free pass by the police
Speaker 1: to crack down on the left and to stop them
Speaker 1: from gaining too much power and overthrowing the government, to
Speaker 1: stop the communists primarily right.
Speaker 2: I thought you meant fighting the youth.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, he is getting the fighting youth
Speaker 1: together right under his back, right like that, that's his
Speaker 1: plan during this period, right, there's obviously the youth who
Speaker 1: are organizing on behalf of communism and you know, for
Speaker 1: a return to the republic. These are the people that
Speaker 1: he's having a secret police go after, and that he's
Speaker 1: sort of allowing these paramilitaries to fight against. Right now,
Speaker 1: during this period pre World War Two, he's known to
Speaker 1: keep a bust of Mussolini in his office and he'll
Speaker 1: regularly ask his hitler during the height of his power.
Speaker 1: But he's also pretty clear in his own statements about
Speaker 1: what he sees is the difference between his fascist allies
Speaker 1: and his own new state regime.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Now, obviously our dictatorship is similar to the fascist dictatorship
Speaker 1: and its strengthening of authority in the war, in which
Speaker 1: it declares on certain democratic principles, and its nationalist character
Speaker 1: and its maintenance of the social order. It is different, however,
Speaker 1: in its methods of renovation. The fascist dictatorship is leaning
Speaker 1: towards a pagan Caesarism, right, and that's what Salazar doesn't want.
Speaker 1: For one thing, he is a Catholic, and he makes
Speaker 1: an alliance with the Catholic Church, right where we will
Speaker 1: allow the Catholic Church will bring back a lot of
Speaker 1: these powers that had been stripped from it to provide
Speaker 1: for like the social safety net, and will also institute
Speaker 1: all these laws that are very friendly to the way
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church wants things to be run. And that's
Speaker 1: very different from like Germany, which is, you know, the
Speaker 1: Nazi regime is an anti Catholic regime in some ways, right,
Speaker 1: they have to co opt Catholicism, but they never are
Speaker 1: really comfortable with it because the church is another center
Speaker 1: of power. And Salazar is okay with there being another
Speaker 1: center of power as long as it helps kind of
Speaker 1: take away from his burden. He sees this as like
Speaker 1: a worthwhile thing. And he's also just a believer in Catholicism,
Speaker 1: and so this is why he's very consciously like we were,
Speaker 1: will take some things that the fascists are doing, but like,
Speaker 1: I'm not this weird kind of like pagan esoteric thing
Speaker 1: that Hitler is like that seems strange to me, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to go too far down that road
Speaker 1: because it's a lot of work and I feel like
Speaker 1: it's going to get this fucker in trouble, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: very he's very smart.
Speaker 2: It's not hard to read the writing on the Wall
Speaker 2: and Y being like, yeah, we should take over like everything. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it should just go Ova and take all
Speaker 2: with all.
Speaker 1: The Soviet yah, oh the kickings and door. Yeah. Sealizar's
Speaker 1: like that seems like a lot of work. Take it
Speaker 1: over the Soviet Union. For one thing. There's like thirty
Speaker 1: Portuguese people.
Speaker 2: Like the idea that he's just so like chill with
Speaker 2: his little pocket.
Speaker 1: He's he's content with what he has.
Speaker 2: It's just like it's a project for him. He's just man, yeah,
Speaker 2: you got to get Portugal movement. Man, we gotta we gotta.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got to fix this up and we don't
Speaker 1: need He's also and as we'll talk about, Portugal owns
Speaker 1: a lot of Africa, right, he's not he's not content
Speaker 1: with a tiny amount of the world. But he doesn't
Speaker 1: want to like expand massively. He's trying to keep a
Speaker 1: hold on what they've got, right, so he doesn't go
Speaker 1: too far into the kind of delusions that are going
Speaker 1: to lead Hitler and Mussolini to ruin.
Speaker 2: And also he's not doing a racism or an anti semitism,
Speaker 2: is he.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's anti Semitic and like by ours, but
Speaker 1: it's not like a governing principle, right, And he's.
Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty anti Semitic, which is just.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in this you know, after the war, there
Speaker 1: will be a Portuguese colonial war that's very racist, right,
Speaker 1: But that's not the guiding light initially of his regime.
Speaker 1: It's more something that makes sense as time goes on
Speaker 1: and they wind up in these colonial conflicts, Like the
Speaker 1: racism kind of follows naturally, but there's not this He
Speaker 1: doesn't come to power with like We're going to wipe
Speaker 1: out this racial group in order to fix Portugal.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's never a part of his politics, you know. And
Speaker 1: so that's a big difference between like the Nazis right.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Salazar is also despite the fact that he is allied
Speaker 1: with Franco and really helps him take power in Spain,
Speaker 1: he's never he never trusts Franco all that much. Tom
Speaker 1: Gallagher's biographer describes them as him as having a wary
Speaker 1: association with Franco's regime. And while Franco restores the monarchy
Speaker 1: in Spain, Salasar never gives serious consideration towards return to
Speaker 1: the monarchy, right, because that's too much of a compromise
Speaker 1: with power for him. Right of his own power. And
Speaker 1: this political alliance that defines his regime in this period
Speaker 1: isn't the pure result of a populist fascist party winning
Speaker 1: the struggle for power. Per Gallagher quote, his formula was
Speaker 1: to create a ruling alliance of conservatives, some moderate liberals
Speaker 1: and a few nationalists ideologues kept in being by his
Speaker 1: political agility and guaranteed ultimately by the armed forces. So
Speaker 1: it's just much more of this compromise regime that he's
Speaker 1: willing to make because he's just kind of he's a
Speaker 1: pragmatic guy. Now, this is ultimately what will save his
Speaker 1: regime and Franco's regime, you know, at least there's an
Speaker 1: argument that it saves Franco's regime during the Second World
Speaker 1: War because Franco only wins his civil war because of
Speaker 1: the help he gets from the continental fascist powers, right
Speaker 1: like he gets very famously, the German Air Force is
Speaker 1: going to bomb a bunch of places for Franco. Right
Speaker 1: And despite the fact that you would think and Hitler
Speaker 1: had kind of expected, well, obviously, once I wind up
Speaker 1: in a big war, Spain is going to back me, right,
Speaker 1: and that Franco never does this. He refuses, he doesn't
Speaker 1: go on the side of the Allies, right, he doesn't
Speaker 1: outright betray Germany, but he never throws his hat into
Speaker 1: the ring with the Axis once the fighting begins in earnest.
Speaker 1: The reasons for this are complex, and they have a
Speaker 1: lot to do with Portugal's traditionally warm relationship with Great Britain,
Speaker 1: because Salazar gets a lot of credit for stopping Franco
Speaker 1: from going all in on the fascists during this war
Speaker 1: and from like outright allying with them. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of debate as to how much credit how much of
Speaker 1: this was Franco just kind of recognizing this is a
Speaker 1: bigger risk than I want to tank. But Salazar, at
Speaker 1: least according to one version of the story, is a
Speaker 1: major part of what keeps Franco out. And part of
Speaker 1: why Salazar is like this is even though he's got
Speaker 1: a lot of sympathies with the fascists and a good
Speaker 1: relationship with them, he still has a good relationship with
Speaker 1: Great Britain, who had been Portugal's traditional ally and so
Speaker 1: Salazar never sees even though he gets he gets lumped
Speaker 1: in as a fascist in this period, he never sees
Speaker 1: politics in simple terms of fascist versus anti fascist right,
Speaker 1: or even authoritarian verse democratic. Instead, he acts based on
Speaker 1: a much simpler logical rubric, which is that Portugal small
Speaker 1: and we don't have any ability to project military force
Speaker 1: in a way that matters on the level of a
Speaker 1: great power. So we have to be careful and we
Speaker 1: can't piss off anyone too much, right or over committed.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna do. He would never back the fascists militarily,
Speaker 1: because like, what am I gonna do send soldiers to
Speaker 1: fucking Russia. I'm gonna have Portuguese truths fighting and fucking Russia.
Speaker 1: What the hell is that gonna do?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: I would, but I'm built different.
Speaker 1: You would, yeah, but you would go yeah, But you know,
Speaker 1: he's probably influenced here by the fact that he just
Speaker 1: watched the Republicans burn a lot of their goodwill by
Speaker 1: getting involved in World War One, and he's like, I'm
Speaker 1: just not gonna do that, Like that could never be me.
Speaker 1: Built different.
Speaker 2: It's actually kind of like a big and obvious thing
Speaker 2: to see is like, hey, the guy that went to
Speaker 2: school knows not to do the Hitler stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, seems bad. Nah, no, thank you, you.
Speaker 2: Know, Like I mean, Hitler was a soldier that that
Speaker 2: went to jail for trying.
Speaker 1: To overthrow the government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like this guy sucks. Yeah, and this guy this,
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm gonna go out on a limb and
Speaker 2: you know what, you can hear me out first.
Speaker 1: Sure, Hitler sucks. Not cool, not my favorite guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not a cool dude.
Speaker 2: And also but really sucks at like knowing what to.
Speaker 1: Do, you know, yeah, yeah, when to get when to
Speaker 1: you know, when to roll the dice?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is funny like when
Speaker 2: you talk about like the value of an education and
Speaker 2: like the irony being like, you know, it's a pretty
Speaker 2: valuable thing to learn about education is how to not
Speaker 2: get all of your people murdered?
Speaker 1: Yeah, how to avoid that shit. Yeah. And it's also
Speaker 1: he's also got this thing going for him where, you know,
Speaker 1: unlike in Germany, and Germany had been the Kaiser's regime
Speaker 1: that had you know, gotten every into World War two,
Speaker 1: and in Portugal it had been the democracy, the republic
Speaker 1: that had made that choice, right, And so he's just
Speaker 1: got he's a little bit you know, he's gunned because
Speaker 1: he's looking at the immediate past and he's like, nah,
Speaker 1: fuck that shit, I'm just that could never be me,
Speaker 1: bro could never be me.
Speaker 2: Not me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, smart smart man. Unfortunately, so he plays a
Speaker 1: role a lot of people will argue in keeping Franco neutral,
Speaker 1: and there's significant evidence that he operates with the direct
Speaker 1: help of the British government in doing this, that he
Speaker 1: is like he's communicating with like the British empires, like
Speaker 1: diplomats because of this long standing alliance. Early in the war,
Speaker 1: British intelligence would pass on messages to Salazar which he
Speaker 1: would take to Franco in order to negotiate backdoor deals
Speaker 1: to keep Spain out of direct involvement in the war.
Speaker 1: And this is really stressful for his hair goes gray
Speaker 1: like because it's the fascists are looking pretty good early
Speaker 1: in the war and there's a lot of pressure Franco's like,
Speaker 1: maybe we ought to get involved. We could get some
Speaker 1: shit out of this, right, and probably a lot of
Speaker 1: even people on like Franco's side are like, why are
Speaker 1: we not backing the clear winners? And Salas are like eh,
Speaker 1: And he gets but he gets increasingly like pump the
Speaker 1: breaks home. This ages him by like ten or fifteen years.
Speaker 1: Most people will agree he's visibly older by the time
Speaker 1: the war, he gots the Obama treatment, he gets the
Speaker 1: he goes gray. Churchill's people are like, he started snapping
Speaker 1: at us and yelling at us. Whenever we talk to him.
Speaker 1: He almost seems like he's losing it, right, Like he
Speaker 1: is not. This is not an easy time for him.
Speaker 1: He's not like negotiating this simply right.
Speaker 2: A pretty stressful era for the World War two. Switzerland
Speaker 2: just looking over being like they got something going on.
Speaker 1: How strong are our borders?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: But look, yeah, so his role in this is substantial
Speaker 1: enough and keeping Franco out of the war that Churchill's
Speaker 1: government organizes three separate tokens of appreciation for Salazar's efforts.
Speaker 1: The first, in September of nineteen forty, is a written
Speaker 1: letter of thanks directly from Winston Churchill. The second they're like,
Speaker 1: you know what, this, this written letter of thanks isn't enough.
Speaker 1: Let's lean on Oxford and let's have Oxford give Salazar
Speaker 1: an honorary degree. Move yeah, yeah, no, that's that's smart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: make him an honorary.
Speaker 2: Letter is kind of like who gives a shit? Really?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it gives it a thanks? Yeah, thank you, thank you? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Thanks drunk? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically the government leans on Oxford, and Oxford is like,
Speaker 1: they send a team to Combra University where he had
Speaker 1: been a professor, and we're like, yeah, let's uh, let's
Speaker 1: give the dictator a degree.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And then the third thing that the British do is
Speaker 1: they upgrade the ambassador to Portugal. Right, And this is
Speaker 1: like a very literal thing where they're like, it had
Speaker 1: been a low raking member of the nobility and they
Speaker 1: send a much higher ranking member of the nobility to
Speaker 1: be the ambassador.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's always fun, right, Yeah, Like.
Speaker 1: Now you've got a guy who's closer to the king
Speaker 1: who's the ambassador because we like you that much, right,
Speaker 1: And they.
Speaker 2: Expand it is a gift, but it is also a
Speaker 2: smart political strategy as well. Yeah, made him feel like
Speaker 2: somebody doing a certain thing where there's a potential that
Speaker 2: you could turn them into an ally. You aren't want
Speaker 2: to butter him up, so you do want a higher ranking.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like how like the ambassador in Mexico
Speaker 2: was historically like a pretty cushy but high ranking yeah
Speaker 2: job because it was like there are next door neighbors
Speaker 2: and that's really cool.
Speaker 1: I guess this is why I mean this is you know,
Speaker 1: in our podcast, Jeff, when we reached out to you,
Speaker 1: we actually had the Duke of Windsor, you know, email
Speaker 1: you asking if you wanted to be on the podcast,
Speaker 1: which which a lot of people don't know that. Daniel,
Speaker 1: our audio editor, is the Duke of Windsor.
Speaker 2: But I was going to say, we have history, and
Speaker 2: so I actually did not appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah you do. You were in the IRA
Speaker 1: for a period of time in the nineties. Anyway, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that later. You know who else was
Speaker 1: in the IRA in the nineteen nineties, probably Hello Fresh? Yeah, hello,
Speaker 1: almost certainly. I mean, actually that's way too cool for HelloFresh. No, now,
Speaker 1: Hello Thatcher is what it was called. Yeah, Hello Thatcher.
Speaker 1: We've brought a bomb. See Hello Fresh. We can be
Speaker 1: mean to you, or we can be nigh to you,
Speaker 1: right if you want us to make more comparisons with
Speaker 1: you in a terrorist group, but like you know, a
Speaker 1: popular one, send us some money. Yeah, we're back and
Speaker 1: we're talking about Hello Fresh, proud sponsors of the IRA. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I said the same thing when I found that out.
Speaker 1: So far, yeah, yeah, yeah, it surprises a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Speaking of surprising. Salas are surprisingly good at being the
Speaker 1: dictator of Portugal, so the fact that the British are
Speaker 1: really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of
Speaker 1: the war is a big ask for the man. But
Speaker 1: it's also you know, Franco, this is not a smooth relationship.
Speaker 1: He and Salazar are not. This is not easy. Franco
Speaker 1: is never as committed to the international fascist cause as
Speaker 1: Hitler and Mussolini. Right, he is like Salazar and Iberian,
Speaker 1: but he's also an opportunist. In these early years of
Speaker 1: sweeping fascist success, he gets really angry at Salazar for
Speaker 1: like holding him back. In one notable moment, he complains
Speaker 1: that Salazar is untimido, like a weakling, right like he's
Speaker 1: he's timid, He's weak. And the frustration is buoyed by
Speaker 1: the manner in which Salazar controls his military because he's
Speaker 1: a lot of guys in his military are kind of
Speaker 1: on the Franco side of things here, and he keeps
Speaker 1: replacing these guys in power and replacing them with these
Speaker 1: younger lickspittles that he can trust to be loyal to him,
Speaker 1: and they he appoints so many kids in their thirties
Speaker 1: over experienced officers that like long standing members of the
Speaker 1: military start to get angry and kind of like feeling frustrated.
Speaker 2: What does this doage?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what is the like he's doing kind of
Speaker 1: a doge thing here, right, And this is very different
Speaker 1: from like a career military man like Franco but also Salazar.
Speaker 1: They're never, they're never, they're not in this period. Eventually,
Speaker 1: his alienation of the military is going to cause problems
Speaker 1: for his successors, but it never gets bad enough while
Speaker 1: he's in power that they feel bold enough to try.
Speaker 1: In World War Two, it becomes clearer as that kind
Speaker 1: of goes on, and like Operation Barbarossa turns against the Germans,
Speaker 1: everyone starts to realize, like, oh shit, Salazar probably had
Speaker 1: the right idea here. Fascism's not looking so hot, right,
Speaker 1: all of its Central Europe has been leveled by like
Speaker 1: Allied bombing raids might have worked out really well for
Speaker 1: us that you kept out of this thing.
Speaker 2: Huh, the boy knew what was up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm kind of glad we didn't send the Portuguese
Speaker 1: army to Stalingrad. And sort of while this is happening,
Speaker 1: Portugal is profiting from both sides of the war. He
Speaker 1: is an arch war profit here, and because he's never
Speaker 1: fully aligned, he's able to make really good money from everyone.
Speaker 1: For the New York Times quote, the money came from
Speaker 1: Britain in the United States for the use of the
Speaker 1: Azora's Islands as naval and air bases. At the same time,
Speaker 1: Lisbon was the spy center for the Axis as well
Speaker 1: as the Allied Powers, with both of which Portugal traded.
Speaker 1: So they're trading with everyone. They're selling to everybody in
Speaker 1: forty they wait until forty three to hand those islands
Speaker 1: over to the Allies as naval and air bases, when
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear you know where things are going. But
Speaker 1: they're profiteering from everyone. Now, all of this does come
Speaker 1: at a personal cost for Salazar. Negotiating a middle way
Speaker 1: at the center of the largest war in humanistry is
Speaker 1: not simple, and this does age him. By nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: he looks like he's much older than his years, and
Speaker 1: the victory of the USSR and the Democratic Nations spooks
Speaker 1: him initially, right in forty five, he's like, shit.
Speaker 2: Oh did he not turn great? Because he thought he
Speaker 2: saw a ghost. Yeah, he thought he saw he thought
Speaker 2: he thought a Scooby Doo character. Yeah, yeah, he thinks
Speaker 2: he's like fucked right that like oh America and the
Speaker 2: Soviets one, the left is going to rise worldwide in
Speaker 2: the wake of this, and that's not going to be
Speaker 2: good for a guy like me who's a career anti communist.
Speaker 2: And so he gets scared enough that in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: five he has an election and it's not a it's
Speaker 2: not a real election, but he lets political parties besides
Speaker 2: his own party run again, and he claims publicly that
Speaker 2: the election will be quote as free as in free England.
Speaker 2: So how many times have you said that exact statement
Speaker 2: over the course of this show constantly where it's like
Speaker 2: the dictator had an election, Yeah, it was an election,
Speaker 2: but he let people run. Yeah, did he kill the
Speaker 2: people that ran against him?
Speaker 1: Not immediately, He's going to lock some of them up
Speaker 1: and tortures some of them. Right, This isn't going to last,
Speaker 1: but there is this initial because he's kind of spooked.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to push the allies too hard. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want to seem like a fascist in this period,
Speaker 1: so he's kind of scared. He empowers a new set
Speaker 1: of special military courts to liberalize the policies of the
Speaker 1: political police. There's this concentration camp Tarafhal where the communists
Speaker 1: and these democratic activists are held, and he improves conditions.
Speaker 1: He lets them talk to their families on the outside.
Speaker 1: He restores contact with what one inmate described as the
Speaker 1: living world. In the post war period for a little
Speaker 1: while and for an article in the Journal of Music
Speaker 1: and Politics, Annabel Duirte writes, Portuguese fascism was quickly trying
Speaker 1: to make its political conversion. It was trying to eliminate
Speaker 1: and make us forget the more conspicuous aspects that I
Speaker 1: didn't fight it with the dying regimes that had been
Speaker 1: its allies.
Speaker 2: And I do like the idea like whoa, whoa, whoa
Speaker 2: fascist me. It's just look this guy. We have field
Speaker 2: days in Jamas, you know him. Yeah, in Portugal camps
Speaker 2: it's like a camp camp.
Speaker 1: Not a camp camp Jesus camp camp camp. No, it's
Speaker 1: a camp, you know, you know, like the camp right exactly.
Speaker 1: It's nice. So these changes are not entirely cosmetic, right this.
Speaker 1: Things do get better for people in military prison for
Speaker 1: a while, not forever, But they don't presage this is
Speaker 1: not a legitimate change towards liberalism. Right, he's not really
Speaker 1: introducing any more freedom. One major policy change that sounds
Speaker 1: good on paper is the political police can now only
Speaker 1: hold detainees without charges or a warrant for one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty days. Right, so you can only keep people
Speaker 1: for six months without saying why you're doing it.
Speaker 2: That's standing on my head.
Speaker 1: And this is not Yeah, you would have to in
Speaker 1: a Portuguese torture prison.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, I'd come out with, the tight end,
Speaker 2: the strongest.
Speaker 1: Shoulder, shoulder nuts especially, Like, God, you're spending way longer
Speaker 1: than six months there.
Speaker 2: All that is just like me, honestly, that's a training camp. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what kind of camp it is. It's training camp.
Speaker 1: It's gonna last a little longer than that, because the
Speaker 1: only result of this policy is that every after six months,
Speaker 1: you release the prisoners and then as soon as they
Speaker 1: step outside the prison, you arrest them again for another
Speaker 1: six months. Right, that's all you're doing. You're not actually
Speaker 1: letting anybody out here.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: He does make it, right, Yeah, it's it's pretty dictatory stuff.
Speaker 1: He does make one real concession, although it's brief, which
Speaker 1: is that he allows the Movemento Unidad Democratica, which is
Speaker 1: like a democratic umbrella party, to briefly start organizing and
Speaker 1: running candidates. Now this is a broad coalition, but even
Speaker 1: that proves to be too much for Salazar to allow.
Speaker 1: Within a few years, the MOVEMENTO starts to pick up
Speaker 1: steam and it becomes clear that there's enough leftist sentiment
Speaker 1: to present a threat to his regime. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight he outlaws the organization, calls it a communist front.
Speaker 1: Now by forty eight he's kind of again, he's got
Speaker 1: these good instincts where he pretends to liberalize in the
Speaker 1: post war period, where there's this kind of surge in
Speaker 1: support for these kind of anti far right, you know,
Speaker 1: pro left ideas worldwide, and he gauges correctly that like,
Speaker 1: that's not going to last. And by forty eight, the
Speaker 1: post war danger posed by the victory of anti fascism
Speaker 1: is over right. The whole Cold War thing is starting
Speaker 1: to spin up. There's now this kind of anti leftist
Speaker 1: sentiment that is increasingly entrenched all over the quote unquote
Speaker 1: democratic world. Portugal gets admitted to NATO and Sala's our
Speaker 1: strong anti communist credentials officially outlasted the brief period during
Speaker 1: which Americans had had to pretend that they considered the
Speaker 1: USSR an ally. Right, he doesn't have to hold out
Speaker 1: long for us to be like, oh, this guy used
Speaker 1: to be Hitler's friend and Mussolini's friend, but he's an
Speaker 1: anti communist. Isn't that all that really matters? Right, We're
Speaker 1: trying to lock up his as many anti communists as
Speaker 1: we can to form this block against the USSR. And
Speaker 1: so by forty eight, he's kind of held out long enough. Right.
Speaker 1: And there had been a lot of direct collaboration between
Speaker 1: the Nazi regime and Salazar's government, and Mussolini's regime and
Speaker 1: Salazar's government, particularly within the political police. Right. Salazar's intelligence
Speaker 1: network had constantly been in contact with Mussolini and Hitler's
Speaker 1: political police before and during the war. One of his
Speaker 1: top intel heads, Captain Agnostino Pierreira, had collaborated with the
Speaker 1: Nazis as a private businessman trading tungsten during the war years. Right,
Speaker 1: and he's going to be operating the torture prison system
Speaker 1: after the war. Right, This guy who had been who
Speaker 1: was directly cribbing notes from the Gestapo and from the
Speaker 1: SD in nineteen fifty six, there's a huge wave of
Speaker 1: repression that gets launched because by the mid fifties, with
Speaker 1: the Cold War really going, Salazar's like, Okay, it's time
Speaker 1: to get rid of all of these liberalizing policies. We
Speaker 1: can really lock in and start absolute cracking down on
Speaker 1: the left and on any kind of like pro democratic organization,
Speaker 1: and nobody in nobody in America, whoever is going to
Speaker 1: fuck with us. Right, he passes a law in fifty
Speaker 1: six that is meant to extend the incarceration periods among
Speaker 1: political prisoners to what is effectively a life sentence, and
Speaker 1: this is directly based off of a German act in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five that led to what's called the Shuthoft system,
Speaker 1: where detention time is unlimited for enemies of the state.
Speaker 1: So again, this ally of the Americans who've just beaten
Speaker 1: the Nazis is using Nazi policies as the rubric for
Speaker 1: creating this sort of system in which to crack down
Speaker 1: on descent, and the US is not only cool with it.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty seven, we send the CIA to Portugal
Speaker 1: to help train his secret police, so they go straight
Speaker 1: from learning from the Nazis to working with the CIA,
Speaker 1: And part of what's happening here is that Salazar has
Speaker 1: lobbied the White House and been like, look, if I fall,
Speaker 1: Portuguese communism is obviously going to come roaring back, you know,
Speaker 1: So you guys need to send me some dudes to
Speaker 1: help my guys do torture. Duarte writes. A new period begins.
Speaker 1: Special agents travel to elite training camps in the United States,
Speaker 1: such as Camp Pierri, Virginia, also known as the Farm,
Speaker 1: where they received instructions and methods and practices of interrogation
Speaker 1: from CIA experts.
Speaker 2: So great now, I mean, I like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: he's just like, look, look a lot of people have
Speaker 2: a lot of ideas, uh huh. And I'm not going
Speaker 2: to say that they're all bad.
Speaker 1: American fascist German fascists all take any fascist idea about
Speaker 1: how to torture leftists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like, can we make them stronger? Though?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And the CIA again like just the degree to
Speaker 1: which they are now playing a crucial role, and specifically
Speaker 1: they're helping teach him how to use we'll talk about
Speaker 1: this more later, like auditory torture in order to like
Speaker 1: really break people's minds in these torture prisons, and the
Speaker 1: CIA is like taking notes from him, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they invented van Halen for this. So this creates an
Speaker 1: extraordinary turning point in the situation, right, the fact that
Speaker 1: there's like that these CIA experts are coming in and
Speaker 1: they're starting to like they're training Portuguese people in the
Speaker 1: farm over in Virginia. There's now protests. There's like a
Speaker 1: protest campaign that rises up from family members of prisoners
Speaker 1: who are like angry that their family members are being
Speaker 1: tortured so hideously, and they start protesting enough that the
Speaker 1: government has to take note of it. Again, it's not
Speaker 1: a complete totalitarian system. He can't totally ignore stuff like this.
Speaker 1: And seventy two Portuguese lawyers from Lisbon, Porto and other
Speaker 1: cities put out a comprehensive report on irregularities concerning the
Speaker 1: treatment of prisoners and deaths in the state prisons. Duarte writes,
Speaker 1: quote Joaquim the most To Olivera, a barber and democrat
Speaker 1: from Foff age forty eight, and Menuel to Silva Junior,
Speaker 1: a worker and anti fascist from Viana de Castello age
Speaker 1: sixty nine, for instance, had died inside a prison in
Speaker 1: Porto in nineteen fifty seven, officially they had committed suicide.
Speaker 1: And it starts to leak out at this period is
Speaker 1: the degree to which these torture prisons have become institutionalized
Speaker 1: in Portugal. People find out that they're locking prisoners in
Speaker 1: these tiny cells called cigaretto, which have no natural light
Speaker 1: or even space to walk. You can only like really stand.
Speaker 1: You can't even fully lie down. There's like a wooden
Speaker 1: board for a bed, but you can't even straighten your
Speaker 1: body out on the ground. People with money who are
Speaker 1: like middle class can pay for a larger cell, but
Speaker 1: it's still a dungeon, right, and it's costing your family
Speaker 1: a significant amount of money every day. One political prisoner
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six left an account stating for over
Speaker 1: a month he was locked in a wet cement cell
Speaker 1: without sufficient light or air. Then he was forced to
Speaker 1: pay the daily sum of tenniscuto's for he was threatened
Speaker 1: with the dungeons if he did not pay. So there's
Speaker 1: starting to be some resistance to this from like family
Speaker 1: members of people who are being held for a period
Speaker 1: of time, and some of this even leaks out internationally.
Speaker 1: But it's this thing where Ultimately, the anti communist struggle
Speaker 1: is more like it matters a lot more for every
Speaker 1: one of his backers than the fact that he is
Speaker 1: using these techniques, like some of which we're teaching him.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And there's this also a handy thing where the CIA
Speaker 1: is like, well, we'll take notes on what he's doing, right,
Speaker 1: We'll figure out what works so that when we start
Speaker 1: pushing to you know, overthrow governments in Latin America, we
Speaker 1: can give them data on what works and sells ours prisons. Right,
Speaker 1: He's like a laboratory for like anti left wing crackdowns
Speaker 1: and operating secret police states. And that's kind of the
Speaker 1: role that he's playing internationally in this period of time.
Speaker 1: So that's cool that it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: I love our role in this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look at us.
Speaker 1: It makes me feel good about the country. One of
Speaker 1: the things that the CIA really helps him lock down
Speaker 1: is their kind of use of the statue. This very
Speaker 1: like Portuguese torture technique, where people are made to hold
Speaker 1: position for days or weeks at a time without sleeping
Speaker 1: while police shout in their ears and threaten them. This
Speaker 1: is billed legally as it's not torture. It's a continuous investigation, right,
Speaker 1: They're constantly being interrogated for evidence about like terrorism, and
Speaker 1: so this is necessary for the security of the state.
Speaker 1: And they start increasingly using sound as a weapon, like
Speaker 1: where they'll play in like speakers, like voices of other people,
Speaker 1: like whispering, or even like sounds from outside, sounds of
Speaker 1: people being tortured to like fuck with the heads of
Speaker 1: people who are locked in position, unable to like sleep
Speaker 1: or move for days at a time, in order to
Speaker 1: make them go crazy. Right, Like that's the purpose of this,
Speaker 1: and the CIA is helping them. Right, We're taking notes
Speaker 1: on all of this and where some of this stuff
Speaker 1: winds up being part of the enhanced interrogation techniques we
Speaker 1: used after nine to eleven. Like, this is groundbreaking research
Speaker 1: in the field of how to torture people, which is
Speaker 1: part of why we're so interested in Salazar's regime, as
Speaker 1: he gives us a chance, He gives our torture guys
Speaker 1: a chance to see what works to break people's brains.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean cool. I know that cool. I know there's
Speaker 2: going to be comments, yeah, but you got to remove
Speaker 2: yourself from the horrors. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty cool. At least we know this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: It's always good to have data, you know, on what
Speaker 1: kind of torture works, on how long you can play
Speaker 1: Van Halen to somebody before their mind collapses. Just about
Speaker 1: nine minutes at least from my little learn han. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Salazar regime obviously is no less brutal after World
Speaker 1: War Two than it had been before. But the man
Speaker 1: seemed different and he was treated different internationally. He's now
Speaker 1: an elder statesman and he's he's fitted around the world
Speaker 1: as like not you know, he's a dictator, but he's
Speaker 1: a good dictator, right He kept Spain out of World
Speaker 1: War Two and he kept Portugal from falling to communism, right,
Speaker 1: So like he's the he's the socially acceptable dictator you
Speaker 1: know in a lot of the West right now. Personally,
Speaker 1: as I said, he looks physically weaker after the war.
Speaker 1: He's kind of burnt out. And you do see, especially
Speaker 1: as the fifties we're into the sixties, he's tired, and
Speaker 1: he's less careful than the younger version of himself had been.
Speaker 1: And these factors he starts kind of slipping. This is
Speaker 1: going to lead him to embrace what would become a
Speaker 1: calamity for the sake of maintaining Portugal's doomed overseas empire. Right,
Speaker 1: he's going to make his first really disastrously bad decisions
Speaker 1: starting in the early sixties, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about that. But you know who else made some bad
Speaker 1: decisions in the sixties, like everyone, that's right, that's right,
Speaker 1: but particularly the sponsors of this podcast. Oh wow, and
Speaker 1: we're back. So if you've ever looked at a mapp
Speaker 1: a Europe, you know that Portugal not a big country.
Speaker 1: It's a little rectangle cut out of the Iberia, a
Speaker 1: fingernail of Europe. Right, It's like the fingernail of Europe.
Speaker 1: If like fucking Spain is the thumb, it's a fingernail
Speaker 1: right now in.
Speaker 2: Sallis Spain is the thumb. It's the thumbnail.
Speaker 1: Yea, it's the thumbnail. Thank you.
Speaker 2: So we are intellectuals on this.
Speaker 1: We have to be accurate here. Now, most of Portuguese territory,
Speaker 1: most of what the government controls, is not Portugal, and
Speaker 1: it's not in Europe.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: These are what are called, euphemistically the overseas provinces, which
Speaker 1: is a term that's created to hide the fact that
Speaker 1: Portugal owns a lot of the rest of the world, right,
Speaker 1: and it's really kind of silly at this point.
Speaker 2: Good for them, I guess, yeah, not going.
Speaker 1: To be great for them in this period.
Speaker 2: No, And to be fair, not good for the Earth.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: No. But if their goal was to be a small
Speaker 2: little sliver on the planet and just start taking shit over, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean mission accomplished temporarily.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they're they're holding onto it for a
Speaker 1: long period of time, right.
Speaker 2: Believe it, achieve it. You know what I'm saying. Something
Speaker 2: you can take away from this episode. You can be
Speaker 2: a small, little dumbass country and still get it done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least for a while up until the early seventies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, let's look at this has instagram reel energy
Speaker 2: where it's like I have two kids and I still
Speaker 2: work out every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, their instagram reeling colonialism, right yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And on a map, their situation looks pretty impressive in
Speaker 1: like the late fifties early sixties, because they've held onto
Speaker 1: Portugal in this period owns modern day Angola and modern
Speaker 1: day Mozambique, and Mozambic alone is like nine times the
Speaker 1: size of Portugal. Right, it's not a much bigger, not
Speaker 1: a small country. They also control Guinea Bassau, Sautome, Capo
Speaker 1: Verdo as well as if you've ever been to India
Speaker 1: or heard of a place called Goa in India, which
Speaker 1: is like it's kind of where Cyitrance comes out of it.
Speaker 1: I've heard it referred to as like Russia's Mexico a
Speaker 1: lot like it's like a party town in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. It's a major like tourist destination. I was
Speaker 1: going to say, is like it's a big time tourist destination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's owned by Portugal up until the latter like third
Speaker 1: or third or so of the todieth century. That's Portuguese
Speaker 1: territory in the middle of fucking India.
Speaker 2: Club Portugal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Club Portugal. And in order to maintain
Speaker 1: all these colonial possessions, Portugal has to keep one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand soldiers stationed mostly in Africa, but all over the
Speaker 1: world in order to keep in charge of these increasingly
Speaker 1: restive possessions. Who after World War Two had started to
Speaker 1: be like, hey, a lot of anti colonial movements are
Speaker 1: succeeding across the world, Like Britain's given up India. Why
Speaker 1: are we still part of Portugal? I feel like Angola
Speaker 1: is its own thing. What are we doing here? Right?
Speaker 1: And by the start of the sixties, the cost of
Speaker 1: repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously. Portugal
Speaker 1: in the start of the sixties has the heaviest defense
Speaker 1: burden of any European nation. They are spending forty percent
Speaker 1: of their annual budget to maintain control of these colonial possessions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's a lot of distance.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of distance. It's not cheap to hold
Speaker 1: a lot of boats.
Speaker 2: But like boats are expensive.
Speaker 1: Boats cost money. An army costs money, a secret police
Speaker 1: force costs money.
Speaker 2: They should looked over to Spain be like, hey, how
Speaker 2: that armada thing work out? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Did that keep you while? Yeah? Really good until it
Speaker 1: was very bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was really good. And then it became pardon
Speaker 2: the sailing reference on albatross around our next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of an albatruss. Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: is and again this is particularly ludicrous. That is the
Speaker 1: sixty start, Portugal spending nearly half of their budget keeping
Speaker 1: control of these colonial possessions. Salazar is the fiscal conservative
Speaker 1: whose power rests on balancing the budget and being rational
Speaker 1: about money. And everyone's like, okay, but is it really
Speaker 1: rational for like us to own so much of Africa?
Speaker 1: And we're all we're not even really making money off
Speaker 1: of it, right, We're spending money holding on to it,
Speaker 1: Like why does this make sense? Right?
Speaker 2: That's the concern. It's like there's resources there, aren't you
Speaker 2: supposed to be like, yeah, during the resources. It's not
Speaker 2: like your whole thing.
Speaker 1: It seems like this is nothing but negatives to us.
Speaker 2: Although to be fair, I guess it is salt really
Speaker 2: a thing you're fighting for in the nineteen hundreds, I.
Speaker 1: Feel like there's plenty of salt. We got way too
Speaker 1: much salt. Some people say waging you can't wage a
Speaker 1: war for salt while exists? No, no, exactly right, like they.
Speaker 2: Get it real cheap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got so much salt now, we don't need
Speaker 1: any of this.
Speaker 2: We should never have waiged those wars. We've got too
Speaker 2: much salt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's we now know what it does to our heart. Right,
Speaker 1: what if we'd never taken you know, any of these
Speaker 1: salt territories. You know, Italians would live forever. So the
Speaker 1: irrationalism of this stance, of the fact that he's trying,
Speaker 1: he's spending so much money to hold onto these possessions
Speaker 1: and not really making back what Portugal is putting into it.
Speaker 1: The irrationalism of this stance is key to understanding it,
Speaker 1: because Salas are he's been kind of almost like a
Speaker 1: robot up to this point. He seems like such a
Speaker 1: He's only making the nuts and bolts good financial decisions,
Speaker 1: and he's gotten his reputation is based on He's like
Speaker 1: this cold hearted countant who doesn't fuck up right, and
Speaker 1: that falls away after this point. Alan Smith, writing for
Speaker 1: the Journal of African History, notes that Salazar has let
Speaker 1: himself become consumed by the quote almost paranoid fear that
Speaker 1: foreigners were busily plotting to dismember the Portuguese Empire. And
Speaker 1: you have to see this as consistent with the logic
Speaker 1: that kept him out of World War two. Portugal small
Speaker 1: and that small size is of vulnerability, and he feels
Speaker 1: some protective effect as long as they have this massive
Speaker 1: overseas empire, that maybe that protects us from our small
Speaker 1: size of our main country. But even that feeling that
Speaker 1: this is keeping us safe is a delusion, right there's
Speaker 1: also like a.
Speaker 2: Big wave of anti colonial sentiment in the latter half
Speaker 2: of the twenty absolutely like pretty, I mean, look at
Speaker 2: what England gave up. Yeah, everything, They're like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: guess we should probably cut it out.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but we'll give up some of it, right, And.
Speaker 2: This is ok, you can be India again.
Speaker 1: This is a problem for Portugal in that he has
Speaker 1: previously he'd been so good at seeing where the wind
Speaker 1: was blowing and like, ah, you know what, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to back the fascists fully in World War two
Speaker 1: because I just don't think they're going to have staying power, right,
Speaker 1: And in this point and right after the war, he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to liberalize on paper because I crypto right. Right,
Speaker 1: he's good, he's been good at buying and selling at
Speaker 1: the right times, and he is buying into colonialism at
Speaker 1: exactly the wrong time.
Speaker 2: Right. Normally is really good at seeing a scam.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's just he's kind of past his prime here, right.
Speaker 1: I think that's a big part of what's going on now.
Speaker 1: All colonial powers are propped up in this in the
Speaker 1: periods before by fantasies. Right. The British hold on to
Speaker 1: what they hold on to as long as they do
Speaker 1: because they've they've got this need to believe they've still
Speaker 1: they haven't given up the empire entirely, right, we still
Speaker 1: have some fragment of this thing that made us great.
Speaker 1: The French in this period clung to a policy known
Speaker 1: as franc Afrique, in which they granted their French speaking
Speaker 1: African colonies a degree of autonomy while maintaining ultimate control
Speaker 1: themselves and acting, as Bobakar Diop wrote for the New
Speaker 1: African as absentee landlords right where they're like, well, we'll
Speaker 1: let them be independent on paper, but these are French
Speaker 1: speaking countries, and so we ultimately exercise power. And this
Speaker 1: is a delusion for France to All of these are delusions.
Speaker 1: And now we're going to talk about what was Portugal's
Speaker 1: delusion that backed up their colonial ideology in the Salazar period, right,
Speaker 1: Because early on, when you're taking all this shit, you
Speaker 1: don't need to back it up by anything other than like,
Speaker 1: we're Christian, they're not. We've got guns. They don't come on.
Speaker 2: Let a skin color, they'll be weird about it.
Speaker 1: In the late twentieth century, Portugal has to find a
Speaker 1: way to like justify why they're holding onto this shit,
Speaker 1: and they actually try to do it by being like, actually,
Speaker 1: we're anti racist and we're the only colonial power that is.
Speaker 1: So the delusion that they onto is.
Speaker 2: An old strategy, Catton, Let's see, it's.
Speaker 1: See how well it works in the long run. The
Speaker 1: strategy Salazar's regime is going to buy into is inspired
Speaker 1: by the work of a Brazilian sociologist named Gilberto Frere,
Speaker 1: and Salazar's regime buys hook line and syncer into this
Speaker 1: racial pseudoscientific theory that Frere comes up with called lusotropicalism,
Speaker 1: and this argues that's brazilient, that's Brazilian. Yes, they argue.
Speaker 1: Lucid Tropicalism is this idea that number one, Portuguese people
Speaker 1: are uniquely well suited to like these tropical and like
Speaker 1: warmer climates that they're colonializing in. So number one, we
Speaker 1: are fit to survive and these places we're running, unlike
Speaker 1: the British right. And number two, we've come up with
Speaker 1: the only system of colonialism that's actually good for colonized
Speaker 1: people because we're not racist, right, Unlike the British and French,
Speaker 1: Portuguese colonizers didn't consider themselves superior to the people they ruled.
Speaker 1: And the evidence for this is that they them and
Speaker 1: had kids with them, right, Like, we're cool with with
Speaker 1: you know, mixed race kids, right, Like, that's what makes
Speaker 1: us not racist, right, we're breeding with them. We're not
Speaker 1: bigoted the same way all of these other Europeans are.
Speaker 2: Right, somebody should have given them an American history text book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, boy, or like any colonial history textbook. Right,
Speaker 1: Portugal is not special and they're no less racist than
Speaker 1: anyone else. But that's what lusotropicalism is, the idea that,
Speaker 1: like Portuguese colonialism is unique and special and thus defensible.
Speaker 2: Right, Glad, they might be slightly less racist than other people, Like,
Speaker 2: they're probably a little less racist, maybe the Hitler.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're less racist than Hitler. Not a high bar, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, but yeah, sure, we've brought him up.
Speaker 2: It would be a shame to just forget him.
Speaker 1: You know, I'll say they clear that bar.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I am going to quote per an article on lusotropicalism
Speaker 1: for Genocide Watch by Nat Hill. Quote. Lusotropicalism became the
Speaker 1: defining ideology of Antonio de Olivera Salazar's pseudo fascist regime
Speaker 1: in Portugal. Following the Second World War, as European powers
Speaker 1: increasingly sought to rid themselves of their colonial territories, Portugal
Speaker 1: under Salazar refused to consider granting its African colonies independence
Speaker 1: or autonomy, calling them the overseas provinces instead of colonies.
Speaker 1: Mlcar Cabral, the founder and leader of the PAIGC in
Speaker 1: Portuguese Guinea, spoke about how the regime used lusotropicalism in
Speaker 1: their colonial dogma. A whole mythology was assemboled, and as
Speaker 1: with other myths, especially those concerning the subjection and exploitation
Speaker 1: of peoples, there was no lack of men of science,
Speaker 1: even renowned sociologists, to provide a theoretical basis. In this case,
Speaker 1: Lusotropicalismo Gilberto Freyer transformed all of us who lived in
Speaker 1: the provinces of Portugal into the fortunate inhabitants of a
Speaker 1: lusotropical paradise. So instead of these are people were ruling,
Speaker 1: these people are really lucky because we know how to
Speaker 1: actually take care of them, and that makes us fine.
Speaker 1: We're different, We're better than every one.
Speaker 2: We're not like other boys, we're not like.
Speaker 1: The other colonial powers. Right, so now the reality is
Speaker 1: that there's nothing different about Portuguese colonialism. It is, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's a swing, it's a good branding, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: But Portuguese colonialism is like all colonialism, based on mass
Speaker 1: resource extraction and force slabor.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Human trafficking had been the core of Portugal's colonial ambitions
Speaker 1: since the fourteen hundreds, when the first West African people
Speaker 1: were captured, taken to Portugal and sold into slavery in
Speaker 1: Lagos Giovine Effect documents. In an article for Global Voices,
Speaker 1: quote among the colonial powers that emerged over the centuries
Speaker 1: of European colonialism, Portugal trafficked the most enslaved people. No
Speaker 1: one else did as much human trafficking in the colonial
Speaker 1: era as Portugal. They are top dog, right, and they've
Speaker 1: got their defenders even to the modern day, who will
Speaker 1: claim that, like, no, we weren't as bad as the
Speaker 1: other assholes, right. Obviously starting with that often there's this
Speaker 1: often reported claim that Portugal was like the first European
Speaker 1: country to ban slavery in seventeen sixty one, and this
Speaker 1: is a lie. Right, that year Portugal banned the importation
Speaker 1: of slaves into one city. But they continue to be
Speaker 1: the primary global transporter of the transatlantic slave trade until
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty, and that Global Voices article has a graph
Speaker 1: will put up in video form that makes it clear
Speaker 1: how much transatlantic slave trading is being done by Portugal. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: Portugal is the light green in this document and every
Speaker 1: period from fifteen oh one up to eighteen fifty, they
Speaker 1: are by far the majority of the transatlantic slave trafficking.
Speaker 1: Right from eighteen oh one to eighteen fifty, the Netherlands
Speaker 1: traffics about five hundred and sixty eight thousand people, and
Speaker 1: the UK and France traffic smaller numbers than that, and
Speaker 1: Portugal is responsible for almost two and a half million people.
Speaker 2: Practical, don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bad, bad, bad sprain with the water bottle. Now,
Speaker 1: the transatlantic slave trade obviously ends kind of in the
Speaker 1: middle of the of the eighteen hundreds, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: stop Portugal from utilizing forced labor. Right, they change it,
Speaker 1: you know, they alter it. You're not you're no longer
Speaker 1: trafficking people in the same way, but you are still
Speaker 1: forcing people to work for you, and you're just dressing
Speaker 1: it up as like well, these people were arrested for
Speaker 1: this purpose. Right in nineteen twenty nine, a civil and
Speaker 1: criminal Political Statute for the Indigenous Peoples of the Colonies
Speaker 1: in Mozambique and Angola was established, which laid out that
Speaker 1: native people could not be assigned rights related to constitutional institutions.
Speaker 1: This forced segregation remained the law of the land throughout
Speaker 1: the period of Salazar's Estado Novo, even though we saying no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're lusotropical lists, right, we're the ones who aren't racist.
Speaker 1: But also indigenous peoples in Africa are not allowed to
Speaker 1: have constitutional rights, you know.
Speaker 2: And also we did a lot of slave stuff.
Speaker 1: We did a lot of slave stuff, and we do
Speaker 1: not feel bad about it.
Speaker 2: We borrowed the Thirteenth Amendment.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now they make some mild concessions to changing international
Speaker 1: opinion during Salazar's term, but these are again minimal. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three, a law for governing Portuguese colonies INDs
Speaker 1: the use of the term colonial empire stoppait. We're not
Speaker 1: going to call ourselves an empire in the fifties, but
Speaker 1: we're going to keep using forced labor that will continue
Speaker 1: to be legal. And this new law notes that the
Speaker 1: state quote can only compel indigenous people to work in
Speaker 1: public works of general interest to the community. An occupation
Speaker 1: whose results belong to them, in the execution of judicial
Speaker 1: decisions of a criminal nature, or to comply with tax obligations.
Speaker 1: So we can't sell slaves. But if you're making something
Speaker 1: that's good for you, we can make you do that work.
Speaker 1: Or if you get in criminal trouble, or if you
Speaker 1: owe money for taxes, then we can foresh the labor
Speaker 1: for the state. Right Totally different, much less evil, obviously,
Speaker 1: obviously way better now. The number one purpose of Portugal's
Speaker 1: colonial empire under Salazar is the same as it had
Speaker 1: always been for Portugal, which is exploiting forced labor. As
Speaker 1: the financial drain for supporting the empire grew greater, Salazar
Speaker 1: pushed to increase the tax burden on Portugal's colonies to
Speaker 1: pay for military deployments and the ever increasing foreign staff
Speaker 1: needed to keep things going. He pushes an aggressive pension
Speaker 1: scheme that destroys the foreign cash reserves in Mozambique and
Speaker 1: other African colonies, which makes it impossible for them to
Speaker 1: act independently because they have no foreign currency to do
Speaker 1: so with. He also pushes aggressive tariffs that make it
Speaker 1: painful to import or trade anything from countries other than Portugal.
Speaker 1: Alan smith Wright's foreign transfers were first made available to
Speaker 1: those firms doing business with the mother country. Exchange for
Speaker 1: purchases from other markets could only be obtained after these
Speaker 1: transactions had been completed, and only if the dealings with
Speaker 1: Portugal had not exhausted the available reserves. The result of
Speaker 1: this policy was that the colonies were often well supplied
Speaker 1: with unnecessary commodities from Portugal while starving for essentials which
Speaker 1: could only be obtained from elsewhere. There can be no
Speaker 1: doubt that sealas are placed great importance on the establishment
Speaker 1: and maintenance of this system, right that, Like, you don't
Speaker 1: have everything you need because you'd have to buy that
Speaker 1: from England or whoever. But you've got all this shit
Speaker 1: you don't need because it's something we make in Portugal
Speaker 1: and we don't make a lot right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they make a delicious seafood dish.
Speaker 1: And this is also bad for the overall Portuguese economy
Speaker 1: because he is banning there's not a lot of Portuguese
Speaker 1: companies that can take advantage of all of the resources
Speaker 1: in Mozambique and Angola and these other possessions. And he's
Speaker 1: banning international companies from investing in these colonies because he's
Speaker 1: scared then their mother countries will take over, right, which
Speaker 1: is increasing the overall burden on Portugal and the overall
Speaker 1: burden on the government because there's less and less money
Speaker 1: to be made doing this shit. Now. While all this
Speaker 1: is happening, and he is focused obsessively on maintaining this
Speaker 1: colonial empire, and this is an obsession for a lot
Speaker 1: of folks in the ruling class, Portuguese citizens don't give
Speaker 1: a shit. They're barely aware of the fact this is
Speaker 1: going on. Evincent the colonies don't make the news and
Speaker 1: Sellazzar's policies make sure that the country never realizes a
Speaker 1: lot of massive material gain from all of these possessions.
Speaker 1: These same policies that are meant to ensure her dominance
Speaker 1: in Mozambique and Angola, like make it just not worth
Speaker 1: it for the regular peoples. So they don't really see
Speaker 1: why are we doing this? A lot of shit comes
Speaker 1: to a hair.
Speaker 2: They're like, hey, we're not doing great, but.
Speaker 1: This isn't helping us at all. Why are we doing this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you won't even let us legalize heroin yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, come on man, Yeah, that's going to wait a
Speaker 1: couple of decades. So in nineteen sixty one, that's the
Speaker 1: most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding. All
Speaker 1: these simmering colonial conflicts across Portuguese possessions burst onto the
Speaker 1: main stage. The UPA, which is a liberation organization in Angola,
Speaker 1: launches a series of attacks on white settler properties in
Speaker 1: northern Angola, killing several Portuguese civilians. And the month before that,
Speaker 1: the MPLA, a Marxist group, had attacked the Luanda prison,
Speaker 1: killing seven guards. So you have these very public terrorists,
Speaker 1: you know, they call them terrorist attacks, and Salazar, his
Speaker 1: control over the media, allows him to depict these explosions
Speaker 1: as in the words of one paper coming from the
Speaker 1: exterior that tries to disturb the lives of white and
Speaker 1: black people in the peaceful land of Angola. They're outside agitators,
Speaker 1: right man.
Speaker 2: It's like there's some sort of playbook that gives me.
Speaker 1: It's like it's always the same fucking playbook. And that
Speaker 1: he claims that, like, all we're trying to do is
Speaker 1: keep things nice for all of our white and black citizens,
Speaker 1: who we all love equally, right, But any claims to
Speaker 1: enlightened racial attitudes by this lusotropicalist regime are discarded at
Speaker 1: this point, as this article by Julia Gario for the
Speaker 1: journal Violence against Women's summarizes the massacres of white settlers
Speaker 1: and their workers in northern Angola in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: The events that, according to the Portuguese government, triggered the
Speaker 1: war were exhaustively photographed by embedded journalists and army officers.
Speaker 1: Photos of the corpses of raped white women and dead
Speaker 1: babies were reproduced in the national media. The Lisbon Society
Speaker 1: of Geography organized an exhibition to expose the selection of
Speaker 1: the pictures to the public, which was quite successful.
Speaker 2: The white they're reading the dogs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're eating the dogs, the dog eaters. The wide
Speaker 1: circulation of these pictures in Portugal was intended to justify
Speaker 1: the deployment of troops abroad and delegitimize anti colonial movements
Speaker 1: and communism. The Portuguese ambag to the United Nations use
Speaker 1: the images to denounce the savagery of terrorists who cross
Speaker 1: the northern border of Angola to behead, rape and mutilate
Speaker 1: our women. These images, where a white woman's body symbolizes
Speaker 1: white innocence threatened by African savagery function to construct a
Speaker 1: retaliatory narrative of Portuguese wartime victimhood. As a call to arms,
Speaker 1: embedded and incendiary words. Their circulation was intended to prevent
Speaker 1: any empathy with anti colonial movements and hence legitimize any
Speaker 1: form of violence employed against them. Tail as old as time,
Speaker 1: they we we know, yeah, we've seen it.
Speaker 2: You know what's happening. We've we've seen it now.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it continues to happen. It's not that you
Speaker 1: never change the playbook, because it works pretty.
Speaker 2: Well for a while. People are real fucking dumb. Yeah people,
Speaker 2: you've met the personation and what a bunch of fucking dances.
Speaker 1: It's never does It doesn't work in the long run, though, right,
Speaker 1: because this is impossible to contain and it's impossible to
Speaker 1: hold on to these possessions when you get increased the
Speaker 1: poritarian right, it's a stopgap. So unrest continues throughout the year,
Speaker 1: and Salazar gets increasingly desperate to contain it. He tries
Speaker 1: he extends Portuguese citizenship across the colonial populations, is kind
Speaker 1: of like look your citizens now, but his primary tactic
Speaker 1: is violence, and sexualized violence against white women is used
Speaker 1: as a justification for this expensive and violent military response,
Speaker 1: and in the same vein sexualized violence against Stanggolan's becomes
Speaker 1: a popular tactic of the military for the next decade.
Speaker 1: As the Portuguese colonial war wears on, African women are
Speaker 1: systematically raped by Portuguese occupying soldiers. Obviously, this doesn't stop
Speaker 1: people from being angry at Portugal. The fire only spreads
Speaker 1: and it goes and moves out from Angola. As Portuguese
Speaker 1: weakness is made manifest, they lose more and more of
Speaker 1: Salazar's prize possessions. Goa, which had been Portuguese property for
Speaker 1: four hundred years, is taken by a newly independent India
Speaker 1: Intocember of nineteen sixty one. Yeah, now we're not going
Speaker 1: to get credit. Well, I mean we're at yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Salazar orders his men, who are surrounded in the
Speaker 1: middle of India, to fight to the death, but his
Speaker 1: own governor general is like, nah, I don't think we
Speaker 1: can win this one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're gonna do that, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, no, thank you, You're you're all the way at Lisbon. Man,
Speaker 1: you don't know how surrounded, how big India is.
Speaker 2: I've seen comin any.
Speaker 1: Guys here, what are you talking about? And you go
Speaker 1: to school, so the truth of this situation cannot be
Speaker 1: allowed to get out to the populace. Salazar's Minister of
Speaker 1: the Army declared, we are today and will be tomorrow
Speaker 1: in India and Africa as long lived the eternal Portugal.
Speaker 1: So that's not how things are gonna work out. But
Speaker 1: for a while, at least Salas our secret police and
Speaker 1: this repression regime he's built sweep into action in Lisbon. Right,
Speaker 1: we can at least pretend things are good in Lisbon,
Speaker 1: and you get some context about what life is like
Speaker 1: in Lisbon during this period of time. I want to
Speaker 1: read you parts of an article by Dennis Redmont, and
Speaker 1: Redmont was an AP reporter station in Rodman, an AP
Speaker 1: reporter station in Lisbon from sixty five to sixty seven,
Speaker 1: and he covers the Portuguese Colonial War extensively, as well
Speaker 1: as this rising youth movement against the war. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, and in sixty six, more drafted Portuguese soldiers
Speaker 1: die in their colonial possessions than Americans die in Vietnam. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the scale of problem this is for Portugal. That year,
Speaker 1: he publishes several articles about the disastrous conduct of the
Speaker 1: military during what had become a hopeless conflict. These articles
Speaker 1: began to spread among student protesters and earned him the
Speaker 1: attention of Salazar's Pide, which is what the secret police
Speaker 1: is called now. He writes in an article for Politico,
Speaker 1: my mail was steamed open, my phone conversations were meticulously
Speaker 1: recorded and translated. A squad of eight goons tried to
Speaker 1: grab me on Happiness Square at my associated press office
Speaker 1: in Lisbon, before I found refuge at the US embassy. Later,
Speaker 1: I was personally interrogated by the head of Portugal's political police,
Speaker 1: which had assassinated some of its opponents, jailed and tortured others.
Speaker 1: The dossier contained the telex reports I had sent out
Speaker 1: into the world, reports of university students being mistreated by
Speaker 1: political police because of their struggle for greater freedom and democracy.
Speaker 1: Censorship was so prevalent the government designated minders to every
Speaker 1: local newspaper who excited any reference to student unrest or
Speaker 1: guerrilla warfare in Africa, and even flagged any literary articles
Speaker 1: deemed unfavorable to the regime. And one of the things
Speaker 1: this guy notes is that none of the local press
Speaker 1: is useful, but the regime is not totalitarian enough that
Speaker 1: you can't buy foreign There's always foreign newspapers available at
Speaker 1: the market and Lisbon right, even if they have to
Speaker 1: be smuggled in, so people are still able to figure
Speaker 1: out how badly the overseas war is going, and unrest
Speaker 1: is just building and building as the pide is getting
Speaker 1: more and more violent to crack down on things. Duarte
Speaker 1: summarizes this cracked down in her article Quote. On April
Speaker 1: twenty first, nineteen sixty five, Maria Mattos was arrested for
Speaker 1: activities against the security of the state. She was stripped,
Speaker 1: naked and beaten by male and female agents. By the
Speaker 1: third day of torture, without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations,
Speaker 1: spiders in the legs of a table, walls moving, and
Speaker 1: heard piercing screams of people being tortured. At the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, an agent started shooting pictures and a
Speaker 1: young male agent homed to typical Portuguese Catholic song in
Speaker 1: honor of the Virgin Mary, entitled on the thirteenth of May.
Speaker 1: The intention is clear to humiliate and taunt the victim,
Speaker 1: taking advantage of their religious connotations of the song to
Speaker 1: Mocker for being a communist and an atheist. In nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, another prisoner, Pedro Baptista, suffered the statue torture
Speaker 1: for a week and heard sounds of protest songs, serenades,
Speaker 1: and photos outside the prison. At first, he thought they
Speaker 1: were an action of solidarity because of his situation, but
Speaker 1: he later concluded that they were an assemblage of pre
Speaker 1: recorded sounds. So there shoulders were shredded, jacked. But also
Speaker 1: what you see here they're doing is like they're playing
Speaker 1: fake protest music to prisoners to make them think that
Speaker 1: their friends are out there, like the revolution is gaining steam,
Speaker 1: and that that's a play, right, like that there's not
Speaker 1: actually anything going on outside of the prison, And when
Speaker 1: people realize that, it kind of breaks them further. Even
Speaker 1: though the regime is weakening in this period.
Speaker 2: It's not cool that they did that, but that's a
Speaker 2: good move.
Speaker 1: It's a smart move. You know, it works for a
Speaker 1: little while. Like all of this stuff. Now, one of
Speaker 1: Salazar's big calls in the late sixties is to ally
Speaker 1: with Rhodesia. He becomes like one of the few countries
Speaker 1: that will recognize the white supremacist regime there when it's fighting,
Speaker 1: it's losing war in order to maintain this white supremacist state.
Speaker 1: And they provide, they really allow Rhodesia to extend their
Speaker 1: time and power by giving them access to international markets.
Speaker 1: Rhodesia can sell goods to Mozambique and will export Rhodesian
Speaker 1: goods through Mozambique, which does extend the brutal colonial war
Speaker 1: in Rhodesia by a period of time. None of this, though,
Speaker 1: is enough to stop the winds of change blowing through Africa,
Speaker 1: nor is it enough to stop the ravages of time
Speaker 1: from impacting Salazar. In nineteen sixty eight, he suffered a
Speaker 1: cerebral hemorrhage, which may have happened when he fell from
Speaker 1: a chair or in the bath right either way, he
Speaker 1: declines rapidly and he has to be put into a coma.
Speaker 1: Now naturally, if he's in a coma, he can't be
Speaker 1: the dictator anymore, so his subordinates takeover and they stop married.
Speaker 2: I believe you've never seen the movie Dave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is that what Dave's about?
Speaker 2: You got to get a Portuguese Sigourney Weaver Hm in there,
Speaker 2: and then you got to just find another guy that
Speaker 2: looks just like him.
Speaker 1: That's actually what they do. So this is very fun.
Speaker 1: He comes out of his coma after a month and
Speaker 1: these guys who've been running things while he's been the
Speaker 1: coma are like, he's too old. Let's just lie. So
Speaker 1: they they pretend he's still running the country, and he
Speaker 1: gets to like sign paperwork and give out orders, and
Speaker 1: everyone's just like, this is definitely what's happening. You're too
Speaker 1: sick to leave, right, You're still in charge absolutely, And
Speaker 1: so for the last two years of his life, Salazar
Speaker 1: has no power, but he believes he's running the country
Speaker 1: because they're just pretending, right, well, they're doing things for it.
Speaker 2: It's like this sad end of a movie that takes
Speaker 2: place in like Elizabethan, England or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, where they're just like faking yeah, Like yeah, buddy,
Speaker 1: you're still running things absolutely, Like why don't you sign
Speaker 1: some more documents? Don't go outside?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like like like a crazy guy in a
Speaker 2: Napoleon hat, Yeah, moving pieces across a map zambik.
Speaker 1: We're still holding on to all of that.
Speaker 2: Really, well, that's like a really funny thing to have
Speaker 2: happen in the age where like t is around.
Speaker 1: It's like a reverse weekend at Bernies where he's still
Speaker 1: alive technically, but yeah, so he continues to believe he's
Speaker 1: in charge until his death on July twenty seventh of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. His successors try to hold things together, but
Speaker 1: the calamitous Colonial Wars had brit acadre of leftist military
Speaker 1: officers who are really unhappy with how the government's working,
Speaker 1: and in April of nineteen seventy four, they launched the
Speaker 1: mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns
Speaker 1: democracy to Portugal. And that's where you know, there's more
Speaker 1: going on in Portuguese politics since then than just that,
Speaker 1: but like that's how the dictatorship ends, right, Yeah, yeah, So.
Speaker 2: I'd also like to add that this is a man
Speaker 2: that had two days of mourning for Hitler.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, this is this is the guy who's yeah,
Speaker 1: like really bummed about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, but people says part of why democracy
Speaker 1: is kind of able to like reform relatively easily and
Speaker 1: more successfully than in a lot of areas in the
Speaker 1: wake of the dictatorship is he never completely eliminated all
Speaker 1: of the like trappings of democracy. So there were these
Speaker 1: institutions that continued to exist under him that it's just
Speaker 1: a matter of like letting them have actual power again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's also like not like he was overthrown really,
Speaker 1: like no, no, I know the Carnation Revolution's going to
Speaker 1: be happening. Yes, that happened in seventy four, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that is like an overthrowing. But it's like not, but
Speaker 1: there's not like fighting.
Speaker 2: Right. But if you're like, oh, can you believe he
Speaker 2: out played himself, it's like, I don't know, man, he
Speaker 2: just went into a coma.
Speaker 1: Yeah he kind of won. Unfortunately he just ended by
Speaker 1: being dead. Yeah. Yeah, he lives out his fucking days, right,
Speaker 1: he fucking he did it. Yeah, he does. The only
Speaker 1: win he you kind of get against him is he's
Speaker 1: aware the colonial empire is collapsing, right, you know, he
Speaker 1: he's not. He's not unaware of the fact that this
Speaker 1: isn't working as well as he wants it to. But
Speaker 1: he never really sees that it's it's fallen out, Like
Speaker 1: he never really lives for everything to collapse entirely. He
Speaker 1: doesn't see Portugal having a life without him, which is
Speaker 1: probably mostly what he wanted, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, He's like, you guys can't live without me? Yeah,
Speaker 2: like we can and we will. Yeah, they'll do just fine.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately, yeah, a bum makes for the balanced budget.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Sala's art. Kind of
Speaker 1: a dicky, kind of a dick, not a nice man.
Speaker 2: I want to go on a limb and say, this
Speaker 2: guy maybe a bit of a no.
Speaker 1: Good nick, maybe a douche. Yeah, maybe sucked, but pretty
Speaker 1: good at being a dictator. Unfortunately, on a technical level,
Speaker 1: again he gets that Oscar. Good for him, Good for him? Well, Jeff,
Speaker 1: on a technical level, do you want to plug any
Speaker 1: of your pluggables here?
Speaker 2: I have a lot of stuff, folks. I do really
Speaker 2: cool stuff. My name is Jeff May and google Jeff
Speaker 2: May podcast if you want, but over at patreon dot
Speaker 2: com slash Jeff May. I have shows like Jeff Has
Speaker 2: Cool Friends, Nerd and Nerd which end up going for free.
Speaker 2: But those both you know, you get early excess on
Speaker 2: sensit episode the whole the Patreon benefits, right. I also
Speaker 2: do a show called The Monthly Flow with and Drake Gazetta.
Speaker 2: I also do Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Gamefully
Speaker 2: Unemployed Network. I do all the stuff on the you
Speaker 2: don't even like this network with Adam Todd Brown and
Speaker 2: I have a great, great channel on YouTube called Jeff
Speaker 2: Has Cool Cards where I open trading cards on camera
Speaker 2: and we're like, oh, that's neat, and people like that,
Speaker 2: and I do, and then I mail them out to
Speaker 2: my patrons because that's nice. I run a stand up
Speaker 2: comedy show the second Friday of every month that blasts
Speaker 2: the past on Magnolia in Burbank, California. So come check
Speaker 2: that out. And I'm on the socials.
Speaker 1: Check him out. Hey, they're Jeff that Yeah, yeah, excellent. Well, everybody,
Speaker 1: this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you've
Speaker 1: just listened to, and now you'll listen to more of it,
Speaker 1: you know. Now you'll listen to more of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: keep doing it, keep listening to it, and we'll keep
Speaker 1: telling you about guys who sucked. Sometimes in Portugal, sometimes
Speaker 1: in other places.
Speaker 2: A lady that sucks.
Speaker 1: It's occasionally a lady. Yeah, we get ladies on this
Speaker 1: show every now and.
Speaker 2: Then, sucky lady every once in a while, A couple
Speaker 2: of them, a couple of them, a bathory showing up everyone.
Speaker 1: Women out out there, you know, if you want to
Speaker 1: be on behind the Bastards take over our country and
Speaker 1: kill hundreds of thousands of people. You know, create your
Speaker 1: own torture police.
Speaker 2: You know that women have been strong, They're stronger than ever.
Speaker 2: That's right, you know, initiative ladies, you gotta dictate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just murders, sell, get people to inject bleach into
Speaker 1: their children. You know you can do it.
Speaker 3: I've the podcasts over no, always with you, but No.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 3: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
Speaker 1: every Wednesday and Friday.
Speaker 3: Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
Speaker 3: the Bastards