Part Two: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

Cools are media.

Hey, everybody, it's Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you know what it is because you're listening to it.

And you're listening to part two of our episodes on Antonio Salazar, so you're probably not tuning into the show for the first time, going, I wonder what this series is.

I'm going to click on an episode about a guy I've never heard of that's clearly labeled as part two.

Like, no one, who would do that?

A mediator.

Part tuning in.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Who would do?

Like, no one, no one.

Don't laugh.

Sophie, no.

It was good.

Yeah.

No, I liked it.

That's okay.

It's okay.

Spray you the water bottle.

So our guest today, Jeff May,

rhymed, but I didn't mean for it to.

Look, man, I have a very rhymeable name.

You do.

You do.

It's useful.

It's like it was useful in this exactly one instance.

It's a month?

Like, people love some teachers saw my name and they never never stopped.

No, no, they, they, yeah, that you can vamp on that for a solid 15 minutes of what's supposed to be math class.

Oh, it was great.

Um, Jeff May, if you were Jeff April, we would not have had you on the show.

Oh, I get it.

Yeah, absolutely not.

Um, Jeff, Jeff,

uh, June, maybe.

That, that actually has a kind of nice ring to it, you know?

Yeah,

we might have Jeff June on the show.

Yeah,

uh, Jeff July, no, it's still alliterative, but I don't like it.

I don't know why.

I almost dated a girl named Maisie.

She went by May, Maisie May.

Oh my god, and then she quickly pumped.

Yeah, I know, yeah.

You can't get in, you can't get too serious with that one.

I was like, but come on, and she's like, This is, it's just not gonna work, it's not gonna work.

There's one reason for that, yeah.

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All right.

So we're back and we're talking about part two.

In the end of part one, Antonio Salazar had established his new state and established a secret police force with a torture prison that occasionally had to deal with noise ordinance violations

in a while too.

Yeah, a little loud, a little loud.

They had to quiet it down a little bit.

Can you just bring it a little

on the torture?

Guys, we love the torture prison.

We're Yimbies when it comes to torture prisons, but they have to abide by like the neighborhood noise ordinances.

Yeah, we have quiet hours.

Yeah, we've got quiet hours.

No, no torturing after 9 p.m.

Come on.

How hard is that?

We know this.

Yeah.

So Salazar's first actions after coming to power are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal.

Now, I don't mean to confuse this with prosperity or even the kind of fraudulent economic boom that the Nazis manufactured after Hitler's return, right?

Portugal never really thrives to a massive extent during Salazar's reign.

It will remain, per capita, one of the poorest nations in Europe.

But the economy stops cycling, right?

Where there's these deep trows and these recoveries.

It kind of stays on an even keel.

And even though that's still not very good for most of the people, there's a lot more stability.

So first off, the people with money, the capitalist class, are a lot happier because stability means you can make predictable investments and whatnot and get predictable returns.

And the regular people at least aren't dealing with these sudden, drastic downturns every couple of years or whatever, right?

And so things are a lot more stable.

Now, this allows him, one of his first measures taken in office, was to take, and he's, you know, Salazar isn't coming out.

He launches an austerity program, a very radical, cut-to-the-bone austerity program.

And this is not entirely of his own devising.

There have been recommendations the League of Nations had made to Portugal, and he takes those recommendations.

And under this austerity program, the poor and the peasant classes in Portugal suffer mightily.

And again, that should tell you, despite a lot of the sympathies between him and Hitler and whatnot, this is not a populist movement, right?

Woodrow Wilson blew it.

Right.

Yeah.

He really did.

The League of Nations, just about as big a fuck up as it could possibly have been.

Despite being a much cooler name than the United Nations, who wouldn't rather be in a league?

Talk about a 180 on that guy, huh?

Oh, boy.

He's just like, we're not going to talk to anybody.

But also, what if we had a justice league?

But we should have like an international order.

Yeah.

So he's able to balance the budget, right?

Which makes him popular among the people who are holding power, who see this as the fastest route to stability.

As the writer Alan K.

Smith noted, this was often a brutal process for regular people.

Quote, the principles which guided him were the elimination of wastefulness, the reduction of spending to a minimum, and complete control over every aspect of life which involved governmental expenditure.

No matter how pressing their needs, areas such as rural development, the health services, and education would have to wait until the necessary surplus was at hand.

So Salazar is like, fuck you, I'm not doing anything to help people until we've got enough spare money to afford it, right?

Like, we're not going to go into debt just to take care of people.

Like, we're going to cut it to the end.

And whatever suffering the peasantry has to make, it's necessary as long as we can kind of keep the economy and the wealthy on track, right?

It's a little rude.

He's kind of a dick.

He's a rudy huxtable, we like to say.

And he's, he's not at all, he's not even going to play at being like, I'm speaking for the people.

I'm the representative of the people, you know, the people like, there's not even that kind of like, that like guys, right?

He would state directly that his philosophy of leadership was, quote, the Portuguese must be treated as children.

Too much too often would spoil them.

He added, quote, I say the same thing, though.

Yeah, you're always saying that.

And it really pisses off our our Portuguese listeners.

People know this about me in the Portuguese, yeah.

Yeah, those windbags, to quote from one of our other bastards.

The truth is that I am profoundly anti-parliamentarian.

I hate the speeches, the verbosity, and the flowerly, meaningless interpolations, the way we waste passion, not around any great idea, but just around futilities, nothingness from the point of view of the national good.

So he's very much this like, look, I'm not giving anybody anything, but at least I'm not like grandstanding about some bullshit while failing to deliver, right?

Like I'm an asshole and I'm not, you know, handing you anything nice, but I'm also keeping the economy from crashing, right?

Like that's his, that's his argument for why he should stay in power.

And it works surprisingly well.

Part of why is that while he gets the credit for his economic policies and the way that they do work, he's almost invisible outside of them.

He is not doing mass rallies.

People are not marching in the streets as he like stands in a reviewing stand and gives some sort of weird little salute he invented.

He avoids any mass public displays, right?

Which leads to this errant belief internationally, people will say that, oh, Portugal, they got so lucky, they have a dictatorship without a dictator, which is nonsense.

That's not what's happening.

He's very much a dictator.

But there's this desire, especially from a lot of international like capitalist conservatives, to be like, oh, Portugal's really figured it out.

They've got all the benefits of a Hitler without having Hitler, you know?

Maybe we could do what they're doing, right?

And that's not the case.

That's not an accurate way to describe Salazar's regime or any regime that's ever existed.

The reality is that very few of the 20th century's authoritarians exercise more direct control over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar.

You could argue Salazar is much more of a dictator in the direct literal sense that even Hitler was, right?

Hitler is a delegator, right?

He has his things he's interested in.

he mostly lets other people handle most things, in part because you can like defray blame for shit that way.

Salazar is kind of the opposite of a lot of these guys in that he's all about direct personal control, of especially economic policy, but a lot of other government policies.

And he doesn't want to do the other crap, right?

He doesn't want to do the big reviewing stand marches.

He doesn't want to do the military adventurism.

So it's less accurate to say Portugal is a dictatorship without a dictator, and more Salazar is a dictator without a cult of personality, right?

What a waste.

Yeah, what a waste.

You could have, you could have had so much more fun with it, man.

Oh, my God.

You know, Hitler had his flair.

Where's your Salazar flair?

Come on.

You've been awesome, man.

Yeah.

Blew it.

Tragic, especially with a name as cool as Salazar.

Oh, my God.

It's a good name.

It's a solid dictator name.

Yeah.

Man, what a waste.

But it is better for political stability.

And as dictators, Salazar is all about stability.

And this is going to be the thing that ultimately saves him where his peers get led to ruin, right?

Unlike Hitler, he doesn't, whatever he says about helping return Portugal to greatness, he's not really interested in returning his nation to some false pre-lapsarian version of greatness or even erasing the humiliations of the past.

He wants to bring stability and then hold the line, right?

That's the kind of guy he is.

Also, that's the best song by Toto.

That is the best song by Toto.

Hold the line.

And Salazar would have agreed with you.

And I think, well, no, no, he passes in 74, so he couldn't have heard Toto.

I think he would have liked Africa to be 100%.

I think he would have liked it.

Unfortunately,

one of his downfalls is that he likes Africa way too much.

Yeah, yeah.

He's just like all these other casuals that think Africa is the best song by Toto.

I know, I know.

That's his big problem.

He's a fucking casual Toto fan is what he is.

That's what brings about the revolution against him is the fact that he's a fake Toto fan and everyone knows it.

Yeah.

They're like, come on, man, the revolution isn't always on time.

No, no, no.

Again,

that's why we brought you in, Jeff.

That's why I get brought in for all the

hottest takes on Toto.

Current musical hits.

Because I only know to make two jokes about Toto, and we already ran through them.

So Salazar, he's the only dictator kind of in this period who is going to really perfectly jink and run and like avoid kind of the different sort of dangers of this moment in European history.

The pitfalls, if you will.

The pitfalls, right?

Like he's never going to be an invade Russia guy, and he's going to play a big role in helping his peer in Spain, Francisco Franco, avoid some of these same pitfalls, unfortunately.

Now, Portugal has a complex history with Spain.

They've been invaded and occupied in the past.

You know,

he's super worried, like every Portuguese leader is, that Spain is going to come for Portugal at some point.

Just looking out the blinds.

Yeah, looking out the blinds, being like, is Spain out there?

Fuck.

They always.

What are they doing out out there.

So you've got this civil war that gets started in Spain between these Republicans and Franco.

And Salazar sees the Republic, which looks like it's going to win at first, as a threat to his continued independence, right?

If the Republic wins the war, maybe they'll come for us.

And then maybe my regime is doomed and Portuguese independence is doomed.

And Salazar extends his support to Franco, right?

So he backs Franco during a crucial early stage in the civil war.

He allows Germany and Italy to use his territory to transfer troops and materiel to Franco's army, which is a critical aspect of like how Franco is able to get enough military aid to win.

Salazar allows Portuguese volunteers to fight for the fascists in Spain, and he uses his secret police and security forces to raid and arrest Republican sympathizers and refugees in his own territory.

And these are the years, because he's letting Italy and Germany in, because he's helping Franco, these are the years in which his movement most resembles the other fascist movements in Europe.

Salazar deliberately cribs from Mussolini and Hitler in particular.

Perr write up in the New York Times, quote, he created a youth movement along Hitlerian lines, principally to prepare the younger people for military service and the Portuguese Legion, which was dedicated to combating internal communism.

These organizations with the army proved useful in putting down a popular outbreak in Lisbon just prior to World War II.

So not only does he kind of ally with the fascists in this period, is he starts putting out these kind of like trappings of fascism where it's like, well, let's get a youth fighting movement in the street.

We need, in addition to the military, we need these civilian combat organizations, these paramilitaries that are sort of given a free pass by the police to crack down on the left and to stop them from gaining too much power and overthrowing the government, to stop the communists primarily, right?

I thought you meant fighting the youth.

No, no, no, no.

He is getting the fighting youth together, right, under his back, right?

Like that, that's his plan during this period, right?

There's obviously the youth who are organizing on behalf of communism and, you know, for a return to the Republic.

These are the people that he's having a secret police go after and that he's sort of allowing these paramilitaries to

fight against, right?

Now, during this period, pre-World War II, he's known to keep a bust of Mussolini in his office, and he'll regularly ask his Hitler during the height of his power.

But he's also pretty clear in his own statements about what he sees as the difference between his fascist allies and his own new state regime.

Quote: Now, Now, obviously, our dictatorship is similar to the fascist dictatorship in its strengthening of authority and the war in which it declares on certain democratic principles, in its nationalist character, in its maintenance of the social order.

It is different, however, in its methods of renovation.

The fascist dictatorship is leaning towards a pagan Caesarism, right?

And that's what Salazar doesn't want.

For one thing, he is a Catholic, and he makes an alliance with the Catholic Church, right?

Where we will allow the Catholic Church, we'll bring back a lot of these powers that had been stripped from it to provide for the social safety net, and we'll also institute all these laws that are very friendly to the way the Catholic Church wants things to be run.

And that's very different from like Germany, which is, you know, the Nazi regime is an anti-Catholic regime in some ways, right?

They have to co-opt Catholicism, but they never are really comfortable with it because the church is another center of power.

And Salazar is okay with there being another center of power as long as it helps kind of take away from his burden.

He sees this as like a worthwhile thing.

And he's also just a believer in Catholicism.

And so this is why he's very consciously like,

we'll take some things that the fascists are doing, but like, I'm not this weird kind of like pagan esoteric thing that Hitler is.

Like, that seems strange to me.

And I don't want to go too far down that road because it's a lot of work.

And I feel like it's going to get this fucker in trouble.

Right.

Yeah.

He's very, he's very smart.

It's not, it's not hard to read the writing on the wall when

being like, yeah, we should take over like the whole everything, yeah?

Yeah, maybe we should just go over and take over all sorts of things.

Yeah, the Soviet Union, yeah.

Oh,

kicking the door, yeah.

Salazar is like, that seems like a lot of work.

Taking over the Soviet Union.

For one thing, there's like 30 Portuguese people.

People like the idea that he's just so like chill with his little pocket.

He's content with what he has.

It's just like it's a project for him.

He's just like, man, we got to get Portugal moving, man.

We got to

do our thing.

We got to fix this up.

And we don't need, he's also,

as we'll talk about, Portugal owns a lot of Africa, right?

He's not, he's not content with a tiny amount of the world, but he doesn't want to like expand massively.

He's trying to keep a hold on what they've got, right?

So he doesn't go too far into the kind of delusions that are going to lead Hitler and Mussolini to ruin.

And also, he's not doing a racism or an anti-Semitism, is he?

I mean,

he's anti-Semitic and like by arse, but it's not like a governing principle, right?

And he's 1930s anti-Semitic, which is just

yeah.

And in this, you know, after the war, there will be a Portuguese colonial war that's very racist, right?

But that's not the guiding light initially of his regime.

It's more something that makes sense as time goes on and they wind up in these colonial conflicts, like the racism kind of follows naturally.

But there's not this, he doesn't come to power with like, we're going to wipe out this racial group in order to fix Portugal, right?

That's never a part of his politics, you know?

And so that's a big difference between like the Nazis, right?

Now, Salazar is also, despite the fact that he is allied with Franco and really helps him take power in Spain, he's never, he never trusts Franco all that much.

Tom Gallagher, his biographer, describes them as having, him, as having a wary association with Franco's regime.

And while Franco restores the monarchy in Spain, Salazar never gives serious consideration towards a return to the monarchy, right?

Because that's too much of a compromise compromise with power for him, right?

Of his own power.

And

this political alliance that defines his regime in this period isn't the pure result of a populist fascist party winning the struggle for power.

Per Gallagher, quote, his formula was to create a ruling alliance of conservatives, some moderate liberals, and a few nationalist ideologues, kept in being by his political agility and guaranteed ultimately by the armed forces.

So it's just much more of this compromise regime that he's willing to make because he's just kind of, he's a pragmatic guy.

Now, this is ultimately what will save his regime and Franco's regime.

You know, at least there's an argument that it saves Franco's regime during the Second World War.

Because Franco only wins his civil war because of the help he gets from the continental fascist powers, right?

Like he gets very famously, the German Air Force is going to bomb a bunch of places for Franco, right?

And despite the fact that you would think, and Hitler had kind of expected, well, obviously, once I wind up in a big war, Spain is going to back me, right?

And Franco never does this.

He refuses.

He doesn't go on the side of the Allies, right?

He doesn't outright betray Germany, but he never throws his hat into the ring with the Axis once the fighting begins in earnest.

The reasons for this are complex, and they have a lot to do with Portugal's traditionally warm relationship with Great Britain, because Salazar gets a lot of credit for stopping Franco from going all in on the fascists during this war and from like outright allying with them.

there's a lot of debate as to like how much credit, how much of this was Franco just kind of recognizing this is a bigger risk than I want to take.

But Salazar, at least according to one version of the story, is a major part of what keeps Franco out.

And part of why Salazar is like this is even though he's got a lot of sympathies with the fascists and a good relationship with them, he still has a good relationship with Great Britain, who had been Portugal's traditional ally.

And so Salazar never sees, even though he gets lumped in as a fascist in this period, he never sees sees politics in simple terms of fascist versus anti-fascist, right?

Or even authoritarian versus democratic.

Instead, he acts based on a much simpler logical rubric, which is that Portugal's small and we don't have any ability to project military force in a way that matters on the level of a great power.

So we have to be careful and we can't piss off anyone too much, right?

Or overcommit our...

He's not going to do, he would never back the fascists militarily because like, what am I going to do?

Send soldiers to fucking russia i'm going to have portuguese troops fighting in fucking russia what the hell is that gonna do right i would but i'm built different you would yeah but you would i would yeah but you know he's probably influenced here by the fact that he just watched the republicans burn a lot of their goodwill by getting involved in world war one and he's like i'm just not gonna do that like that could never be me built different it's actually kind of like a big and obvious thing to see is like hey the guy that went to school knows not to do the hitler stuff yeah seems bad nah no thank you you know like i mean hitler was a soldier that that went to jail for trying to overthrow the government yeah like this guy sucks yeah and this guy this i mean i'm gonna go out on a limb and you know what you can hear me out first sure hitler sucks not cool not my favorite guy yeah not a cool dude and also but really sucks at like knowing what to do you know yeah yeah when to get when to you know when to roll the dice yeah yeah Yeah.

Yeah.

But it is funny, like, when you talk about like the value of an education

and like the irony being like, you know, it's a pretty valuable thing to learn about education is how to not get all of your people murdered.

Yeah.

How to avoid that shit.

Yeah.

And it's also, he's also got this thing going for him where.

you know, unlike in Germany, in Germany, it had been the Kaiser's regime that had, you know, gotten every into World War II.

And in Portugal, it had been the democracy, the republic that had made that choice, choice, right?

And so he's just got, he's a little bit, you know, he's gun-shy because he's looking at the immediate past and he's like, nah, fuck that shit.

I'm just, it could never be me, bro.

Could never be me.

Not me.

Yeah.

Not me.

And yeah, smart, smart man, unfortunately.

So he plays a role, a lot of people will argue, in keeping Franco neutral.

And there's significant evidence that he operates with the direct help of the British government in doing this, that he is like, he's communicating with like the British Empire's like diplomats because of this long-standing alliance.

Early in the war, British intelligence would pass on messages to Salazar, which he would take to Franco, in order to negotiate backdoor deals to keep Spain out of direct involvement in the war.

And this is really stressful for his hair goes gray, like, because it's the fascists are looking pretty good early in the war, and there's a lot of pressure.

Franco's like, maybe we ought to get involved.

We could get some shit out of this, right?

And probably a lot of even people on like Franco's side are like, why are we not backing the clear winners?

And Salazar is like,

and he gets, but he gets increasingly like, pump the brakes, homie.

This ages him by like 10 or 15 years.

Most people will agree.

He's visibly older by the time of the war.

He got the Obama treatment, huh?

He gets the he goes gray.

Churchill's people are like, he started snapping at us and yelling at us whenever we talked to him.

He almost seems like he's losing it, right?

Like he is not, this is not an easy time for him.

He's not like negotiating this simply, right?

A pretty stressful era for World War II.

Just Switzerland just looking over being like, they got something weird going on.

How strong are our borders, right?

Good luck, guys.

Yeah.

So his role in this is substantial enough in keeping Franco out of the war that Churchill's government organizes three separate tokens of appreciation for Salazar's efforts.

The first, in September of 1940, is a written letter of thanks directly from Winston Churchill.

The second, they're like, you know what, this written letter of thanks isn't enough.

Let's lean on Oxford and let's have Oxford give Salazar an honorary degree.

That's a good move.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's smart.

Yeah, make him an honorary.

That letter is kind of like, who gives a shit, really?

Yeah, who gives it?

Oh, thanks.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thanks, drunk.

Yeah.

So basically, the government leans on Oxford, and Oxford is like, they send a team to Coimbra University, where he had been a professor, and we're like, yeah,

let's give the dictator a degree, right?

And then the third thing that the British do is they upgrade the ambassador to Portugal, right?

And this is like a very literal thing where they're like, it had been a low-ranking member of the nobility and they send a much higher ranking member of the nobility to be the ambassador.

Yeah, that's always fun.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, now you've got a guy who's closer to the king who's the ambassador because we like you that much, right?

And they explained that.

It is a gift, but it is also a smart political strategy as well.

Yeah, make him feel valuable.

Somebody doing a certain thing where there's a potential that you could turn turn him into an ally.

You want to butter him up.

So you do want a higher ranking.

You know, it's sort of like how like the ambassador to Mexico was historically like a pretty cushy but high-ranking

job because it was like, they're our next door neighbors and that's really cool, I guess.

This is why, I mean, this is, you know, in our podcast, Jeff, when we reached out to you, we actually had the Duke of Windsor, you know, email you asking if you wanted to be on the podcast,

a lot of people don't know that Daniel, our audio editor, is the Duke of Windsor.

But I was going to say we have history, and so I didn't.

I actually did not appreciate that.

Yeah, well, yeah, you do.

You were in the IRA for a period of time in the 90s.

Anyway, we'll talk about that later.

You know who else was in the IRA in the 1990s?

Probably HelloFresh.

Yeah, hello almost certainly.

I mean, actually, that's way too cool for HelloFresh.

No, no.

Hello Thatcher is what it was called.

Yeah, Hello Thatcher.

We've brought a bomb.

See, HelloFresh, we can be mean to you or we can be nice to you, right?

If you want us to make more comparisons with you in a terrorist group, but like, you know, a popular one, send us some money.

Yeah.

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Yeah.

I don't know.

I said the same thing when I found that out so far.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It surprises a lot of people.

Speaking of surprising, Salazar, surprisingly good at being the dictator of Portugal.

So the fact that the British are really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of the war is a big ask for the man.

But it's also, you know, Franco, this is not a smooth relationship.

He and Salazar are not, this is not easy.

Franco is never as committed to the international fascist cause as Hitler and Mussolini, right?

He is, like Salazar, an Iberian, but he's also an opportunist.

In these early years of sweeping fascist success, he gets really angry at Salazar for like holding him back.

In one notable moment, he complains that Salazar is un timido, like a weakling, right?

Like he's timid, he's weak.

And the frustration is buoyed by the manner in which Salazar controls his military, because he's a lot of guys in his military are kind of on the Franco side of things here.

And he keeps replacing these guys in power and replacing them with these younger lickspittles that he can trust to be loyal to him.

And he appoints so many kids in their 30s over experienced officers that like long-standing members of the military start to get angry and kind of like feeling frustrated.

What is this?

Doge?

Yeah, yeah, what is it?

Like he's doing kind of a doge thing here, right?

And this is very different from like a career military man like Franco, but also Salazar, they're never, they're never, they're not in this period.

Eventually his alienation of the military is going to cause problems for his successors, but it never gets bad enough while he's in power that they feel bold enough to try.

In World War II, it becomes clearer as that kind of goes on and like Operation Barbarossa turns against the Germans, everyone starts to realize like, oh shit, Salazar probably had the right idea here.

Fascism's not looking so hot, right?

All of Central Europe has been leveled by like Allied bombing raids.

Might have worked out really well for us that you kept out of this thing, huh?

Your boy knew what was up.

Yeah, I'm kind of glad we didn't send the Portuguese army to Stalingrad.

And sort of while this is happening, Portugal is profiting from both sides of the war.

He is an arch war profiteer, and because he's never fully aligned, he's able to make really good money from everyone.

Per the New York Times quote, the money came from Britain and the United States for the use of the Azores islands as naval and air bases.

At the same time, Lisbon was the spy center for the Axis, as well as the Allied powers, with both of which Portugal traded.

So they're trading with everyone, they're selling to everybody.

They wait until 43 to hand those islands over to the Allies as naval and air bases when it's pretty clear where things are going.

But they're profiteering from everyone.

Now, all of this does come at a personal cost for Salazar.

Negotiating a middle way at the center of the largest war in human history is not simple, and this does age him.

By 1945, he looks like he's much older than his years.

And the victory of the USSR and the Democratic Nations spooks him initially, right?

In 45, he's like, shit.

Oh, did his hair turn gray because he thought he saw a ghost?

Yeah, he thought he saw

Scooby-Doo character.

Yeah, yeah.

He thinks he's like fucked, right?

That like, oh, America and the Soviets won.

The left is going to rise worldwide in the wake of this.

And that's not going to be good for a guy like me who's a career anti-communist.

And so he gets scared enough that in 1945,

he has an election.

And

it's not a real election, but he lets political parties besides his own party run again.

And he claims publicly that the election will be, quote, as free as in free England.

So

how many times have you said that exact statement over the course of this show?

Constantly.

Whereas like the dictator had an election.

Yeah.

It wasn't a real election, but he let people run.

Yeah.

Did he kill the people that ran against him?

Not immediately.

He's going to lock some of them up and torture some of them, right?

This isn't going to last.

But there is this initial because he's kind of spooked.

He doesn't want to push the allies too hard.

He doesn't want to seem like a fascist in this period.

So he's kind of scared.

He empowers a new set of special military courts to liberalize the policies of the political police.

There's this concentration camp, Tarafal, where the communists and these democratic activists are held.

And he improves conditions.

He lets them talk to their families on the outside.

He restores contact with what one inmate described as the living world in the post-war period for a little while.

And for an article in the Journal of Music and Politics, Annabel Duarte writes: Portuguese fascism was quickly trying to make its political conversion.

It was trying to eliminate and make us forget the more conspicuous aspects that identified it with the dying regimes that had been its allies.

And I do like the idea of like, whoa,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, fascists.

Not really.

Look, this guy, we have field days in jail.

Fascism, I hardly know him.

Yeah.

In

Portugal camps.

It's like a camp camp, not a camp camp.

Jesus.

Camp camp camp.

No, it's like camp, you know?

Right, exactly.

It's nice.

So these changes are not entirely cosmetic, right?

Things do get better for people in military prison for a while, not forever.

But they don't presage, this is not a legitimate change towards liberalism, right?

He's not really introducing any more freedom.

One major policy change that sounds good on paper is the political police can now only hold detainees without charges or a warrant for 180 days, right?

So you can only keep people for six months without saying why you're doing it.

That's standing on my head.

And this is not, yeah, you would have to in a Portuguese torture prison.

I'll tell you what, I'd come out with the tightest, strongest shoulder.

Your fucking shoulders would be nuts, especially since

you're spending way longer than six months there.

All that this law means.

Honestly, that's a training camp.

Yeah.

That's what kind of camp it is.

It's a training camp.

It's got to last a little longer than that because the only result of this policy is that after six months, you release the prisoners.

And then as soon as they step outside the prison, you arrest them again for another six months, right?

That's all you're doing.

You're not actually letting anybody out here.

Now, he does make a...

Yeah, it's pretty dictatory stuff.

He does make one real concession, although it's brief, which is that he allows the Muvimento Unidad Democrática, which is like a democratic umbrella party, to briefly start organizing and running candidates.

Now, this is a broad coalition, but even that proves to be too much for Salazar to allow.

Within a few years, the Muvamento starts to pick up steam, and it becomes clear that there's enough leftist sentiment to present a threat to his regime.

So in 1948, he outlaws the organization and calls it a communist front.

Now,

by 48, he's kind of,

again, he's got these good instincts where he pretends to liberalize in the post-war period where there's this kind of surge in support for these kind of anti-far-right, you know, pro-left ideas worldwide.

And he gauges correctly that like, that's not going to last.

And by 48, the post-war danger posed by the victory of anti-fascism is over, right?

The whole Cold War thing is starting to spin up.

There's now this kind of anti-leftist sentiment that is increasingly entrenched all over the quote-unquote democratic world.

Portugal gets admitted to NATO, and Salazar's strong anti-communist credentials officially outlasted the brief period during which Americans had had to pretend that they considered the USSR an ally, right?

He doesn't have to hold out long for us to be like, oh, this guy used to be Hitler's friend and Mussolini's friend, but he's an anti-communist.

Isn't that all that really matters?

Right.

We're trying to lock up as many anti-communists as we can to form this block against the USSR.

And so by 48, he's kind of held out long enough, right?

And there had been a lot of direct collaboration between the Nazi regime and Salazar's government and Mussolini's regime and Salazar's government, particularly within the political police, right?

Salazar's intelligence network had constantly been in contact with Mussolini and Hitler's political police before and during the war.

One of his top intel heads, Captain Agnostino Pereira, had collaborated with the Nazis as a private businessman trading tungsten during the war years, right?

And he's going to be operating the torture prison system after the war, right?

This guy who had been, who was directly cribbing notes from the Gestapo and from the SD.

In 1956, there's a huge wave of repression that gets launched because by the mid-50s, with the Cold War really going, Salazar's like, okay, it's time to get rid of all of these liberalizing policies.

We can really lock in and start absolutely cracking down on the left and on any kind of like pro-democratic organization.

And

nobody in America or ever is going to fuck with us, right?

He passes a law in 56 that is meant to extend the incarceration periods among political prisoners to what is effectively a life sentence.

And this is directly based off of a German act in 1935 that led to what's called the Schutthoft system, where detention time is unlimited for enemies of the state.

So, again, this ally of the Americans who have just beaten the Nazis is using Nazi policies as the rubric for creating this sort of system in which to crack down on dissent.

And the U.S.

is not only cool with it, in 1957, we send the CIA to Portugal to help train his secret police.

So they go straight from learning from the Nazis to working with the CIA.

And part of what's happening here is that Salazar has lobbied the White House and been like, look, if I fall, Portuguese communism is obviously going to come roaring back, you know, so you guys need to send me some dudes to help my guys do torture.

Duarte writes, a new period begins.

Special agents travel to elite training camps in the United States, such as Camp Peary, Virginia, also known as the Farm, where they received instructions and methods and practices of interrogation from CIA experts.

So great.

Now he's not a good idea.

I mean, I like that he's not.

Yeah.

You know, he's just like, look, look.

A lot of people have a lot of ideas.

Uh-huh.

And I'm not going to say that they're all bad.

American fascists, German fascists, all take any fascist idea about how to torture leftists.

Yeah, he's like, can we make them stronger, though?

Yeah.

And the CIA, again, like just the degree to which they are now playing a crucial role.

And specifically, they're helping teach him how to use, we'll talk about this more later, like auditory torture in order to like really break people's minds in these torture prisons.

And the CIA is like taking notes from him, right?

They introduce him to Van Halen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They invented Van Halen for this.

Yeah.

So this creates an extraordinary turning point in the situation, right?

The fact that there's like that he's, these, these CIA experts are coming in and they're starting to like, they're training Portuguese people in the farm over in Virginia.

There's now protests.

There's like a protest campaign that rises up from family members of prisoners who are like angry that their family members are being tortured so hideously.

And they start protesting enough enough that like the government has to take note of it.

Again, he's not, it's not a complete totalitarian system.

He can't totally ignore stuff like this.

And 72 Portuguese lawyers from Lisbon, Porto, and other cities put out a comprehensive report on irregularities concerning the treatment of prisoners and deaths in the state prisons.

Duarte writes, quote, Joaquim Lamosta Oliveira, a barber and Democrat from Faf, age 48, and Manuel de Silva Jr., a worker and anti-fascist from Viana de Castello, age 69, for instance, had died inside a prison in Porto in 1957.

Officially, they had committed suicide.

And what starts to leak out at this period is the degree to which these torture prisons have become institutionalized in Portugal.

People find out that

they're locking prisoners in these tiny cells called cigredo, which have no natural light or even space to walk.

You can only like really stand.

You can't even fully lie down.

There's like a wooden board for a bed, but you can't even straighten your body out on the ground.

People with money who are like middle class can pay for a larger cell, but it's still a dungeon, right?

And it's costing your family a significant amount of money every day.

One political prisoner in 1956 left an account stating, for over a month, he was locked in a wet cement cell without sufficient light or air.

Then he was forced to pay the daily sum of 10 escudos, for he was threatened with the dungeons if he did not pay.

So

there's starting to be some resistance to this from like family members of people who are being held for a period of time.

And some of this even leaks out internationally, but it's this thing where ultimately the anti-communist struggle is more, like it matters a lot more for every one of his backers than the fact that he is using these techniques, like we're with some of which we're teaching him, right?

And there's this also handy thing where the CIA is like, well, we'll take notes on what he's doing, right?

We'll like figure out what works so that when we start pushing to

overthrow governments in Latin America, we can give them data on what works in Salazar's prisons, right?

He's like a laboratory for

anti-left-wing crackdowns and operating secret police states.

And that's kind of the role that he's playing internationally in this period of time.

So that's cool.

That is really cool.

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

I love our role in this.

Yeah, look at us.

It makes me feel good about the country.

One of the things that the CIA really helps him lock down is their kind of use of the statue, this very like Portuguese torture technique where people are made to hold position for days or weeks at a time without sleeping while police shout in their ears and threaten them.

This is billed legally as it's not torture, it's a continuous investigation, right?

They're constantly being interrogated for evidence about like terrorism.

And so this is necessary for the security of the state.

And they start increasingly using sound as a weapon, like where they'll play in like speakers, like voices of other people, like whispering or even like sounds from outside, sounds of people being tortured, to like fuck with the heads of people who are locked in position, unable to like sleep or move for days at a time in order to make them go crazy, right?

Like that's the purpose of this.

And the CIA is helping them, right?

We're taking notes on all of this and where some of this stuff winds up being part of the enhanced interrogation techniques we used after 9-11.

Like this is groundbreaking research in the field of how to torture people,

which is part of why we're so interested in Salazar's regime, is he gives us a chance, he gives our torture guys a chance to see what works to break people's brains.

Pretty cool.

Pretty cool stuff.

I mean, cool is it.

I know that cool.

I know there's going to be comments.

Yeah.

But you got to remove yourself from the horrors.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

At least we know this stuff, right?

It's always good to have data, you know, on what kind of torture works, on how long you can play Van Halen to somebody before their mind collapses, which is about nine minutes, at least from my list of people.

People have learned learned that Haylen.

Yeah.

So Salazar's regime obviously is no less brutal after World War II than it had been before, but the man seemed different and he was treated different.

Internationally, he's now an elder statesman and he's he's feted around the world as like not, you know, he's a dictator, but he's a good dictator, right?

He kept Spain out of World War II and he kept Portugal from falling to communism, right?

So like

he's the socially acceptable dictator, you know, in a lot of the West, right?

Now, personally, as I said, he looks physically weaker after the war.

He's kind of burnt out.

And you do see, especially as the 50s wear into the 60s, he's tired and he's less careful than the younger version of himself had been.

And these factors, he starts kind of slipping.

This is going to lead him to embrace what would become a calamity for the sake of maintaining Portugal's doomed overseas empire, right?

He's going to make his first really disastrously bad decisions starting in the early 60s.

And we're going to talk about that.

But you know who else made some bad decisions in the 60s?

Like everyone.

That's right.

That's right.

But particularly the sponsors of this podcast.

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And we're back.

So if you've ever looked at a map of Europe, you know that Portugal, not a big country.

It's a little rectangle cut out of the Iberia.

It's like the fingernail of Europe.

Right.

It's like the fingernail of Europe.

If like fucking Spain is the thumb, it's a fingernail, right?

Now, in Salazar.

If Spain is the thumb, it's the thumbnail.

Yeah, it's the thumbnail.

Thank you.

See, we are intellectuals on this.

Yeah, we have to be accurate here.

Now, most of Portuguese territory, most of what the government controls, is not Portugal and it's not in Europe, right?

These are what are called euphemistically the overseas provinces, which is a term that's created to hide the fact that Portugal owns a lot of the rest of the world, right?

And it's really kind of silly at this point.

Good for them, I guess.

Yeah.

Not going to be great for them in this period.

No, and to be fair, not good for the earth.

No, no.

But if their goal was to be a small little sliver on the planet and just start taking shit over,

I mean, mission accomplished temporarily.

Yeah.

I mean, they're holding on to it for a long period of time, right?

Believe it, achieve it.

You know what I'm saying?

That's something you can take away from this episode.

You can be a small little dumbass country and still get shit done.

Yeah, at least for a while, up until the early 70s.

Yeah.

It's like this has Instagram reel energy where it's like, I have two kids and I still work out every day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're Instagram reeling colonialism, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And on a map, their situation looks pretty impressive in like the late 50s, early 60s, because they've held on to Portugal in this period owns modern day Angola and modern day Mozambique and Mozambique alone is like nine times the size of Portugal right it's like much bigger not a small country they also control Guinea-Bissau São Tomé Capo Verdo as well as if you've ever been to India or heard of a place called Goa in India which is like it's kind of where sitrance comes out of it's I've heard it referred to as like Russia's Mexico a lot like it's it's like a party town in a lot of ways it's a major like tourist destination

that's what I was going to say is like it's a big-time tourist destination.

Yeah.

That's owned by Portugal up until the latter like third or third or so of the 20th century.

That's Portuguese territory in the middle of fucking India.

Like club Portugal.

Yeah, it's like club Portugal.

And in order to maintain all these colonial possessions, Portugal has to keep 100,000 soldiers stationed mostly in Africa, but all over the world in order to keep in charge of these increasingly restive possessions, who after World War II had started to be like, hey, a lot of anti-colonial movements are succeeding across the world.

Like, Britain's given up India.

Why are we still part of Portugal?

I feel like Angola is its own thing.

What are we doing here, right?

And by the start of the 60s, the cost of repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously.

Portugal, in the start of the 60s, has the heaviest defense burden of any European nation.

They are spending 40% of their annual budget to maintain control of these colonial possessions.

Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of distance.

There's a lot of distance.

It's not cheap to hold

boats, but like boats are expensive.

Boats cost money.

An army costs money.

A secret police force costs money.

They should have looked over to Spain and be like, hey, how'd that Armada thing work out?

Yeah, did that keep you guys at that?

Yeah, really good until it was very bad.

Yeah.

It was really good, and then it became, pardon the sailing reference, an albatross around our necks.

Yeah, a little bit of an albatross.

Yeah.

So this is, and again, this is particularly ludicrous that as the 60s start, Portugal spending nearly half of their budget keeping control of these colonial possessions, Salazar is the fiscal conservative whose power rests on balancing the budget and being rational about money.

And everyone's like, okay, but is it really rational for like us to own so much of Africa?

And we're all, we're not even really making money off of it, right?

We're spending all of our money holding on to it.

Like, why does this make sense, right?

that's the concern it's like there's resources there

aren't you supposed to be like yeah during the resources isn't that like your whole thing it seems like this is nothing but negatives to us although to be fair i i guess is salt really a thing you're fighting for in the 1900s i feel like there's there's plenty of salt we got way too much salt some people say waging you can't wage a war for salt while mcdonald's exists no no exactly right you just get it real cheap yeah we've got so much salt now we We don't need any of this.

We should never have waged those wars.

We've had too much salt.

Yeah, we now know what it does to our heart, right?

What if we'd never taken, you know, any of these salt territories?

You know, Italians would live forever.

So the irrationalism.

of this stance, of the fact that he's spending so much money to hold on to these possessions and not really making back what Portugal is putting into it.

The irrationalism of this stance is key to understanding it.

Because Salazar, he's been kind of almost like a robot up to this point.

He seems like such a, he's only making the nuts and bolts good financial decisions.

And he's gotten his reputation is based on he's like this cold-hearted accountant who doesn't fuck up, right?

And that falls away after this point.

Alan Smith, writing for the Journal of African History, notes that Salazar has let himself become consumed by the, quote, almost paranoid fear that foreigners were busily plotting to dismember the Portuguese Empire.

And you have to see this as consistent with the logic that kept him out of World War II.

Portugal's small, and that small size is a a vulnerability.

And he feels some protective effect as long as they have this massive overseas empire that maybe that protects us from our small size of our main country.

But even that feeling that this is keeping us safe is a delusion, right?

There's also like a big wave of anti-colonial sentiment in the latter half of the 20th century.

Absolutely.

Like pretty, I mean, look at what England gave up.

Yeah, everything.

They're like, yeah, I guess we should probably cut it out.

But yeah, but we'll give up some of it, right?

And this is.

Okay, India, you can beat India again.

This is a problem for Portugal in that he has previously, he'd been so good at...

seeing where the wind was blowing and like, ah, you know what?

I'm not going to back the fascists fully in World War II because I just don't think they're going to have staying power, right?

And in this point, and right after the war, he's like, I'm going to liberalize on paper because I'm like, crypto.

Right, right.

He's, he's good.

He's been good at buying and selling at the right times, and he is buying into colonialism at exactly the wrong time, right?

He normally is really good at seeing a scam.

Yeah.

And he's just, he's kind of past his prime here, right?

I think that's a big part of what's going on.

Now,

all colonial powers are propped up in this and the periods before by fantasies, right?

The British hold on to what they hold on to as long as they do because they've got this need to believe they've still, they haven't given up the empire entirely, right?

We still have some fragment of this thing that made us great.

The French in this period clung to a policy known as franc-afrique, in which they granted their French-speaking African colonies a degree of autonomy while maintaining ultimate control themselves and acting, as Bobocard Diop wrote for the New African, as absentee landlords, right?

Where they're like, well, we'll let them be independent on paper, but these are French-speaking countries, and so we ultimately exercise power.

And this is a delusion for France too.

All of these are delusions.

And now we're going to talk about what was Portugal's delusion that backed up their colonial ideology in the Salazar period, right?

Because early on, when you're taking all this shit, you don't need to back it up by anything other than like, we're Christian, they're not.

We've got guns, they don't.

Come on, look at our skin color.

Don't be weird about it.

In the late 20th century, Portugal has to find a way to like justify why they're holding on to this shit.

And they actually try to do it by being like, actually, we're anti-racist and we're the only colonial power that is.

So the delusion that they latch onto is a-bold strategy, Cotton.

Let's see if it pays off.

Let's see how well this works in the long run.

The strategy Salazar's regime is going to buy into is inspired by the work of a Brazilian sociologist named Gilberto Freire.

And Salazar's regime buys hookline and sinker into this racial pseudoscientific theory that Frere comes up with called lusotropicalism.

And this argues, that's Brazilian.

That's Braziliant, yes.

They argue, lusotropicalism is this idea that number one, Portuguese people are uniquely well suited to like these tropical and like warmer climates that they're colonializing in.

So number one,

we are fit to survive in these places we're running, unlike the British, right?

And number two, we've come up with the only system of colonialism that's actually good for colonized people because we're not racist, right?

Unlike the British and French, Portuguese colonizers didn't consider themselves superior to the people they ruled.

And the evidence for this is that they fucked them and had kids with them, right?

Like we're cool with, you know, mixed race kids, right?

Like that's what makes us not racist, right?

We're breeding with them.

We're not bigoted the same way all these other Europeans are, right?

Somebody should have given them an American history textbook.

Yeah, yeah, boy.

Or like any colonial history textbook, right?

Portugal is not special and they're no less racist than anyone else.

But that's what lusotropicalism is.

The idea that like Portuguese colonialism is unique and special and thus defensible.

They might be slightly less racist than other people.

Like they're probably a little less racist than Hitler.

Yeah, they're less racist than Hitler.

Not a high bar, right?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, sure.

We've brought him up.

It would be a shame to just forget him, you know?

I'll say they clear that bar, right?

I am in a quote per an article on Lusotropicalism for Genocide Watch by Nat Hill, quote, Lusotropicalism became the defining ideology of Antonio Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's pseudo-fascist regime in Portugal following the Second World War.

As European powers increasingly sought to rid themselves of their colonial territories, Portugal, under Salazar, refused to consider granting its African colonies independence or autonomy, calling them the overseas provinces instead of colonies.

Amilcar Cabral, the founder and leader of the PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea, spoke about how the regime used Luso-tropicalism in their colonial dogma.

A whole mythology was assembled, and as with other myths, especially those concerning the subjection and exploitation of peoples, there was no lack of men of science, even renowned sociologists, to provide a theoretical basis, in this case, lusotropicalismo.

Gilberto Freyer transformed all of us who lived in the provinces of Portugal into the fortunate inhabitants of a lusotropical paradise, right?

So instead of these are people we're ruling, these people are really lucky because we know how to actually take care of them, and that makes us fine.

We're different.

We're better than everyone.

We're not like other boys.

We're We're not like the other colonial powers, right?

So now the reality is that there's nothing different about Portuguese colonialism.

It is

a good, it's a swing.

It's a good

branding, right?

Yeah.

But Portuguese colonialism is like all colonialism, based on mass resource extraction and forced labor, right?

Human trafficking had been the core of Portugal's colonial ambitions since the 1400s, when the first West African people were captured, taken to Portugal, and sold into slavery in Lagos.

Giovanni Effeck documents in an article for Global Voices: quote, among the colonial powers that emerged over the centuries of European colonialism, Portugal trafficked the most enslaved people.

No one else did as much human trafficking in the colonial era as Portugal.

They are top dog, right?

And they've got their defenders even to the modern day who will claim that, like, no, we weren't as bad as the other assholes, right?

Obviously, starting with that off, there's this often reported claim that Portugal was like the first European country to ban slavery in 1761.

And this is a lie, right?

That year, Portugal banned the importation of slaves into one city, but they continued to be the primary global transporter of the transatlantic slave trade until 1850.

And that Global Voices article has a graph we'll put up in video form that makes it clear how much transatlantic slave trading is being done by Portugal, right?

Like Portugal is the light green in this document, and every period from 1501 up to 1850, they are by far the majority of the transatlantic slave trafficking, right?

From 1801 to 1850,

the Netherlands trafficks about 568,000 people.

The UK and France traffic smaller numbers than that.

And Portugal is responsible for almost 2.5 million people.

Portugal, don't do that.

Yeah, bad, bad, bad.

No, spray them with the water bottle.

Now, the transatlantic slave trade obviously ends kind of in the middle of the 1800s, but that doesn't stop Portugal from utilizing forced labor, right?

They just change it.

You know, they alter it.

You're no longer trafficking people in the same way, but you're still forcing people to work for you.

And you're just dressing it up as like, well, these people were arrested for this purpose, right?

In 1929, a civil and criminal political statute for the indigenous peoples of the colonies in Mozambique and Angola was established, which laid out that native people could not be assigned rights related to constitutional institutions.

This forced segregation remained the law of the land throughout the period of Salazar's Estado Novo, even though he's saying, no, no, no, we're lusotropicalists, right?

We're the ones who aren't racist, but also indigenous peoples in Africa are not allowed to have constitutional rights, you know?

And also, we did a lot of slave stuff.

We did a lot of slave stuff, and we do not feel bad about it.

We borrowed the 13th Amendment.

Yeah.

Now, they make some mild concessions to changing international opinion during Salazar's term, but these are, again, minimal.

In 1953, a law for governing Portuguese colonies ends the use of the term colonial empire.

So they stop.

We're not going to call ourselves an empire in the 50s, but we're going to keep using forced labor.

That will continue to be legal.

And this new law notes that the state, quote, can only compel indigenous people to work in public works of general interest to the community, an occupation whose results belong to them, in the execution of judicial decisions of a criminal nature or to comply with tax obligations.

So we can't sell slaves, but if you're making something that's good for you, we can make you do that work.

Or if you get in criminal trouble, or if you owe money for taxes, then we can force you to labor for the state, right?

Totally different.

Much less evil.

Obviously, obviously way better.

Now,

the number one purpose of Portugal's colonial empire under Salazar is the same as it had always been for Portugal, which is exploiting forced labor.

As the financial drain for supporting the empire grew greater, greater, Salazar pushed to increase the tax burden on Portugal's colonies to pay for military deployments and the ever-increasing foreign staff needed to keep things going.

He pushes an aggressive pension scheme that destroys the foreign cash reserves in Mozambique and other African colonies, which makes it impossible for them to act independently because they have no foreign currency to do so with.

He also pushes aggressive tariffs that make it painful to import or trade anything from countries other than Portugal.

Alan Smith writes, Foreign transfers were first made available to those firms doing business with the mother country.

Exchange for purchases from other markets could only be obtained after these transactions had been completed and only if the dealings with Portugal had not exhausted the available reserves.

The result of this policy was that the colonies were often well supplied with unnecessary commodities from Portugal while starving for essentials which could only be obtained from elsewhere.

There can be no doubt that Salazar placed great importance on the establishment and maintenance of this system, right?

That like you're you don't have everything you need because you'd have to buy that from England or whoever, but you've got all this shit you don't need because it's something we make in Portugal and we don't make a lot, right?

No, no, they make a delicious seafood dish.

And this is this is also bad for the overall Portuguese economy because he is banning, there's not a lot of Portuguese companies that can take advantage of all of the resources in Mozambique and Angola and these other possessions.

And he's banning international companies from investing in these colonies because he's scared that then their mother countries will take over, right?

Which is increasing the overall burden on Portugal and the overall burden on the government because there's less and less money to be made doing this shit.

Now, while all this is happening, and he is focused obsessively on maintaining this colonial empire, and this is an obsession for a lot of folks in the ruling class, Portuguese citizens don't give a shit.

They're barely aware of the fact that this is going on.

Events in the colonies don't make the news, and Salazar's policies make sure that the country never realizes a lot of massive material gain from all of these possessions.

These same policies that that are meant to ensure her dominance in Mozambique and Angola, like make it just not worth it for the regular people.

So they don't really see why are we doing this?

A lot of shit comes to a head.

They're like, hey, we're not doing great.

This isn't helping us at all.

Why are we doing this?

Yeah.

You won't even let us legalize heroin yet.

Yeah, come on, man.

Yeah, that's going to wait a couple of decades.

So in 1961, that's the most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding.

All these simmering colonial conflicts across Portuguese possessions burst onto the main stage.

The UPA, which is a liberation organization in Angola, launches a series of attacks on white settler properties in northern Angola, killing several Portuguese civilians.

And the month before that, the MPLA, a Marxist group, had attacked the Luanda prison, killing seven guards.

So you have these very public terrorist, or you know, they call them terrorist attacks.

And Salazar, his control over the media allows him to depict these explosions as, in the words of one paper, coming from the exterior that tries to disturb the lives of white and black people in the peaceful land of Angola.

They're outside agitators, right?

Man, it's like there's some sort of playbook that exists.

It's like it's always the same fucking playbook.

And he claims that, like, all we're trying to do is keep things nice for all of our white and black citizens who we all love equally, right?

But any claims to enlightened racial attitudes by this luso-tropicalist regime are discarded at this point, as this article by Julia Garayo for the journal Violence Against Women summarizes.

The massacres of white settlers and their workers in northern Angola in 1961, the events that, according to the Portuguese government, triggered the war, were exhaustively photographed by embedded journalists and army officers.

Photos of the corpses of raped white women and dead babies were reproduced in the national media.

The Lisbon Society of Geography organized an exhibition to expose the selection of the pictures to the public, which was quite successful.

The white women.

And they're eating the dogs.

Yeah, they're eating the dogs, the dog eaters.

The wide circulation of these pictures in Portugal was intended to justify the deployment of troops abroad and delegitimize anti-colonial movements and communism.

The Portuguese ambassador to the United Nations used the images to denounce the savagery of terrorists who crossed the northern border of Angola to behead, rape, and mutilate our women.

These images, where the white woman's body symbolizes white innocence threatened by African savagery, functioned to construct a retaliatory narrative of Portuguese wartime victimhood.

As a call to arms embedded in incendiary words, their circulation was intended to prevent any empathy with anti-colonial movements and hence legitimize any form of violence employed against them.

Tale as old as time.

Bay,

we know.

Yeah, we've seen it.

We know what's happening.

We're seeing it now.

Right.

Yeah, it continues to happen.

It's not that you never change the playbook because it works pretty well for a while.

People are real fucking dumb.

Yeah, people are real.

I don't know if you've met the person.

And what a bunch of fucking dunces.

It's never, it does, it doesn't work in the long run, though, right?

Because this is impossible to contain, and it's impossible to hold on to these possessions when you get increasingly authoritarian, right?

It's a stopgap.

So, unrest continues throughout the year, and Salazar gets increasingly desperate to contain it.

He tries, he extends Portuguese citizenship across the colonial populations.

It's kind of like, look, you're citizens now.

But his primary tactic is violence.

And sexualized violence against white women is used as a justification for this expensive and violent military response.

And in the same vein, sexualized violence against Angolans becomes a popular tactic of the military.

For the next decade, as the Portuguese colonial war wears on, African women are systematically raped by Portuguese occupying soldiers.

Obviously, this doesn't stop people from being angry at Portugal.

The fire only spreads.

And it moves out from Angola.

As Portuguese weakness is made manifest, they lose more and more of Salazar's prized possessions.

Goa, which had been Portuguese property for 400 years, is taken by a newly independent India in December of 1961.

We were just going to party there.

Yeah, now we're not going to get credit for inventory.

Well, I mean,

we're going to go get a lot of credit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Salazar orders his men who are surrounded in the middle of India to fight to the death, but his own governor general is like, nah, I don't think we can win this one.

Yeah, we're not going to do that, man.

Yeah, no, no, thank you.

You're all the way at Lisbon, man.

You don't know how surrounded, how big India is.

I don't know.

I've seen commitments.

I've got to see guys here.

What are you talking about?

Didn't you go to school?

So the truth of this situation cannot be allowed to get out to the populace.

Salazar's minister of the army declared, we are today and will be tomorrow in India and Africa, as long live the eternal Portugal.

So

that's not how things are going to work out.

But for a while at least, Salazar's secret police and this repression regime he's built sweep into action in Lisbon, right?

We can at least pretend things are good in Lisbon.

And to get some context about what life is like in Lisbon during this period of time, I want to read you parts of an article by Dennis Redmond.

And Redmond was an AP reporter stationed in Lisbon.

Rodman.

Rodman.

An AP reporter stationed in Lisbon from 65 to 67.

And he covers the Portuguese colonial war extensively, as well as this like rising youth movement against the war.

In 1966, in 1966, more drafted Portuguese soldiers die in their colonial possessions than Americans die in Vietnam, right?

That's the like scale of problem this is for Portugal.

That year, He publishes several articles about the disastrous conduct of the military during what had become a hopeless conflict.

These articles began to spread among student protesters and earned him the attention of Salazar's PIDE, which is what the secret police is called now.

He writes in an article for Politico, My mail was steamed open.

My phone conversations were meticulously recorded and translated.

A squad of eight goons tried to grab me on Happiness Square at my Associated Press office in Lisbon before I found refuge at the U.S.

Embassy.

Later, I was personally interrogated by the head of Portugal's political police, which had assassinated some of its opponents, jailed and tortured others.

The dossier contained the telex reports I had sent out into the world, reports of university students being mistreated by political police because of their struggle for greater freedom and democracy.

Censorship was so prevalent that the government designated minders to every local newspaper who excised any reference to student unrest or guerrilla warfare in in Africa, and even flagged any literary articles deemed unfavorable to the regime.

And one of the things this guy notes is that none of the local press is useful, but the regime is not totalitarian enough that you can't buy foreigners.

There's always foreign newspapers available at the market in Lisbon, right?

Even if they have to be smuggled in.

So people are still able to figure out how badly the overseas war is going, and unrest is just building and building as the PIDE is getting more and more violent to crack down on things.

Duarte summarizes this crackdown in her article, quote, On April 21st, 1965, Maria Matos was arrested for activities against the security of the state.

She was stripped naked and beaten by male and female agents.

By the third day of torture without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations, spiders in the legs of a table, walls moving, and heard piercing screams of people being tortured.

At the end of the episode, an agent started shooting pictures, and a young male agent hummed a typical Portuguese Catholic song in honor of the Virgin Mary, entitled On the 13th of May.

The intention is clear, to humiliate and taunt the victim, taking advantage of the religious connotations of the song to mock her for being a communist and an atheist.

In 1973, another prisoner, Pedro Baptista, suffered the statue torture for a week and heard sounds of protest songs, serenades, and fados outside the prison.

At first, he thought they were an action of solidarity because of his situation, but he later concluded that they were an assemblage of pre-recorded sounds.

So their

shoulders were shredded.

Jacked.

But also, what what you see here, they're doing is like they're playing fake protest music to prisoners to make them think that their friends are out there, that like the revolution is gaining steam.

And that that's a play, right?

Like that there's not actually anything going on outside of the prison.

And when people realize that, it kind of breaks them further, even though the regime is weakening in this period.

It's not cool that they did that, but that's a good move.

It's a smart move, you know?

It works for a little while, like all of this stuff.

Now, one of Salazar's big calls in the late 60s is to ally with Rhodesia.

He becomes like one of the few countries that will recognize the white supremacist regime there when it's fighting its losing war in order to maintain this white supremacist state.

And they provide, they really allow Rhodesia to extend their time and power by giving them access to international markets.

Rhodesia can sell goods to Mozambique and will export Rhodesian goods through Mozambique, which does extend the brutal colonial war in Rhodesia by a period of time.

None of this, though, is enough to stop the winds of change blowing through Africa, nor is it enough to stop the ravages of time from impacting Salazar.

In 1968, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which may have happened when he fell from a chair or in the bath, right?

Either way, he declines rapidly and he has to be put into a coma.

Now, naturally, if he's in a coma, he can't be the dictator anymore.

So his subordinates take over and they stop managing.

I believe you've never seen the movie Dave.

Yeah.

Is that what Dave's about?

You got to get a Portuguese Sigourney Weaver

in there, and then you got to just find another guy that looks just like him.

That's actually what they do.

So this is very funny.

Literally the plot of Dave.

He comes out of his coma after a month.

And these guys who have been running things while he's been in the coma are like, he's too old.

Let's just lie.

So they pretend he's still running the country and he gets to like sign paperwork and give out orders.

And everyone's just like, this is definitely what's happening.

You're too sick to leave, right?

You're still in charge, absolutely.

And so, for the last two years of his life, Salazar has no power, but he believes he's running the country because they're just pretending, right?

Well, they're doing things for him.

It's like the sad end of a movie that takes place in like Elizabethan England or something.

Yeah, yeah, where they're just like faking.

Yeah, like, yeah, buddy, you're still running things.

Absolutely.

Like, why don't you sign some more documents?

Don't go outside.

Yeah, it's like

a crazy guy in a Napoleon hat

moving pieces across a map.

Mozambique, we're still holding on to all of that really well.

That's like a really funny thing to have happen in the age where like TE is around.

He's like a reverse weekend at Bernie's where he's still alive technically, but yeah.

So he continues to believe he's in charge until his death on July 27th of 1970.

His successors try to hold things together, but the calamitous colonial wars had bred a cadre of leftist military officers who are really unhappy with how the government's working.

And in April of 1974, they launched the mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns democracy to Portugal.

And that's where, you know, there's more going on in Portuguese politics since then than just that.

But like, that's how the dictatorship ends, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

I would also like to add that this is a man that had two days of mourning for Hitler.

Yeah, yeah, this is this, this is the guy who's, yeah, like, really bummed about that.

And people will say part of why democracy is kind of able to

reform relatively easily and more successfully than a lot of areas in the wake of the dictatorship is he never completely eliminated all of the like trappings of democracy.

So there were these institutions that continued to exist under him that it's just a matter of like letting them have actual power again.

But it's also like not like he was overthrown, really.

No, no.

Yeah, no, the Carnation Revolution's going to be happening.

Yes, that happened in 74.

And yeah, that is like an overthrowing, but it's like not, there's not like fighting, right?

But if you're like, oh, can you believe he outplayed himself?

It's like, I don't know, man.

He just went into a coma.

Yeah, he kind of won, unfortunately.

He just ended by being dead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He lives out his fucking days, right?

He fucking, he did it.

Yeah, he does.

The only win he, we kind of get against him is he's aware the colonial empire is collapsing, right?

You know,

he's not unaware of the fact that this isn't working as well as he wants it to, but he, he never really sees that it's it's fallen.

Like, he never really lives for everything to collapse entirely.

He doesn't see Portugal having a life without him, which is probably mostly what he wanted, right?

Yeah, he's like, you guys can't live without me.

Yeah, like we can and we will.

Yeah, they'll do just fine.

Uh, but unfortunately, yeah, a bummer.

Thanks for the balanced budget.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's the story of Salazar.

Kind of a dick.

Yeah.

Kind of a dick.

Not a nice man.

I'm going to go out on limb and say this guy may be a bit of a no-good nick.

Maybe a douche.

Yeah, maybe sucked.

But pretty good at being a dictator, unfortunately.

On a technical level, again, he gets that Oscar.

Good for him.

Good for him.

Well, Jeff, on a technical level, do you want to plug any of your pluggables here?

I have a lot of stuff, folks.

I do really cool stuff.

My name's Jeff May.

And you Google Jeff May podcast if you want, but I have Jeff Hasco over at patreon.com slash Jeff May.

I have shows like Jeff Has Cool Friends, Nerd, and Nerd, which end up going for free.

But those both, you know, you get early access on censored episodes.

The whole, the Patreon benefits, right?

I also do

a show called The Monthly Flow with Andrea Gazetta.

I also do Tom and Jeff Watch Batman with Game Fully Unemployed Network.

I do all the stuff on the You Don't Even Like This Network with Adam Todd Brown.

And I have a great, great channel on YouTube called at Jeff Has Cool Cards, where I open trading cards on camera and like, oh, that's neat.

And people like that.

And I do.

And then I mail them out to my patrons.

Because that's nice.

I run a stand-up comedy show the second Friday of every month at Blast in the Past on Magnolia in Burbank, California.

So come check that out.

And I'm on the socials.

Check it out.

Hey there, Jeffro.

Oh, and variations of that.

Yeah, yeah.

Excellent.

Well, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you've just listened to.

And now you'll listen to more of it.

You know, now you'll listen to more of it.

Yeah.

Keep doing it.

Keep listening.

And we'll keep telling you about guys who sucked.

Sometimes in Portugal, sometimes in other places.

Usually.

It's a lady that sucks.

Occasionally a lady.

Yeah.

We get ladies on this show every now and then.

A sucky lady every once in a while.

A couple of them.

A couple of them.

A bathroom showing up every once in a while.

Women out there.

You know, if you want to be on Behind the Bastards, take over a country and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

You know, create your own torture police.

You know, women have been strong.

They're stronger than ever.

That's right.

You know, initiative, ladies.

You got to dictate.

Yeah.

Just murder.

Get people to inject bleach into their children.

You know, you can do it.

I believe in you.

The podcast's over.

No.

I was with you, but no.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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