Part One: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

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So, today we're talking about a dictator who is unfortunately maybe the best at being a dictator on like a technical level, right?

Like if we're giving technical awards on the actual like

craft of dictatoring, so like the dictator Oscars that they don't show on television, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The dictator Oscars that don't make because they're kind of boring, right?

Like,

they did it like last night.

We had the dictator Oscars.

Yeah, this is the dictator Oscar for like, yeah, set dressing or whatever.

It goes to Antonio Salazar.

The editor is crazy here.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, great, great audio editor.

We're talking about, have you, did you know that Portugal had a dictator at the same time that like Germany and Italy had dictators and Spain?

I mean, I have to say yes because of my history

and all that.

But like, you know, I forget shit.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So Antonio Salazar was the dictator of Portugal from like the 30s up to the 70s, right?

So he has a very long run.

It's a short reign.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like 12.

He's got, he's like two, he's like more than two.

He's like three Hitlers, right?

Three, almost four Hitlers.

Oh, look at this guy.

He's like four Hitlers.

He's like a four Hitler run.

Yeah, exactly.

I got to be honest, though.

Did he put up Hitler numbers?

That's why he lasted.

Yeah.

It's like, I guess Hitler would be like the Bo Jackson of dictatorship.

Like it's like, it's like a very, very bright burn.

If you don't mind me saying such a terrible way to describe that.

No.

But then it fizzle out after he had that hip injury.

Right.

And Salazar has a hip injury in like 68 that takes him out.

You know?

Salazar just gets long.

He's got the longevity.

But he's in there a long time.

He's like that guy who was with the Patriots.

Fuck, what's his name?

Everybody hates him.

Tom Brady.

Tom Brady?

Tom Brady.

Antonio Salazar is the Tom Brady of dictators.

Tom Brady is single-handedly responsible for stopping a lot of domestic violence in New England.

So I'm going to actually say,

you know, if you really think about it.

It's a garbage fan base full of terrible people.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

The Patriots, the worst.

And when he came in, we were like, I don't know about, okay, we love this guy.

He's keeping things safe.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not going to say that about Antonio Salazar, but he does have the staying power, right?

And he's one of these guys.

He gets called a fascist a lot.

And there's an argument to be made for that.

He gets called a fascist generally because, you know, he comes up around the same time Hitler does, around the same time Franco does, a little bit after Mussolini.

And they're all kind of Sympatico for a while.

So there's this argument that, like, well, Salazar was like a fascist dictator as well.

And you can kind of debate that.

But, you know, I think if we want to put it in like Beatles' terms, right?

Hitler's the John Lenin of fascism and Mussolini's the George Harrison.

And, you know, they kind of clock out first, which leaves Franco as the Ringo.

And I think we've got to say that maybe Salazar is the Paul McCartney of fascism.

I don't know.

I mean, that's...

That's pretty good.

Also, Europe was a vibe, huh?

Yeah, yeah.

They were not doing well right after that World War.

They were certainly going for it.

You know, I got it.

You got a handful.

They took big swings.

Yeah.

You know, like, well, we're in our big swing period today, and we didn't even have a World War I over it, right?

So who are we to judge?

We can judge a little.

I mean, to be fair,

we've had a few.

We've had a couple, yeah.

We've taken our swings.

This isn't our first set.

So as we'll discuss, you know, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not you should call Salazar a fascist.

He certainly uses a lot of fascism tools.

Like there's aspects of it that he utilized.

And he has good relationships with all of the fascist powers during his days.

He's going to intervene to help Franco win his civil war in Spain.

But ideologically, he's not someone who's like super on board, especially with all the weird Hitler stuff.

Like he's not a cult of personality guy.

He's not a big ideology of fascism guy.

Like he thinks that stuff's kind of weird.

And he's above all, like an economics professor and a Catholic conservative who's just kind of like, I'm the only guy smart enough to run Portugal and I'll I'll torture as many people as I have to do in order to keep the economy running, right?

Like he is a balance the budget no matter who has to die kind of motherfucker.

I guess it really depends on like if fascism is decided on at the start of the journey

or just summed up at the end of the journey, right?

Like I'm not doing a fascism and then at the end you're like,

kind of seems like you might have been.

Yeah, with him it would be, I think it looks at the start a lot like a fascism.

And then at the end, it's like, well, you were just kind of a garden variety dictator, like maybe, but you never did any of the weird cult of personality shit.

Like, you were never

like that kind of stuff was sort of absent.

But we'll, we'll talk about it.

At the end, we could kind of say, where do we want to, where do we want to land on this motherfucker?

On the fash scale.

Yeah, on the fash scale.

But either way, he sucked, right?

We're not debating that part of it.

So Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was born on April 28th, 1889, in a small house in the village of Vimiro.

His parents were kind of odd ducks for their era.

His father, Antonio, married his mom in 1881 when they were 40 and 35.

And this is a lot older than people tend to, it's older than, it's like pretty old for getting married now.

Like back in the 1880s, the average lifespan in Portugal for men is 46.5 years, right?

Now, that doesn't mean people died at 47, but it means that, you know, infant mortality was so high that those averages are low a lot.

And this is still pretty weird for you to wait this long to get married.

And it's also, it's hard to conceive, right?

When you're, when both parties are over 35 years old.

It's relatively difficult, especially with 1880s, you know, obstetrics technology.

The other thing that makes his mom and dad weird is that they can read, which is not normal for Portuguese peasants.

Or modern Americans, if you're not.

Modern Americans, yes.

Thanks to ChatGPT.

Yeah, right.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Can we just say that the least surprising piece of news just dropped and that people that use chat GPT are morons, right?

Right, right.

That it breaks their brains, that it's like atrophying you because you're not thinking about how to put words together.

Bad for you.

That story this week about the guy that proposed to his AI girlfriend and then cried when she said yes.

And then it breaks out that he's got like his

human partner.

I don't think they're married, but they have a kid together.

They have a child.

I just,

oh, fuck.

So that's not Salazar's parents.

Yeah, we're cooked.

Yeah.

All the other Portuguese peasants are using 1880s chat GPT, which I guess is just being too busy to learn how to read.

But his mom and dad know how to read.

Now, everyone else in their village, most of the people living in this village who are, because these are, again, like all peasants, even though it's the 1880s.

Outside of a couple of maybe aspects of modernity that have crept in, most of the people in these villages are living lives that, like, if you go back three or four hundred years,

there's more in common than there is different, right?

Which we can't say about nobody, even like the poorest rural people in the U.S.

today, do not live lives that are similar to rural Americans in the 1700s in a lot of ways.

But that is kind of the case in Portugal in this period, a lot more so than it's going to be in any later period.

His village does have kind of one thing going for it, which is that Vimiro, when he is kind of like a little kid, is chosen to be the site of a railway station, right?

Which is going to ensure that while a lot of small rural towns kind of die out as modernity comes to Portugal, Vimiro is going to continue to be like relevant, you know, because there's, there's this connection to the rest of the world.

It's going to become the tombstone.

Yeah, it's a tombstone, a Portugal type situation.

Everyone's going to be dressed like Undertakers with big black mustaches and stuff.

It's going to be that's right.

That's right.

And yeah, Doc Holiday is going to show up with fucking

consumption.

It's going to be incredible.

Val Kilmer.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

So good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially if you've seen that movie Val.

He filmed as he was dying.

Incredible stuff.

Great movie.

So,

his mom is kind of the Val Kilmer of Vimiro.

And like Val Kilmer, she's a small business owner.

I don't actually know if that's true of Val, but it's true of his mom.

She was rolling.

Yeah,

she's doing great.

She's going to become an entrepreneur.

She's going to open like a tavern in this town with like some rooms to rent.

And that's going to help the family rise up to what's effectively the Portuguese middle class.

While Antonio Salazar is like a kid to an adolescent, right?

His family is going from, we're kind of near the bottom rung to we're actually doing pretty well because there's this railway station picked for our town and my mom knows how to capitalize on it, right?

His mom gets the money to start this business because his dad also does okay for himself.

He's an estate manager, which means you've got these rich families who have like generational wealth because their ancestors 400 years ago plundered the new world

and they have big estates, but they don't, they're not going to take care.

They don't want to garden.

They don't want to farm.

They don't want to do anything with them.

So they hire hire a guy like Antonio, our Antonio's dad,

to take care of the properties while they're away being rich, hanging out in their other houses in Lisbon or whatever, you know?

Hell yeah, man.

Capitalist feudalism.

Right, right.

That's kind of what's going on here.

And that's the world his parents inhabit.

And that's the world Antonio kind of comes up in.

Portugal is not a healthy country as Salazar is growing up, right?

If you remember the early period of colonialism, right after Columbus, you know, quote unquote discovers the new world, the two powers that are first, like really expanding around the world and taking a lot of colonies and taking advantage of, you know, Europe beginning this colonialization process are Spain and Portugal.

And Portugal is for a couple of hundred years a major world power.

They have colonies all over the planet because they're just very early successful in the age of sale and they rapidly take a lot of colonies, which is, you know, Portugal is not a big country.

So in very short order, their colonial possessions are dozens of times the size of the actual country itself.

And this does pretty well for them for a while.

But like Spain, they kind of also burn out quickly, right?

Like as the British Empire is starting to really pick up steam as king shit, Portugal is kind of the sick man of colonialism, or at least Portugal and Spain are both kind of the sick men of colonialism.

It's actually really funny because one of the three dates that I told my students they would have to know was 1492.

And I'm like, it's not for who you think.

Yeah.

Like it's not Columbus, but it is his bosses because one of the reasons that they really flopped super hard was they basically were like, we're going to make a Christo state, basically, like an entirely, and they kicked out all the, all the Jews and the Muslims.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And so that basically means they kicked out their most educated and wealthy members of their society and were just like, we'll do it normally.

Yeah.

We'll figure it out.

You kicked out the banks and the universities, basically.

And so they just started crumbling.

They started building and then they were just, they couldn't keep going.

So these fell apart.

It's very funny.

Yeah.

And there's a lot to say about like taking all of these, you know, suddenly flooding their market with precious metals too, and like what that does with the value of these things.

Like there's a lot that goes on, but Portugal is like not a wildly dissimilar story.

And that kind of by the time the 17, 1800s are creeping around, things are starting to like look kind of shitty, even though they still have massive overseas possessions, which they're going to maintain until the middle, late middle of last century.

So the fact that they've got all these colonial territories, Portugal, is going to come in handy when Napoleon invades in 1807 and the royal family of Portugal has to flee to Brazil, which declares its independence not long after this fact.

So that's no longer going to be a case for Portugal, you know, kind of after this period.

As is often the case with royal families, Portugal's royal family, not good at ruling.

The Catholic Church, which held tremendous power, coveted its position as the sole provider of social services and the cultural power that that brought, very similar to Spain.

You get a lot of similar things with like basically carlists like people who believe in the catholic church as the sole like legitimate sort of you know authority um you know pushing against these kind of republican ideals in the 1800s 1900s as modernity comes in i mean it's it is funny how much plague beat the shit out of the church oh yeah after people came out they're like these guys weren't doing shit yeah like oh wow turns out they were wrong about a lot turns out the the the pope in in france

surrounded himself in a wall of fire.

Mm-hmm.

That doesn't seem good.

We do that.

I've done that before.

It's not the worst thing to do, but yeah.

I mean, it's cool.

It's cool.

It looks great.

It is cool.

Yeah.

Also, check out the movie, the new Paul Verhoeven movie,

Bernadota or something like that.

It's about this nun in Italy during the plague years.

Fucking wild shit.

She becomes a robot cop.

Yeah, exactly.

It is cool.

Classic Paul Verhoven movie.

So as a result, very little changes in Portugal, and almost nothing gets better until the king is ousted during a civil war in the 1830s.

This is not going to last super long, but for a period of time, there's this like liberal kind of party backed by Great Britain, and they win, and they see some property

from the church and from the nobility.

But they also don't do much to fix the larger issues the country has.

And most Portuguese people still can't read.

The country is bent over under the weight of these titanic debts that have been accrued from generations of overspending.

And the country kind of continues to hobble along.

Monarchists are able to get like a weak king, you know, in there, and they quarrel with Republicans who are trying to support like a new electoral system that also isn't very sturdy.

And it's into this kind of fucked up and failing nation that Salazar grows up, right?

So this is also what's happening is he's watching both this increasingly like sclerotic and ineffective like royal family fail to hold power.

And he's also watching these gasps of republicanism that aren't really fixing things either.

And we've never seen this in the background of a dictator.

Yeah, this never happened.

We've never seen them grow up in a failing place and learn

how to play certain

chords in order to get what they want.

Yeah.

No, never before.

But yeah, nothing's working for him, except for he sees his parents like succeeding, right?

Because they're unusually educated and ambitious and they want more for their kids.

His older sister, Marta, becomes a school teacher.

His parents seem to have been the normal amount of strict for their era, but a biographer Tom Gallagher notes that as the youngest child and only boy, Antonio Salazar was babied and, quote, received none of the punishments that his mother occasionally meted out, right?

So he's kind of by the time he comes along, his sisters have sort of gotten all of the spankings, right?

Not an uncommon youngest kid story where, yeah, my parents were way bigger dicks when I was a kid.

What happened?

What you need, though, is you need that gap.

You need a a bigger gap between the siblings, the top sibling and the youngest, the oldest and the youngest.

Because if it's too close, you just get the beatings anyway.

Yeah, you just get the beatings.

But if it's long enough, your parents are tired.

Their arms don't work as well, especially when they're as old as Antonio.

My brother and I were two years apart.

So he would beat me, and then I would get something.

There you go.

There you go.

But then, like, I know people.

My little brother's 15 years younger than me.

It's like, well, that kid's not getting hit.

Yeah, you're not going to hit your 15 years.

Then you're just beating a child, right?

But we're all perfect.

Yeah, as opposed to kids beating each other the way God intended.

So he's the favorite of the family, not just of his parents, but of his sisters too.

His mom's going to become obsessed with setting him up for success.

For his part, Antonio never seems to have sought the limelight.

He is a quiet kid.

Gallagher, his biographer, posits that he was kind of overwhelmed by his mother's personality, but also kind of in awe of her capabilities because she's just this very competent competent woman.

She's, you know, raising her kids.

She's helping to farm, you know, because they have to grow food for their own survival.

And she's a small business owner, right?

And is kind of single-handedly raising the family's position in society.

While he's not helping her at the family business or helping in the fields, young Antonio spends his time alone with his dog in the woods.

He wouldn't have had a lot of free time by our standards, and much of his learning had to be self-directed, right?

Because the Portuguese education system is not good.

His parents kind of help him learn to read, and then he's on his own for a lot of his early education outside of that.

By the time he's 10, his mother had convinced his father that he's not getting enough attention or challenge in what education he is receiving.

So he is enrolled in a seminary in the north of the country, right?

And this is the normal story.

If you grow up in a very Catholic place in this time and you're a really smart kid, but your family's poor, basically your only option is we'll enroll you in seminary and they will teach you stuff on the expectation that you'll become a priest, right?

Which is like half the time they were like, psych.

Yeah, I'm not doing that.

No, thank you.

I'm just kidding.

And then, and then there's like nine monks left that they're like, I guess I'll write all the books then.

Yeah, I guess I'll be the one who keeps remembering how to read for this town.

Time to illuminate some more fucking manuscripts, I guess.

Great.

I'm not tired of that at all.

So he is, as you state, it's one of those things where he's technically training to be a priest, but you don't have to.

you're not like locked in and salazar he's a good little catholic boy and he initially seems to have adopted this as an ambition for himself where he's like well yeah i guess being a priest is the thing i'm going to do um that's not going to last super long and he's going to stop wanting to be a priest probably we don't know this perfectly but the likeliest reason why he stops wanting to be a priest is the normal reason young boys stop wanting to become priests started j and o he starts fucking right he starts you know?

And he's like, oh, you know what?

Being a priest might suck ass, actually.

Heaven sounds cool, but is this sort of busting a nut?

Isn't it

cool as getting laid?

Absolutely not.

I can give myself heaven whenever I want.

Right, right, right.

As long as I'm able to, yeah.

We have heaven at home.

Yeah, we've got heaven at home, or at least in my next door neighbor's house.

So he meets a girl.

He actually meets several girls.

His first is, you know, she's 16, so is he.

And she'll remain Maria de Figurido.

She'll remain a friend and a political advisor for the rest of their lives, right?

This kind of first girl that he hits it off with is going to be, she'll be influential politically in Portugal while he's the ruler because she'll send him letters about like how this is how this is working, this is how this is working, and he'll kind of continue to trust her.

The second girl he falls for is Felismina de Ulivera, and she's two years older than him, right?

The two meet at a railway station and according to some accounts, begin a love affair that is what primarily derails Salazar's ambitions of priesthood.

There's some dispute in this.

Tom Gallagher argues that Salazar kind of keeps true to his vows for a while and then gives up the seminary later for another reason.

But there are other arguments that I find really credible that it's probably a liaison with this girl, even though it takes a while that makes young Antonio realize, oh, fuck, I'm not going to take a vow of celibacy.

Peter Booker, who's co-founder of the Algarve History Association, writes an article about Salazar's alleged romantic history for Portugal resident, and he noted, Salazar was studying to be a priest at the time and attended the seminary, but that fact did not prevent him from beginning a love affair.

She was a friend of Marta, one of Salazar's sisters, and during the young holidays, Felismina would stay at the Salazar family home.

They exchanged innumerable letters.

Felismina began to have problems of conscience regarding her relationship with Salazar.

She was a devout Catholic and did not want him to renounce the priesthood because of her.

Little did she know that not only was Salazar already thinking about abandoning his career, but he was also about to dump her.

And this seems kind of plausible, right?

It's not just this girl, but it's in general, he's starting to get laid.

And he's like, I don't need to stay with this lady, but also the priesthood's clearly not for me because I kind of like fooling around, right?

Okay.

So we are sort of avoiding the 500-pound gorilla in the room, which is that those vows have never mattered among Catholic clergy.

If you want to know how many popes had illegitimate children, oh man, Google.

Nearly all of them.

Oh, you can get up to Pope and still be fucking?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So the norm is for popes to get laid, which is part of the problem, right?

One of many.

But yeah,

that's kind of what's happening with him.

But he's also like.

It's very important to note that this is the church and this is the steeple.

Right.

Open it up and fuck all the people.

Right.

That's kind of where Salazar's got to take it.

Except for like, I don't even need the church.

I don't need the steeple.

I'm just going to fuck.

I'm just going to be fucking all the people.

I'm just going to fucking become an economist.

So he's a bookish Catholic boy, and he like, yeah, he starts figuring out like, this is not the future for me.

So he leaves the seminary in 1908.

This is a big year for Portugal.

It's the same year King Carlos and the Crown Prince Louis-Philippe are assassinated while they drive through Lisbon in an open coach.

So this is like a daring, it's called the Lisbon Regicide.

And it's a very famous like.

moment in the early 20th century.

There's a lot going on behind this assassination.

It gets blamed by some people.

Tom Gallagher, who's kind of a more conservative guy, this biographer whose book I read on Salazar, blames it on anarchists.

Much as I'd like to take credit or anarchists take credit for killing a king, that's not really what's happening here.

These guys are like radical Republicans, right?

I don't mean in the modern term.

I mean like people who support a Republican.

Concept of a Republican.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I think we, I mean, I know we conflate them, but the difference between Republicans and Democrats and then liberal and conservative, like it all depends on labeling.

Right.

And these guys are like radical, like we want to be able to vote and fuck having a royal family, right?

That's the kind of radicals they are, as opposed to like being radical in favor of the abolition of the state, which is more of an anarchist thing.

That's not really what's going on with these guys.

There's a lot else that's happening behind this regicide, right?

That kind of helps inspire it.

The Portuguese government has just conducted negotiations with Great Britain over the extent of Portugal's African territory.

And Portugal makes makes a lot of compromises in how much of Africa they're going to continue to hold.

And this is seen as disastrous by many nationalists.

And there's a lot of Republican nationalists who are like, well, the crown just gave up a lot of our overseas empire.

Another thing that's going on in the background is that, as is often the case with Portugal, they're terrified that Spain is going to invade, right?

Because if you look at a map, Spain is a lot of Iberia.

and Portugal is pretty small.

So how did they avoid unification in that in the late 1400s?

It's wild.

Because Granada, Navarre, Castile, and Aragon, I mean, Aragon and Castile were obviously the marriage, but then they sucked in Navarre and Granada.

Just go get Portugal, man.

There's a period of time where they are occupied by Spain, right?

But there's also like reasons of natural defensiveness and just like the power of the Portuguese state in that period that Portugal.

But Portugal doesn't, you know, wind up obviously unified, but that is constantly a fear going on in the background.

And it's one of those things, it's not really a thing in modern Portuguese politics, I don't think, but it's like a huge factor in everybody's thinking right now is that like Spain is right next to us and they're much bigger.

And they were gobbling shit up.

And they're gobbling shit up.

And there's this broader fear that like Portugal, we used to be great and we're being sidelined by greater powers because we've kind of slid into senescence, right?

We're old and we're tired and we don't have the juice we used to have and we're going to get eaten up entirely if we're not careful, right?

Like that's a major political factor in everything that's going on here.

Anyway, you know what else is a major political factor?

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And we're back.

So,

the Republican movement is starting to pick up steam in Portugal, kind of in the period when the king was assassinated.

Yeah, because of the railways, there's steam now.

The king gets kind of politically active in politics, which makes things even more chaotic and inefficient because it's like it's not great.

He's not good at it.

The king's not really good at much.

And the king who gets assassinated has appointed this guy to act as his minister, who's widely seen as like a dictatorial figure.

And eventually two Republicans with rifles decide, like, enough of this bullshit.

We're going to take matters into our own hands.

And yeah, these guys are kind of radical Republicans.

And one of them has some history of anarchist sympathy.

He's part of an anarcho-syndicalist organization in his youth.

But they're militant, like Republican activists with rifles.

One of them's in the army.

And yeah,

they shoot and kill the king and his heir.

And the Lisbon Regicide becomes kind of a seminal moment for right-wing politics in Portugal.

Sal Lazar, who's a young man at this point, he's leaving the seminary this year, he's livid when he finds out what's happened.

Now, he is starting to get political at this point.

He's been elected the president of his student body association.

And in the spring of 1908, he publishes a column attacking his fellow Catholics because they become so politically separated from the shocking violence.

in the capital that like we Catholics need to get more political in order to save our country from you know, this sort of radical republican sentiment that's going to destroy, like, force us into anarchy.

Salazar's thinking here is probably influenced by the writing of a far-right propagandist from France named Charles Morris, who wrote for France's most popular proto-fascist newspaper, Action Francais.

Salazar's argument is that democracy cannot maintain order and separation of church and state is a calamity for stability and public order, right?

Which is very much like taken from Morris's, the stuff that Morris is writing in France at the time.

I would like to also add that Action Francais is my favorite rapper.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, probably politically different than the original newspaper.

These are the guys like Action Francais and Morris are going to have a big role in like the far-right French coup attempt that's going to happen kind of right before World War II.

Like they're kind of a major inciting factor to it.

And these are the guys that Salazar.

So that's part, one of the reasons why people are like, is this guy fascist?

It's like he's definitely very influenced by some proto-fascist thinkers.

Could you imagine de Gaulle of trying to run France?

Oh, my God.

Could you imagine?

I mean, yeah, in the post-war period, sure, it doesn't go great.

Could you imagine de Gaulle?

We like that.

It's a history pun.

Yeah, it's a good history pun.

It's also just his last name.

I'm sorry.

Hey, I'm going to go.

I'm sorry about that, guys.

I'm going to take off.

It's okay.

We can forgive one French pun,

but that's that's all.

No more.

So Salazar, he starts making some stabs at politics, right?

You know, kind of in this post-regicide period, but he's not fully committed to it.

Part of this is that the wind is kind of blowing against the right wing.

You know, after that king gets assassinated, the sort of left is looking like they've got the wind behind their sails.

So he's like, I don't want to.

It's a pretty big move.

It's a pretty big move, shooting the king and his son.

Quite literally a coup.

Yeah.

Try it in your own monarchy what a triumph yeah you know um a rifle a couple of small pieces of lead gets you to the game yeah gets you right in really changes the ground um

so he's like i don't feel like this is a safe time to be like a far-right catholic activist so i'm just gonna take a teaching job and like lecture talking about the economy uh he graduates from his secondary education in 1910.

he opts to leave the church um and you know one of the practical reasons reasons behind this is that the church is kind of losing power.

So Salazar winds up attending the prestigious University of Coimbra as a law student in October of 1910, thanks to the financial support of a family that his dad works for.

This is like the family his dad is, you know, taking care of their grounds.

And Salazar tutors, like the mistress of this wealthy family, like he tutors her kids in exchange for financial support.

So he teaches her kids to be less stupid

and they pay for him to go to to this fancy college, this university, which is going to really change his life.

It's going to give him an opportunity to become someone in politics.

And this change in his life, where he starts going to the school and his options start to open up, accompanies another dramatic change in Portuguese government because the Republicans revolt and they force the monarchy entirely out of the country, right?

They'd killed the king and his heir.

But, you know, you've still got kind of a weak monarchy in there.

And then there's a revolt a little while later.

And now Portugal is just a straight up republic for a little while right salazar bides his time as the republic tries to consolidate his power and he works towards an advanced degree he gets into academic tutoring as a side business and it proves to be very lucrative like he's he's teaching a lot of kids he's making good money and he's investing it and he proves to be very good investing money right he's just one of these guys that understands how to turn a dollar into a couple of dollars and then a couple of more dollars and and so on and so forth i'm always weirdly jealous of those people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like

they're just really good at making money.

Yeah.

And also I'm just like, yeah, but that must be like a, if you care about money, that must be miserable.

Yeah.

I mean, and he's not like a super happy person, it doesn't seem.

Like he doesn't have outside of like constantly sleeping around

and investing his money and writing economic treatises.

That's pretty much his whole life at this point.

And being really angry that the Catholic Church isn't more powerful.

Those are his hobbies, right?

I mean, some of those hobbies are cool.

Yeah, one of those hobbies is cool.

One of those hobbies is just cool, man.

Yeah.

The other hobbies, kind of lame.

Yeah, then dudes rock, and then sometimes dudes do not rock.

Yeah, and he's more on the dudes not rocking side of things.

But he does accept for a while that, like, I can't fight democracy right now and the monarchy is too weak, so it's not really worth me fighting for.

So he kind of pivots and he starts, you know, coming up with his own theories about how to reform things.

His attitude is that that the Republic is going to fail.

And so he's trying to figure out what system should replace it.

And he does a lot of reading on the encyclicals of Pope Leo VIII, who had encouraged Catholic organization and power under a democratic system, right?

Which had Leo VIII had been like, hey, democracy, probably here to stay.

We shouldn't fight to have like kings under the Catholic Church anymore.

We should organize instead to gain legislative power and democratic systems for Catholicism.

That was like a millennium afterwards, right?

Like Leo VIII, that, if I recall, he's from like before

1000, isn't he?

There's an anti-pope named Pope Leo VIII who was around the 1000s.

But this Pope Leo VIII that we're talking about was head of the Catholic Church from February 1878 until 1903.

Oh, oh, so it's like recently.

It's complicated.

There's another earlier Leo VIII.

You're right.

Who's around 9, yeah, he's an anti-pope from 963 to 965 whose election is debated.

Wasn't he the one that was like, they were all excommunicating each other?

Yeah, yeah, he was during the anti-pope period, but there's another Leo VIII who's the head of the, and who's an official pope from like 1878 to 1903, right?

Man.

Yeah.

Popes, right?

Why would you take that name?

Yeah.

I'm not familiar enough with papistry to give you a whole like why he decided to take that kind of cursed name, but he's he's the pope who like writes an encyclical being like, we catholics should just find a way to kind of make democracy work for catholicism right to we should organize and find ways to gain power in democracies you know that's kind of like one of the things he writes and this has a really big impact on salazar um but no good good point this is not that the pope from the 960s um okay that guy was debatably not the real pope i didn't mean to derail the pod but i'm just like wait i know it's always hard with the anti-popes right there's a lot of names where you're like wait a second yeah yeah no no and i'm sure you guys have talked about it before but just this idea that there was like at one point, like just a bunch of popes excommunicating people.

And we could get there again.

That's my dream for Catholicism.

Yeah.

Fuck it.

Are you not happy with the current pope?

Go to Avignon and have a new pope made, you know?

I mean, I do like a Chicago.

I'm not really fighting.

Yeah.

It's nice to have a Chicago Pope, but I think we could get a Boston Pope and really just have a Battle of the Accents, you know?

I got to be 100% honest.

We don't have a great track record.

We probably shouldn't have a Boston Pope.

Cardinals have done some stuff.

I mean, to be fair, most, if not all, cardinals have done some stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very few, very few clean cardinals out there.

You know what?

I like the idea of a Boston Pope, though, because that's the first Pope that would be willing to fight you in a toll booth.

Yeah.

Like that.

Let's just give it to Ben Affleck.

See if he could take it.

So he can do a bad accent of his own town.

Yeah.

Pope Affleck I.

Let's let it happen.

Yeah.

Pope Benedict, kid.

Yeah.

So Salazar, who's

starting to accept, like, okay, maybe we should find a way to organize under democracy.

He joins a school association while he's in college, the Center for Christian Democracy, which when the Republicans had come to power, they'd like banned for a couple of years, but ultimately allowed to reform in 1912.

And it was for this group that Salazar gives his first public speech, where he describes himself as a Christian democratic soldier.

Two years later, he leads a delegation to Lisbon, which protests an attempt to turn a local church building into a museum.

His academic career flourishes around this time.

He receives awards from his liberal and conservative teachers alike because his economic papers are, in their eyes, like so brilliant and well thought out.

And he opens a consulting firm that gives out financial and legal advice to like companies and whatnot that are, you know, trying to figure out how to get by in this very chaotic time in which the Portuguese economy is not doing well.

And he's good enough at this, per Tom Gallagher, quote, he now had enough money to augment his wardrobe with elegant clothes.

He attended soirees and receptions, and his circle of friends widened.

Catholics and conservatives predominated, but not all of them were from such backgrounds.

So he's making money.

He's starting to enter high society.

He's becoming a known man, and he's becoming a known, like, kind of firebrand right-wing intellectual type, right?

He's a little bit of like a Jordan Peterson figure, if Jordan Peterson had been good at something.

And he continues to work as a tutor, which seems to still have been his kind of bread and butter.

He would later claim, tutoring did two things for me.

It kept me in the university and it kept me out of trouble.

But this is not exactly true, right?

He's like, now he's still fucking.

He's still fucking, right?

And he's kind of noteworthy.

And as a figure in this period, most of his earliest friends are women and girls, including 16-year-old Julia Perestrello, who's the daughter of his godmother and the wealthy benefactors of his family, right?

So this is the daughter of the family that's like paying for him to go to college that like his dad is employed by.

He falls.

Quick reminder, how old is this man again?

Very good point.

She is 16 and he is 23 years old.

So that's a bit of an age gap.

It is.

And that's kind of an uncomfortable period.

Bad for the era.

It's not like it wouldn't have been if he had been from the same social strata as she.

It wouldn't have been noticed in the era, right?

Yeah, it's kind of one of those things where like you're looking back and you're like, you know know what?

Yeah.

That's age appropriate for the time.

It would, it wouldn't have been wild.

Like people wouldn't, if he'd been rich, if he'd been rich, it wouldn't have been weird.

But because he's from a poor background, her parents are like, absolutely not.

And we look at the age gap and go like, oh yeah, that's inappropriate.

But they're just being like, well, but his parents aren't rich.

So this is an inappropriate match, right?

That's the only real issue they have.

He's like, don't worry.

Yeah.

I'll take care of that.

It's sort of like the Dr.

Pepper guy named Dr.

Pepper after the the dad that said he'd never amount to anything.

That's that.

Is that the story of Dr.

Pepper?

It might be apocryphal, but I'm pretty sure it's Dr.

Pepper was the guy that wouldn't allow a dude to marry.

The creator wanted to marry the guy's daughter and he said no.

That sounds accurate.

As the for the official soda of Texas, that that sounds like the kind of con man origin story I like.

I don't like that the official soda of Texas is my favorite soda.

Oh, it is, unfortunately.

But

let's turn to a more comfortable subject than Texas, this 23-year-old hitting on a teenager.

Much better.

He decides to hit on her in the most appropriate manner for the time, which is he writes an article about how hot he is for this girl in a Catholic magazine.

He had contributed to this publication before, but he'd mostly written like serious articles about Catholicism in democracy and like scholarly studies about like how what the Catholic Church, what role it should have in a modern society.

And so he kind of changes up on his normal publication by writing a column that's just titled She.

And in it, he describes it as like, it's, it's kind of written as a fictional piece.

And he's writing as sort of like an anonymous author who's in love with a girl who lives in a wealthy manner, but is financially out of his league.

And it's written in such a way that the subject of his affections is anonymized.

And he can argue like, this is not a literally true article.

It's like I'm writing, you know,

plagiarizing Lady in the Tramp.

But it's very clear that, like, oh, this is Salazar writing about a teenager that he's hot for, right?

That's too, that's from a family that's too rich for him.

And I can't imagine what must have been going through his head to make him write this thing, let alone like his editor is like, well, you mostly write about the Pope, but yeah, this, this article about how you've got a crush on a 13-year-old girl sounds great, man.

Let's.

I thought she was 16.

Wait,

or 16.

Sorry, sorry.

16-year-old girl.

He's like, yeah, why not?

Let's pause.

Let's publish this fucker.

Yeah.

I did need to clarify specifically because I previously had gone on record and be it saying that wasn't that bad for the time.

No, no, no.

This is, it's 16 and 23.

Okay.

So

I can't get into the head of this editor who's like.

yeah this sounds like a good article for you to publish antonio and i can't get into antonio who is like yeah this this will clearly work for me right and unfortunately for him fortunately probably for that girl his

like her mom, who's again the patron of Salazar's family, she catches on to this.

Like she reads this magazine because she is from a rich conservative Catholic family.

And she sees, oh, this tutor we've hired to tutor our teenage daughter is writing an article about how he's got a crush on a teenage girl who lives in a manor and who's much richer than him.

I wonder if it's Antonio.

We should probably start watching them, right?

Like we should keep an eye on these two.

This does not sound good.

That seems pretty chill.

Yeah.

Because he's going to be like, hey,

should we be paying attention to this?

Yeah, we should probably keep an eye on what's happening with this kid and our daughter.

If a Facebook dad saw this, he'd be like, touch my family and there'll be two hits, me hitting you and you hitting the ground.

But they don't have Facebook.

So their only option is to keep an eye on her homework.

So they're like paying attention to the homework he's giving her.

And Antonio gives Julia some suspicious homework, right?

He tells her to write an essay on love.

And so this, this really gets their guard up.

And they're like, okay, yeah, he's definitely hitting on our daughter.

And then her mom finds, like, they start monitoring Julia's mail and they find a letter that Salazar sends Julia, which is, to be blunt, very inappropriate, right?

And the Perestrellas, again, their primary problem is that he's poor and she's rich.

And so after they catch this letter, they just make sure he's not going to be tutoring her anymore and he's never going to get any unobserved access to their daughter again, right?

So they lock this down because she's supposed to marry a rich guy, right?

That's that's their reasoning.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely.

They all heard the song.

Yeah.

Now, one of Salazar's mentors in the church, who's like one of these fathers who's kind of taking this kid under his wing, finds out about this.

I think Julia's mom comes to him and is like, you need to talk to this boy.

And so he sits down with Salazar and they have like a literal come to Jesus moment where he's basically like, hey, you're one of the best minds that the Catholic conservative movement has.

What the fuck are you doing pining over a teenager in the goddamn newspaper?

Are you out of your mind?

Right.

Like, this is not smart behavior.

And this warning, Salazar never stops socializing with women and girls, right?

He will continue to do that for most of the rest of his life.

But he is going to get a lot more careful about it.

And he's going to learn how to like hide this in a much better way than writing newspaper articles about his crushes.

So, he takes that warning.

And you know what else our listeners should take is the advice of these products and services.

They should take note of what we're about to say, yeah, yeah, take note and uh, you know, give some companies your credit card information.

It never works out badly, no breaches, yeah, it's never happened,

And we're back.

Ah,

so Salazar is kind of establishing himself as an intellectual.

He's learning how to flirt, sometimes even with adults.

And while this is going on,

if he had a nickname, can we call him the sexual intellectual?

Yeah, yeah, you could call him that.

Because I'm going to for the rest of the show.

You sure shouldn't.

But that's, yeah, that's what he's doing, right?

And the new Republican government of Portugal is kind of shitting the bed as he is coming up and becoming more prominent and learning how to kind of keep a lid on some of his proclivities.

And part of why the Republican government shits the bed in this period is that World War I happens and Portugal does not have a dog in that fight, right?

They shouldn't have.

There is no reason.

You just look at the map.

There's no fucking reason for Portugal to get involved in World War Goddamn 1.

Like, we're going to go swimming.

Yeah, you go swimming.

You live in Portugal.

Enjoy the beach.

What is wrong with you?

Don't send soldiers to die on the Western Front.

You don't want some teenager to get wrapped up in barbed wire waiting to kill the Kaiser.

Get out of here.

Come on.

What are you doing?

Got a couple of frisbees, some scatch balls, you know?

There's a lot of smaller European countries like this that are like, you have no, you have no reason to get involved.

And they do.

And it goes badly for everyone who's like, well, maybe if we get involved in World War I, we can help tip things and we can get some shit in the peace negotiations after.

And the Republican government, they largely get involved in World War I because they've got all these African colonies and they're worried that if there's like a negotiated peace, England might give away some of Portugal's African possessions to the Kaiser in exchange for like a better peace deal.

And so we don't really want to risk that.

So we'll send some men off to die in the Western Front and fighting in Africa.

And they wind up losing like 10,000 soldiers and just pointless battles, right?

And for in World War I terms, they get off pretty light.

Like that's not a lot of guys to lose in World War I by the standards.

But it is also 10,000 people.

Right.

It's still 10,000 people who absolutely didn't need to be involved in that stupid fucking war.

And it costs a shitload of money.

And just the fact that they've gotten involved in this disastrous war and they don't get really shit in the peace, it rattles the new regime's public support.

People are like, well, fuck, this Republican government doesn't seem a whole lot better than the one that it replaced, right?

Pointless wars, wasting money on stupid bullshit.

Did we just replace one set of assholes with another set of assholes?

And salads are.

It's pretty much history.

Politics as well.

That's the world, right?

It's like, yeah, which set of assholes?

You know, maybe they suck a little less.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, I wouldn't mind an asshole that's not trying to like destroy the lives of every person in the country.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe we could get a slightly better asshole who's just corrupt and incompetent.

And if we got to throw some adrenochrome at him to keep it going, let's do it.

Yeah.

Keep the peace, you know?

Keep the peace.

And keep the adrenochrome flowing.

Salazar.

No, man, I got to try that stuff because it sounds good.

It's good.

It's great.

You got to get it from the brain of somebody who's had it really harvested, you know, before they're going to.

Oh, yeah.

You don't want like the fake

true blood adrenochrome.

No, no.

You want the really good shit.

From the source.

Directly from the source.

That's right.

That's right.

This episode brought to you by Adrienach.

Yeah, exactly.

Use a promo code.

No, I'm not going to make a Jeffrey Epstein joke here.

What I am going to say is that Antonio Salazar in this period,

when people are starting to get angry at the Republic, he becomes a very popular lecturer.

And he's also, he's working as an economics professor right now.

So he's lecturing about how fucked up the system is, how the right and the conservative Catholics need to come into power.

And he's also writing studies on like wheat reform and the role of gold in finance.

And he's repeatedly arguing Portugal's government is spending too much money, which it is.

Like he's not wrong about his fundamental economic conclusions.

And his economic work is widely applauded.

And in July of 1918, he appears on the color of Catholic Illustrated as an up-and-coming thinker.

The swimsuit edition.

Yeah, the swimsuit edition.

He's naked.

He's got one of those, you know, Italian banana hammocks.

It's tasteful.

Yeah, it's very tasteful, right?

But, you know, they just checked Portugal.

You know, he's right there on the water.

Like, it's natural.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The lighting's perfect.

So by this point, a new group of anti-government rebels is ascendant.

They're called the Integralists.

And these are members of the wealthier classes who had sought a break from the republic and returned to a more authoritarian government, if not a monarchy.

So they're like, we probably can't go all the way back to the way things used to be, but we should have a system where the rabble have less power, where like regular people have less ability to like influence the government.

And a lot of folks in Portugal, especially in like the middle class and upper middle class, are more sympathetic to these aims because in the aftermath of the war, Portugal is in chaos.

The new government is running up tremendous debts.

And even though they're on the winning side of the war, they're not spared the unrest that hits in places like Germany.

There's an open civil war in the north of the country and a monarchist coup in 1919 that gets suppressed.

And in that same year as there's a civil war and this coup, four different governments come and go in Lisbon, right?

This is like a parliamentary system where, you know, if the government can't form a coalition, it gets dissolved.

And so there's just constant turnover and chaos.

I like the idea that they attempted a coup in 1919.

It's like,

where'd you get that idea, guys?

Yeah.

Wow.

No one else was doing coups in 1919.

Creative Portugal.

Wow.

Really going for it.

Yeah.

So the same year that that's all going on, 1919, Salazar gets suspended from his job for spreading monarchist propaganda, although he argues in court that he's not political.

His only involvement in politics is voting.

And he publishes an article defending himself widely, in which he argues, I am convinced that politics alone can never solve the great problems that demand solution, and that it is a grave mistake to expect everything from their evolution or from an arbitrary departure from their normal course.

I'm sure that the solution is to be found more in each one of us than in the political color of a ministry.

So far as I can, I try to make my students men, men in the best sense of the word, and good Portuguese of the type which Portugal needs to make her great.

Right?

Now let me tell you about this girl I love.

Yeah, now let me tell you about this teenager that I got the hots for.

Yeah.

Now, the reality is that Salazar is very political, all right?

He gets his PhD after the war ends, and he is actively as a teacher trying to cultivate this like new generation of conservative activists.

He helps found the Catholic Sinner Party, and in 1921, he's one of three of their members to be elected to the parliament.

He actually only gets to go to work at the parliament for two days, and he hates it, right?

Like, because there's these all these constant debates over what to do, and he can't just like tell people, this is what you're going to do to fix the economy.

This is what we're going to do to like get things on the right course.

He gets really angry, and he's like, I don't want to do this fucking job.

Even though he gets elected to several important financial committees, but he starts whining to his mentors in the Catholic clergy and the university that he doesn't want to do this job he campaigned to get.

It's too hard.

He's stuck in the mud.

And his mentors are like, but you're in power.

You have a chance to put your theory into practice.

And they accuse him of not taking the work seriously.

I would like to add.

That this is the most relatable man we have ever covered on this show.

Right, right.

And just the terms like, yeah, it sucks to be in politics, huh?

Yeah, it's a guy that wanted a job, and then he's immediately like, I immediately regret wanting this job.

Oh my God.

You got the job you wanted.

Yeah.

And I fucking hate it.

Yeah, it's terrible.

And he gets really lucky that in October, like he only ever does like two days actually doing this job in parliament.

And in October, the conservative government and coalition collapses because left-wing militants assassinate the prime minister and a number of their other conservative political enemies.

So he's like, well, I guess I'm not going to continue trying to be in the government.

Seems dangerous right now.

I'm going to go back to being a teacher.

And all this violence, which isn't limited to the assassinations or to the left.

There's just a lot of political violence, largely in Lisbon.

And

it's happening as they're going through multiple governments every single year.

There's all this conflict.

The economy is in the shitter.

The currency is worth nothing.

The republic is obviously weak.

And people are tired of just this constant turnover of nothing working.

And as they're continuing to be exhausted, in 1922, they watch fascism come to Italy.

And they also watch this right-wing military dictatorship take over in Spain under Primo di Rivera the following year.

And they're like, well, maybe, you know, maybe it's not exactly Italian fascism.

Maybe it's not exactly what the Spanish are doing, but some sort of like authoritarian right-wing regime.

Maybe that'll fix all of our problems, right?

That's all we, yeah, that'll fix that, historically fix this problem.

Yeah, historically seems like the right idea.

Yeah, just fascism primavera or whatever the hell is that.

Primo di Rivera.

Yeah, we'll take it.

So by this point, the right is ascendant across Portugal.

Young military officers who had been radicalized during the war link up with youth organizations, a lot of which had been inspired by Morris's movement in France and the writing of guys like Salazar, right?

He's not like leading directly, but he has been the intellectual father of a lot of these kind of right-wing youth organizations.

And, you know, they are starting to gain power, even at the same time as he can barely keep himself together.

Like, he is scared by number one, it's dangerous to be a public conservative intellectual in this period.

Dangerous to be anyone who's public and political in this period, dangerous to be an intellectual in any period, right?

It's never super safe.

And he is, he's kind of crippled by panic attacks and psychosomatic illnesses, right?

Like, he can't really keep himself together, even though his side of things seems to be doing well.

He runs for office in 1925 and he does not do a great job of it, right?

He's His heart really isn't in it.

And then in May of 1926, without Salazar's help, the Republican government falls to a military coup by these like right-wing military officers.

Now, by this point, the economy is in the shitter completely, which is a big part of why the coup succeeds.

Like the old government hadn't been keeping things together and they don't have much support.

The generals who'd overthrown the Republican government know they can't just sit back and hope for things to get better, right?

They had like the military might to take over, but they don't know how to run an economy, right?

They're generals and they're Portuguese generals, so they barely know how to run a military, right?

And I'm going to quote what a win then, you know?

Yeah, it's not hard to take over from the guys without guns, right?

Or without as many.

I guess that's right, but it's just very funny that they're like, look, they're bad at pretty much everything.

Yeah, we don't know how to know

how bad

the previous guys were.

The previous ones were, yeah.

And so they're going to be like, we need someone to help us figure out how to actually fix things.

Otherwise, we're just going to get overthrown in short succession.

I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times by Alwin Whitman here.

The victorious generals asked Salazar, then reputed to be an economic wizard, to take over the Ministry of Finance.

He demanded a free hand to execute his reforms.

And this being refused, he went back to teaching.

And this is what's so interesting to me about Salazar, is he's he's not, in a lot of ways, like a guy like Hitler, like a guy like Mussolini.

He obviously, he's interested in power, or he wouldn't have gotten into politics at all or entertained the idea, but it's not his primary motivating force in life.

He actually does have a plan B and he would have been somewhat content just continuing to be an intellectual.

So like taking power, being a dictator is an option for him, but it's not his only option.

And it's not the one he's putting most of his effort and time into, right?

Up and I like the idea that he's just playing hard to get.

Yeah, he's like

buying a car.

Right.

Right.

And he's like, this is what I want.

And they're like, well, we can't do that.

He's like, well, then I'm going to walk away.

Yeah, then I'll walk away.

We can move some numbers around here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that, that's kind of what happens here, right?

Is that he shows that, like, I'm not obsessed with taking this position unless I can really get a free hand in things.

And the generals are desperate enough that, like, eventually they agree to do that.

I'm going to quit.

You learned this from all the fucking, right?

Yes.

This is

what taught him how to

win the dictatorship of Portugal.

There it is.

You show too much interest.

You say you write an essay about it.

That's not going to go great.

You've got to neg the military dictatorship in order to be appointed the dictator, right?

That's how it always works yeah i'd uh you know i i would be your dictator if you if you know wore makeup or something yeah if you wore if you dress up a little bit come on how many medals have you guys even won here are we not even shaving our country's legs anymore yeah look what's going on portugal military um yeah get some better cannons or something so uh i'm gonna quote from witman's article again here Two years later, General Antonio Oscar de Fragosa Carmona engineered his election as president of Portugal, and he promptly put Salazar in charge of the nation's purse strings.

By cutting public spending and by judicious taxation, Salazar succeeded within a year in balancing the budget for the first time since 1910.

Shortly, too, he liquidated the foreign debt and lifted the escudo, the monetary unit, to a premium on foreign exchanges.

So

that's the end of the story.

He's a great man.

He gets his free hand in managing the economy, and he's really good at it, right?

He manages to do what his predecessors could never do.

He balances the budget, and he takes the escudo had been like a laughing stock in European finance for years and he restores stability in a way that just hadn't existed for a long time.

His popularity grows and it becomes very clear to the military that Salazar is indispensable in politics, right?

Like we have the guns, but we don't know how to manage an economy.

We're certainly not any better at it than the people that we deposed.

They have the plans, but we have the power.

Right.

Yeah.

Just like, yeah, just like in The Simpsons.

In 1932, Salazar becomes the president of the Council of Ministries, which effectively puts him in charge of the country, right?

So he's kind of like, because he's so good at this, these generals, all they know how to do is, you know, control the guys with guns.

But Salazar knows how to make the economy stable, which allows him to keep the wealthy and the powerful on his side and keep the people from rioting too much.

And so he just keeps demanding more and more power.

And the military's like, I guess, yeah, you can have it, right?

I guess you can have some more.

I guess you can have some more.

He's like, oh, I can't do it.

yeah exactly and kind of bit by bit he winds up the absolute dictator of portugal and he's like starts to sideline the military and kick guys out who are threats to his power as he gains more and everyone's too scared of him because they can't keep the economy going on their own right which is such a different way from these other fascists he's not brought to power by a populist uprising he doesn't like win mass votes in an election he's not like mussolini or like hitler he keeps showing results in the economy and demanding more control.

And the military is like, well, no one else knows how to steer this thing, right?

So I guess, sure.

I found a write-up in the textbook Portuguese Studies by Paul Santos and Luciano Dela Rue, and it describes what happens next.

Within four short years, Salazar had so enhanced his prestige and developed his political power that he was nominated prime minister.

The army had no desire to govern and no plan for government anyway, so they handed power back to civilians whom they regarded as trustworthy enough to protect their honor and keep his position secure.

Therefore, while the the military had brought Salazar to power, the regime that he molded, the Estado Novo, after the return to barracks, was very largely civilian.

And the Estado Novo is proclaimed in 1933.

It means new state, right?

So Salazar, he's kind of officially in full power in 33, the same year that Hitler rises to power.

And he says, like, we've got a new state, right?

And there's a new deal almost for Portugal and her government.

That's where FDR got it.

That's where FDR took it from.

He should sue FDR.

Yeah.

Or FDR should.

Yeah.

So Salazar cribs a lot from Hitler,

which is part of why he gets

funny Hatlit.

Yeah.

But it's just sort of the aesthetics, right?

Like you can see he sees that like, okay, there's some value in some of these fascist aesthetics, but that's not how he gains power, right?

He doesn't take power the way that Hitler does.

He kind of like...

almost infects the coup that took power and then like takes over it.

He's like one of those bugs that gets inside a wasp's brain if the wasp is the Portuguese military.

He takes it like a zombie bug or whatever.

Right, right.

That's how he does it, which is very different from the other fascists.

No, it kind of seems like he's just using the Hitler stuff as like flourishes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, oh, I can dress it up a little.

This is working right now.

This is the new hotness.

Sure.

Yeah.

Shuzh it up a little bit.

Yeah.

Let's put it, sprinkle a little bit of Hitler around the edges.

Yeah.

Let's get a little Hitler in there.

Yeah, a little bit of Hitler in there for some spice.

Just a dash of Hitler.

Yeah.

And he, you know, he uses, he's going to, he has a secret police state, as we'll talk about and he's going to use force and violence and he's going to crib from the nazis very directly in several ways as to how his secret police works but he doesn't have a cult of personality like hitler does and he's actually kind of he has some respect for hitler in the early period but he's also like He's looking at all these weird esoteric aspects of Hitler's fascism, like his beliefs in race signs.

He's like, this guy is just kind of weird.

I'll also add that like not calling attention to it is a pretty good way to have a 40-year reign instead of a shoot yourself in a bunker reign.

Right, exactly.

Salazar doesn't want to be a shoot himself in the bunker guy.

No, man.

He's boiling the frog in the slow way, you know?

What's interesting about him and the smartest thing about him is he understands there's a limit to how much power you should seek.

Salazar is never going to be a, what if I tried to take all of Europe guy?

He's like, I'm content with Portugal, you know, and all of her African properties, which are much larger than Portugal, right?

But as we'll like, as we'll talk about, that's a big deal.

But he's not, he's never going to be a gamble too much to keep power sort of guy.

He's smarter than that.

He's probably the smartest of these kind of right-wing dictators in Europe in this period.

That some of those Hitler Germans are going to be learning Portuguese, if you know what I mean.

They sure are.

Salazar is a dyed-in-the-wool corporatist.

His charter for the Estado Novo, which is approved by plebiscite in 1933, which is ostensibly a public vote, but is not really a free one.

This new state is described in the plebiscite as a unitary and corporative state.

Only one party is allowed in the assembly, and the premier who's appointed by the president is unaccountable.

Salazar is the premier in the early days as well as the finance minister and over the years he's going to serve as foreign minister, minister of war, and minister of the colonies.

Kind of whenever he wants to assert direct control, he'll just have himself made the minister of that thing, right?

But he's always the dictator, right?

He's always kind of the guy where the buck stops.

And one of the first big things he cracks down on once the Estado Novo is declared the law of the land is women's rights.

Salazar writes that because women are so key to the structure of the family, they shouldn't be voting as a general rule.

Now, because he's this guy, he's got a lot of close female friends who he takes very seriously, he's not completely against women having the vote.

So he's letting, he wants rich women to be able to vote.

If you've got university education, then you can vote as a woman, which you don't necessarily need as a man, even though nobody's vote really matters all that much, right?

And his argument is that like, yeah, a few women have the rights to vote, but most women should be forced to maintain a sort of femininity that he argues is conducive to the Catholic norms of family life.

Now, this is where he's...

Yeah.

Is he 2025?

Yeah, he's modern in that way, right?

And like all of these modern guys we have who say the same shit, he doesn't follow any of these rules in his normal life.

He never marries and he never has kids.

And he maintains this carousel of powerful women as lovers and advisors.

He's willing to make exceptions for women that he personally respects, but he's not willing to live like the idolized Portuguese citizen, nor does he want to have a family of his own.

Catherine the Great energy coming off of him, huh?

Very much so, right?

Per an article on Portugal.com, financial abuse against women was institutionalized.

The law allowed husbands to prohibit wives from working outside the home.

Women were not allowed to access certain professions, diplomacy, the military, etc.

And certain professions like nursing had limited rights, such as the right to marry.

A wife needed the consent of her husband to travel to another country.

Contraceptives were only allowed for health reasons, and even so, the husband would need to give consent.

Abortion was illegal in all cases, with a prison sentence of up to eight years.

And so he cracks down on women's rights, and alongside this comes a crackdown in the right to dissent in any way that might force a change in the Estado Novo.

Salazar never tries.

This is not a totalitarian state in the same way that is attempted in like Germany.

germany but this is very likely the fact that he's not trying for complete control is not that he doesn't want it or is a better guy it's that he's smarter he knows that like you know if you grasp too tightly shit slides through your fingers right you know we we all know our star wars right we all know princess organa talking to random tarkin on the yeah star and he's like yeah there's i'm not that's not really worth investing in right there's an amount of force that is worthwhile to deploy against the people to stop things from getting too far along, but there's an amount of force that is going to like be dangerous to me and will drive up like support for any kind of like rebellious movement.

And I'm not going to play into that.

So the new constitution makes place for a new secret police force, the PVDE,

which in English stands for the State Surveillance and Defense Police.

And the PVDE is going to go under a couple of different names over the course of the Estado Novo.

We're going to call them the PVDE right now for the sake of going forward.

And to to be fair, he didn't start Portugal having a secret police.

This is always the case with these things.

This starts in the Republic.

The Republic began having a secret police force, and under the Republic, the secret police force starts maintaining a prison called the Alyubé in Lisbon.

I'm going to quote from an article in the newspaper Portugal Resident Here.

The building is close to the cathedral in the center of Lisbon and has a long history of imprisonment, firstly until 1820 for those condemned by the ecclesiastical courts, and for the next hundred years for women convicted of common crimes.

The The word Al-Yube comes from the Arabic and means either a well or cistern, and by extension, a dungeon.

So starting in 1928, the military dictatorship began building a network of informants through the PBDE and started the practice of sending them to Al-Yude to be tortured.

Salazar turns up to speed on this process, and under his new state, creative new torture methods are introduced.

Hell yeah, man.

It's called innovation.

It's called innovate.

We're going to beat people and we're going to sleep deprive them, but we're also going to introduce something new called the statue which is where a prisoner is forced to stand with his arms extended without moving for hours or even days at a time and if you wait i'm going to tell you though that's really great for your shoulders oh yeah incredible shoulder exercise because what you're doing is instead of building bulk you're actually building a more tight striated muscle it's really really good if you're like a fighter now the downside of this is you get beaten senseless by the guards if you move your arms at all which is not so good for building up good striated muscle okay it's called coaching it's called coaching roll trying to make you stronger.

I'm like, that's not to me that I'm like, yeah, that sounds like pretty standard.

Yeah, yeah.

That's that's what brings the regime down is they make too many great boxers.

Yeah.

Too many powerful, tight

quarters.

Yeah.

So the name of the game in this new state is maintaining a sense of quiet respectability and not freaking out the regular citizenry too much, right?

This is while torturing anyone who's like too much of a communist or a Republican activist.

So that you're still kind of, it's not accountability would be the wrong term, term, but Salazar is scared of being too publicly brutal.

And in fact, once the neighborhood complains about the constant screaming coming from the Alhude prison, the PVDE moves their torture operations to a more secluded environment.

So there's like a, we're not going to be better, but we will be quieter.

Because again, we don't want to, we don't want to be too over the line here.

Otherwise, that's going to like spark the kind of rebellion we don't want to deal with.

I like that it's just like a noise complaint.

Yeah, it's like a noise complaint.

You got to be quieter with the torture, guys.

Can you keep the suffering down a little bit?

Yeah, you're freaking out the neighbors, and some of them have real money, like they're taxpayers, right?

We don't want to make them uncomfortable.

So the new state has begun at this point by like the mid-30s.

And for the next four decades, Antonio Salazar will rule Portugal with an iron fist.

And we'll talk about what he does in power in part two.

But first, Jeff, we're going to talk about where the audience can find you on the internet.

Oh, God.

That's where I live.

That's That's where you live.

That's where we all live.

I do a lot of stuff and it's really fun and it's all very different.

So you're welcome to check out any or all of these things.

First and foremost, I have a show called Jeff Has Cool Friends where I interview just people that I think are in my life that I find very interesting.

Sometimes they are famous celebrities and sometimes they're people I went to high school with, but I just.

It's really fun.

It's a really fun way to sort of learn more about people and stuff like that.

I do that show.

I also do a show called Nerd on that same network as well, the Jeff Has Cool Friends sort of brand that's with my friend Dre Alvarez.

And I also do a monthly show called The Monthly Flow with Andrea Gazetta.

You can get those all early uncensored bonus stuff at patreon.com slash Jeff May.

You can get

nerd and Jeff Hascool Friends for free everywhere else later.

Hell yeah.

I do Tom and Jeff Watch Batman with our friend Tom Ryman on Gamefully Unemployed.

I do lots of great shows with Adam Todd Brown on the You Don't Even Like podcast network.

I also open cards on camera and I send them to people on the at Jeff has cool cards network.

And you can actually get cards in the mail, like a care package from me over on the Patreon.

So lots of really cool stuff.

And you can find me at Hey There JeffRow2

on Instagram because they booted my last one because they accused me of selling sex, which I did not do.

No.

I do not have the confidence to do that.

Yeah, unlike Antonio Salazar.

Oh, he didn't have to sell it.

No, no, he was, he was, he was giving that shit away.

And if you're in, uh, if you're in Burbank or the Southern California area, I do a great comedy show the second Friday of every month at Blast from the Past on Magnolia, and it is called Mint on Card.

It's a comedy in a toy store.

Comedy in a toy store.

Well, everybody, check out Jeff, find him on the old internet, and uh, find us on Thursday, which is like two days from now, uh, talking about the rest of Antonio Salazar's life.

All right, that's it.

Bye.

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