Part Two: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also 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 of
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. I got a
guy I've never heard of that's that's clearly labeled as

(00:23):
part two. Like, no one who would do that?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Are tuning in? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Exactly exactly who would do like? No one?

Speaker 3 (00:32):
No, I liked it.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
It's okay, it's okay. The water bottle, so our guest today,
Jeff may rhymed, but I didn't mean for it to look.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Man, I have a very rhymable name.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
You do you do?

Speaker 2 (00:49):
It's useful.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
It's like it was useful in this exactly one instance.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's a month like people love. Some teachers saw my
name and they never stopped.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
No, no, they Yeah, that you can vamp on that
for solid fifteen minutes of what's supposed to be math class.
Was great, Jeff may If you were Jeff April, we
would not have had you on the show. Oh I
get it, fat Yeah, absolutely not. Jeff Jeff June. Maybe
that that actually has a kind of nice ring to it,

(01:21):
you know, yeah, like June on the show. Yeah, Jeff July. No,
it's still illiterative. But I don't like it. I don't
know why.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
I almost stated a girl named Mazie.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
She went by mazy May.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Oh my god, and then she quickly pumped.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, no, yeah, you can't get in. You can't get
too serious with that one.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I was like, but come on, I was like, this
is it's just not gonna work.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
It's not gonna work. There's one one reason for that.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
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
ordnance violations in allow to allow yeah, a little loud,
a little loud. They had to quiet it down a

(02:17):
little bit.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Can you just bring it a little Yeah on the torture.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Guys, we love the torture prison. We're yimbi's when it
comes to torture prisons. But they have to abide by
like the neighborhood noise ordinances.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, yeah, we have quiet hours.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah we've got quiet hours. No, no torturing after nine pm.
Come on, how hard is that?

Speaker 2 (02:35):
You know this?

Speaker 1 (02:36):
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

(02:56):
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's there's these deep troughs 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

(03:19):
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,

(03:40):
Salasar isn't coming out. He launches an austerity program, a
very radical, cut to the bone austerity program. And this
is not entirely 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

(04:03):
between him and you know, Hitler and whatnot, this is
not a populist movement, right.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Woodrow Wilson blew it right.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
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 one.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
To eighty on that guy?

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Oh boy, yes.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Like we're not going to talk to anybody. But also
what if we had a justice.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Leagbe but we should, 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.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
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 IT 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

(05:09):
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 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.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Right. Rude, it's a little rude.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
It's kind of a dick.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
It's a rudy Huxtable, we like to say.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
And 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.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
I say the same thing though.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, you're always saying that, and it really pisses off
our Portuguese listeners.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
People know this about me and the Portuguese.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah, yeah, those wind bags quote from one of our
other bastards. The truth is that I am profoundly anti parliamentarian.
I hate the speeches, the verbosity, and the flowery, 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,

(06:18):
I'm not giving anybody anything, but at least I'm not
like grand standing about some bullshit while failing to deliver, right, Like,
I'm an asshole and I'm not handing you anything nice,
but I'm also keeping the economy from crashing, right Like.
That's his argument for why he should stay in power,
and it works surprisingly well. Part of why is that

(06:40):
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 likes, stands in
a reviewing stand and gives some sort of weird little
salute he invented. He'd avoids any mass public displays, right,
which leads to as arrant belief. Internationally, people will say that, oh, Portugal,

(07:03):
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 capitalist conservatives, to be like, oh, Portugal has
really figured it out. They've got all the benefits of
a Hitler without having Hitler. You know what, maybe we

(07:24):
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 twentieth centuries authoritarians exercised more direct control
over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar.

(07:44):
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
it that way. Salazar is kind of the opposite of
a lot of these guys, and that he's all about

(08:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
Right. What a waste?

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, what a waste. You could add so much more
fun with it. Man, Oh my god. You know Hitler
had his flair. Where's your Salazar flair?

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Come on an awesome man?

Speaker 1 (08:37):
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 dictator, 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

(08:59):
says about helping return Portugal to greatness, He's not really
interested in returning his nation to some false prelapsarian 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.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
Also, that's the best song by Toto.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
That is the best song by Toto. Hold the line
and Salazar would have agreed with you. And I think, well, no. No. Seven.
He passes in seventy four, so he couldn't have heard total.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
I think he would have liked Africa to be one
hundred pou liked it, Unfortunately history 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.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
I know, I know. That's his big problem. The 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.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, they're like, come on, man, the revolution isn't always
on time.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
No no, no again, no no no, That's why we
brought you in, Jeff.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's why I get brought in for all the hottest,
hottest takes on Toto current musical hits, because I.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Only know how 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 this moment in
European history.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
The pitfalls, if you will.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
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'd been invaded and occupied in
the past. You know, he's he's super worried, like every
Portuguese leader is that Spain is going to come for

(10:48):
Portugal at something. Just looking out the blinds, Yeah, look
at out the blinds, being like a Spain out there. Fuck,
they always they're doing out there. So you've got this
civil war that get 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,

(11:08):
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 in 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

(11:31):
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,

(11:51):
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, per right up in the
New York Times quote, he created a youth movement to
long Hitlarian 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

(12:14):
in putting down a popular outbreak in Lisbon just prior
to World War Two. 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 these civilian combat organizations, these paramilitaries that

(12:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
I thought you meant fighting the youth.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
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,

(13:08):
during this period pre World War Two, 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 is the difference between his fascist allies
and his own new state regime.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Now, obviously our dictatorship is similar to the fascist dictatorship
and its strengthening of authority in the war, in which
it declares on certain democratic principles, and its nationalist character
and 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.

(13:45):
For one thing, he is a Catholic, and he makes
an alliance with the Catholic Church, right where we will
allow the Catholic Church will bring back a lot of
these powers that had been stripped from it to provide
for like the social safety net, and will 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

(14:07):
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,

(14:29):
and so this is why he's very consciously like we were,
will 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,
very he's very smart.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's not hard to read the writing on the Wall
and Y being like, yeah, we should take over like everything. Yeah,
I mean it should just go Ova and take all
with all.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
The Soviet yah, oh the kickings and door. Yeah. Sealizar's
like that seems like a lot of work. Take it
over the Soviet Union. For one thing. There's like thirty
Portuguese people.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Like the idea that he's just so like chill with
his little pocket.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
He's he's content with what he has.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
It's just like it's a project for him. He's just man, yeah,
you got to get Portugal movement. Man, we gotta we gotta.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, we've got to fix this up and we don't
need He's also and 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

(15:45):
to lead Hitler and Mussolini to ruin.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
And also he's not doing a racism or an anti semitism,
is he.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
I mean, he's anti Semitic and like by ours, but
it's not like a governing principle, right, And he's.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Nineteen thirty anti Semitic, which is just.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
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

(16:21):
out this racial group in order to fix Portugal.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
That's never a part of his politics, you know. And
so that's a big difference between like the Nazis right.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Now.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
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's biographer describes them as him as having a wary
association with Franco's regime. And while Franco restores the monarchy
in Spain, Salasar never gives serious consideration towards return to

(16:52):
the monarchy, right, because that's too much of a 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 nationalists ideologues kept in being by his

(17:15):
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

(17:38):
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 that Franco never does this. He refuses, he doesn't

(18:00):
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

(18:22):
and from like outright allying with them. There's a lot
of debate as to how much credit how much of
this was Franco just kind of recognizing this is a
bigger risk than I want to tank. 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

(18:45):
Great Britain, who had been Portugal's traditional ally and so
Salazar never sees even though he gets he gets lumped
in as a fascist in this period, he never sees
politics in simple terms of fascist versus anti fascist right,
or even authoritarian verse democratic. Instead, he acts based on
a much simpler logical rubric, which is that Portugal small

(19:07):
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 over committed.
He's not gonna do. He would never back the fascists militarily,
because like, what am I gonna do send soldiers to
fucking Russia. I'm gonna have Portuguese truths fighting and fucking Russia.

(19:28):
What the hell is that gonna do?

Speaker 3 (19:30):
Right?

Speaker 2 (19:30):
I would, but I'm built different.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
You would, yeah, but you would go 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.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, yeah, seems bad. Nah, no, thank you, you.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Know, Like I mean, Hitler was a soldier that that
went to jail for trying.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
To overthrow the government.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Sure, Hitler sucks. Not cool, not my favorite guy. Yeah,
not a cool dude.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
And also but really sucks at like knowing what to.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Do, you know, yeah, yeah, when to get when to
you know, when to roll the dice?

Speaker 2 (20:24):
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?

Speaker 1 (20:37):
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, and Germany had been the Kaiser's regime
that had you know, gotten every into World War two,
and in Portugal it had been the democracy, the republic
that had made that choice, right, And so he's just
got he's a little bit you know, he's gunned because

(21:00):
he's looking at the immediate past and he's like, nah,
fuck that shit, I'm just that could never be me,
bro could never be me.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Not me.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, 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 empires, like
diplomats because of this long standing alliance. Early in the war,

(21:29):
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

(21:50):
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 Salas are like eh,
And he gets but he gets increasingly like pump the
breaks home. This ages him by like ten or fifteen years.
Most people will agree he's visibly older by the time
the war, he gots the Obama treatment, he gets the

(22:10):
he goes gray. Churchill's people are like, he started snapping
at us and yelling at us. Whenever we talk 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.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
A pretty stressful era for the World War two. Switzerland
just looking over being like they got something going on.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
How strong are our borders?

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Right?

Speaker 1 (22:34):
But look, yeah, so his role in this is substantial
enough and 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 nineteen forty, is a written
letter of thanks directly from Winston Churchill. The second they're like,
you know what, this, this written letter of thanks isn't enough.

(22:55):
Let's lean on Oxford and let's have Oxford give Salazar
an honorary degree. Move yeah, yeah, no, that's that's smart. Yeah,
make him an honorary.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Letter is kind of like who gives a shit? Really?

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Yeah, it gives it a thanks? Yeah, thank you, thank you? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Thanks drunk? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
So basically the government leans on Oxford, and Oxford is like,
they send a team to Combra University where he had
been a professor, and we're like, yeah, let's uh, let's
give the dictator a degree.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
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 raking member of the nobility and they
send a much higher ranking member of the nobility to
be the ambassador.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah that's always fun, right, Yeah, Like.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Expand it is a gift, but it is also a
smart political strategy as well. Yeah, made him feel like
somebody doing a certain thing where there's a potential that
you could turn them into an ally. You aren't want
to butter him up, so you do want a higher ranking.
It's sort of like how like the ambassador in Mexico
was historically like a pretty cushy but high ranking yeah

(24:08):
job because it was like there are next door neighbors
and that's really cool.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
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,
which which a lot of people don't know that. Daniel,
our audio editor, is the Duke of Windsor.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
But I was going to say, we have history, and
so I actually did not appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah, well, yeah you do. You were in the IRA
for a period of time in the nineties. Anyway, Well,
we'll talk about that later. You know who else was
in the IRA in the nineteen nineties, probably Hello Fresh? Yeah, hello,
almost certainly. I mean, actually that's way too cool for HelloFresh. No, now,
Hello Thatcher is what it was called. Yeah, Hello Thatcher.
We've brought a bomb. See Hello Fresh. We can be

(24:58):
mean to you, or we can be nigh 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, we're back and
we're talking about Hello Fresh, proud sponsors of the IRA. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
I said the same thing when I found that out.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
So far, yeah, yeah, yeah, it surprises a lot of people.
Speaking of surprising. Salas are 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.

(25:45):
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 and 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 untimido, like a weakling, right like he's

(26:07):
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 they he appoints so many kids in their thirties

(26:27):
over experienced officers that like long standing members of the
military start to get angry and kind of like feeling frustrated.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
What does this doage?

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yeah, yeah, what is the 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.

(26:57):
In World War Two, 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 its 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.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Huh, the boy knew what was up.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
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 profit here, and because he's never
fully aligned, he's able to make really good money from everyone.
For the New York Times quote, the money came from
Britain in the United States for the use of the

(27:40):
Azora's 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 in
forty they wait until forty three to hand those islands
over to the Allies as naval and air bases, when
it's pretty clear you know where things are going. But
they're profiteering from everyone. Now, all of this does come

(28:03):
at a personal cost for Salazar. Negotiating a middle way
at the center of the largest war in humanistry is
not simple, and this does age him. By nineteen forty five,
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 forty five, he's like, shit.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Oh did he not turn great? Because he thought he
saw a ghost. Yeah, he thought he saw he thought
he thought a Scooby Doo character. Yeah, yeah, he thinks
he's like fucked right that like oh America and the
Soviets one, 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 nineteen forty

(28:42):
five he has an election and it's not a 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 where it's like

(29:02):
the dictator had an election, Yeah, it was an election,
but he let people run. Yeah, did he kill the
people that ran against him?

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Not immediately, He's going to lock some of them up
and tortures 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

(29:31):
political police. There's this concentration camp Tarafhal 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 Duirte writes, Portuguese fascism was quickly trying

(29:54):
to make its political conversion. It was trying to eliminate
and make us forget the more conspicuous aspects that I
didn't fight it with the dying regimes that had been
its allies.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
And I do like the idea like whoa, whoa, whoa
fascist me. It's just look this guy. We have field
days in Jamas, you know him. Yeah, in Portugal camps
it's like a camp camp.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Not a camp camp Jesus camp camp camp. No, it's
a camp, you know, you know, like the camp right exactly.
It's nice. So these changes are not entirely cosmetic, right this.
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

(30:39):
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 one hundred
and eighty days. Right, so you can only keep people
for six months without saying why you're doing it.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
That's standing on my head.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
And this is not Yeah, you would have to in
a Portuguese torture prison.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
I'll tell you what, I'd come out with, the tight end,
the strongest.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Shoulder, shoulder nuts especially, Like, God, you're spending way longer
than six months there.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
All that is just like me, honestly, that's a training camp. Yeah,
that's what kind of camp it is. It's training camp.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
It's gonna last a little longer than that, because the
only result of this policy is that every 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.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
He does make it, right, Yeah, it's it's pretty dictatory stuff.
He does make one real concession, although it's brief, which
is that he allows the Movemento Unidad Democratica, 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.

(31:49):
Within a few years, the MOVEMENTO starts to pick up
steam and it becomes clear that there's enough leftist sentiment
to present a threat to his regime. So in nineteen
forty eight he outlaws the organization, calls it a communist front.
Now by forty eight he's kind of again, he's got
these good instincts where he pretends to liberalize in the

(32:09):
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 forty eight, 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

(32:33):
sentiment that is increasingly entrenched all over the quote unquote
democratic world. Portugal gets admitted to NATO and Sala's our
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

(32:54):
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 his as many anti communists as
we can to form this block against the USSR. And
so by forty eight, 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

(33:15):
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 Pierreira, 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

(33:39):
after the war. Right, This guy who had been who
was directly cribbing notes from the Gestapo and from the
SD in nineteen fifty six, there's a huge wave of
repression that gets launched because by the mid fifties, 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 absolute cracking down on

(34:01):
the left and on any kind of like pro democratic organization,
and nobody in nobody in America, whoever is going to
fuck with us. Right, he passes a law in fifty
six 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
nineteen thirty five that led to what's called the Shuthoft system,

(34:24):
where detention time is unlimited for enemies of the state.
So again, this ally of the Americans who've just beaten
the Nazis is using Nazi policies as the rubric for
creating this sort of system in which to crack down
on descent, and the US is not only cool with it.
In nineteen fifty seven, we send the CIA to Portugal
to help train his secret police, so they go straight

(34:44):
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,

(35:07):
such as Camp Pierri, Virginia, also known as the Farm,
where they received instructions and methods and practices of interrogation
from CIA experts.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
So great now, I mean, I like, 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.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
American fascist German fascists all take any fascist idea about
how to torture leftists.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yeah, he's like, can we make them stronger? Though?

Speaker 1 (35:36):
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, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(35:56):
they invented van Halen for this. So this creates an
extraordinary turning point in the situation, right, the fact that
there's like that 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

(36:18):
who are like angry that their family members are being
tortured so hideously, and they start protesting enough that the
government has to take note of it. Again, it's not
a complete totalitarian system. He can't totally ignore stuff like this.
And seventy two Portuguese lawyers from Lisbon, Porto and other
cities put out a comprehensive report on irregularities concerning the

(36:40):
treatment of prisoners and deaths in the state prisons. Duarte writes,
quote Joaquim the most To Olivera, a barber and democrat
from Foff age forty eight, and Menuel to Silva Junior,
a worker and anti fascist from Viana de Castello age
sixty nine, for instance, had died inside a prison in
Porto in nineteen fifty seven, officially they had committed suicide.
And it starts to leak out at this period is

(37:03):
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 cigaretto, 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

(37:26):
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 nineteen fifty six 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 tenniscuto's for he was threatened
with the dungeons if he did not pay. So there's

(37:48):
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 some of which we're teaching him.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
And there's this also a handy thing where the CIA
is like, well, we'll take notes on what he's doing, right,
We'll figure out what works so that when we start
pushing to you know, overthrow governments in Latin America, we
can give them data on what works and sells ours prisons. Right,
He's like a laboratory for like anti left wing crackdowns
and operating secret police states. And that's kind of the

(38:35):
role that he's playing internationally in this period of time.
So that's cool that it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
I love our role in this.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah, look at us.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
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,

(39:09):
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

(39:31):
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 nine to eleven. 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, as

(39:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
I mean cool. 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.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
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. Just about
nine minutes at least from my little learn han. Yeah.
So Salazar regime obviously is no less brutal after World
War Two than it had been before. But the man

(40:33):
seemed different and he was treated different internationally. He's now
an elder statesman and he's he's fitted 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 Two and he kept Portugal from falling to communism, right,
So like he's the he's the socially acceptable dictator you
know in a lot of the West right now. Personally,

(40:56):
as I said, he looks physically weaker after the war.
He's kind of burnt out. And you do see, especially
as the fifties we're into the sixties, 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,

(41:18):
he's going to make his first really disastrously bad decisions
starting in the early sixties, and we're going to talk
about that. But you know who else made some bad
decisions in the sixties, like everyone, that's right, that's right,
but particularly the sponsors of this podcast. Oh wow, and

(41:44):
we're back. So if you've ever looked at a mapp
a Europe, you know that Portugal not a big country.
It's a little rectangle cut out of the Iberia, a
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.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Sallis Spain is the thumb. It's the thumbnail.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yea, it's the thumbnail. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
So we are intellectuals on this.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Good for them, I guess, yeah, not going.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
To be great for them in this period.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
No, And to be fair, not good for the Earth.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
No.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
No. But if their goal was to be a small
little sliver on the planet and just start taking shit over, yeah,
I mean mission accomplished temporarily.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, I mean they're they're holding onto it for a
long period of time, right.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Believe it, achieve it. You know what I'm saying. Something
you can take away from this episode. You can be
a small, little dumbass country and still get it done.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
Yeah, at least for a while up until the early seventies.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yeah. Now, let's look at this has instagram reel energy
where it's like I have two kids and I still
work out every day.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Yeah yeah, their instagram reeling colonialism, right yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
And on a map, their situation looks pretty impressive in
like the late fifties early sixties, because they've held onto
Portugal in this period owns modern day Angola and modern
day Mozambique, and Mozambic alone is like nine times the
size of Portugal. Right, it's not a much bigger, not
a small country. They also control Guinea Bassau, Sautome, Capo

(43:35):
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 Cyitrance comes out of it.
I've heard it referred to as like Russia's Mexico a
lot like it's like a party town in a lot
of ways. It's a major like tourist destination. 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

(43:58):
or third or so of the todieth century. That's Portuguese
territory in the middle of fucking India.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Club Portugal.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
Yeah, it's like Club Portugal. And in order to maintain
all these colonial possessions, Portugal has to keep one hundred
thousand 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 Two had started to
be like, hey, a lot of anti colonial movements are
succeeding across the world, Like Britain's given up India. Why

(44:28):
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 sixties, the cost of
repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously. Portugal
in the start of the sixties has the heaviest defense
burden of any European nation. They are spending forty percent

(44:50):
of their annual budget to maintain control of these colonial possessions.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, I mean that's a lot of distance.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
There's a lot of distance. It's not cheap to hold
a lot of boats.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
But like boats are expensive.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Boats cost money. An army costs money, a secret police
force costs money.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
They should looked over to Spain be like, hey, how
that armada thing work out? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Did that keep you while? Yeah? Really good until it
was very bad.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, it was really good. And then it became pardon
the sailing reference on albatross around our next.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, a little bit of an albatruss. Yeah. So this
is and again this is particularly ludicrous. That is the
sixty 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

(45:41):
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 money holding on to it,
Like why does this make sense? Right?

Speaker 2 (45:53):
That's the concern. It's like there's resources there, aren't you
supposed to be like, yeah, during the resources. It's not
like your whole thing.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
It seems like this is nothing but negatives to us.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Although to be fair, I guess it is salt really
a thing you're fighting for in the nineteen hundreds, I.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Feel like there's plenty of salt. We got way too
much salt. Some people say waging you can't wage a
war for salt while exists? No, no, exactly right, like they.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Get it real cheap.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Yeah, we've got so much salt now, we don't need
any of this.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
We should never have waiged those wars. We've got too
much salt.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
Yeah, it's 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 trying,
he's spending so much money to hold onto these possessions
and not really making back what Portugal is putting into it.
The irrationalism of this stance is key to understanding it,

(46:47):
because Salas are 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 countant 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

(47:09):
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 two. Portugal small
and that small size is of vulnerability, and he feels
some protective effect as long as they have this massive
overseas empire, that maybe that protects us from our small

(47:33):
size of our main country. But even that feeling that
this is keeping us safe is a delusion, right there's
also like a.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Big wave of anti colonial sentiment in the latter half
of the twenty 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.

Speaker 1 (47:55):
But yeah, but we'll give up some of it, right, And.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
This is ok, you can be India again.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
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 two
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 crypto right. Right,

(48:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Right. Normally is really good at seeing a scam.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
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 in the
periods before by fantasies. Right. The British hold on to
what they hold on to as long as they do
because they've they've got this need to believe they've still
they haven't given up the empire entirely, right, we still

(48:57):
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 Bobakar 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

(49:20):
speaking countries, and so we ultimately exercise power. And this
is a delusion for France to 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.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
Let a skin color, they'll be weird about it.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
In the late twentieth century, Portugal has to find a
way to like justify why they're holding onto 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 onto is.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
An old strategy, Catton, Let's see, it's.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
See how well it 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 Frere,
and Salazar's regime buys hook line and syncer into this
racial pseudoscientific theory that Frere comes up with called lusotropicalism,
and this argues that's brazilient, that's Brazilian. Yes, they argue.

(50:27):
Lucid Tropicalism 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 and 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

(50:49):
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 them and
had kids with them, right, Like, we're cool with 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 of these other Europeans are.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Right, somebody should have given them an American history text book.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Right, Glad, they might be slightly less racist than other people, Like,
they're probably a little less racist, maybe the Hitler.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
Yeah, they're less racist than Hitler. Not a high bar, right.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Yeah, I know, but yeah, sure, we've brought him up.
It would be a shame to just forget him.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
You know, I'll say they clear that bar.

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Right.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
I am going to quote per an article on lusotropicalism
for Genocide Watch by Nat Hill. Quote. Lusotropicalism became the
defining ideology of Antonio de Olivera 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

(52:06):
or autonomy, calling them the overseas provinces instead of colonies.
Mlcar Cabral, the founder and leader of the PAIGC in
Portuguese Guinea, spoke about how the regime used lusotropicalism in
their colonial dogma. A whole mythology was assemboled, and as
with other myths, especially those concerning the subjection and exploitation
of peoples, there was no lack of men of science,

(52:28):
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. So instead of these are people were ruling,
these people are really lucky because we know how to
actually take care of them, and that makes us fine.

(52:49):
We're different, We're better than every one.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
We're not like other boys, we're not like.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
The other colonial powers. Right, so now the reality is
that there's nothing different about Portuguese colonialism. It is, I mean,
it's it's a swing, it's a good branding, right, yeah,
But Portuguese colonialism is like all colonialism, based on mass
resource extraction and force slabor.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
Human trafficking had been the core of Portugal's colonial ambitions
since the fourteen hundreds, when the first West African people
were captured, taken to Portugal and sold into slavery in
Lagos Giovine Effect 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

(53:33):
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 often there's this
often reported claim that Portugal was like the first European
country to ban slavery in seventeen sixty one, and this

(53:55):
is a lie. Right, that year Portugal banned the importation
of slaves into one city. But they continue to be
the primary global transporter of the transatlantic slave trade until
eighteen fifty, and that Global Voices article has a graph
will put up in video form that makes it clear
how much transatlantic slave trading is being done by Portugal. Right, Like,

(54:16):
Portugal is the light green in this document and every
period from fifteen oh one up to eighteen fifty, they
are by far the majority of the transatlantic slave trafficking.
Right from eighteen oh one to eighteen fifty, the Netherlands
traffics about five hundred and sixty eight thousand people, and

(54:37):
the UK and France traffic smaller numbers than that, and
Portugal is responsible for almost two and a half million people.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Practical, don't do that.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Yeah, bad, bad, bad sprain with the water bottle. Now,
the transatlantic slave trade obviously ends kind of in the
middle of the of the eighteen hundreds, but that doesn't
stop Portugal from utilizing forced labor. Right, they change it,
you know, they alter it. You're not you're no longer
trafficking people in the same way, but you are still
forcing people to work for you, and you're just dressing

(55:07):
it up as like well, these people were arrested for
this purpose. Right in nineteen twenty nine, 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 we saying no, no, no,

(55:31):
we're lusotropical lists, right, we're the ones who aren't racist.
But also indigenous peoples in Africa are not allowed to
have constitutional rights, you know.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
And also we did a lot of slave stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
We did a lot of slave stuff, and we do
not feel bad about it.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
We borrowed the Thirteenth Amendment.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Yeah. Now they make some mild concessions to changing international
opinion during Salazar's term, but these are again minimal. In
nineteen fifty three, a law for governing Portuguese colonies INDs
the use of the term colonial empire stoppait. We're not
going to call ourselves an empire in the fifties, but
we're going to keep using forced labor that will continue
to be legal. And this new law notes that the

(56:08):
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

(56:30):
owe money for taxes, then we can foresh the 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

(56:51):
the financial drain for supporting the empire grew 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

(57:13):
so with. He also pushes aggressive tariffs that make it
painful to import or trade anything from countries other than Portugal.
Alan smith Wright's 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

(57:35):
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 sealas are placed great importance on the establishment
and maintenance of this system, right that, Like, 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

(57:57):
and we don't make a lot right now.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
Yeah, they make a delicious seafood dish.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
And 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 then their mother countries will take over, right, which
is increasing the overall burden on Portugal and the overall

(58:25):
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 this is
going on. Evincent the colonies don't make the news and

(58:45):
Sellazzar's policies make sure that the country never realizes a
lot of massive material gain from all of these possessions.
These same policies that are meant to ensure her dominance
in Mozambique and Angola, like make it just not worth
it for the regular peoples. So they don't really see
why are we doing this? A lot of shit comes
to a hair.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
They're like, hey, we're not doing great, but.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
This isn't helping us at all. Why are we doing this?

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Yeah, you won't even let us legalize heroin yet.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah, come on man, Yeah, that's going to wait a
couple of decades. So in nineteen sixty one, 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

(59:33):
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 terrorists,
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

(59:54):
exterior that tries to disturb the lives of white and
black people in the peaceful land of Angola. They're outside agitators,
right man.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
It's like there's some sort of playbook that gives me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
It's like it's always the same fucking playbook. And that
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 lusotropicalist regime are discarded at
this point, as this article by Julia Gario for the
journal Violence against Women's summarizes the massacres of white settlers

(01:00:27):
and their workers in northern Angola in nineteen sixty one.
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
The white they're reading the dogs.

Speaker 1 (01:00:49):
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 ambag to the United Nations use
the images to denounce the savagery of terrorists who cross
the northern border of Angola to behead, rape and mutilate
our women. These images, where a white woman's body symbolizes

(01:01:10):
white innocence threatened by African savagery function to construct a
retaliatory narrative of Portuguese wartime victimhood. As a call to arms,
embedded and incendiary words. Their circulation was intended to prevent
any empathy with anti colonial movements and hence legitimize any
form of violence employed against them. Tail as old as time,
they we we know, yeah, we've seen it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
You know what's happening. We've we've seen it now.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Right, Yeah, it continues to happen. It's not that you
never change the playbook, because it works pretty.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Well for a while. People are real fucking dumb. Yeah people,
you've met the personation and what a bunch of fucking dances.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
It's never 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 increased the
poritarian 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, is kind

(01:02:12):
of like look your 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 Stanggolan's becomes
a popular tactic of the military for the next decade.
As the Portuguese colonial war wears on, African women are

(01:02:32):
systematically raped by Portuguese occupying soldiers. Obviously, this doesn't stop
people from being angry at Portugal. The fire only spreads
and it goes and moves out from Angola. As Portuguese
weakness is made manifest, they lose more and more of
Salazar's prize possessions. Goa, which had been Portuguese property for
four hundred years, is taken by a newly independent India

(01:02:54):
Intocember of nineteen sixty one. Yeah, now we're not going
to get credit. Well, I mean we're at 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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Yeah, we're gonna do that, man, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
No, no, thank you, You're you're all the way at Lisbon. Man,
you don't know how surrounded, how big India is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
I've seen comin any.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
Guys here, what are you talking about? And 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 lived the eternal Portugal.
So that's not how things are gonna work out. But
for a while, at least Salas our secret police and

(01:03:50):
this repression regime he's built sweep into action in Lisbon. Right,
we can at least pretend things are good in Lisbon,
and you 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 Redmont, and
Redmont was an AP reporter station in Rodman, an AP
reporter station in Lisbon from sixty five to sixty seven,

(01:04:12):
and he covers the Portuguese Colonial War extensively, as well
as this rising youth movement against the war. In nineteen
sixty six, and in sixty six, more drafted Portuguese soldiers
die in their colonial possessions than Americans die in Vietnam. Right,
that's the scale of problem this is for Portugal. That year,
he publishes several articles about the disastrous conduct of the

(01:04:34):
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

(01:04:57):
in Lisbon, before I found refuge at the US 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 the government designated minders to every

(01:05:19):
local newspaper who excited any reference to student unrest or
guerrilla warfare 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 foreign There's always foreign newspapers available at

(01:05:40):
the market and 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 cracked down in her article Quote. On April
twenty first, nineteen sixty five, Maria Mattos was arrested for

(01:06:02):
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 homed to typical Portuguese Catholic song in
honor of the Virgin Mary, entitled on the thirteenth of May.

(01:06:24):
The intention is clear to humiliate and taunt the victim,
taking advantage of their religious connotations of the song to
Mocker for being a communist and an atheist. In nineteen
seventy three, another prisoner, Pedro Baptista, suffered the statue torture
for a week and heard sounds of protest songs, serenades,
and photos outside the prison. At first, he thought they
were an action of solidarity because of his situation, but

(01:06:45):
he later concluded that they were an assemblage of pre
recorded sounds. So there shoulders were shredded, jacked. But also
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, like the revolution is gaining steam,
and that that's a play, right, like that there's not

(01:07:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
It's not cool that they did that, but that's a
good move.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
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 sixties 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,
it's losing war in order to maintain this white supremacist state.

(01:07:38):
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

(01:08:00):
from impacting Salazar. In nineteen sixty eight, 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 takeover and they stop married.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
I believe you've never seen the movie Dave.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
Yeah, is that what Dave's about?

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
You got to get a Portuguese Sigourney Weaver Hm in there,
and then you got to just find another guy that
looks just like him.

Speaker 1 (01:08:32):
That's actually what they do. So this is very fun.
He comes out of his coma after a month and
these guys who've been running things while he's been the
coma are like, he's too old. Let's just lie. So
they 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

(01:08:54):
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 it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
It's like this sad end of a movie that takes
place in like Elizabethan, England or something.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
Yeah, it's like like like a crazy guy in a
Napoleon hat, Yeah, moving pieces across a map zambik.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
We're still holding on to all of that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
Really, well, that's like a really funny thing to have
happen in the age where like t is around.

Speaker 1 (01:09:35):
It's like a reverse weekend at Bernies where he's still
alive technically, but yeah, so he continues to believe he's
in charge until his death on July twenty seventh of
nineteen seventy. His successors try to hold things together, but
the calamitous Colonial Wars had brit acadre of leftist military
officers who are really unhappy with how the government's working,

(01:09:56):
and in April of nineteen seventy four, 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, So.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
I'd also like to add that this is a man
that had two days of mourning for Hitler.

Speaker 1 (01:10:18):
Yeah yeah, this is this is the guy who's yeah,
like really bummed about that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
And you know, but people says part of why democracy
is kind of able to like reform relatively easily and
more successfully than in 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

(01:10:45):
a matter of like letting them have actual power again. Yeah,
but it's also like not like he was overthrown really,
like no, no, I know the Carnation Revolution's going to
be happening. Yes, that happened in seventy four, and yeah,
that is like an overthrowing. But it's like not, but
there's not like fighting.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
Right. But if you're like, oh, can you believe he
out played himself, it's like, I don't know, man, he
just went into a coma.

Speaker 1 (01:11:07):
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 you kind of get against him is he's
aware the colonial empire is collapsing, right, you know, he
he's not. He's not unaware of the fact that this

(01:11:28):
isn't working as well as he wants it to. But
he never really sees that it's it's fallen out, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
Yeah, He's like, you guys can't live without me? Yeah,
like we can and we will. Yeah, they'll do just fine.
But unfortunately, yeah, a bum makes for the balanced budget.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Sala's art. Kind of
a dicky, kind of a dick, not a nice man.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
I want to go on a limb and say, this
guy maybe a bit of a no.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
I have a lot of stuff, folks. I do really
cool stuff. My name is Jeff May and google Jeff
May podcast if you want, but over at patreon dot
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 excess on
sensit episode the whole the Patreon benefits, right. I also

(01:12:44):
do a show called The Monthly Flow with and Drake Gazetta.
I also do Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Gamefully
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 Jeff
Has Cool Cards where I open trading cards on camera

(01:13:04):
and we're 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 that blasts
the past on Magnolia in Burbank, California. So come check
that out. And I'm on the socials.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
Check him out. Hey, they're Jeff 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 to it, and we'll keep
telling you about guys who sucked. Sometimes in Portugal, sometimes

(01:13:44):
in other places.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
A lady that sucks.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
It's occasionally a lady. Yeah, we get ladies on this
show every now and.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
Then, sucky lady every once in a while, A couple
of them, a couple of them, a bathory showing up everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
Women out out there, you know, if you want to
be on behind the Bastards take over our country and
kill hundreds of thousands of people. You know, create your
own torture police.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
You know that women have been strong, They're stronger than ever.
That's right, you know, initiative ladies, you gotta dictate.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
Yeah, just murders, sell, get people to inject bleach into
their children. You know you can do it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
I've the podcasts over no, always with you, but No.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator