Salazar Portugal Quotes

O Embaixador Campbell costumava dizer que os portugueses são um povo estranho, para quem um permanente estado de frustração é uma espécie de segunda natureza.

Comme d'usage, le Dictateur se trompe.

Ao longo de 400 anos, de D. João III a Oliveira Salazar, Portugal criou uma forma mental e uma visão do mundo que se alimentam exclusivamente da negativização do pensamento oposto, da doutrina contrária, da teoria diferente, nulificando igualmente os seus autores – conceito combatido, autor preso, exilado ou morto, livro queimado ou proibido. O pensador portador da diferença era encarado como inimigo a abater ou a esmagar e o povo – eterno rústico aldeão, alimentado pelas malhas de crendice e da superstição – como massa amorfa ignorante a iluminar e converter. A história da cultura portuguesa moderna e contemporânea solidificou-se, ao longo de cerca de 400 anos por via de uma série de sucessivas negatividades que não têm par no movimento cultural dos restantes países europeus, porventura com excepção da Espanha.

what came to be known as the Carnation Revolution, the soldiers who swarmed into the streets of Lisbon, Portugal, placed flowers in their gun barrels to reassure the population of their peaceful intentions. And the officers who overthrew President Antonio Salazar on April 25, 1974, proved true to their word. Having ended close to half a century of repressive rule, they held elections the next year that brought to Portugal the democracy that it still enjoys today. But the impact went much further. After the Carnation Revolution, democracy bloomed in key Mediterranean countries held back by dictatorships from much of the social and economic progress of the rest of postwar Western Europe. Three months after the Lisbon uprising, the junta of colonels that was running Greece fell.

Os verdadeiros pensadores, os que pensam, transpõem, sem ninguém dar por isso - nem eles próprios - todas as possíveis limitações. A Censura da Inquisição não impediu, por exemplo, em Portugal e em Espanha, o aparecimento de eternas obras-primas, respeitadas até nos seus atrevimentos. Nunca a protecção aos artistas foi tão longe - protecção aos mais audaciosos, aos mais irreverentes - como na Roma papal. E ainda hoje é aos Estados autoritários que a Arte mais deve porque são os mais construtivos, porque procuram febrilmente deixar na nossa época alguma coisa de durável, de eterno. Além de que a ordem foi sempre o verdadeiro clima de beleza.

Em Portugal, porém, esses agrupamentos formaram-se à volta de pessoas, de interesses mesquinhos, de apetites e para satisfazer esses interesses e apetites. Ora é essa mentalidade partidária que tem de acabar, se queremos entrar num verdadeiro período de renovação. A terapêutica da Nação doente, retalhada, exige-nos uma imobilização, que pode ser definitiva ou demorada, de toda a acção política fragmentária.

One man I unfortunately did not get to mention in my book, but I feel also deserves to be noted here, is Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France. In June 1940, when Germany took France, people were being attacked and cities were falling under Nazi control, and people were desperate to flee, he defied strict orders to not authorize visas. As the Portuguese consulate filled with desperate people, Mendes went with his heart and conscience and vowed to sign as many visas as he could regardless of nationality or religion, and he did so without taking payment. For three days, he signed and signed and signed, his name reduced to only “Mendes,” but the consulate stamp on those visas was enough to let refugees flow through the borders. Before he was forced to stop, he managed to sign at least 3,800—this number has been confirmed with certainty by the Sousa Mendes Foundation (survivors and descendants of the families he saved with those visas), though estimates of the number range between 10,000–30,000. For his defiance, he was stripped permanently of his title, shunned by António de Oliveira Salazar, the prime minister of Portugal, and never again able to secure employment. Sousa Mendes is noted to have said: “I could not have acted otherwise, and I therefore accept all that has befallen me with love.

I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franc's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. […] Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction. Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted. Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience. Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful. Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat. Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals. The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.