Part Two: Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Two – Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator

Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, ventures deep into the lives and regimes of history’s most notorious figures. In Part Two, titled “Antonio Salazar: The Smartest Fascist Dictator”, hosts Robert Evans, Jeff May, and Sophie From Mars dissect the complex legacy of Portugal’s long-standing dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Released on July 17, 2025, this episode provides a comprehensive examination of Salazar's rise to power, his governance strategies, his manipulation of Portugal’s colonial empire, and his interactions with other global powers during and after World War II.

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Introduction to Antonio Salazar

The episode kicks off with the hosts acknowledging returning listeners and teasing the ongoing series about Salazar. Despite the intro banter, the core focus quickly shifts to Salazar’s political maneuvers and authoritarian strategies.

Robert Evans (00:35): “Salazar's first actions after coming to power are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal.”

Economic Stabilization and Austerity Measures

Upon assuming power, Salazar prioritized stabilizing Portugal’s faltering economy. His austerity measures, though harsh, aimed to halt economic volatility, ensuring predictable investments for the wealthy and preventing drastic economic downturns.

Robert Evans (05:02): “Salazar’s first actions after coming to power are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal. The economy stops cycling where there are deep trials and recoveries; it kind of stays on an even keel.”

However, these measures had a dire impact on the poorer and peasant classes, revealing the non-populist nature of his regime.

Sophie From Mars (06:00): “Despite a lot of sympathies between him and Hitler, this is not a populist movement.”

Salazar vs. Other Fascist Leaders

Salazar’s approach to dictatorship was notably different from contemporaries like Hitler and Mussolini. While Salazar maintained direct control over economic policies, he shunned the grandiose public displays and cult of personality that characterized other fascist leaders.

Robert Evans (10:17): “Few of the 20th century's authoritarians exercised more direct control over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar.”

This distinction made his regime appear less overtly fascist, leading some international observers to mistakenly view Portugal as a dictatorship without a dictator.

Robert Evans (10:55): “He is a dictator without a cult of personality.”

Alliances and Neutrality During WWII

Salazar adeptly balanced alliances during WWII, supporting Franco’s Nationalists in Spain while maintaining a strategic neutrality that kept Portugal out of the direct conflict. His collaboration with Britain was pivotal in keeping Franco from fully aligning with the Axis powers.

Robert Evans (25:02): “The British are really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of the war.”

This delicate balancing act earned Salazar discreet appreciation from Winston Churchill, including a written letter of thanks, an honorary degree from Oxford, and the upgrading of the British ambassador to Portugal.

Post-War Policies and Lusotropicalism

After WWII, Salazar embraced Lusotropicalism, a theory suggesting that Portuguese colonialism was inherently benign and racially inclusive. This ideology was used to justify the continued exploitation and control of Portugal’s African colonies.

Robert Evans (60:19): “Lusotropicalism became the defining ideology of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's pseudo-fascist regime in Portugal following the Second World War.”

Contrary to these claims, Portugal's colonial practices involved severe exploitation, forced labor, and systemic racism, mirroring the oppressive tactics of other colonial powers.

Robert Evans (61:51): “Portuguese colonialism is very different. It is based on mass resource extraction and forced labor.”

Repression and Torture Tactics

Salazar's regime was notorious for its brutal repression, managed by the secret police (PIDE). The podcast details the horrific methods employed to suppress dissent, including physical and psychological torture.

Robert Evans (75:48): “Maria Matos was arrested for activities against the security of the state. She was stripped naked and beaten by male and female agents. By the third day of torture, without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations.”

Salazar further entrenched his oppressive regime by collaborating with the CIA in the 1950s, enhancing PIDE’s interrogation techniques.

Robert Evans (40:54): “In 1957 we send the CIA to Portugal to help train his secret police.”

Maintenance of the Colonial Empire and Its Collapse

Portugal’s expansive but costly colonial empire, including territories in Africa and India like Angola, Mozambique, and Goa, became increasingly untenable. By the early 1960s, nearly half of Portugal’s annual budget was dedicated to maintaining these colonies, leading to economic strain and growing resistance movements.

Robert Evans (53:47): “The cost of repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously.”

Salazar’s rigid stance led to continuous conflicts and international pressure, culminating in the loss of territories and widespread unrest.

Robert Evans (66:30): “In 1961, that's the most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding.”

Decline and Death of Salazar

Salazar’s declining health in 1968, marked by a cerebral hemorrhage, left the regime vulnerable. Despite his incapacitation, subordinates maintained a façade of his continued control until his death in 1970. This period saw intensified repression and systemic instability.

Robert Evans (77:09): “He lives out his days, but he believes he's running the country because they're just pretending.”

The Carnation Revolution

The culmination of Salazar’s oppressive policies and the unsustainable colonial wars led to the Carnation Revolution in April 1974. This mostly peaceful uprising overthrew the Estado Novo regime, restoring democracy to Portugal.

Robert Evans (83:24): “In April of 1974, they launched the mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns democracy to Portugal.”

Conclusion: The Legacy of Salazar

Antonio Salazar’s dictatorship was marked by a paradoxical blend of economic stability and ruthless repression. His meticulous financial policies and strategic neutrality during WWII garnered international favor, yet his obsessive maintenance of a declining colonial empire and brutal suppression of dissent ultimately led to his downfall. Salazar remains a complex figure: technically astute and authoritarian, yet morally reprehensible.

Robert Evans (80:51): “He’s kind of a dick. Not a nice man.”

Notable Quotes with Attribution and Timestamps

• Robert Evans (05:02): “Salazar’s first actions after coming to power are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal.”

• Sophie From Mars (06:00): “Despite a lot of sympathies between him and Hitler, this is not a populist movement.”

• Robert Evans (25:02): “The British are really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of the war.”

• Robert Evans (60:19): “Lusotropicalism became the defining ideology of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's pseudo-fascist regime in Portugal following the Second World War.”

• Robert Evans (75:48): “Maria Matos was arrested for activities against the security of the state. She was stripped naked and beaten by male and female agents. By the third day of torture, without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations.”

• Robert Evans (40:54): “In 1957 we send the CIA to Portugal to help train his secret police.”

• Robert Evans (53:47): “The cost of repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously.”

• Robert Evans (66:30): “In 1961, that's the most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding.”

• Robert Evans (77:09): “He lives out his days, but he believes he's running the country because they're just pretending.”

• Robert Evans (83:24): “In April of 1974, they launched the mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns democracy to Portugal.”

• Robert Evans (80:51): “He’s kind of a dick. Not a nice man.”

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Insights and Conclusions

Antonio Salazar's regime exemplifies the complexities of authoritarian governance. His ability to stabilize Portugal's economy through strict austerity measures earned him support among the elite, yet his oppressive tactics and unsustainable colonial ambitions sowed the seeds of his eventual downfall. Salazar’s strategic neutrality during WWII and collaboration with both Axis powers and the Allies highlight his pragmatic, albeit morally corrupt, approach to power. The collapse of his dictatorship through the Carnation Revolution underscores the inherent instability of regimes built on repression and exploitation.

By dissecting Salazar's policies and their ramifications, Behind the Bastards offers a nuanced view of a dictator who, while effective in certain administrative aspects, remains a cautionary tale of the destructive potential of unchecked authoritarianism.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody, it's behind the Bastards. The podcast that. You know what it is? Cause you're listening to it, and you're listening to part two of our episodes on Antonio Salazar. So you're probably not tuning into the show for the first time going, I wonder what this series is. I'm gonna click on an episode about a guy I've never heard of that's clearly labeled as part two. Like, no one who would do that.

[Jeff May]

They're part tuning in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Who would do, like. No. No one.

[Jeff May]

No, don't laugh, Sophie.

[Robert Evans]

No, it was good.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah, no, I liked it.

[Robert Evans]

That's okay. It's okay.

[Jeff May]

Spray you the water bottle.

[Robert Evans]

So our guest today, Jeff. Maybe that rhymed, but I didn't mean for it to.

[Jeff May]

Look, man, I have a very rhymable name.

[Robert Evans]

You do? You do. It's true.

[Jeff May]

It's useful.

[Robert Evans]

It's like, exactly one instance.

[Jeff May]

It's a month. Like, people love substance. Teachers saw my name and they never stopped.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Oh, it was great.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Oh, I get it.

[Danil]

Facts.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Absolutely not. Jeff June. Maybe that actually has a kind of nice ring to it, you know? Yeah, we might have June on this show. Jeff July. No, it's still alliterative, but I don't like it. I don't know why.

[Jeff May]

I almost dated a girl named Maisie.

[Robert Evans]

She went by May Mayzy Mae. Oh, my God.

[Jeff May]

And then she quickly pumped.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

I was like. But come on. And she's like, this is. It's just not gonna work.

[Robert Evans]

It's not gonna work. There's one reason for that.

[Jeff May]

Yeah.

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[Christiane Amanpour]

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[Jamie Rubin]

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[Robert Evans]

All right, so we're back and we're talking about part two. At the end of part one, Antonio Salazar had established his new state and established a secret police force with a torture prison that occasionally had to deal with noise ordinance violations in order to. Yeah, a little loud. A little loud. They had to quiet it down a little bit.

[Jeff May]

Can you just bring it a little on the torture, guys?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Yeah, yeah, we have quiet hours.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we've got quiet hours. No torturing after 9pm Come on, how hard is that?

[Jeff May]

We know this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Salazar's first actions after coming to power, are all focused on returning some sort of financial stability to Portugal. Now, I don't mean to confuse this with prosperity or even the kind of fraudulent economic boom that the Nazis manufactured after Hitler's return, right? Portugal never really thrives to a massive extent during Salazar's reign. It will remain, per capita, one of the poorest nations in Europe. But the economy stops cycling where there's these deep trials and these recoveries, it kind of stays on an even keel. And even though that's still not very good for most of the people, there's a lot more stability. So first off, the people with money, the capitalist class, are a lot happier because stability means you can make predictable investments and whatnot and get predictable returns. And the regular people at least, aren't dealing with these sudden, drastic downturns every couple of years or whatever.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

And so things are a lot more stable now. This allows him. One of his first measures taken in office was to take. And Salazar 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 between him and Hitler and whatnot, this is not a populist movement, Right?

[Jeff May]

Woodrow Wilson blew it, right?

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Jeff May]

Talk about a 180 on that guy, huh?

[Sophie From Mars]

Oh, boy.

[Jeff May]

It was just like, we're not gonna talk to anybody. But also, what if we had a.

[Robert Evans]

Justice League, but we should have, like an international order. Ye. 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. The principles which guided him were the elimination of wastefulness, the reduction of spending to a minimum, and complete control over every aspect of life which involved governmental expenditure, no matter how pressing their needs. Areas such as rural development, the health services, and education would have to wait until the necessary surplus was at hand. So Salazar is like, fuck you. I'm not doing anything to help people until we've got enough spare money to afford it.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like, we're not gonna go into debt just to take care of people. Like, we're going to cut it to the end. 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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

Rude. It's a little rude, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

He's kind of a dick.

[Jeff May]

He's a Rudy Huxtable, we like to say.

[Robert Evans]

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, guise.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He would state directly that his philosophy of leadership was, quote, the Portuguese must be treated as children. Too much, too often would spoil them. He added, quote, I say the same thing, though. Yeah, you're always saying that. And it really pisses off our Portuguese listeners.

[Jeff May]

People know this about me and the Portuguese.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, those windbags. To quote from one of our other bastards, the truth is that I am profoundly anti parliamentarian. I hate the speeches, the verbosity and the flowerly meaningless interpolations. The way we waste passion, not around any great idea, but just around futilities, nothingness from the point of view of the national good. So he's very much this, like, look, I'm not giving anybody anything, but at least I'm not, like, grandstanding about some bullshit while failing to deliver.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Like, I'm an asshole and I'm not, you know, handing you anything nice. But I'm also keeping the economy from crashing, Right? Like, that's his. That's his argument for why he should stay in power. And it works surprisingly well. Part of why is that while he gets the credit for his economic policies and the way that they do work, he's almost invisible outside of them. He is not doing mass rallies. People are not marching in the streets as he, like, stands in a reviewing stand and gives some sort of weird little salute he invented. He avoids any massive public displays, right? Which leads to this errant belief internationally. People will say that, oh, Portugal, they got so lucky. They have a dictatorship without a dictator. Which is nonsense. That's not what's happening. He's very much a dictator. But there's this desire, especially from a lot of international, like, capitalist conservatives, to be like, oh, Portugal's really figured it out. They've got all the benefits of a Hitler without having Hitler, you know? Yeah, maybe we could do what they're doing, right? And that's not the case. That's not an accurate way to describe Salazar's regime or any regime that's ever existed. The reality is that very few of the 20th century's authoritarians exercised more direct control over their national economy or government policy than Antonio Salazar. You could argue Salazar is much more of a dictator in the direct, literal sense, that even Hitler was.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Hitler is. Is a delegator.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He has his things he's interested in. He mostly lets other people handle most things in part because you can, like, defray blame for shit that way. Salazar is kind of the opposite of a lot of these guys in that he's all about direct personal control of especially economic policy, but a lot of other government policies. And he doesn't want to do the other crap, right? He doesn't want to do the big reviewing stand marches. He doesn't want to do the military adventurism. And 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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Jeff May]

What a waste.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, what a waste. You could have had so much more fun with it, man. Oh, my God. You know, Hitler had his flair. Where's your Salazar flair?

[Jeff May]

Come on, that've been awesome, man.

[Robert Evans]

He blew it. Tragic. Especially with a name as cool as Salazar. Oh, my God.

[Jeff May]

It's a good name.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Unlike Hitler, he doesn't. Whatever he says about helping return Portugal to greatness, he's not really interested in returning his nation to some false prelapsarian version of greatness or even erasing the humiliations of the past. He. He wants to bring stability and then hold the line, right? That's the kind of guy he is.

[Jeff May]

Also. That's the best song by Toto.

[Robert Evans]

That is the best song by Toto. Hold the line. And Salazar would have agreed with you. And I think. Well, no, no, he passes in 74, so he couldn't have heard Toto.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

I think he would have liked it. Unfortunately, knowing his history, one of his downfalls is that he likes Africa way too much.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

I know, I know. That's his big problem.

[Jeff May]

He's a fucking casual Tot fan is.

[Robert Evans]

What he is, that's what brings about the revolution against him, is the fact that he's a fake toto fan and everyone knows it. Yeah.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. Again, no, no, no. That's why we brought you in, Jeff.

[Jeff May]

That's why I get brought in for all the hottest, hottest takes on Toto current musical hits, because I only know.

[Robert Evans]

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 avoid kind of the different sort of dangers of this moment in European history.

[Jeff May]

The pitfalls, if you will.

[Robert Evans]

The pitfalls, right. Like, he's never going to be an invade Russia guy, and he's going to play a big role in helping his peer in Spain, Francisco Franco, avoid some of these same pitfalls. Unfortunately. Now, Portugal has a complex history with Spain. They've been invaded and occupied in the past. You know, he's super worried, like every Portuguese leader is that Spain is going to come for Portugal at some point.

[Jeff May]

Just looking out the blinds.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Looking out the blinds, being like, is Spain out there? Fuck. They always.

[Jeff May]

What are they doing out there?

[Robert Evans]

So you've got this civil war that gets started in Spain between these republicans and Franco. And Salazar sees the republic, which looks like it's gonna win at first, as a threat to his continued independence.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

If the republic wins the war, maybe they'll come for us and then maybe my regime is doomed and Portuguese independence is doomed. And Salazar extends his support to Franco.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So he backs Franco during a crucial early stage in the civil war. He allows Germany and Italy to use his territory to transfer troops and materiel to Franco's army, which is a critical aspect of, like, how Franco is able to get enough military aid to win. Salazar allows Portuguese volunteers to fight for the fascists in Spain, and he uses his secret police and security forces to raid and arrest republican sympathizers and refugees in his own territory. And these are the years because he's letting Italy and Germany in, because he's helping Franco. These are the years in which his movement most resembles the other fascist movements in Europe. Salazar deliberately cribs from Mussolini and Hitler in particular. Per write up in the New York Times, quote, he created a youth movement along Hitlerian lines, principally to prepare the younger people for military service and the Portuguese Legion, which was dedicated to combating internal communism. These organizations with the army proved useful in putting down a popular outbreak in Lisbon just prior to World War II. So not only does he kind of ally with the fascists in this period is he starts putting out these kind of like trappings of fascism where it's like, well, let's get a youth fighting movement in the street. We need, in addition to the military, we need these civilian combat organizations, these paramilitaries that are sort of given a free pass by the police to crack down on the left and to stop them from gaining too much power and overthrowing the government to stop the communists primarily.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

I thought you meant fighting the youth.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no. He is getting the fighting youth together right under his back.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like that's his plan during this period.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

There's obviously the youth who are organizing on behalf of communism and for return to the republic. These are the people that he's having a secret police go after and that he's sort of allowing these paramilitaries to fight against. Right now, during this period, Pre World War II, he's known to keep a bust of Mussolini in his office and he'll regularly ask his Hitler during the height. But he's also pretty clear in his own statements about what he sees as the difference between his fascist allies and his own new state regime. Now, obviously our dictatorship is similar to the fascist dictatorship in its strengthening of authority and the war in which it declares on certain democratic principles. In its nationalist character and its maintenance of the social order, it is different. However, in its methods of renovation. The fascist dictatorship is leaning towards a pagan caesaris.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And that's what Salazar doesn't want. For one thing, he is a Catholic and he makes an alliance with the Catholic Church.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Where we will allow the Catholic Church will bring back a lot of these powers that had been stripped from it to provide for 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 Germany, which is the Nazi regime is an anti Catholic regime. In some ways they have to co opt Catholicism, but they never are really comfortable with it because the church is another center of power. And Salazar is okay with there being another center of power as long as it helps kind of take away from his burden. He sees this as like a worthwhile thing. And he's also just a believer in Catholicism. And so this is why he's very consciously like, we'll take some things that the fascists are doing, but like, I'm not this weird kind of like pagan esoteric thing that Hitler Is like, that seems strange to me and I don't want to go too far down that road because it's a lot of work and I feel like it's going to get this fucker in trouble.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's very smart.

[Jeff May]

It's not hard to read the writing on the wall when being like, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We should take over like the whole everything. Yeah, yeah, maybe you should just go.

[Jeff May]

Over and take over all.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the Soviet Union. Yeah. Oh, kicking the door. Yeah. Salazar's like, that seems like a lot of work taking over the Soviet Union. For one thing, there's like 30 Portuguese people.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

He's, he's content with what he has.

[Jeff May]

It's just like it's a project for him. He's just like, man, yeah, we gotta get Portugal moving, man. We gotta, we gotta, yeah, do our thing.

[Robert Evans]

We gotta fix this up and we don't need. He's also into, as we'll talk about, Portugal owns a lot of Africa, right. He's not, he's not content with a tiny amount of the world, but he doesn't want to like expand massively. He's trying to keep a hold on what they've got, right. So he doesn't go too far into the kind of delusions that are going to lead Hitler and Mussolini to ruin.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

I mean, he's anti Semitic and like by arse, but it's not like a governing principle.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

He's 1930s anti Semitic, which is just.

[Robert Evans]

And in this, you know, after the war, there will be a Portuguese colonial war. That's very racist.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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 gonna wipe out this racial group in order to fix Portugal.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

That's never a part of his politics, you know. And so that's a big difference between like the Nazis.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Now, Salazar is also, despite the fact that he is allied with Franco and really helps him take power in Spain and he never trusts Franco all that much. Tom Gallagher's biographer describes them as having him as having a wary association with Franco's regime. And while Franco restores the monarchy in Spain, Salazar never gives serious consideration towards a return to the monarchy.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Because that's too much of a compromise with power for him, 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 political agility and guaranteed ultimately by the armed forces. So it's just much more of this compromise regime that he's willing to make because he's just kind of. He's a pragmatic guy. Now, this is ultimately what will save his regime and Franco's regime. You know, at least there's an argument that it saves Franco's regime during the Second World War, because Franco only wins his civil war because of the help he gets from the continental fascist powers, right? Like he gets very famously, the German air force is going to bomb a bunch of places for Franco, right? And despite the fact that you would think, and Hitler had kind of expected, well, obviously, once I wind up in a big war, Spain is going to back me, right? And Franco never does this. He refuses. He doesn't go on the side of the Allies, right? He doesn't outright betray Germany, but he never throws his hat into the ring with the Axis once the fighting begins in earnest. The reasons for this are complex, and they have a lot to do with Portugal's traditionally warm relationship with Great Britain. Because Salazar gets a lot of credit for stopping Franco from going all in on the fascists during this war and from, like, outright allying with them. There's a lot of debate as to, like, how much credit, how much of this was Franco? Just kind of recognizing this is a bigger risk than I want to take. But Salazar, at least according to one version of the story, is a major part of what keeps Franco out. And part of why Salazar is like this is even though he's got a lot of sympathies with the fascists and a good relationship with them, he still has a good relationship with Great Britain, who had been Portugal's traditional ally. And so Salazar never sees, even though he gets lumped in as a fascist in this period, he never sees politics in simple terms of fascist versus anti fascist, right? Or even authoritarian versus democratic. Instead, he acts based on a much simpler, logical rubric, which is that Portugal's small and we don't have any ability to project military force in a way that matters on the level of a great power. So we have to be careful and we can't Piss off anyone too much.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Or over commit our. He's not gonna do. He would never back the fascists militarily. Cause like, what am I gonna do? Send soldiers to fucking Russia? I'm gonna have Portuguese troops fighting in fucking Russia. What the hell is that gonna do?

[Jeff May]

I would, but I'm built different.

[Robert Evans]

You would. Yeah, but you would. I would do it. 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 I. And he's like, I'm just not going to do that. Like, that could never be me built different.

[Jeff May]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Seems bad. No, no, thank you.

[Jeff May]

You know, like, I mean, Hitler was a soldier that, that went to jail.

[Robert Evans]

For trying to overthrow the government. Yeah.

[Jeff May]

Like, this guy sucks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

This guy.

[Robert Evans]

This.

[Jeff May]

I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb and you know what, you can hear me out first.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Jeff May]

Hitler sucks.

[Robert Evans]

Not cool. Not my favorite guy. Yeah. Not a cool dude.

[Jeff May]

And also. But really sucks at like knowing what to do, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. When to get, when to, you know, when to roll the dice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff May]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Mm.

[Jeff May]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. How to avoid that shit. Yeah. And it's also, he's also got this thing going for him where, you know, unlike in Germany, in Germany it had been the Kaiser's regime that had, you know, gotten every into World War II. And in Portugal, it had been the democracy, the republic that had made that choice.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And so he's just got. He's a little bit, you know, he's gun shy because he's looking at the immediate past and he's like, nah, fuck that shit. I'm just. It could never be me, bro. Could never be me.

[Jeff May]

Not me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sophie From Mars]

Smart.

[Robert Evans]

Smart man. Unfortunately. So he plays a role, a lot of people will argue, in keeping Franco neutral. And there's significant evidence that he operates with the direct help of the British government in doing this, that he is like, he's communicating with like, the British Empire's like, diplomats. Because of this long standing alliance, early in the war, British intelligence would pass on messages to Salazar, which he would take to Franco in order to negotiate backdoor deals to keep Spain out of direct involvement in the war. And this is really stressful for. His hair goes gray because the fascists are looking pretty good early in the war and there's a lot of pressure. Franco's like, maybe we ought to get involved. We could get some shit out of this.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

And probably a lot of even people on Franco's side are like, why are we not backing the clear winners? And Salazar's like, but he gets increasingly like, pump the brakes, homie. This ages him by like 10 or 15 years. Most people will agree he's visibly older.

[Jeff May]

By the time he got the Obama treatment. Huh.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Like he is not. This is not an easy time for him. He's not negotiating this simply.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

A pretty stressful era for me. World War II, just Switzerland just looking over, being like they got something weird going on.

[Robert Evans]

How strong are our borders?

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

Good luck, guys.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So his role in this is substantial enough in keeping Franco out of the war that Churchill's government organizes three separate tokens of appreciation for Salazar's efforts. The first, in September of 1940, is a written letter of thanks directly from Winston Churchill. The second, they're like, you know what? This, this written letter of thanks isn't enough. Let's lean on Oxford and let's have Oxford give Salazar an honorary degree. That's a good move. Yeah, yeah. No, that's. That's smart.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Make him an honorary.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah, thanks.

[Jeff May]

Drunk.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So basically the government leans on Oxford and Oxford is like, they send a team to Coimbra University where he had been a professor and were like, yeah, let's give the dictator a degree.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And then the third thing that the British do is they upgrade the ambassador to Portugal.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Yeah, that's always fun, right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And they, they expect it is a.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Make him feel valid.

[Jeff May]

Somebody doing a certain thing where there's a potential that you could turn them into an Ally, you want to butter them up. So you do want a higher ranking, you know, it's sort of like how like the ambassador Mexico was historically like up pretty cushy but high ranking job because it was like they're our next door neighbors and that's really cool.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

But I was going to say we have history. And so I didn't, I actually did not appreciate that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, yeah, you do. You were in the IRA for a period of time in the 90s. Anyway. We'll talk about that later. You know who else was in the IRA in the 1990s?

[Jeff May]

Probably HelloFresh.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, hello. Almost certainly. I mean, actually that's way too cool for hellofresh. No, no, hello Thatcher is what it was called. Yeah, hello Thatcher. We've brought a bomb. See, Hellofresh. We can be mean to you or we can be nice to you.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah.

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[Robert Evans]

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast.

[Sophie From Mars]

You better listen.

[Robert Evans]

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

[Jeff May]

Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the Cancer and.

[Robert Evans]

Then the Aries comes out and they say, who the is that? No, you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a sag Moon. Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

[Jeff May]

Okay, that is your Capricorn talking.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about hellofresh. Proud sponsors of the Iraq. Wow. Yeah, I don't know.

[Jeff May]

I said the same thing when I found that out.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It surprises a lot of people. Speaking of surprising, Salazar surprisingly good at being the dictator of Portugal. So the fact that the British are really leaning on him to help keep Franco out of the war is a big ask for the man. But it's also, you know, Franco. This is not a smooth relationship. He and Salazar are not. This is not easy. Franco is never as committed to the international fascist cause as Hitler and Mussolin. He is, like Salazar, an Iberian, but he's also an opportunist. In these early years of sweeping fascist success, he gets really angry at Salazar for like, holding him back. In one notable moment, he complains that Salazar is un timido, like a weakling, right? Like he's timid, he's weak. And the frustration is buoyed by the manner in which Salazar controls his military, because he's. A lot of guys in his military are kind of on the Franco side of things here. And he keeps replacing these guys in power and replacing them with these younger lickspittles that he can trust to be loyal to him. And he appoints so many kids in their 30s over experienced officers that like long standing members of the military start to get angry and kind of feeling frustrated.

[Jeff May]

What is this Doge?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, what is it? 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 not in this period. Eventually his alienation of the military is going to cause problems for his successors. But it never gets bad enough while he's in power that they feel bold enough to try. In World War II, it becomes clearer as that kind of goes on and Operation Barbarossa turns against the Germans, everyone starts to realize like, oh, shit, Salazar probably had the right idea here. Fascism's not looking so hot, right? All of Central Europe has been leveled by Allied bombing raids. Might have worked out really well for us that you kept out of this thing, huh?

[Jeff May]

Your boy knew what was up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm kind of glad we didn't send the Portuguese army to Stalingrad and sort of while this is happening, Portugal is profiting from both sides of the war. He is an arch war profiteer. And because he's never fully aligned, he's able to make really good money from everyone. Per the New York Times quote, the money came from Britain and the United States for the use of the Azores Islands as naval and air bases. At the same time, Lisbon was the spy center for the Axis as well as the Allied powers, with both of which Portugal traded. So they're trading with everyone, they're selling to everybody. They wait until 43 to hand those islands over to the Allies as naval and air bases. When it's pretty clear you know where things are going, but they're profiteering from everyone. Now. All of this does come at a personal cost. For Salazar, negotiating a middle way at the center of the largest war in human history is not simple. And this does age him. By 1945, he looks like he's much older than his years. And the victory of the USSR and the democratic nations spooks him initially, right. In 45 he's like, shit.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he thought he saw.

[Jeff May]

He thought he's a Scooby Doo character.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. He thinks he's like fucked, right? That like, oh, America and the Soviets won. The left is going to rise worldwide in the wake of this. And that's not gonna be good for a guy like me who's a career anti communist. And so he gets scared enough that in 1945 he has an election. And it's not a real election, but he lets political parties besides his own party run again. And he claims publicly that the election will be, quote, as free as in free England.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Constantly.

[Jeff May]

Whereas, like, the dictator had an election.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

Did he kill the people that ran against him?

[Robert Evans]

Not immediately. He's gonna lock some of them up and torture some of them.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

This isn't gonna last. But there is this initial because he's kind of spooked. He doesn't want to push the allies too hard. He doesn't want to seem like a fascist in this period. So he's kind of scared. He empowers a new set of special military courts to liberalize the policies of the political police. There's this concentration camp, Tarrafal, where the communists and these democratic activists are held. And he improves conditions. He let talk to their families on the outside. He restores contact with what one inmate described as the living world in the post war period. For a little while. And for an article in the Journal of Music and Politics, Annabel Duarte writes, Portuguese fascism was quickly trying to make its political conversion. It was trying to eliminate and make us forget the more conspicuous aspects that identified it with the dying regimes that had been its allies. And I do like the idea of like, what? Whoa, whoa, Fascists.

[Jeff May]

It's just, look, this guy, we have field days in jail, fascism.

[Robert Evans]

I hardly know him. Yeah.

[Jeff May]

In, in, in Portugal camps.

[Robert Evans]

It's like a camp camp. Not a camp camp. Jesus.

[Jeff May]

Camp, camp, camp.

[Robert Evans]

No, it's like camp, you know. You know, like Portugal camp. Right, Exactly. It's nice. So these changes are not entirely cosmetic.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He's not really introducing any more freedom. One major policy change that sounds good on paper. Is the political police can now only hold detainees without charges or a warrant for 180 days.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Dude, that's standing on my head.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Especially since, oh my God, you're spending way longer than six months there all.

[Jeff May]

Honestly, that's a training camp. Yeah, that's what kind of camp it is. It's training camp.

[Robert Evans]

It's gotta 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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

That's all you're doing. You're not actually letting anybody out here. Now he does make. 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. Within a few years, the Muvumento starts to pick up steam and it becomes clear that there's enough leftist sentiment to present a threat to his regime. So in 1948, he outlaws the organization and calls it a communist front. Now by 48 again, he's got these good instincts where he pretends to liberalize in the post war period where there's this kind of surge in support for these kind of anti far right, pro left ideas worldwide. And he gauges correctly that that's not gonna last. And by 48, the post war danger posed by the victory of anti fascism is over.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

The whole Cold War thing is starting to spin up. There's now this kind of anti leftist sentimen that is increasingly entrenched all over the democratic world. Portugal gets admitted to NATO and Salazar's strong anti communist credentials officially outlasted the brief period during which Americans had had to pretend that they considered the USSR an ally.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

We're trying to lock up as many anti communists as we can to form this bloc against the USSR. And so by 48, he's kind of held out long enough.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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 Pierre, had collaborated with the Nazis as a private businessman trading tungsten during the war years.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And he's going to be operating the torture prison system after the war.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

This guy who had been, who was directly cribbing notes from the Gestapo and from the SD in 1956, there's a huge wave of repression that gets launched because by the mid-50s, with the cold War really going, Salazar's like, okay, it's time to get rid of all of these liberalizing policies. We can really lock in and start absolutely cracking down on the left and on any kind of like pro democratic organization. And nobody in America or wherever is going to fuck with us.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He passes a law in 56 that is meant to extend the incarceration periods among political prisoners to what is effectively a life sentence. And this is directly based off of a German act in 1935 that led to what's called the Schuthoff system, where detention time is unlimited for enemies of the state. So again, this ally of the Americans who have just beaten the Nazis is using Nazi policies as the rubric for creating this sort of system in which to crack down on dissent. And the US is not only cool with it, in 1957 we send the CIA to Portugal to help train his secret police. So they go straight from learning from the Nazis to working with the CIA. And part of what's happening here is that Salazar has lobbied the White House and been like, look, if I fall, Portuguese communism is obviously going to come roaring back, you know, so you guys need to send me some dudes to help my guys do torture. Duarte writes, A new period begins. Special agents travel to elite training camps in the United States, such as Camp Peary, Virginia, also known as the Farm, where they received instructions and methods and practices of interrogation from CIA experts.

[Sophie From Mars]

So great.

[Robert Evans]

Now he's, I mean, I like that he's double dipping. Yeah.

[Jeff May]

You know, he's just like, look, look, a lot of people have a lot of ideas.

[Robert Evans]

Uh huh.

[Jeff May]

And I'm not gonna say that they're.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

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?

[Jeff May]

They introduced him to Van Halen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They invented Van Halen for this.

[Jeff May]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this creates an extraordinary turning point in the situation, Right? The fact that there's, like, that he's. These CIA experts are coming in and they're starting to, like, they're training Portuguese people in the farm over in Virginia. There's now protests. There's, like, a protest campaign that rises up from family members of prisoners who are, like, angry that their family members are being tortured so hideously. And they start protesting enough that, like, 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 72 Portuguese lawyers from Lisbon, Porto and other cities put out a comprehensive report on irregularities concerning the treatment of prisoners and deaths, deaths in the state prisons. Duarte writes, quote, joaquin the Most de Oliveira, a barber and Democrat from Faf, age 48, and Manuel Da Silva Jr, a worker and anti fascist from Viana do Castello, age 69, for instance, had died inside a prison in Porto in 1957. Officially, they had committed suicide. And what starts to leak out at this period is the degree to which these torture prisons have become institutionalized in Portugal. People find out that they're locking prisoners in these tiny cells called cigretto, which have no natural light or even space to walk. You can only, like, really stand. You can't even fully lie down. There's like a wooden board for a bed, but you can't even straighten your body out on the ground. People with money who are, like, middle class can pay for a larger cell, but it's still a dungeon, right? And it's costing your family a significant amount of money every day. One political prisoner in 1956 left an account stating for over a month he was locked in a wet cement cell without sufficient light or air. Then he was forced to pay the daily sum of tennis kudos for he was threatened with the dungeons if he did not pay. So there's starting to be some resistance to this from, like, family members of people who are being held for a period of time. And some of this even leaks out internationally. But it's this thing where ultimately the anti Communist struggle matters a lot more for every one of his backers than the fact that he is using these techniques, some of which we're teaching him.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And there's this also handy thing where the CIA is like, well, we'll take notes on what he's doing, right? We'll figure out what works so that when we start pushing to overthrow governments in Latin America, we can give them data on what works in Salazar's prisons.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

He's like a laboratory for anti left wing crackdowns and operating secret police states. And that's kind of the role that he's playing internationally in this period of time. So that's cool.

[Jeff May]

That is really cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, it's great. I love our role in this.

[Jeff May]

Yeah, look at us.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

They're constantly being interrogated for evidence about like terrorism. And so this is necessary for the security of the state. And they started 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 head. Heads of people who are locked in position, unable to sleep or move for days at a time in order to make them go crazy.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

That's the purpose of this. And the CIA is helping them. We're taking notes on all of this. And some of this stuff winds up being part of the enhanced interrogation techniques we used after 9 11. 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 he gives us a chance, he gives our torture guys a chance to, to see what works to break people's brains.

[Jeff May]

Pretty cool.

[Robert Evans]

Pretty cool stuff. I mean, cool to see it.

[Jeff May]

I know that.

[Sophie From Mars]

Cool.

[Jeff May]

I know there's gonna be comments.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

But you gotta remove yourself from the horrors. That's pretty cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's pretty cool. At least we know this stuff, right? It's always good to have data, you know, on what kind of torture works, on how long you can play Van Halen to somebody before their mind collapses. Which is about nine minutes at least from my list of people have learned. Yeah. So Salazar's regime obviously is no less brutal after World War II than it had been before. But the man seemed different and he was treated different internationally. He's now an elder statesman and he's feted around the world as like not, you know, he's a dictator, but he's a good dictator.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

He kept Spain out of World War II and he kept Portugal from falling to communism.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

So he's the socially acceptable dictator in a lot of the west right now. Personally, as I said, he looks physically weaker after the war. He's kind of burnt out. And you do see especially as the 50s wear into the 60s, he's tired and he's less careful than the younger version of himself had been. And these factors, he starts kind of slipping. This is going to lead him to embrace what would become a calamity for the sake of maintaining Portugal's doomed overseas empire.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

He's going to make his first really disastrously bad decisions starting in the early 60s, and we're gonna talk about that. But you know who else made some bad decisions in the 60s?

[Jeff May]

Like everyone.

[Robert Evans]

That's right, that's right. But particularly the sponsors of this podcast. Oh wow.

[Danil]

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[Robert Evans]

High Key Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast.

[Sophie From Mars]

You better listen.

[Robert Evans]

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

[Jeff May]

Just one little spicy off comment, that's all it takes. Everyone loves, loves me at the cancer.

[Robert Evans]

And then the Aries comes out and they said, who the is that? No, you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a sag Moon. Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

[Jeff May]

Okay, that is your Capricorn talking.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So if you've ever looked at a map of Europe, you know that Portugal, not a big country, it's a little rectangle cut out of the Iberia, the.

[Jeff May]

Fingernail of Europe, Right?

[Robert Evans]

It's like the fingernail of Europe. If, like fucking Spain is the thumb, it's a fingernail.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Now in Salazar, if Spain is the.

[Jeff May]

Thumb, it's the thumbnail.

[Robert Evans]

Like the thumbnail. Thank you.

[Jeff May]

We are intellectuals on this show.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

Good for them, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Not gonna be great for them in this period.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

No, and to be fair, not great. Good for the Earth.

[Robert Evans]

No, no.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

I mean, mission accomplished.

[Sophie From Mars]

Temporarily.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, they're holding onto it for a long period of time.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

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 shit done.

[Sophie From Mars]

Mm.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. At least for a while. Up until the early 70s.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. They're Instagram reeling colonialism, right? Yeah, yeah. And on a map, their situation looks pretty impressive in like the late 50s, early 60s. Cause they've held onto Portugal in this period. Owns modern day Angola and modern day Mozambique. And Mozambique alone is like nine times the size of Portugal.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Not a small. Bigger, not a small country. They also control Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome, Capo Verde, 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 Cy Trance comes out of. I've heard it referred to as like Russia's Mexico a lot. Like, it's. It's like a party town in a lot of ways. It's a major, like, tourist destination.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That's owned by Portugal up until the latter, like third or third or so of the 20th century. That's Portuguese territory in the middle of fucking India.

[Jeff May]

Like Club Portugal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like Club Portugal. And in order to maintain all these colonial possessions, Portugal has to keep 100,000 soldiers stationed mostly in Africa, but all over the world, in order to keep in charge of these increasingly restive possessions, who after World War II had started to be like, hey, a lot of anti colonial movements are succeeding across the world. Like Britain's given up India. Why are we still part of Portugal? I feel like Angola is its own thing. What are we doing here?

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And by the start of the 60s, the cost of repressing these constant movements for independence had grown precipitously. Portugal in the start of the 60s has the heaviest defense burden of any European nation. They are spending 40% of their annual budget to maintain control of these colonial possessions.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

There's a lot of distance. It's not cheap to hold boats.

[Jeff May]

But like, boats are expensive.

[Robert Evans]

Boats cost money. An army costs money. A secret police force costs money.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Did that keep you guys in power?

[Jeff May]

They were a while.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Really good. Until it was very bad.

[Jeff May]

Yeah, it was really good. And then it became, pardon the sailing reference. An albatross around our necks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, a little bit of an albatross. Yeah. So this is. And again, this is particularly ludicrous that as the 60s start, Portugal spending nearly half of their budget keeping control of these colonial possessions. Salazar is the fiscal conservative whose power rests on balancing the budget and being rational about money. And everyone's like, okay, but is it really rational for us to own so much of Africa and we're not even really making money off of it?

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

We're spending all of our money holding onto it. Like, why does this make sense?

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

That's the concern. It's like there's resources there. Aren't you supposed to be like, yeah, during the. Resources is not like your whole thing.

[Robert Evans]

It seems like this is nothing but negatives to us.

[Jeff May]

Although to be fair, I guess, is salt really a thing you're fighting for in the 1900s?

[Robert Evans]

I feel like there's plenty of salt. We've got way too much salt. Some people say, waging.

[Jeff May]

You can't wage a war for salt while McDonald's exists.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, exactly.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

You can just get it real cheap.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We've got so much salt now, we don't need any of this.

[Jeff May]

We should never have waged those wars. We've had too much salt.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We now know what it does to our heart.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

What if we'd never taken any of these salt territories? Italians would live forever. So the irrationalism of this stance, of the fact that he's spending so much money to hold onto these possessions and not really making back what Portugal's putting into it. The irrationalism of this stance is key to understanding it because Salazar, he's been kind of almost like a robot up to this point. He seems like such a. He's only making the nuts and bolts. Good financial decisions and he's gotten. His reputation is based on. He's like this cold hearted accountant who doesn't fuck up.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And that falls away after this point. Alan Smith, writing for the Journal of African History, notes that Salazar has let himself become consumed by the almost paranoid fear that foreigners were busily plotting to dismember the Portuguese empire. And you have to see this as consistent with the Logic that kept him out of World War II. Portugal's small and that small size is a vulnerability and he feels some protective effect as long as they have this massive overseas empire that maybe that, that protects us from our small size of our main country. But even that feeling that this is keeping us safe is a delusion.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

There's also like a big wave of anti colonial sentiment in the latter half of the 20th century. Like pretty. I mean, look at what England gave up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Everything.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

And yeah, and this is okay, India.

[Jeff May]

You can be India again.

[Robert Evans]

This is a problem for Portugal in that he has previously he'd been so good at seeing where the wind was blowing and like, ah, you know what? I'm not going to back the fascists fully in World War II because I just don't think they're gonna have staying power.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right, Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Jeff May]

He normally is really good at seeing a scam.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And he's just, he's kind of past his prime here.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

We still have some fragment of this thing that made us great. The French in this period clung to a policy known as franca frique, 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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Where they're like, well, we'll let them be independent on paper, but these are French speaking countries and so we ultimately exercise power. And this is a delusion for France. So all of these are delusions. And now we're gonna talk about what was Portugal's delusion that backed up their colonial ideology in the Salazar period.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Cause 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.

[Jeff May]

Come on, look at our skin color. Come on, don't be weird about it.

[Robert Evans]

In the late 20th 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 are anti racist and we're the only colonial power that is. So the delusion that they latch onto.

[Jeff May]

Is a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for it.

[Robert Evans]

Let's see how well this works in the long run. The strategy Salazar's regime is going to buy into is inspired by the work of a Brazilian sociologist named Gilberto Freire. And Salazar's regime buys hook, line and sinker into this racial pseudoscientific theory that Frere comes up with called Lussotropicalism.

[Jeff May]

He argues that's Brazilian.

[Robert Evans]

That's Brazilian, yeah. Yes, they argue lucid tropicalism is this idea that, number one, Portuguese people are uniquely well suited to these tropical and warmer climates that they're colonializing in. So, number one, we are fit to survive in these places we're running, unlike the British, right. And number two, we've come up with the only system of colonialism that's actually good for colonized people. Because we're not racist.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Unlike the British and French, Portuguese colonizers didn't consider themselves superior to the people they ruled. And the evidence for this is that they fucked them and had kids with them.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Like we're cool with, you know, mixed race kids, right? Like, that's what makes us not racist.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

We're breeding with them. We're not bigoted the same way all of these other Europeans are, right?

[Jeff May]

Somebody should have given them an American history textbook.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, boy. Or like any colonial history textbook, right? Yeah. Portugal is not special and they're no less racist than anyone else. But that's what Lussotropicalism is. The idea that, like, Portuguese colonialism is unique and special and thus defensible.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Jeff May]

They might be slightly less racist than other people. Like, they're probably a little less racist.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe Hitler. Yeah, they're less racist than Hitler. Not a high bar, right? Yeah, I know, but like, yeah, sure.

[Jeff May]

We'Ve brought him up. It would be a shame to just forget him, you know?

[Robert Evans]

I'll say they clear that bar, right? I am. In a quote per an article on Lussotropicalism for Genocide Watch by Nat Hill quote, Lussotropicalism became the defining ideology of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's pseudo fascist regime in Portugal following the Second World War. As European powers increasingly sought to rid themselves of their colonial territories. Portugal under Salazar refused to consider granting its African colonies independence or autonomy, calling them the overseas provinces instead of colonies. Amilcar Cabral, the founder and leader of the PAIGC in Portuguese guinea, spoke about how the regime used Lusotropicalism in their colonial dogma. A whole mythology was assembled. And as with other myths, especially those concerning the subjection and exploitation of peoples, there was no lack of men of science, even a renowned sociologist, 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 Lussotropical paradise.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

We're not like other boys.

[Robert Evans]

We're not like the other colonial powers.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

I mean, it's a good.

[Robert Evans]

It's a swing, it's a good branding, right? Yeah. But Portuguese colonialism is, like all colonialism, based on mass resource extraction and forced labor, right? Human trafficking had been the core of Portugal's colonial ambitions since the 1400s, when the first West African people were captured, taken to Portugal, and sold into slavery in Lagos. Giovina FEC documents in an article for Global Voices. Among the colonial powers that emerged over the centuries of European colonialism, Portugal trafficked the most enslaved people. No one else did as much human trafficking in the colonial era as Portugal. They are top dog, right? And they've got their defenders even to the modern day, who will claim that, like, no, we weren't as bad as the other assholes, Right? Obviously, starting with that off, there's this often reported claim that Portugal was, like, the first European country to ban slavery in 1761. And this is a lie, Right? That year, Portugal banned the importation of slaves into one city, but they continued to be the primary global transporter of the transatlantic slave trade until 1850. And that global Voices article has a graph we'll put up in video form that makes it clear how much transatlantic slave trading is being done by Portugal.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

From 1801 to 1850, the Netherlands traffics about 568,000 people, and the UK and France traffic smaller numbers than that. And Portugal is responsible for almost two and a half million people being trafficked.

[Jeff May]

Oh, Portugal, don't do that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, bad, bad, bad.

[Jeff May]

Spray em with the water bottle.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

They just change it, you know, they alter it. 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 it up as like, well, these people were arrested for this purpose, right? In 1929, a civil and criminal political statute for the indigenous peoples of the colonies in Mozambique and Angola was established which laid out that native people could not be assigned rights related to constitutional institutions. This forced segregation remained the law of the land throughout the period of Salazar's Estado Novo, even though he's saying, no, no, no, we're Lussotropicalists, right? We're the ones who aren't racist. But also indigenous peoples in Africa are not allowed to have constitutional rights, you know?

[Jeff May]

And also we did a lot of slave stuff.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

We borrowed the 13th amendment.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now they make some mild concessions to changing international opinion during Salazar's term, but these are again, minimal. In 1953, a law for governing Portuguese colonies ends the use of the term colonial empire. So they stop. We're not going to call ourselves an empire in the 50s, but we're going to keep using forced labor that will continue to be legal. And this new law notes that the state can only compel indigenous people to work in public works of general interest to the community, an occupation whose results belong to them in the execution of judicial decisions of a criminal nature or to comply with tax obligations. So we can't sell slaves, but if you're making something that's good for you, we can make you do that work. Or if you get in criminal trouble, or if you owe money for taxes, then we can force you to labor for the state, right? Totally different. Much less evil, obviously. Obviously, way better. Now, the number one purpose of Portugal's colonial empire under Salazar is the same as it had always been for Portugal, which is exploiting forced labor. As the financial drain for supporting the empire grew greater, Salazar pushed to increase the tax burden on Portugal's colonies to pay for military deployments and the ever increasing foreign staff needed to keep things going. He pushes an aggressive pension scheme that destroys the foreign cash reserves in Mozambique and other African colonies. Which makes it impossible for them to act independently because they have no foreign currency to do so with. He also pushes aggressive tariffs that make it painful to import or trade anything from countries other than Portugal. Alan Smith writes, foreign transfers were first made available to those firms doing business with the mother country. Exchange for purchases from other markets could only be obtained after these transactions had been completed and only if the dealings with Portugal had not exhausted the available reserves. The result of this policy was that the colonies were often well supplied with unnecessary commodities from Portugal while starving for essentials which could only be obtained from elsewhere. There can be no doubt that Salazar placed great importance on the establishment and maintenance of this system.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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 and we don't make a lot, right?

[Jeff May]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jeff May]

They make a delicious seafood dish.

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Which is increasing the overall burden on Portugal and the overall burden on the government because there's less and less money to be made doing this shit now while all this is happening. And he is focused obsessively on maintaining this colonial empire. And this is an obsession for a lot of folks in the. In the ruling class. Portuguese citizens don't give a shit. They're barely aware of the fact this is going on. Events in the colonies don't make the news. And Salazar's policies make sure that the country never realizes a lot of massive material gain from all of these possessions. These same policies that are meant to ensure her dominance in Mozambique and Angola, like, make it just not worth it for the regular people. So they don't really see why are we doing this. A lot of shit comes to a head.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

This isn't helping us at all. Why are we doing this?

[Jeff May]

Yeah, you won't even let us legalize heroin yet.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, come on, man. Yeah, that's gonna wait a couple of decades. So in 1961, that's the most disastrous year for Salazar's dictatorship since its founding, all these simmering colonial conflicts across Portuguese possessions burst onto the main stage. The up, which is A liberation organization in Angola launches a series of attacks on white settler properties in northern Angola, killing several Portuguese civilians. And the month before that, the mpla, a Marxist group, had attacked the Luanda prison, killing seven guards. So you have these very public 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 exterior, that tries to disturb the lives of white and black people in the peaceful land of Angola. They're outside agitators, right?

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like it's always the same fucking playbook. And he claims that, like, all we're trying to do is keep things nice for all of our white and black citizens who we all love equally.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

But any claims to enlightened racial attitudes by this Lussotropicalist regime are discarded at this point, as this article by Julia Garayo for the journal Violence Against Women summarizes the massacres of white settlers and their workers in Northern Angola in 1961. The events that, according to the Portuguese government, triggered the war were exhaustively photographed by embedded journalists and army officers. Photos of the corpses of raped white women and dead babies were reproduced in the national media. The Lisbon Society of Geography organized an exhibition to expose the selection of the pictures to the public, which was quite successful. The widescreen and.

[Jeff May]

They're eating the dogs.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they're eating the dogs. The dog eaters. The wide circulation of these pictures in Portugal was intended to justify the deployment of troops abroad and delegitimize anti colonial movements and communism. The Portuguese ambassador to the United nations used the images to denounce the savagery of terrorists who crossed the northern border of Angola to behead, rape and mutilate our women. These images, where the white woman's body symbolizes white innocence threatened by African savagery, function to construct a retaliatory narrative of Portuguese wartime victimhood as a call to arms embedded in incendiary words. Their circulation was intended to prevent any empathy with anti colonial movements and hence legitimize any form of violence employed against them. Tale as old as time.

[Jeff May]

Hey, we know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we've seen it.

[Jeff May]

We know what's happening. We're seeing it now, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it continues to happen. You never change the playbook because it works pretty well for a while.

[Jeff May]

Well, people are real fucking dumb.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, people are not. I don't know if you've met the person.

[Jeff May]

What a bunch of fucking dunces.

[Robert Evans]

It doesn't work. In the long run, though, right, because this is impossible to contain and it's impossible to hold on to these possessions when you get increasingly authoritarian. Right. It's a stopgap. So unrest continues throughout the year, and Salazar gets increasingly desperate to contain it. He tries. He extends Portuguese citizenship across the colonial populations. It's kind of like, look, you're citizens now. But his primary tactic is violence. And sexualized violence against white women is used as a justification for this expensive and violent military response. And in the same vein, sexualized violence against Angolans becomes a popular tactic of the military for the next decade. As the Portuguese colonial war wears on, African women are systematically raped by Portuguese occupying soldiers. Obviously, this doesn't stop people from being angry at Portugal. The fire only spreads and it goes, it moves out from Angola. As Portuguese weaken, is made manifest, they lose more and more of Salazar's prized possessions. Goa, which had been Portuguese property for 400 years, is taken by a newly independent India in December of 1961. We were just going to party there. Yeah. Now we're not going to get credit for. Well, I mean, we're going to go to credit. Yeah, yeah. So Salazar orders his men who are surrounded in the middle of India to fight to the death. But his own governor General is like, nah, I don't think we can win this one.

[Jeff May]

Yeah, we're not gonna do that, man.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, no, thank you. You're all the way in Lisbon, man. You don't know how surrounded, how big India is. I don't know if you've seen.

[Jeff May]

Can we get this guy a map?

[Robert Evans]

There are many guys here. What are you talking about?

[Jeff May]

Didn't you go to school?

[Robert Evans]

So the truth of this situation cannot be allowed to get out to the populace. Salazar's Minister of the army declared, we are today and will be tomorrow in India and Africa as long live the eternal Portugal. So that's not how things are going to work out, but for a while at least. Salazar's secret police and this repression regime he's built sweep into action in Lisbon.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

We can at least pretend things are good in Lisbon. And to get some context about what life is like in Lisbon during this period of time, I want to read you parts of an article by Dennis Redmond. And Redmond was an AP reporter stationed in Lisbon. Rodman Rodman, an AP reporter stationed in Lisbon from 65 to 67. And he covers the Portuguese colonial war extensively, as well as this like, rising youth movement against the the war in 1966. In 66, more drafted Portuguese soldiers die in their colonial possessions than Americans die in Vietnam, right? That's the like scale of problem this is for Portugal. That year he publishes several articles about the disastrous conduct of the military during what had become a hopeless conflict. These articles began to spread among student protesters and earned him the attention of Salazar's pide, which is what the secret police is called now. He writes in an article for Politico. My mail was steamed open. My phone conversations were meticulously recorded and translated. A squad of eight goons tried to grab me on Happiness Square at my Associated Press office in Lisbon before I found refuge at the 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 local newspaper who excised 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 the market in Lisbon, right? Even if they have to be smuggled in. So people are still able to figure out how badly the overseas war is going. And unrest is just building and building as the PIDE is getting more and more violent to crack down on things. Duarte summarizes this crackdown in her article quote. On April 21, 1965, Maria Matos was arrested for activities against the security of the state. She was stripped naked and beaten by male and female agents. By the third day of torture, without sleeping, she began to have hallucinations. Spiders in the legs of a table, walls moving, and heard piercing screams of people being tortured. At the end of the episode, an agent started shooting pictures and a young male agent hummed a typical Portuguese Catholic song in honor of the Virgin mary, entitled on 13 May. The intention is clear to humiliate and taunt the victim, taking advantage of the religious connotations of the song to mock her for being a communist and an atheist. In 1973, another prisoner, Pedro Baptista, suffered the statue torture for a week and heard sounds of protest songs, serenades and fados outside the prison. At first he thought they were an action of solidarity because of his situation, but he later concluded that they were an Assemblage of pre recorded sounds. So their shoulders were shredded, Jack. 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. That like the revolution is gaining steam. And that's a play, right? Like there's not actually anything going on outside of the prison. And when people realize that, it kind of breaks them further. Even though the regime is weakening in.

[Jeff May]

This period, it's not cool that they did that. But that's a good move.

[Robert Evans]

It's a smart move. You know, it works for a little while, like all of this stuff, stuff. Now, one of Salazar's big calls in the late 60s is to ally with Rhodesia. He becomes like one of the few countries that will recognize the white supremacist regime there when it's fighting its losing war in order to maintain this white supremacist state. And they really allow Rhodesia to extend their time in power by giving them access to international markets. Rhodesia can sell goods to Mozambique and will export Rhodesian goods through Mozambique, which does extend the brutal colonial war in Rhodesia by a period of time. None of this though, is enough to stop the winds of change blowing through Africa, nor is it enough to stop the ravages of time from impacting Salazar. In 1968 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which may have happened when he fell from a chair or in the bath, right? Either way, he declines rapidly and he has to be put into a coma. Now naturally, if he's in a coma, he can't be the dictator anymore. So his subordinates take over and they stop managing.

[Jeff May]

I believe you've never seen the movie Dave.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Is that what Dave's about?

[Jeff May]

You got to get a Portuguese Sigourney Weaver in there and then you got to just find another guy that looks just like him.

[Robert Evans]

That's actually what they do. So this is very funny.

[Jeff May]

That's literally the plot of Dave.

[Robert Evans]

He comes out of his coma after a month and these guys who have been running things while he's been in the coma are like, he's too old, let's just lie. So they pretend he's still running the country and he gets to sign paperwork and give out orders and everyone's just like, this is definitely what's happening. You're too sick to leave, right? You're still in charge. Absolutely. And so for the last two years of his life, Salazar has no power, but he believes he's running the country because they're just pretending, right? While they're doing things for him.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

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.

[Jeff May]

Yeah. It's like a crazy guy in a Napoleon hat moving pieces across a map.

[Robert Evans]

While they're like, okay, Mozambique. We're still holding on to all of that. Really?

[Jeff May]

Well, that's like, a really funny thing to have happen in the age where, like, TV is around.

[Robert Evans]

He's like a reverse Weekend at Bernie's, where he's still alive technically, but. Yeah. So he continues to believe he's in charge until his death on July 27th of 1970. His successors try to hold things together, but the calamitous colonial wars had bred a cadre of leftist military officers who are really unhappy with how the government's working. And In April of 1974, they launched the mostly peaceful Carnation Revolution, which overthrows the regime and returns democracy to Portugal. And that's where, you know, there's more going on in Portuguese politics since then than just that. But, like, that's how the dictatorship ends, right? Yeah.

[Sophie From Mars]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Good stuff.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This is the guy who's. Yeah. Like, really bummed about that. And, you know, people will say it's part of why democracy is kind of able to, like, reform relatively easily and more successfully than a lot of areas in the wake of the dictatorship is he never completely eliminated all of the, like, trappings of democracy. So there were these institutions that continued to exist under him that it's just a matter of, like, letting them have actual power again.

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

No, no.

[Jeff May]

I know the Carnation Revolution's gonna be happening.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. That happened in 74. And, yeah, that is like an overthrowing, but it's, like, not. There's not like a fighting.

[Jeff May]

But if you're like, oh, can you believe he outplayed himself? It's like, I don't know, man. He just went into a coma.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he kind of won, unfortunately.

[Jeff May]

He just ended by being dead.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. He lives out his fucking days, right?

[Jeff May]

He fucking. He did it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he does. The only win you kind of get against him is he's aware the colonial empire is collapsing.

[Sophie From Mars]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie From Mars]

Right?

[Jeff May]

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

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they'll do just fine. But unfortunately, yeah, a bummer.

[Jeff May]

Thanks for the balanced budget.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Salazar.

[Jeff May]

Kind of a dick.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, kind of a dick. Not a nice man.

[Jeff May]

I'm going on a limb and say this guy may be a bit of a no good Nick.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe a douche. Yeah, maybe sucked, but pretty good at being a dictator. Unfortunately, on a technical level, again, he gets that Oscar.

[Jeff May]

Good for him.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Jeff May]

I have a lot of stuff, folks. I do really cool stuff. My name's Jeff May and Google Jeff May podcast if you want, but I have Jeff has cool [e-mail] jeffmay I have shows like Jeff has Cool Friends, Nerd and Nerd which end up going for free, but those both, you know, you get early access on censored episode. The whole the Patreon benefits.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Jeff May]

I also do a show called the Monthly Flow with Andrea 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 and like oh, that's neat. And people like that. And I do. And then I mail them out to my patrons because that's nice. I run a stand up comedy show the second Friday of every month at blast in the past on Magnolia in Burbank, California. So come check that out. And I'm on the socials.

[Robert Evans]

Check him out.

[Jeff May]

Hey there, Jeff Rowe. And variations of that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, excellent. Well, everybody, this has been behind the Bastards, a podcast that you've just listened to and now you'll listen to more of it, you know. Now you'll listen to more of it. Yeah, keep doing it. Keep listening and we'll keep telling you about guys who sucked. Sometimes in Portugal, sometimes in other places.

[Jeff May]

Usually there's a lady that sucks.

[Robert Evans]

Sucks. Succasionally. A lady. Yeah, we get ladies on this show every now and then.

[Jeff May]

A sucky lady every once in a while.

[Robert Evans]

A couple of them. A couple of them.

[Jeff May]

A Bathory showing up every once in a while.

[Robert Evans]

Women out there, you know, if you want to be on behind the Bastards, take over a country and kill hundreds of thousands of people. You know, create your own torture police.

[Jeff May]

You know, women have been strong. They're stronger than ever.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Jeff May]

You know, the initiative. Ladies, you gotta dictate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, just murder. Get people to inject bleach into their children. You know, you can do it. I believe in you. The podcast's over. No, I was with you.

[Jamie Rubin]

But no.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Danil]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

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[Christiane Amanpour]

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[Jamie Rubin]

And I'm Jamie Rubin, a former advisor to Bob both Presidents Clinton and Biden.

[Christiane Amanpour]

We were married for 20 years and divorced for seven. Now we've joined forces on the X Files to make sense of how we ended up with no world order. Listen to Christiana Manpour presents the X files on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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