quinta-feira, 10 de outubro de 2019

Patriotic stupidity and globalization (2)



This text concludes the recently released:

Predatory Capitalism and Patriotic Stupidity (1)


SUMMARY

3 – Globalization exists and will not turn back
4 – How to clearly see, today, patriotism
5 – Nationalism is a self-interested invention. Heretical notes on the Portuguese case


Patriotic  stupidity and globalization  (2)


3 – Globalization exists and will not turn back

The historical process of globalization has accelerated brutally in recent decades and constitutes an “einbahnstrasse” (one-way street) which fits in with human nature, prone to the exchange of goods, experiences, cultures, to satisfy its innate curiosity, its insatiability for knowledge. Progressive thinking that regards labour as the base element of production and workers as the agent of true social transformation has always been internationalist; it has always defended the unity of the workers of the planet, regardless of differences of cultures, creeds and habits. 

In recent decades, capitalism has moved from a phase of inter-imperialist rivalries, in which peoples were entangled and made enemies of one another, to an imperial phase, based on the effective unity of their institutions against the peoples as a whole, in their plurality. 

The sacrosanct and inescapable pursuit of profit maximization promoted, among other things:

  • A very powerful core of institutions with worldwide characteristics: The multinationals, the financial system, and mafia capital, that shape the political, economic, social, and ideological reality of Humanity.
  • They operate under a globalized logic, using huge and complex logistics networks for the exchange of goods, where millions of tons of raw materials, semi-finished goods, components, and finished goods circulate; and, in addition, they use technical platforms for the instantaneous exchange of information.
  • Following that logic, production is technically segmented, disintegrated and spread over various regions, countries or continents, depriving workers of the power for localized claims; its integration as a global process, generator of a final product, is also  a capitalist’s role.
  • If the movement of consumers (tourists) is liberalized and encouraged, the movement of workers is far from obeying the same pattern, since the bet on wage and labour differences justifies the existence of barriers (borders) and the consequent relative price reduction of labour.
  • The technical process, made more complex by the incessant incorporation of technologies, promotes strong productivity growth, and this has only been possible with a marked increase in the workers’ skills; however, this is antagonistic to the leveling down of the remuneration and leads to widening inequalities in income distribution.
  • This technical process is accompanied by the extension of the range of competences to be shared among many workers, the dematerialization of the information leading to a decision; and therefore it is characterized by the collective and integrated, networked, nature of the decision process.
  • Given the collective capacity of workers to ensure the entire production process and the decisions inherent to it, it is unnatural that the integration of production remains dependent on the capitalist; the workers’ groups, through the effective control of the productive process, render the existence of the bosses and the capitalists technically useless, and the way is open for the collectivization of the means of production and for self-management   [1].
  • The change of corporate objectives into financial ones, their reliance on banks and speculation, is a form of monetary wealth creation that does not correspond to wealth creation through labour. On the other hand, it made trivial the existence of corporate dismantling, unemployment, wage breaks, unpaid work, precariousness, the commodification of human life itself; its gluttony drags even large countries to ruin.
  • Politically, neoliberal ideology is in practice assumed by parties within the state apparatus itself, manipulating anti-democratic or formally democratic political organization systems and in promiscuous connection with media groups; the latter assuming a fundamental role in promoting the ideology convenient for the continuity of the capitalist system.
  • A brutal aggravation of the ecological footprint, resulting from the ideology of infinite growth fostered by a consumerism made insatiable by the advertising machine, and which generates imbalances throughout the life chain on the planet, triggered by the interference of major pharmaceutical companies, food goods’ “traders”, and seed monopolists.
  • Capitalist management needs the constant dynamic of competition between regional, national and international entities and the inequalities resulting therein, promoting misery, migration and war.
Capital management requires the construction of large territorial spaces, where goods and capital circulate without barriers and hence the existence of global institutions, in the international (IMF, WTO…) or supranational (EU, NAFTA, NATO, ECB…) format, for the regulation or deregulation of the capitalists’ actions.

Nevertheless, nations remain important for the overall management of the system as a means of segmentation, division and cantonment of peoples and workers; and as a material basis for fostering an ideology suited to the maintenance of these divisions – nationalism and patriotism, often spiced with religious, ethnic or cultural factors. And the national structures of political and economic power coexist today quite well with their insertion into supranational structures and the partial guardianship of international institutions within the hierarchy of nations.

It can be said that nationalism is the ideology, the rational, structuring element, which aims to differentiate and unify a people and patriotism is an irrational, affective element, the feeling of national belonging, especially through its external symbols, the king / president, the anthem and the flag. The first is an instrument of global politics, the second an instrument for rallying and emotionally snatching crowds, usually as patriotic as they are ignorant; both tend to behave by excluding the “other”, the non-national.

The nation was invented as a form of social organization associated with a particular matrix of economic relations and, therefore, it inherently brings the need for a regulator of these relations – the State – within a clear territorial delimitation of action, where it is given the monopoly of issuing laws and the power of coercively enforcing them through the use of the heavy arm of courts, police and the military.

This intertwining between nation, economic relations matrix, and the state, constituted the triangle of foundation for capitalism and bourgeois power, in antagonism with territories unified around a royal figure with absolute power, sustained by a landlords-acolytes caste that held legal control over the huge masses of miserable peasants, all of those characteristic of pre-capitalist times. This potential, and available, labour was absolutely necessary for the capitalist manufactures, to fuel the colonial trade. Without prejudice to the democratic ideas of many theorists of the XVIII century, the truth is that the liberation of the peasants from the nobles and the clergy, with its transference to the cities, coincided with a new bondage, at the hands of the capitalists.

·       And from there onwards it came to be considered, in a sort of "end of history", that people must be organized into nations, the idea even existing, in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, that to every people should correspond a nation state… provided it would exist in the territories of rival powers. The civilized England advocated the birth of nations in Austro-Hungarian and Turkish territories but it brutally crushed the Irish. And as for the colonized peoples they were not granted a dignity beyond their identification as tribes of savages.

·       Following the same logic of “end of history” the consolidating capitalist economic relations were taken as the supreme state of civilization, once the feudal archaism, the power of the nobility and the religious obscurantism, namely Papist, were overcome. And even today, even in its rotten neoliberal order, capitalism and its beneficiaries and defenders – bankers, speculators, bosses, mandarins, menial penmen, military and academics – still do not want to admit the winds of change to a new paradigm of economic organization based on collective ownership, self- management and direct democracy.

·      The third element of the above mentioned triangle is the state and its inherent political organization. In the eighteenth century, the bourgeois and small landowners considered the natural order of things to be that power and political representation would outright push aside slaves and the proletariat, considered be brutalized, illiterate and without property to manage. Also removed were the women who, in bourgeois romanticism, should be loving wives, birthing women, home fairies and obedient to their husbands; and they were no longer soulless, eternally defiled by original sin, yet were very useful for work and fornication, even if the legitimacy of the sexual act was restricted to the necessity of human reproduction.

·       More essential than the issues of representation in government administration, the question is whether a state with powers over and above the individuals is needed, with all the familiar experience of its private appropriation by sectarian and mafia groups, with a real power higher that of people not invested with that power. As the state has been taking on a larger role in societies – national and supranational States – and is increasingly revealing more anti-democratic and authoritarian contours, it is necessary to ask whether the establishment of Orwell's utopia is desirable. Given that the modern state was born and has been growing in a stifling form in the shade, for the profit and by necessity of capitalism itself, and is providing abundant proof of its inability to foster social welfare and showing a fascistic and genocidal bent, the question is intuitive: should or can the modern state survive the overcoming of nations and capitalism?

The first case of happy application of the link between nation, state, and capitalism in the late eighteenth century was the creation of the United States. American settlers, on a collision course with English suzerainty, adopted an original form of social organization detached from a king-church leader and founded a republic; This in turn came to generate a power based on a new aristocracy, that of money, ruler of a fundamental text with an almost biblical immutability. This aristocracy was able to invent a system of lasting representation (of that aristocracy), unchanging as it is convenient to the business world, which accelerated an unstoppable capitalist growth that lasted about two centuries. The systematic recourse to war in the name of "national interest", which has behind it the moralistic perversion of being gods’ elected people, really is a centerpiece of its temporary success. 

Immediately after the American independence came the French Revolution, whose radicalism was the matrix of the subsequent establishment of bourgeois powers in Europe and the basis for the very overcoming of the latter, with the ideas of emancipation of the working classes, of anarchist or Marxist penchant, of the dispossession of the bourgeoisie and extirpation of capitalism.

The powers of those nations constituted in the image of the European or American model since the eighteenth century, while being unable to hide the history of the peoples prior to their constitution as Nation-states, tend to establish a continuity between past times and later reality, in order to establish their legitimacy and justify the application of the rigors of the law on recalcitrant heads.

In the case of the USA, the Indian tribes were decimated and the survivors cantoned in reserves, and, attempts at integrating that past, the remains of the Indian civilizations, into the history of the country, could be seen much later, in a kind of logic of folklore for tourist consumption. In France, the erasure of the feudal past and the dominance of the nobility were accomplished by the total administrative restructuring of the territory and the elimination of the regional designations related to that past. In contrast, Vercingetorix is praised and the fictional Asterix is created to underline the resistance of the ancestors to the invader; while simultaneously trying to forget the lack of "patriotism" of the fascist collaborationists with the Nazis, Pétain and his followers.

In Latin America, European or mixed-race oligarchies gained independence from Spain, keeping the often-majority Indian populations still marginalized today, as in Chiapas or, as in the case of the Mapuche people. However, they did not fail to claim Aztec, Mayan or Inca grandeur as national deeds, to justify their national unity on more or less contingent borders.

And in Africa, because nations there have a more recent creation, the obvious cases of their artificiality occur at each corner of the map. Ghana took its name from a state that existed thousands of miles to the northwest and ten centuries ago; the Nigerian federation links the remains of the Sokoto caliphate to the north with the forest peoples of the south; the recent partition of Sudan only corroborates an ancestral separation between the peoples, united by the English occupation; and Congo is presented as a state without any unity other than being heir to the lands entrusted to the king of the Belgians in the late nineteenth century.

More examples of the artificiality of nation-states and their respective apparatuses, as well as of their insertion in the objectives of capital, which is now globalized and national only in subsidiary way, could be given. Later on, the process of construction of the Portuguese nation-state will be very briefly looked upon.

4 – How to clearly see, today, patriotism

The intention of this whole set of notes is to explain that nationalism and, even less, patriotism are not an inherent to the human species but a historical element related to the specific social upbringing immanent from the capitalist production relations. And that in today’s context all the material and objective conditions for its abandonment, as summarized above, are found.

The extirpation of capitalism cannot be carried out exclusively in one country. Not only because of the dangers of bastardization, as those that were found in the former Soviet Union (among other cases), but mainly because capitalism is a global, imperial and invasive system of all territorial areas, social relations, that even defiles the way we think and act.

Today, nations have a much smaller autonomy than before, especially if they are small and poor, with pseudo-Democratic regimes, greedy and incapable employers, as well as politically and materially corrupt “mandarin classes”. What exists is a dense articulation of workers’ activity in all countries that promotes a total interdependence among all of them.

Small countries like Portugal, having been for several decades in a cycle of gradual insertion into a wide network of states where the decision is remote, within a London-Berlin-Milan triangle, do not have the human and political dimension to get rid of, in isolation, the tightening from the financial capital and the “troika”. And, not having the size, they hardly have the capacity.

This external pressure is managed, in-house, by the class of “mandarins” at the present time locally led by Cavaco and the PPC[2] rattle-hammerers, and then redirected to focus on the crowd, seeking to ensure survival conditions for employers; despite it being known that some sectors, such as construction, that have for many years been blown oversize by the banks' easy credit policy, will have to shrink quite a bit. Within the parochial scenario there is, therefore, a struggle between the employers that try to pass on its difficulties to the labour world, and the multitude, which tries to resist, as it can, to this assault.

It is obvious that this resistance may be much bigger than the present one, with the decisive efforts and generalized self-organization of activist networks, flexibly articulated, with mass actions and civil disobedience, able even to drag from their lethargy many of those comfortably lying in the shadows of the institutional left’s leafy tree and of the labour unions.

One form of resistance, interesting but limited, comprises the modes of productive cooperation, particularly in the collective exploitation of farm gardens, defensive ways for people to find alternatives to the income loss resulting from unemployment and fiscal robbery. Evidently, from an economy point economic view, these initiatives have not caused major concerns to the capitalists and their governmental foremen. Politically, however, these initiatives are very relevant because they generate practical demonstrations of self-management, of collective production, of absence of bosses or differentiations among workers, full proof of the bosses’ uselessness. They are practical examples of a post-capitalist organization.

If some perverts keep stored in two places on the planet the only colonies of smallpox virus, capitalism will have to be preserved only in history books, in the memory, associated with theft, suffering and war. This cannot be accomplished without effort, without sacrifice, or with pious spirits of complacency.

The insistence on the patriotic key means implicitly that we, workers, precarious, unemployed, pensioners, must unite with the Luso[3] capitalists against the anonymous bankers that can just as easily be Germans, Americans, or Portuguese. And, being tightly united with our capitalist compatriots, does it mean we guarantee that they will not sack us? That they will not avoid depositing with the social security that part of our salary that pays for our parents' retirement? And are we sure that they will sell their high-end cars so that VAT does not increase for the essential goods we consume? And will they invest here what they have accumulated in off-shores, and create jobs, or will they rather prefer to use that money in speculation that will even be against the interests of the Portuguese state that supplies them with EU funds? Who pays for those damages?

No one will believe the examples we gave. However, this is the content hidden in the logic of the sacrifices for “all”, of the “we have to produce more”, in the patriotic litany, in the non-inclusion of those assaulted in Portugal, in the common destiny of the world crowd; It is a subliminal discourse of divide and rule.

In fact, producing more today comes not at the expense of more employment, but from increased work, especially of the unpaid kind, by those who still have it. Today, speaking about the increase of the “national” production without changing the correlation of forces between labour and capital is to bet on the social model and economic paradigm that has led a substantial part of the humans to the current disaster. It is a conservative proposal for the perpetuation of capitalism and its revitalization. It is a proposal that conceals that the same state that imposes cuts on wages and to the Christmas allowance, is the one that will promote an easier sacking, reduce IRS deductions and increase taxes, and guarantee to the Portuguese banks, in the first minute after the rating is cut, its support, help, and financing.

It's too tragic to be comic. It feeds the passive state of the general multitude and highlights the enormous responsibilities of the unions and the “parliamentable”[4] left that pose themselves as the omniscient leaders of the popular masses within the ongoing return-to-fascism project. Any constraining of the struggle to the national framework is a way of leading it into a dead end that fuels discouragement and hopelessness.

When a company or business is struggling financially its owners have several options before them: close it down, capitalize it with their own or someone else's funds, or simply sell it for the best price. When it comes to a bank, the mandarins' subordination relations with the bankers cause the transfer of the problem to the state and, in a collateral turn, the coup falls upon the crowd which is completely strange to the difficulties of the usurers. The Mandarin class is the exception agent that turns the bankers' difficulties into a "national" problem. This is what happened with BPN[5], where the state intervention removed from any responsibility the less than commendable SLN[6] owners.

That intervention really is the image of the Portuguese mandarins and their criminal behavior. Nationalization was not carried out in order not to undermine the whole Portuguese banking system, as the Socrates' government affirmed – by order of the major bankers we add – although BPN’s weight on the banking sector is small. They poignantly pointed out the need to avoid the unemployment of many workers. After burying in it € 4,500 million of the public purse, the government now prays for an Angolan bank to deign to offer alms in the amount of € 70.6 million for BPN. And to make matters worse, the famous Moody’s grades several Lusitanian banks at waste level, certainly not by the contagion of the objective bankruptcy of BPN, which had been known for three years, but because of their own inadequacies.

And that happens on the same day a neoliberal bureaucrat with the ministerial hat, discloses another assault on the income of much of the population. Those whose situation does not allow them to pay their home installment to the bank, who have to choose between buying their medicines and a bowl of soup, can they ask Cavaco, Passos or Gaspar[7] for the same prompt financial support from the state? Of course not, since they and the readers are not on the same side, are not in the same "homeland".

Even within a logic of collective sacrifice, by "all", it would be arguable that the effort should be proportional to each person’s income and, therefore, included in a redistribution of wealth, given that Portugal has one of the most unequal societies in Europe. None of this has been happening, quite the contrary.

Benefiting from the relative social apathy, the ineffectiveness of the institutional left and the unions, the Portuguese capitalism, faithful interpreter of the neoliberal catechism, transfers the costs of the State and the banks financial imbalance to the 95.1% of the population of 15 years of age and older who do not live from interest, profits or rents[8]. All of this reveals that national solidarity is a fiction and that, contrary to the laws of the sea, the captain is the first to abandon the drifting ship after plundering the sailors.

In practical terms, it is necessary to consider clearly and as a priority the construction of a network of movements, articulated, with exchange of experiences and mutual help. The internationalism of the multitude, the robbed and offended, forgotten for many decades is the order of the day and clearly resurfaces in the mass movements and protests in Europe and beyond. The internationalism of the multitude must be the answer to the various forums in which the capitalists, their states and their parties, which even use the name "socialist international", are articulated to a group of mafia gangs. On the other hand, elitist and detached from the multitude, ideas such as the European Left Party do not respond in the least to the longings of the peoples attacked by the neoliberal drift of capitalism, which, by the way, is unaware of their existence .

The greatest likelihood of success and social transformation will come within the framework of coordinated action among the multitude of EU countries in the process of being crushed by the neoliberal compressor, notably from an articulation between all Iberian peoples. We even believe that a continued articulation between the Iberian peoples would be enough to bring down the machine that supplies bankers at the expense of the sovereign debts.

5 – Nationalism is a self-interested invention. Heretical notes on the Portuguese case

When nations were invented in the eighteenth century, nationalism and patriotism were created as symbiotic products. The latter has been used as a painkiller to be used when having pain and to be kept in the closet when enjoying good health; but, as is well known, the painkiller aims to allow forgetting the ills’ effects not to overcome their causes.

At school – and this is not unique to the western Lusitanian beach – the program attempts to trace back the love of the homeland to ancient times. As with every nation, in Portugal there is a tentative to fuse in an inescapable continuum the social organization before and after the actual creation of the nation, when the country ceased to be a land owned by a family. This continuum is intended to smooth out the differences between territories belonging to a dignitary called the king, with the power to cede at times of marital alliances or even through sale, on the one hand, and the nation-states, in which residents are assigned a nationality, on the other.

In Portugal, the power invented one Viriato[9] to demonstrate that there was already a strong sense of independence, of national identity, among the shepherds of Serra da Estrela, many centuries before an adolescent’s[10] rebellion against his mother in the mid-twelfth century. Interestingly, during this interval of a millennium there is nothing on the record regarding emancipation revolts against the Romans, the Sueva or Visigothic monarchies, and no fierce defense against the Saracen infidels is known. The earliest textbooks hardly mentioned the Visigothic, Suevo, or, even less, the Muslim kingdoms; those were subjects of history only because they were enemies of the hardworking Christian princes in the context of such a "reconquer." There is a tendency towards the historical study of nations, and much smaller one for the study of the peoples or the territories where the nations were lodged.

In the mid-twelfth century, the feudal lords of Entre Douro and Minho did not like the vassalage with which they were bound to their Galician counterparts, by the imposition of the king of Leon, the supreme overlord of both groups. After much fighting and a papal recognition in return for the delivery of gold, the kingdom of Portugal was constituted, whose differentiation from Galicia was nil, except for the conflict between the barons on both sides of the Minho river. The subsequent conquest of the territories to the south, which culminated with the annexation of the Algarve in mid-thirteenth century and the integration of Lisbon as Portugal’s military defense anchor, underpinned the existence of the Portuguese monarchy, furthermore lacking powerful nobility as existed in the Europe from across the Pyrenees. As is well known, even after nine centuries, the border between Portugal and the future Spanish state does not separate territories that are geographically, economically, demographically, and sociologically distinct; it is merely a demarcation resulting from the conflicts between landlords of the medieval era.

During the Portuguese dynastic crisis of 1383/85, the Portuguese land landlords were divided between the rightful supporters of King Fernando's daughter and her husband, the king of Castile and the others (the minority) in alliance with the merchants and artisans of Lisbon, the only place that, in fact, counted in strategic terms for the expansionism of the Castilian lords. Lisbon would not have resisted the siege (1384) had it not been for General Pest's intervention among the Castilian hosts who, decimated, returned to their lands. Nuno Álvares Pereira's military capabilities in conquering the castles of Castile's allies and the contingent of 600 experienced English soldiers finally solved the issue without any patriotic clamor from the huge working population in the camps, indifferent to who reigned in Lisbon, provided they were not bothered with tributes and warfare destruction. It is evident that the humble population benefited nothing from the reorganization of the nobility, the redistribution of landlords, the creation of a great potentate – the house of Bragança – and the multipronged Order of Christ, linked to the monarchy and which would finance the colonial expansion of the XV century. Only the flies had changed, and we know that, in the northern frontier of Trás-os-Montes, people moved to one or the other side of what, to them, was not a border, always according to the amount of taxes to be paid, or, if you prefer, the flies’ hum.

In 1580, after a new dynastic crisis, the Iberian unification happened because Portugal was inherited by Philip II of Spain, after the weak threat of an aspirant like Antonio, the prior of Crato, was dominated. The fact that the seat of power was in Madrid or Lisbon and the king's territorial origin did not prevent most of Portugal’s residents from sleeping and, as such, no nationalist contestation happened for a period of sixty years.

In 1640 the difficulties the Spanish empire was facing against English and Dutch were part of its decline. In this context, the other European dynastic houses were assaulting the king of Spain’s heritage, in which the Portuguese colonies were also located. The king of Spain and Portugal, with insufficient resources to cope with these difficulties, was particularly disliked by the peripheral Portuguese ruling classes who felt they could maintain the colonies if they were outside the protection of the Spanish royal house. The tax increase in Portugal as a result of the State’s financial problems (or the crown’s if you wish) led to popular uprising in Porto and Évora, but this was an economic fight which was exploited by the nobility and the bourgeoisie to get popular support against Spain.

This was followed by a long period based on a clear English protectorate, convenient for England which thus kept Iberia divided, satisfying their imperial interests, and therefore felt as essential the survival of a subsidiary monarchy. Methuen's treaty seals this economic subordination while the crown misspent Brazil's gold and diamonds in splendid works – the Mafra Convent and the Church of Saint Roque – hired Domenico Scarlatti to entertain the king, while the people of Lisbon had to organize a contribution (“crowdfunding”) to get the Free Waters aqueduct built, in order to have water in abundance and with quality.

It is England that draws Portugal into the Napoleonic wars and it is in what follows that the bourgeois revolutions for the establishment of political liberalism develop in the Peninsula, as well as popular uprisings against theft and violence carried out by French occupants. These revolts will be prolonged in the following decades, in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the evident centre stage positioning of the popular classes, as in the Patuleia case, causing the English military intervention to impose the, then constitutional, law and order.

Still in the late nineteenth century, a few decades before the exacerbated patriotism of the First Republic took revenge in 1910 of a Saxe Coburg and Braganza king of Portugal and the Algarves… had the opportunity to observe, in practice, the patriotism of Portugal’s residents. One day when the royal figure was sailing somewhere off the north coast of Portugal, the crew of a fishing vessel was asked if they were Portuguese or Spanish. The fishermen readily answered “we are from Póvoa de Varzim”[11]. To them, of course, what counted was the place of their roots, their families, their work, all else being meaningless abstractions. But, since the History we are told is the narrative of the rulers and the powerful…

In the late nineteenth century, the European powers, namely England and Germany, saw on the map of Africa vast territories controlled or wanted by a Portuguese bourgeoisie that did not know what to do with them; and they imposed their will, seizing the areas between Angola and Mozambique, included in the famous pink map, in the face of the Portuguese bourgeoisie’s protest chorus, which the Republicans took advantage of to incriminate the monarchy, which was obviously incapable of opposing English wishes. The deep country, illiterate and living poorly on the countryside, does not seem to have accompanied this patriotic vibe which was located somewhere, far away.

The First Republic explored nationalistic and patriotic ideas, notably when it forced to go to Flanders – and to defend colonial rights – thousands of young men, poorly dressed, equipped, or armed, who left their villages to experience the wonders of chemical warfare. At the same time, and within the ambit of meritorious action in education, the regime instilled, starting with the school, the idea of ​​the homeland, the deeds of the ancestors, the “aljubarrotas”[12], but gave much less relief to the role of the homeland in the ignoble slave trade .

Salazar took advantage of the patriotic wave to enclose Portugal in a logic of sacrifice in which "all" should participate in the aggrandizement of the beloved homeland; it also served to justify the perks granted to the armed forces that supported him on the throne. On the one hand, Italian and German nationalism was at its height and was in tow of Salazar's sympathies for Italian fascism, which he pointed to as an example; on the other hand, it helped the people to bear the load of low wages and lack of decent living conditions, to benefit the Portuguese capitalists not only for surviving against the competition but also for enriching them. Finally, the Catholic Church was helping to maintain the resignation of the God-fearing, amen. The pide[13] and an army, already by then filled with sitting generals, were watching over the collective security…

When the colonial wars began, a new patriotic vibe was spewed in the newspapers, radio and television: “Angola is ours” sang the FNAT choir. Of course, patriotism was in the chicken pen of the hundreds of thousands of people who had emigrated to seek a better life or to flee the war, and those who stood and growled against the regime were classed as anti-patriots, conspirators, in the payroll of international communism; the latter, if it were today, would be named by Moody's, the ogre pursuing the benevolent performance of the PPC and its banker friends.

Think not that, in those fascist blackness times, only those with the regime were patriots! Mário Soares[14], accepted Marcelo Caetano's orders to not set the colonial issue as a theme of the 1969 “elections”. And the Communist Paty defended a “national democratic revolution” while limiting its internationalism to the servile following of the positions of a nationalist and imperial power, the USSR. The homeland is not debatable and the homeland extended to the top of Ramelau[15], present on three continents!


20/7/2011

This and other texts in:


[2] PPC is the abbreviation of  Pedro Passos Coelho, the Portuguese primer that follows, point by point, the troika diktats
[3] Luso means Portuguese, a reference to the Lusitanians, a tribe that lived in the nowadays Portuguese territory, before the Roman conquest
[4] NT: Word play using “parliamentary” and “lamentable”. In the original “paralamentar” – literally “to be lamented” or lamentable – said of the behaviour of certain parliament members.
[5] BPN – Banco Português de Negócios, belonged to the mafia group that had Cavaco (President of Republic) as the leader. After the collapse the bank was nationalized in 2008 with millions of losses, included in the public deficit
[6] SLN was a group also related to Cavaco’s mafia
[7] Gaspar, minister of finance during mostly of troika intervention in Portugal
[9] Viriato is a mythical leader of the Lusitanian tribe fighting the Roman invaders. Near Salamanca and Valencia, in Spain there are also claims on the Viriato’s presence
[10] Reference to the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, died at 1185
[11] TN. Póvoa do Varzim was at the time a small fishing village in the Portuguese Atlantic north coast.
[12] NT: Aljubarrota was a decisive battle of the Portuguese dynastic crisis of 1383/85 (see above).
[13] NT: “pide”, acronym of “Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado”  (Internacional and State Defense Police) was a security agency, the secret police. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIDE
[14] Mário Soares, the founder of the Socialist Party, primer and minister in the seventies
[15] Ramelau is a mountain  in East Timor, a Portuguese colony at the time

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