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:
[1] Afinal qual é
a função social do capitalismo?
[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
[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
[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
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário