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Oh, it's Behind the Bastard's a podcast that gets behind the bastards. You know what this is. You know what it means. We talk about bad people, the worst in all of history, and today.
Start this with a very tony soprano.
Oh oh is that a tony soprano? I never watched the Sopranos. Here to be angry at me about that is post Sophie licker Litman, my producer and Jeff May.
Haven't you had Matt Leeb on this show and yet you.
Still have not seen the Sopranos.
What's wrong with you?
That's an act of aggression.
Can you can you spend this weekend at least watching the book?
No, I'm sorry. I'm an Italian American. I was raised in the Sopranos, you know, like got mobbed up family.
You need this down the list?
All right?
All right, you need you.
We had to change our last name.
You need to watch the Sopranos this year. That is your goal for the first year of twenty twenty five. I'm disgusted with you right now.
It's okay.
I can use the Italian slurs. You can't, Sophie.
I'm horrified by your behavior.
I can use those slurs too. You can't tell you absolutely can.
I'm not Italian, but I know you're a but you were a boxer, so it counts. Uh yeah, Jeff, how are you doing, Jeff May.
I'm good. It's been it's been a while. It's been a while.
It's been a long while since I visited. The embargo is lifted, which is nice.
Yes, thank you.
After those crime I so sorry for saying all those really a horrible thing.
I don't even know what I was thinking that.
It's okay, it's okay. DEI is over. We can say those things. Oh finally, the woke mob they came for Jeff May. No, Jeff, you're one of our I mean you're you're my old friend from back in the day, by which I mean the time when I worked at Cracked uh and lived in Los Angeles. And you're also one of our favorite guests. And this is this is fun. You and I have both seen the movie Ghost Dog, featuring the magnificent Forest Whitaker American Samurai himself. You know
that's in the Criterion collection now. It should be, it should be. It's perfect.
It's a beautiful movie. I will say.
I have bonded over my love of Ghost Dog Wave Warrior with more than just you.
Yeah, it's an incredible film. I've been bringing up now that and Or's out and everybody's talking about Sager Aar, I'm like, you guys need a motherfucking see ghost Talk. Yeah, Like, if you like that, you need to see ghost Talk.
Yeah yeah you kind of do you should anyway, you should anyway.
In the Criterion closet, so like Mark Hamill could grab it on an Instagram reel or something, you don't know.
Yeah, it's perfect. So today we're talking about a dictator who was, unfortunately maybe the best at being a dictator on like a technical level, right, like if we're giving technical awards on the actual like craft of dictatoring.
So like the dictator oscars that they don't show on television.
Yeah yeah, yeah, the Dictator oscars that don't make because they're kind of boring, right like.
They did it like last night we had the Dictator Oscar.
Yeah, this is the Dictator Oscar for like, yes, set dressing or whatever. It goes to Antonio Crazy here. Yeah yeah, yeah, great, great audio editor we're talking about. Have you did you know that Portugal had a dictator at the same time that like Germany and Italy had dictators in Spain.
I mean I have to say yes because of my history degree and all that, but like you know, I forget shit.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Antonio Salazar was the dictator of Portugal from like the thirties up to the seventies. Right, So he is he has a very long run. It's a short yeah, yeah, like twice he's got he's like two, he's like more than two. He was like three Hitler's right, three almost four Hitlers.
Oh look at this guy, he's like four Hitlers.
Like he's like a four Hitler run. Yeah, exactly.
I gotta be honest, though he was did he did he up Hitler numbers? That's why he lasted?
Yeah, It's like I guess Hitler would be like the the bo Jackson of dictators. Like it's like it's like a very very bright burn. You don't mind me saying such a terrible way to describe that. No, but then a fizzle out after he had that hip injury.
Right, and Salazar has a hip injury in like sixty eight that takes him out. You know, Salzar just gets long, he's got the longevity, but he's in there a long time. He's like that guy who was with the Patriots.
Fuck, what's his name?
Everybody hates him, Tom Brady, Tom Brady Brady. Antonio Salazar is the Tom Brady of dictators.
Tom Brady is single handedly responsible for stopping a lot of domestic violence in New England. So I'm going to actually say, you know, if you really think about it, it's a garbage fan base full of terrible people.
It is. It is the Patriots the worst.
And when he came in, we were like, I don't know about okay, we love this guy.
He's keeping things safe.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to say that about Antonio Salazar, but he does have the staying power, right, and he's one of these guys. He gets called a fascist a lot, and there's an argument to be made for that. He gets called a fascist generally because you know, he comes up around the same time Hitler does, around the same time Franco does a little bit after Mussolini, and they're
all kind of simpatico for a while. So there's this this argument that like, well, Salazar was like a fascist dictator as well, and you can kind of debate that. But you know, I think if we want to put it in like Beatles terms, right, Hitler's the John Lennon of fascism and Mussolini's the George Harrison, and you know, they kind of clock out first, which leaves Franco as the ringo. And I think we've got to say that maybe Salazar is the Paul McCartney fascism.
I don't know. I mean, that's that's pretty good. Also, Europe was a vibe huh.
Yeah, yeah, they were not doing well right after that World War.
They were certainly going for it. You know, I got it, you gotta hand. They took big swings.
Yeah, you know, like, well, we're in our big swing period to day and we didn't even have a World War One over it, right, So who are we to judge?
We can judge a little, I mean, to be fair, we've had we've had we've had a few.
We've had a couple. Yeah, we've taken our swings. This is in our first set, so as we'll discuss. You know, there's a lot of debate as to whether or not you should call Salazara fascist. He certainly uses a lot of fascism tools like there's aspects of it that he utilized, and he has good relationships with all of the fascist powers during his days, he's going to intervene to help Franco win his civil war in Spain. But ideologically he's not someone who's like super on board, especially with all
the weird Hitler stuff. Like he's not a cult to personality guy. He's not a big ideology a fascism guy, Like he thinks that stuff's kind of weird, and he's above all, like an economics professor and a Catholic conservative who's just kind of like, I'm the only guy smart enough to run Portugal and all torture as many people as I have to do in order to keep the economy running, right, Like he has a balan. It's the budget, no matter who has to die. Kind of motherfucker.
I guess it really depends on like if fascism is decided on at the start of the journey, yeah, or just summed up at the end of the journey, right, like, yeah, I'm not doing a fascism and then at the end you're like kind of seems like you might have been Yeah, with him, it would be.
I think it looks at the start a lot like a fascism, and then at the end it's like, well, you were just kind of a garden variety dictator, like maybe, but you never did any of the weird cult to personality shit, like you were never like that kind of stuff was sort of absent.
But we'll talk about it.
At the end, we could kind of say, where do we want to where do we want to land on this motherfucker on a fash scale, Yeah, on the fash scale. But either way, he sucked, right, we're not debating that part of it.
So.
Antonio de Olivera Salazar was born on April twenty eighth, eighteen eighty nine, in a small house in the village of Vimiro. His parents were kind of odd ducks for their era. His father Antonio, married his mom in eighteen eighty one, when they were forty and thirty five. And this is a lot older than people tend to It's older that it's like pretty old for getting married now, like back in the eighteen eighties, the average lifespan in
Portugal for men is forty six point five years. Right now, that doesn't mean people died at forty seven, but it means that, you know, infant mortality was so high that those averages are low a lot. And this is still pretty weird for you to wait this long to get married. And it's also it's hard to conceive right when you're when both parties are over thirty five years old, it's relatively difficult, especially with eighteen eighties, you know, obstetrics technology.
The other thing that makes his mom and dad weird is that they can read, which is not normal for Portuguese peasants.
Were modern Americans?
If you're modern Americans, yes, thanks to chat GPT.
Yeah right, sorry, how we ruined education? Yeah?
Can we just say that the least surprising piece of news just dropped and that people that use chat GPT.
Or morons right right right, that it breaks their brains. That it's like atrophying you because you're not thinking about how to put words together.
Bad for you.
That story this week about the guy that proposed to his Ai girlfriend and then cried when she said yes.
And then it breaks out that he's got like his he's a human partner.
I don't think they're married, but they have a kid together, they have a child.
I just yeah, oh fuck, so that's not Salasar's parents, right, we're cooked.
Yeah.
All the other Portuguese peasants are using eighteen eighties chat GPT, which I guess is just being too busy to learn how to read. But his mom and dad know how to read now everyone else in their village, most of the people living in this village who are because these are again like all peasants, even though it's the eighteen eighties.
Outside of a couple of maybe aspects of modernity that have crept in, most of the people in these villages are living lives that like if you go back three or four hundred years, there's more in common than there is different, right, which we can't say about nobody, even like the poorest rural people in the US today do not live life that are similar to rural Americans in
the seventeen hundreds in a lot of ways. But that is kind of the case in Portugal in this period, a lot more so than it's going to be in any later period. His village does have kind of one thing going for it, which is that Vimiro, when he is kind of a little kid, is chosen to be the site of a railway station, right, which is going to ensure that while a lot of small rural towns
kind of die out as modernity comes to Portugal. Vermiro is going to continue to be like relevant, you know, because there's this this connection to the rest of.
The World's going to become the tombstone.
Yeah, it's it's a tombstone, a Portugal type situation.
It's going to be dressed like undertakers with big black mustaches and stuff. It's going to that's right, that's right.
And yeah, Doc Holliday is going to show up with fucking consumption. It's going to be incredible. Val Kilmer, Oh my god.
Oh my god, so good.
Yeah, yeah, especially if you've seen that movie Val, He's filmed as he was dying. Incredible stuff. Great movie. So his mom is kind of the Val Kilmer of Miro, and like Val Kilmer, she's a small business owner. I don't actually know if that's true a Val, but it's true of his mom.
He was rolling.
Yeah, she's doing great. She's going to become an entrepreneur. She's going to open like a tavern in this town with like some rooms to rent, and that's going to help the family rise up to what's effectively the Portuguese middle class. While Antonio Salazar is like a kid to an adolescent. Right, His family is going from we're kind of near the bottom rong to we're actually doing pretty well because there's this railway station picked for our town and my mom knows how to capitalize on it.
Right.
His mom gets the money to start this business because his dad also does okay for himself. He's an estate manager, which means you've got these rich families who have like generational wealth because their ancestors four hundred years ago plundered the New World and they have big estates, but they don't they're not going to take care. They don't want a garden, they don't want to farm, they don't want
to do anything with them. So they hire a guy like Antonio are Antonio's dad to take care of the properties while they're away being rich, hanging out in their other houses in Lisbon or whatever.
You know.
Hell yeah, man, capitalist feudalism.
Right, right, that's kind of what's going on here, and that's the world his parents inhabit, and that's the world Antonio kind of comes up in. Portugal is not a healthy country as Salazar is growing up. Right, if you remember the early period of colonialism, right after Columbus, you know, quote unquote discovers the New World. The two powers that are first like really expanding around the world and taking a lot of colonies and taking advantage of you know,
Europe beginning this colonialization process are Spain and Portugal. And Portugal is for a couple one hundred years a major world power. They have colonies all over the planet because they're just very early successful in the age of Sale, and they rapidly take a lot of colonies, which is, you know, Portugal is not a big country, so in very short order, their colonial possessions are dozens of times the size of the actual country itself. And this does
pretty well for them for a while. But like Spain, they kind of also burn out quickly, right like as the British Empire is starting to really pick up steam as king shit, Portugal's kind of the sick man of colonialism, or at least Portugal and Spain are both kind of the sick men of colonialism.
It's actually really funny because one of the three dates that I told my students they would have to know was fourteen ninety two, and it's I'm like, it's not for who you think, Yeah, like it's not Columbus, but it is his bosses. Because one of the reasons that they really flopped super hard was they basically were like, we're gonna make a Christo state, basically like an entirely and they kicked out all the all the Jews and the Muslims.
Oh yeah, yeah, And so that basically.
Means they kicked out their most educated and wealthy members of their society and we're just like, we'll do it normally.
Yeah, we'll figure this out. You kicked out the banks and the universities basically, and so they just started crumbling and they started building and then they were just they couldn't keep going. So these help. It's very funny.
Yeah, and there's a lot to say about like taking all of these you know, suddenly flooding their market with precious metals too, and like that does with the value of these things. Like there's a lot that goes on.
But Portugal is like not a wildly dissimilar story and that kind of by the time the seventeen eighteen hundreds are creeping around, things are starting to like look kind of shitty, even though they still have massive overseas possessions, which they're going to maintained until the middle late middle
of last century. So the fact that they've got all these colonial territories Portugal is going to come in a handy when Napoleon invades in eighteen oh seven and the royal family of Portugal has to flee to Brazil, which declares it's independence not long after this fact, So that's no longer going to be a case for Portugal, you know, kind of after this period, as is often the case with royal families, Portugal's royal family not good at ruling.
The Catholic Church, which held tremendous power, coveted its position as the sole provider of social services and the cultural power that that brought. Very similar to Spain, you get a lot of similar things with like basically Carlists, like people who believe in the Catholic Church is the soul, like legitimate sort of you know authority, you know, pushing against these kind of republican ideals in the eighteen hundreds nineteen hundreds, as modernity comes out.
I mean, it is funny how much plague beat the shit out of the Church. Oh yeah, after people came out, they're like, these guys weren't doing shit.
Yeah, Wow. It turns out they were wrong about a lot.
Turns out the pope in France. Yeah, surrounded himself in a wall of fire. That doesn't seem good.
We do that.
I've done that before. It's not the worst thing to do. But yeah, I mean it's cool, it's cool, It looks great.
It is cool.
Yeah. Also check out the movie, the new Paul Verhoven movie, Bernadotta or something like that. It's about this nun in Italy during the plague years. Fucking wild shit.
She becomes a robot cop.
Yeah, exactly, it is cool, classic Paul Verhoven movie. So, as a result, very little changes in Portugal and almost nothing gets better until the king is ousted during a civil war in the eighteen thirties. This is not going to last super long, but for a period of time there's this like liberal kind of party backed by Great Britain, and they win and they see some property in the church from the church and from the nobility, but they also don't do much to fix the larger issues the
country has, and most Portuguese people still can't read. The country has bent over under the weight of these Titanic debts that have been accrued to from generations of overspending and the country kind of continues to hobble along. Monarchists are able to get like a weak king you know, in there, and they quarrel with Republicans who are trying to support like a new electoral system that also isn't very sturdy. And it's into this kind of fucked up
and failing nation that Salazar grows up. Right, So this is also what's happening, is he's watching both this increasingly like sclerotic and ineffective, like royal family fail to hold power, and he's also watching these gasps of republicanism that aren't really fixing things either.
And we've never seen this in the background, right, dictator, Yeah, this has never a failing place and learn how to how to play certain people chords in order to get what they want.
Yeah, no, never before.
But yeah, nothing's working for him, except for he sees his parents like succeeding, right, because they're unusually educated and ambitious and they want more for their kids. His older sister,
Marta becomes a school teacher. His parents seem to have been the normal amount of strict for their era, but a biographer, Tom Gallagher notes that as the youngest child and only boy, Antonio Salazar was babied and quote received none of the punishments that his mother occasionally meet it out right, so he's kind of by the time he comes along, his sisters have sort of gotten all of the spankings, right, not an uncommon youngest kids story where yeah,
my parents were way bigger dix when I was a kid.
What happened. What you need, though, is you need that gap. You need a bigger gap between the siblings, the top sibling and the younger, the oldest thing, because if it's too close, you just get the beatings.
Any Yeah, you just get the beatings. But if it's long enough, your parents are tired, their arms don't work as well, especially when there's old as Antonio.
My brother and I were two years apart, so he would beat me and then I would I would get something there you go.
But then, like I know, people lay it on my little brother's fifteen years younger than me. It's like, well, that kid's not getting hit.
Yeah, you're not going to hit your fifteen years Yeah, then you're just beating a child, right, But we're all perfect, yeah, as opposed to kids beating each other the way God intended, so he's the favorite of the family, not just of his parents, but of his sisters too. His mom's going to become obsessed with setting him up for success. For his part, Antonio never seems to have sought the limelight.
He is a quiet kid. Gallagher's biographer posits that he was kind of overwhelmed by his mother's personality, but also kind of in awe of her capabilities, because she's just this very competent woman. She's, you know, raising her kids. She's helping to farm, you know, because they have to grow food for their own survival. And she's a small business owner right, and is kind of single handedly raising
the family's position in society. While he's not helping her at the family business or helping in the fields, young Antonio spends his time alone with his dog in the woods. He wouldn't have had a lot of free time by our standards, and much of his learning had to be self directed, right, because the Portuguese education system is not good. His parents kind of help him learn to read, and then he's on his own for a lot of his
early education. Outside of that, by the time he's ten, his mother had convinced his father that he's not getting enough attention or challenge in what education he is receiving. So he is enrolled in a seminary in the north of the country, right, And this is the normal story.
If you grow up in a very Catholic place in this time and you're a really smart kid, but your family's poor, basically your only option is will enroll you in seminary and they will teach you stuff on the expectation that you'll become a priest, right, which is like half the time they were like, psych, yeah, I'm not doing that, No, thank you.
I'm just kidding.
And then and then there's like nine months left that I guess I'll write all the books.
Then yeah, I guess I'll be the one who keeps remembering how to read for this town.
Time to illuminate some more fucking manuscripts. I guess. Great. I'm not tired of that at all.
So he is, as you state, it's one of those things where he's technically training to be a priest, but you don't have to. You're not like locked in and Salazar he's a good little Catholic boy, and he initially seems to have adopted this as an ambition for himself where he's like, well, yeah, I guess being a priest is the thing I'm going to do that's not going to last super long, and he's going to stop wanting
to be a priest. Probably we don't know this perfectly, but the likeliest reason why he stops wanting to be a priest is the normal reason young boys stop wanting to become priests started and oh he starts fucking right, he starts fucking you know, he's like, oh, you know what, being a priest might suck ass?
Actually, heaven sounds cool, but is busting and not? Is it is cool? Yeah? Cool? Is getting laid? Absolutely not.
I can give myself heaven whenever I want, right, right, right, as long as I'm able to.
Yeah, we have heaven at home.
Yeah, we've got heaven at home, or at least in my next door neighbor's house. So he meets a girl. He actually meets several girls. His first is you know, she's sixteen, so is he. And she'll remain Maria di Figurito. She'll remain a friend and a political advisor for the rest of their lives.
Right.
This kind of first girl that he hits it off with is going to be she'll be influential politically in Portugal while he's the ruler, because she'll send him letters about like how this is how this is working, so this is working, and he'll kind of continue to trust her. The second girl he falls for is Philismina the Olivera, and she's two years older than him. Right the two meet at a railway station and, according to some accounts, begin a love affair that is what primarily derail Salazar's
ambitions of priesthood. There's some dispute in this. Tom Gallagher argued that Salazar kind of keeps true to his vows for a while and then gives up the seminary later for another reason. But there are other arguments that I find really credible that it's probably a liaison with this girl, even though it takes a while that makes young Antonio realize, oh fuck, I'm not going to take a vow of celibacy.
Peter Booker, who's co founder of the Algarve History Association, writes an article about Salazar's alleged romantic history for Portugal Resident, and he noted Salazar was studying to be a priest at the time and attended the seminary, but that fact did not prevent him from beginning a love affair. She was a friend of Marta, one of Salazar's sisters, and during the young holidays, Phillismina would say at the Salazar family home, they exchanged in numeral letters. Philismina began to
have problems of conscience regarding her relationship with Salazar. She was a devout Catholic and did not want him to renounce the priesthood because of her Little did she know that not only was Salazar already thinking about abandoning his career, but he was also about to dump her. And this seems plausible, right, It's not just this girl, but it's in general. He's starting to get laid and he's like,
I don't need to stay with this lady. But also the priest's clearly not for me because I kind of like fooling around, right.
Okay, So we are sort of avoiding the five hundred pound gorilla in the room, which is that those vows have never mattered on the Catholic clergy. If you want to know how many popes had illegitimate children.
Oh man, google clearly all of them. Oh you can get up to pope and still be.
Fucking oh yeah, oh yes, So the norm is for popes to get laid, which is part of the problem, right, one of many, but yeah, it's it's uh, that's kind of what's happening with him.
But he's also like.
It's very important to note that this is the church and this is the steeple, right, open it up and fuck all the people.
Right, That's kind of where Salazar's got to take it, except for like, I don't even need the church, I don't need the steeple. I've just got to fuck I'm the people. I'm just gonna fucking become an economist. So he's a bookish Catholic boy, and he like, yeah, he starts figuring out, like this is not the future for me. So he leaves the seminary. In nineteen oh eight, this is a big year for Portugal. It's the same year King Carlos and the crown Frince Louis Philippe are assassinated
while they drive through Lisbon in an open coach. So this is like a daring. It's called the Lisbon regi Aside, and it's a very famous like moment in the early twentieth century, there's a lot going on behind this assassination. It gets blamed by some people. Tom Gallagher, who's kind of a more conservative guy, this biographer whose book I read on Salazar, blames it on anarchists. Much as I'd like to take credit or anarchists take credit for Killege King.
That's not really what's happening here. These guys are like radical Republicans, right, I don't mean in the modern term, I mean like people who support a.
Republican except the right public. Yeah, yeah, like I think we I mean, I know, we conflate them. But the difference between Republicans and Democrats and then liberal and conservative, like, yeah, it all depends on labeling, right.
And these guys are like radical, like we want to be able to vote and fuck having a royal family. Right, that's the kind of radicals they are as opposed to, like being radical in favor of the abolition of the state, which is more of an anarchist thing. That's not really what's going on with these guys. There's a lot else that's happening behind this region side, right, that kind of
helps inspire it. The Portuguese government has just conducted negotiations with great Britain over the extent of Portugal's African territory, and Portugal makes a lot of compromises and how much of Africa they're going to continue to hold, and this is seen as disastrous by many nationalists, and there's a lot of Republican nationalists who are like, well, the crown
just gave up a lot of our overseas empire. Another thing that's going on in the background is that, as is often the case with Portugal, they're terrified that Spain is going to invade, right, because if you look at a map, Spain is a lot of Iberia and Portugal is pretty small.
So how did they.
Avoid unification that in the late fourteen hundreds it's Granada, Nevada, Castile and Aragon. I mean Aragon Castille were obviously the marriage, but then they sucked in Navarre and Grenada.
Let's go get Portugal, man.
There's a period of time where they are occupied by Spain, right, but there's also like reasons of natural defensiveness, and just like the power of a Portuguese state in that period that Portugal, but the Portugal doesn't you know, wipe up obviously unified, but that is constantly a fear going on in the background, and it's one of those things. It's not really a thing in modern Portuguese politics, I don't think, but it's like a huge factor in everybody's thinking right now.
Is that, like Spain is right next to us, and they're much bigger, and they were going and they're goblin shit up, and there's this broader fear that like Portugal, we used to be great and we're being sidelined by greater powers because we've kind of slid into citizens. Right, we're old and we're tired, and we don't have the juice we used to have, and we're going to get eaten up entirely if we're not careful, right, Like, that's a major political factor in everything that's going on here anyway.
You know what else is a major political actor advertising.
And we're back.
So the Republican movement is starting to pick up steam in Portugal kind of in the period when the king is assassinated. Yeah, because the railways there's steam.
Now.
The king gets kind of politically active in politics, which makes things even more chaotic and inefficient because it's like it's not great, he's not good at it. The King's not really good at much. And the king who gets assassinated has appointed this guy to act as his minister, who's widely seen as like a dictatorial figure. And eventually two Republicans with rifles decide, like, enough of this bullshit,
We're going to take matters into our own hands. And yeah, these guys are kind of radical Republicans, and one of them has some history of anarchist sympathy. He's part of an anarcho syndicalist organization in his youth. But they're they're militant, like republican activists with rifles. One of them's in the art Army, and yeah, they shoot and kill the king and his heir, and the Lisbon Regiside becomes kind of
a seminal moment for right wing politics in Portugal. Salazar, who's a young man at this point, he's leaving the seminary this year. He's livid when he finds out what's happened.
Now he is starting to get political. At this point, he's been elected the president of his student body association, and in the spring of nineteen oh eight, he publishes a column attacking his fellow Catholics because it become so politically separated from the shocking violence in the capital that like, we Catholics need to get more political in order to save our country from this sort of radical republican sentiment
that's going to destroy like force us into anarchy. Salazar's thinking here is probably influenced by the writing of a far right propagandist from France named Charles Morris, who wrote for France's most popular proto fascist newspaper, Action Francais. Salazar's argument is that democracy cannot maintain order and separation of church and state as a calamity for stability in public order right, which is very much like taken from Marris's the stuff that Mars is writing in France at the time.
I would like to also add that Action Francis is my favorite rapper.
Yeah yeah, yeah, probably politically different than the original newspaper. These are the guys like Action Fransei and Mars are gonna have a big role in like the far right French coup attempt that's gonna happen kind of right before World War Two, Like they're kind of a major inciting factor to it. And these are the guys that Salas are. So that's part one of the reasons why people are like, oh, is this guy fascist? It is like he's definitely very influenced by some proto fascist thinkers.
Could you imagine de gaull Of trying to run France?
Oh my god, could you imagine? I mean, yeah, in the post war period. Share it doesn't go great.
Could you imagine de Gaulle. Uh, it's we got we like that. It's a history pun.
Yeah, it's a good history pun. It's also just his last name.
I'm sorry, Hey, I'm gonna go. I'm sorry about that, guys, I'm going to take off.
It's okay. We can forgive like one French pun. But that's all. No more so Salazar. He starts making some stabs at politics, right, you know, kind of in this post regis side period, but he's not fully committed to it. Part of this is that the wind is kind of blowing against the right wing, you know, after that king gets assassinated, the sort of left is looking like they've got the wind behind their sales. So he's like, I don't want to take a.
Big, big move. It's a pretty big move shooting the king and his son. Yeah, quite literally a coup.
Yeah, try it in your own monarchy triumph.
You know, a rifle, a couple of small pieces of lead.
Get you to the game, Yeah, get you right in really changes the ground. So he's like, I don't feel like this is a safe time to be like a far right Catholic activist, So I'm just going to take a teaching job and like lecture talking about the economy. He graduates from his second area vucation in nineteen ten, he opts to leave the church, and you know, one of the practical reasons behind this is that the church
is kind of losing power. So Salazar winds up attending the prestigious University of Cuimbra as a law student in October of nineteen ten, thanks to the financial support of a family that his dad works for. This is like the family his dad is, you know, taking care of their grounds, and Salazar tutors like the mistress of this wealthy family, like he tutors her kids in exchange for
financial support. So he teaches her kids to be less stupid, and they pay for him to go to this fancy college, this university, which is going to really change his life. It's going to give him an opportunity to become someone in politics. And this change in his life where he starts going to the school and his options start to open up companies. Another dramatic change in Portuguese government, because the Republicans revolt and they force the monarchy entirely out
of the country. Right, they'd killed the king and his heir, but you know, you've still got kind of a weak monarchy in there. And then there's a revolt a little while later, and now Portugal is just a straight up republic for a little while.
Right.
Salazar bides his time as the republic tries to consolidate his power, and he works towards an advanced degree. He gets into academic tutoring as a side business, and it proves to be very lucrative. Like he's teaching a lot of kids. He's making good money, and he's investing it, and he proves to be very good investing money. Right, He's just one of these guys that understands how to turn a dollar into a couple of dollars and then a couple of more dollars and so on and so forth.
I'm always weirdly jealous of those people. Yeah, Yeah, they're just really good at making money.
Yeah.
And also I'm just like yeah, but that must be like a if you care about money, that must be miserable.
Yeah, I mean, and he's not like a super happy person. It doesn't seem like he doesn't have outside of like constantly sleeping around and investing his money and writing economic treatises. That's pretty much his whole life at this point, and being really angry that the Catholic Church isn't more powerful. Those are his hobbies, right, I mean, some of those hobbies are cool.
Yeah. One of those hobbies is cool. One of those hobbies is just cool man.
Yeah, the other hobbies kind of lame.
Yeah. Then dudes rock and then sometimes dudes do not rock.
Yeah, And he's more on the dudes not rocking side of things. But he does accept for a while that like, I can't fight democracy right now, and the monarchy's too weak, so it's not really worth me fighting for. So he kind of pivots and he starts, you know, coming up
with his own theories about how to reform things. His attitude is that the republic is going to fail, and so he's trying to figure out like what systems should replace it, and he does a lot of reading on the encyclicals of Pope Leo the eighth, who had encouraged Catholic organization and power under a democratic system, right, which had Leo the eighth had been like a democracy probably here to stay. What we shouldn't fight to have like
kings under the Catholic Church anymore. We should organize instead to legislative power in democratic systems for Catholicism.
That was like a millennium afterwards, right, like Leo the eighth that if I recall, he's from like before one thousand, isn't he?
There's an anti pope named Pope Leo the eighth who was around the one thousands. But this Pope Leo the eighth that we're talking about was head of the Catholic Church from February eighteen seventy eight until nineteen oh three.
Oh oh, so recent.
It's complicated. There's another earlier Leo the eighth, you're right, who's around nine. Yeah, he's an anti pope from nine sixty three to nine sixty five who's election was debated.
Wasn't he the one that was like they were all excommunicating each other.
Yeah, yeah, he was during the anti pope period. But there's another Leo the Eighth who's the head of the and who's an official pope from like eighteen seventy eight to nineteen oh three, right man, yeah.
Pope's right, why would you take that name?
Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with papistry to give you a whole like why he just I had to take that kind of cursed name. But he's he's the pope who like writes an encyclical being like, we Catholics should just find a way to kind of make democracy work for Catholicism, right, we should organize and find ways to gain power in democracies.
You know.
That's kind of like one of the things he writes. And this has a really big impact on salas Ar. But no, good, good point. This is not that the pope from the nine sixties. Okay, that guy was debatably not the real pope. I didn't mean to derail the pod, but I'm just like, wait, I know it's always hard with the anti popes, Right, there's a lot of names where you're like wait a second, yeah, yeah, no, no.
And I'm sure you guys have talked about it before.
But just this idea that there was like at one point, like just a bunch of popees excommunicating and we.
Could get there again. That's my dream for Catholicism. Yeah, fuck it. Are you not happy with the current pope? Go to Avignon and have a new pope made, you know, I mean, I do like really fighting. Yeah, a Chicago it's nice to have a Chicago Pope, but I think we could get a Boston pope and really just have a battle of the accents, you.
Know, one hundred percent honest. We don't have a great track record.
We probably shouldn't have a Boston pope.
Cardinals have done some stuff. I mean, to be fair, most, if not all, cardinals have done some stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, very few clean cardinals out there, you know what.
I like the idea of a Boston pope though, because, like, that's the first hope that would be willing to fight you in a toll booth.
Yeah. I like that.
Let's just give it to Ben Affleck. See if he could take.
It so he can do a bad accent of his own town.
Yeah, Pope Affleck the first.
Let's let it happen. Yeah, Pope Benedick kid.
Yeah, so Salazar, Who's who's you know? Starting to accept like, okay, maybe we should find a way to organize under democracy. He joins a school association while he's in college, the Center for Christian Democracy, which when the Republicans had come to power they'd like banned for a couple of years, but ultimately allowed to reform in nineteen twelve. And it was for this group that Salazar gives his first public speech,
where he describes himself as a Christian democratic soldier. Two years later, he leads a delegation to Lisbon which protests an attempt to turn a local church building into a museum. His academic career flourishes around this time. He receives awards from his liberal and conservative teachers alike because his economic papers are, in their eyes, like so brilliant and well thought out. And he opens a consulting firm that gives out financial and legal advice to companies and whatnot that
are trying to figure out how to get by. And this very chaotic time in which the Portuguese economy is not doing well, and he's good enough at this per Tom Gallagher quote, he now had enough money to augment his wardrobe with elegant clothes. He attended soirees and receptions, and his circle of friends widened Catholics and conservatives predominated, but not all of them were from such backgrounds. So
he's making money, he's starting to enter high society. He's becoming a known man, and he's becoming a known like kind of firebrand right wing intellectual type. Right, he's a little bit of like a Jordan Peterson figure, if Jordan Peterson had been good at something. And he continues to work as a tutor, which seems to still have been his kind of bread and butter. He would later claimed tutoring did two things for me. It kept me in
the university and it kept me out of trouble. But this is not exactly true, right, he's like sleeping around. He is still fucking right, and he's kind of noteworthy as a figure in this period. Most of his earliest friends are women and girls, including sixteen year old Julia Parastrello, who's the daughter of his godmother and the wealthy benefactors of his family. Right, so this is the daughter of the family that's like paying for him to go to college, that like his dad, is employed by he.
Falls How old is this man? Again?
Very good point. She is sixteen and he is twenty three years old. So that's a bit of an age.
Gap, it is, and that's uncomfortable period for the.
Era's It's not like it wouldn't have been if he had have been from the same social strata as she, it wouldn't have been noticed in the era, right.
Yeah.
It's kind of one of those things where like you're looking back and you're like, you know what, Yeah, that's age appropriate for the time.
It would it wouldn't have been wild like people would if he'd been rich. If he'd been rich, it wouldn't have been weird. But because he's from a poor background, her parents are like absolutely not. And we look at the age gap and go like, oh, yeah, that's not inappropriate, but they're just being like, well, but his parents aren't rich, so this is an inappropriate match, right, that's the only real issue they have.
He's like, don't worry, Yeah, I'll take care of that.
It's sort of like the Doctor Pepper guy named doctor Pepper after the dad that said he'd never amount to anything.
That's that?
Is that the story of doctor Pepper. I it might be apocryphal, but I'm pretty sure it's. Doctor Pepper was the guy that wouldn't allow a dude to marry the creator wanted to marry the guy's daughter.
And he said, no, that sounds accurate as the for the official soda of Texas. At that, that sounds like the kind of cod man origin story.
I don't like that. The official soda of Texas is my favorite soda.
Oh it is, unfortunately, But let's turn to a more comfortable subject than Texas. This twenty three year old hitting on a teenager that much better. He decides to hit on her in the most appropriate manner for the time, which is he writes an article about how hot he
is for this girl in a Catholic magazine. He had contributed to this publication before, but he'd mostly written like serious articles about Catholicism and democracy and like scholarly studies about like how what the Catholic Church, what role it
should have in a modern society. And so he kind of changes up on his normal publication by writing a column that's just titled she, and in it he's describes it as like it's kind of written as a fictional piece, and he's writing as sort of like an anonymous author who's in love with a girl who lives in a wealthy manner, but is financially out of his league, and it's written in such a way that the subject of his affections is anonymized, and he can argue, like, this
is not a literally true article. It's like I'm I'm writing, you know.
It's like I'm a plagiarizing Lady in the tramp.
But it's it's it's very clear that like, oh, this is Salazar writing about a teenager that he's hot for. Right, that's too that's from a family that's too rich for him. And I can't imagine what must have been going through his head to make him write this thing, let alone, Like his editor is like, well, you mostly write about the pope, but yeah, this article about how you you've got a crush out a thirteen year old girl sounds great. Man,
let's uh thought she was sixteen? Wait or sixteen? Sorry, sorry, sixteen year old girl. He's like, yeah, why not, let's let's publish this fucker.
Yeah, I did.
I did need to clarify, specifically because I previously had gone on record and be it saying that wasn't that bad for the time.
No, no, no, this is it's sixteen and twenty three, Okay, So I don't I can't get into the head of this editor who's like, yeah, this sounds like a good
article for you to publish, Antonio. And I can't get into Antonio, who is like, yeah, this, this will clearly work for me, right and unfortunately for him, fortunately probably for that girl his the girl like her mom, who's again the patron of Salazar's family, she catches onto this like she reads this magazine because she is from a rich, conservative Catholic family, and she sees, Oh, this tutor we've hired to tutor our teenage daughter is writing an article
about how he's got a crush on a teenage girl who lives in a manner and who's much richer than him. I wonder if it's Antonio, we should probably start watching them, right, Like, we should keep an eye on these two. This does not sound good.
That seems pretty chills. Really, hey, should should we paying attention to this?
Yeah, we should probably keep an eye on what's happening with this kid and our daughter.
If a Facebook dad saw this, he'd be like, touch my family, and they'll be two hits, me hitting you and you hitting the ground.
But they don't have Facebook, so they're their only option is to like keep an eye on her homework. So they're like paying attention to the homework he's giving her. And Antonio gives Julia some suspicious homework, right, He tells her to write an essay on love. And so this this really gets their their guard up and they're like, okay, yeah, he's definitely hitting on our daughter. And then her mom
cut finds like she's there. They start monitoring Julia's male and they find a letter that Salisar sends Julia, which is to be blunt, very inappropriate, right, and the paristrella is again their primary problem is that he's poor and she's rich. And so after they catch this letter, they just make sure he's not going to be tutoring her anymore and he's never going to get any unobserved access
to their daughter again. Right, So they lock this down because she's supposed to marry a rich guy, right, That's that's their reasoning.
Yeah no, no, no, no no no no no no no no no no.
Yeah absolutely heard the song. Yeah. Now, one of Salazar's mentors in the church, who's like one of these fathers who's kind of taking this kid under his wing, finds out about this. I think Julia's mom comes to him and is like, you need to talk to this boy, and so he sits down with Salazar and they have like a literal come to Jesus moment where he's basically like, hey, you're one of the best minds that are The Catholic conservative movement has what the fuck are you doing pining
over a teenager in the goddamn newspaper? Are you out of your mind?
Right?
Like, this is not smart behavior? And this warning. Salazar never stops socializing with women and girls, right. He will continue to do that for most of the rest of his life, but he is going to get a lot more careful about it, and he's going to learn how to like hide this in a much better way than writing newspaper articles about his crushes. So he takes that warning. And you know what else our listeners should take is the advice of these products and services.
Take note of what we're about to say.
Yeah, yeah, take note, and you give some companies your credit card information. It never works out badly, no breaches, it's never happened.
And we're back. Ah.
So Salazar is kind of establishing himself as an intellectual. He's learning how to flirt sometimes even with adults. And while this is going on.
Yeah, if he had a nickname, can we call him the sexual intellectual?
Yeah, yeah, you could call him that. I'm going to for the rest of the show.
You shouldn't, but that's yeah, that's what he's doing, right, And the new Republican government of Portugal is kind of shitting the bed as he is coming up and becoming more prominent and learning how to kind of keep a lid on some of his proclivities. And part of why the Republican government shits the bed in this period is that World War One happens and Portugal does not have a dog in that fight, right, they shouldn't have. There
is no reason. You just look at the map. There's no fucking reason for Portugal to get involved in World War goddamn One.
Like we're gonna go swimming, Yeah, go swimming. You're live in Portugal, enjoy the beach. What is wrong with you?
Don't send soldiers to die in the Western Front, you know.
On some teenager to get wrapped up in barbed wire waiting to kill Kaiser. Get out of here. Come on, what are you doing? You got a couple of frisbees, some sketch balls, you know.
You have a there's a couple of there's a lot of smaller European countries like this that are like, you have no you have no reason to get involved, and they do and it goes badly for everyone who's like, well, maybe if we get involved in World War One, we can help tip things and we can get some shit
in the in the peace negotiations after. And the Republican government they largely get involved in World War One because they've got all these African colonies and they're worried that if there's like a negotiated peace, England might give away some of Portugal's African possessions to the Kaiser in exchange for like a better peace deal, and so we don't
really want to risk that. So we'll send some men off to die in the Western Front and fighting in Africa, and they wind up losing like ten thousand soldiers and just pointless battles. Right in World War one terms, they get off pretty light, Like, that's not a lot of guys to lose in World War One by the standards.
Also, ten thousand people, right.
It's still ten thousand people who absolutely didn't need to be involved in that stupid fucking war and it costs a shitload of money. And just the fact that they've gotten involved in this disastrous war and they don't get really shit in the piece. It rattles the new regime's public support. People are like, well, fuck, this Republican government doesn't seem a whole lot better than the one that it replaced, right, pointless wars, wasting money on stupid bullshit?
Did we just replace one set of assholes with another set of assholes? And sallazz pretty much mystery politics. Yeah, that's the world, right, It's like, yeah, which set of assholes? You know, maybe they suck a little less?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, It's like I wouldn't mind an asshole that's not trying to like destroy the lives of every person in the country.
Yeah, yeah, maybe we can get a slightly better asshole who's just.
Corrupt and incompetent.
And if we've got to throw some adrinochrome at him to keep it, let's do it.
Yeah. Keep the peace, you know.
Keep the peace and keep the adrenochrome flowing.
Sally Man, I got to try that stuff because.
It sounds it's good, it's great. You got to get it from the brain of somebody who's had it really harvested, you know before that.
Yeah, you don't want like the fake no no, no, true blood adrenochrome.
No, no, you want you want the really good ship.
From the source, directly from the source. That's right, that's right. This episode brought to you by ass.
Yeah, exactly, use a promo code.
Uh uh.
Now, I'm not going to make a Jeffrey Epstein joke here. What I am going to say is that Antonio Salazar, in this period when people are starting to get angry
at the Republic, he becomes a very popular lecturer. And he's also he's working as an economics professor right now, so he's lecturing about how fucked up the system is, how the right and the conservative Catholics need to come into power, and he's also writing studies on like wheat reform and the role of gold and finance, and he's repeatedly arguing Portugal's government is spending too much money, which it is. Like he's not wrong about his fundamental economic conclusions,
and his economic work is widely applauded. And in July of nineteen eighteen, he appears on the Color of Catholic illustrated as an up and coming thinker. Yeah, the swimsuit edition. He's naked, he's got one of those you know, Italian banana hammic.
Tasteful. Yeah, it's very tasteful, right, but you know they're like Portugal. You know, he's right there on the water, like it's natural. Yeah, yeah, the lighting's perfect. So by this point a new group of anti government rebels is ascendant. They're called the integralists, and these are members of the wealthier classes who had sought a break from the republic and returned to a more authoritarian government, if not a monarchy, you know. So they're like, we.
Probably can't go all the way back to the way things used to be, but we could. We should have a system where the rabble have less power, where like regular people have less ability to like influence the government. And a lot of folks in Portugal, especially in like the middle class and upper middle class, are more sympathetic to these aims because in the aftermath of the war,
Portugal is in chaos. The new government is running up tremendous debts, and even though they're on the winning side of the war, they're not spared the unrest that hits in places like Germany, there's an open civil war in the north of the country and a monarchist coup in nineteen nineteen that gets suppressed, and in that same year as there's this civil war in this coup, four different governments come and go and Lisbon right, this is like
a parliamentary system where if the government can't form a coalition, it gets dissolved, and so there's just constant turnover in chaos.
I like the idea that they attempted a coup in nineteen nineteen. It's like, which, where'd you get that idea? Guys?
Yeah, wow, no one else was doing coups in nineteen nineteen Creative Portugal.
Wow, i'ly going for it. Yeah.
So the same year that that's all going on, nineteen nineteen, Salazar gets suspended from his job for spreading monarchist propaganda, although he argues in court that he's not political, he has only involvement in politics as voting, and he publishes an article defending himself widely in which he argues, I am convinced that politics alone can never solve the great problems that demand solution, and that it is a grave mistake to expect everything from their evolution or from an
arbitrary departure from their normal course. I'm sure that the solution is to be found more in each one of us than in the political color of a ministry. So far as I can, I try to make my students men men in the best sense of the word, and good Portuguese of the type which Portugal needs to make her great.
Right now, let me tell you about this girl I love. Yeah.
Now, let me tell you about this teenager that I got the huts for.
Yeah. Now.
The reality is that Salazar is very political, right He gets his PhD after the war ends, and he is actively as a teacher trying to cultivate this new generation of conservative activists. He helps found the Catholic Center Party and in nineteen twenty one he's one of three of
their members to be elected to the Parliament. He actually only gets to go to work at the Parliament for two days, and he hates it, right because there's these all these constant debates over what to do, and he can't just tell people, this is what you're going to do to fix the economy, this is what we're going to do to get things on the right course. He gets really angry, and he's like, I don't want to
do this fucking job. Even though he gets elected to several important financial committees, but he starts whining to his mentors and the Catholic clergy and the university that he doesn't want to do this job a campaigned to get it's too hard, he's stuck.
In the mud.
And his mentors are like, but you're in power. You have a chance to put your theory into practice, and they accuse him of not taking the work seriously.
I would like to add that this is the most relatable man we have ever covered on this show, right right.
And just the terms like, yeah, it sucks to be in politics.
Yeah, it's a guy that wanted a job. And then he's immediately like I immediately regret wanting this job. My god, what have this job you wanted? Yeah? And I fucking hate it.
Yeah, it's terrible. And he gets really lucky that in October, like he only ever does like two days actually doing this job in parliament, and in October the Conservative government and coalition collapses because left wing militants assassinate the Prime Minister and a number of their other con served with political enemies. So he's like, well, I guess I'm not going to continue trying to be in the government seems dangerous. Right now, I'm going to go back to being a teacher.
And all this violence, which isn't limited to the assassinations or to the left, there's just a lot of political violence, largely in Lisbon. And you know, it's happening as they're going through multiple governments every single year. There's all this conflict. The economy is in the shitter, the currency is worth nothing, the republic is obviously weak, and people are tired of
just this constant turnover of nothing working. And as they're continuing to be exhausted, in nineteen twenty two, they watch fascism come to Italy and they also watch this right wing military dictatorship takeover in Spain under Primo di Rivera the following year, and they're like, well, maybe, you know, maybe it's not exactly Italian fascism, maybe it's not exactly what the Spanish you're doing, but some sort of like
authoritarian right wing regime. Maybe that'll fix all of our problems, right, that's always yeah, that historically fixes probably, Yeah, historically seems like the right idea.
Yeah, nascism, primavera or whatever the hell is.
Yah, primo di rivera, Yeah, we'll take it. So by this point the right is a scendant across Portugal. Young military officers who had been radicalized during the war link up with youth organizations, a lot of which had been inspired by Marris's movement in France and the writing of
guys like Salazar. Right, he's not like leading directly, but he has been the intellectual father of a lot of these kind of right wing youth organizations, and you know they are starting to gain power, even at the same time as he can barely keep himself together, Like he is scared by number one. It's dangerous to be a public conservative intellectual in this period, dangerous to be anyone who's public and political in this period.
And he's intellectual in any period.
Right, it's never super safe, and he is. He's kind of crippled by panic attacks and psychosomatic illnesses, right, Like, he can't really keep himself together, even though his side of things seems to be doing well. He runs for office in nineteen twenty five, and he does does not do a great job of it, right, His heart really isn't in it. And then in May of nineteen twenty six, without Salazar's help, the Republican government falls to a military
coup by these right wing military officers. Now by this point, the economy is in the shitter completely, which is a big part of why the coup succeeds. Like the old government hadn't been keeping things together and they don't have much support. The generals who'd overthrown the Republican government know they can't just sit back and hope for things to get better. Right, They had like the military might to take over, but they don't know how to run an economy, right.
They're generals and they're Portuguese general so they barely know how to run a military, right, And I'm going to.
Quote what a win?
Then you know, yeah, it's not hard to take over from the guys without guns, right, Yea.
I guess I guess that's right.
But it's just very funny that they're like, look, they're bad at pretty much everything.
Yeah, we don't know how to know, yeah, how bad the previous guys were previous, and so they're going to be like, we need someone to help us figure out how to actually fix things. Otherwise we're just going to get overthrown in short succession. I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times by Aldin Whitman. Here, the victorious generals asked Salazar, then reputed to be an economic wizard, to take over the Ministry of Finance. He demanded a free hand to execute his reforms, and this
being refused, he went back to teaching. And this is what's so interesting to me about Salazar is he's he's not in a lot of ways like a guy like Hitler, like a guy like Mussolini. He obviously he's interested in power, or he wouldn't have gotten into politics at all or entertained the idea, but it's not his primary motivating force in life. He actually does have a plan B, and he would have been somewhat content just continuing to be
an intellectual. So, like, taking power, being a dictator is an option for him, but it's not his only option, and it's not the one he's putting most of his effort and time into.
Right up in that he's just playing hard to get. Yeah, he's like buying a car right right, and he's like this is what I want and like, well, we can't do that. He's like well, and I'm gonna walk away.
Yeah, that I'll walk away. You can move some numbers around here.
Yeah, yeah, and that that's kind of what happens here, right, is that he shows that, like, I'm not obsessed with taking this position unless I can really get a free hand in things, and the generals are desperate enough that like eventually they agree to do that, I'm gonna quit. You learned this from all the fucking right, Yes, this is the hard Gues's what taught him how to how to win the dictatorship of Portugal.
There it is, you show too much interest, you say, you write an essay about it, that's not going to go great.
You've got to nag the military dictatorship in order to be appointed the dictator, right, That's how it always works.
Yeah, i'd you know, I would be your dictator if you, if you know, wore makeup.
Or somethyeah, if you wore if you dress up a little bit. Come on, how many medals have you guys even won here?
Even shaving our country's legs anymore? Yeah?
Like, what's going on Portugal military? Yeah, get some better cannons or something. So I'm going to quote from Whitman's article again here. Two years later, General Antonio Oscar de Fragosa Carmona engineered his election as President of Portugal, and he promptly puts Salazar in charge of the nation's per strings. By cutting public spending and by judicious taxation, Salazar succeeded within a year in balancing the budget for the first
time since nineteen ten. Shortly too, he liquidated the foreign debt and lifted the escudo, the monetary unit, to a premium on foreign exchanges. Yeah, that's the end of the story.
He's a great man. He gets his.
Free hand in managing the economy, and he's really good at it.
Right.
He manages to do what his predecessors could never do. He balances the budget and he takes the escudo had been like a laughing stock in European finance for years, and he restores stability in a way that just hadn't existed for a long time. His popularity grows and it becomes very clear to the military that Salazar is indispensable in politics. Right, like, we have the guns, but we don't know how to manage an economy. We're certainly not any better at it than the people that we deposed.
They have the plans, but we have the power, right, yeah, you just like yeah, just like in The Simpsons.
In nineteen thirty two, Salazar becomes the President of the Council of Ministries, which effectively puts him in charge of the country. Right, So he's kind of like because he's so good at this. These generals, all they know how to do is, you know, control the guys with guns. But Salazar knows how to make the economy stable, which allows him to keep the wealthy and the powerful on his side and keep the people from rioting too much.
And so he just keeps demanding more and more power, and the military is like, I guess, yeah, you can have it, right, I guess you can have some more. I guess you could have some more, yeah, exactly, And kind of, bit by bit he winds up the absolute dictator of Portugal, and he's like starts to sideline the military and kick guys out who are threats to his power.
As he gains more and everyone's too scared of him because they can't keep the economy going on their own right, which is such a different way from these other fascists. He's not brought to power by a populist uprising. He doesn't like win mass votes in an election. He's not like Mussolini or like Hitler. He keeps showing results in the economy and demanding more control in the military. Is like, well, no one else has had to steer this thing, right,
so I guess sure. I found a write up in the textbook Portuguese Studies by Paul Santos and Luciano de LaRue, and it describes what happens next. Within four short years, Salazar had so enhanced his prestige and developed his political power that he was nominated Prime Minister. The army had no desire to govern and no plan for government anyway, so they handed power back to civilians, whom they regarded as trustworthy enough to protect their honor and keep this
position secure. Therefore, while the military had brought Salazar to power, the regime that he molded, the Estado Novo after the return to barracks, was very largely civilian. And the Estado Novo is proclaimed in nineteen thirty three. It means new state right, so Salazar he's kind of officially in full power in thirty three, the same year that Hitler rises to power and he says, like we've got a new state, right, and there's a new deal almost for portis enter government.
That's where FDR got it. That's where FDR took it from. You should see FDR.
Yeah, or FDR should Yeah. So sala is Our cribs a lot from Hitler, and you know, which is part of why he gets keeps. Yeah, but he just it's just sort of the aesthetics, right, Like you can see he sees that like, okay, there's some value in some of these fascist aesthetics. But that's not how he gains power, right. He doesn't take power the way that Hitler does. He kind of like almost infects the coup that took power
and then like takes over it. He's like one of those bugs that gets inside a wasp's brain if the wasp is the.
Poetry military like a zombie buger.
Right right, That's how he does it, which is very different from the other fascists.
It kind of seems like he's just using the Hitler stuff as like flourishes.
Yeah, yeah, like, oh I could dress it up a little. This is working right now, this is the new hotness. Sure, yeah, up a little bit. Yeah, let's put it sprinkle a little bit of Hitler around the edges. Yeah, you're a little Hitler in there. Yeah, a little bit of Hitler
in there for some spice, just a dash of Hitler. Yeah, and he uses he's going to he has a secret police state, as we'll talk about, and he's going to use force and violence, and he's going to crib from the Nazis very directly in several ways as to how his secret police works. But he doesn't have a cult
of personality like Hitler does. And he's actually kind of he has some respect for Hitler in the early period, but he's also like he's looking at all these weird esoteric aspects of Hitler's fascism, like his beliefs and race scigens, and he's like, this guy is just kind of weird.
Yeah.
I'll also add that, like, not calling attention to it is a pretty good way to have a forty year reign instead of shoot yourself in a bunker rain right exactly.
Salazar doesn't want to be a shoot himself in the bunker guy.
No, man, he's spoiling the frog in the slow way.
You know what's interesting about him, and the smartest thing about him is he understands there's a limit to how much power you should seek. Salazar is never going to be a what if I tried to take all of Europe guy? He's like, I'm content with Portugal, you know, and all of her African properties, which are much larger than Portugal, right but as well as we'll talk about that's a big deal.
But he's not.
He's never going to be a gamble too much to keep power sort of guy. He's smarter than that. He's probably the smartest of these kind of right wing dictators in Europe in this.
Power that some of those Hitler Germans are going to be learning Portuguese, if you know what I.
Mean, They sure are. Salazar is a diet in the wool corporatist. His charter for the Estado Nova, which is approved by plebiscite in nineteen thirty three, which is ostensibly a public vote but is not really a free one. This new state is described in the plebiscite as a unitary and corporative state. Only one party is allowed in the Assembly, and the premier, who's appointed by the president,
is unaccountable. Salazar is the premier in the early days as well as the finance minister, and over the years he's going to serve as foreign Minister and Minister of War and Minister of the colonies. Kind of whenever he wants to assert direct control, he'll just have himself made the minister of that thing. Right, But he's always the dictator, right, He's always kind of the guy where the buck stops. And one of the first big things he cracks down on once the Estado Novo is declared the law of
the land is women's rights. Salah's our rights that because women are so key to the structure of the family, they shouldn't be voting as a general rule. Now, because he's this guy, he's got a lot of close female friends who he takes very seriously. He's not completely against women having the vote, so he's letting he wants rich
women to be able to vote. If you've got university education, then you can vote as a woman, which you don't necessarily need as a man, even though nobody's vote really matters all that much, right, And his argument is that like, yeah, a few women have the rights to vote, but most women should be forced to maintain a sort of femininity that he argues as conducive to the Catholic norms of family life.
Now this is where he's yeah, twenty twenty five.
Yeah, he's modern in that way, right, And like all of these modern guys we have who say the same shit, he doesn't follow any of these rules in his normal wife. He never marries, and he never has kids, and he maintains this carousel of powerful women as lovers and advisers. He's willing to make exceptions for women that he personally respects, but he's not willing to live like the idolized Portuguese citizen, nor does he want to have a family of his own.
Catherine the great energy coming off of him, very much so, right.
Per an article on Portugal dot com, financial abuse against women was institutionalized. The law allowed husbands to prohibit wives from working outside the home. Women were not allowed to access certain professions diplomacy, the military, etc. And certain professions like nursing had limited rights, such as the right to marry. A wife needed the consent of her husband to travel
to another country. Contraceptives were only allowed for health reasons, and even so the husband would need to give consent. Abortion was illegal in all cases, with a prison sentence of up to eight years, and so he cracks down on women's rights, and alongside this comes to crackdown in the right to dissent in any way that might force a change in the Estado Novo. Salazar never tries. This is not a totalitarian state in the same way that is attempted in like Germany. But this is very likely.
The fact that he's not trying for complete control is not that he doesn't want it or is a better guy. It's that he's smarter. He knows that, like, you know, if you grasp too tightly, shit slides through your fingers.
Right. You know, we all know our Star Wars, Right, we all know Prince Organa talking to ramof Tarkin on the.
Yeah Star and he's like, yeah, there's that's not really worth investing in. Right, There's an amount of force that is worthwhile to deploy against the people to stop things from getting too far along. But there's an amount of force that is going to like be dangerous to me and will drive up like support for any kind of like rebellious movement, and I'm not going to play into that.
So the new constitution makes place for a new secret police force, the PVDE, which in English stands for the State Surveillance and Defense Police, and the PVDE is going to go under a couple of different names over the course of the Estado Novo. We're going to call them the PVDE right now for the sake of going forward, and to be fair. He didn't start Portugal having a secret police This is always the case with these things.
This starts in the Republic. The Republic began having a secret police force, and under the Republic, this secret police force starts maintaining a prison called the al Ube in Lisbon. I'm going to quote from an article in the newspaper Portugal Resident here. The building is close to the cathedral in the center of Lisbon and has a long history of imprisonment, firstly until eighteen twenty for those condemned by the ecclesiastical courts, and for the next hundred years for
women convicted of common crimes. The word alube comes from the Arabic and means either a well or cistern, and by extension a dungeon. So starting in nineteen twenty eight, the military dictatorship began building a network of informants through the PBDE and started the practice of sending them to al ude to be tortured. Salazar turns up to speed on this process, and under his new state, creative new torture methods are introduced.
Hell man, it's called innovation.
It's called innovate. We're gonna beat people and we're gonna sleep deprive them. But we're also going to introduce something new called the statue, which is where a prisoner is forced to stand with his arms extended without moving for hours or even days at a time.
And if you wait for.
Better tell you though, that's really great for your shoulders. Oh yeah, incredible shoulder extras. What you're doing is instead of building bulk, you're actually building a more tight, striated muscle.
It's really really good if you're like a fighter.
Now, the downside of this is you get beaten senseless by the guards if you move your arms at all, which is not so good for building up good straight coaching.
Okay, it's called coaching.
It's called coaching, trying to make you stronger. I'm like, that's not to me that I'm like, yeah, that sounds a pretty standard dah.
Yeah.
That's what brings the regime down is they make too many great boxers.
Yeah, too many powerful tight course.
Yeah, so the name of the game in this new state is maintaining a sense of quiet, respectability, and not freaking out the regular citizenry too much. Right, this is while torturing anyone who's like too much of a communist or a Republican activist, so that you're still kind of
it's not an accountability would be the wrong term. But Salazar is scared of being too publicly brutal, and in fact, once the neighborhood complains about the constant screaming coming from the Alude prison, the PVDE moves their torture operations to
a more secluded environment. So there's like a we're not going to be better, but we will be quieter because again, we don't want to we don't want to be too over the line here, otherwise that's going to like spark the kind of rebellion we don't want to deal with.
I like that. It's just like a noise complaint.
Yeah, it's like a noise complaint. You gotta be quieter with the torture guys, and you keep the suffering down a little bit. Yeah, you're freaking out the neighbors, and some of them have real money, like they're taxpayers, right, we don't want to make them uncomfortable. So the new state has begun at this point by like the mid thirties, and for the next four decades, Antonio Salazar will rule Portugal with an iron fist, and we'll talk about what
he does in power in part two. But first, Jeff, we're going to talk ab about where the audience can find you on the internet. Oh God, that's where I live, that's where you do, That's where we all live.
I do a lot of stuff and it's really fun and it's all very different, So you're welcome to check out any or all of these things. First and foremost, I have a show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, where I interview just people that I think are in my life that I find very interesting. Sometimes they are famous celebrities, and sometimes there are people that went to high school with. But I just it's really fun. It's a really fun way to sort of learn more about people and.
Stuff like that. I do that show.
I also do a show called Nerd on that same network as well, the Jeff Has Cool Friends sort of brand. That's with my friend Dre Alvarez, and I also do a monthly show called the Monthly Flow with Andrea Gazette.
You can get those.
All early uncensored bonus stuff at Patreon, dot com, slash Jeff May you can get nerd and Jeff has cool Friends.
For free everywhere else later.
Yeah, I do Tom and Jeff watch Batman with our friend Tom Ryman on Gamefully Unemployed. I do lots of great shows with Adam Todd Brown on that you don't even like podcast network. I also open cards on camera and I send them to people on the at Jeff has Cool Cards Network and you can actually get cards in the mail like a care package from me over
on the Patreon. So lots of really cool stuff and you can find me at Hey there jeffro two on Instagram because they booted my last one because they accused me of selling sex, which I did not do.
No, I do not have the confidence to do that.
Yeah, unlike Antonio salasar Oh, he didn't have to sell it. Yeah no, he was giving that shit away.
And if if you're in Burbank or the southern California area, I do a great comedy show the second Friday of every month at Last from the Past on Magnolia and it is called Mint on card. It's a comedy in a toy store.
Comedy in a toy store. Well, everybody check out Jeff, find him on the old Internet, and find us on Thursday, which is like two days from now, talking about the rest of Antonio Salazar's life.
All right, that's it fine see.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards