sábado, 9 de fevereiro de 2008

Salazar: How Bad Is the Best?

Monday, Jul. 22, 1946

How Bad Is the Best?

(See Cover)
Last week Portugal produced no big spot news ; it hadn't for 20 years ; it might not for 20 years more if the God he strove so hard to serve spared Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. For Salazar distrusted news. He suppressed and distorted it for the good of the Portuguese who, he believed, were unfit for facts. After 20 years of Salazar, the dean of Europe's dictators, Portugal was a melancholy land of impoverished, confused and frightened people. Even Salazar, that model of rectitude, showed signs of succumbing to a law of politics discovered by Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts ab solutely."
The real news from Portugal was that another European dictatorship had failed, though it might hang on for years. In the way of dictatorships, it had stunned and shackled the wholesome forces that might have replaced it. Not only was Portugal at a new low point, it showed every sign of changing for the worse, perhaps slowly, perhaps by violent upheaval.
Success Story. Portuguese, however, looked happy enough last week as Lisbon turned out for the annual People's Fair (to aid Lisbon's numerous orphans). They rented boats on Palhava Park lake. They smeared their swarthy faces with spun sugar candy. They took pleasure in their jados ("songs of fate"), although these ditties are not always gay. Sample:
Barbarous and murderous mother, Pitiless, heartless, she Threw her daughters down a well Where they died in misery.
They bought from fisherwomen in Bedouin-like headdresses the Portuguese equivalent of hot dogs — grilled sardines. But the biggest crowds milled, with wistful eyes, around the U.S. pavilion, where wooden doll exhibits depicted typical scenes of life in the fabled, incredibly distant land of freedom.
If Portuguese had felt boastful instead of wistful, there was material for self-congratulation about their Government and their way of life. Britain, their old ally, banker and protector, now owed them £80,000.000. Spain, their old rival, was in the United Nations' doghouse, while Salazar, in spite of his anti-democratic sympathies, had pursued throughout World War II a serpentine policy whose final tack was enough in the Allies' direction to earn their tolerance, if not their approval. The Portuguese national budget, thanks to Salazar, was always balanced these days. (It had shown a deficit in 68 of the 70 years before 1928.) Portugal's exports were much higher than before the war; her merchant marine was about to double its tonnage and her fishing fleet was expanding. Portugal's shop windows were full of luxury goods unobtainable in most of Europe. Her currency unit, the escudo, was steady at four U.S. cents.
Unhappy Ending. Behind this glossy exterior of success, decay eats away at Portugal. Financial Wizard Salazar has not balanced the budgets of Portuguese families. Food prices have nearly doubled since 1939. One typical family with a monthly income of 1,200 escudos in May paid out 1,663 escudos for rent, food, clothing, water and light. Strictly controlled wages lag far behind. Government workers, especially important to a dictatorship, got a 25% increase in 1944 to meet a 112% rise in the retail price index.
Plain Portuguese obviously are not buying the luxury goods in the shops. The incidence of tuberculosis, venereal disease and insanity is high, and there is an acute shortage of doctors & nurses. In one month last year, 5,800 new mental cases needing hospital treatment were reported, of whom only 1,118 were treated.
The red tape that keeps patients out of hospitals permits Lisbon's director of public health to gain credit with budget-minded Salazar by returning part of his appropriation to the national treasury each year.
The same bureaucracy lets the older half of Lisbon (which had survived the 1755 earthquake) wallow. A few blocks from the grandiose and spotless Rocio, Lisbon's counterpart of Times Square, the Old Town's slums have no electricity, running water or sewage. Once a day street cleaners climb up & down Castello de Sao Jorge hill, where generations of shuffling bare feet have polished the cobbles satin-smooth. An hour after the cleaners have passed, the same steep, crooked passages are foul with refuse.
Portugal's literacy rate is 50%, one of the lowest of Western countries—officially. But since those who can barely sign their names are counted as literate, the actual figure is much lower. Despite repeated promises, Salazar, a teacher himself, has achieved little or no improvement in Portuguese education. Teachers make $12-$16 a month; few schools have been built—but Salazar lavishes money on the preservation of public monuments.
The minority who can read are little better off than those who cannot. Contemporary-Portuguese literary efforts are scarcely worth the paper they are written on. Portuguese are kept in ignorance of some of the most important world news. Salazar will not let any paper print news about Russia or about Communist activity anywhere. No Portuguese paper mentioned the recent wave of strikes in the U.S. nor any other labor conflict. The United Nations is barely mentioned, because Portugal is not a member. Since there is sometimes courtesy, if not honor, among dictators, Salazar has permitted no mention of the controversy between U.N. and Caudillo Francisco Franco.
M.U.D.-Slinging. How do the people like their strait jackets? Few dictators ever know. Salazar found out last fall when he suddenly proclaimed freedom of the press and free elections for a new National Assembly. After a few days' hesitation, opposition groups which had scarcely suspected one another's existence came out of the underground. Two weeks after the proclamation, in a rented schoolroom on Lisbon's Rua do Bemformoso, the first meeting of the Movimento Unidade Democratica (M.U.D.) was held. Much to M.U.D.'s surprise, supporters poured in by the thousands. Every paper except two Government sheets supported M.U.D. in a campaign of invective against Salazar, who was shocked by the hatred he had fomented by 20 years of suppression.
When the Government realized that it might be beaten at the polls, it made three decisions that stopped M.U.D.: 1) refusal to postpone the elections long enough for M.U.D. to organize a campaign ; 2) refusal to open the voting registration books, long neglected by many Portuguese, who scorned controlled elections; and 3) warnings that, whatever the outcome at the polls, the new freedom would end on the day after the election. M.U.D. refused to play under those rules; only Salazar's candidates appeared on the ballots. German-trained political police pounced on opposition party headquarters, took recalcitrants to jail, snapped muzzles back on newspapers. 'Army officers who had enrolled in M.U.D. were demoted; "disloyal" students were flunked. Fear replaced brief hope as the country slipped lack into bitter, sullen acquiescence, with little chance that Salazar would ever make another gesture toward keeping his old promise that his dictatorship was merely a "transition." Salazar, at 57, had now become dictator for life, unless revolt unseated him.
The Little Priest. Other modern dictators had been men so evil that their personalities obscured the inherent evil of dictatorship. Franco was a barrack-room bully, Mussolini a strutting iiar, Hitler a ranting sadist, and Stalin a bloody-minded professor of the art of power. But Salazar was a virtuous man—selfless, intelligent, efficient. If despotism could be benevolent, Salazar's character was ideal material for "the good dictator." Born at Santa Comba Dao, not far from Europe's second oldest university, in a typical pink-walled Portuguese Village, he had made such good marks in grade school that his peasant mother, whom he worshiped, called him "the little priest." He entered a seminary, but later decided he had no vocation for the priesthood and became an economics instructor at Coimbra University.
In 1926 he got a first unpalatable taste of politics. National finances were in chaos after 20 changes of government in five years. Salazar was invited to come to Lisbon to straighten them out. He took a look at the parliamentary confusion and, in deep disgust, demanded a free hand with the Treasury. Refused, he caught the next train back to the sedge-lined banks of the Mondego. He expressed his contempt for Lisbon's attempts at democracy and said that "one of the greatest mistakes of the 19th Century (which created the 'citizen'—an individual isolated from the family, the class, the cultural milieu, etc.) was to suppose that English . . . democracy was . . . capable of adaptation to all European peoples."
At the end of two years, continued chaos resolved itself into a government shakeup, and mild, aristocratic General Antonio Oscar de Fragoso Carmona became President. This besashed and epauletted figurehead (still President in name today) made Salazar Minister of Finance, with extraordinary powers, which he used to make himself dictator of the nation.
Salazar began immediately to construct his Estado Novo. He announced that the New State would be based on two great calls for social reform—the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII and the Quadragesima Anno of Pius XI (see RELIGION). But however lofty may have been his inspiration, Salazar's execution was on a quite different pattern, one already known and hated as Fascism: free thought was abolished, the individual became subordinated to the state, the human bill of rights was suppressed and the secret police became the main arm of government. Soon little boys, well-shod and sporting Balilla-like uniforms, were marching in the wake of Salazar's blackshirt-type Legido (Legion), which gave the stiff-arm salute and chanted: "Who leads? SALAZAR!"
The Quiet Life. It is doubtful if Salazar likes either the salute or the slogan. Unlike all other modern dictators, he hates parades, pomp or cheers. When he rides to ceremonies with President Carmona, the old soldier preens and beams; Salazar slinks back in the car, a scowl on his handsome face with the Savonarola-hard mouth. Asked why he refused to respond to cheers, Salazar gave a characteristic answer: "I could not flatter the people without being a traitor to my own conscience. Our regime is popular but it is not a government of the masses, being neither influenced nor directed by them. These good people who, moved by the excitement of the occasion, cheer me one day, may rise in rebellion the next day for equally passing reasons. . . ."
Salazar has never married and, until very recently, there has been no woman in his life. Several years ago he adopted two little girls. He rises at 6:30 every morning, has a roll and coffee and attends Mass, then goes to his office, where his first chore is to arrange the flowers on his desk. He works until 1 p.m. With a light lunch he has port, usually diluted, and never more than three-quarters of a glass. After lunch he rests and takes an hour's walk, sometimes with his adopted daughters, sometimes alone and unguarded on Lisbon's streets. At 4 he returns to his office and works till 7:30. All important decisions of all Ministries are made by Salazar.
Woman in the Garden. Salazar relieves this dull routine by tending his magnificent flower garden at Santa Comba. It was there, and through the medium of the flowers he loves, that he met the woman who has in the last few months made an extraordinary difference in his life. When he decided to give a reception for Dona Amelia de Orleans e Braganga, mother of Don Duarte Nufio, the pretender to Portugal's throne, his advisers suggested that the Countess de la Seca, a widow with two young children, should act as hostess. When the Countess took over the flower arrangement for the party, Salazar was so impressed by her taste that he wrote her a short note. She replied with a long letter and Salazar asked permission to call on her. The Countess received him at tea. Since then she has been official hostess at his social affairs, which have increased in number, and his manner has become less introspective and austere. He takes more interest in clothes and food, and even in the pomp and trappings of office.
The most significant fact about Salazar's relationship with the Countess is that not even the gossipy Portuguese, not even Salazar's thousands of enemies, sug gest that she is his mistress. His reputation for piety is so great that a liaison is considered unthinkable. Many Portuguese hope the rumors that he intends to marry are true; they say marriage might humanize the man whom most of them fear, but whom few love.
The Lust for Power. In recent months Salazar has seemed to need a mellowing influence more than ever. He was so disillusioned by the adverse criticism in last fall's brief interlude of freedom that he almost quit his job. His attitude toward public office lost much of its humility; he felt now that he really understood the worst in his people, that he had plumbed the depths of popular perfidy and ingratitude. He used to think that he had been called by Providence to save his country; he now feels a martyr condemned (because he alone is right) to save Portugal in spite of herself. A touch of arrogance always present in his make-up (he never lets associates or even visitors smoke in his presence) has been growing noticeably. Now he seems to enjoy the power to suppress criticism.
This tendency spells more influence for the extreme right wing of Salazar's Cabinet. The Army clique, headed by bull-necked Lieut. Colonel Santos Costa, a fanatic totalitarian, is important, although Portugal's military prowess has been dormant for four centuries; in World War I the Portugese soldiers were considered by many critics to have been the least effective of the 16 fighting nationalities. Costa and the Interior Minister, Lieut. Colonel Julio Botelho Moniz, who bosses the political police, work on Salazar's fear of "chaos" (the familiar justification of dictators) to get his permission for more & more restrictive measures against possible rebels.
A relatively liberal wing in the Cabinet took heart during the period of freedom. The cleavage between it and Costa's followers is widening, and Salazar may soon have to choose between them.
The Long, Languid Reign. The 8,000,000 Portuguese whom Salazar rules inherit the memory, but not the courageous spirit, of Magellan, Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama. After the great age of discovery, plague, famine and emigration sapped the nation's strength. Portugal's 16th Century one-eyed demi-Homer. Luis de Camoens, noting the decline, asked in his Lusiad:
. . . And has one languid reign
Fix'd in your tainted, souls so deep a stain
That now, degenerate from your noble sires,
The last dim spark of Lusian flame expires?
The "one languid reign" prolonged itself through generations of more or less useless kings and dictators. Portugal's economy was precariously maintained by cork and port and citrus fruit and sardines from the homeland, and coffee and sisal from the colonies. Her political survival was assured by the alliance with Britain, which expected no active military help from Portugal, but considered it as the most reliable bridgehead to the Continent.
Pushed into history's backwaters, the Portuguese have quietly tenanted one of the loveliest of lands, the long Atlantic coast, the purple-brown hills, the tall pines and the gardens of roses, carnations and bougainvillea which they tend with rare skill.
But they have never been masters of this land, and Salazar seems to think they never will be. He has said they were "excessively sentimental . . . have a horror of all discipline . . . lack continuity of effort and tenacity [but with] proper discipline and control, there is nothing they cannot be taught."
Teacher Salazar is aware that there are other teachers with other ideas of discipline and control. He has recently said: "The world, weary and disillusioned, is sweeping half-measures from the political field . . . forming up clearly on the Right or on the Left." Salazar's own policies have encouraged both the disillusionment and the drift to the Right and Left extremes. Last month in Lisbon an old streetcar motorman, who earns $30 a month after 25 years' service, summed it up: "I ask only for the minimum to enable me and my family to live. Salazar gives us only the right to die. . . . Yes, I belong to the Anti-Fascist Unity Council ... I can't tell you how. The M.U.D.? Too much lawyers, too many words, too afraid of the law.
"We are working with the Army. It is composed of workers, too—and our day will come. Are we Communists? I do not know ... we are for liberty and decent human life."
It looked as if the good dictator, like the bad ones, only created what he wanted most to destroy.