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“Neither a fascist nor a communist”. https://twitter.com/amconmag/status/1353070957728944132
Whether one can call Salazar’s regime *stricto sensu* or *lato sensu* fascist is an open-ended question and I’m not here to solve it. But calling him “neither a fascist nor a communist” is a hell of a way to evade it. So let’s take a look at how the regime self-described.
Above we see the cover of one of several pamphlets officially published by the Estado Novo in foreign languages to publicise their new Constitution. I happen to have the French version. Guess what’s the first word on it?
We’re not yet out of the first page and the propaganda wing of the Estado Novo is already accusing jews of using a profit ideology in order to “dechristianise” society, and “developing social misery to offer it as a holocaust to a factitious progress”. Classic anti-semitic trope.
The Estado Novo pamphlet is obsessively anti-liberal but also avowedly anti-democratic. Democracy is but a sham, “a deceptive mask” that creates societal enmities where before there had been “social distinctions” that were the equivalent to “moral obligations”.
The solution was, of course, dictatorship. Not only to avoid the “degrading spectacle” of parliamentarianism, but to “fundamentally change the political system”.
But dictatorship was not enough to "change the juridical status of the Nation” so a new constitution was written, already under Salazar, where “the State reserves to itself the right to organize the moral, cultural and economic corporations" of the nation, i.e., state corporatism
Because “there can be no order” without organising collective “activities and wills”, a single-party regime had to be created through the União Nacional, which was not a “party” because there was only one, as parties are “contrary to the principle of the Nation’s moral unity”.
Well, but at least Salazar’s regime was reactionary but not revolutionary? Wrong, it portrayed itself as a “nationalist revolution” that had gone beyond the mere “regenerative action” of military dictatorship.
So, there you have it, all in one document, as the Estado Novo wanted to present itself to foreigners: anti-Semitic tropes on page one, nationalist revolution, state corporatism, authoritarian single-party regime — and this is what fascinates American Conservative today. /ends
Post-scriptum: the propaganda document on which the thread is based dealt exclusively with the Estado Novo Constitution and not its Colonial Act, but Estado Novo colonialism would surely merit another thread in itself. Maybe @zpmonteiro, who knows much more on this, could help?
Extra! @zpmonteiro replied to my request and, as usual, he’s got the receipts on the colonial aspects of Salazar’s “benevolence”: forced labor, disenfranchisement, punitive actions on local populations, leading up to 3 colonials wars and at least a few known massacres. Do read: https://twitter.com/zpmonteiro/status/1353257503757373441
