Fascism Is No Longer a Shadow in Portugal (It’s a Reality)
“When you sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship.”
I was going to start this article by writing its title: The Shadow of Fascism in Portugal.
It seemed like a poignant and relevant title.
But I didn’t even get to complete the first word when I deleted it and immediately knew why. Unfortunately, I feel that we are no longer in that moment of talking about shadows, hidden figures, or icebergs with covered roots.
Unfortunately, I feel that the monster has returned and is no longer a shadow of anything but is spreading across the world like a huge black knot.
Every time these images appear in my mind, I remember the sad propaganda image of Hitler with a globe in his hand, wanting to spread his sick ideology all over the world or, in a better option, praising those who really deserve it, Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator kicking the globe, playing with it as if it were an ordinary toy.
Never, as a child, did I think that in my lifetime, I would feel fascism rising again. I thought, as perhaps many like me did that such a poisonous snake was extinct when, in fact, it remained under hot ashes, ready to flare up again as soon as there was a new breath.
When I was little, all these values seemed immutable, especially as I was Portuguese and we had the longest fascist dictatorship in the West. Forty-eight years of fascism.
And it’s good to use the right words and call things by what they are.
Even more so at a time when, in an attempt to downplay this tragic period in Portuguese history, some people are really debating whether those 48 years were fascism or simply a time when an authoritarian regime ruled Portugal.
They were 48 years without democratic elections, marked by an enormous fear of saying anything that went against the norm; years when the island of Tarrafal in Cape Verde saw the birth of a concentration camp for political prisoners; where women were considered second-class citizens and earned less than half as men; where Portuguese youth was created in the style of all the other indoctrinated youths to follow the one-party regime for the supposed good of the nation.
Those were years of extreme poverty and, above all, illiteracy. And it was precisely this sea of ignorance that is now resurfacing in full force, almost fifty years after the end of the dictatorship, showing us, especially the Portuguese, how we have failed in school education in these fifty years of democracy.
We have failed or have been failing more recently. Just log on to any social media, open the news in the form of images with a short text, and look at the comments.
Nothing deters the CHEGA supporters anymore. ( CHEGA is now the third national force and an extreme-right party).
It’s the Donald Trump effect, just as it once was the Mussolini or Hitler effect, stinking up the world, and of course, Portugal doesn’t escape unscathed.
The CHEGA supporters don’t need facts; they reject them. I’ve seen this movie elsewhere.
They don’t care if the math is right or wrong because they are blinded by a love for their idol, who hasn’t even managed to be creative enough to be different from Trump: the tics are the same, the inflammatory speech similar, and even the iconic red tie is part of his outfit. And, of course, the hatred and, above all, the anger are there in every word.
We have failed even more with education when we see that it is young people, more prone to ideological indoctrination, who are the prominent supporters of these new extremist measures.
And this distresses me, as it should anyone.
It concerns me because, as humans, we always find ourselves in repetitive political cycles. If it was rebellious to be left-wing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the picture has changed to the opposite. To be rebellious now is to be predominantly against any sanity; these days, it’s to align yourself with the extreme right.
Anyone whose education has not failed them, and who knows how extremist movements came about in the last century, is aware that it all started with pure hate speech, the actions of a madman, and, of course, clear contempt for everything that was knowledge.
“At the end of 8/11/1923, with a blizzard looming in the air, Adolf Hitler, a 34-year-old politician known for his fiery rhetoric, burst into a crowded beer hall in the southeast of Munich. Surrounded by three bodyguards, two of them in military uniform, Hitler held a pistol.
“Wide-eyed and looking like a drunken fanatic”, the slender Hitler, with his 1,75m , tried to interrupt a speech being given by the head of the Bavarian government. But he couldn’t make himself heard. Climbing onto a chair, he raised his arm and fired a shot into the high coffered ceiling.
“Silence!” he shouted.
The 3,000 audience members fell into a “deathly silence,” as one witness recalled. Then the man on the chair announced something shocking. “The national revolution has begun! The building is surrounded by 600 heavily armed men! No one is allowed to leave.”
Behind Hitler, a platoon of men in metal helmets under the command of Captain Herman Goring dragged a heavy machine gun to the entrance of the brewery. Thus began Adolf Hitler’s infamous coup d’état in a brewery in 1923.” (1924, the year that created Hitler, by Peter Ross Range)
In addition to this transcript, we must remember the kind of witch-hunt that writers, scientists, and people with even the slightest functioning brain suffered.
As well as the enormous number of books burned in a clear demonstration that intellectuality was a thing for the weak and that bodies and physical strength were superior.
For Hitler, this was how things were done: by shouting, shooting, and valuing human bestiality over knowledge.
And in a wave of shock, ideas crossed borders. And if a hundred years ago ideas took a long time to spread and even then they did, nowadays all it takes is the blink of an eye for what was considered immoral to be questioned as such, and vice versa.
And if radio once served as a rapid means of spreading these ideas, today, we can replace that word with TikTok or any other social media.
In Portugal — as in the Western world — it is on these platforms that young people are becoming radicalized because it is also on these platforms that hatred, anger, exacerbated arguments, and no deep thought flow.
It is on these platforms that the far-right, with little intellectuality and thought of its own, has set half the world on fire. And it is on these platforms that, more than at school, the minds of today and tomorrow are being shaped.
The left, partly responsible in itself for its own radicalism, or in Portugal, for a city elitism that despises country life, is under-represented and is therefore losing the battle behind the scenes in the elections that will take place on March 10 this year.
I’m left-wing, and I have no problem saying so (quite the opposite). But I’m not blind when I point out that the Left has become almost numb to problems that affect the majority of people, having turned to minorities and letting down the electoral majority who are now feeling cheated, forgotten, and belittled by an elitist way of thinking that seems incomprehensible to them.
We have failed a lot, and we continue to fail.
We know that the far-right is growing on social media, but here in Portugal, the left political parties are not giving this phenomenon real value. They have turned their backs on something they should be holding by the horns, like an ox. (Forgive the oxen because I’m not a bullfighting fan either).
It’s 2024, but sometimes it feels like we’ve stepped into a time machine, and it’s 1924.
Why?
It’s enough to know that in April 1924, the Fascists won the Italian elections with a two-thirds majority. The association with the present day is chilling, where images of this January 2024 with Italian men giving the fascist salute have, unfortunately, not gone around the world. (I say unfortunately because nobody is paying attention. The contempt for the snake also makes it even greater.)
In the same year, 1924, in the same Italy, a man called Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered in Rome after speaking out against the fascists. If before these men were heroes, as Giacomo might have been, today, things are a straightforward, chilling, and horrifying reversal of values.
Here in Portugal, in the year 2024, more precisely last weekend, we saw a CHEGA activist unashamedly declare his true identity: “I’m a man, I’m a father, I’m a grandfather, I’m a fascist.”
The followers of this ideology of barbarians are now proliferating openly. They are angry people whom the supposed ‘system’ has failed miserably.
They’re on Instagram, the only social media account I have. But also on all the others, whether they are less or more relevant.
The slogans are always the same: “death to socialism”, “a turn to the right is urgent”. For me, the most obvious ignorance was seeing today on a news cover how the richest are getting richer and the poor poorer, and someone commented how it was “ socialism’s fault.” The definition of capitalism is far removed from these benighted heads.
While all this is unfolding at breakneck speed, the left continues to focus solely and exclusively on its own audience.
It continues to say what the people who voted for them want to hear. They still don’t know that they should be addressing those who are radicalizing to the right.
They lack the wisdom to try to win over those voters who feel abandoned. And, of course, I understand that it’s a thankless and frustrating job when the right clearly wins much more quickly and easily since it’s more effortless to spread hatred than knowledge.
In a country where ignorance has hovered for many years, it has become a tough root to eliminate.
As I wrote a few days ago, in a country that the world has so forgotten, it’s challenging for most people to see the massive influx of migrants who have chosen Portugal to improve their lives and accept them. Nobody wants to share anything.
Fear, fueled by hatred and ignorance, is already proliferating in people’s lives.
This is clearly the world of 2024.
A world where resources are becoming scarce, where people driven by climate disasters, which in turn generate wars, are fleeing their homes in an attempt to find peace and a better life elsewhere on this planet that should belong to everyone.
But we know better than to look at geopolitics through the eyes of an innocent.
The left needs to be more down to earth, turn to those it has abandoned, and bet on the same tools the right has used to look at general problems and regain confidence.
I’m afraid, however, that they’re asleep. And of course, there’s the other cliché that “when you sleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship”.
I wish this phrase weren’t relevant in this strange year of 2024.
Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal. I like to write about my country, Portugal, and about my life in this corner of the world. But I also enjoy politics, economics, and issues concerning the climate crisis I’m witnessing in my life and where I live.
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Here’s a list of my most successful articles on Medium. I hope you enjoy them.
1- Have you been in a public place and had to put up with other people’s noise coming from their phones? Did that upset you? You may relate to this then:
2- My take on the climate crisis, the changes all over the years, and the real effects happening where I live
3- Inflation is causing damage to people all over the world, and Portugal isn’t an exception:
4- My experience while being a student abroad in Brazil
5- Portugal isn’t Spain, of course. These are the main differences between both countries:
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