The Portuguese Who Still Idolize the Former Dictator- a National Shame

I still have a Facebook account, although I should have canceled it long ago.

We know the benefits of it, keeping in touch with people we haven’t seen for a long time or finding contacts for services we want to take advantage of.

Other than that, what seemed to be a simple kid’s game when I was a teenager, has now become applicable to everyone.

We already know this.

But if there is still some use to be made of it, the long-standing negative side of social networking should have been more than enough reason for someone to implode it all.

This is how the Internet has become, where every person seems entitled to his or her opinion and makes it seem valid.

No more experts since we are all one. And these instantly-online-made specialists seem to have become gurus that the most unwary follow.

They do so because they have never been educated to think, analyze, and especially question whether the source of information is reliable.

It’s the old “if it was on TV, it’s true” extrapolated to the maximum.

All the more so because if television still had a certain scrutiny on the veracity of information, social media not only don’t have it but seem to encourage the sharing of authentic brain vomit written and shared online.

And where once only photographs were shared, it soon became the sharing of cartoons, phrases, and snippets of invented news… a true Wikipedia of ignorance.

It is commonplace, I believe, to say that social media are, in our times, the actual attack on democracy as we know it. Those who still doubt this are perhaps the ones who are precisely getting carried away by all this upheaval of instability in our society.

But why all this dissatisfaction?

It’s not from now, but there are things I have to get off my chest:

In the world at large, we know how we have been seeing a rapid escalation of the far right politicians. What we thought were won battles have come back to haunt us and show us that nothing is indeed guaranteed.

It was easy as a child and teenager to understand this:

Fascism bad, democracy good (it’s not perfect, but it’s the best you can get).

Now in Portugal, a country that lived through the longest fascist dictatorship in Western Europe, 48 years of a shitty life, one would expect that even the people who still lived through that time would have a memory, or at least a collective memory, of the gravity of that time.

But no! They don’t!

Lo and behold, I come across an acquaintance on Facebook — an affable, but of course, ignorant woman — sharing one of those memes that, by its simplistic discourse, catches out those who know little.

One of those nostalgic catchphrases which always romanticize a time when nothing was that romantic. Saying, if memory serves me right, how Salazar (the rogue fascist dictator) was a humble person who didn’t squander money, compared to our current politicians democratically elected (well or badly) by the people.

This is not new, though. If one goes back more than a decade, we can witness how a goofy contest elected Salazar as the “best Portuguese of all time.” A silly TV contest where the people voted — the irony of this — by SMS to elect specific historical figures as the best of the best.

But if a few years ago all this was nothing more than a shock to the sane part of society, today all this becomes much more dangerous since the third political force currently in Portugal is an extreme-right party, with all the afflictions that this means.

Today it is even more dangerous when every clown can make videos, say barbaric things, and put them on TikTok or Youtube.

Sure, these slander spreaders can loudly come out to say that this is true democracy, the one where the people speak, where they express themselves, and where they take power.

But no, this is not democracy!

This is anarchy, a step towards where ignorance rules and worse, where history is manipulated by painting it in other shades, and where value judgments are added to it.

(And if you come to say this is what leftists have been doing by adding other stories to the masters narrative of History… My God, you have so much to learn)

And if before it was easy to understand our common humanity and to get that fascism was bad, and democracy was good, today the structures of our civilization start to crumble exactly with these and more Facebook posts where this is misrepresented.

Where fascism is already starting to paint itself as exemplary, and where democracy is painting itself as an ungoverned and unattractive thing.

There is nothing more wrong with this.

And there is no shortage of countless books, films, series, and documentaries explaining Portuguese fascism.

There is no lack of many voices, still living from that time, telling of the poverty, the illiteracy, the treatment of women as second-class citizens, and the economic and, above all, cultural backwardness caused by a retrograde and anti-progress man and its regime.

There is no lack of records and reports of the colonial war that lasted from 1961 to 1974, that killed so many of our men, that left our women widows, that left so many children without fathers, brothers without other brothers.

You don’t even have to open books, open your eyes to the older people and how studying was only accessible to the rich and denied to the poor, which was most of the population.

Portugal entered 1975, after the revolution, from the middle ages and perhaps only really started to enter the twentieth century almost at the end of it.

But ironically, sharing that post by a woman whose access to education was limited is also one of the many proofs of the effect of Salazar and the fascism he installed in Portugal.

It is proof that generations have been affected by the lack of access to school education, to culture, to knowledge, to knowing more.

And it’s dangerous, of course. It is because, as I said, we now have a fascist party, and we have people who go to the polls to vote, people who don’t open a book, don’t watch documentaries and don’t go further than a Facebook share.

But if they don’t have the ability to study or dig deeper, they can make a cross on a piece of paper, and that? That is worrying.

Portuguese, we should have more memory!

Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal. I like to write about my country, Portugal. But I also enjoy pop culture, American culture, and cultural differences. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article!

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