Patriotic stupidity and globalization (2)

Grazia.tanta@gmail.com 20/7/2011 1
Patriotic stupidity and globalization (2)
This text concludes the recently released:
“Predatory Capitalism and Patriotic Stupidity (1)”
SUMMARY
3 –Globalization exists and will not turn back
4 –How to clearly see, today, patriotism
5 –Nationalism is a self-interested invention. Heretical notes on the
Portuguese case
Patriotic stupidity and globalization (2)
3 – Globalization exists and will not turn back
The historical process of globalization has accelerated brutally in recent
decades and constitutes an “einbahnstrasse” (one-way street) which fits in with
human nature, prone to the exchange of goods, experiences, cultures, to satisfy
its innate curiosity, its insatiability for knowledge. Progressive thinking that
regards labour as the base element of production and workers as the agent of
true social transformation has always been internationalist; it has always
defended the unity of the workers of the planet, regardless of differences of
cultures, creeds and habits.
In recent decades, capitalism has moved from a phase of inter-imperialist
rivalries, in which peoples were entangled and made enemies of one another, to
an imperial phase, based on the effective unity of their institutions against the
peoples as a whole, in their plurality.
The sacrosanct and inescapable pursuit of profit maximization promoted,
among other things:
 A very powerful core of institutions with worldwide characteristics: The
multinationals, the financial system, and mafia capital, that shape the
political, economic, social, and ideological reality of Humanity.
 They operate under a globalized logic, using huge and complex logistics
networks for the exchange of goods, where millions of tons of raw
materials, semi-finished goods, components, and finished goods

circulate; and, in addition, they use technical platforms for the
instantaneous exchange of information.
 Following that logic, production is technically segmented, disintegrated
and spread over various regions, countries or continents, depriving
workers of the power for localized claims; its integration as a global
process, generator of a final product, is also a capitalist’s role.
 If the movement of consumers (tourists) is liberalized and encouraged,
the movement of workers is far from obeying the same pattern, since the
bet on wage and labour differences justifies the existence of barriers
(borders) and the consequent relative price reduction of labour.
 The technical process, made more complex by the incessant
incorporation of technologies, promotes strong productivity growth, and
this has only been possible with a marked increase in the workers’ skills;
however, this is antagonistic to the leveling down of the remuneration
and leads to widening inequalities in income distribution.
 This technical process is accompanied by the extension of the range of
competences to be shared among many workers, the dematerialization
of the information leading to a decision; and therefore it is characterized
by the collective and integrated, networked, nature of the decision
process.
 Given the collective capacity of workers to ensure the entire production
process and the decisions inherent to it, it is unnatural that the integration
of production remains dependent on the capitalist; the workers’ groups,
through the effective control of the productive process, render the
existence of the bosses and the capitalists technically useless, and the
way is open for the collectivization of the means of production and for
self-management1
.
 The change of corporate objectives into financial ones, their reliance on
banks and speculation, is a form of monetary wealth creation that does
not correspond to wealth creation through labour. On the other hand, it
made trivial the existence of corporate dismantling, unemployment, wage
breaks, unpaid work, precariousness, the commodification of human life
itself; its gluttony drags even large countries to ruin.
 Politically, neoliberal ideology is in practice assumed by parties within the
state apparatus itself, manipulating anti-democratic or formally
democratic political organization systems and in promiscuous connection
with media groups; the latter assuming a fundamental role in promoting
the ideology convenient for the continuity of the capitalist system.
1
Afinal qual é a função social do capitalismo?
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/afinal-qual-a-funo-social-do-capitalista

 A brutal aggravation of the ecological footprint, resulting from the
ideology of infinite growth fostered by a consumerism made insatiable by
the advertising machine, and which generates imbalances throughout the
life chain on the planet, triggered by the interference of major
pharmaceutical companies, food goods’ “traders”, and seed monopolists.
 Capitalist management needs the constant dynamic of competition
between regional, national and international entities and the inequalities
resulting therein, promoting misery, migration and war.
Capital management requires the construction of large territorial spaces, where
goods and capital circulate without barriers and hence the existence of global
institutions, in the international (IMF, WTO…) or supranational (EU, NAFTA,
NATO, ECB…) format, for the regulation or deregulation of the capitalists’
actions.
Nevertheless, nations remain important for the overall management of the
system as a means of segmentation, division and cantonment of peoples and
workers; and as a material basis for fostering an ideology suited to the
maintenance of these divisions – nationalism and patriotism, often spiced with
religious, ethnic or cultural factors. And the national structures of political and
economic power coexist today quite well with their insertion into supranational
structures and the partial guardianship of international institutions within the
hierarchy of nations.
It can be said that nationalism is the ideology, the rational, structuring element,
which aims to differentiate and unify a people and patriotism is an irrational,
affective element, the feeling of national belonging, especially through its
external symbols, the king / president, the anthem and the flag. The first is an
instrument of global politics, the second an instrument for rallying and
emotionally snatching crowds, usually as patriotic as they are ignorant; both
tend to behave by excluding the “other”, the non-national.
The nation was invented as a form of social organization associated with a
particular matrix of economic relations and, therefore, it inherently brings the
need for a regulator of these relations – the State – within a clear territorial
delimitation of action, where it is given the monopoly of issuing laws and the
power of coercively enforcing them through the use of the heavy arm of courts,
police and the military.
This intertwining between nation, economic relations matrix, and the state,
constituted the triangle of foundation for capitalism and bourgeois power, in
antagonism with territories unified around a royal figure with absolute power,
sustained by a landlords-acolytes caste that held legal control over the huge
masses of miserable peasants, all of those characteristic of pre-capitalist times.
This potential, and available, labour was absolutely necessary for the capitalist
manufactures, to fuel the colonial trade. Without prejudice to the democratic
ideas of many theorists of the XVIII century, the truth is that the liberation of the
peasants from the nobles and the clergy, with its transference to the cities,
coincided with a new bondage, at the hands of the capitalists.

 And from there onwards it came to be considered, in a sort of "end of
history", that people must be organized into nations, the idea even existing,
in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century,
that to every people should correspond a nation state… provided it would
exist in the territories of rival powers. The civilized England advocated the
birth of nations in Austro-Hungarian and Turkish territories but it brutally
crushed the Irish. And as for the colonized peoples they were not granted a
dignity beyond their identification as tribes of savages.
 Following the same logic of “end of history” the consolidating capitalist
economic relations were taken as the supreme state of civilization, once the
feudal archaism, the power of the nobility and the religious obscurantism,
namely Papist, were overcome. And even today, even in its rotten
neoliberal order, capitalism and its beneficiaries and defenders – bankers,
speculators, bosses, mandarins, menial penmen, military and academics –
still do not want to admit the winds of change to a new paradigm of
economic organization based on collective ownership, self- management
and direct democracy.
 The third element of the above mentioned triangle is the state and its
inherent political organization. In the eighteenth century, the bourgeois
and small landowners considered the natural order of things to be that
power and political representation would outright push aside slaves and
the proletariat, considered be brutalized, illiterate and without property to
manage. Also removed were the women who, in bourgeois romanticism,
should be loving wives, birthing women, home fairies and obedient to
their husbands; and they were no longer soulless, eternally defiled by
original sin, yet were very useful for work and fornication, even if the
legitimacy of the sexual act was restricted to the necessity of human
reproduction.
 More essential than the issues of representation in government
administration, the question is whether a state with powers over and
above the individuals is needed, with all the familiar experience of its
private appropriation by sectarian and mafia groups, with a real power
higher that of people not invested with that power. As the state has been
taking on a larger role in societies – national and supranational States –
and is increasingly revealing more anti-democratic and authoritarian
contours, it is necessary to ask whether the establishment of Orwell's
utopia is desirable. Given that the modern state was born and has been
growing in a stifling form in the shade, for the profit and by necessity of
capitalism itself, and is providing abundant proof of its inability to foster
social welfare and showing a fascistic and genocidal bent, the question is
intuitive: should or can the modern state survive the overcoming of
nations and capitalism?
The first case of happy application of the link between nation, state, and
capitalism in the late eighteenth century was the creation of the United States.
American settlers, on a collision course with English suzerainty, adopted an

original form of social organization detached from a king-church leader and
founded a republic; This in turn came to generate a power based on a new
aristocracy, that of money, ruler of a fundamental text with an almost biblical
immutability. This aristocracy was able to invent a system of lasting
representation (of that aristocracy), unchanging as it is convenient to the
business world, which accelerated an unstoppable capitalist growth that lasted
about two centuries. The systematic recourse to war in the name of "national
interest", which has behind it the moralistic perversion of being gods’ elected
people, really is a centerpiece of its temporary success.
Immediately after the American independence came the French Revolution,
whose radicalism was the matrix of the subsequent establishment of bourgeois
powers in Europe and the basis for the very overcoming of the latter, with the
ideas of emancipation of the working classes, of anarchist or Marxist penchant,
of the dispossession of the bourgeoisie and extirpation of capitalism.
The powers of those nations constituted in the image of the European or
American model since the eighteenth century, while being unable to hide the
history of the peoples prior to their constitution as Nation-states, tend to
establish a continuity between past times and later reality, in order to establish
their legitimacy and justify the application of the rigors of the law on recalcitrant
heads.
In the case of the USA, the Indian tribes were decimated and the survivors
cantoned in reserves, and, attempts at integrating that past, the remains of the
Indian civilizations, into the history of the country, could be seen much later, in a
kind of logic of folklore for tourist consumption. In France, the erasure of the
feudal past and the dominance of the nobility were accomplished by the total
administrative restructuring of the territory and the elimination of the regional
designations related to that past. In contrast, Vercingetorix is praised and the
fictional Asterix is created to underline the resistance of the ancestors to the
invader; while simultaneously trying to forget the lack of "patriotism" of the
fascist collaborationists with the Nazis, Pétain and his followers.
In Latin America, European or mixed-race oligarchies gained independence
from Spain, keeping the often-majority Indian populations still marginalized
today, as in Chiapas or, as in the case of the Mapuche people. However, they
did not fail to claim Aztec, Mayan or Inca grandeur as national deeds, to justify
their national unity on more or less contingent borders.
And in Africa, because nations there have a more recent creation, the obvious
cases of their artificiality occur at each corner of the map. Ghana took its name
from a state that existed thousands of miles to the northwest and ten centuries
ago; the Nigerian federation links the remains of the Sokoto caliphate to the
north with the forest peoples of the south; the recent partition of Sudan only
corroborates an ancestral separation between the peoples, united by the
English occupation; and Congo is presented as a state without any unity other
than being heir to the lands entrusted to the king of the Belgians in the late
nineteenth century.

More examples of the artificiality of nation-states and their respective
apparatuses, as well as of their insertion in the objectives of capital, which is
now globalized and national only in subsidiary way, could be given. Later on,
the process of construction of the Portuguese nation-state will be very briefly
looked upon.
4 – How to clearly see, today, patriotism
The intention of this whole set of notes is to explain that nationalism and, even
less, patriotism are not an inherent to the human species but a historical
element related to the specific social upbringing immanent from the capitalist
production relations. And that in today’s context all the material and objective
conditions for its abandonment, as summarized above, are found.
The extirpation of capitalism cannot be carried out exclusively in one country.
Not only because of the dangers of bastardization, as those that were found in
the former Soviet Union (among other cases), but mainly because capitalism is
a global, imperial and invasive system of all territorial areas, social relations,
that even defiles the way we think and act.
Today, nations have a much smaller autonomy than before, especially if they
are small and poor, with pseudo-Democratic regimes, greedy and incapable
employers, as well as politically and materially corrupt “mandarin classes”. What
exists is a dense articulation of workers’ activity in all countries that promotes a
total interdependence among all of them.
Small countries like Portugal, having been for several decades in a cycle of
gradual insertion into a wide network of states where the decision is remote,
within a London-Berlin-Milan triangle, do not have the human and political
dimension to get rid of, in isolation, the tightening from the financial capital and
the “troika”. And, not having the size, they hardly have the capacity.
This external pressure is managed, in-house, by the class of “mandarins” at the
present time locally led by Cavaco and the PPC2
rattle-hammerers, and then
redirected to focus on the crowd, seeking to ensure survival conditions for
employers; despite it being known that some sectors, such as construction, that
have for many years been blown oversize by the banks' easy credit policy, will
have to shrink quite a bit. Within the parochial scenario there is, therefore, a
struggle between the employers that try to pass on its difficulties to the labour
world, and the multitude, which tries to resist, as it can, to this assault.
It is obvious that this resistance may be much bigger than the present one, with
the decisive efforts and generalized self-organization of activist networks,
flexibly articulated, with mass actions and civil disobedience, able even to drag
from their lethargy many of those comfortably lying in the shadows of the
institutional left’s leafy tree and of the labour unions.
2
PPC is the abbreviation of Pedro Passos Coelho, the Portuguese primer that follows, point by point, the troika diktats

One form of resistance, interesting but limited, comprises the modes of
productive cooperation, particularly in the collective exploitation of farm
gardens, defensive ways for people to find alternatives to the income loss
resulting from unemployment and fiscal robbery. Evidently, from an economy
point economic view, these initiatives have not caused major concerns to the
capitalists and their governmental foremen. Politically, however, these initiatives
are very relevant because they generate practical demonstrations of self-
management, of collective production, of absence of bosses or differentiations
among workers, full proof of the bosses’ uselessness. They are practical
examples of a post-capitalist organization.
If some perverts keep stored in two places on the planet the only colonies of
smallpox virus, capitalism will have to be preserved only in history books, in the
memory, associated with theft, suffering and war. This cannot be accomplished
without effort, without sacrifice, or with pious spirits of complacency.
The insistence on the patriotic key means implicitly that we, workers,
precarious, unemployed, pensioners, must unite with the Luso3
capitalists
against the anonymous bankers that can just as easily be Germans, Americans,
or Portuguese. And, being tightly united with our capitalist compatriots, does it
mean we guarantee that they will not sack us? That they will not avoid
depositing with the social security that part of our salary that pays for our
parents' retirement? And are we sure that they will sell their high-end cars so
that VAT does not increase for the essential goods we consume? And will they
invest here what they have accumulated in off-shores, and create jobs, or will
they rather prefer to use that money in speculation that will even be against the
interests of the Portuguese state that supplies them with EU funds? Who pays
for those damages?
No one will believe the examples we gave. However, this is the content hidden
in the logic of the sacrifices for “all”, of the “we have to produce more”, in the
patriotic litany, in the non-inclusion of those assaulted in Portugal, in the
common destiny of the world crowd; It is a subliminal discourse of divide and
rule.
In fact, producing more today comes not at the expense of more employment,
but from increased work, especially of the unpaid kind, by those who still have
it. Today, speaking about the increase of the “national” production without
changing the correlation of forces between labour and capital is to bet on the
social model and economic paradigm that has led a substantial part of the
humans to the current disaster. It is a conservative proposal for the perpetuation
of capitalism and its revitalization. It is a proposal that conceals that the same
state that imposes cuts on wages and to the Christmas allowance, is the one
that will promote an easier sacking, reduce IRS deductions and increase taxes,
and guarantee to the Portuguese banks, in the first minute after the rating is cut,
its support, help, and financing.
3
Luso means Portuguese, a reference to the Lusitanians, a tribe that lived in the nowadays Portuguese
territory, before the Roman conquest

It's too tragic to be comic. It feeds the passive state of the general multitude and
highlights the enormous responsibilities of the unions and the “parliamentable”4
left that pose themselves as the omniscient leaders of the popular masses
within the ongoing return-to-fascism project. Any constraining of the struggle to
the national framework is a way of leading it into a dead end that fuels
discouragement and hopelessness.
When a company or business is struggling financially its owners have several
options before them: close it down, capitalize it with their own or someone else's
funds, or simply sell it for the best price. When it comes to a bank, the
mandarins' subordination relations with the bankers cause the transfer of the
problem to the state and, in a collateral turn, the coup falls upon the crowd
which is completely strange to the difficulties of the usurers. The Mandarin class
is the exception agent that turns the bankers' difficulties into a "national"
problem. This is what happened with BPN5
, where the state intervention
removed from any responsibility the less than commendable SLN6
owners.
That intervention really is the image of the Portuguese mandarins and their
criminal behavior. Nationalization was not carried out in order not to undermine
the whole Portuguese banking system, as the Socrates' government affirmed –
by order of the major bankers we add – although BPN’s weight on the banking
sector is small. They poignantly pointed out the need to avoid the
unemployment of many workers. After burying in it € 4,500 million of the public
purse, the government now prays for an Angolan bank to deign to offer alms in
the amount of € 70.6 million for BPN. And to make matters worse, the famous
Moody’s grades several Lusitanian banks at waste level, certainly not by the
contagion of the objective bankruptcy of BPN, which had been known for three
years, but because of their own inadequacies.
And that happens on the same day a neoliberal bureaucrat with the ministerial
hat, discloses another assault on the income of much of the population. Those
whose situation does not allow them to pay their home installment to the bank,
who have to choose between buying their medicines and a bowl of soup, can
they ask Cavaco, Passos or Gaspar7
for the same prompt financial support from
the state? Of course not, since they and the readers are not on the same side,
are not in the same "homeland".
Even within a logic of collective sacrifice, by "all", it would be arguable that the
effort should be proportional to each person’s income and, therefore, included in
a redistribution of wealth, given that Portugal has one of the most unequal
societies in Europe. None of this has been happening, quite the contrary.
4
NT: Word play using “parliamentary” and “lamentable”. In the original “paralamentar” – literally “to be
lamented” or lamentable – said of the behaviour of certain parliament members.
5
BPN – Banco Português de Negócios, belonged to the mafia group that had Cavaco (President of
Republic) as the leader. After the collapse the bank was nationalized in 2008 with millions of losses,
included in the public deficit
6
SLN was a group also related to Cavaco’s mafia
7
Gaspar, minister of finance during mostly of troika intervention in Portugal

Benefiting from the relative social apathy, the ineffectiveness of the institutional
left and the unions, the Portuguese capitalism, faithful interpreter of the
neoliberal catechism, transfers the costs of the State and the banks financial
imbalance to the 95.1% of the population of 15 years of age and older who do
not live from interest, profits or rents8
. All of this reveals that national solidarity is
a fiction and that, contrary to the laws of the sea, the captain is the first to
abandon the drifting ship after plundering the sailors.
In practical terms, it is necessary to consider clearly and as a priority the
construction of a network of movements, articulated, with exchange of
experiences and mutual help. The internationalism of the multitude, the robbed
and offended, forgotten for many decades is the order of the day and clearly
resurfaces in the mass movements and protests in Europe and beyond. The
internationalism of the multitude must be the answer to the various forums in
which the capitalists, their states and their parties, which even use the name
"socialist international", are articulated to a group of mafia gangs. On the other
hand, elitist and detached from the multitude, ideas such as the European Left
Party do not respond in the least to the longings of the peoples attacked by the
neoliberal drift of capitalism, which, by the way, is unaware of their existence .
The greatest likelihood of success and social transformation will come within the
framework of coordinated action among the multitude of EU countries in the
process of being crushed by the neoliberal compressor, notably from an
articulation between all Iberian peoples. We even believe that a continued
articulation between the Iberian peoples would be enough to bring down the
machine that supplies bankers at the expense of the sovereign debts.
5 – Nationalism is a self-interested invention. Heretical notes on the Portuguese
case
When nations were invented in the eighteenth century, nationalism and
patriotism were created as symbiotic products. The latter has been used as a
painkiller to be used when having pain and to be kept in the closet when
enjoying good health; but, as is well known, the painkiller aims to allow
forgetting the ills’ effects not to overcome their causes.
At school – and this is not unique to the western Lusitanian beach – the
program attempts to trace back the love of the homeland to ancient times. As
with every nation, in Portugal there is a tentative to fuse in an inescapable
continuum the social organization before and after the actual creation of the
nation, when the country ceased to be a land owned by a family. This
continuum is intended to smooth out the differences between territories
belonging to a dignitary called the king, with the power to cede at times of
marital alliances or even through sale, on the one hand, and the nation-states,
in which residents are assigned a nationality, on the other.
8
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/portugal-os-mercados-e-o-empobrecimento-generalizado

In Portugal, the power invented one Viriato9
to demonstrate that there was
already a strong sense of independence, of national identity, among the
shepherds of Serra da Estrela, many centuries before an adolescent’s10
rebellion against his mother in the mid-twelfth century. Interestingly, during this
interval of a millennium there is nothing on the record regarding emancipation
revolts against the Romans, the Sueva or Visigothic monarchies, and no fierce
defense against the Saracen infidels is known. The earliest textbooks hardly
mentioned the Visigothic, Suevo, or, even less, the Muslim kingdoms; those
were subjects of history only because they were enemies of the hardworking
Christian princes in the context of such a "reconquer." There is a tendency
towards the historical study of nations, and much smaller one for the study of
the peoples or the territories where the nations were lodged.
In the mid-twelfth century, the feudal lords of Entre Douro and Minho did not like
the vassalage with which they were bound to their Galician counterparts, by the
imposition of the king of Leon, the supreme overlord of both groups. After much
fighting and a papal recognition in return for the delivery of gold, the kingdom of
Portugal was constituted, whose differentiation from Galicia was nil, except for
the conflict between the barons on both sides of the Minho river. The
subsequent conquest of the territories to the south, which culminated with the
annexation of the Algarve in mid-thirteenth century and the integration of Lisbon
as Portugal’s military defense anchor, underpinned the existence of the
Portuguese monarchy, furthermore lacking powerful nobility as existed in the
Europe from across the Pyrenees. As is well known, even after nine centuries,
the border between Portugal and the future Spanish state does not separate
territories that are geographically, economically, demographically, and
sociologically distinct; it is merely a demarcation resulting from the conflicts
between landlords of the medieval era.
During the Portuguese dynastic crisis of 1383/85, the Portuguese land landlords
were divided between the rightful supporters of King Fernando's daughter and
her husband, the king of Castile and the others (the minority) in alliance with the
merchants and artisans of Lisbon, the only place that, in fact, counted in
strategic terms for the expansionism of the Castilian lords. Lisbon would not
have resisted the siege (1384) had it not been for General Pest's intervention
among the Castilian hosts who, decimated, returned to their lands. Nuno
Álvares Pereira's military capabilities in conquering the castles of Castile's allies
and the contingent of 600 experienced English soldiers finally solved the issue
without any patriotic clamor from the huge working population in the camps,
indifferent to who reigned in Lisbon, provided they were not bothered with
tributes and warfare destruction. It is evident that the humble population
benefited nothing from the reorganization of the nobility, the redistribution of
landlords, the creation of a great potentate – the house of Bragança – and the
multipronged Order of Christ, linked to the monarchy and which would finance
the colonial expansion of the XV century. Only the flies had changed, and we
know that, in the northern frontier of Trás-os-Montes, people moved to one or
9
Viriato is a mythical leader of the Lusitanian tribe fighting the Roman invaders. Near Salamanca and
Valencia, in Spain there are also claims on the Viriato’s presence
10
Reference to the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, died at 1185

the other side of what, to them, was not a border, always according to the
amount of taxes to be paid, or, if you prefer, the flies’ hum.
In 1580, after a new dynastic crisis, the Iberian unification happened because
Portugal was inherited by Philip II of Spain, after the weak threat of an aspirant
like Antonio, the prior of Crato, was dominated. The fact that the seat of power
was in Madrid or Lisbon and the king's territorial origin did not prevent most of
Portugal’s residents from sleeping and, as such, no nationalist contestation
happened for a period of sixty years.
In 1640 the difficulties the Spanish empire was facing against English and
Dutch were part of its decline. In this context, the other European dynastic
houses were assaulting the king of Spain’s heritage, in which the Portuguese
colonies were also located. The king of Spain and Portugal, with insufficient
resources to cope with these difficulties, was particularly disliked by the
peripheral Portuguese ruling classes who felt they could maintain the colonies if
they were outside the protection of the Spanish royal house. The tax increase in
Portugal as a result of the State’s financial problems (or the crown’s if you wish)
led to popular uprising in Porto and Évora, but this was an economic fight which
was exploited by the nobility and the bourgeoisie to get popular support against
Spain.
This was followed by a long period based on a clear English protectorate,
convenient for England which thus kept Iberia divided, satisfying their imperial
interests, and therefore felt as essential the survival of a subsidiary monarchy.
Methuen's treaty seals this economic subordination while the crown misspent
Brazil's gold and diamonds in splendid works – the Mafra Convent and the
Church of Saint Roque – hired Domenico Scarlatti to entertain the king, while
the people of Lisbon had to organize a contribution (“crowdfunding”) to get the
Free Waters aqueduct built, in order to have water in abundance and with
quality.
It is England that draws Portugal into the Napoleonic wars and it is in what
follows that the bourgeois revolutions for the establishment of political liberalism
develop in the Peninsula, as well as popular uprisings against theft and violence
carried out by French occupants. These revolts will be prolonged in the
following decades, in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the evident
centre stage positioning of the popular classes, as in the Patuleia case, causing
the English military intervention to impose the, then constitutional, law and
order.
Still in the late nineteenth century, a few decades before the exacerbated
patriotism of the First Republic took revenge in 1910 of a Saxe Coburg and
Braganza king of Portugal and the Algarves… had the opportunity to observe, in
practice, the patriotism of Portugal’s residents. One day when the royal figure
was sailing somewhere off the north coast of Portugal, the crew of a fishing
vessel was asked if they were Portuguese or Spanish. The fishermen readily
answered “we are from Póvoa de Varzim”11
. To them, of course, what counted
11
TN. Póvoa do Varzim was at the time a small fishing village in the Portuguese Atlantic north coast.

was the place of their roots, their families, their work, all else being meaningless
abstractions. But, since the History we are told is the narrative of the rulers and
the powerful…
In the late nineteenth century, the European powers, namely England and
Germany, saw on the map of Africa vast territories controlled or wanted by a
Portuguese bourgeoisie that did not know what to do with them; and they
imposed their will, seizing the areas between Angola and Mozambique,
included in the famous pink map, in the face of the Portuguese bourgeoisie’s
protest chorus, which the Republicans took advantage of to incriminate the
monarchy, which was obviously incapable of opposing English wishes. The
deep country, illiterate and living poorly on the countryside, does not seem to
have accompanied this patriotic vibe which was located somewhere, far away.
The First Republic explored nationalistic and patriotic ideas, notably when it
forced to go to Flanders – and to defend colonial rights – thousands of young
men, poorly dressed, equipped, or armed, who left their villages to experience
the wonders of chemical warfare. At the same time, and within the ambit of
meritorious action in education, the regime instilled, starting with the school, the
idea of the homeland, the deeds of the ancestors, the “aljubarrotas”12
, but gave
much less relief to the role of the homeland in the ignoble slave trade .
Salazar took advantage of the patriotic wave to enclose Portugal in a logic of
sacrifice in which "all" should participate in the aggrandizement of the beloved
homeland; it also served to justify the perks granted to the armed forces that
supported him on the throne. On the one hand, Italian and German nationalism
was at its height and was in tow of Salazar's sympathies for Italian fascism,
which he pointed to as an example; on the other hand, it helped the people to
bear the load of low wages and lack of decent living conditions, to benefit the
Portuguese capitalists not only for surviving against the competition but also for
enriching them. Finally, the Catholic Church was helping to maintain the
resignation of the God-fearing, amen. The pide13
and an army, already by then
filled with sitting generals, were watching over the collective security…
When the colonial wars began, a new patriotic vibe was spewed in the
newspapers, radio and television: “Angola is ours” sang the FNAT choir. Of
course, patriotism was in the chicken pen of the hundreds of thousands of
people who had emigrated to seek a better life or to flee the war, and those who
stood and growled against the regime were classed as anti-patriots,
conspirators, in the payroll of international communism; the latter, if it were
today, would be named by Moody's, the ogre pursuing the benevolent
performance of the PPC and its banker friends.
Think not that, in those fascist blackness times, only those with the regime were
patriots! Mário Soares14
, accepted Marcelo Caetano's orders to not set the
colonial issue as a theme of the 1969 “elections”. And the Communist Paty
12
NT: Aljubarrota was a decisive battle of the Portuguese dynastic crisis of 1383/85 (see above).
13
NT: “pide”, acronym of “Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado” (Internacional and State
Defense Police) was a security agency, the secret police. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIDE
14
Mário Soares, the founder of the Socialist Party, primer and minister in the seventies

defended a “national democratic revolution” while limiting its internationalism to
the servile following of the positions of a nationalist and imperial power, the
USSR. The homeland is not debatable and the homeland extended to the top of
Ramelau15
, present on three continents!
20/7/2011
This and other texts in:
http://www.scribd.com/group/16730-left-aligned
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents
www.esquerda_desalinhada.blogs.sapo.pt
15
Ramelau is a mountain in East Timor, a Portuguese colony at the time

Patriotic stupidity and globalization (2)

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