How revolutions are controlled and abused.
Half a century ago : The Carnation Revolution in Portugal. By Hermann Ploppa
Photo : People climb a tank and celebrate during the Carnation Revolution. Lisbon, April 25, 1974
I thank the author for the right to publish the article.
Half a century ago: The Carnation Revolution in Portugal | By Hermann Ploppa
Published on: April 27, 2024
A comment from Hermann Ploppa.
We now recognize the counterinsurgency tricks used by the Western community of values. These tricks were effective half a century ago. But back then people were still far too gullible to see through the sophistication.
On the night of April 24th to 25th, 1974, radio stations in Portugal played a completely apolitical tearjerker. Namely Portugal's contribution to the European hit competition Grand Prix de Eurovision. Paulo de Carvalho intoned his little song “And after the farewell” <1> . What was there? But not even the feared eavesdroppers and listeners of Portugal's fascist secret STASI understood that the song was the attack signal for a revolution. Because when Carvalho's croon sounded, the young officers of the Armed Forces Movement MFA knew that they had to be ready now. Hours later, the notorious eavesdroppers and peeps from the DGS secret police also knew that something was no longer right here. Was now playing on the radio The forbidden song “Grandola, vila morena” by the anti-fascist singer Zeca Alfonso <2> . Now the dissatisfied young officers of the MFA moved into the important cities with tanks and foot soldiers. The population, which had been subjugated by the dictatorship for half a century and which the fascists declared to be kept “poor and stupid,” knew that things could only get better. The incoming soldiers were greeted with breakfast by women. The soldiers willingly had red carnations stuck into the barrels of their rifles. A symbol of the socialist movement.
Apparently, Marcelo Caetano's dictatorship was so complacent that an approaching revolution went unnoticed. The angry crowd initially besieges the headquarters of the hated secret police DGS. The DGS people react in the usual pattern: they shoot at the crowd. There were four deaths and 43 injuries. But the crowd stays on the square. The following morning, the secret police surrendered to the revolting military.
The current dictator Caetano has entrenched himself and is sending troops against the revolutionaries. Unfortunately, the government soldiers immediately join the revolutionaries. Caetano now only wants to hand over his power to a proper military general. He wants the dashing military man Antonio de Spinola as his successor. You can understand that well. Because Spinola, who wore a monocle as a visual aid in the style of Wilhelmine generals (Translator's explanation: Wilhelm II was the last emperor of Germany), was a proven fascist warrior of the old school. In the Spanish Civil War, he fought as a Portuguese soldier on Franco's side. He was an observer for the German Wehrmacht during the horrific siege of Leningrad. But in the spring of 1974, Spinola had made himself completely unpopular with those in power.
This brings us to one of the reasons why the military in Portugal, of all places, cut off the power of the fascist dictatorship. Because Portugal still had colonies at that time. Portugal had already had to say goodbye to Brazil, the gold mine, in the nineteenth century. To achieve this, Portugal had conquered a number of colonies in Africa, although they were not half as profitable as Brazil. And now the resistance movements in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea became ever stronger. Portugal was in danger of being completely destroyed by these colonial wars. These wars became increasingly costly. And because the first set of Portuguese officers had already largely fallen, young men from the Portuguese lower class now had to move up into the officer ranks. And they hadn't forgotten where they came from. And with what contempt the common people were treated under Caetano and his predecessor and permanent dictator, Antonio Salazar. The new officers from the lower class were not operationally blind like their aristocratic predecessors. They saw themselves more as fellow sufferers of the African colonial peoples. They joined together in the Armed Forces Movement, or MFA, and thought together about how to end this devastating colonial war. And what a modern, fair Portugal should look like.
Yes, and to the surprise of not least those young officers, it was the warrior General Spinola who came to their aid. At the beginning of 1974 he wrote a clever book called “Portugal and the Future”. He then explains that this damned Portuguese colonial war cannot be won militarily. In addition, the Portuguese economy, which is not doing well anyway, is going completely to the dogs. Because half of the national budget has to be wasted on this colonial war. The colonies must therefore be granted independence. Portugal needs the money for more important things than keeping some absolutely unprofitable colonies at all costs. Spinola knows what he's talking about. In 1973, he commanded the dirty Operation Green Sea. Spinola launched an attack on the neighbouring country Guinea state with the assistance of Portuguese troops and local collaborators. The aim of the action: to get Portuguese prisoners out. On top of that, teach the independent state of Guinea a lesson. Assassinate the charismatic political leader Amilcar Cabral and the President of Guinea, Sekou Touré. Spinola's coup ends as a partial victory. He kicked out the captured Portuguese. But he didn't get Sekou Touré and Amilcar Cabral.
When the beleaguered dictator Caetano now wants to push the monocle General Spinola as his successor to the revolting officers in Lisbon, the young officers understandably have difficulty swallowing. But maybe it's not such a bad thing to make a famous general, who revealed amazing rays of hope in his last book, the new head of state? Spinola becomes the new head of state. Perhaps that was the first mistake of the young armed forces movement. In any case, a transitional government is now being formed to prepare for a democratic Portugal. And like every unprepared political new beginning, the Carnation Revolution begins touchingly innocent and chaotic at the same time. Thousands of political ideas are sprouting like flowers after a warm rain. But it is clear that there are certain well-fed political circles that can redirect this touching chaos to their own advantage.
Their very first victims are the forces of grassroots democracy. Namely, those people who were simply pushed into a vacuum. The old regime actually collapsed all by itself. Suddenly the vacuum has to be filled with new content. Nobody initially pushed forward and saw this situation as a springboard for their career. Self-help organizations are forming that want to rebuild the collapsed society from below. The disadvantage of these basic movements: they have to constantly reinvent the wheel. So we experiment wildly and try out new forms of organization. Mistakes are made. Valuable time is wasted. In the course of the Carnation Revolution, countless workers' councils and cooperatives were formed. Society should be completely reorganized from below.
But while people are experimenting so much down there, other circles have long had a plan. There are roughly three groups that were active in the wild years of the Carnation Revolution between 1974 and 1976. In addition to the grassroots democrats already mentioned, there were still those people who would like to have everything go back to how it was under the dictatorship of Salazar and Caetano. In addition to the right-wing extremist military, the Catholic Church, which thrived under the dictatorship, should be mentioned here. The Soviet-style communists also had their, as always completely unrealistic, unsuccessful master plan to influence Portugal in the interests of Soviet geopolitics. The Soviet communists under Alvaro Cunhal continued to lose support in this process.
But neither the fascist faction of Salazar nostalgics nor the Soviet communists won the race. The Social Democrats once again proved to be the most suitable strategists for the integration of Portugal into a modernized Europe. In the 1970s, the triumph of the internationally networked Social Democrats was still unbroken. Ultimately, it was the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is close to the SPD, and was supposed to break the neck of grassroots democracy in Portugal. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation is named after the SPD politician Friedrich Ebert, who had the grassroots movement in Germany massacred with fascist units after the First World War was lost. In this way paved the way for the triumph of the National Socialists under Hitler. The German Social Democrats recognized early on that the Caetano regime would not last much longer. In time, they installed the politician Mario Soares as their man in Portugal. Willy Brandt did his best to protect the exiled politician. And so, at the behest of the SPD, the Portuguese Socialist Party PS was founded in the premises of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bad Münstereifel in 1973 <3> .
As soon as all exiled politicians are allowed to enter Portugal again, Mario Soares, heavily padded with money and tactical advice from the SPD, begins to turn things around in Portugal. The politician benefits from the fact that the grassroots politicians are increasingly at odds. And that the Salazar nostalgics, incapable of a political strategy, use every opportunity to cause unrest. As early as March 1975, the former general and short-term head of state Spinola attempted a coup against the hated young officers and failed. The advance from the far right in turn caused the interim government to turn the wheel very far to the left. Many companies in Portugal are now being nationalized. This in turn drives insecure citizens into the more right-wing camp. In November 1975 there was another coup, the background to which remains obscure to this day. The most important result is that the mastermind of the Carnation Revolution, the officer Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, is politically eliminated. And that the grassroots Democrats are being blamed for this strange coup. This serves as a justification for declaring the Carnation Revolution over.
In 1976, the military handed political responsibility back to civil society. A Constituent Assembly drafted a democratic constitution. The excellently trained “socialists” of Mario Soares from Bad Münstereifel win the parliamentary elections. Right-wing Social Democrats themselves declared the goal second. In third place are the Soviet Communists under Alvaro Cunhal. In the subsequent election for president, Otelo Carvalho, now criminalized and defamed by the media, lost to the successful November 1975 coup leader Antonio Ramalho Eanes, with 16 percent to 62 percent of the votes cast.
The way is clear for the Social Democrat Mario Soares, who is controlled and directed from Germany. Portugal is now going the same way as Spain or Greece. Into the European Community. Into the Eurozone. And thus inevitably under the control of American-German-French investor groups. Today, Portugal belongs less to the Portuguese than ever before. Foreign conglomerates have seized the meat of this beautiful country.
When you watch how peoples on this planet are continuously dispossessed and disenfranchised according to the same pattern under the appearance of democracy, the rule of law and social progress, you ask yourself: why don't we finally learn from these bitter lessons and start? To develop strategies yourself? When will we finally form think tanks and networks ourselves to put a stop to this activity?
It's still not too late.
Sources and notes
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<2>
<3> https://www.fes.de/archiv-der-sozialen-demokratie/artikelseite-adsd/fes-portugal
“Shortly after the FES opened its new educational center in Bad Münstereifel, it provided the Portuguese socialists with both resources and logistics for a founding congress in that same educational facility. This makes the FES education center a historical place.
During the Carnation Revolution, the FES initially focused its activities on the infrastructure of the future PS and on training new party actors. Educational work was central to an organization that at the beginning of democratization had only 50 activists and indulged in radicalized rhetoric in which it seemed to seek to surpass one of the best-organized communist parties in Europe. Although a lot had been achieved in developing the PS party structure by 1976, there was almost no progress in educational work.”
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Source / Original article in German :
https://apolut.net/vor-einem-halben-jahrhundert-die-nelkenrevolution-in-portugal-von-hermann-ploppa/
The Telegram channel of Hermann Ploppa :
A link to the journalist group "APOLUT":
https://apolut.net/podcast/tagesdosis/