NOTE: Substack offers the option between paid and unpaid subscriptions. This option is not exclusive; that is, those who wish to remain as subscribers or unpaid viewers will continue to have access to all the content. However, those who wish to contribute to the Ephemera Archive project by paying a subscription will particularly help with the auction purchasing policy in Portugal or abroad, which will be the destination of the money thus obtained.

Starting in 1947, a group of white farmers “colonized” a territory they deemed suitable for agriculture and livestock farming, stretching from Mecarra and Motaze to Lake Chuali, within the Magude Administrative Division of the Gaza District in Mozambique. This colonization effort intensified between 1956 and 1959, with rice being the primary crop. However, years of drought damaged the harvests. Consequently, during a 1959 visit by the Minister of Overseas Territories, Rear Admiral Vasco Lopes Alves, the farmers presented him with an album containing photographs of the settlement, along with their grievances and requests for assistance.

This album is held in the Ephemera Archive, these images are an example of the album’s content.

The addition of the RAN printing house archive (RAN Estate [Raúl de Almeida Nunes] – Printing and Publishing) to the EPHEMERA Archive made it possible to link a collection of postcard sample sheets that illustrate the evolution of taste—specifically *kitsch*, a classification of taste closely tied to the historical evolution of postcard iconography beyond mere documentary subjects (landscapes, traditional costumes, objects, etc.). RAN’s primary activity and greatest asset was the publication of postcards, a field in which it was a pioneer. Attached is a small sample of these large sheets, which combined various types of postcards.

.

Christian Couple

King of the Congo speaking to the people.

Ibo, 1905.

It must be the silly season, but on these summer days with punishing temperatures, my otherwise useful brain shrinks considerably, and I care about only a handful of things. It isn’t even a matter of escapism or a vacation—things I don’t usually take in the same way ordinary mortals do, likely with irreparable consequences for that same shrunken head perched on my shoulders. A vacation simply means fewer secondary obligations and more time to devote to primary ones (such as “saving” papers—old and new, from a century ago or today—from the paper-shredding reaper, the Memory Destroyer, the Enemy of Archives), which is a wonderful thing.

I assume that what interests me these days lacks the audience or viewership it might garner if I were to talk about wildfires, the dead ministers with a grave inside government, the old treacheries of “Costa,” the Roma and South Asian communities and their local nemesis Dr. Ventura, presidential silences and pronouncements, or crimes born of jealousy and greed—or, ideally, if I wrote about the “preparations” for the “preparations” of the football season, a topic clung to by a television industry suffering from soccer withdrawal. None of that for me; I am left with what interests me, even with a brain halved in size by the heat. Namely, Trump and the dangerous reality show surrounding him, along with papers, manuscripts, magazines, newspapers, and books—though papers more than anything else, because they hold an element of surprise that I rarely find in books anymore.

Trump and these papers ruin my rest and sleep; in the case of the papers—which occasionally decide to topple from the stacks where they ought to be resting quietly—they even threaten my physical safety. It is a grand term, perhaps, but I have been assaulted more than once by piles of books and papers that decided to shift their center of gravity without higher authorization. As for Trump and the lively entourage around him—a spectacle better than any great comedy, a veritable *Guignol*—they start doing interesting things as early as 1 a.m. their time, when he kicks off on Truth Social (a name that is fake news). And we, hooked on this opiate of raw, hard, unadulterated politics, end up watching television at 3 or 4 in the morning, all because of the time zones, then spend the rest of the day walking around like zombies.

Of course, what is happening in Trump’s America is extremely serious: it is the daily effort of a crude, unprincipled autocrat—accustomed to getting his way through money and threats—to subvert the governance of a democracy, attacking its institutions and making braggadocio his way of life. Surrounding him are shameless mini-Trumps—”minions,” a magnificent word to characterize them—who parry every blow aimed at him and justify the most absurd things, as if that savagery were the new normal. There is no shortage of mini-Trumps of all three genders, nor of timid little mice afraid of losing their Republican seats; if he wanted to build a Trump sewage treatment plant behind the Capitol to “drain the swamp,” they would immediately justify the enormous symbolic significance of the act coming from an “unconventional” President. The refrain is that it was precisely by being “unconventional” that he won the election—as if that justified everything he does based on a single criterion: his ego. And who knows? He might even stage a coup d’état under the banner of “Trump 2028.” And he is without any doubt the most dangerous man in the world.

In truth, America is governed today by the only man in the world who violates Freud’s laws: he possesses an Ego and a Superego, but no Id. He *does* have one, but I shudder at the thought of peering into that deep cavern (speaking of which, it seems the psychiatric association considers it acceptable to publicly discuss the President’s mental state...). In time, an opera buffa will be written about Trump.

After all this, the propaganda machine performs the most absurd mental gymnastics to justify him, transforming bad manners, a lack of character, ignorance, and crudeness into a display of “unconventionality”—a style that defies traditional politicians and employs business methods—all to please the “base.” I don’t know what sickens me more: Trump, the Republican gnomes, that hand-picked coterie of presidential aides, or Fox News—that Ministry of Propaganda and Narcissistic Mirror—with the sheer “gall” it displays.

Naturally, this succession of misdeeds—this farce masking a drama (the drama of the world’s most powerful man being “this” person)—makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night. And the papers? The papers are the soothing balm for the world’s wickedness. There, I find not a moment of boredom and discovery after discovery; the complexity of the world they portray is a good thing—whereas the rest, that dark path reminiscent of the 1930s, is utter crap.

(Samizdat)

NOTE: Substack offers the option between paid and unpaid subscriptions. This option is not exclusive; that is, those who wish to remain as subscribers or unpaid viewers will continue to have access to all the content. However, those who wish to contribute to the Ephemera Archive project by paying a subscription will particularly help with the auction purchasing policy in Portugal or abroad, which will be the destination of the money thus obtained.

The mechanisms of radicalism currently underway on the right of the political spectrum are clearly visible in columnists’ texts, on social media pages, and in that mirror of minds that are the comments in unmoderated or poorly moderated comment boxes, whether in Observador, Sol, or even Público. Moreover, the practice of moderating the same publication in the main body and allowing everything on its Facebook pages favors the degradation of opinion, with the false argument of its democratization.

Although it is easy to see that a multiplicity of false names and pseudonyms belong to the same person, to create the illusion of quantity, it is not irrelevant to know this fictional form of vox populi, intentional and aiming to achieve political objectives. Similarly, it is possible to perceive other deliberate mechanisms, such as sending derogatory opinions either at the beginning or at an advanced stage of the comments, so that these are either the first or the last and, in some way, condition the reading of the whole. There are people who do this as naturally as breathing, true militants of the comment sections, and there are professionals from communication agencies or organized groups within political parties, like those found on radio programs, the live opinion shows, operating in secret.

Many of these mechanisms are not exclusive to the radical right; they also exist on the left, but the tribal tide that is rising is that of the radical right, associated with anti-democratic populism, exacerbated by the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the current political situation. The themes and the way they are presented and discussed are so similar to each other, from the Observador to the Diabo, that they represent a cast that can be identified and discussed.

In other articles I will return to this issue, with portraits of the “argumentary,” almost all associated with personal attacks, which since the beginning of the 20th century has been identified and studied as a modus operandi of radical populist attack journalism. Today I focus on the use of the Soviet argument from the Brezhnev period to employ psychological, psychoanalytic, and psychiatric interpretation to explain dissent. Dissent was considered a mental illness, and several opponents of the Soviet regime, such as Vladimir Bukovsky, Leonid Plyushch, and Grigorenko, were persecuted as if they were ill. The idea, presented in a simplistic way, was this: how is it possible, without suffering from any mental illness, to question a perfect regime of political sociability like Soviet socialism, a source of happiness and well-being? How was it possible, without diminishing mental faculties, to be “against the people”?

This Soviet argument is now widely used in the world of personal attacks by the radical right. It may seem strange given the apparent political opposition, but it is not: there is a similarity in the desire to destroy the other, and the mechanisms for doing so are identical. These types of attacks, very common in the gray margins of politics, are increasingly migrating to the “respectable” zones of opinion. How is it possible, without being sick, demented, senile, “crazy,” lunatic, without having diminished mental faculties, to question the discourse of the radical right about the “dictator” Costa, about the “authoritarian socialism” that governs us, how is it not possible to see the corrupt essence of democracy, described as the “system,” how is it possible not to accept the “scientific” theses about reality, how, in short, can one disagree about the world of Evil that governs us without being either servile or sick or both?

The terms I used and repeat - demented, senile, “crazy,” lunatic, without all faculties - have all been used here these days and are a kind of upgrade of the reduction of political positions to psychological traits and behaviors, be it envy or resentment, the two most common, which are central to personal attacks. It is an increasingly vulgar style, which accompanies the growing inability to accept positions in a democratic conversation, or even to admit that it can exist because that is accepting the “system.” The best example is the pro-Trump Republicans, and their national imitators.

If we remove the psychologism, and its superior form in the argument of dissent or disagreement as mental illness, there is almost nothing left about it. Squeeze it and it comes out empty, which means that it is not about debating or discussing, but considering that the other can never be heard or be an interlocutor, because they are diminished in their mental faculties, as seen by their positions...

NOTE: Substack offers the option between paid and unpaid subscriptions. This option is not exclusive; that is, those who wish to remain as subscribers or unpaid viewers will continue to have access to all the content. However, those who wish to contribute to the Ephemera Archive project by paying a subscription will particularly help with the auction purchasing policy in Portugal or abroad, which will be the destination of the money thus obtained.

(…)

7

The Archive has a priority: to save, save, save everything that is part of our collective memory. After saving, it is necessary to preserve, organize, make an inventory, make it available, research, and publish. This entire sequence is important, but first we need to save, and this is not always the priority in other archives. We believe that whatever happens, apart from action of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, plague, famine and war, what enters here is safer than what stays at home. Death, divorces, moving house, evictions, the end of personal or family libraries, or the days of collective destruction, such as Mondays after elections, they all contribute to our archive. Every day, thousands of fragments of our collective memory disappear, letters, photos, papers, manuscripts, objects, posters. We know this process all too well and fight against it.

8

Hence an active collection policy, which goes everywhere and has already saved relevant documents thrown away, in containers in the middle of fields, in warehouses in the middle of cowsheds, on football fields in the middle of demolitions, in ruins of factories, in popular clubs evicted from their premises.

A recent example was that of a political party headquarters in Coimbra, which was closed and everything such as correspondence, accounting, pamphlets and posters, was thrown into the trash. We collected it all. This collection policy is based on a pedagogy of memory (which includes television programs, articles, lectures, exhibitions, etc.), on a fine network of points of collection throughout the country and abroad, and on the action of volunteers based on the idea: throw anything away. We tell people: “don’t worry, don’t do it yourself, if necessary, we’ll dump it”.

9

The Archive is omnivorous, it eats everything.

It is understandable that this cannot be done by large archives, as they must be selective, but our experience tells us that something unique and relevant always emerges in what we receive, even if more time is lost in sorting. This is how we found a rare photograph of Camilo Pessanha, a diary of an inheritance, a humble love letter, thousands and thousands of “good words” (cunhas), a recording of an important meeting made on the sly, or a pile of manuscripts hidden from the PIDE (Political Policy existing during the dictatorship) inside piles of newspapers.

We know it would be crazy to think we can have it all, but we try. In other words, it is a milder form of madness. It is a human way of fighting against oblivion, meaning death. A way of fighting against ephemerality and forgetfulness.

10

The Archive is holistic, it is not partial and dispersed, even if it seems so. It communicates with a library and a kind of museum, in the style of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “rapid response collection”. All these parts are coherent with each other and serve each other. From the communiqué to the canvas of a billboard, to the photograph of a street action, to the video film of an intervention, to the electoral “toasting”, we can build the continuum of images, texts, actions that make up the activist intervention in society, the ecology of protest or, more prosaically, people’s daily lives. In this daily work, we record and recover a lot that does not remain in “memory” anywhere else, we witness and annotate the inner side of collective actions such as demonstrations, with unique documentation and record, long before the media or other archives realize the value of the memory of what was happening. One vivid example was the collection, from day one, of the Covid pandemic in Portugal, and the signs of its social and political impact, covering the first denialist speeches, restaurant protests, graffiti on the walls.

11

The Archive is patrimonial, physical, biological, and analogical. Part of it is also digital, but what we consider more important, more in conformity with our senses and even more durable, in many cases, is the materiality of things. It lives on paper, cardboard, fabric, canvas, clay, metal, before, during and after electrons. The Archive is part of a “paper culture”, which does not live on nostalgia, nor does it miss the dust of books or the smell of paper, and it does not claim to be better than digital culture. It claims to be different. In some things digital is better, and in others, paper is better. And in its differences, it is sometimes unique and, for certain human tasks with a human dimension, more capable.

12

The Archive does not compete with other archives, or with any other initiative or institution of the same kind. When we are asked what to do with an estate or a holding, we explain the advantages and disadvantages of handing it over to another archive or ours. When we have collections that complete those of another archive, we are always available to work on them or share their access together. The task of making a memory network is a collective one, thus benefiting from the diversity of perspectives and experiences.

13

The Archive belongs to the so-called “civil society”; actually, it is an example of a genuine citizens’ institution. It is autonomous, independent, sustainable and belongs to those who work in it and to the Association that manages it. We do not assume public fetishism as the best way to safeguard collective heritage. We know too well many public institutions that, due to lack of resources or dynamism, are effectively dead and cost a lot of money to maintain. The Archive works better, saves more, organizes more, takes more inventories, publishes more than many public archives with budgets a hundred times larger. We do things that no one does, nor anyone could do. An example of what we do, and no other archive can do in Portugal, is the monitoring of municipal elections. In the 2025 election there were about 12,000 different local campaigns that were nationwide collected, with more than 100,000 physical “products”, such as leaflets, posters, campaign “gifts”, gadgets, T-shirts, flags, stickers, etc. To date we have managed to collect around 50,000 of those items, but even that is just half. Nonetheless, the campaign folders are always open and new “products” are coming in all the time, from 1976 to 2026.

14

The Archive has its own identity and, therefore, we believe that an excessive centralization of the entire heritage of memory in a single State Archive is wrong, because often the outcome is the loss of identity of its foundation, its founder, its funds, the style of those who work there, and the look they carry over memory. There are not two equal looks, the same things are not given the same importance, the same things are not kept for the same reasons.

Our work for memory has a civic significance for us.

15

The Archive lives on both the big and the small people, the main and the secondary ones. Nothing that is human is irrelevant to us. Hence its assets are relevant to Portuguese history (Sá Carneiro, Sousa e Castro, Victor Crespo, Nuno Rodrigues dos Santos, Hattenberger Rosa, Radical Right-Wing collection, “Mundo da Canção” magazine, José Fonseca e Costa, student movement, several unions, Pedro Ramos de Almeida, Victor Serrão, Esperantist movement, Adelino Torres, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, far-left organizations, dictatorship propagandists, war medicine in Angola, scientific spoils, etc.), but our experience shows that many characters considered secondary are much more important than what they seem.

Similarly, we value the memory traces of common people, usually forgotten by History with a capital H, like the character of a worker referred by Brecht poem “A Worker Reads and Asks” in his questions about the “Caesar” and his cook:

“Caesar smote the Gauls.
Wasn’t there at least a cook with him?”

We keep, study and publish a love correspondence between a seamstress and an office

clerk, laborers’ papers, teenagers’ diaries, war aerograms, photos of rich and poor weddings, etc. This allows us to get to know hitherto invisible realities, such as what it was like for a single boy to live in a boarding house in the 1930s, how sex education was carried out for a poor girl, what it was like to have an abortion in the 1940s, or the life of a blind girl in assistance institutions, or the running of a parish house, or soldiers’ daily lives in the colonial war, described in their diaries.

16

The Archive is sustainable. Sustainable so that what happened to others does not happen to us, creating mistrust about the private archives and their different role from public archives. It lives on the contributions of its members, currently more than 850, and on collaboration agreements and counterparts with public and private institutions, but always with a basic rule: we never spend beyond the resources we have, nor do we have fixed expenses beyond our means.

And, above all, nothing limits our autonomy. Since most work is done by friends and pro bono volunteers, our expenses are associated with accounting, warehouse rents and the cost of collections and transport. In addition to a significant flow of donations, the acquisitions made for the archive are offered by others and therefore free of charge for the archive. Therefore, whoever wants to help us can and should join and pay a fee according to their possibilities.

But we pay a price for our independence, we cannot do everything we want, and we are not rich, and it is a miracle that we do so many things.

17

The Archive is the result of an amateur activity, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that circumstance. It is therefore viewed with some

understandable mistrust by some professionals, some in good faith, others who are responsible for archives deader than a mummy and who resent our “amateur” dynamism.

We do not comply with all standards and best practices, because of lack of knowledge and resources. But we are learning fast, and a lot of what we do already takes archival rules into account. For example, we have very effective conservation practices, temperature and relative humidity control, pest control, etc. We scan with the recommended resolution for the archives and our databases are primitive but made in such a way that they can be exported to more professional software, without losing the previous work.

We follow the rules of prudence, confidentiality and data protection, when justified. But we do not consider ourselves trapped by European bureaucratic regulation, with enormous absurdities, for example, regarding data protection and copyright, which is allowing some rapacious firms to register thousands of documents, advertisements, images, etc., as their own, which go from being “orphans” to having “fathers” who do business with paternity records. We do not follow them because we do not agree with them and because they greatly harm public disclosure, for example on the Internet, of information of public interest. And we are going to evolve, both from the point of view of organizing what we have and what we are constantly receiving, and from the technological point of view, always with the help and contribution of our friends.

We already have a small administrative structure, an embryonic editorial department, a small team that prepares exhibitions, volunteers responsible for areas such as music, photography, art, literature, sport, Time, gastronomy, or handling specific collections, and efficient logistics that take care of collections, storage, purchases, etc. But, due to the scarcity of resources, we are far from being able to respond to the growing demand by researchers and those curious about local history, and the dispersion of storage places makes it difficult to search and quick consultation. At the same time, the amateur nature of our work creates delays and much of what we wish to cover (demonstrations, for example) remains undocumented.

18

The Archive lives of its friends and volunteers. More than an organization, it is a movement, a movement for the civic sense of memory. Its strength and capacity for achievement arise from the approximately 150 women and men, across the country and beyond, as we have our faithful Spanish, Irish and Portuguese friends living in various countries, who dedicate part of their time to helping the Archive. There is a huge effort to collect papers, to save spoils, to photograph campaigns, to go to demonstrations, to register everything, to inventory documents, to digitize, to do physical work, as the poster says, “if you think that intellectual work is light, come and work with us”.

19

It is not always easy: some people do not want to be photographed, even when they are in a public demonstration, some are displeased by what we report from the “inside” of the political action, some think that an Archive of this nature should have anathemas and censorship – for example, not collecting elements about the radical right, - but there are those who take risks to show what is happening. For example, enduring tear gas and police charges to show what the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations in Paris are like, or covering more aggressive demonstrations such as those performed by denialists who suspect people wearing masks in the pandemic, or the extreme-right-wing.

20

The Archive does not depend on the circumstances of its formation, nor on the life of its founder. Today, it is the work of a team fully capable of giving continuity to it. And it has a plan B. And a plan C, if necessary. However, it needs to have an institutional framework that does not exist in Portugal, nor in many European countries, but it does exist in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It needs a new law that reconciles the patrimonial soundness of foundations with the flexibility of non-profit cultural associations, which allows keeping the patrimony safe and using the great strength of voluntary work and pro bono dedication. It also needs a law on foundations that is not designed with the tax authorities in mind, nor with large foundations, but a law that is friendly towards small and medium-sized foundations in danger of extinction. A law that effectively punishes the fraudulent foundations that are improperly occupying the civic space of those who are giving everyone what was private and is of great value, which is real wealth.

21

It naturally needs more resources, and for that, it relies on the contributions of its members and the support of everyone, including the state, municipalities, companies, associations. For all these reasons, more than an archive and a library, EPHEMERA is a movement, a movement for memory, therefore, a movement for democracy.

Welcome to EPHEMERA and thank you.

1

The Ephemera Archive-Library has been “harvesting Memory” for more 15 years. It has more than 750,000 titles of books and brochures, tens of thousands of periodicals titles, around 1 million pamphlets, many thousands of posters, pictures, banners, outdoors, political cloths, handmade posters for demonstrations and protests, photographs, thousands of objects, hundreds of thousands of leaflets, flyers, cards, etc., thousands of emblems and pins, tens of thousands of stickers, more than six linear kilometers of shelves and cabinets. It comprises a set of estates, collections and holdings that are unique in terms of its size and the importance of its funds. It is undoubtedly the largest private archive in Portugal and one of the largest in Europe.

2

It is a national and international collection with about 100 countries represented, although this number in some cases is only a little more than a pin. But there are good collections from Spain, Ireland, Sweden, France, USA, Brazil, the PALOP (Portuguese-speaking African countries), etc. and, since there is no parallel in portuguese archives, it is the only place where, for example, a scholar on design and political propaganda can find election posters from Iran or Colombia, Angola or Norway, Afghanistan or Uganda. All this can be found in six adapted houses and a warehouse in Vila da Marmeleira (Rio Maior), 3 warehouses in Barreiro, a large warehouse in Santa Iria da Azóia and other storerooms in our collection points. At this moment, there are collection points in Viana do Castelo (“Girassol” Café), Porto ( University of Porto and Mira Galleries), Lamego (National Museum of Lamego), Guarda (Association of Traditional Games), Aveiro (Clube Os Galitos), Viseu (Polytechnic Institute of Viseu), Coimbra (“Santa Cruz” Café), Figueira da Foz (Ginásio Clube Figueirense and Misericórdia), Santarém (Recreational Workers Society of Santarém), Lisboa (Mercado do Forno do Tijolo), Barreiro, and other collection points will soon be opened in Leiria and Braga. In many other places in Portugal, friends and volunteers collect and keep documents for the archive. There are four collection sites outside Portugal, in Spain, Sweden, Luxembourg and Luanda, in Angola.

Dispersion and lack of space are our main problems.

3

The public impact of the Archive is considerable. About 30,000 documentation folders are published online, with more than 280,000 images and texts, both on the blog and on the Ephemera website, on the Facebook page that releases the archive publications and activities, and on the YouTube channel (more than 1.000 videos). On social media there are more than 36,000 followers (about 20.698 on Facebook + 7,380 on Twitter + 5.974 on Instagram + 1,443 on YouTube), and more than 5,000,000 visits to the blog have been registered. In collaboration with TVI24/CNN, we have produced more than 50 documentaries on various aspects of the Archive (documents, objects, etc.), with good audiences.

Exhibitions organized by the Archive had tens of thousands of visitors, in Viana do Castelo, Porto, Óbidos, Coimbra, Lamego, Viseu, Ponte de Sor, Torres Vedras, Mangualde, Lagoa, Condeixa, Ferreira do Alentejo, Lisbon, Barreiro, etc. The number of visitors rises significantly if we include school visits.

Several books, articles and academic works have used materials from the Archive, in which several national and international research are currently taking place. In collaboration with “Tinta da China” publishing house, there is a collection managed by the Archive with ten published books, and eight Ephemera Booklets are edited, with their own edition, all using materials collected by us.

CADERNOS EPHEMERA

4

Protocols of agreement with cultural groups, publications and artists are in place, which allow the development of creative work based on the materials of the archive. In close co-operation with schools in various locations around the country, guided tours and work included in the school syllabus have been carried out, as was the case with the examination works by the students in Engraving and Silkscreen Printing, at the António Arroio Decorative Arts School, in Lisbon.

5

To draw attention to the preservation of memory, the archive uses unusual means, such as, for example, a football team playing with Ephemera equipment, thus remembering the importance of memory.

Several shows were organized (e.g., the celebration of the anniversary of the Beatles; Abbey Road album, in Barreiro), such as, electronic music sessions in our warehouse, theatre plays based on originals existing in the Archive, musical performances, films and dances.

Many materials from the archive are reproduced online and print publications, and on Wikipedia pages around the world. Articles and reports on the Archive and its funds have been made in the Portuguese, USA, and Spanish press, as well as dozens of references in European, North and South American academic publications.

6

The Archive is managed by Ephemera Cultural Association, a non-profit cultural association founded in 2017, whose public utility was recognized in 2019. Currently, the association has more than 850 members. Collaboration protocols were signed with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Museum of Lamego, the City Council of Barreiro, Baía do Tejo, the Resistance Museum of Peniche, the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, the “Clube dos Galitos”, in Aveiro, and others that are in the signature phase.

The Association is an honorary member of the Order of Merit, a distinction awarded by the President of the Republic on a visit to the Archive and has been granted with several awards and distinctions.

7

The Archive has a priority: to save, save, save everything that is part of our collective memory. After saving, it is necessary to preserve, organize, make an inventory, make it available, research, and publish. This entire sequence is important, but first we need to save, and this is not always the priority in other archives. We believe that whatever happens, apart from plague, famine and war, what enters here is safer than what stays at home. Death, divorces, moving house, evictions, the end of personal or family libraries, or the days of collective destruction, such as Mondays after elections, they all contribute to our archive. Every day, thousands of fragments of our collective memory disappear, letters, photos, papers, manuscripts, objects, posters. We know this process all too well and fight against it.

8

Hence an active collection policy, which goes everywhere and has already saved relevant documents thrown away, in containers in the middle of fields, in warehouses in the middle of cowsheds, on football fields in the middle of demolitions, in ruins of factories, in popular clubs evicted from their premises.

A recent example was that of a political party headquarters in Coimbra, which was closed and everything such as correspondence, accounting, pamphlets and posters, was thrown into the trash. We collected it all. This collection policy is based on a pedagogy of memory (which includes television programs, articles, lectures, exhibitions, etc.), on a fine network of collections throughout the country and abroad, and on the action of volunteers based on the idea: throw anything away. We tell people: “don’t worry, don’t do it yourself, if necessary, we’ll dump it”.

9

The Archive is omnivorous, it eats everything. (…)

(To be continued)

(Donato Creti)

Dedicated to the memory of José Medeiros Ferreira, who once spoke of the “Gordian knot” in an interview with a journalist who told him she didn’t know what it was, to which he replied, “If you don’t know, you should.”

The classical world is increasingly absent from the public sphere of knowledge, where less and less is known about it. And although much was never known compared to the countries of the Reformation, less and less is also known about the Bible. We should not be deluded about the value that schools, universities, society, communication—not to mention the so-called “social networks”—and politics today give to the humanities and classical studies. This value is almost zero. On the contrary, it is understood as useless knowledge, justifying funding cuts, placing Latin and Greek subjects at the bottom of the list, if not eliminating them from the curriculum, even surpassing philosophy. And it’s not just this siege against the classical humanities—in fact, against all humanities—it’s their implicit public devaluation in many documents, political declarations, and actions.

The most blatant portuguese example is the defense of an Orthographic Agreement that is intended to be imposed by force, and which severs the orthographic roots of Portuguese in Latin. And whoever writes this considers one to be just as ignorant if one doesn’t know what Archimedes’ principle is, or the second law of thermodynamics, as one is if one doesn’t know who Polyphemus or Solomon, or Judith or the Good Samaritan were.

The belittling of the humanities, and the even greater devaluation of classical studies, comes along with the reduction of collective memory. The loss of roots is a constant in contemporary societies, not only in Portugal, but in Portugal with the greater gravity that the new ignorance is added to the old. And there is little awareness of the damage that this new ignorance does to us, making us go backwards.

The current problem with ignorance is that it has never had such a good press, such good defenders, such arrogant knights against knowledge, as it does today. One of these fruits of the new ignorance is Trump, who believes that all one needs to know to succeed is to lead the country according to the model of his predatory businesses, and the racist and xenophobic ideas that are born in the most infected places of social networks. And being where he is, he chooses his collaborators according to the same model, who will choose the high-ranking officials by the same standard – in reality, “commissioners” destined to safeguard MAGA – and so on, brutalizing society from top to bottom, giving full credence to the popular saying that “the fish rots from the head down”. The dissolution of all standards that implied that one needed to know something about the environment, international trade, foreign policy, and education to perform functions in these areas explains why “distrust for expertise” and the dissolution of truth (”fake news”) are now the operating criteria of the Trump administration. And all those who fail to realize that these attitudes are modern, very modern, as modern as the latest smartphone, to use an appropriate comparison, are mistaken.

And it’s not just in the USA; here too, we have increasingly active guardians of ignorance who want to put a ball where, when animals could talk, a human head used to be. The circulating ideas that “literacies,” as they are now called, which “mean nothing more” to today’s youth (and adults for that matter), are being replaced by other “literacies” that replace them and are “more attractive” because they can be typed on a phone, or in a 140-character message, or “posted” as photographs of food, or the empty and depressing loquacity of WhatsApp, intended to replace face-to-face sociability with virtual sociability, are instrumental in justifying ignorance and sweeping away from curricula everything that seems useless, replacing knowledge with chatter and generalized attention deficit.

No. Knowledge does not replace knowledge; it complements it. And what is lacking is always missed. I often wonder how it’s possible to send high school students to read Os Maias, or whatever work by Eça, or Camilo, or Camões, or Gil Vicente, or Nemésio, or Jorge de Sena, or whatever literary work they are supposed to read in high school and during compulsory schooling, without knowing anything about Greek mythology or the Bible, not to mention the rich vocabulary of Portuguese that doesn’t fit in an X message. I don’t know, moreover, why people think nowadays that many things “don’t fit” in their heads. It’s ironic that modernity provides us with hard drives with terabytes of space, and seems to shrink our heads.

We can, in fact, live comfortably, particularly if we inherit something, and be successful, without knowing anything about the Odyssey, or the Greek Anthology, knowing who Argos or Typhon were, being completely unaware of Sparta and Athens, of Sophocles andThucydides, or never having read a “life” by Plutarch (speaking of which, mandatory reading for over a millennium for anyone who wanted to have a public life...) or the accounts in which an apocalyptic prophet named Jesus announced the end of the world and the path to “salvation.” We can. But we are poorer for it.

In the old days, this was called “indirect experience,” it didn’t replace direct experience, but it helped a lot. And, at a turning point in life, instead of running to a practitioner of any arcane therapy, or to a witch—which for the new ignorance isn’t so different—one could always know that other men and women, who live in the world of the “ancients,” know something about illness or death, about happiness and curiosity, about hope and inescapable destiny, about heroism and cowardice, about betrayal and loyalty, about honor and shame, about intrigue, fashion, and sex. His words carried immense power because they were often the first words written about the most human of attitudes, and they resonate with us even if we don’t realize it.

But knowing is far more valuable.

George Cruikshank. “The British Beehive. 1867

I was never part of the school of thought regarding the “identity of the Portuguese,” which played a significant role in the Estado Novo regime and which, from time to time, emerges with the rise of nationalism, as is happening today in quite perverse ways. One of these was the national example that the Prime Minister decided to give to the Portuguese people with a football player, Ronaldo, who is now a lackey of a Saudi assassin, which, incidentally, is not unrelated to the moments when it seems that only football fills the hearts of the masses with pride for Portugal. It is ironic to see them waving the little flags of a strange Portugal that, instead of the five shields, has Chinese pagodas, but it is nonetheless a portrait of the strong correlation between football nationalism and ignorance.

But I was born in Portugal, I am Portuguese, a patriot in the sense that I am honored by the language, the literature, and, whether I like it or not, I was shaped by our history, often through the closest path of a family. old and by the city that “shaped” me, Porto. For all this, this is also my identity, and it saddens and worries me that everything we have that is best, and in some cases much better, such as our unique literature and its instrument, our language, is in a profound crisis precisely when it is, more than ever, necessary for the good “identity” of the Portuguese. That is why it is an insult to the Portuguese to throw Ronaldo at us as a motivational model of cheap psychology. We are at the level of Big Brother.

But, as usual, our nationalists, who all get excited if it is said that we were a slave-owning people, become blind, deaf and mute when a country that had Fernão Lopes, João de Barros, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Damião de Góis, Manuel Bernardes, or Father António Vieira - and it is no coincidence that I chose these names - appears personified by a football player in a way that would never have been used for the Eusébio, starting with the fact that he was black.

One of the reasons why, when looking at Portugal with an obsession with identity, we make a mistake that is not innocent, is forgetting one of the most present traits in our people, from top to bottom, from the poor to the rich, is the prevalence of behaviors that conform to each person’s social place. Those who pay attention realize that those at the top know where they are and remind those who don’t see them in that place and don’t recognize their social authority, just as those at the bottom know very well what their place is and what the costs are of not recognizing it in even invisible submission. As for those in the middle, it’s more complicated because it’s a bad place to be, very uncomfortable, especially when you look up and are never treated as an equal. An entire industry lives off this middle-class dilemma, starting with reality shows, jet-set magazines, fashion, and its venues, be it gyms, vacation spots, restaurants, travel, cultural consumption. But, in a society that is profoundly unequal economically, culturally, and socially, behaviors become fixed in the place where one is and where one should be. There are many examples of how this hierarchy is “breathed” like air. For example, the GNR (National Republican Guard) that carried out arrests in the camps during the dictatorship knew that they could start beating them as soon as they got into the van, while the PIDE (secret police) tortured, but they still knew which family the prisoner came from and acted accordingly. On the other hand, the writer who wrote a historical novel about the Ballet Roses scandal committed an anachronism when he placed a titled nobleman involved at lunch with a PIDE agent, someone that no one from the “upper class,” criminal as they may be, would do because a PIDE agent would not sit at the same table as a count or marquis. Another example is the cruelty of the poor towards other poor people. The recent episode of the Minister of Education, who, as they say, has “humble” origins, finding it natural to say that students from the lower classes are poor, filthy, and bad, and therefore ruin university residences, is another example.

The difficulty in dealing with the weight of social hierarchies in Portugal is that they carry within them what Marxists call “struggle of classes”, that is, they refer to inequality and exclusion, as it was said in pedantic terms, to the Weltanschauung.

I understand very well that the way one can look at what I wrote, basically criticizing Ronaldo, throwing spelling mistakes at Chega, and confronting our rulers who are all “rereading Eça” (the most common answer to the question of what they are reading) with Fernão Lopes, suffers from total and complete snobbery. Perhaps, but, precisely because of where I started, is that responding brutally to the dominant aggressive ignorance is the best way to be patriotic. Oh! And another thing, fighting for the Portuguese to earn more, to get out of poverty, to have more options in life, to have a good and fair life, the great objective of democracy, happiness.

At a time when the radical right is trying to reclaim its entire history in the 20th century—that is, the 48 years it ruled Portugal as a dictatorship—because it needs to reinforce its legitimacy by cleansing itself of its past, in order to demonize the past of “others” at will, it is worth looking at what this dark period of our collective life was like. Or do you think it was the left that governed from 1926 to 1974? As they say in plebeian Portuguese, you have the nerve ( a lata) to say that.

One of the techniques is to say that the dictatorship regime, which they don’t call that, obviously, was “indefensible.” In passing, like eating a pawn in chess, briefly and without consequences in the economy of discourse, only to then not say a line, a word, a “but,” even of circumstance, mentioning the dictatorship, the prisons and repression, the censorship, and the thousands of deaths in the colonial war during the modest sum of 48 years.

Land of milk and honey, with a small problem, which is “indefensible on the political level,” but they don’t even say why, because it would spoil the rest, which is “defensible.” What is implied is that in many other matters it is “defensible.” That is what a narcissistic academic, Trump impersonator, did in a strictly political intervention with very little academic rigor, Nuno Palma, at MEL. In the Weberian sense, the mechanism of empathy with what is euphemistically classified only as the “Estado Novo” is all too clear in a remake of what might be called the mussolinian school of thought, “Mussolini was bad, but he made the trains arrive on time.”.

The problem of context is eluded, and in this case, context is everything. There is no shortage of examples of the context that is lacking here. Only Censorship had a long and exemplary history to tell, but there wasn’t only Censorship; there were forgeries, fake news, with the publication by the Portuguese Legion and the PIDE of false documents, disguised as genuine ones. It was a very common practice, which included pamphlets with forged signatures, fake copies of clandestine newspapers, and posters with manipulated images, of which those I reproduce here are mere examples. From Salazar, publicly lying about the assassination of Delgado, to the legionnaire on the corner, falsehood was commonplace. Falsehood, slander, and defamation as instruments of attack against opponents.

Of the examples I reproduce above, one is particularly repulsive, the “biography” of Mário Sottomayor Cardia. Cardia is accused of stealing money in the changing rooms of the University City to go have dinner at the Mónaco restaurant, from where he would leave drunk. I am certain, I am absolutely certain, that there will be those who read this today and think, “Maybe it was really true.” Today in 2026, because when this filthy document was written, whoever read it realized that the PIDE or the Legion was doing their dirty work. As things stand, it was more innocuous to read it in 1969 than it is today.

This particularly disgusts me because Sottomayor Cardia was arrested and beaten by the PIDE at that time, causing him to have a detached retina. Cardia was a man as frail as he was courageous, and the violence against him is a “watermark” of the brutality of the “indefensible” dictatorship. Incidentally, the same propensity of the valiant police and PIDE officers to beat men of fragile constitution was demonstrated by Urbano Tavares Rodrigues. And, strictly speaking, many, many hundreds of communists, anarchists, oppositionists, or innocent people caught by mistake, like the first group or men accused of the attack on Salazar who, obviously, “confessed.”

Those from MEL, Observador, the new think tanks, and the ever-expanding communication galaxy, understand them all too well. Crushed by the iron dictatorship of the PS, PCP, and BE, and by the ineffectiveness of the “soft right,” that is, the PSD, what irritates them is not being able to assume an innocence that the shadow of 48 years of right-wing dictatorship takes away from them. But in conclave, they are increasingly comfortable praising that non-soft right that protected us from communism for almost the entire 20th century.

And that pattern is far more sinister than anything else.

(Demonstration against the troika politics, Lisbon, 2012.)

How long will Portugal remain like this? I don’t know, but I suspect a very long time, too long. “Like this” is how we are now, without hope, without a future, only with the present. A long present, too long for some.

The question is anything but technical; it’s “social” in its deepest sense. It can be asked by a twenty-year-old or a forty-year-old man or woman, and although each person’s room for maneuver is different, it is their life that depends on the answer; it is their life that, if stuck in the present, will suffer. The question is humanist, in a sense that is no longer used; it is a question that arises from the human condition and from thinking about the cursed disciplines of today such history, or literature, or politics, or philosophy.

All the things that have gone out of fashion and that are, for our elite, expendable, useless. It is typical of times of plenty to dispense with thinking, and that is why it is ironic that the defenders of the primacy of economics as an “inevitability” (a typical Marxist idea), and who proclaim the virtues of lean times, maintain in their heads a typical sign of times of plenty: that it is not necessary to think because “real” life has to do with the dilemmas they consider simple of producing and spending.

This and other questions that need to be asked from the complexity of the human being, thought of in societies where there is a cultural choice of democracy, immediately refer to ethical dilemmas, which are at the heart of this choice. Now, many of the dilemmas that Portuguese society faces today are in the domain of ethics, and I rarely see them treated as such. And to enunciate them, even before dealing with them, we do not need any proclamation of revealed truth, nor any moralism. All that is needed is a will to truth.

How long will Portugal remain like this? It begins because this is a dilemma for the common man, not a dilemma for the ruling class, nor for the power elite, nor for those who have enough leeway to escape with little damage from times of crisis. The question is only crucial for some, not for everyone, and that is why “how long” is only a problem for those who do not live well, or live worse and worse. And we are at the first of the ethical dilemmas that makes ridiculous the Churchillian comparison that sometimes appears in the speeches of rulers, attracted by the rhetoric of “blood, sweat and tears,” without having to shed a drop, try, or cry a tear.

What gives greatness to the tragedy of the war that Churchill led is that all the characters on the stage share the same risk. There is a “unity of danger,” a consistency in the common risk, from which no one escapes. This is what makes the great military leaders who command from the front, and the political leaders who put their heads on a stump, not just lose the next elections, so great in wars. It is not “protagonism,” nor “leadership,” nor the bastardization of the word “charisma,” nor the words of a “politicking jargon” made up of professional political careers in the interstices of parties and businesses. It is the consciousness of community, something very rare and very difficult to achieve, and which has the sine qua non condition of risk sharing. Now, in the current crisis, there are many exceptions, and the exceptions are always for the “same” to forge a feeling of “us.”

The result is an ever-widening psychological abyss that will make Portugal an even more dual society than it already was, two parts that feel differently, act differently, and live differently. In a society that is already very detached and fragmented, this abyss between people and social groups will coalesce the fragments, one to each side, but will not bring them closer. This is the case of the “new poor,” who will get closer to the poor, will live like them, but are not like them.

A significant portion of the so-called “middle class” is sinking into a poverty for which it is far from prepared and adapted. In fact, if there is one thing for which there is no “adjustment,” it is poverty. That is why it revolts me to consider that impoverishment is merely a “change of habits,” as if suddenly people chose to eat chicken instead of meat because they believe in the virtues of saving, or as a form of punishment for previously “living beyond their means.” No, the people who have started buying farm-raised chicken are not “adapting,” they are simply choosing not what they want, but what they can afford. One of the moral dilemmas of our time lies in the obligation to reject a language that permeates the actions of many people with guilt and submission, redeemed by poverty, as if there were any moral value in pure necessity.

“The Portuguese have to accept living in a different way.” Of course they do, but that statement can only be made if we consider that they do it out of necessity and not by choice, and that not everyone does it. There is no “unity of danger,” I insist, it’s not for everyone. This absurd idea, perhaps the one that most legitimizes the language of power and the one that most internalizes its effectiveness, lies in the fact that a collective feast of abundance, easy credit, money distributed in abundance, and various state benefits is the main culprit for the current situation. And the culprit is the common man, those whom the “adjustment” attacks most to send them back to their original condition of poverty, from which they should never have left.

If this is where we must start, then we will find many other “culprits” before we get to the family that bought the sofas, or went on vacation, with consumer credit, or bought a house with money borrowed from the bank. We must go to the banks that granted this credit because it brought them profit, to the politicians who made an entire policy based on this false prosperity, and to the economists who, then as now, justify the present by its inevitability.

When I hear about the “credit feast,” who is responsible for the “feast”? Who threw the party to collect profits, or participated in it to have an easier life? The fair answer is: at least both. The injustice of the response is that only one appears as “guilty” of the “feast,” and only one pays its costs. And if we are even talking about the many billions that constitute the national debt, which today is pointed out as a moral burden for the poor who “lived beyond their means,” with that majestic plural of “we,” in “we lived beyond our means,” they certainly did not go into the pockets of ordinary people who now pay the cost. It was not the poor, nor the civil servants, nor the lower middle class who made the PPPs. The discourse of power is all made to blame those at the bottom, while almost apologizing to moderate those at the top a little. The response from those at the bottom is a populist and egalitarian farce, which also promises nothing good for the future.

There are some imbeciles who say that speaking like this is speaking like the Left Bloc. No, speaking like that is how all those who do not see reality through the eyes of power and fashionable ideas should speak, and who strive to understand the ultimate meaning of politics in a democracy: people only have one life, and, if that life is ruined, there is no other. Politics in a democracy is secular, it lives from earthly life, not from celestial life. And if that is not the driving force of politics in a democracy, the common and concrete good of the people, then democracy does not survive. I don’t have the genius for Cato, and everything said here is more than moderate and should be, if we weren’t all focused on simplistic explanations and dichotomous slogans from blogs, sensible. Moreover, the great betrayal of the PSD, PS, and CDS is that they have thrown away, blinded by power, all the humanist, social, liberal, and Christian roots of their thought and, even worse, of their “feeling.”

That is why Portugal, as it is portrayed abroad, is disillusioned, revolted, depressed, hopeless, and without meaning, either falling into complete anomie and submission, or thrashing senselessly against everything and everyone. And the great tragedy of democratic politics is that these people are alone, they can’t count on anyone except the remnants of genuine social solidarity that still exist, and what remains of the family, shattered by the “fracturing” engineering of recent decades. The ruling elite, both political and economic, knows little of this feeling of loneliness, and, worse still, knows less, because lifestyles diverge more and more each day, between the comfort of power and the devastation of poverty.

The tear this is creating in an already very worn-out Portugal will be very difficult to mend.

“If the Devil publishes pamphlets, we go to Hell to collect them.” (Quotation from the Ephemera Archive)

So, here’s more of the same, but really good. EVERYTHING.

The goal of the Ephemera Archive is, first of all, save, save, save an entire memory of the Portuguese people and offer an international context to that memory. We know very well everything that is lost every day, with the passing to the ethereal side of a generation that had books and wrote letters and with the end of many clubs and associations that gentrification expels from their headquarters, and also with the increase of aggressive ignorance in our days. EVERYTHING.

There is a small problem here: which is that for us, this memory starts from this morning and goes backwards. And this morning we already received a huge package with Nordic material, from the two countries that recently joined NATO, including documentation about the presidential elections in Finland. After the material that came last week from Kurdistan, EVERYTHING.

With the quiet madness that strikes all friends and volunteers of the Ephemera Archive, in 2024 we managed, largely riding on the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, to organize and support about 50 exhibitions and more than 150 events, lectures, debates, guided tours, openings, editing several books and collaborating on many others, from Monforte to the Picote Dam, with the support of some local authorities with more resources, but for the most part pro bono. That is, without relying on the state money. EVERYTHING.

At the same time, hundreds of donations, including collections that change Portuguese history, and many more archives and collections, both from the Caesars and the “cooks,” using Brecht’s verses in the mouth of a “literate worker,” came in. Just to give a few examples, among the collections that arrived this year are those of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, Mário Brochado Coelho, the last Prime Minister of the 19th century, António Serpa Pimentel (which, among other things, includes all the documentation of the negotiation of one of the various Portuguese bankruptcies, including the unpublished correspondence of the then Minister of Finance, Oliveira Martins), that of the Free Fishermen’s Union, papers from the Ferro Rodrigues family, and a lot of documentation from LUAR, an armed resistance organization, and many thousands of books, periodicals, posters, prints, photographs, objects, manuscripts, and typewritten documents. EVERYTHING.

We have many weaknesses and difficulties: we do not always do everything well and we listen carefully to the criticism and advice of those who have knowledge and experience in the areas in which we operate. Although we do a lot, we do not have the access and speed conditions that are often requested of us. The size, about 6 km of shelves, implies dispersion. We have a weak IT structure, and although we have three million digitized images, only about 10% is properly catalogued. But there is one area where we follow the archive recommendations to the letter, that of conservation.

The weaknesses are the price of being, as it is now said, “sustainable,” working with volunteers and with scarce resources—it is the price of independence. And it is also the assertion of our autonomy, in collaboration with all public and private institutions, while understanding that there is merit and an advantage in not concentrating all this memory in the state archives.

The Ephemera Archive is a dynamic civil society institution, and, to use the jargon of our days, it has a great ‘business model,’ which could very well be presented as an example by the Liberal Initiative. They didn’t count on this, but it is the effect of EVERYTHING.

I repeated the word EVERYTHING in practically every paragraph and chose with very little modesty the paradigm of German romanticism images, but we have here an implicit philosophy, even when we spend days carrying bags, removing staples from papers, cleaning moldy books, putting newspapers in order, trying to identify dates in pamphlets (blessed MRPP who almost always dated them…), reading all the letters in the world in correspondence, from the very difficult calligraphy of Salazar, Virgílio Ferreira, Eduardo Lourenço, to the legible Cunhal and Otelo, and fighting, literally fighting among ourselves for space and proving every day that nature abhors a vacuum.

This philosophy is linked to a strange inheritance of Prometheus’ pride; we are an omnivorous archive, we want EVERYTHING. In fact, it is not exactly with an archive that we are dealing, but with a movment in favour of memory, understanding the value of memory in present times. Its fuel is an infinite curiosity and with the learning that this curiosity brings, in practically everything, which are the remains of the men and women who leave traces of their lives here.

It is because of them and what we learn from them, that we want EVERYTHING and we have a metaphysical project to value EVERYTHING, sorry for the presumption.

*

If you wish to become a member of the Ephemera Archive or have materials of interest to donate to the Archive, whether Portuguese or from around the world, contact ephemerasecretariado@gmail.com

“Only what the public knows exists” (Salazar)

The great achievement of the censorship that existed for 48 years, the longest dictatorship in 20th-century Europe with the exception of the USSR, was to leave as a legacy, even to this day, a nostalgia for a Portugal where everyone understood each other, where there was “consensus,” where everyone worked for the “common good,” without corruption other than the theft of bread by the needy, where there was “respect” and good education. In other words, a perverse nostalgia for the Portugal of the dictatorship.

I know the censorship that lasted 48 years well, even from personal experience; I had two books banned. The country that could not come to the public eye, that is, the “real” country as it is said now, was very different from what managed to emerge in newspapers and books, even in the clandestine press. One of the great successes of Censorship was to create an image of a pacified, inert, non-conflictual Portugal, without major violence, with more good morals than bad ones, which was effective even with those who fought against the dictatorship. And it remains effective when one reads what is written today about the evils of democracy, particularly corruption, with the suggested and sometimes explicit idea that nothing of this magnitude existed before April 25th. One of the things that attackers of the “system” do is to emphasize the dimension of corruption in democracy, inevitably suggesting that it comes with the form of the regime and, therefore, fighting corruption is also fighting the “system” of corrupt parties and politicians.

Does no one ever ask why there was never anything like “Operation Marquês” throughout the long 48 years of dictatorship? Weren’t there corrupt people in the high places of the nation? Weren’t there corrupt people in the National Union? Did no general, ambassador, member of the National Assembly, minister or secretary of state, Legion commander or graduate of the Portuguese Youth, no colonial governor, bishop, “get their hands dirty”? Or were there cases of corruption that the Censorship did not let us know about? Undoubtedly, as can be seen in the cuts of the Censorship, in the same way that there was pedophilia, violence against women, rapes, robberies, violence, and suicides.

But the answer is even worse: there was no corruption because there was no justice for the powerful of the regime, and the little that existed was for the intermediate and lower echelons. And, therefore, corruption among the bigwigs of the Situation, whether politicians, with the all-too-common transhumance from politics to business, decided almost always by Salazar himself, or the bankers and businessmen of the regime, were naturally protected because no one even dared to start an investigation. The exception with the “ballets roses” was a case of morals, of child prostitution for the elite, similar to the Epstein files, and yet heavily protected by Censorship.

In this sense, Censorship may have been the most effective weapon of the dictatorship regime, whose effects are still submerged in our daily lives today. Much more than the subversion of the “political,” what Censorship protected was power, all the hierarchies that emanated from it, demanding more than respect, “a little respect.” In 48 years, in which there was not a single day without censorship, this was its legacy: to hide Portugal and show a fictional country.

Levitan, Vladimirka, the road to exile in Siberia..

I have the best memories of Russia, better yet, I owe a great deal to Russia, and that’s why I’m disgusted by confusing Putin with “the Russians” as is being done now. More than these memories, I have great admiration for the Russians, and, as for Russian culture, it “made” me, as much as everything else.

I knew Russia when it was still the USSR and then soon after, during the turbulent years of transition, and the return to that Russian curse, the autocracy, the dictatorship. I remember a Russian, a member of the Duma, probably of the Communist Party, happy to meet foreigners, inviting me to his very modest home, in one of those apartment blocks in the suburbs of Moscow, like those that Russian missiles are destroying in Kiev. He would open the cupboards where he kept his reserve of “special” foods, those that were difficult to obtain, for example, a type of ham, and offer them to the “foreigner” out of pure generosity because he had nothing to gain from what he was doing. We talked about Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, which he had to study in school, a history of the “empire,” which we had most likely “read” in a very different way.

I left through the door of those sinister buildings and today I don’t even remember the name of the man and the family that accompanied him, but I know what the word hospitality meant. There was a closeness very similar to ours, without ceremonies or protocols, just company and conversation, between two worlds that were very distant in geography and even in history. Mine, however bad it was, with 48 years of dictatorship, his with the tragedy of millions of dead on its back, some of them from his family. Tragedy is not a light word, but you can’t know anything about Russia without understanding it. And yet, I knew he was from the dying Soviet power bureaucracy, and he knew I was from the “enemy.” But, as I’ve said many times, that was an exceptional period where things could have evolved differently. Or maybe not.

The Russian Federation under Putin was on its way, or rather, it was already there. I met oligarchs, bureaucrats, military officers, members of the CPSU, and it wasn’t hard to see that as you climbed the ladder of power and money, so did the brutality, in direct proportion to the historical suffering of the Russian people in whose name they wielded power, and with that indifference to violence when their interests were threatened. Indifference that began with “their own,” in whose name they spoke.

But, in the bland conversation with my Russian host, the common ground was the vast amount I had learned about Russia from books, that form of knowledge increasingly despised by the brazen ignorance of social media and the obsessively face-to-face world of today. It was these memories and the Russia of Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn that helped me never to be mistaken about Putin.

I was not mistaken about Putin, and about the present war that is not a war between democracy and dictatorship, but rather something else: a war between an aggressor and an aggressor. The aggressor is not the Russian people, it is Putin and his military and civilian court, but the victim is the Ukrainian people, whoever governs them. This distinction, if not made, causes those who omit it to side with the aggressor. And in this war, siding with the aggressor is to trample on freedom, sovereignty, law, humanity, and people. Not “special” people, but ordinary people.

I admit that most Russians support this war, and it’s not just because Putin’s censorship prevents knowledge of what is happening and the harsh repression prevents any freedom to protest. Prohibiting and arresting, assaulting and killing is something that those in power in Russia have always known how to do very well, from the Okhrana to the Cheka, the KGB and the SVR, from the Tsars through Stalin to Putin. But what is also part of this Russian tragedy is that some of its culture is exactly the opposite of this violence, and that it describes better than anyone the combination of obedience and rebellion that history, with a small h, has imposed on the Russian people, on the “humble.” These days, I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s short story, “Alyosha the Pot,” describing his death after falling from a roof:

“He prayed with the pope, only with his hands and his heart. And in his heart, there was the feeling that if it is good here for the one who obeys and does not offend, it will also be good there.

He spoke little. He only asked for something to drink and was surprised by something.

Surprised by something, he stretched out his hand and died.”

I had the chance to witness, in the year 2000, 26 years ago, the demonstration “against the law of silence” held in Brussels. I have seen many demonstrations, in many places - but I have never seen anything like this.

It was a popular demonstration, which is unusual. Since the formula of the peaceful protest procession became established as a democratic habit - and this happened only in our century with the first orderly demonstrations of the German Social Democrats in Berlin, which did not degenerate into pitched battles with the police - demonstrations have been instruments of political action, dependent on party logics or inherent to the political process. It is true that there were also organizations that circulated around the procession - the remnants of the Belgian Communist Party, a Trotskyist group, some ecologists - but they were marginal. They had little to do with what was happening, they were merely parasitic.It’s not even the number of people that counts, but the form, the character, the content.

That long line of men, women, and children, many entire families, those very small new European families, had no special pattern that deviated it from a balanced representation of Belgian society. There were Belgians, French speakers, and Flemish, there were emigrants, old and young, children and teenagers. There was only one identifying trait – there didn’t seem to be any wealthy people. They were workers, civil servants, maids, housewives, casually dressed in jackets and sweaters, few suits and ties. In that enormous crowd was a Belgium somewhat poorer than the Eurocratic and business fauna usually found in the center of Brussels, mixed with the tourists. There were many people who had come by train and bus from the city’s suburbs, and the meeting points for the demonstration were associated with public transport. Those people travel by subway, by bus, by train.

Furthermore, there were almost no signs, and the few that were there had been made by those who brought them. They were rarely the size of a common poster advertising a rock concert and were lost among bare-handed demonstrators, without stickers, without symbols, without anything. There were no slogans, nobody shouted anything - silence “against silence”.

The organizers of this march are the ad hoc committees that were created around the families of the murdered children from Dutroux’s pedophile ring. They had almost no means of publicizing the demonstration and considered it a success if 10,000 people showed up. Three times that number showed up. In 1999, the number of protesters was much higher, but this could be understood by the emotion of the tragedy of the murders. Today there are fewer people, but they are the same and still numerous, and there is no reason not to notice that they are communicating subtly with the many hundreds of thousands who did not take to the streets. Far from the emotion caused by the criminal revelations, the same revolt continues. Popular. Silent. Strong.

What do the protesters want? They don’t say it clearly, but it’s clear: they want someone to be in charge - because they have an obligation to be in charge - to control the judges and the police to end the crimes. That someone not only does justice, but also guarantees reparation, reparation for the families, reparation for everyone who is there.

That everyone, starting with the families, be a “part” in this justice process, have a “voice,” the only one considered legitimate and pure, because it comes from loss and suffering. Let justice come from those who suffer and not from those who judge, because it is suspected that those who judge are closer to the criminal than to the victim.

The pretext is the crimes of the Dutroux pedophile ring, but the target is the perception that they were only possible because of a network of complicity involving politicians, police officers, and judges. It is against a sensed conspiracy that the protesters revolt, a conspiracy of the powerful against the common people, which conceals crimes as terrible as the rape and murder of children, through a “law of silence,” which functions as a law of power, in favor of power.

Thus, the demonstration is both popular and subversive, in the true sense of the word. What is at stake is order, the democratic order based on the separation of powers. The protesters want someone—and that someone can only be a ruler, a politician, or the “people” in the streets—to interfere in the judicial process, to give orders to a judge. This clearly violates the classic separation of powers, in the same way that, a few years ago, there were calls for Italian judges to “govern” Italy against the mafia and corruption.

At a time when, in Portugal, due to weariness and a search for novelty, it is important to look to Belgium, as was done in the past with Italy. Because any of the powers – executive, legislative, and judicial – is equally at the heart of the question of democracy and its exhaustion.The weakening of the mechanisms of representation affects them all. It’s not because the other branches of government are better or in better health – it’s because the crisis of democracy targets all the institutions of that democracy, and one form of this crisis is to shake the boundaries between the branches of government, to overlap and confuse them, or to oscillate in a mechanism of seeking legitimacy through public opinion from one to another. The Belgian protesters reflect a deep unease that is also ours. In Belgium, it’s against judges, who are perceived as “politicians” like any other. But the real revolt is against power and the powerful, carried out by ordinary people who don’t believe in parties or unions to express and channel this revolt.

It’s not a new problem, but it takes on new forms today.

Zé Povinho is a character created in the 19th century by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, a famous caricaturist and satirical illustrator, representing the response of the Portuguese people to those who want to rule over them without reason.On a television program, I suggested that the best response Portugal SHOULD have given to the Board of Peace was to place an inflated image of Zé Povinho next to the White House, in the gesture that made him famous, the “manguito,” . The “manguito” is untranslatable, but it’s a gesture with the arms equivalent to “f* you.”
One of the first illustrations I received in response to my suggestion was this one.

Portugal will be part of Trump’s Board of Peace “as an observer”? What a shame! And you’re going to kiss Trump’s hand in Washington? It seems you won’t go to the first meeting, but you’ll go to the others. Will Portugal pay the entry fee that Trump demanded of 854 billion euros? Nothing surprises me anymore.

Didn’t our “observer” see in the first meeting Trump fall asleep, mix up all the names, and make several comments about the appearance of the President of Paraguay, whom he considered “handsome”? Then he specified that he doesn’t like men, but women, so as not to be misinterpreted... And that was it.

In Europe, the countries that still have a shred of dignity, such as Spain, France, and Sweden, at least said no, Hungary obviously said yes, and Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovakia, and Cyprus agreed to be observers. Look at the founding member countries and you’ll immediately see which side Portugal is on: Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam… In other words, who will Portugal be “observing” in the room where it will be? Milei with his chainsaw, Lukashenko, Putin’s pawn (Putin was invited and is thinking about it…), Bukele, the dictator of El Salvador’s prisons, MBS, the murderous prince of Saudi Arabia, the war criminal Netanyahu, and a plethora of interesting and “democratic” dictatorial leaders from the former USSR countries and the Gulf princes, all people without blood on their hands and champions of freedom. What unites them? Being friends with Trump, many of them to survive, and with a good, per capita, dose of corruption.

The Board of Peace formed by Trump with these dictators has a single motive: to fight the United Nations and favor the absurd and demented pathological narcissism of Trump, the one who ended the war between Azerbaijan and Cambodia, or something similar. I don’t even bother checking the list of wars he claims to have ended, with wars that ended, with wars that didn’t end, and with wars that never existed. Is this what we want from our diplomacy? To vouch for Trump’s United Nations, the man who said that after not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize he became “uninterested” in peace? The man who endorses Putin’s dictatorship in its invasion of Ukraine, who wants it to surrender to add another “peace” to his resume? The man who posts images with a map of Greater America in the background with Greenland and Canada painted in the colors of the American flag? The man who is betraying, is that the right word, the Western democracies of Europe and their security interests? The man who starts all the wars necessary to get oil, rare earths, attacking some bad guys to please other bad guys in his court, in the name of great principles that he bastardizes every day, like defending Christians in Nigeria, or protesters against the Iranian theocracy, or putting Rubio as president of Cuba? This dangerous and demented man should be put miles away by any normal person, let alone by the diplomacy of a European democratic country.

The Gaza pretext doesn’t hold water at all: the head of “Portuguese diplomacy” admits that the organization is “perfectly compliant” as long as it is confined to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonsense! This is trying to deceive us, Trump’s Board of Peace goes much further than Gaza, where, incidentally, Israeli attacks continue killing Palestinians without the said Board lifting a finger, nor worrying about the “ceasefire”. If there is any concern, it is for the Gaza Riviera with the building in the middle with a Trump tower, and Israelis (not Palestinians) eating ice cream in the streets.

Will Portugal, a country with a democracy born from a liberating revolution, accept being subjugated to Trump as “president for life”? Yes, it will. Nobody elected Trump, and until he dies, even after being President, will he command the Board of Peace? Yes, in theory.

Europe, which Trump insults, treats as a nullity, decides to agree with him, even though it is indeed a nullity, and Portugal is going down the same path. And if we stop, take a deep breath, and use our heads, we think about what kind of world accepts this dictator of bad habits. At least one decent country decided to arrest an indecent man, a brother in morals to Trump. Nothing happens to him until one day. On that day, he falls from a great height, and shame will fall upon his American, European, and Portuguese servants.

If the government wants to please Trump, it can do so in many ways, for example, by creating a Nobel Peace Prize for capoeira, with a Portuguese popular icon a golden Barcelos rooster covered in little hearts, and then presenting it with pomp and circumstance to the emperor of the world, telling him that he is the “king” of capoeira.

He will be thrilled with the “king” treatment and he... will thank Spain.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of between two hundred and five hundred men fled through the lands of eastern Angola, between the headwaters of the great rivers, changing their sleeping location almost daily, walking on foot and at night. Their main problem was hunger. They ate wild honey, cassava scraps, larvae, plants, and fruits with very low nutritional value. Since they couldn’t shoot for fear of being located by the noise of gunfire, they very rarely had meat, and only on two or three occasions did they take half a dozen cows with them. Teams assigned to collect food would spend ten days gathering what little there was, almost always returning with only honey, enough for three days. Theft or hoarding of food was punished with whippings, whether committed by soldiers or officers. The guerrillas dreamed of food. Literally. More than the fighting, which only occurred in advanced defensive perimeters, hunger was their main difficulty. It had gone from “tactical” to “strategic.”

To our eyes today, everything seemed reversed: roles, ideas, political friendships, “left-right,” geostrategies. The guerrilla column was the Presidential Column, where marched the only African guerrilla leader who didn’t die in a palace bed, Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi, perhaps the best product of all time from Chinese military schools, read, for the umpteenth time, Mao Zedong’s books on “peasant war” during breaks in the march. One night, he attentively followed the Bush-Al Gore debate with his companions, rooting for Bush. In the clandestine meetings of the UNITA Directorate, held with great difficulty in the middle of the bush, the slogan, which was also that of the Cuban revolution, “Homeland or Death We Will Win,” (Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!) was shouted, and the example of figures such as Lumumba, Che Guevara, Nkrumah, and, Nelson Mandela, was praised. The final communiqué of one of these meetings was signed with the war name “Black Jaguar of the Jagas,” and the guerrilla soldiers lived up to a range of programmatic names such as that of General Black Power.

Most of the leaders who accompanied Savimbi on his final Long March were, like him, a product of the Protestant missions that bordered the Benguela Railway line, where stations and posts gave rise to villages with a small rural bourgeoisie rooted in African traditions of seniority (Savimbi was one of the Elders), a deep religiosity, and the value of education as an instrument of personal advancement. They were Protestants, they hated disorder, drunkenness, debauchery. Some of the last internal communications written by Savimbi contained anathemas against these behaviors, and it wasn’t just for political-military reasons. The Maoist-peasant egalitarianism, the revolutionary asceticism that permeated UNITA, and Savimbi’s personality cult, somewhere between the magical-superstitious and the most traditional African “authoritarianism,” were unique traits. It doesn’t matter if everything was like that, but the desire for it to be was completely genuine.

In pursuit of the Presidential Column and with the explicit objective of killing what they called “militarist UNITA” and Savimbi, there was a powerful army trained by Cubans and Soviets, supported by Portuguese and South African mercenaries, almost all former allies of UNITA, some linked to Luso-Angolan “security” companies, in which MPLA generals and militants of the Portuguese far-right were mixed. The money came from Angolan oil exploited by Americans. The planes bombing the column were MiGs and Sukhois, the observation planes were Brazilian Tucanos piloted by Brazilians. On the international stage, UNITA’s most active opponent, and, along with the South Africans, its most powerful ally, was the US under the Clinton administration.

This story is the story of History as a trap. Nothing seemed to be in its “place,” and yet nothing was out of place. The post-Cold War world had caught men, organizations, and countries in the interstices of its change. UNITA and the epic figure of Savimbi were, and are, one of the most exemplary cases of what it means to be caught in the twists and turns of history. Completely caught.

Memory is not easy. Memory deals with history, the most tumultuous human creation, which, incidentally, only exists because of memory and which, like all human work, tends to be cruel and full of noise, of “sound and fury.”

Out, out, brief candle!

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It’s a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Shakespeare having a man, Macbeth, speaking alone tells us everything about history, and that’s why great stories tend to be tragic and small stories tend to be sad. Great and small histories are metaphors again.

The great story is the story of war, of just and unjust conflicts, of misery, poverty and hunger, of institutionalized violence, inequality, arrogance, discrimination, racism, and power that abuses its rights without limits.

The small story is the story of the lives of many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who did not have, nor do they have, the life they wanted, but only the life they could have.

Is there any happiness in between? There is, undoubtedly, but it is the exception, and those who do not take this into account are not doing what they should, starting with their ethical obligation not to accept a world of violence, inequality, exclusion, and lies, nor do they perceive what is happening around them, confusing their precious individuality, which they usually think is freedom, but is merely selfishness, which in many cases simply means being privileged in their comfort.

Two contradictory examples from history - one good and one bad. The good one is very simple: the access in the last hundred years to minimum conditions for survival for billions of people in Asia, particularly in China and India, is a true revolution for humanity, quite invisible to those who, despite everything, have the minimum guaranteed.

The bad example is with us, it’s European. Looking at Europe, it’s important to consider that, in the last 2000 years, the longest period of peace in its history occurred from 1945, the end of World War II, until 1991 with the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars—less than 50 years in 2000 years of history. It seems like a short time, but 50 years is exceptional.

Therefore, our perspective, the one that informs the work of the Ephemera Archive, a genuine institution of civil society, autonomous and fiercely independent, is more skeptical than optimistic, more critical than complacent, precisely because we see and know a great deal. A great deal.

Our ambition is to be a modern “cabinet of curiosities,” driven by curiosity, the greatest creative force. What we do at the Ephemera Archive is collect the traces of this history, big or small. From archives and collections that change Portuguese history, such as those of Sá Carneiro, Vítor Crespo, Nuno Rodrigues dos Santos, Sousa e Castro, and Henrique Galvão, to scientific collections, those of large and small political parties, associations and unions, the far-right, censorship and the police, workers’, cultural, social and economic struggles, from easy elections like the presidential ones to very difficult elections like the local ones, with their many tens of thousands of items per election, covering the last two hundred years up to this day. And with the intention of doing so from an international perspective, to provide Portugal and its researchers with the possibility of comparative work both in the present and in that “foreign country” that is the past. And also to preserve and bring to a library and archive everything that for 48 years could not enter here: communist, anarchist, fascist publications, from Rinascita and L’Humanité to Volk und Reich. And to do so in an attempt to create a continuum between manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, books, publications, fanzines, posters and diverse iconography, and objects, the analog and the digital. The archive is patrimonial, maintaining the idea that physical things have value in themselves, because they refer to the senses and their human dimension of proximity.

As for what I have simply called small history, the humble objects, the common stories, the world of those who do not remain in the grand history, but who made it with pain and blood and sacrifice, often in vain, like those that Brecht recalls in his famous poem:

Caesar conquered the Gauls.

He didn’t even have a cook in his service?

We take care of Caesar and the cook.

What we learn is immense, leaving no room for boredom, because it covers everything that grand history doesn’t tell us and is situated where the details are, the place where, as we know, the Devil resides. For example, what a poor single man living in a boarding house was like, the inner workings of that life in the 1930s and 40s. You can’t even imagine. I guarantee you’ll look at Portuguese films from the 30s and 40s, full of single men, shop assistants, clerks, warehouse workers, living in boarding houses, with a different perspective. Or learn about the hardships, the hunger, real hunger, in the barracks of the 1910s and 20s, reflected in letters to girlfriends asking them to bring a basket of food to take with them when they passed by in formation in Praça do Comércio. Or the constant presence of favoritism and patronage, a social phenomenon reflecting the absence of a capable bureaucratic administration, where the only power was that of influence.And so on.

Let’s return to memory. We know that memory is largely constructed and selective, and subject to great pressures from the present to control, remember, or erase the past. We also know that we never escape the gaze of time, which changes with time, and what we see today we ignore tomorrow. Therefore, today we know to what extent the defense of memory is a crucial element in the defense of democracy, at a time when it is besieged by very powerful forces, coming both from political power and from shifts in mentality that favor the growth of a form of aggressive ignorance against the mediations of democracy, beginning with those of knowledge and learning. The conspiracy theories that are currently enjoying a golden age, because they serve political power and ignorance, abound in so-called social networks, which are far less networks and far less social than one might think. They are far less networks because, while appearing egalitarian and democratic, they have a meaning and a direction, and there are those who control them to serve their objectives. And in their strength, before being “social,” they are narcissistic mirrors originating from the egalitarian ignorance and loneliness of modern societies, which generate more tribes than “societies,” incorporating into the lives of the most excluded the illusion that they are heard, or that they have power.

*

Having said all that, here is your new doctorate, with the same package of flaws and qualities intertwined, like everyone else, with the pretense of never having changed in essence, true to yourself for the sake of others, but not giving up on waging the cultural and political battle for democracy and freedom, things that only exist if we fight for them. Without that, they fall like a wall without support, because evil has a solid foundation and always has the advantage.

Without illusions, like Macbeth, but incapable of doing otherwise.

(Speech at the doctorate honoris causa ceremony at ISCTE, 2020)

The rapid erosion of privacy is one of the most evident consequences of the rise of demagoguery, the massification of contemporary societies in the consumption of cultural goods, the perverse use of new technologies to spread rumors and slander, to control, spy on, and “reveal,” all culminating in a public life dominated by spectacle and sentiment, corroding democracy from within.

It is true that in this matter, as in many others, there is a social history that we do not always see clearly. In fact, the poorest have never valued privacy because they have never had it. Living in promiscuous conditions in a “village” world, or relegated to “islands,” “villages,” and later to the various versions of the French HLM, housing complexes, and suburbs, the “lower” part of society did not have “space” for those delights of wealth that was having individual rooms. Luxury and money protected, as they still protect, privacy by limiting “access,” but that doesn’t mean privacy can be considered a privilege of those “at the top.” Privacy, in its best sense, is one of the acquired rights of the bourgeois world, of the home, of family or private space, of the freedom to show or hide what seems to us to be the ultimate possession: the world of one’s own being. It was born, like much of what we consider acquired in our rights, freedoms, and guarantees, from the world of Vermeer’s paintings, from the revolution that came from the mercantile capitalism of the Dutch Golden Age.

Since I am not willing to give up this humanist spirit in the best sense of the word, I will not give up having or being private, in favor of a new demagogic form of voyeuristic collectivism of the masses. It is not easy, given the way things are going in Portugal, following in the footsteps of other countries, to which is added the usual mediocrity of our environment. Today we have a public life that feeds on banal sentimental and emotional “food,” with superficial discourse on everything, with an attack on reason in favor of televised sentimentality, excited in news broadcasts about crimes, illnesses, accidents and “cases,” the case of “little Maddie,” the Esmeralda case, the Casa Pia case, cases of pedophilia, important and irrelevant, mixed into the same type of excited narrative in live broadcasts. In this world, the smallest pretext serves to eliminate the intimate and private sphere, whether it’s for a former PJ inspector to talk about the sex life of the McCanns, or for a multitude of new interpreters of feelings—psychiatrists, psychologists, child psychiatrists, and child psychologists—the new communication fauna, to explain to us the lost souls in their disturbed states, whether it’s the “father of the heart” versus the “biological father,” or the murderous mother of some “baby,” dragged to the delight of other howling women screaming murderess, in poor, worn-out jeans and handcuffs, or the sudden public appearance of the new ghost of collective fright, the pedophile who, coming from the dark and obscure network of chat rooms or from school and the sacristy, prepares to assault the only remaining symbol of the world’s innocence: children.

This path is increasingly trodden; this assault on intimacy and privacy is becoming normal. I’ve said this many times, and I’ll certainly repeat it, convinced that it’s a protest that’s ineffective in its results. And the worst is yet to come, because on the broader level of civic education, we are generating a youth that increasingly undervalues ​​privacy and intimacy. The thousands of young people who expose themselves on the Internet, on blogs, on “social” sites, on Tik-Tok, who use their cell phones as instruments of control, who accept with absolute normality that they have a video camera, or a GPS locator that allows others to always know where they are, grow up without valuing their intimate and private space. The world in which they will live is populated by surveillance cameras, wiretaps, electronic identity checks, information networks ranging from credit cards to toll roads, and this seems absolutely normal to them. Thus, they join the people who spy on prisoners leaving the courts and who think that only those who have things to hide worry about privacy.

The ideology of this voyeurism finds its best expression in gossip magazines, although there are already very worrying signs of the same trends on the Internet. “Coming out” is one of the key words in the new public promiscuity. In their rare editorials, gossip magazines and their columnists appeal to “coming out” about relationships, betrayals, engagements, elopements, pregnancies, appetites, sexual orientations, partners, and other “assumptions” that serve as fodder for these publications. Truth be told, more than the public “assumption” of any of these things, with the consequent loss of mystery and secrecy, and therefore of gossip-colored value, what these magazines desire is to “assume” the punishing role of being themselves, in indiscreet photos taken in secret.

Increasingly, these magazines, some television programs, and online outlets are beginning to receive more professional attention, which uses public voyeurism and the erosion of privacy to intervene in the demagogic market of feelings, with the aim of manipulating public opinion, promoting personalities socially and politically, containing damage, or, less visibly, conducting hostile campaigns against adversaries. One of the characteristics of this new demagogic and sentimental space is its easy use and manipulation by professionals who know it well, with its rules and trends, as is the case with the new generation of communication agencies.

Where before there was a forced or semi-forced public “assumption” by the paparazzi who inhabit some of the city’s more fashionable places, now there is a desired “assumption,” stimulated and controlled by communication agencies. It is no longer the public exposure desired and consented to by those who enjoy living in the rosy world of Caras, Nova Gente, Flash, etc., etc., and for whom this exposure is pleasant and socially desirable, but rather by those who today use private life as an instrument of political action, as a mechanism for sending messages and images intended to obtain political dividends in the crucial market of demagogic sentiment. It is always a risky path in the long term, as Santana Lopes or Manuel Maria Carrilho realized to their own detriment, because it usually backfires, due to the very nature of public exposure and its pursuit of transgression as a means of enhancing news value. But, in the meantime, it continues to bear fruit. There is another problem, which transcends the willingness of each individual to play this risky game, and that is that, for every politician or “public figure” who exposes themselves, the privacy of those who do not wish to do so diminishes, paving the way for voyeuristic, rosy-tinted impunity.

The erosion of the intimate sphere, which should be untouchable even for so-called “public figures,” and of the private sphere, even with some loss of “space” for “public figures,” is a bad path for a society that values ​​freedoms and rights.