Nationalist Doctrine

Nationalist Doctrine

(extracted from “Jefes the excellent book by Henri Massis, published by Editorial Sol y Luna, p. 69  

Taken from http://lascadenasdeobligado.blogspot.mx/

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Main doctrinal principles ― pressingly necessary in our country nowadays ― which inspired the nationalist policy of the great leader, Antonio Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) who ruled Portugal from 1926 to1968.

“This is the most honest, most judicious and most measured dictatorship in Europe.” Jacques Bainville. February 1938.

Clear and vigorous principles required Salazar to transform Portugal  morally; country which had fallen into the most resounding state of corruption, in this manner beginning its admirable material and patriotic resurgence.

Oh! simple principles: “We did not ask so great a thing ― wrote Mr. Salazar ― sense and notion of fatherland and of national solidarity, family, social unit par excellence; authority and hierarchy; spiritual value of life and due respect for the human person; duty to work; superiority of virtue; sacred character of religious sentiments, this is the essential of what is necessary for the mental and moral formation of the new state.” And Salazar adds: “We are, then, against all types of internationalism, against communism, against socialism, against libertarian unionism, against all that diminishes, divides and dissolves the family; against class struggle; against the godless and the stateless; against the slavery of labor; against the purely materialistic notion of life; against force as origin of law. We are against all of the great heresies of our time, the more so because we have never had proof of a single place on earth where liberty to spread such heresies has been a source of blessings. When such liberty is granted to the barbarians of our modern age, it serves not but to undermine the foundations of our civilization.”

Mr. Salazar is, then, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary, to the extent to which he understands, taking into consideration, things, realities, evidence manifested by the social and political life of all times. That is why he never lets go the opportunity to denounce the myths which rebel themselves against vital necessities.

"No matter how dear the care for our people may be to us or how sound defenders of its continuous rising in the material and moral order we may be; that does not obligate us in any way to believe that the origin of power lies in the masses, or that government can be an endeavor of the multitudes and not of an elite, upon which the duty to lead the community and to sacrifice itself on its behalf is incumbent. To wish to guarantee the liberties which are essential to social life and to human dignity itself, does not entail the obligation to consider liberty as the element upon which any political construction should be erected. Liberalism has ended up falling into the following sophism: There is no liberty against liberty. But in harmony with the essence of man and life's realities, we say: Only against the common good is it that liberty does not exist."

"Subordination of all interests to the interests of the whole, this is the spirit that inspires the reforms introduced by the new Portuguese regime" (as cited by E. Schreiber in “El Portugal de Salazar”): “Instead of making everything depend on the individual taken by himself as in the liberal regime, our organization, says Mr. Salazar, is founded on the realities of a new society where the individual does not exist except to the extent of, and as regards, his membership in natural groups (families, professional organizations, unions and corporations, territorial communes), and in this role she recognizes rights. Said in other terms, for the new state, there are no abstract rights of man, there are concrete rights of men. These rights limit the rights of the state and we accept such limitation. Thus, there are liberties we consider fair and useful, but precisely because we want to keep them, we defend the notion of the authority necessary for their safeguarding."

But these ideas, it may be said, are the ones propagated by the political doctrine of Charles Maurras; all DeMaistre, all La Tour du Pin, all Fustel as well as the social teachings of the great encyclicals are there!  Yes, these ideas are ours, but here you see them applied by a man who rules, incarnated in an actual experience, inscribed into living history.  Their effectiveness, their success, prove to us that they were not abstractions, daughters of the spirit of the system, but “available realities” of which a nation under our eyes profits from to be born again.