“Well well, that wouldn’t belong in the Netherlands, such a gigantic painting with negro slaves”, I whisper to Ricardo Regalla Dias Pinto, the chief of cabinet of Chega!, Portugal’s third party and also the most patriotic. Chega means enough. That’s it!
The huge painting shows how the legendary explorer Vasco da Gama (known from the cigars and a fine street in 020-Gaza) is received with all due respect by the samorin, the prince of Kozhikode (Calcoen in Dutch) on the Malabar Coast in the present Kerala in India. The negro slaves bow to Vasco.
This racist painting had of course already been set on fire in the Netherlands by the Sturmabteilung of Antifa and Bij1, or some fool had glued himself to it.
The Portuguese, of the left and right persuasion, on the other hand, are proud of their past and are therefore absolutely not ashamed of it. Oikophobia is unknown in Lusitania.
In a previous episode of European Patriots I wrote how the grandeur of the Portuguese empire was recreated on a small scale in Coimbra: in Portugal dos Pequenitos. ‘Portugal van de Kleinetjes’ is an almost seventy-year-old amusement park that can be compared to Madurodam. The most striking buildings from cities such as Porto, Lisbon, Coimbra and regions such as the Algarve and Alentejo have been recreated in miniature. Portugal dos Pequenitos with its castles and turrets is reminiscent of the setting of the Flying Fakir in Efteling.
Accompanied by Arie Pos, we stand in the Salão Nobre, the Noble Hall of the Assembleia da República, the parliament of Portugal, in the stately Palácio de São Bento in Lisbon.
This is different from our parliament, with those unsavory ones climbing wall. The Noble Salon is completely in the style of Salazar’s new state. The seven paintings on display pay homage to the Portuguese explorers: Infante (Crown Prince) Dom Henrique the Navigator hands over his revolutionary plan for the voyages of discovery to the captain of the Portuguese navy, Diogo Cão discovers the mouth of the Congo River, Bartolomeu Dias discover the Cape of Good Hope, Pedro Alvares Cabral andt in Vera Cruz in Brazil. Malacca is occupied by Afonso de Albuquerque and finally the most controversial painting: Vasco da Gama is received by the samorin.
The cheerful Ricardo Regalla is a convinced monarchist (supporter of Duarte Pio of Bragança, the last pretender to the throne living in Sintra) and has a royal mustache, like the lamented Dom Carlos the First. Chega’s second man says that the deputy Joacine Katar Moreira demanded that the seven paintings be removed.
Moreira argues that this art is the legacy of dictator Salazar and glorifies the subjugation of other peoples and cultures and the Portuguese colonial past. She suggests that there should be a separate museum for it. That reminds me of my favorite museum; the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, which is full of “entartete” art.
Herr Adolf Ziegler was chairman of the Reichskulturkammer from 1936 to 1943. His task was to purify the art in Germany. The works of Jewish artists and other subversives were confiscated or destroyed. Ziegler organized the great Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art” in 1937 in Munich, with 650 modern paintings, graphics and sculptures from 32 museums, including important masters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Lyonel Feininger and Ernst Barlach and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
The owner of the Reichskulturkammer exhibited them in the Pinakothek, accompanied by anti-Semitic slogans and taunting remarks.
I especially love Nolde and Kirschner (who belong to the current The bridge belonged) but I also love the colonial paintings in the Portuguese Parliament and the oriental eroticism van Eugene Delacroix, in his magnificent museum in Paris. Ricardo Regallo: “The joke with that lady of color who wants to cancel the paintings is that the Negro slaves in the painting have nothing to do with Vasco Da Gama, but were owned by the Indian ruler.”
Wokism is not very common in Portugal. That is something from Anglo-Saxon foreign countries, we read here in newspapers and magazines. A past of four and a half centuries of colonial power and exploitation in Africa, Asia and Brazil, the slave trade, the Inquisition and bloody wars of independence has not yet led to mea culpas or apologies. Only non-Portuguese historians of the empire writes back-school recall the less attractive sides of Portugal’s illustrious centuries as an explorer nation and world superpower.
The voyages of discovery and the empire are still unabashedly celebrated by the state as a founding myth for national pride, and that pride remains great. The Portuguese ancestors did something great far away and ‘gave the world new worlds’, as many commemorations invariably claim, according to the words of Camões from The Lusiads (1572), (buy the translation by Professor Pos dan!) Portugal’s national epic about Vasco da Gama and his iron-eating buddies in the East.
Black Lives Matter isn’t really an issue here either. You have to be careful with color distinction in Portugal, precisely because of the colonial heritage. Prime Minister António Costa has a tan because of his family roots in India, the former justice minister: Francisca Van Dunem. She has her tan from Angola and her surname from a distant Dutch ancestor, many Algarvians look like Arabs and the Jewish factor in the Portuguese DNA is large. So being different is not easy. The Portuguese are more easily opposed to Gypsies, Spaniards, Romanians or Russians than to the hard-to-untangle knot of their own genetic material.
There is so little to cancel without a blow to national pride. Busses of school children still pay enthusiastic visits to the already mentioned ‘Portugal dos Pequenitos’ in Coimbra. While in Spain the pot-bellied and -lipped negro from the bags of Conguitos (Spanish Maltese) has disappeared, in Porto you can still go to the famous delicatessen ‘O Pretinho do Japão’ (the negro from Japan), where you can be surprised by a life-sized colored wooden boy in servant’s attire is welcomed. The web page of the store is currently under construction. A wipe mark?
Manuel Matías in Sir Raymond de Souza join the guided tour. Manuel is Chega’s de factotum and a staunch anti-abortion activist. He was the leader of the Pró-Vida party that merged into Chega at the end of 2020, and has long been an adviser to party chairman André Ventura. Manuel’s daughter, the beautiful one Rita Matias, is one of the party’s deputies. Raymond is a Portuguese who was born in Brazil, moved to South Africa, migrated to Australia and eventually settled in the United States. He travels the globe as a flying ambassador of International Missions for Human Life International (HLI).
Chega and Andre Ventura are constantly demonized in the Portuguese press – without exception “progressive” -. Ventura left the leftist Partido Social Demócrata and drew many voters away from the PSD and the Partido do Centro Democrático Social (CDS). He is against abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage, but Chega has many gays among its members. With a theme such as immigration you do not score in Portugal (2.5 million Portuguese live outside the mother country) and Islam is not an election thing either, with 0.001 percent mohammedans in the country. Chega has no problem whatsoever with Ukrainian refugees, but is very suspicious of the motives of many fortune seekers from Islamic countries. To give just one example: a few years ago, the whole of Fuseta was in turmoil because of the arrival of no fewer than 800 refugees from the Levantine jungle. Fuseta is a cute fishing village between Olhão and Luz de Tavira, just Egmond aan Zee around 1930, with Judeo-Christian norms and values and good clean fun for the whole family. Barely 2500 men and women live in Fuseta and they are all related to each other. The Syrians would be parked in a beautiful hotel complex in the middle of the village. Now Fuseta lives off tourism and if there’s one thing you shouldn’t have on a virgin beach with sunbathing Catholic Portuguese girls, it’s a pack of unskilled Muslim testosterone bombs who have never seen a girl in a bikini.
All’s well that ends well because the Syrians refused to come to Portugal. They thought it was a poor, uncivilized and aggenebbish rotten country, with filthy haram food, little sun & culture and they were especially disturbed by the ubiquitous hurtful and disrespectful Jesus statues and Jesus images.
I’ve been to Syria about five times and you can sweep up some nice hummus, but I mainly saw that that gribus would not soon produce a Nobel Prize winner, a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist, let alone a decent periodontist.
The Syrians in question wanted to go to Germany and so as not to offend them, they were served at their beck and call. Now they all live on Kurfürstendamm. The Portuguese hotemot who was responsible for this scandalous human trafficking, saw a fat refugee bonus pass by.
Chega has the patriotic slogan Deus patria e familia work added: work. What I find charming about the club is their unconditional support for Israel and their demand that the Portuguese embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Chega is very popular in rural areas such as the Algarve and the Alentejo and in the working-class town of Setubal, where many disappointed left-wing workers live. Chega, Portugal’s third party, has no mayor, just like the PVV in the Netherlands. I now know a number of party cadres, friendly bonvivants (a kind of cozy Vlaams Belangers but very Roman Catholic) and am curious about their party congress in Santarem, for which I, Arie Pos and Geert Wilders are invited.
next week a blazing report from your raging right-wing reporter!
