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Fake news:Portugal ‘fooled’ ex-dictator to believe he still led from his sickbed
- slater 4y agoArchive: https://archive.ph/vxvUm https://archive.ph/vxvUm
- cozzyd 4y agoBut... Why? Did his aides just not want to disappoint?
- mc32 4y agoAnd not one person in his circle would betray the ruse even if unintentionally, like grandchildren or other relative?
- smabie 4y agoI imagine it started gradually: one lie led to another and before you know it, you're printing a whole new newspaper for him every day. I find it unlikely that this was a coordinated deception that happened all at once.
- JetSpiegel 4y agoWho would bell the cat?
- cafard 4y agoThe late Simon Leys mentioned this in one of the essays in The Hall of Uselessness (NYRB books).
- eurasiantiger 4y agoThe Independent is owned by a Russian oligarch.
- JetSpiegel 4y ago> A staunch Catholic, he was opposed to communism and socialism but distanced himself from Nazism and fascism. Come on, how distanced was he from Hitler and Mussolini? Sure, Portugal remained "neutral" during WW2, but we still sold the Nazis tungsten ore, and filled the central bank with stolen Belgian gold. There was a big espionage ring on lighthouses to surveill the Mediterranean allied ships, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes died in disgraced after saving many jews by giving them visas to escape France. In 1937 when anarchists nearly killed Salazar and the political police spent a month arresting drunks, while the bombers read about big arrests on the papers, Salazar called Mussolini to send him his best investigators to solve it. They didn't, the police chief got egg on his face, and the guys that cracked the case were fired, the official version remained, since the drunks they rounded up had their pictures printed in the front pages (pretty banged up from the torture). He was so Catholic, the official papal newspaper was censored as much as all the others.