Originally Posted by
Tooting Carmen
OK, it is true that Portugal under him remained much less industrialised than Northern Europe and North America and salaries were still much lower, but weren't there real socioeconomic improvements during his regime too, especially the massive reduction in illiteracy, which before he came along was at 75%? More generally, much like I argued in another thread that, in many ways, it was Eastern Europe's poverty compared to Western Europe that made it Communist rather than the other way round, in a similar way could it not be argued that Fascism was more a consequence than a cause of the poverty that characterised Portugal (and Spain and Italy) compared to other parts of the West? Because the point is that those countries were certainly no paradises of milk and honey before the dictatorships came along.