Portuguese History, Portuguese Empire and Historical Figures
How they manipulate us: the methods of anti-Portuguese history
History would mean the rigorous investigation of the collective action of Humanity, or of the many humanities that compose it, completed with a prudent and dispassionate judgment that discerns the proximate and remote causes of historical development. However, it is more frequent, which tempts us to conclude that it is natural, that history is written for or against certain conceptions, parties or ideologies. Those who write anti-Portuguese history intend to reduce the intervention of our people in the general course of things to a terrorist enterprise, emphasizing this and that act of violence, inducing hastily from a certain infamy, cutting from the voluminous and very rich source of almost six centuries of Portuguese overseas activity only the slave transit in the Atlantic, seeking to present it as the definitive legacy bequeathed to human posterity from the Expansion and the Empire.
The anti-Portuguese history is sometimes written using pure and simple lies. In the vast majority of these cases, the conscientious reader or listener will be able to dislodge a book of serious historiography from his shelf, or from the shelf of any nearby public library, and guard against fraud. However, the anti-Portuguese story is almost always produced by more subtle methods. In a brief but significant essay, “Catholic Truth in History,” Hilaire Belloc described the ways in which anti-Catholic treaties and manuals were forged in Protestant England. The methods of anti-Catholic historiography that Belloc examines are applicable to any person or collectivity whose history, and identity, one wants to deform for any purpose, and are also found in anti-Portuguese historiography, which any scrutineer will be able to detect, a once the nature of such procedures has been realized.
The anti-Portuguese story begins to generate itself in the selection of materials. Any narrative requires a selection of facts to be mentioned. The chronicles of human deeds offer us an ocean of successes, personalities and contexts, among which it is necessary to sift what is thought to be recorded. Thus, the selection of material can be done so that the truth is obscured, even if each fact that presents itself is true. Anti-Portuguese history selects only from the annals of Expansion and Empire that which offers a lurid portrait of our collective enterprise.
The narrator's tone is always a non-negligible element of any work of historiography. The anti-Portuguese tone will employ irony towards our greatest deeds, will use the strongest and most emotional words to describe the verified abuses, will introduce expressions of insinuating ambiguity in paragraphs where descriptive rigor would prevail.
Finally, the proportion chosen between the different parts of the narrative competes to complete a false portrait in anti-Portuguese historiography. Two historians can select the same set of facts to be dealt with in their works. But the dimension and emphasis they give to each of the facts, the order in which they are placed in the narrative, impress the reader in different, more favorable or harmful ways. Whoever stories against Portugal will not hesitate to untie his pen, which sails at the top of his hat, to report, in grotesque detail, what infamously exists to be published about our imperial past.
The history of Portugal's overseas expansion, as a whole and in its parts, has been the subject of these multiple methods of hiding and distorting historical truth. More recently, taking advantage of the impetus projected from abroad, anti-Portuguese historiography has endeavored to reduce the history of the Expansion and the Empire to the slave trade, to the abuses practiced on Native Americans and Africans, to raids and to war. Even if any allegations related to these events, in themselves, are true, and in many cases they are not, the exposition that is built with them of the history of Portugal is false. Excluded are Portugal's decisive contributions to the progress of Humanity: the victory over distance, the foundation of a true world market, the diffusion of technology, the food revolution... for Humanity, of which, today, to a greater or lesser degree, we enjoy the fruits, unknown to the ancients for millennia.
In the next anti-Portuguese history text that he finds, the esteemed reader will be able, by looking at the selection, the tone and the proportion used, to point out exactly where the lie is.