Counter-Currents
1,782 words
A while ago Guillaume Durocher did an interview with Erkenbrand to introduce them to a wider audience, and to promote their 2018 conference. Today I want to likewise honor a Portuguese organization I recently discovered. They are called Escudo Identitário, or Identitarian Shield. I was very encouraged to see that Rightist ideas are spreading to the Iberian Peninsula, a region that has been a Leftist bulwark since the mid-1970s.
Éordred: So the “Identitário” part of your name, is that inspired by the identitarian movement? Where did Escudo come from, what are its origins, and where does it stand ideologically?
Escudo Identitário: We don’t have any official links to any identitarian group, but we consider ourselves followers of the identitarian ideology, and we support every identitarian initiative in Europe. Escudo was formed in 2017 after a Communist-affiliated student’s union at the Nova University of Social Studies (FCSH) decided to crack down on a conference about colonial history that had been organized by another patriotic group. After hearing about the crackdown, a lot of young men who had intended to attend the conference started communicating online and decided to take counter-action. We stormed the university, confronted the student’s union, and delivered a protest letter to the Dean. At the time, this made a lot of noise in the press and, without even bothering to check the facts, both the Portuguese Parliament and the President condemned our action for being violent.
After the action, we decided not only to keep in touch but to start something new. We wanted to build an identitarian movement from scratch, which would have the capability of intervening on short notice whenever Leftists interfere with freedom of speech. Our ideological starting point was in traditional Portuguese nationalism, but over the last few months it started evolving into something new. We started borrowing a lot of ideas from the French New Right, especially the works of Guillaume Faye. Counter-Currents has been inspirational as well, as are ideas from many other movements of a traditionalist and reactionary stripe. Currently, we have our own variant of identitarianism that we call “Escudismo.”
Escudismo is not only a Portuguese identitarian worldview, but it is also a way of being and behaving in this ever-changing world of ours. We have some articles, in Portuguese, on our Website, describing this new concept of ours, although the full manifesto is not yet finished. Our symbol is the Portuguese Lynx, which is currently threatened with extinction.
Éordred: Is there rising nationalist sentiment in Portugal? What does the landscape of the parties and movements on the Right look like? Are there populists? Do you have any alternative media on your side?
Escudo Identitário: Nationalist and populist sentiments are definitely growing here in Portugal, but the vast majority of people vote far Left to center Left. This is a legacy of Salazar. People are getting more and more fed up with the current system, and most have already figured out that there is a demographic replacement taking place. But as is generally known, politics follows culture, but only with some lag, and right now, Portuguese politics has not yet caught up with these “new” sentiments. At the moment, not one political party has assumed an identitarian position. We are going to have elections this year, and unless something changes, it’s going to be business as usual. Some left-of-center party will win, and the status quo will remain. We will have to wait until 2023 for some serious change in the political landscape.
At the moment, there is virtually no alternative media in Portugal, apart from some very small Instagram accounts or Facebook pages which mostly reshare content made by others in the international alternative media.
Éordred: I know a little bit about Iberia, but not much, beyond the fact that it is in poverty, that it has been strongly Leftist since the fall of Franco and Salazar, and that the European Union has done it little good economically and culturally. Can you describe the socioeconomic and political situation in Portugal, and how you see your role in it?
Escudo Identitário: The Left’s hegemony began during the time of Salazar. We can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend that the revolution against the regime he established – the Estado Novo – on April 25, 1974 came out of nowhere. The nationalists were so comfortable in the Estado Novo that, not only did they fail to reinvent themselves and adjust to the times, but they didn’t even understand that there was a culture war going on.
Ever since, the Left has basically dominated – not only the political landscape, but also the cultural. The EU, despite having some positive aspects for us, such as forcing our country to accept the new reality that we are no longer a maritime empire and that our focus should be on Europe, also exerted some very bad influences, especially when it comes to the materialistic and individualistic approaches to life that it spreads. Liberal values mixed with lusotropicalist (the belief that all members of our former colonies were Portuguese, and were the same as us) propaganda – this was very common during the Estado Novo, and it formed a destructive cocktail that still pollutes the minds of the older generations (our version of the “boomers”). It’s usually said that the older generations are less open to mass immigration, but that simply isn’t true. They might be against mass immigration from Muslim countries, and from those countries that Portugal shares no history or culture with, but when it comes to our former colonies – which is where the bulk of our immigrants come from – they are its most ardent supporters, even more so than young, college-aged Leftists.
There have been several attempts by nationalists to regain political power in the past, but there has never been any attempt to wrest back control of our culture. That is what we as Escudo want to focus on. This is where we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the movement in Portugal. We are metapolitical. Without cultural hegemony, we will never see the day when our ideas are implemented.
Éordred: What do you think of the possibility for cooperation with the Spaniards and Iberianism?
Escudo Identitário: There has always been anti-Spanish sentiment in Portugal, which is normal, since we are a much smaller country, and there has always been the threat of a Spanish invasion. Spain ruled us for sixty years at one point. However, considering the threat of becoming a minority in our own homeland, we understand that we have to let go of old grudges and join together, not only with our Spanish brothers but with all our European brothers in the pursuit of a new European Union, one that is built on the foundation of identity and bound by blood rather than material interests and petty liberalism. What we have now is an EU where the peoples, the cultures, and the countries are all viewed as nothing but obstacles to the hegemony of finance. We simply can’t afford to have another brother war since, as Victor Hugo said, “A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
Éordred: What is your view of nations like Brazil, where they speak Portuguese but have drifted away culturally and are less racially homogenous, or where the people are of a different race entirely, as in Angola? And do you think Jair Bolsonaro’s rise will help you in Portugal?
Escudo Identitário: We have almost nothing in common with those nations. Some nationalists love to fetishize our old symbols and dream about our imperial history, but truth be told, nowadays there is nothing apart from the language (and in some cases even this is questionable) linking us to our former colonies, which are united in the CPLP (Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries). We should maintain our historical ties with them, but they must understand that our focus and our future lies in Europe, just as their future lies in their own respective continents. There is nothing to be gained from more integration, or from some kind of “CPLP Schengen Zone” (which is basically a euphemism for flooding Portugal with even more immigrants from our former colonies).
Regarding Bolsonaro, he might embolden some local politicians, but in the long run, it will be mostly irrelevant for us.
Éordred: You have an upcoming event in May, featuring some well-known speakers of the international Right, but also some native Portuguese speakers. What can you tell us about this event, and more generally about how you shape your activism?
Escudo Identitário: This event is our first entry into the world of conferences and meetings. We understand that unless we these ideas with a large public we won’t go very far. Forúm Prisma Actual, which basically means Current Scope Forum, will be a space to discuss and spread our ideas freely, and to invite prestigious people from movements around Europe. This year we will have Olena Semenyaka from the Ukrainian National Corps. We couldn’t ask for someone better to start off our initiative. We will also have Lieutenant Colonel Brandão Ferreira, who is an expert in geopolitics, and who will share with us some of his ideas regarding Portugal’s role in the world today. The other two speakers will be Afonso MA, our current leader, and a speaker from Escudo Norte, our chapter in northern Portugal. It will be a very thorough conference, as we will cover many different pressing issues such as geopolitics, demography, activism, and metapolitics.
Usually, whenever we organize something in Escudo, we don’t charge people, but instead ask them to give us whatever they feel like giving. Not only does this allow younger people to have easier access to our content and still feel like they are giving something toward the cause, but in general we have found that people tend to actually give more than they would have been asked for as a ticket price.
It is crucial to have these spaces of free discussion, because we’re witnessing more and more government and media crackdown on “dangerous” ideas. Not only that, but the current topics that are being discussed on a national scale – apart from football, of course – are completely stale. There are no new ideas, there are no new initiatives, and whenever there is a debate, both sides basically agree with one another. We need these spaces in order to bring fresh air to a decaying nation, to challenge the status quo head-on, and simply because they don’t want us to have them. There is no doubt that in a free speech environment, our ideas would prevail, but since such an environment does not exist, we must build it ourselves and do what our motto begs us to do: Defend the Future.
15 comments
“… very encouraged to see that Rightist ideas are spreading to the Iberian Peninsula, a region that has been a Leftist bulwark since the mid-1970s.”
The interview with Escudo Identitário reps is interesting – the clarity of thought in analysis of their country and EU is refreshing.
Similarly in Spain, the Vox populist party is making dramatic progress, filling in the center-right space partially vacated by “official” political parties.
They have a parliamentary representation. They have a smart leadership.
They are successful because they “speak with a frankness and clarity of conviction long unheard of in multicultural Spain.”
Spain has national election on April 28.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-21/spain-does-term-islamist-constitute-hate-speech
At the risk of being a purity-spiraler, Spain’s Vox is dangerously pro-Israel, much as the Kosher “counter-Jihad” movement of Tommy Robinson et. al. is. While entryist activism from within Vox to push it in a proper antizionist direction would be worthwhile, I’d be concerned about its current leadership.
The subject of Israel does not even register with their voters. In Spain no one gives a damn, and the number and influence (exerted from within Spain) of the tribe are tiny. People care mostly about Catalonia, the twin blessings of Islam and migration, and stopping the general marginalisation of right-wingers in public life.
Why does it matter, if any White Identitarians cover their “assets” to some extent by singing praises of Israel? What is so bad about Israel from a WN perspective, anyway? Although I reject exterminationist Nazism, and indeed know many Jews whom I like and admire personally, I understand the JQ fairly well – was reading books like The Controversy of Zion and The Zionist Factor well before I purchased K. MacDonald’s trilogy as the latter became available across the 90s – and absolutely agree that White Ethnostates, whether in the New World or especially in Europe, need to be 100% Gentile (at least wrt Europe, Jews should be asked gently but firmly to leave posthaste; other non-Europeans should be removed more rapidly and forcefully).
But why the hostility to Israel? First, why should any WN care about the Middle East at all (except possibly, from a Western Civ view, for persecuted Christians)? Second, what is our interest in protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians? What have any Muslims ever done on behalf of Whites? Third, why shouldn’t we be at least moderately, rhetorically Zionist (no more US foreign and military aid, of course), given that Israel is a true ethnostate – similar to what we want for our people – and that its existence should be pointed to positively to our critics precisely as an example of what we want for the English,French, Germans etc?
This is one fantastic comment. All we need to know about our attitude towards the JQ in a few words. Extra points for this: “… what is our interest in protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians? What have any Muslims ever done on behalf of Whites?”. More specifically, I never saw a Palestinian give a damn because their Muslim brethren are pulling on us the “peaceful” migration scam the Jews pulled on them, let alone warn us or lift a finger to help us. Quite to the contrary: they are quite happy when their kind do the conquering. Really, every single ethnic group is ethnocentric except for Whites. And we gave the the tool of universalist ideas that they use to destroy us. They play us like afiddle, be they low or high IQ.
Thank you. I think the focus for the foreseeable future should be on RACE (and immigration), not Jews. The latter are a dangerous distraction in an age of unsecured borders. When the West has ended its immigration madness, and begun deporting nonwhite colonists from Europe en masse, Jews will get the message that they, too, need to shape up. And if they don’t, they, too, can be removed, given that they now have their true homeland to return to, and can make no appeals for clemency.
First of all, the biggest problem with Israel (even worse than its immoral treatment of Palestinians and manipulation of the US’s foreign policy) is that it is intended as a vehicle for Zionist Jews to rule the world, NOT merely a state for Jews to live in. Top religious and even secular Jewish leaders openly state this. For instance, first President of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, envisioned a world government (with a “world court” and “world army”) headquartered in Jerusalem. Prominent Rabbis like Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadiah Yosef envision a world in which non-Jews are “born only to serve Jews”. Jewish theologians consider the establishment of Israel as a major theological precursor to the Jewish “messiah” (Moshiach) coming and helping them rule the world, after a series of apocalyptic wars described in Daniel.
Of note, these are long-standing theological positions that Jews have held for centuries. Many verses in the TaNaKh, e.g. Isaiah chapters 2, 60, and 61; Deut. 15:6; and Micah 5:6-9 promise the Jews that they will take over the wealth and political power of the nations in which they are scattered as a diaspora.
A significant part of the legal mechanism for this future, Orwellian Zionist order is a code of laws that the Jewish religion calls the “Noahide Laws”. These are seven laws that Jews openly intend to impose on ALL Gentiles, with the enormous Jewish organization Chabad Lubavitch being one of their most visible proponents (every year, the US Congress & sitting US president sign “symbolic” legislation honoring these totalitarians). The laws decree the death penalty for “crimes” like “hate speech” against the Jewish god and torah; “sexual crimes” like homosexuality; “idolatry” (which most Jews say includes worshiping Jesus); and not establishing “courts of justice” (which conveniently are to be under the Sanhedrin).
Ultimately, in principle I (like you) do strongly support the creation of a state for Jews to inhabit in complete safety and cultural autonomy and do not at all favor exterminationism, but this state should not be in the Middle East (where religious nutjob Jews can claim they are fulfilling “prophecies” in their quest for world domination) but somewhere totally removed but habitable, e.g. Madagascar. And I’m sure it’s obvious to you that most pro-Israel Jews do not intend to leave their Gentile host countries for Israel.
Even if everything you say is true (I’m pretty sure this does not apply to secularists like Netanyahu, and 100% sure it doesn’t apply to my small number of Republican Jewish friends and acquaintances) I would not change my comment. I don’t believe the USA should have any kind of “special relationship” with Israel; give them any more of our money (let the rich Jews pay for Israel); or fight their wars or work for their peace. I want the US (and other White countries) to totally segregate ourselves from the Middle East and its odious peoples.
But I am not at all worried about Zionist world domination. Zionists (even assuming you are correct in imputing to ALL Jews the global imperialist designs of various fundamentalist fanatics) are only as strong as we allow them to be. The key to prevent any Jewish world empire is for the White West to recover its spine, expel all nonwhites (at least from Europe), and then develop a series of White Nationalist racial/ethnostates, with appropriate levels of defense spending and R&D, as well as pro-natalist and eugenicist legislation. In that scenario, Jews in Israel can fantasize all they want about world domination, but they’ll be lucky to hold onto tiny Israel in the face of Arab/Muslim fecundity and withdrawn Western support.
In the meantime, getting to those recrudescent racial states requires gradual White racial radicalization, which in turn requires that pro-Whites marshall their limited forces, and deploy their very limited political capital, to maximum effect. Nothing matters next to stopping the Immigration Invasion. If doing so means building temporary alliances with anti-immigration Jews, or Christianist pro-Israelites, so be it. First things first.
Agreed. Much of the Right is jumping aboard a bandwagon built for them by Zionists and neocons, by the likes of Horowitz, Geller, Geert Wilders, Gina Rosenwald, Robert Spencer, in a well-funded and well-connected Israel First network. It is being identified by media and academics as Right -wing; whereas it is whig liberal or in the U.S. context Wilsonian-internationalist. In damning Islam per se and the Koran as intrinsically evil it also fails to identify the Wahhabism that is the enemy of both the West and mainstream Islam, has the Right fighting a straw man, and supporting bogus causes as it usually did during the cold war. Rather, Islam has much in common with the Right, as Nietzsche and Le Bon discerned, but I suppose great scholars such as Tommy Robinson and Pauline Hanson know better. As for their relations with the West, one could think of their contribution to saving Spain from Bolshevism, and their help against the Ottomans, for which they were betrayed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour. Muslims are entering the West because of the chaos brought to them by such duplicity, as well as the wars brought upon them by the USA’s Saudi allies and their terrorist networks, and such matters as destroying Qaddafi and opening Europe to Africa thereby.
Islam is metaphysically false, and racio-culturally alien. It has been waging war against the Christian world for 14 centuries. Muslims kidnapped and enslaved millions of Whites throughout the early-modern period. Such White slavery as still exists is overwhelmingly (outside of America’s vile, racially integrated, homosexualist-predator prisons) a Muslim enterprise.
Islam is the enemy of everything that is uniquely the product of Western man. It is a stultifying and stunted civilization. Muslims come to the West because we have grown morally weak and let them in – where they proceed to knife our people, rape our women, and deal drugs, all the while parasiting off welfare (“benefits”).
ALL Muslims (except for the tiny number of homegrown convert-morons) must be expelled.
Excellent. The interviewee is eloquent and obviously understands very well what is at stake and what methods we have to use to make progress. May Portugal haver their VOX party rather sooner than later.
Nice job. Hail victory!
The links have gone already?!
No, they’re still there, we just had the link wrong. I’ve fixed them.
@ Bolton:
• “their contribution to saving Spain from Bolshevism” >> LOL they fought for money; raped like crazy; desecrated and peed on tombs (this is well known, but I had the “privilege” of hearing a vivid, first-hand account of their gallant help against Bolshevism from a civil war vet in the fields of Aragon when I was 18). Also, their kind, disinterested help during the less than 4 years of civil war totally compensates the 700 years of occupation of the Iberian peninsula. Powerful take!
• “their help against the Ottomans” LOL I thought they were fighting to free themselves from the Ottoman yoke, and they were actually helping us, from the goodness of their heart. Evil, Islamophobic me.
• “they were betrayed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour” >> by contrast, Muslims would never betray us. Never. Ever.
• “Islam has much in common with the Right, as Nietzsche and Le Bon” >> I thought Islam is and has been the West’s historic enemy since the 7th century. But hey, Nietzsche and Le Bon say it ain’t so (Hitler said it too! Yay!). Good to know. Also, it’s not about fighting for the West and its peoples. It’s about Left vs Right!!!
•”Muslims are entering the West because of the chaos brought to them by such duplicity, as well as the wars brought upon them by the USA’s Saudi allies and their terrorist networks, and such matters as destroying Qaddafi and opening Europe to Africa thereby” >> because History, you know, started in 2003 with the Iraq war. That is the reason Muslim mass settlement started. No Muslim ever set foot in Europe before that.
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