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However, the polemical debate with those who attacked Sérgio was above all political: the major defects they accused his História de Portugal of having were due to the fact that Sérgio never ceased to show how badly the Estado Novo ruled the country. For him, even the “empire” was only acceptable if its aim was to free the people from poverty through technical improvements, the redistribution of property and economic planning. “For an impoverished people such as ours, the first task of ‘imperialism’ should be to rescue its economy from the backward quagmire in which it has lain, thereby freeing the people from their poverty and giving them a new conception of life, a new organic of progressive cooperation.” And he made it very clear he defended cooperativism (which he fought for) leading to a liberating socialism without authoritarianism. On the path leading to this future a knowledge of history would serve to free us from the weight of the past. It was necessary to awaken the Portuguese people “from their historical sleep, showing them the reality of economic conditioning and convincing them of the urgency of a critical examination of all the customs they had inherited from their grandparents, in this decisive moment for the human species which requires men to profoundly modify the production regime and the distribution of goods”. |
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