I
The holding of the “Avante!” Festival was the pretext for a gigantic reactionary operation that aimed to attack the PCP and above all to pave the way for limiting the exercise of the rights and freedoms of the workers and people, namely the right to resist the liquidation of their rights, as was seen with the campaign against May Day.
In fact, even though they did not mouth this objective, some did not ban the Festival and the PCP only because the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic does not allow it, nor would the communists, democrats and the people in general allow it. An operation that although is not of today portrays the class hatred of big capital circles that see in the PCP the most consistent force in combating their policy and projects for intensifying exploitation, the force that denounces submission to external impositions that condition the future of the country and the life of the people and that fights for the sovereign development of Portugal.
It would be a mistake to dissociate this operation from the broader offensive that has long known, due to its virulence, continuity and lack of scruples, the expression of growing anti-communism and undisguised fascistic hatred.
But the characteristics and intensity of the campaign that has been witnessed for five months, the resources it has mobilised, the spurious methods it has used, cannot be deceived. In terms of falsification and mystification, they went as far as dishonesty allowed them to go.
II
The epidemic was only the pretext, the instrument that worked for their anti-communist crusade as a gift from heaven. An operation commanded from the reactionary centres, with wide projection in the dominant media, punctuated with anti-democratic tics and totalitarian impulses of some party leaders and that did not find in the institutions or administrative bodies positions to discourage it.
One cannot look at this operation within the strict scope of the target they favoured - the Avante! Festival. It is much deeper and broader in scope, part of an agenda and objectives that aim to target more than the PCP. The PCP is just the main target because it embodies the only force capable of facing, resisting and jeopardising the most reactionary objectives associated with the interests of monopoly capital. But many democrats, even those who differ much from PCP's intervention and struggle, would be mistaken if they did not see in this process a dangerous agenda for questioning the central aspects of democratic life.
What we witnessed was an operation that, based on a climate of collective fear, aims to keep civic, democratic and political participation locked down, to impose restrictions on the exercise of rights and freedoms, thus expediting the ongoing agenda of intensifying exploitation and liquidation of rights.
The strategy of fear and restrictions instilled on a mass scale is devastating. A strategy supported by a communicational offensive that benefited from the imposed isolation and that made everyone even more helpless in the face of the torrent of fear and the infernal scenarios associated with it. In the name of the virus everything was justified. The widespread option was not that of prevention, of the pedagogy of good public health practices, but of confronting people with the false dilemma of choosing between rights and life, employment or life, wages or life. A suffocating blanket of conformism was meticulously woven and installed, the awareness of each one's rights submerged by the sense of survival. What is a feeling intrinsic to life and human condition, fear, as a factor of self-defence that can be overcome by the rational observation of the reality in presence, was raised to the expression of social conduct, fuelled by the obscurantist exacerbation of the unknown, with unpredictable behavioural consequences and effects on physical and mental health.
It must be said that it is difficult, unless there are elements of appreciation and reflection that allow a conscious assessment of life and all that surrounds it, to resist the outpour of fear. Day after day, hour after hour, the endless images of ventilated patients, open graves or coffins in movement presented without any journalistic decency. The role, bordering on the ridiculous, to which the main media organs subjected themselves for days longing for the time when there would be a first case in the country, and then a first death, were news received with despicable enthusiasm. The Prime Minister's unfortunate statement on March 12, boosting fear, when presenting the stand of each person in the face of the disease as "a struggle for survival". The surgical tuning of mass communication with the option, not innocent, of referring to the epidemic as a pandemic, not so much thinking about the meaning and real definition of each of the terms, but because the second has a greater scaring load associated with it. The insistence, in addition to what public health measures naturally required, of lockdown and isolation, translated into the exhaustive repetition of "stay at home", the hammering of the expression "social distancing" (and not "physical" as it should strictly be referred) to promote individual atomization. The deterministic transformation of a situation that, regardless of the seriousness that must be recognised, seeks to institutionalise it as a standard of future life translated into the idea "nothing will be as before". The spread of conformism and passive acceptance of attacks on rights, dismissals or cut in wages using the blunt expression "everything will be fine". The incentive to denounce conducts not subordinated to the state of "curfew" that was sought to impose, or the pernicious stigmatisation of the young people and elderly, inducing them to self-limit their right to move around, to socialise, in fact to live.
III
It was to this swamp of fear, paralyzing and permissive, that were added aspects of ideological mystification. Once the ground was prepared to make believe that a simple gesture or movement would lead to contagion or certain death, it was time to put the pieces together. The supreme hypocrisy with which some now take for granted an alleged "feeling" or "perception" of the people, presenting it as innate, when they know that they were the ones who generated and promoted it using an unusual and forced formatting of public opinion.
The offensive against the Festival followed a meticulous plan and phasing. It began with the 25th of April and more clearly with May Day that they tried to prevent, courageously carried out by CGTP-IN as a great day of struggle and affirmation of rights in a context in which, except for the PCP, all distanced themselves from it, by choice or opportunism. Holding on to an alleged exceptionality that had allowed these events, contrasting them to the absence of the Fatima ceremonies in that month (decided on their own by the religious authorities), or to the restrictions on weddings and funerals, evading the field of rights and guarantees that could not be constitutionally suspended.
A plan that continued based on the falsification of an alleged “ban on music festivals” sustained and maintained until the days of the Avante! Festival concealing that it was the promoters of the big festivals themselves who had asked it invoking commercial contracting reasons and, specially, because the legislation invoked explicitly allowed the holding of shows and similar initiatives within the framework of public health guidelines(1).
The reactionary plan set in motion had a clear objective: to make the PCP, in the face of ideological pressure and blackmail, to give up holding the Avante! Festival. The determination of the PCP thwarted that goal. It was now a question of moving on to a new phase - to prevent its holding, using all means, however illegitimate they were, as they were. Faced with the defeat of this new claim, they entered a new and final phase: that of doing everything to deflate the Festival and demobilise those who had the intention of enjoying it. The holding of the Festival was in itself an expression of the failure of this reactionary ambition.
IV
The battery of lies, slander, mystification, falsification for this new level of offensive was what we all know. A command centre that unified the key ideas that commentators and analysts parroted for weeks on end. A finely tuned media editorialising was triggered: countless front page calls, news alignment (numbers of infected and Covid deaths, particularly in the world since those in the country were not enough, always preceding the pieces on the Festival); illustration of data related to contagions and the epidemic illustrated with images of the construction of the Avante! Festival(2); unprecedented resorting of “Public Opinion” call-in programmes; treatment of the news related to the Festival within the Covid-19 separator (case of Público in the “to the minute” and in the Observer “live”); reproduction of news written to liven up the idea of a Party with special privileges (even after the time when life returned to a possible normality with trips to the beach, pilgrimages in August to Fátima, book fairs and several indoor and outdoor shows). The use of gross manipulation, such as the use of a fake front page of The New York Times(3) to open a piece on one of the SIC news programme and supporting the manipulative narrative of the piece that Clara de Sousa enthusiastically took on. The shameless and slanderous accusation against the PCP of placing the profits of the Festival ahead of the health of the Portuguese, inventing a profit of two million euros in the 2019 Festival(4) that they themselves (in this case also SIC) had to deny when editing a piece about the losses (!) of the last festivals(5), losses that had already been reported by Jornal de Negócios in September 2018, two years before(6).
For the materialisation of the objectives to which the dominant circles had proposed themselves, also the action of the great information giants - Google and Facebook - was not lacking through the censorship imposed on paid advertisements(7) related to the Festival, on the basis of unfounded formal excuses that translated first in their suspension and later on their rejection.
The guiding lines of the operation were clear: to put in contrast the PCP with the climate and ideas that disseminated, to present it as a privileged body to whom the law would not apply, imbued with a selfishness that would lead it to devalue the interest of all in the name of its own self-interest, irresponsible because it would not take into account the disease and its risks. All encouraged on the basis of anti-communist prejudice and stigmatization, trying to identify the virus with the communists and the PCP, reproducing here what Trump carries out with the expression of the "Chinese virus". In which everything was valid: legal injunction that had the sole objective of animating news, unwarranted and provocative acts by PSD and CDS, Rui Rio's anti-democratic lashing out as the Festival drew near; petitions and signatures in writing and online(8) (loaded with hate) against the holding of the Avante! Festival duly amplified by the media; the fomented expressions of protest of residents of Amora that went on for hours on TV, including many interviews in studio, based on the selective choice of protagonists (some of them important local leaders of the PS and PSD), the diffusion to exhaustion of establishments willing to close due to risks of contagion brought by the thousands that would come, god knows from where (without any journalist having the lucidity or intelligence to question why in the Algarve all was not closed after being "invaded" by half a million vacationers, dozens of thousands of whom were foreigners). The way in which the voice of command was transformed in all the media in the minutes following the information given on the maximum licensed occupancy for the venue (incidentally mandatory for similar venues) in anticipation of effective attendance at the 2020 Festival to heighten alleged risks of contagion and promoting the idea of "irresponsibility" will go down in the history as a case study of orchestrated manipulation. At the same time that everything was done to hide or evade the concentrations of thousands of people who rightly went to the beaches, went to the Sanctuary of Fátima in the pilgrimage dedicated to emigrants, the information of the approximately 30 thousand tickets sold for the F1 race at the race track in Portimão at the end of September, the crowds at the book fairs, the multiple shows, some of which were publicised due to the presence of government officials and the President of the Republic.
Added with the intervention of different organisations, starting with the National Association of Public Health Doctors, the Associations of Doctors and Nurses, aligned with the PSD and other reactionary sectors, frenzies in the attack against the Festival and raising suspicion on the conditions in which it would be held (9).
All along this period, the Portuguese had the privilege of coming into contact with images, hitherto always hidden, of the massive participation in the Festival, its shows and its huge rallies. An "abnormality" quickly corrected with the return to the old normal concealment that the front pages of the press the day after the Festival tried to restore, and which the Expresso inaugurated, living up to its front role in the anti-communist crusade by the monopoly group Impresa, bringing to the front page of the printed edition of September 5, not any image of the Festival, but a new speculation about “accounts”, and a week later to bring to the newsstands a new edition in which it completely ignores that the Festival took place.
The anxious search for elements to attack the preparation and holding of the Festival was also expressed in the number of requests (generally met) to report on the ground during the construction period of the Festival, which began to appear even before the first work day. A reality so different from what has happened in recent years, in which this unusual "interest" was never revealed with the dimension that this year has awakened. The most clear demonstration of this concentration of media organs against the Festival lies in the unprecedented fact that it was the opening headline of all seven open-signal television broadcasts of August 31 (the date of the release of the Contingency Plan and the opinion of the General Directorate of Health), something that usually doesn’t even happen on the days of the Festival.
V
The flood of opinion articles, comments in different media, political commentary and a profusion of other texts, make the task of including them impossible. The lines of ideological diversion, the subtleties of prose to support the announced chronicle, the intellectual vulgarity summoned to animate the pre-established script does not allow one to go beyond some minimal systematisation, the only use of which is to keep registered how far political dishonesty and lack of scruples can go.
In the anti-Festival choir, there were many voices and no fewer argumentative variants that, with diverse subtleties or brute anti-communism, supported the mission entrusted to them: to prevent the Festival or, if such a bold objective was thwarted, to cause the greatest possible damage to the PCP. The panoply is such that their identification will inevitably fail. In them, prominent figures stand out: from the silliness of Miguel Sousa Tavares "a single infected person resulting from this festival is attributable to the leadership of the PCP"(10), to Marques Mendes' deceits "festivals are prohibited"(11), from the anti-communist distillation of São José Almeida “the immoral superiority of the PCP” to the delirious assertions of João Miguel Tavares “the Avante Festival” is a gift of the PCP to Chega”(12), something that knowing the character of the figure he would not disdain having taken place.
It should be noted, from the outset, the status of those who condescendingly admitted the right of the PCP to hold the Festival and to have political activity even though immediately sentencing the irresponsibility of doing so, invoking the “example” of (13) others who, due to strategy, fear or opportunism locked down their political intervention.
Together with those who bluntly or democratic platitudes sentenced the banning of the Festival, claiming about the lack of action by those who, according to them, should materialise their ambition (14).
Note those who shamelessly repeated their indignation at the Festival's different treatment even when they disguised the poison they distilled, adding that this differentiation should be resolved with the authorization of other events(15), as if dozens of shows were not taking place.
Let us not forget those who, like São José Almeida (16), made it clear that their anti-democratic ambitions go beyond their hatred of the PCP when, unambiguously, they supported the ban on the May Day actions .
Add those who look at this whole operation as PCP’s manoeuvre to victimize themselves by attributing to them the inability to know how to communicate(17), the same ones who, with honourable exceptions, ignored the disclosure of the set of public health prevention and safety procedures made on June 23, that is two and a half months before its holding and which were confirmed to be fully assured. Those same ones who left no room for any well-founded clarification without being subject to the anathema and dogma that murdered any possibility of finishing an explanation.
Or even those who, with great cynicism, decree the inevitable loss of influence of the PCP, complaining about what this would mean for political life, now seeming to regret what they largely aspired to foster(18).
VI
The PCP never intended any privileged treatment in observing public health prevention rules. As well as declaring that discretionary drives that intended the imposition of exceptional rules that are not required in any other activities or events were not acceptable, as was partially found and denounced.
In preparing the Avante! Festival, in its political and cultural dimension, the set of measures was respected in the multiplicity of organisational procedures within the framework of the legal provisions in force, based on conscientiously assumed requirements.
If there is an undeniable fact, it is that the conditions imposed by the Directorate General of Health (DGS) for the holding of the Festival not only did not translate any privileged treatment, but, on the contrary, they translated into discriminatory requirements. So it was when establishing an area per visitor in different spaces, different from what is set down in law, ignoring the distinction between indoor capacity and outdoor event and extrapolating without objective criteria sustained in an area per visitor to the Festival without parallel in any other event or public space. Examples are: the limitation of the total occupancy of the compound to 16,563 presences for an area of 300 thousand m2 predominantly outdoors, disregarding about 140 thousand m2 in the criteria for fixing this occupancy; the setting of the capacity of the 25 April stage for 2000 people in an area of 16,000 m2 (8 m2 per person) in striking contrast to those fixed for shows in Campo Pequeno (4m2 indoors) and in the Palácio de Cristal (2m2), or the Porto Book Fair (3500 in an area of 4000 m2, that is, little more than 1 m2 per person!).
The operation directed against the Avante! Festival did not find in institutions or administrative entities positions to discourage it. DGS, subjected to political pressure, first postponed for more than a month and a half the evaluation of the set of measures that it proposed to implement to guarantee health security, having instead of what was required - identification of possible shortcomings and omissions and issuing recommendations - decided to produce a "technical" opinion that involved, above all, a political exercise that welcomed the substance of the operation against the Festival, filled with elements and formulations that fit into a pre-established script against the Festival. As is well known, only one week before the Festival and following meetings that had taken place between DGS and PCP over several weeks, always at the request of the latter, DGS rules were known, which represented, in different matters, requirements distinct and superior to other achievements.
It is still unclear whether the incomprehensible and reproachable process adopted by the DGS was also endorsed or not by the government, the truth is that the government's repeated justification that “the government did not have the powers to prevent the Festival from taking place” showed its hesitations to respond clearly to those who aimed to illegitimately prevent its holding.
It is in this context that the President of the Republic chose to join the chorus of those who harboured suspicion about the Festival. Either invoking reasons for alleged inequalities with others, or feeding the idea of risks (even when he allowed himself to be photographed with dozens of vacationers without any physical distance, or appealed at the Book Fair for many thousands to visit it), or when pressing DGS for illegitimate demands. An attitude he already had during the days of the Avante Festival!, the most serious expression of which was questioning the conditions of safety and prevention of public health and its legitimacy in invoking, not facts that simply did not exist to support what he said, but the concept of "national perception" so much more dangerous when in the President of the Republic’s words.
Note the anti-democratic activism of the PSD and Rui Rio who during weeks outstretched in ridiculous comparisons and comments to feed the argumentative irrationality of fear and stigmatisation of the Avante! Festival. A register that, initiated with the challenge against May Day, clearly showed his non-conformity with the Constitution, the rights and freedoms enshrined in it and the democratic regime itself. An action added to the provocative actions of JSD, JP and CDS, the initiatives of their proxies (Liberal Initiative(19) and Chega(20)) designed to animate news programmes and news sites, and the fascistic comments and opinions of the many that pollute the media space. The action of well-known activists from the PS and JS(21) in the municipality of Seixal in promoting the anti-Festival crusade cannot be overlooked, nor the statements by BE leaders, beginning with their national coordinator, who without questioning the right to hold the Festival implicitly presented it as a risk factor that should be avoided, translated either in “I hope the PCP and DGS do everything necessary to preserve the health of all Portuguese”, or implicitly presenting it as an irresponsible behaviour that the BE did not share as proved by having chosen not to carry out similar initiatives.
VII
After failing the intention to prevent the Festival, recognising the indisputable conditions of protection and security, it was necessary to find other lines to prolong the attack against the PCP. At the forefront of these, the idea of a “Deserted Festival” to support the thesis of a party isolated from the masses and disconnected from popular sentiment.
Those who, through their intervention, did everything to create obstacles to the Festival and who pressured by all means to impose limitations on its occupancy, those same who sowed obscurantist and irrational arguments to frighten and upset, presenting the Festival as a synonym of contagion giving wings to the prejudice associated with it, came hypocritically, during and after the Festival to claim that the 2020 edition had fewer people than in the previous year.
The question is not, as they insidiously claim, that the PCP does not have the "perception" of popular sentiment. The question that was posed is not only not accepting, but contradicting and fighting what in terms of the masses they want to instil - an uncritical acceptance of the dictatorship of fear, of consolidating a level of terror inducing the feeling that any gesture or movement is contagion for certain. It is this feeling that the dominant power and opinion want to institute thinking that what follows are factors favourable to their agenda of exploitation, liquidation of rights, limitation of freedoms. The hatred that many did not disguise against the Party lies in the fact that, unlike others who, in order to ride the atmosphere, accommodated or even fed this feeling, the PCP not only did not surrender but rather fought it.
To those who, due to lack of argument, now elaborate on the alleged exchange of favours between the government and the PCP, presenting the holding of the Festival as a counterpart for the adoption of the State Budget, are those same who are already trying, in the event of its non-adoption , the idea that this rejection would confirm, within the framework of the sacrosanct "perception" of a feeling of national unity in the face of the "crisis" to which everyone should be "patriotically" bound, yet another sign of that "isolation".
VIII
The holding of the Festival was a victory of the affirmation of the enjoyment of life over fear, proof of the value of militancy, of courage, of responsibility. The holding of the Avante! Festival, safe, joyful, combative and creative, is the practical proof that it is possible to fight fear and conformism, give hope and confidence in the fight for the future.
The Avante! Festival was proof that it is possible to guarantee safety and protection in terms of health and at the same time enjoy life, exercise rights, give space to culture and solidarity.
The Avante! Festival opened doors to the sector of culture, to artists, technicians who throughout the country claim precisely for support in the face of the almost total loss of activity. And the Festival did it in the most dignified way: creating conditions for them to work and showing that it is possible, even in the current circumstances, to make culture.
Sooner than later, the valuable contribution given by the holding of the Festival to bring back confidence and joy, the right to culture and the enjoyment of life will be recognised. To all those who for various reasons were unable to participate, we will make an appointment to meet in the many battles that we will have to fight and will meet again at the 45th. edition of the Avante Festival in September 2021.
Remarks:
(1) Law no. 19/2020 of May 29.
(2) Expresso on-line, August 5.
(3) Jornal da Noite, September 1.
(4) Jornal da Noite, August 5.
(5) Jornal da Noite, September 3.
(6) Jornal de Negócios, September 6, 2018.
(7) Publication announcement edited on the Friday night of the Festival, suspended mid-morning on Saturday and pending decision, until its definitive rejection already on Sunday.
(8) “JP hands a petition in São Bento with 5,000 signatures against the holding of the Festival”.
(9) Note the defence of an “independent inspection” of the sanitary rules on the ground by Filipe Fróis, presented as coordinator of the Covid-19 crisis office of the Medical Association (Jornal Económico, 28/08/20), or the statements by the president of the Nurses’ Association according to whom “a party with 17 people cannot be held, but the Avante Festival with 16,000 can”.
(10) Interview on Diário de Notícias. It should be noted that the interview given on August 8 was republished on August 31, certainly because it contains an argumentative richness of the type "the Avante Festival is a provocation that is similar to the attitude of Trump and Bolsonaro".
(11). SIC… “they should not authorize the Avante Festival, in September, after having banned the summer festivals”. Covões himself came to deny the Monday after the Festival in the RTP3 programme “Tudo é economia”.
(12) Público, 15/08/2020.
(13) Público, São José Almeida: “… common sense of almost all parliamentary parties that practically suspended rallies, rentreés ...”.
(14) Miguel Sousa Tavares, interviewed by João Céu e Silva: “ … the Avante Festival should be cancelled”.
(15) jn, 26/08/20, Manuel Serrão: "I do not disagree with the privileged treatment because the Avante Festival should not take place, but quite the opposite because it should also go ahead as should other festivals, events, pilgrimages that apparently are prohibited"! “When the sun rises it is for everyone”, he sentenced.
(16) Público, 29/08/20: “common sense advised that it should not have been authorized”.
(17) jn, 26/08/20, Inês Cardoso:.”… it does not mean that the PCP was intelligent or correct to manage the organisation. They communicated badly, reacted arrogantly to requests for clarification and classified any criticism as a political attack”.
(18) Bernardo Ferrão, SIC, Primeiro Jornal, September 4.
(19) Observador, 31/08/20, “Avante –Iniciativa Liberal presents petition and resolution for full disclosure of DGS opinion».
(20) Observador, 31/08/20, “Chega, questions the Minister of Health and demands disclosure of DGS opinion».
(21) https://www.dn.pt - socialist youth attacks pcp for irresponsible insistence regarding Avante festival.
In o militante