Re: Brazil
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:09 pm
ANOTHER LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED IN BRAZIL
william serafino
Jan 14, 2023 , 10:41 a.m.
The assault last Sunday, January 8, on the headquarters of the National Congress, the Presidency and the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil at the hands of a mob of Bolsonaro militants was an event of unquestionable gravity due to its political and institutional connotation, representing for the South American country an unprecedented event and a general short circuit for its political map.
The interpretative convention as a result of the event has been that it is a frontal attack on democracy, a kind of insurrectionary maneuver equivalent to the assault on the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021, but in a Brazilian format. The way in which the violent action took place, the extensive audiovisual recording of the eccentricities of Bolsonaro's supporters and the damage caused, undoubtedly facilitate the superimposition of images with the events of the gringo Capitol.
At this point, after several days of mobilization called by the Bolsonarismo to challenge Lula's electoral victory, in which the intervention (coup) of the Armed Forces was demanded, it would be illusory to believe that the assault was a surprise, beyond the shock which represented the event itself. In short, the table for a violent action was set even before the first round in October of last year, with intelligence information, journalistic reports and political warnings that warned well in advance about the preparation of a coup device and street violence.
Bolsonarismo kept his followers fanatical after Lula's victory, centered around the fraud narrative, prolonged the mobilization spirit and with this they created the atmosphere of psychological tension necessary to bet on the violent action last Sunday, once Solidified the previous links in the military police, the body in charge of the security of the Plaza de los Tres Poderes that ended up escorting the assailants .
With all these elements and background, it would be naive to think that Lula and the top leadership of the Brazilian government had not planned an event of this kind. It is highly probable that the decision was to let the plan develop, avoiding direct contention hours before to break up the Bolsonarista camp at the Army Headquarters, given that Lula's life and position were not in danger by not being there. physically at that time in the Planalto Palace.
With this decision, Lula exposed the violent excesses of Bolsonarismo through the media, increased the metric of national and international support around his figure and now has real elements to deploy a narrative of widespread condemnation, lasting over time, that contributes to isolating Bolsonarismo from its peripheral alliances with conservative sectors of Brazilian politics. A good move by the president at the first exchange after having once again assumed command of the country. In short, he translated a coup attempt (with little chance of real success) into a justification framework to face the beginning of his term politically strengthened and positioned as the great arbiter of Brazilian politics.
Although from the tactical side everything seems to be in order, at least in the balance favorable to Lula that left the hysteria last Sunday, the long term of Brazilian politics looks conflictive and worrying. As Gabriela de Lima, a specialist in geography and history consulted by the newspaper La Marea , points out, Bolsonarismo goes beyond the figure of Bolsonaro himself., which means that not only does it have a life of its own as a movement, but it has incorporated new values and meanings (political, ethical, institutional) into the country's politics. It has left a deep mark on Brazilian society, says de Lima, who asserts that Bolsonarismo's ways of doing politics (suppressing consensus as a form of government, presenting the dictatorship as a revolution, among other attributes) have had an attractive effect social important.
This reading, not at all encouraging in the immediate future for Brazil, seems to deepen when one carefully observes the way in which the assault was interpreted. That is to say, the story of consensus that the event left, and that the western left, in its different variations, drew as a binary confrontation, without gray areas, between democracy and authoritarianism.
First, the uncritical defense of the concept of democracy, a category that, in the Brazilian context, also has the problem of being the result of a constitutional transition process supervised by the power factors of the outgoing dictatorship. As Florestán Fernándes and Waldo Ansaldi pointed out at the time , the transition to democracy in Brazil preserved remnants of the national security state of the dictatorship, which have persisted to this day.
Democracy in Brazil, concludes an investigation by Everton Rodrigo Santos, was based on a conciliation model of elites from above that, using an institutional dynamic agreed upon by the military and traditional parties, has survived over time at the cost of a reduction in the real power capacities of the presidential institution.
From this perspective, the plea for the defense of "Brazilian democracy" in opposition to Bolsonarismo conceals the way in which that same model, which preserved the privileges and power of the military, incubated a movement with a neo-fascist profile. Seen this way, the current model of Brazilian democracy is not the solution, or the system to be defended from an authoritarian counterrevolution, but rather the problem itself. The origin of current evils.
This argument faces another problem, perhaps more decisive: it was the legal mechanisms of Brazilian democracy that made possible the overthrow of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and that facilitated the judicial cornering of Lula until he was sent to prison. It is paradoxical that it was Bolsonarismo, and not the PT, who attacked the physical infrastructure of one of the main institutions (the Congress) responsible for the persecution of Lula's own party.
The story of the defense of democracy as a neutral, totalizing and universal value on the part of the western left not only errs on excessive generalization, but also, in the Brazilian case, keeps legal and institutional levers alive, converted into coup instruments, which have already been used to attack Lula and his party.
Reading democracy as an end in itself, and not as a means for an existential political struggle, explains the intellectual naivety of a left that is always exposed to losing power after validating a system of rules of the game designed to limit its advance.
Uncritically defending democracy in Brazil, as it is conceived, only guarantees the radicalization and expansion of Bolsonarismo, since it is its immediate political and ideological product. The constituent path, a reformatting of the political and institutional model, seems to be the only way to contain fascism, as Venezuela has shown in different stages of its evolution.
Pretending to combat a Bolsonarismo that fights for a conservative counterrevolution defending the status quo that gave rise to it is an illusion.
Another interesting as well as paradoxical aspect that the assault leaves us is the exchange of roles in terms of political tactics and theoretical approaches. The left, historically associated with a revolutionary program of rupture, creation of dual power and dismantling of the bourgeois and oligarchic power structures, now settles in a defense of established democracy that would make the liberal intelligentsia proud. The right, on the other hand, linked secularly to the preservation of privileges and order, is dedicated to the destruction of state institutions and to make chaos a political instrument.
Perhaps the problem here is not so much how the complexity of postmodernism causes these displacements, but the very intellectual formulation of dividing the world into left and right, as both categories are emptied of meaning and lose any explanatory function of the political present.
In short, the assault in Brazil does not show the "threats against democracy", it has too many defenders on both sides of the political spectrum to be in real danger, but rather the intellectual limits of the western left itself to assess the moment with a criterion independent of the dogmas of liberalism and its system of supposedly "universal" values and beliefs.
But the fact does raise a concern, which even goes beyond Brazil: the willingness of right-wing expressions to break the established (for purposes that clearly point to the most open political and economic oppression), fight in the streets for a world horizon (anti-communism) and co-opt political meanings of high symbolic value such as class or nation, to implement their political project.
Given this, the western left, which has taken the events in Brazil as an intellectual defining event of the time, seems to choose to operate passively on the existing rules of the game, aspiring to survive politically within the false neutrality of democracy.
Perhaps a bit of Bolsonarismo, his spirit of combat, his willingness to break the framework of normality and his political and ideological determination about what must be changed, would not hurt the western left and the one that now has power in Brazil. If not, the only thing we can hope for is a new 2016, under other methods.
https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ot ... -en-brasil
Google Translator
************
A criminal attack on democracy: Why Brazil’s fascists should not get amnesty
From all the excitement echoing from the red tide that took over during Lula’s inauguration as Brazil’s President, the most significant was the call for “no amnesty”
January 13, 2023 by Gabriel Rocha Gaspar
Pro-democracy protesters in São Paulo following the January 8 right-wing attacks on Brasília (Photo: Michelle Guimarães/Estudantes NINJA)
From all the excited cries echoing from the red tide that took over Brasília during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (known as Lula) inauguration as the Brazilian President on January 1, 2023, the most significant—and challenging, especially from the institutional stance of the new government—was the call for “no amnesty!” The crowds chanting those words were referring to the crimes perpetrated by the military dictatorship in Brazil from 1964 to 1985 that still remain unpunished. Lula paused his speech, to let the voices be heard, and followed up with a strong but restrained message about accountability.
Lula’s restraint shows his respect for the civic limitation of the executive, standing in sharp contrast to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s notion of statesmanship. After all, one of the characteristics that allow us to properly qualify “Bolsonarismo” as fascism is the deliberate amalgamation between the institutional exercise of power and counter-institutional militancy. As a president, Bolsonaro went beyond mixing those roles; he occupied the state in constant opposition against the state itself. He constantly attributed his ineptitude as a leader to the restrictions imposed by the democratic institutions of the republic.
While Bolsonaro projected an image of being a strongman in front of cameras, which eventually helped him climb the ladder of power, he maintained a low profile in Congress and his three-decade-long congressional tenure is a testament to his political and administrative irrelevance. His weak exercise of power revealed his inadequacy as a leader when he finally took over as president. Bolsonaro catapulted to notoriety when he cast his vote for impeaching former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.
Before casting his vote, Bolsonaro took that opportunity to pay homage to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, “convicted of torture” during the military dictatorship, whom he jestingly referred to as “the dread of Dilma Rousseff!”; Ustra was responsible for systematically torturing the former head of state when she, then a young Marxist guerrilla, was jailed by the dictatorship. From that day until Bolsonaro’s last public appearance—after which he fled the country to make his way to Orlando, Florida before Lula’s inauguration—the only opportunity he ever had to stage his electoral persona was by instigating his supporters through incendiary speeches. That combination led to an impotent government, run by someone who encouraged his supporters to cheer for him using the ridiculously macho nickname “Imbrochável,” which translates to “unfloppable.”
By endorsing the need for accountability while respecting the solemnity of the presidency and allowing people to call for “no amnesty,” Lula restores some normality to the dichotomy that exists between the representative/represented within the framework of a liberal bourgeois democracy. A small gesture, but one that will help establish the necessary institutional trust for fascism to be scrutinized. Now, the ball is in the court of the organized left; the urgency and radicality of the accountability depend on its ability to theoretically and politically consubstantiate the slogan “no amnesty.”
No amnesty for whom? And for what? What kind of justice should be served to the enemies of the working class? To the former health minister who, claiming to be an expert in logistics, turned Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas into a “herd immunity test laboratory” to deal with a collapsing health care system during the peak of the COVID outbreak in Brazil; To the former environment minister who sanctioned the brutal colonization of Indigenous lands by changing environmental legislation; To a government who supported expanding civilian access to army-level weaponry; To the national gun manufacturer who endorsed such political aberration and promoted weapons sale; To the health insurance company that conducted unconsented drug tests on elderly citizens, while espousing to the motto, “death is a form of discharge”; To Bolsonaro himself, who among so many crimes, decided to repeatedly deny science and advertisehydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as cures to COVID-19; To the chancellor who used the Itamaraty (Brazil’s equivalent of the US State Department) to intentionally marginalize Brazil in the international community; To the media owners who endorsed or tolerated all that misanthropy, whitewashing fascist rhetoric, and offered a megaphone for amplifying racism, sexism, LGBT phobia, and, underlying them all, the brutal classicism.
The list goes on. There are so many crimes, so many delinquent individuals and corporations, and so many victims—starting with the deaths of innocent people because of COVID and the trauma suffered by their families and spreading to all vulnerable populations: Indigenous people, the Black population, Maroons, and LGBTQIA+—that a dedicated agency to investigate and prosecute them all is necessary. Perhaps the substance we must inject into the cry for “no amnesty” is the establishment of a special court. As suggested by professor Lincoln Secco, that should be the Manaus Tribunal, named after the city that was used as a testing ground for Bolsonaro’s anti-vax propaganda, where patients were left to die at the height of the COVID pandemic. And hopefully, the Manaus Tribunal, observing all the rites, all the civility, and all the legal requirements will be capable of bringing about the historic outcome the Constitutional Assembly of 1988 fell short of delivering: close the doors of Brazilian institutions to fascism, forever.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/13/ ... t-amnesty/
william serafino
Jan 14, 2023 , 10:41 a.m.
The assault last Sunday, January 8, on the headquarters of the National Congress, the Presidency and the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil at the hands of a mob of Bolsonaro militants was an event of unquestionable gravity due to its political and institutional connotation, representing for the South American country an unprecedented event and a general short circuit for its political map.
The interpretative convention as a result of the event has been that it is a frontal attack on democracy, a kind of insurrectionary maneuver equivalent to the assault on the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021, but in a Brazilian format. The way in which the violent action took place, the extensive audiovisual recording of the eccentricities of Bolsonaro's supporters and the damage caused, undoubtedly facilitate the superimposition of images with the events of the gringo Capitol.
At this point, after several days of mobilization called by the Bolsonarismo to challenge Lula's electoral victory, in which the intervention (coup) of the Armed Forces was demanded, it would be illusory to believe that the assault was a surprise, beyond the shock which represented the event itself. In short, the table for a violent action was set even before the first round in October of last year, with intelligence information, journalistic reports and political warnings that warned well in advance about the preparation of a coup device and street violence.
Bolsonarismo kept his followers fanatical after Lula's victory, centered around the fraud narrative, prolonged the mobilization spirit and with this they created the atmosphere of psychological tension necessary to bet on the violent action last Sunday, once Solidified the previous links in the military police, the body in charge of the security of the Plaza de los Tres Poderes that ended up escorting the assailants .
With all these elements and background, it would be naive to think that Lula and the top leadership of the Brazilian government had not planned an event of this kind. It is highly probable that the decision was to let the plan develop, avoiding direct contention hours before to break up the Bolsonarista camp at the Army Headquarters, given that Lula's life and position were not in danger by not being there. physically at that time in the Planalto Palace.
With this decision, Lula exposed the violent excesses of Bolsonarismo through the media, increased the metric of national and international support around his figure and now has real elements to deploy a narrative of widespread condemnation, lasting over time, that contributes to isolating Bolsonarismo from its peripheral alliances with conservative sectors of Brazilian politics. A good move by the president at the first exchange after having once again assumed command of the country. In short, he translated a coup attempt (with little chance of real success) into a justification framework to face the beginning of his term politically strengthened and positioned as the great arbiter of Brazilian politics.
Although from the tactical side everything seems to be in order, at least in the balance favorable to Lula that left the hysteria last Sunday, the long term of Brazilian politics looks conflictive and worrying. As Gabriela de Lima, a specialist in geography and history consulted by the newspaper La Marea , points out, Bolsonarismo goes beyond the figure of Bolsonaro himself., which means that not only does it have a life of its own as a movement, but it has incorporated new values and meanings (political, ethical, institutional) into the country's politics. It has left a deep mark on Brazilian society, says de Lima, who asserts that Bolsonarismo's ways of doing politics (suppressing consensus as a form of government, presenting the dictatorship as a revolution, among other attributes) have had an attractive effect social important.
This reading, not at all encouraging in the immediate future for Brazil, seems to deepen when one carefully observes the way in which the assault was interpreted. That is to say, the story of consensus that the event left, and that the western left, in its different variations, drew as a binary confrontation, without gray areas, between democracy and authoritarianism.
First, the uncritical defense of the concept of democracy, a category that, in the Brazilian context, also has the problem of being the result of a constitutional transition process supervised by the power factors of the outgoing dictatorship. As Florestán Fernándes and Waldo Ansaldi pointed out at the time , the transition to democracy in Brazil preserved remnants of the national security state of the dictatorship, which have persisted to this day.
Democracy in Brazil, concludes an investigation by Everton Rodrigo Santos, was based on a conciliation model of elites from above that, using an institutional dynamic agreed upon by the military and traditional parties, has survived over time at the cost of a reduction in the real power capacities of the presidential institution.
From this perspective, the plea for the defense of "Brazilian democracy" in opposition to Bolsonarismo conceals the way in which that same model, which preserved the privileges and power of the military, incubated a movement with a neo-fascist profile. Seen this way, the current model of Brazilian democracy is not the solution, or the system to be defended from an authoritarian counterrevolution, but rather the problem itself. The origin of current evils.
This argument faces another problem, perhaps more decisive: it was the legal mechanisms of Brazilian democracy that made possible the overthrow of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and that facilitated the judicial cornering of Lula until he was sent to prison. It is paradoxical that it was Bolsonarismo, and not the PT, who attacked the physical infrastructure of one of the main institutions (the Congress) responsible for the persecution of Lula's own party.
The story of the defense of democracy as a neutral, totalizing and universal value on the part of the western left not only errs on excessive generalization, but also, in the Brazilian case, keeps legal and institutional levers alive, converted into coup instruments, which have already been used to attack Lula and his party.
Reading democracy as an end in itself, and not as a means for an existential political struggle, explains the intellectual naivety of a left that is always exposed to losing power after validating a system of rules of the game designed to limit its advance.
Uncritically defending democracy in Brazil, as it is conceived, only guarantees the radicalization and expansion of Bolsonarismo, since it is its immediate political and ideological product. The constituent path, a reformatting of the political and institutional model, seems to be the only way to contain fascism, as Venezuela has shown in different stages of its evolution.
Pretending to combat a Bolsonarismo that fights for a conservative counterrevolution defending the status quo that gave rise to it is an illusion.
Another interesting as well as paradoxical aspect that the assault leaves us is the exchange of roles in terms of political tactics and theoretical approaches. The left, historically associated with a revolutionary program of rupture, creation of dual power and dismantling of the bourgeois and oligarchic power structures, now settles in a defense of established democracy that would make the liberal intelligentsia proud. The right, on the other hand, linked secularly to the preservation of privileges and order, is dedicated to the destruction of state institutions and to make chaos a political instrument.
Perhaps the problem here is not so much how the complexity of postmodernism causes these displacements, but the very intellectual formulation of dividing the world into left and right, as both categories are emptied of meaning and lose any explanatory function of the political present.
In short, the assault in Brazil does not show the "threats against democracy", it has too many defenders on both sides of the political spectrum to be in real danger, but rather the intellectual limits of the western left itself to assess the moment with a criterion independent of the dogmas of liberalism and its system of supposedly "universal" values and beliefs.
But the fact does raise a concern, which even goes beyond Brazil: the willingness of right-wing expressions to break the established (for purposes that clearly point to the most open political and economic oppression), fight in the streets for a world horizon (anti-communism) and co-opt political meanings of high symbolic value such as class or nation, to implement their political project.
Given this, the western left, which has taken the events in Brazil as an intellectual defining event of the time, seems to choose to operate passively on the existing rules of the game, aspiring to survive politically within the false neutrality of democracy.
Perhaps a bit of Bolsonarismo, his spirit of combat, his willingness to break the framework of normality and his political and ideological determination about what must be changed, would not hurt the western left and the one that now has power in Brazil. If not, the only thing we can hope for is a new 2016, under other methods.
https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ot ... -en-brasil
Google Translator
************
A criminal attack on democracy: Why Brazil’s fascists should not get amnesty
From all the excitement echoing from the red tide that took over during Lula’s inauguration as Brazil’s President, the most significant was the call for “no amnesty”
January 13, 2023 by Gabriel Rocha Gaspar
Pro-democracy protesters in São Paulo following the January 8 right-wing attacks on Brasília (Photo: Michelle Guimarães/Estudantes NINJA)
From all the excited cries echoing from the red tide that took over Brasília during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (known as Lula) inauguration as the Brazilian President on January 1, 2023, the most significant—and challenging, especially from the institutional stance of the new government—was the call for “no amnesty!” The crowds chanting those words were referring to the crimes perpetrated by the military dictatorship in Brazil from 1964 to 1985 that still remain unpunished. Lula paused his speech, to let the voices be heard, and followed up with a strong but restrained message about accountability.
Lula’s restraint shows his respect for the civic limitation of the executive, standing in sharp contrast to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s notion of statesmanship. After all, one of the characteristics that allow us to properly qualify “Bolsonarismo” as fascism is the deliberate amalgamation between the institutional exercise of power and counter-institutional militancy. As a president, Bolsonaro went beyond mixing those roles; he occupied the state in constant opposition against the state itself. He constantly attributed his ineptitude as a leader to the restrictions imposed by the democratic institutions of the republic.
While Bolsonaro projected an image of being a strongman in front of cameras, which eventually helped him climb the ladder of power, he maintained a low profile in Congress and his three-decade-long congressional tenure is a testament to his political and administrative irrelevance. His weak exercise of power revealed his inadequacy as a leader when he finally took over as president. Bolsonaro catapulted to notoriety when he cast his vote for impeaching former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.
Before casting his vote, Bolsonaro took that opportunity to pay homage to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, “convicted of torture” during the military dictatorship, whom he jestingly referred to as “the dread of Dilma Rousseff!”; Ustra was responsible for systematically torturing the former head of state when she, then a young Marxist guerrilla, was jailed by the dictatorship. From that day until Bolsonaro’s last public appearance—after which he fled the country to make his way to Orlando, Florida before Lula’s inauguration—the only opportunity he ever had to stage his electoral persona was by instigating his supporters through incendiary speeches. That combination led to an impotent government, run by someone who encouraged his supporters to cheer for him using the ridiculously macho nickname “Imbrochável,” which translates to “unfloppable.”
By endorsing the need for accountability while respecting the solemnity of the presidency and allowing people to call for “no amnesty,” Lula restores some normality to the dichotomy that exists between the representative/represented within the framework of a liberal bourgeois democracy. A small gesture, but one that will help establish the necessary institutional trust for fascism to be scrutinized. Now, the ball is in the court of the organized left; the urgency and radicality of the accountability depend on its ability to theoretically and politically consubstantiate the slogan “no amnesty.”
No amnesty for whom? And for what? What kind of justice should be served to the enemies of the working class? To the former health minister who, claiming to be an expert in logistics, turned Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas into a “herd immunity test laboratory” to deal with a collapsing health care system during the peak of the COVID outbreak in Brazil; To the former environment minister who sanctioned the brutal colonization of Indigenous lands by changing environmental legislation; To a government who supported expanding civilian access to army-level weaponry; To the national gun manufacturer who endorsed such political aberration and promoted weapons sale; To the health insurance company that conducted unconsented drug tests on elderly citizens, while espousing to the motto, “death is a form of discharge”; To Bolsonaro himself, who among so many crimes, decided to repeatedly deny science and advertisehydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as cures to COVID-19; To the chancellor who used the Itamaraty (Brazil’s equivalent of the US State Department) to intentionally marginalize Brazil in the international community; To the media owners who endorsed or tolerated all that misanthropy, whitewashing fascist rhetoric, and offered a megaphone for amplifying racism, sexism, LGBT phobia, and, underlying them all, the brutal classicism.
The list goes on. There are so many crimes, so many delinquent individuals and corporations, and so many victims—starting with the deaths of innocent people because of COVID and the trauma suffered by their families and spreading to all vulnerable populations: Indigenous people, the Black population, Maroons, and LGBTQIA+—that a dedicated agency to investigate and prosecute them all is necessary. Perhaps the substance we must inject into the cry for “no amnesty” is the establishment of a special court. As suggested by professor Lincoln Secco, that should be the Manaus Tribunal, named after the city that was used as a testing ground for Bolsonaro’s anti-vax propaganda, where patients were left to die at the height of the COVID pandemic. And hopefully, the Manaus Tribunal, observing all the rites, all the civility, and all the legal requirements will be capable of bringing about the historic outcome the Constitutional Assembly of 1988 fell short of delivering: close the doors of Brazilian institutions to fascism, forever.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/13/ ... t-amnesty/