Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 24, 2023
Quantum Bird
![Image](https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Lula-Brazil-GettyImages-1246116883.jpg?resize=1000,667&quality=90)
The so-called “Vigorous and Proud” Foreign Policy – slogan repeated ad nauseum by Celso Amorim during the years of the first Lula administration – never really convinced anyone with an IQ above room temperature (in degrees Celsius), but at least it allowed Brazil to gain some international prestige and a certain protagonism as one of the BRICS articulators. With Lula version 2023 this is over.
The pride and vigor seems to have completely disappeared from the scene, while the native foreign policy, still strongly influenced by Amorim and his group, shows increasingly clear and resounding signs of “activity” only in terms of vassalage to the USA/US.
The first achievement of this plot was to convert Brazil into the only BRICS country to condemn the Russian Special Operation in Ukraine. Lula could have expressed his superficial, counter-factual and anti-historical reading of the conflict directly to Putin, but chose to do so from the White House, alongside Biden, during his Disney-style US visit a few weeks ago.
It went badly in the Global South, which has consistently rejected any attempt to frame Russia as the aggressor party in the conflict – correctly, by the way.
Next, we had to tolerate the interview with Mauro Vieira, the current “Chancellor”, in the yellow pages of that notorious little national magazine of immaculate coup tradition. He declared that Brazil had come off the wall. In fact, it jumped on the lap of the USA, and immediately courted the Nazi regime in Kiev. We all saw the pictures of Vieira next to Dmytro Kuleba, the neo-Nazi Ukrainian chancellor.
![Image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpQKOVsXEAAUXsy.jpg:large)
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira met with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Now get ready for the proverbial icing on the cake: Brazil has just voted at the UN condemning Russia for the Special Military Operation. Here is the score:
![Image](https://sakerlatam.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/photo_2023-02-23_17-46-13.jpg)
The astute reader will not be impressed by the number of green squares. Between the Yellows (abstention) and Reds (against) we have all the countries that are engaged in internecine struggles to conquer, defend and extend their sovereignty. The Yellows and Reds also account for the absolute majority of the world’s population. The Greens (for) gather the empire’s overwhelmed vassals, the countries occupied or “springed” by the USA, and finally, the pseudo-democracies corrupted by the hegemon’s fiat money. It was in this unpleasant cacophony that Itamaraty, under Lula and Vieira, placed Brazil. I leave it to the reader to choose the appropriate category among the options listed.
The Brazilian foreign policy makers perform these maneuvers while pretending to pose as potential mediators in the conflict. Do these policymakers not understand that they have just definitively deprived themselves of the necessary neutrality that such a position requires? Or do they believe that by proceeding in this way they would be qualifying themselves to plead for a position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council? – if this is the case, look me up, I have a bridge to sell.
Be that as it may, the Russian Special Operation in Ukraine will proceed inexorably, until the collective West is ready to grant Russia the collective security conditions formulated and delivered into Biden’s hands in Geneva in the summer of 2021. And these circumstances leave in stark evidence the myopia and amateurism of Brazilian foreign policy, whose formulators, at best, are trying to use the conflict in the former Ukraine as a springboard for irresponsible and reputation-damaging protagonism.
Do Lula and Vieira not realize that their erratic foreign policy could consolidate Brazil as the geopolitical dwarf it has become since the coup against Dilma Rousseff and Operation Lava-Jato, followed by the Bolsonaro government, threw the country into limbo in international relations?
Another ghost that prowls Brazil’s geopolitical future has to do with a possible presidency of the BRICS Bank, the NDB, by Dilma Rousseff. Would we be about to witness Brazil’s conversion into a kind of pro-hegemon Trojan Horse of continental proportions, working in the heart of the BRICS?
I sincerely hope not.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/02/ ... cal-dwarf/
Is Lula's ass-kissing DC payback for not being 'couped'? But then what are the excuses from the other pink tide players?
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Looking back at Bolsonarismo and its project of cultural and national destruction
During the riots in Brasília on January 8, Bolsonaristas caused irreparable damage to the country’s cultural patrimony, destroying art that represents everything they are against
February 26, 2023 by Tings Chak
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Construir-a-esperanc%CC%A7a.jpeg)
Construir A Esperança, Resgatar A Alegria (“Build Hope, Recover Happiness”) (2022), Nathalia Ferreira Guimaraes
At the start of this year, days after the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the Brazilian president, an event shook the nation. On the January 8, thousands of supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the halls of power in the country’s capital, Brasilia. They were dressed in yellow and green, the colors of the country’s flag and the national football team’s official shirt, itself a disputed symbol as it was appropriated by the far-right “Bolsonaristas” in recent years. The protesters invaded the “Three Powers” – Planalto Presidential Palace, National Congress, and Federal Supreme Court. Met with little resistance from the military police, the Bolsonaristas broke through the barricades and went on a destructive spree. Among the wreckage were 700 pieces of artwork, decorations, and furniture that were vandalized or destroyed. The invaders ransacked the buildings, which themselves are works of art, designed in the 1950s by one of Brazil’s most famous architects and communists, Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012). These buildings in the heart of the new political center of the country were monuments to a national project, of a vision for a modern Brazil.
But looking back on the day, what were the Bolsonaristas hoping to create from the destruction? And reflecting on the last four years, what has been the project of Bolsonarismo? There were three pieces of artwork found among the ruins that give some insight into these questions, and the possibilities that Lula’s return holds.
The protagonists of history and art.
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/022476D2-F74F-4BC1-B48F-0459313CF6EC-1024x800.jpeg)
As Mulatas (“The Mulatto Women”) (1962), Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (reproduced from Twitter)
The centerpiece of the presidential palace’s main hall is As Mulatas (“The Mulatto Woman”), painted in 1962 by the great modern artist, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976). Though much of the reporting has focused on its monetary value, estimated at US$1.5 to 3.8 million, it is impossible to quantify cultural loss.
Di Cavalcanti saw artmaking as an act of political participation, and his work represented the underrepresented sides and contradictions of the Brazilian reality. As a key organizer of São Paulo’s Modern Art Week in 1922 that elevated Brazilian culture and modernity onto the international stage, he joined the Communist Party of Brazil in 1928, and was jailed more than once for his political affiliation.
Reconciling the language of the European avant-garde with the Brazilian context, Di Cavalcanti’s work was focused on the national question, but with his artistic eye turned to the workers, people of the favelas, women, and black people as the protagonists. As its title suggests, As Mulatas features women of mixed ancestry. It asks by whom and for whom is Brazil built, in a country where 56.1% of its 212 million inhabitants self-identify as being black or of mixed ancestry, and who have been historically denied access to political power and cultural representation. This painting was slashed seven times by Bolsonaro-supporters in the invasion.
In September 2022, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and several Brazilian partners, including the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), launched the visual art exhibition, 200 years of an interrupted nation | Art as a form of denunciation and resistance. 28 artworks were created as a reflection on the dual anniversaries of 200 years of Brazilian independence and the centenary of the Modern Art Week, which, “despite its limits,” writes the organizers, “tried to represent the true protagonists of a nation that insisted on being born: The Brazilian people, historically marginalized and invisibilized.” Bolsonarismo represents a continuation of this “interrupted nation,” and its insistence on cultural destruction is not an accident, but epitomizes its political project.
Two great fires.
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/4D521E31-0C19-4C66-8E0A-B03B920853AC-1024x721.jpeg)
Galhos e Sombras (“Branches and Shadows”) by Frans Krajcberg (reproduced from Twitter)
I moved to Brazil in May 2018, shortly before the election of Bolsonaro. A lawfare coup had already been underway for at least two years, which led to the impeachment of Workers’ Party (PT) president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the imprisonment in April 2018 of then ex-president Lula for 580 days on unfounded corruption charges.
My first year in Brazil was bookended by two great fires. The first was the tragic fire of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where most of the 20 million artifacts were destroyed. In response to this fire, Bolsonaro said, “It already caught on fire, what do you want me to do?” When asked about the museum’s chronic underfunding that led to this fire, Bolsonaro responded with mockery, showing his outright disdain for the country’s cultural heritage and the role of art and culture. Very symbolically, he made it one of his first tasks to dissolve the Ministry of Culture upon assuming his presidency. Brazil’s far right, galvanized around Bolsonaro, is a project of violent historical erasure and cultural destruction, in a physical and subjective sense.
The second fire. On Monday, August 19, 2019, I walked out of the office to be met with the ominously and prematurely blackened skies of São Paulo. It was only 3:30pm, hours before nightfall. Winds had carried smoke from the Amazonian wildfires, 2,700-kilometers away. Bolsonaro had encouraged the illegal burning, serving the interests of agrobusiness and his financiers, at the expense of the planet, the people, and world heritage. During Bolsonaro’s presidency, over 33,000 km2 of the Amazon, the lungs of the planet, was destroyed – equivalent to the size of Taiwan island – and deforestation rates increased by 59.5%, outdoing any other presidency since satellite measurements began in 1988.
It may be a cruel irony that one of the sculptures vandalized in the Brasilia invasion was Galhos e Sombras (“Branches and Shadows”) by Frans Krajcberg (1921-2017), a Polish-born Jewish artist who immigrated to Brazil after most of his family had been killed in the Holocaust. A defender of the Amazon and as an act of protest, Krajcberg made sculptures using burnt wood from illegal forest fires. He went to the Amazon forest several times, gathering materials for his work while bearing witness to these environmental crimes. Krajcberg’s own family fell victim to Nazi fascism, and decades later, his work and the subject of his work – the Amazon – are today’s victims of Bolsonarismo. History may repeat itself, first as a tragedy, as Marx said, but the second time remains a tragedy still.
At the COP27 in Egypt, still weeks before he officially reassumed his presidential post, Lula made a moving speech, committing to net-zero deforestation in the Amazon until 2030. “Brazil is back,” the audience chanted. If Krajcberg was still alive, we know on which side he would stand, and for which project for the country he would support.
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/A6A3A4A7-90DE-4E41-A66B-23377597D880-1024x800.jpeg)
O Brasil toma posse de si mesmo (“Brazil takes power over itself”), 2022, Jorge Silveira (reproduced from Twitter)
Lula arrived at the Planalto Palace to receive his green-and-yellow presidential sash, which was supposed to be handed over by Bolsonaro, who instead was found strolling in the suburbs of Orlando. Lula arrived hand-in-hand with the Brazilian people – indigenous, black, and poor people, women and children from the periphery, and people with disabilities. Photographed, illustrated, and circulated countless times since, this symbolic act has already become an iconic image. Like Di Cavalcanti’s paintings, this political act reinserts the people – the workers, poor, and dispossessed – as the protagonists of history and politics. This political act is also a battle of ideas, a battle over culture, emotions, and the image.
Days later, Bolsonaristas, and their “project of national destruction” as Lula had called it, invaded that same palace. Ironically, one of the works vandalized and left littered on the ground was Bandeira do Brasil, a painting by Jorge Eduardo (1936–) of the national flag – the very symbol that Bolsonaro supporters had appropriated and distorted for their ultra-right cause. But what message did they want to say in this act? To whom does this symbol belong?
On inauguration day, a fifty-meter Brazilian flag was carried by hundreds of people as Lula proclaimed, “Our message to Brazil is one of hope and reconstruction.” What the Bolsonaristas tore down during the invasion, and over the last five years, is being raised and reclaimed by the people. “To create,” as Di Cavalcanti said nearly a century ago, “is above all to give ideal substance to what exists.” And the people will continue to create from the embers of the great fires, and to give substance to new national project in Brazil’s own image.
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/971EE6A0-2153-4B8C-93CE-9793C00D3428-1024x650.jpeg)
![Image](https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/94D4100B-DDD7-45AF-9905-007A062B50B3-1024x486.jpeg)
Top: Bandeira do Brasil (“Brazilian Flag”) (1995), Jorge Eduardo (reproduced from Twitter)
Bottom: 50-meter Brazilian flag unfurled at Lula’s presidential inauguration (reproduced from Twitter)
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/02/26/ ... struction/