By TARSO GENRO*
The confirmation of Lula's victory can only occur when the weight of the criminal law falls entirely on the fascists, the militiamen and their political leaders
On December 12, 2022, while President Lula was graduating from a historic session of the Superior Electoral Court, listening to an epic speech by Minister Alexandre de Moraes, Bolsonarist militiamen attacked the headquarters of the Federal Police and set fire to some vehicles in Brasília. It was our Munich Brewery, a “putsch” for a coup that failed and a protest for its defeat in the presidential elections, where all the dirt that emerged in it came from its stables of “fake news”, of the equipped State organs, of the illegal actions of the Federal Highway Police and of the bandit pigeonholes of the secret budget. These actions by the Bolsonarist right show that Lula's victory and democracy still depend on a strong political process of moving away from the remains of the tragedy anchored in the port of our recent history.
Voted by the base of the government in a scandalous gesture that became a planetary shame of our democratic decay, which prided itself on its international isolation, genocidal denialism and systematic attacks on the institutions of the 1988 Constitution, this “budget” could only be composed of a marginal alliance of the religions of money with the worst of the physiology of the country's business elites. It was the unity of barbarism against democracy, of physiologism with the militia spirit, of a large part of the middle classes with the “sacred” institutions of the holy spirit monetized in political corruption.
That's how he was voted, to destroy parity of arms in the elections, in which the surprising thing was the victory of a man supposedly annihilated by a media-judicial conspiracy, who returned with courage and moral energy to rebuild a country torn apart by hatred, the work of art of fascism that has covered at least two centuries of Western history. Here he openly assumed – with Jair Bolsonaro – the necrophilic passion of denialism and the naturalization of other people's pain through planned debauchery. Militia and political groups, militia and religions of money: weapons and gestures, murders and the naturalization of death, racism and misogyny, composed the dictionary of the national fascist encyclopedia that almost led us to suicide.
Fascism and Nazism are Siamese, now embraced by the majority of the ruling classes and the popular classes manipulated by the politics of the extreme right. Both are anti-system, they propose revolutions “from above and “from below”, which recognize in barbarism a permanent substance contained in the Human: “not an unfortunate accident of history” (...), as Simone Weil said, but “the barbarian mire of the soul”, “a permanent and universal character of human nature”, waiting for critical opportunities to manifest itself through violence and the denial of solidarity and justice. (the inner barbarism, Jean-François Mattei, Unesp).
The book Caste – the origins of our malaise, by Isabel Wilkerson (Zahar), sheds powerful light on the formation of American society and its institutionalized power structure from the XNUMXth century onwards. The castes organically assembled around the “plantations” and the creation of the “black” identity – as a thing – in contrast to the white identity of the European settlers, released an epic form of labor exploitation. There were formed the new bases of accumulation – material and cultural – specificities of a new expanding capitalist system, whose hegemonic tendencies on a global scale were already visible.
Modernization and barbarism, science and technique, politics and ideology, are harmonized in this way: they shape the empire that becomes – at the same time – an example of political liberalism and also an example of the coexistence of its freedoms with barbarism. The XNUMXth century condenses and integrates, promotes divisions and revulsions, in the growing nation, which are experienced both in the “parties” of barbarism and among the “parties” of modern democracy, moderators of violence, whose tendency would be to assign to the State minimum norms of civility, which if carried out would block the impeding excesses of nation formation.
The impulse of American democracy, however, remains tied to the caste system, already organic in the social classes in renewal, whose policy – from the State – promoted both democracy and the martyrdom of millions, for the glory of Western civilization. This conflict between barbarism and democratic civility is also expressed in resistance struggles – victorious or defeated – against Nazism and Fascism. And in the struggle between dictatorships and defenders of the constitutional foundations of democracies in Latin America, today uniformly besieged by fascism, which returns with diverse formal models on a planetary scale
It is not much publicized in the historiography of racism and “apartheid” American, that the intellectuals and “social” scientists of the Nazi Party studied with great interest the strategies of social and racial purification in the USA, such as the no-go zones for the black community – both in social and geographic space – as well as the prohibition of marriages between whites and blacks, in the origins of the American democratic formation. The election of President Joe Biden, who is the opposite of Donald Trump and the Klan in this matter, allows for a broader and deeper reflection on this vital issue for the future of the Americas.
In fact, the affirmation of the American model within the world power system was a gigantic laboratory of conciliation between barbarism and modern humanism, in which the strength of barbarism, which is alive and strong, was recently tested in President Donald Trump's coup attempt in the assault on the Capitol. The choice of the location occupied by the well-paid militiamen was not gratuitous, as there was the symbol of liberal democracy that procedurally incorporated the vast black community of the country in the protections of the rule of law that were formalized in the laws, as an idea that the nation wanted make yourself.
Comparing the situation of the rise of fascism in Italy with the national political episodes that were gradually giving legitimate political form to Bolsonarism (proto-fascism), which was slowly unifying with relevant strata of financial capital and with the most marginal sectors of the bourgeoisie more “ adventurous”, makes sense: it is about understanding the succession process, among its “elites”, which will reflect both in the political strategy of the popular sectors, as in the necessary changes for the adaptation of capitalism to a new cycle of accumulation.
Antonio Gramsci in prison in 1926, almost two years after being elected deputy, wrote in the midst of the fascist era that “the elements of the new culture and the new way of life (…) are only the first attempts (…) a superficial and simian initiative”, to interfering in what today “would be called Americanism”: it is a preventive criticism of the “old strata that will be discarded” (...) “and which are already taken by a wave of social panic, an unconscious reaction of those who are powerless” (Americanism and Fordism”, Hedra), to leverage – in the processes of change in the capital system – the aspects that interest him. Fascism would thus be a reactionary victory with the appearance of a revolution.
The great historical synthesis of this complicated political process of formation of the American State, within the parameters of liberal democratic modernity – an imperial State and military occupations in its “vital” exterior – is reflected in two exemplary historical facts at the present time, which concern the what happens in our country: on the one hand, the American Army formally refusing to participate in a coup against the institutions of liberal democracy; and on the other, its former president blatantly attempting this coup, manipulating his fascist puppets in Brazil, to compose an arc of alliances in the extreme right of the USA, which, victorious, would reflect its fascist and racist power throughout Latin America.
President Lula's diplomacy was the victory of a broad democratic front, which has different demands on the State and different pretensions for the future. It ends a heroic cycle of resistance and democratic offensive, guided by unity around the rule of law. And it wasn't just civil, as the lack of majority support for Jair Bolsonaro's coup within our armed institutions may be indicating a new virtuous cycle in our republican history.
Its confirmation can only occur, however, if the weight of the penal law – within the democratic rituals of the State of Law – falls entirely on the fascists, the militiamen and their political leaders, who even yesterday showed that terror and barbarism are its main weapons against the Republic and democracy. Whoever lives will see: we live and we will see!
*Tarsus-in-law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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