By BRUNA FRASCOLLA*
When the identitarian wave swept Brazil in the last decade, its opponents had, so to speak, a critical mass already formed in the previous decade
Just as in the English-speaking world, there are numerous books in Brazil that seek to explain why wokism is bad. And, just like in the English-speaking world, it is the neoconservative right that usually does this. According to their song, wokism it is bad because it threatens the West – which is tacitly identified with political liberalism.
This is quite a political maneuver, because the name “West” goes back to the division between East and West, which dates back to the Roman Empire, whose fragments, in the Middle Ages, were divided between the Church of Rome, in the West, and the Church of Constantinople, in the East. Both churches, the Eastern and the Western, are anti-liberal. Thus, what the neocons understand by the West is a political ideology that first appeared in a Protestant country, England, and then emerged, with universalist and anti-clerical features, in Catholic France.
Both liberal traditions are foreign to Brazil, so defending the West here is a foreignism. Of course, our law, our religion and our language come from Rome, and that makes us, in a literal sense, Western. But we belong to what Western ideologues call the Dark Ages, because we were not liberated by the Reformation or the Enlightenment. On the contrary, we were led by the intellectual capital of the Counter-Reformation, the College of Coimbra. We are too dark to be Western in the sense that this word is used by ideologues.
In the English-speaking world, there are leftist criticisms of wokism, or, as they prefer to call it, at identity politics, here translated as “identitarianism”. These criticisms usually focus either on the French side of liberalism, condemning the particularism of struggles of race, gender, etc., or on orthodox Marxism, which only admits class particularism and, therefore, considers that identity struggles divert the focus from the real problem.
In Brazil, after a barrage of translations of neocon criticisms of the wokism, finally comes out, by a liberal right-wing publisher, Identitarianism (LVM), by Antonio Risério, a democratic leftist who was a Trotskyist during the last military dictatorship and joined the Counterculture. As Antonio Risério himself points out, the left at that time was not democratic. And this was perfectly normal, since democracy in Brazil first appeared in the Republic of Café com Leite (1898-1930), considered corrupt to the core, and then returned with the end of the Second World War due to pressure from the USA.
This is a settled point, and Antonio Risério comments that “at that time, the United States held back the wave of democracy, provoking, among other things, the redemocratization of Brazil, with the end of the Vargas dictatorship” (p. 270). Later, during the Cold War, Brazil would suffer a military coup supported by the USA with the alleged aim of saving democracy from an imminent communist revolution; and later, again under pressure from the USA, Brazil would establish the New Republic, democratic and liberal.
To give you an idea, in the New Republic, Brazil had a president who was an NGO funded by the Ford Foundation, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. And the alternative to Fernando Henrique's party was Lula's party, which included people like Florestan Fernandes, another NGO funded by the Ford Foundation.
As usual, Antonio Risério hits the nail on the head with great force on the theories of Florestan Fernandes and the Ford Foundation. This time, the novelty is that he highlighted a 2011 doctoral thesis that did not receive the attention it deserved and only became a book in 2019, published by a paid publisher. It is about The Negro Question: The Ford Foundation and the Cold War (1950-1970) (Appris), by Wanderson da Silva Chaves. Based on this work, Antonio Risério gives details of how the New Left was a CIA project, which used the Ford Foundation as a front, to foment an anti-Soviet left after Stalin's death. The specific issue was Soviet propaganda based on racial problems in the US, and Florestan Fernandes claimed that racism here was worse than there.
As for the book's plot, Antonio Risério attacks identitarianism from all sides; he accuses it of being contrary to the West, contrary to the Enlightenment and contrary to the interests of the working class. At the same time, he repeats his usual criticism that identitarianism is contrary to Brazil and also that it is contrary to the values preached by the Counterculture, from which it originated. This last criticism is usually made by the French left, as seen in its reaction to me Too.
I think the most interesting new thing about the book is its attempt to document the arrival of identitarianism in Brazil. From what Antonio Risério has gathered, identitarianism first made itself felt in universities that received money from the Ford Foundation. However, for the wider public, identitarianism appeared on the internet in 2014, when forums on topics as diverse as atheism and animal rights were flooded with slogans like “when the oppressed speaks, the oppressor is silent.”
As we learned from Antonio Risério, left-wing anti-PT supporters who share this impression suggest that PT is behind identitarianism. It would be a way to co-opt the civil society that rebelled in June 2013 (when there was a series of demonstrations without a defined agenda, and from which the New Right emerged as a political force organized via social networks). But, as the wokism it is global, it has to have a global cause, and the year 2014 marks the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
I do not believe, however, that the general view of the phenomenon offered by Antonio Risério is coherent, because he idealizes the past of the Counterculture, which is a creation of the CIA, while criticizing identitarianism, which is another creation of the CIA. Identitarianism, exported by the United States, must be criticized so that we can maintain democracy, which is an export of the United States. The complaint, when all is said and done, is that we have bad imperialism and we should have good imperialism.
One thing that bothers me about the text by left-wing liberals is the tacit admission that certain electoral choices border on crime. Voting for Trump, Orbán, Meloni and Fico is treated this way in Antonio Risério’s work. But it goes further: the US is no longer able to hold together democracy around the world or even at home (since it could elect Donald Trump) and that is why “dark times” are coming.Dark times”, he says on p. 272, “are being suffered today in Putin’s Russia, in the Ayatollahs’ Iran, in Xi Jinping’s China, in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And the democratic societies of the West are not safe from a terrifying plunge into the darkest darkness”.
Let's take the most obvious example, which is Iran. I would not want to live as an Iranian woman, and I do not believe that homosexuals should be executed simply for the consensual satisfaction of their sexual appetites. I find it inconsistent when Western feminists and gays criticize their home countries and paint them as the worst places in the world to be a woman or gay according to their own values, when Iran and Saudi Arabia would be infinitely worse according to those same values.
That said, what should we do? Drop bombs on these countries to force women there to wear shorts against their will? Maybe, if I were born in Iran, I would like to wear a veil and would be appalled by the imperialism that wanted to make me want to wear a veil. shorts. Just as I am Brazilian, I am against imperialism that wants to force me to classify myself as a member of white culture, and to treat black culture as something separate and distinct from my own culture, since I (like Antonio Risério) was born in “Black Rome”. What would be the alternative to dropping bombs? Filling it with paid propaganda, precisely as the Ford Foundation did in the countries within its sphere of influence.
I think that this purely moral condemnation of the customs of foreign peoples only makes sense from a religious or dogmatic perspective. And, in fact, the origin of the confusion lies in the little-known theological liberalism. In short, Protestantism in the 19th century faced a split between fundamentalism and liberalism. The elites in the United States are morally and theologically liberal, and hence their mania for, roughly speaking, throwing bombs around the world so that homosexuals can hold hands and women can have abortions after having casual sex.
With Antonio Risério, the reader learns that neo-racism in Brazil is the fault of the CIA, which worked hard to create a left that was compatible with capital. As for the issues related to ecology, recreational drug use, sexual liberation and the subsequent normalization of abortion, all of this would be the result of a positive and spontaneous movement on the left, which was renewed after Stalin's death and was – surprisingly – responsible for the fall of the Iron Curtain. Lech Walesa, the Prague Spring, the students of Tiananmen Square, all of this would be spontaneous. The CIA is very powerful, of course, but its actions are evil and, it seems, practically limited to imposing the North American racial model on Brazilians.
In fact, the CIA had a hand in all the New Left's agendas. It turns out that it had never been as homogeneous as it is today. I'll give you the example of feminism. Antonio Risério criticizes: “There is no such thing as 'consensual' sex between a man and a woman. […] That is to say, neofeminism condemns heterosexual desire. And this has nothing to do with the feminism of the countercultural era — the feminism of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem” (p. 52). As far as I know, the proponent of the idea that “PIV = rape”, that is, “penis in vagina is rape”, is feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was at university doing activism at the height of the Counterculture.
And if political lesbianism was not strong in the 60s, it certainly did not reach its peak in the 2010s. It must have been around the 1970s and 1980s. As for Gloria Steinem, it has long been known that she worked for the CIA.
What strikes me as very strange about intellectuals who are nostalgic for the Counterculture is that they take it as representative of the civilization to which they belong. But even if one comes from a country like the United States, England or France, the fact is that this new morality, which they take to represent the West, is a blink of an eye in their history. Even an elderly progressive Californian should realize that his West was, for the most part, “obscurantist,” because that is what gay walking hand in hand and women having abortions whenever they feel like it isn't even a hundred years old.
What all this shows us is that propaganda is powerful, but it is not omnipotent. No amount of money in the world can make Brazilians accept the dogmas of Florestan Fernandes and the Ford Foundation regarding race. Antônio Risério sees this clearly. In an even more radical way, however, no amount of money in the world can make Brazilians accept Planned Parenthood's propaganda. That is why Globo does not make soap operas with heroines who have abortions, and not because of its tacit adherence to a capitalist system that is contrary to women's bodily autonomy (in fact, capitalists like Bezos in the US pay for their employees' abortions). Capitalism enters the scene with the will of Globo network to maintain the audience. In countries with a Catholic background, it is often difficult to push abortion. France and Argentina are the exceptions.
I conclude this text by emphasizing that the book is very informative and has documentary value, even regarding the mentality of part of the Brazilian left that lived through the 1960s. To situate the reader unfamiliar with the subject, I explain that when the identitarian wave swept Brazil in the last decade, its opponents had, so to speak, a critical mass already formed in the previous decade.
*Bruna Garrafalla holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
Originally published on the website of Strategic Culture Foundation.
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