By ROMUALDO PESSOA CAMPOS FILHO*
Strangling the economy, spreading fear, anguish and anxiety are part of the Bolsonarist (mis)government project
It is necessary to understand how we got here and why we are on the brink of a precipice, in one of the worst medical, health and socioeconomic crises in the history of our country.
According to the President of the Republic, “The people don't even have chicken feet to eat anymore. Now, what I've been talking about, chaos is coming. Hunger will drive people out of the house. We are going to have problems that we never expected to have very serious social problems”.[1] See, this was said by the bizarre president of Brazil, it is not from any unionist or militant who is fighting against social inequalities. But who governs and, in theory, has all the elements and conditions to adopt measures that minimize the serious social problems generated by this pandemic. But he doesn't care about that, for an obvious reason: strangling the economy, spreading fear, anguish and anxiety, is part of a government project.
Evidently he is right when he says that we are in the midst of chaos. And this is consistent with a strategy adopted by your government, not only during the pandemic, but even before we experienced this viral hell. Of course, Covid19 was incorporated into a strategy that was already underway: turning Brazilian society into chaos.
Bolsonaro was elected in the wake of a destruction of democracy, as we know it in our parts, and, mainly, of politics. Although he was the underdog in history, he made perfect use of a whole wave generated by perverse media mechanisms, from television channels, newspapers and radio stations, which since 2015 have bet on the deconstruction of political projects of social nature and economic visions based on in developmentalism, to, through the attack on politics and projecting the rise of alienation, overthrow a government and bet on strongly neoliberal, meritocratic and anti-national policies.
But the speech carried out, through the encouragement of demonstrations, broadcast live on TV channels, where hateful behavior was disseminated and neo-fascism was projected, did not reach the desired goal by the conservative sectors of the parties defeated in the 2014 election Because they also became targets of the witch hunt, and in the identification of what is conventionally called “old politics”. Everything went down the drain, including character, seriousness, honesty, hope… Cynicism, militia banditry and religious hypocrisy prevailed. If what was intended was to demonize politics, the devil knew how to understand and took control. Thus, the way was open to chaos. The social networks potentiated this, through the fake news, and the pandemic only came to accelerate this situation, already foreseen and consolidated in the 2018 elections.
In the last two years we have tried to analyze how Bolsonaro came to the presidency, in the vacuum of these disastrous interventions by the neoliberal centre-right sectors. He emerged as a “myth”, as what in geopolitics we know as an “outsider”, criticizing politics, with an anti-corruption discourse (as always this discourse precedes Brazilian political crises and coup movements) and agglutinating by his side resentful, defeated morally, economically dispossessed, frustrated, alienated and wealthy opportunists.
Although the absolute majority of those mentioned here could be classified at the maximum level of alienation, and it does not matter if they have higher education or not. They are political illiterates. In addition to a stupid bourgeoisie and the execrable part of the upper middle class. And, running on the outside, in a subtle and sibylline way, because in that decade this movement was on the side of all governments, the evangelical segments, mainly neo-Pentecostals, and the Catholic conservatives of the charismatic current. They ran outside at first, because they later incorporated the president's neo-fascist discourse and began to constitute themselves (alongside the armed force, militia or official) in their main base of support. Logically behind this the ambition for power and greed as a common practice of its main religious leaders to extort the faithful.
But Jair Messias Bolsonaro did not fall by parachute. He became part of a project of these religious reactionary segments and joined a movement that had been taking shape worldwide for a decade, which generated another political aberration: Donald Trump. But it was also underway in several other countries, such as Hungary, Poland, Italy, the United Kingdom, among others, in addition to the USA, where all this perverse inspiration came from.
We were able to identify, inspired by some books and documentaries (indicated at the end of this text), that this project was led by a character who became better known last year, because he was arrested accused of embezzling money in a collection made in the USA to help the Trump administration and build a wall on the border with Mexico. Steve Bannon, is the character behind the “chaos strategy”. His office was responsible for advising the “politicians” who emerged from the darkness, attracting to their sides all those individuals who carried some kind of frustration and hatred of the social conditions in which they lived.
In the documentary “Hacked Privacy”, available on Netflix, attention is drawn to a sentence said by Christopher Wylie, Data Scientist, when referring to Steve Bannon (vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and creator of the news site Breitbart), who would be the doctrine used by these companies: “If you want to fundamentally change society, you must first destroy it. And only after he has destroyed it can he reshape the pieces into his vision of a new society.”
Therefore, Bolsonaro's strategy, guided by this scoundrel articulator of the world's right-wing international, is to keep radicalized a segment that will be greatly harmed economically, in addition to the loss of lives, which will become forgotten by the focus that is being adopted and by the real conditions that will be millions of people. Deaths will be naturalized. This represents what we know today as “necropolitics”. Alienated and corrupted in their desires and looks, these people follow the easy, irresponsible and carefully planned discourse by the architects of chaos.
Although the number of people who follow him is decreasing, the tendency is for his radicalism to increase, as the incompetence and irresponsibility with which he governs the country becomes increasingly clear.
Those responsible for opening the gates of these perversions, when they carried out another failed strategy of "rebuilding the country destroyed by Dilma Roussef" try to review their behavior and realize the gravity of the events that are underway and that is leading our country to reach 600 deaths in this pandemic, in addition to a huge economic crisis and the destruction of more than a dozen million jobs. In recent months, manifestos have appeared from various sectors,[2] many of whom are co-responsible for this desert into which politics has plunged, trying to find a new course that prevents us from reaching rock bottom.
These manifestos do not exactly represent a “mea culpa”, but they help to pave the way for the recomposition of political forces that understand the seriousness of the situation in which they have put us. That's what those people who have sense, cry for life, cry for their dead and yearn for a sovereign country, free from the "myths" that roam around orphans of their asylums.
At that moment, cornered, tied to the compromises of the “colonels” of the old politics, incensed by crazy religious fundamentalists and the worst that exists in the capitalist economy, insensitive drifters with the national reality and with the polls indicating that their prestige melts like butter at the sun, Bolsonaro tries to divert attention from the serious problems that plague the country and criminally affect the vast majority of the Brazilian population.
As a tactic, in its strategy of spreading chaos and surviving under the rubble of the Brazilian state, it desperately seeks to create enemies that are clearly windmills transformed into monsters, in its hallucinatory ravings. Guided by Steve Bannon, and disoriented by his sociopathic characteristic, he shoots at the Federal Supreme Court, perhaps one of the pillars of democracy that he sees as the last obstacle to his farcical coup attempt, typical of a small Napoleon, in his unenforceable Brumário.
Days ago, his guru stated in an interview that with a printed vote, no one will be able to defeat Bolsonaro, not even Lula. And that he would win every other election to come. [3] Therefore, the attack on electronic ballot boxes and the STF is part of a strategy to generate facts that divert attention from the serious problems in progress and their incompetence to solve them, feed their crazy and fascist-like militancy, and, in the (real) eminence to see his re-election frustrated, paving the way for a coup. It would be all or nothing, of someone who must have the exact dimension of his crimes and what will come from legal proceedings as soon as he is removed from power.
It is imperative that conscious people do not stop fighting, to recover our dignity and to understand the importance of building a fair, less unequal society, and where values such as empathy, altruism and solidarity are disseminated. Recovering Brazil and our way of being Brazilian, without fundamentalisms or stupid cultural wars that deplete our joy of living fully amidst the diversity and miscegenation that constituted us as a nation.
Either we do this or it will prevail for as long as the destruction of a country requires, the strategy of chaos. The apocalypse behind necropolitics.
It is in our hands, not only our destinies, but also the determination to prove to Bolsonaro that chaos will not prevail and that all evil, perversion and villainy will be fought by those who will survive his planned hecatomb. And we will be millions!
*Romualdo Pessoa Campos Filho He is a professor at the Institute of Socio-environmental Studies at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG).
References
The Weekly S01E09: The Rabbit Hole (The Rabbit Hole) –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3J7r1H4SYo
Hacked Privacy – Understand how data analytics company Cambridge Analytica became the symbol of the dark side of social media after the 2016 US presidential election –https://www.netflix.com/br/title/80117542
Get me roger stone – Watch the rise, fall and rebirth of political operator Roger Stone, an influential player on Team Trump for decades – https://www.netflix.com/br/title/80114666
they are among us – The documentary explores the political alliance between churchmen, oligarchs, Cambridge Analytica and their shell companies that changed the balance of politics in the US. –https://globoplay.globo.com/eles-estao-entre-nos/t/wwppjgqzSJ/
DA EMPOLI, Giuliano. The Chaos Engineers. São Paulo: Vestigio, 2020
DOWBOR, Ladislau. Capitalism is moving. São Paulo: Editions Sesc São Paulo, 2020.
LEVITSKY, Steven; ZIBLATT, Daniel. how democracies die. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2018
LIMA, Delcio Monteiro de. Demons descend from the North. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves Editora, 1987.
Notes
[1] https://noticias.uol.com.br/saude/ultimas-noticias/redacao/2021/03/19/o-caos-vem-ai-a-fome-vai-tirar-o-pessoal-de-casa-diz-bolsonaro.htm
[2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2021/03/banqueiros-e-economistas-pedem-medidas-efetivas-de-combate-a-pandemia-em-carta-aberta.shtml
[3] https://www.diariodocentrodomundo.com.br/video-bannon-mente-e-diz-que-bolsonaro-ganha-de-lula-a-menos-que-maquinas-o-roubem/
