By TARSUS GENUS*
The democratic resistance, through its recognized leadership, created a new political majority to overcome fascism and fear.
In the last two months, I changed my understanding of how to approach what happened to this country, so that almost half of its voters would adhere to a clumsy psychopath - disconnected from the national Army due to psychiatric problems - who voluntarily, not only sabotaged the national public health with the result of nearly 700 deaths in the pandemic, but also – in broad daylight – attempted coups against the rule of law and perverted all possible republican and democratic values, advocating the torture and murder of opponents as a method of doing politics and win over followers for his fascist adventures.
I came to the conclusion, in fact, that this was not what was incomprehensible, that theory and political sociology could come to explain it, but that what was difficult would be to understand the greatness and generosity of the majority of the dispossessed masses in Brazil, of a significant part of the middle sectors and a small part of the nation's successful entrepreneurs, who managed to resist. And from this resistance they set out, through their recognized leaderships, to create a new political majority to defeat fascism and fear, in elections that would be permanently affected by their hordes of liars and demented people on social networks.
In unequal conditions, such as those that were formed through the “judicial” and media elimination of the left and its democratic figures, the people resisted. In the end, the most mentally healthy and generous groups and people of all classes, united in a great front in defense of sovereignty and democracy: an anti-fascist front, even if fascism did not present itself in a formal and integral, hidden in the meshes of clandestine networks and in the hidden funding pigeonholes of financial globalization.
The fascists managed to promote myths – the deformed concept of homeland, the idiotic “understanding” of naturalized racism, the stimulus to violence against those who are different – but the majority of the people resisted. Despite the tons of lies, the manipulations of reality, the spilling of money to support militias and buy weapons, the people resisted. Myths vary, form and change, their monsters expel the odor of inhumanity and sarcasm for the pain of others, showing that the “myth” also suffers the “limits of its own variations, because limited by the formal structures of the imagination”. This opens and closes to the dream, builds and eliminates doubts that are dismantled and proposes to undo the threats, when – on the other side – courage and initiative still flourish.
Fascism is demonic, first dispersed and motivated by false campaigns against corruption. Then, formally and organically, in the criminal networks that select the alienated and the unwary, through logarithms that distribute the messages to form the bubbles of hate – expansive and manipulated – it is placed against all the values of democratic modernity. The fascination of myths spreads from these bubbles, expanding, dividing families, antagonizing neighbors that were previously only divergent, creating niches of power in the state structure, perverting the “golden youth”.
Fascism wants to motivate everyone to become an accomplice of hatred. From this “higher” base of society, fascism reaches segregated youths – in regions of hunger and informal crime power – to invite them to participate, politically, in executions and eliminations, without judgment and without law. A network of marginals armed by the leader’s voluntarist policy and the non-recognition of the election results, when adverse – additionally prepared in permanent demagogic action with the masses – are two important elements of the new world extreme right, which is seen so much in Donald Trump as in Jair Bolsonaro, arranged in different political moments, but with the same content.
In an article recently published in the journal page 12, from Buenos Aires, Luis Bruschtein deals with the attempted assassination of vice-president Cristina Kirchner, showing how “the language used”, preparatory and juxtaposed with the life of hired killers seduced by fascism – with their peculiar forms of acting sympathetic to the public – using identity resources and arguments related to the country's economic situation, it configures false formulas that are not even related to the language of those who command and finance, in clandestinity, their movements.
In public, as in the so-called “freedom forums”, they talk about democracy, justice, attack on privileges (of public employees), ability to “manage themselves” to “compete”, and thus show that the right wing, fascist or not, was “always more attentive” than the democrats – leftist or not – to the types of knowledge necessary to make politics effectively, in the new neoliberal global order. In the same financial flows of the clandestine capital of organized crime transit the new languages of evil, racism, misogyny, hatred of those different in their sexuality, to dominate the weakest and eliminate the strongest: the lie controlled and sent to the right addresses it is its deadliest and surest weapon against democracy.
The Brazilian people are under a historic test to be protagonists of our national project. To defeat fascism is to defeat fear, to overcome one's own limits, to be a bit like Mandela, Seregni, Lula, Friar Bartolomeu de Las Casas, Tiradentes and all the women in the world who rebelled against patriarchal hatred , machismo and injustice. As Mario Benedetti said, through the mouth of one of his characters in his wonderful Scaffolding: "Fear is the precondition of courage, no one is brave if he doesn't first go through fear, courage comes from overcoming fear".
I add, with the risk of making mistakes, but without fear: only cowards do not fear, because they only act when they attack through betrayal or with a physical strength superior to their victims. The Brazilian people are losing fear to be happy.
*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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