By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*
Fascism and its neoliberal preaching by Bolsonarist hosts only admitted the isolated individual, a monad of private interests
Without doctrine, without a party and with an aversion to politics, there is Brazilian-style fascism showing up on that unfortunate January 08th with its fallen characters, coming from camps near military barracks trusting that they would count on their adherence to their movement. Convinced in their magical beliefs, they believed that the promotion of chaos with the forcible seizure of the Praça dos Três Poderes and the physical installations of the republican power would suffice, even if without a plan, for their purposes of installing an exceptional government, which would fall into their hands. hands due to the effects of the game of dominoes in which chaos would irresistibly spread until the rise to power of the character to whom mythical qualities were attributed, who, incidentally, did not show up in this uprising of the yard of miracles.
Such events, unprecedented here and in every part of the known world, did not last more than a few hours, containing the crazy men and women of all ages, coming from all corners of the national territory, led to prison without major resistance, but leaving in its wake a destructive action that continues to hurt the self-esteem of Brazilians with the desecration of works of their culture and civilization.
What remains of this human disaster is a heritage to be painstakingly reconstructed, and much more than that, to identify the immediate and deep roots to which they are attached in order to remove the insanity and the marks of the evil that harbors in our society that still conserves the quasi-fashionable marks of our upbringing from the large slaveholding rural property.
The extraordinary events that shook us, and still shake us, must be studied by social science, Brazilian and foreign, for which there is not only abundant material, but also by a thorough investigation into the motivations of the authors, most of them in prisons, which became entangled in their practices.
As they say, you shouldn't wipe this dismal episode with a cloth and move on. From now on, the history of the country, in order to follow its course, either deciphers correctly what has just occurred to it or it will succumb to the flowers of evil that germinate in its womb. Relentless determination of its causes, accountability of those who in words and deeds encourage fascist preaching and the refusal of democracy as a country's project, must be the non-negotiable commitment of all those who oppose the barbarism that surrounds our common life.
The high courts of the Judiciary have given adequate answers to the crimes that were committed, but that is not enough, only politics can proceed with actions that aim at the serpent's egg that hides in a fragmented, disorganized mass society with its isolated members. each other. The emphasis on the social question that has characterized the beginnings of the Lula-Alkmin government is certainly positive, but it cannot, as has been noticed so far, remain restricted to the State's reparative intentions in the face of an absentee society, hoping from above that its rights are granted.
Without parties that represent it, without unions and active social movements, without a place and means through which it can experiment with its speech acts, we risk reiterating the perverse itinerary that was the starting point for the political tragedy that we now have to overcome.
For four years, day after day, we were witnesses of libertic actions that intended to break down any organic ties in our common life, denying factual reality to the existence of this thing called society. Fascism and its neoliberal preaching by Bolsonarists only admitted the isolated individual, a monad of private interests only put in order by the mythical intervention of the head of the nation. In that sense, there was something of mysticism in the doggy of January 8th, in which a mass of ignorant individuals, due to the physical fault of their leader, tried to lower his spirit as in a religious cult in order to carry out the work that belonged to him in the feelings of all. Bolsonaro embodied, thus in mystical anointing, the depredation in which each ecstatic demonstrator destroyed a national icon.
The Germans, after 1945, solemnly promised that their national tragedy would never be repeated, and they did. Will we be able to do the same?
*Luiz Werneck Vianna is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at PUC-Rio. Author, among other books, of The Passive Revolution: Iberism and Americanism in Brazil (Revan).
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