By TARSUS GENUS*
The culprit of the mortality is not the Army. It's Bolsonaro and his liberal and fascist politicians
On the gray afternoon of Wednesday, I apprehensively watch the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Globo News. I'm afraid they'll kill him. Four American Presidents were assassinated while exercising their functions and nine of them were attacked. Lincoln was killed on April 14, 1865 with a treacherous shot in the back of the head by John Both, a southern, racist, segregationist, who ended the life of the president who led the War against slavery, in the country that was born for democracy. With Trump, the USA began its internal political decay without eliminating the miserable roots of the cultural wounds of slavery. American history is not rosy, but violent externally and internally, and the Capitol attackers represent it in a medullary way.
I like Biden because he reminds me more of Russian and American soldiers liberating the concentration camps from the Nazi beast and less of the imperial USA, which has always turned its allied countries into “free” territories of forces that believed in equality, independence and sovereignty. And that's a lot and it's enough on the days when we suffer the Bolsonaro nightmare. Individuals do not make history, but they can, under certain circumstances, substantially interfere in the ways of solving the great problems that it poses to us.
The young men and women of Globo, authentically moved by the inauguration of Biden – and that is good for Brazil – talk about American democracy without realizing (or knowing) that Trump's great policy was to try to transpose – into the legal order internal – the external legal forms through which the American State, in its clandestine international law, has always dealt with the territories and peoples it intended to control, with fire and sword. Say Allende, the children set ablaze by Napalm in Vietnam, those tortured in Brazil by interrogation "teachers" of the sinister "Services" of the USA and say Che Guevara, killed in Bolivia in the fight against the gangs of trafficker Generals who controlled that people .
The indignation that takes hold of the (fragmented) majority of Brazilian society and the devastating effects, in the political life and in the country's economy, of a Government of "capangage", corruption and explicit rigging of the State, - cannot cloud our vision about the landscape that opens up within the crisis. José Murilo de Carvalho wrote that in the Old Republic, “in addition to being useless, voting was very dangerous.
Since the Empire, elections in the capital were marked by the presence of capoeiras, hired by candidates to guarantee the results” and (...) “elections were decided by gangs that operated in certain parts of the city and rented their services to politicians.”
“The most sophisticated gangs that operate” in all (or certain) parts of the Globe – in the current time – have their crimes forgiven or these prescribe in the sleepy corners of “due legal process”. Steve Bannon, one of the most important criminals of post-modern times, whose daily task is to destroy liberal democracy and therefore do the dirty work in its decay, has just been pardoned by Trump, along with a bunch of extreme criminals. right, almost
swept away the institutions of American political democracy.
One cannot say the same thing about voting today as José Murilo wrote: it is not useless to vote, nor is it irrelevant to mobilize in the streets, in the networks; nor is it useless to denounce the abuses of scoundrels in the global space; nor is it impossible to communicate collectively, piercing the “bubbles” of fascist control; nor is it impossible to resist in the fields of culture and science, bypassing or hitting head on with darkness, ignorance and blatant lies. Nor is it irrelevant to have sensible voices in the mainstream media, which stand up bravely, either out of conscience or for market interests.
If it is true that the main centers of power over electoral processes in Brazil remain in the hands of the privileged, it is also true that this system – until Bolsonaro – was being “purified” in political-electoral terms, until it suffered a
brutal impact of the “holy alliance” of big capital. This, sacralized with the oligopolistic media, was expanded with the adhesion of the physiological bases that participated in all the Governments in Brazil, post-military dictatorship and during that period. This article wants to propose another view on the responsibility of the military institution – not on the military singularly taken – in the slaughter that the Federal Government provides with its genocidal health policy.
José Murilo de Carvalho's vision, referred to above, serves more to designate what Bolsonaro wants to restore (which we must urgently block), than what is already mounted in the country's power instances. Rio de Janeiro advances a little what the President wants for the country and explains his true obsession with controlling the territory, inside the police structures and outside, with its pure militia base. The Brazil of tomorrow cannot be what Rio is today, massacred by the religions of money and by a good part of its “elite”, which is confused with organized crime itself. I think that the country's military – the vast majority – do not want the country to be – in the future – what Rio de Janeiro is today. This is my point
departure.
The coup against Dilma and the Federal Constitution may have had the sympathy of part of the country's military forces, but it was not promoted by any of them. It is understandable that the scenario of barbarism provokes the rejection of the entire “system of power” set up after the elections that brought Bolsonaro to power, but it is not correct – neither tactically nor strategically – to put all institutions in the same bag. And it's not
It is equally correct to bestow “concentrated” responsibilities on the military, in the current mortality, because – if it is true that in the complex chess game of political power all cats can be brown – the identity guided by this immediate appearance can lead to misunderstandings serious.
In this case, this attribution to the Army's military may contribute to giving greater opacity to the policy, softening the main responsibilities of what happens here, which was not provoked by the institution that, fundamentally, respected the minimum republican protocols of the nation. If this guilt were to be fixed, a fundamental question would remain unresolved: why a President, precisely for not betraying his sordid electoral message after the election, managed to survive as the Ruler of a nation, without any respect for republican morality and made the project of its dominant classes, lending its face to the neoliberal political body of the country?
By that I mean that it is wrong, from a political point of view, and unfair, from a historical point of view, to identify the Brazilian Army with the sanitary massacre. It is wrong, because it helps the military extreme right to reorganize itself into active duty and it is wrong because Bolsonaro does not even remotely represent the average morality of the FFAA -nor its political vocation, which is conservative positivist, but not fascist-; and it is wrong, because it reduces the objective and subjective responsibility of the reserve military, the politicians around Bolsonaro, the religions of money that support him and the media-business consortium that elected him President and still keeps him in power. This is the consortium responsible for the ongoing political crisis and for the death toll.
It is wrong, finally, because it is impossible to build a Republic and Democracy in Brazil, without the majority of the Armed Forces being conquered for a nation project, whose sovereignty will be deposited – in large part – in the hands of these institutions, within the Democratic State of Law, whether it has the characteristics of a Social State, whether it is a merely liberal-democratic Rule of Law. These considerations are completely opposite to the “ear pulling” that some active and reserve military want to give to journalists who denounce their excesses and the total lack of integrity of this Government, directly attacking freedom of criticism and opinion.
Trump left threatening to return. If in our generous country, of samba, laughter and football – of historic struggles for democracy and in defense of rights – it was possible for Bolsonaro to embody a part of the spirit of our people, it is not absurd for Trump to return. But his expulsion from the White House, in the name of life and the law, also indicates that it is possible to take the fools out of the Government, even if they appear to be strong, to archive them in the trash of our History.
*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 left in process (Voices).
