By LAYMERT GARCIA DOS SANTOS*

With the pandemic, genocide becomes effectively a state policy.

The site's editorial team the earth is round conceived the publication of a series of articles about the Bolsonaro era entitled “Two years of misgovernment”. Which leads me to ask myself what they had in mind and to think, above all, in the ambiguous sense of the proposed term.

Indeed, in a first, more frequent sense, misrule would designate an erratic government like a windsock, disoriented, with no defined direction. If this is true, we would be facing a performance marked above all by the unpredictability, ignorance and incompetence of “clueless” rulers. But such a perspective only proceeds if we take as a measure and parameters what the Bolsonaro era is not (but should be...): a representative democracy functioning, albeit precariously, according to the rules of a republican rule of law.

Which, let's face it, is not quite the case, given the vertiginous succession of criminal and fraudulent records over the last six-seven years that paved the way for the orcrim's rise to maximum power. In fact, strictly speaking, such a succession would not even need to be remembered – it is engraved in everyone's traumatized mind. Thus, if we take seriously what happened, and which is common knowledge, it becomes impossible to accept that the word misrule designate error. Accepting such a hypothesis would be to corroborate the thesis of the primacy of the lack of competence and knowledge, of the lack of the art of governing...

It would then be misrule a dis-government, that is, the undoing of State policy, at least as we experience it, again, precariously, in republican Brazil? If so, we have to admit that there is no lack, there is an ever-repeated assertion of a categorical agency of excesses to destroy the fragile order prevailing until then, with its laws, usages and customs, in all spheres of social life, aiming to implant a new order – even if it aspires to the ghostly reconfiguration of the rubbish of the colonial past and the dictatorship.

In this case, we should understand the expression “two years of misgovernment” in its positive meaning, that is, as two years of a deliberate policy of destruction of institutions, decomposition of the nation and deconstitution of Brazilian society. Which, evidently, intelligence practically refuses to accept, given the enormity and monstrosity of the undertaking. Because we would be talking about the end of Brazil as a country.

But if lucidity is repugnant to such an imperious statement, the same does not happen with affections. Sit down the shock of the end in anguish renewed (and intensified) every day, which is declared unavoidable and, at the same time, unassimilable. As the writer Henry Miller would say, the world falls apart first secretly, in the unconscious, before erupting outside.

“If I think of Germany at night, / I soon lose sleep.” – wrote Heinrich Heine, in the 30s of the XNUMXth century. The famous verses of the German poet give an idea of ​​the restlessness that shook him. Now, what about the reaction of Brazilian intellectuals to a “country in total and mortal crisis”, in the expression of the astute political analyst Jânio de Freitas? It seems to me that they lose much more than sleep. They also lose their voices – either because they can't find words to match the event, or because all they have to do is shriek misfortunes to the point of hoarseness, in an alarm all the more strident the more impotent. The silence... or words in the wind.

On the left, many people complain about the lack of purposeful interventions, the disconnect between intellectuals and the people and the country. Perhaps it is not a case of indifference, of disinterest, but of the perception that Brazil's horizon has closed, it has become a “negative horizon”. This becomes quite evident when we think of the great Brazilian intellectuals of the XNUMXth century. Despite obstacles of all kinds (and they mapped many), they believed that it would be possible to overcome the cursed legacy of the colonial past and build a future.

Therefore, they focused on the issue of formation of a country called Brazil – think of Caio Prado Jr, Sérgio Buarque, Gilberto Freire, Antônio Candido, Florestan Fernandes, Celso Furtado, Darcy Ribeiro, and so many others trying to understand Brazil to help transform it. it. But who, today, can in good conscience intend to think of the country in terms of formation? Roberto Schwarz, already in the 1990s, used the term dismantling to designate a major characteristic of contemporary capitalism, and, in 2003, named Brazil as a “ex country ou half country”; Paulo Arantes published in 2007 a book entitled Extinção, and Chico de Oliveira, who loved his homeland so much, had to recognize in it the figure of a platypus...

Not so long ago – it was 2003! Today, the dead-end evolution of the Brazilian platypus has been consummated. The animal grew exponentially, assumed its continental dimension. And each of its inconsistencies went to war with every other, tearing the monstrous figure apart. Unless I'm mistaken, without remission.

Misrule?

The word, now, even sounds kind, too modest to name a lethal process, since the different strata of the establishment sealed a sworn alliance on the bible of neoliberal fundamentalism to end the race of workers and open the international season of plundering of Brazil's resources, enormous but not inexhaustible.

each stratum of establishment made its specific contribution: the military invented and promoted Jair Bolsonaro with methods of hybrid warfare to raise him to the throne, to supposedly “save” Brazil from PT communism and the Amazon from international greed, through a scorched earth policy ( which includes, in addition to the devastation of biomes, the social and ethnic cleansing territory, with the genocide of Indians and quilombolas); the Judiciary implementing the lawfare Lava-Jato in all instances, to criminalize opponents and establish the permanent exception; the “security” bodies collaborating with militiamen and jagunços to sow terror in the peripheries and threaten social movements and their leaders in the countryside and cities; the mainstream media with its leniency in relation to all the crimes that have been committed, not to mention its poorly disguised game of affecting “independence” but closing with the extreme right whenever necessary; It is, Last but not least, high finance and high business – a true pillar of support for the regime, along with the military –, interested in the “reforms” that imply the demolition of the little Welfare State that existed and the conversion of the State into mere police of Capital . And it's not worth invoking the sighed resignation of the lace fists for having to tolerate the limitless scrotum of the rulers. The consecration of the militia lumpesinate to the highest posts is their work, their historic responsibility.

The Law, the Order, the Capital… and all the “good men” of the establishment. Hand in hand with lumpen of all social strata, in favor of destruction. For different but converging reasons. Judiciary bandits to transform the power to judge and punish (and their effects) into What our; this is the power of law in the power of agency. The military, associated with militiamen, to exercise command through armed force and fear of it. The Kapital to impose neoliberal fundamentalism. It is known that this has as its basic principles the non-recognition of the existence of society and the extinction of the category “workers”, even from a theoretical perspective. “And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” – had sentenced, in 1987, Margareth Thatcher, the totem of Paulo Guedes, along with Pinochet.

There are individuals and there is a market. And since there is no more worker, who can be transmuted into entrepreneur and enthusiast, capitalist of himself, investing his innate and acquired resources in the market. Whoever cannot, “monetary subject without money”, in the expression of Roberto Schwarz, may he die in silence, as Junk Mail. For this very reason, all proposed reforms converge to the extinction of all rights, including the right to life, except the sacrosanct right to property. For this very reason, guaranteed employment and income, access to health and education, stability in the public service, housing, public safety, science, culture, environment, life, in short, need to be annihilated. Ultimately, neoliberal fundamentalism reserves for populations, as the only perspective, bare life, that is, killable.

Thus, everywhere you look, on the scene of Brazilian life, the tendency to destruction and a formidable death drive prevails, whose concrete manifestation began in 2013. Now that it has spread, the project of misgovernment is to mobilize it in the micro and macro levels, that is both within the individual and in the collective, is to unleash it in order, later, who knows, to establish a regime of total domination over the rubble.

This has already been diagnosed by several analysts and classified as necropolitics, whether considered fascist, or merely authoritarian, bonapartist, etc... . Well, the pandemic changed everything by making the criminal project explicit. It took some time, of course, for everyone to understand that the lack of a health policy was deliberately and zealously conducted by the Ministry of Health, in addition to being accompanied by all sorts of administrative measures that could, whether preventing the fight against the virus or compromising it.

However, from the publication of the research by the Faculty of Public Health at USP and Conectas Human Rights, in early 2021, it was demonstrated that Bolsonaro has an “institutional strategy for the spread of the coronavirus”. In other words: the genocide is no longer deducted from the misrule federal, as a mistake, becoming effectively configured as a state policy. In addition to the lack of preventive health measures to prevent the spread of contagion, there is a lack of patents on vaccines and other supplies, without forgetting the systematic promotion of pro-contamination measures. It is no longer a question of neglecting the pandemic, of a Each man for himself and God against all – is worse, much worse. Thus, the plague radicalized the crisis by exposing the perverse nature of the government and by making it impossible to maintain the appearance that “institutions are working”.

In an instigating and, in a certain sense, prophetic text entitled “Beyond Necropolitics”, Vladimir Safatle foreshadowed that the crisis was entering a new phase, in which the spread of death was no longer directed at “others”, but became, also, suicide of the State. Inspired by the concept of Suicidal State forged by Paul Virilio to think about the logic explained by Nazism when the realization of defeat became unavoidable (the famous Telegram 71, in which Hitler orders: “If the war is lost, let the nation perish”), the philosopher points out that Brazil has become unmanageable.

Not because of a kind of collateral and unforeseen effect of the destruction process, but because the military, magistrates, politicians, financiers, loggers, mining companies, agribusiness and international investors, in struggle to extract as much as they can from the national wealth, in the least time possible, act to hasten the end of the nation-state. In Safatle's understanding, this is the meaning of the “experiment” that is being put into practice here.

Whose contours are delineated when unbridled surrender and the destruction of institutions gain synergy. In the military establishment, with the continued demoralization of an already proven dishonored Army; in the Judiciary, with the lurid revelations of Vaza Jato unmasking the illegalities of the “Republic of Curitiba” and the complicity of higher courts, raising legal uncertainty to the maximum (Walter Delgatti is our Snowden, the hacker who exposed the rotten entrails that establishment most wanted to hide); in diplomacy, with the transformation of Brazil into an international slum and its banishment from the geopolitical game; in politics, with the scandalous negotiations between Centrão and the Bolsonarist military, sinking Congress even further into the well-known swamp of corruption; and now, in the first clash between Bolsonarism and the market, since the contradictions between the project of total militia-military power and the demands of Capital do not always converge, which should lead to a deepening of the crisis for the population and for the country.

In short: the establishment it is being crossed by violent tensions between its different aspects and within each one of them. And it is already showing signs that it is struggling to process and contain them, even though it continues to believe that it can only blame the population, as has always been its habit.

Does anyone believe that Kapital will raffle Bolsonaro through a process of impeachment for his dissatisfaction with the military intervention in Petrobras? It would be easy to criminalize it – there are plenty of reasons. But a few days earlier, hadn't Kapital received the autonomy of the Central Bank as a gift? If there were to be a rupture, what would the holy alliance look like to manage the liquidation of the world of work, without the armed arm that ultimately allows it to be carried out? On the other hand, is there a chance that the military's sham nationalism becomes something serious, to the point of directly confronting Kapital's plans, which the government endorsed until yesterday? There is a strong probability that everything will end in pizza, with Bolsonaro and the military giving in… However, the fissures are accumulating… while the left still seems to believe in an electoral solution to contradictions and conflicts of this scale!

Several clues and trends suggest that Vladimir Safatle's diagnosis is correct. The destruction of institutions leads to the decomposition of the country and the deconstitution of society; suggests that the Brazilian State is in a suicidal process, taking the people and the nation together. And it will not be the miserable and fake concept of “Nation” of the military that will be able to camouflage the disintegration of Brazil. The consequences, evidently, will be incalculable, in view of the wealth of resources in water, minerals, oil, forests. Even more: in view of the continental dimension of Brazil and its crucial importance for the solution of global climate warming.

The whole world has an interest in Brazil surviving. But the establishment Brazilians have neither eyes nor ears for the intensity of the collapse. O establishment you are sure that everything is as it always was. Under control.

*Laymert Garcia dos Santos he is a retired professor in the sociology department at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Politicize new technologies (Publisher 34).