By TARSUS GENUS*
100 thousand dead and nothing happens: the Amazon burns and the tombs proliferate
Bolsonaro fueled the fire in the Amazon with his hateful statements about Ibama inspection and his wild admiration for the mines. Bolsonaro encouraged indifference to the deadly virus, when he mocked, saying that he was not a gravedigger and when – in his sick denial of the danger – he said that everything was a simple flu, which would not kill a thousand people in this “desolate land”. He continued to be tolerated and respected by the traditional media, for his commitment to the destructive “reforms” of the Welfare State. Nothing happened and nothing happened.
“Do you have this here because you worked or because your father gave it to you?”, said the young Matheus Pires, to the racist brute who questioned him in a non-elitist condominium in the city of Valinhos in São Paulo. It was a summary episode of Brazil surrounded by facts that no delirium of political science could have foreseen five years ago: 100 dead are not impressive enough to forge unity among the progressive camp or to the point of causing rebellions; Criminal schemes that heavily involve the President's family are discovered every day. And nothing happens.
The Amazon burns in flames, protected by the highest environmental echelons of the Government; scoundrel defamations circulate on radios and networks against STF Ministers; no information about the assassination attempt against Lula, no news about the arsenal of weapons of war – apprehended in the President's Condominium –; no information about cocaine on the presidential plane and about the criminal release of weapons to present and future militias. And nothing happens.
No one knows who ordered Marielle's death and no word comes out of the President trying to minimally unite a country with a devastated economy and a society divided and manipulated by fascist hypnosis: it awakens the worst reactions of the unconscious of each tormented person. These throw their flames of hatred at each other, because they do not understand or do not want to understand the world in which they live. Its way out is the immediacy of anger against others and its desire is to find those responsible for the failure of the monster created by the false choice between extremes. And nothing happens.
“Are you like this because you chose to be, or because your parents bequeathed you an inheritance of pain and compulsion towards death, as a necrophiliac policy?” – makes you want to ask, like Matheus Pires, ten times on the networks, ten times on the radio, ten times on Jornal Nacional, compassionate for the deaths of one hundred thousand, but indifferent to the hunger of millions that will be the legacy of the rentier reforms. And nothing happens.
I risk thinking that we lack understanding, in order to organize a vast anti-fascist, anti-neoliberal political field – democratic and mobilizing – that a new “political” and “social” order is already being instituted. It is an order that allows the formal permanence of the 1988 Constitution, but forges – beside it and in its normative voids – another concrete order, whose illegal authority is given by the ideological domain of “common sense”, by the conspiracy of the extreme right of the abroad and for the implementation of liberal reforms, in the economic domain, internally supported by Rede Globo and its “party” and class ramifications. And nothing happens.
This strategy generated an atypical symbiosis, of contradictory unity, between the proto-fascism of the external controllers of the demonic figure of Bolsonaro and those internal rentiers, integrated into the prevailing class system in the country. This process – somewhat misshapen and somewhat formalized by Bolsonaro’s authoritative voice – could also cost Rede Globo its life, which has been displaced from its traditional funding sources. And nothing happens.
What is certain, however, is that Globo will bet on it, until the end of time, because its “owners” will remain tied to the realm of money and privileges, in other profitable economic activities, here and abroad. We cannot forget that the oligopoly of the television media and the majority of the traditional press operated, in the cases against Lula, as a parallel Public Ministry, for his condemnation, being therefore pioneers of this new concrete order, already in a galloping deformation of the “due process”. Cool". A lot has happened since then.
The connection of the political distortions of the moments of “exception”, to make the liberal-rentier “adjustment” viable in Brazil, was approached by many of us, since this process was shown in its entirety. Analogously to what was observed by Ernst Bloch in Nazism, we said like him: “since the state of exception is always different from anarchy and chaos, there subsists, in a legal sense, an order, even if not a legal order, because only in 1935 the 'Nuremberg Laws' revoked, for example, the citizenship rights of Jews”. The parallel order happened and it is the death of 100 thousand and the crisis of democracy.
In a country where a denialist President commits a crime of responsibility a day and reaches 100 deaths – due to the negligence of the State and the murderous example of its leader – the new parallel order of fascism could be consolidated. Unless shame and love of neighbor take over politics and it rebels – within the 88 Constitution – in the streets and in the Courts, to rescue the legacies of the revolutions that unified the people against all forms of tyranny. This can happen?
*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.
