By EUGENIO BUCCI*
In the 8th, the defunct government seems to have reincarnated in Malta to finish the job of destruction that it had left unfinished.
The crushing of the Republic last Sunday, January 8, 2023, will go down in history as the compact summary of the government that ended on December 31, 2022. of historical heritage, cultural values, politics, justice and public facilities.
The defunct government seems to have reincarnated in Malta to finish the job of destruction it had left unfinished. By smashing clocks, paintings, windows and chairs, the bandits broke the offices and molded, definitively, the death mask of the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. the portrait postmortem it is the clearest. It's that there, without taking it off. You can no longer say you didn't expect it.
Throughout the week, civil society organizations and public authorities repudiated the coup assault. They got the intention right, which is good, but they got the object wrong, which is not so good. The filth that flooded the Federal Supreme Court, the National Congress and the Planalto Palace on Sunday was not the real attempt at a coup d'état. The great attempt – this one, yes, threatening – was the government that lasted from 2019 to 2022. During this period, the Executive Power was structured as a persistent project of rupture of the democratic order to establish a State of exception.
That, yes, was a blow, day after day, a gerund blow. Public bodies such as Ibama and Funai were dismantled, traditions of light such as the Itamaraty received trousseau, science deserved nothing but contempt, Justice suffered daily affronts, public health was trampled and the press, intimidated by direct speeches from the head of state. No, the real aggression against democracy wasn't the pranks on January 8th that ruined works of art, but the presidency of the man who took refuge in Florida after humiliating the entire national culture. Sunday afternoon was just the posthumous finale – which is to be execrated, no doubt, but the worst came first.
And it didn't come without warning. The former president himself took care to flaunt his purposes, many times. Almost four years ago, he said: “Brazil is not an open terrain where we intend to build things for our people. We have to deconstruct a lot of things. Undo a lot.” It was on the night of March 17, 2019, in Washington, at a dinner that brought together the smelly cream of reactionary refuse. Already on that occasion, just over two months after taking office, the subject publicly defined himself as a deconstructor, a destroyer. Now, his trained followers took it literally: they made a mess of everything they saw in front of them – and behind their backs (you must have seen it on the internet).
The level of hallucination is unprecedented. Certainly, the leaders did not believe that they would overthrow Lula with the late riot; they wanted to harass, attack, cause, create an adverse climate – and, of course, they wanted to do it without showing their faces, without incriminating themselves. As for the predators present, they seemed certain that they would be decorated the next day. How insanity.
Narcissists like the owner have recorded countless scenes in which they appear perpetrating serial crimes. They produced evidence and more evidence against themselves. Some shout, in a mystical trance: “It’s Brasêêêo!” Others exult: “It is ours! It is ours! This is ours!” Continuously, they tear the scenery apart, revealing what they mean by “it's ours” and, even more, what goes on in the clouded mind of those who command them.
Among the readings that have already been made on the eve of infamy, let us not lose sight of the, so to speak, semiotic interpretation. The mob in catharsis condensed the ideology of the former government into performance. The show was organized as an infographic of horrors. In the thanactic theater, the henchmen were naked, as their king already is. We no longer have the right to pretend we didn't see it.
And here we are. While useful fools stay in jail, bosses and bosses try to hide it. They pretend it's not up to them and renege on their warrants. Diligent, they plot new plots. They will attack again. They dream of armed confrontations. Since the leader planned to drop bombs because he wasn't satisfied with the pay, what exists there is identity terrorism and, even worse, zombies, the kind that dies and rises again. The death mask will plead for the reactivation of the corpse. There is no lack of tacit, veiled and hypocritical support, even in uniform.
That the institutions work, at least to investigate, judge and punish the yellow shirt vandals, their gurus, their financiers and, mainly, the prevaricators who, armed or not, facilitated the attack. If it turns into pizza, the nation derails. Justice will have to do its part, without delay.
But that alone will not be enough. From now on, we will have to deepen the fight against disinformation and the factory of fanaticism, or we will not break the spell of fascist servitude to which so many Brazilian men and women have succumbed. And we will follow a country without judgment under the cap.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of The superindustry of the imaginary (authentic).
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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