By TARSUS GENUS*
Olavo de Carvalho’s malice and negationism: who did his ideas serve, what resulted from them
Nietzsche is singled out in the history of modern philosophy, not without dispute, as a philosopher of Nazi Germany. There is no such doubt about Alfred Rosemberg, a philosopher of the common sense of Nazism, as this serial killer sowed – in the German “common man” – the conviction that the Jewish people should be mercilessly eliminated, like animals taken to a slaughterhouse. About Heidegger, who consciously served Hitler, the discussion remains: through some saying that his political opportunism (which allowed him to be appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg by Hitler) did not nullify his “philosophical genius”; opposed to others who consider him an amoral devoted to Nazi banditry. It is debatable, but here the Bolsonar government had the philosopher it deserved, with a psychopath fixed in the anal orifices, accepted by the mainstream press as a columnist with high political knowledge.
I think that Heidegger, mystic and irrationalist, was a deceiver whose elaboration allowed him to be an adherent of Nazism, “cold and dramatic, without a hint of humor; (proponent of) (silly) abstractions and twisting of ideas”, which often served for the most different interpretations of his disciples” (“apud” Moreno Claros). It would be imprudent, however, to say that he was uneducated and ignorant like Rosemberg and that he lacked the formal skills to try to put together a philosophical “system” that, in the end, has faded into world history. The defeat of Nazi-fascism and the strength of the Nuremberg trials liquidated that totalitarianism, which is now trying to rise again. Heidegger, however, if he was a philosopher, was not a minimally respectable human being, as his ideas interfered in history to forge the evil of war and the barbarism of the Holocaust.
I make this quick note to argue that the “big question” about the said professor Olavo de Carvalho, who recently died of a disease he said did not exist, is not whether he was a philosopher or not, but who his ideas served , what came out of them, what content he lent his intellectual militancy and what the consequence, in the lives of ordinary people, of what he lucubrated in his bizarreness, capacity for manipulation and serial lies, which he expelled in his daily verves. Montaigne and Gramsci, showed with their life works that a philosophy, whatever its meaning, is of no importance if it does not somehow integrate into people's lives. In this sense, Olavo was efficient: he gave a flag to the idiots and organized the sense of hatred for his intermediary prophets.
I am referring, for example, to two macro statements by perhaps the astrologer Olavo, which travel the world and become part of the lives of millions, which show their intrinsic evil – the sower of ignorance and death – which have historical importance and deserve to be studied. . I am referring to your medieval admission that the earth can be flat and that vaccination is a “globalist” conspiracy to impose totalitarian domination over people's daily lives. The formation of this ideology, disguised as a popular philosophy, is not just a psychotic naivety, but a complex formulation about the totality of the world and a strategy for building the future as a medieval revival.
the pamphlet booklet Handbook of the Perfect Latin American Idiot, published 25 years ago, was not an aberration because it is a right-wing book or because it attacks those who it calls sympathizers of “Marxist ideology” or “contumacious idolaters of failure” or, even, because it considers itself “one of the most serious in the world”. It is an aberration because it is false, disrespectful, offensive to people on the left and right, as long as they are serious and do not accept their half-illustrated nonsense, which identifies only in a field of political thought – without any blushing – “those who are really responsible for the economic, social and cultural backwardness” of Latin America.
The authors of the book are Plinio Mendoza (Colombian), Carlos Alberto Montaner (Cuban) and Vargas Llosa (Peruvian), who seek to show that until that time, idiots won and that certainly one day figures like Macri, Sebastian Piñera and Bolsonaro would arrive to save us. They came and got worse and the real idiots came out of their holes. The central thesis of the three-handed work is that there is not even a shared responsibility for Latin American ills, as even put by serious liberal political scientists, who identify – beyond “statism” and “nationalism” – (rock- de-touch of its elitist hysteria) other components of Latin American social and economic backwardness, whose responsibility lies with the privileged classes.
We are the heirs of colonial-imperial domination, which left behind the moral and social miseries that we know, such as the slavery ideology of the “superior” classes, the genocide of the natives, oligarchic democracies and concentrations of land ownership and income, at levels brutal. The book by the “liberal” trio was, in a way, a precursor to the deceased “philosopher”, who often appealed to someone else's anus (or his own) to end a political or philosophical debate. We did not attach importance, at the time, to the pamphlet by Vargas Llosa and his friends, as it was only being read by aspiring ultraliberals, obscure “market” executives, adhering journalists, mediocre and lackluster professors from smaller Universities, although it was widely publicized by the what is called the “big press”.
Olavo’s malice and negationism, in fact, is the “scientific” (pamphleteer) counterpart to the booklet on “political science” that dealt with the “Latin American idiots”, who are those who are committed to life, to equality and political freedoms, with science and Enlightenment reason. Simple as that: it doesn't matter if, in the future – more particularly in a probable dark age – Olavo de Carvalho is going to be respected as a philosopher, because even Rosemberg was respected during the Nazi period. What matters now is how we are going to prevent that from happening, defeating their fanatics in the next elections and restoring the validity of the 1988 Charter, so that denialism and the political cult of death are thrown into the dustbin of 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 possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
