By TARSUS GENUS*
A great front for life, against fascism and its ultraliberal perversion.
On May 13, 1818 – in the months of the Inquisition – “where the Court had been for about a decade”, King D. João VI signed a decree through which he begged the Pope to designate D. José da Cunha Azeredo Coutinho as the last general inquisitor, as a reward, because he had not urged – as most prelates did at the time – his diocesans to support the French invaders. The inauguration of the new inquisitor took place under the trembling and fearful light of the luminaries of tradition, as occurred in the ancient rituals of the Holy Office.
But Europe had changed and the tradition of all the dead generations ceased to oppress – for a while – the brains of the living. In the History of the “Portuguese Inquisition” (G. Marcocci and JP Paiva, Ed. Esfera dos Livros) the authors close the first page of the chapter “The last hours of the Holy Office” (p. 430), with an illuminated period: “ however, these lights would not eclipse the shadows in which the Inquisition was hiding and that the ideals of equality and freedom of the French Revolution were even more accentuated”.
This memory hangs over us as a call to those ideals. All of the vital national selfishness – which accelerated with the dominance of financial capital over indebted states and which has been dividing society at an ever-increasing pace between the poor-miserable and the rich – has led us to a limit situation: either we compose by force of a minimally supportive or equitable world order, given the brutal lessons of the pandemic, or we will have a permanent state of war that will lead humanity to the apocalypse by the plague. Lula's speech was a warning and a hope, which must be complemented with a great front for life, against fascism and its ultraliberal perversion.
President Lula's speech echoed around the world. Brazil returned to the world public scene through the voice of a statesman from the working-class world, who created an original government in a country that not even the intellectual sophistication of FHC – today more of a prince than a sociologist – managed to project as a respected subject in the global order. . Political personalities from various positions in the field of liberal democracy looked at Brazil as if breathing in the fresh air of a fantastic morning.
The fate of the world order, in its “new” normal, will be an old normal made worse by the redistribution of the payment of the costs of the tragedy, which the rich countries will promote arbitrarily, according to their interests. That is why we can predict – with little margin of error – that once fascism and the madness installed in power are defeated, the foreign policy of countries like ours will be decisive for – based on a cooperative and interdependent relationship with sovereignty – to rise from the crisis better than before.
FHC did not have the same respect as Lula, not because he was incompetent as a ruler, because he was not. But because it mimicked the politics of “liberal” nations around the globe, free of charge and without reward. It made Brazil, with its performance, a “low cost” country, disrespected in the financial system of rich countries and making life easier not for its investors in production, but for its speculators with the debt of countries that are within the circle of hunger .
The world order was (and is) asymmetrical – as FHC himself said – thinking that with this “great” discovery he already had a justification for his Government’s submission to the declining social democratic vision, which went from a position that defended the protection from the State to the weakest – economically – in defense of a “technological” destiny in which job offers under capitalism would, in the human traction of couriers, replace a way of life without services and regular jobs.
Brazilian foreign policy today has as its public voice an adherent of the most obscure and retrograde ideas throughout the existence of our Republic. It represents, on the outside scenario, the political necrophilia that guides the Bolsonaro government in its internal issues, centered on the tripod: unrestricted armament to strengthen the militias, scientific denialism to expand death and make the population indifferent to barbarism; and reforms to annihilate what remains of the Welfare State, without putting anything in its place.
It is, therefore, about unlocking the lowest instincts and the most perverse fantasies of human beings, who will be placed on the limit – by naturalizing barbarism – between dying from hunger or dying from disease and thus awakening the wild competition between them, to to survive between handouts and dwindling emergency aid.
Whoever governs us in the next period – with the victory of a candidate from the progressive and anti-fascist camp – we have to think quickly about a concrete democratic internationalism, to face the terrible situation of the post-pandemic. Bolsonaro struggled to place the country in a “Sophie’s choice”, which in the end was based on the option between Trump and his fascist entourage or a coup d’état, supported by the militias that he wants more and more armed.
The central axis of anti-fascism and the productive and political reconstruction of the country must guide Brazil's foreign relations, removing the direction of the State from the hands of the insane. Corpses are being piled up and the greater insane still rules. From his brutal indifference to human life – because he is neither a “sissy” nor a “gravedigger” – a lava of hatred springs up in an increasingly unequal society, which spreads in the form of a necrophilic pyramid that resembles the fields of Elsen , Berla, Buckenwals and Auschwitz.
*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.
