The epicenter of the Apocalypse

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By EUGENIO TRIVINHO*

The anti-fascist indignation in Brazil alleviates the health fragility of millions of poor and vulnerable people, humiliated by the contempt and sarcasm of networked genocides

1.

Dethrone the genocide – scream, suffocated, millions of indigenous, black, mestizo and poor white people in Brazil. Demolish the gendarme – claims a significant portion of the population. Literally disarm the genocidal network – hopelessly deplore millions of families tired of contamination and mourning.

Dozens of new strains of Sars-CoV-2 proliferate, with the eventual incubation of a supervirus, on the rise to one million deaths, with a daily average of around 1.000 to 3.000 – one of the greatest necrosanitary absurdities in the history of the State in Brazil, in full swing. XXI century. This fact is incompatible with an economy already ranked among the top 10 in the world. The economic and health mismanagement made the country plummet three global levels. Intern today between the 12th and 13th. If there is no change in route, it will plummet even more, expanding pockets of misery and poverty, instead of reducing inequalities and renegotiating the sharing of the treasure.(1)

The new super strain – it is believed, across borders – grows stronger in silence and may escape the curve of prophylactic efficacy of marketed vaccines, nullifying the greatest and fastest effort, ever seen, by technoscience in the pharmaceutical sector, aiming to optimize individual immunity in international scale.(2) There are trillions of dollars at stake, thrown at imminent damage, with disastrous consequences on the multilateral work force, on the production and distribution of material wealth and on the rate of economic development worldwide.

As a result, Brazil arrived, in mid-April, to the point of catalyzing restrictions against itself from hundreds of countries, with the exception of less than ten, which did the favor of preserving remnants of reliability. (3)

In just over two years, the federal government, via the Ministries of Health and Foreign Affairs, practically transformed the country into the leper partner of the globalized world. The historically bizarre semantics of a word make the entire expression unbearable, in correspondence with a painful situation: the inhuman and irrational treatment of those infected by the Mycobacterium leprae, identified in 1874 by Gerhard Hansen and causing leprosy, in the modern catalogue.

Indignation does not disperse focus or miss a trip: this frieze on suffering from leprosy, within the scope of a reflection on tropical neo-fascist tendencies, even wants to en passant, draw attention to the unacceptable social status of the relationship with leprosy in the country. (4)

The political unhappiness that, since Brasilia, sustains the confinement of the country extends to the image of each Brazilian. It also covers the blunt denialist, the unfortunate flat-Earther and/or the frivolous defender of ineffective drugs against Sars-Cov-2 and its variants. Revolving magmas of a dark health history, the global stigma self-provoked by the far-right populist binge accumulates with that of a diplomatic pariah of the civilized orb.

Late-capitalist neoliberalization engendered the economic-financial globalization of the planet in recent decades, under the thrust of communicational technologies in instantaneous time. In a suicidal opposite, the nationalist Bolsonarization of the State regresses towards the borders and against the scientistic West: the endogenic sociopathy of the federal administration, of an anti-modernist necropolitical nature, is equivalent to unfortunate ostracism in the midst of a globalized world.

The Brazilian people, especially the millions of poor workers, segregated and betrayed, did not deserve so much intentional neglect, so much induced international contempt.

Altogether, the feat of the federal government is so disastrous that, as a bomb motive, it should have already staggered multilateral deposition. The demanding verification auctions concrete and statistical motives. The scattered image of the corner of the planet, to the extent that it influences investment flows in the internal productive park, compromises economic growth, undermines legal employability rates, intensifies the informality of work and income, expands poverty and misery – in short, it destroys structurally our Human Development Index (HDI).(5)

Post-2018 Brazil is no longer a mere domestic problem, for a complex and exclusive antipasto of nationalist-populist caudillos, always with unconfessed intentions more insidious than those made explicit. The country has become a gigantic global vicissitude: it even implies the survival of citizens in each of the approximately 210 existing countries.

Up to sites right-wing journalists, who supported the legal-institutional uproar of 2016 and 2018 to later put their hands to their heads in the face of the negationist monstrosity installed from January 2019, buried suspicions: in agreement with the reasons of Europe (as ), echo the discourse that Brazil has become this international threat.(6) The superego of prudence always plays in favor of serenity: if the comings and goings of political position and opinion are legitimate, they do not fail to immortalize landmarks and traces.

If Sars-Cov-2 is the pandemic name of the beast, the guest of the Palácio do Planalto appears on the drawing board of developed countries as the international face of the beast of beasts. So many outbursts of deceit that the main world leaders have already isolated him as a disqualified interlocutor and as a danger to humanity, proven by ongoing events. Invariably, the silent pandemic, its bootlickers and its media horde (in addition to digital networks, the most aggressive niche) do not skimp on inventions and nationalist and anti-Western lies, without concern – as has been said – with the stigma transferred to millions of Brazilians who live or circulate in foreign territories. Echo more emphasis: the world isolates multi-coroned Brazil like a lost and ownerless dog in healthy and/or cured geopolitical spaces, a sick and maskless cazumbi deserving, rather, pity and ostracism, not diligent political aid, vigorous international pressure , to assist in the dissolution of the internal necropolitical hornet, which, in expanded return, threatens all countries from the southern hemisphere.

The criticisms made recently by representatives of several countries in the European Parliament to the tropical gendarme without insignia were so harsh that they rejected him as persona non grata of the sanitaryly responsible democratic world.(7) The paranoid-fetishist crowd filters these vehement protests and denunciations through the gusts of “imaginary communism”, which they feed. The equation is an orthodox rag of common sense: they are “suspicious narratives” – they say openly, without shame – coming from “cultural Marxism”, linked to the “international communist movement” against “Judeo-Christian civilization” and, therefore, justify the ongoing “culture war”, imported from North American conservatism. Laughing at this Brazilian intellectual tragedy is immoral: its deleterious effects make laughter reach the memory of the millions killed by COVID-19.

Dethrone the protofuhrer – advocates broad opposition youth, shoulders aligned with future decades.

Take him out of the most important chair in the Republic – scream, voiceless, orphaned children in the pandemic.

Sweep the genocidal network from the fabric of the State and make way for accelerated and uninterrupted vaccination. Save the planet.

2.

The previous notes inspire a more directed political reflection.

Peculiar evangelical tendencies, assuming biblical monopolies on prosperity as a rhetorical-proselytizing device and as a late-capitalist ideology, gnash teeth and foam in defense of a government that promotes pro-pandemic agglomerations and, with that, squirts disturbances in the population of international quadrants. Maximum date of sale, it is worth, then, a provocation, sent below, with a diametrically divergent interpretative signal, with this preamble: exaggeration can sin, but never by untruth or dishonesty.

The geopolitical-sanitary configuration of Brazil has conditioned, from the southern hemisphere to the globe, the prospective image of an Apocalypse that is also peculiar: that of a pandemic volcano spewing superviruses from all tectonic plates and, little by little, re-involving millions of people in the world , with unpredictable consequences.

The Apocalypse (from the Latin apocalypsis and the Greek apokalupsis, discovery, unmasking or revelation) goes back to prodigious visions, expressed in rich symbolic language in the context of Judeo-Christian scriptures, about a period of great and successive tribulations, due to terrifying events. The events would not precede the entropy of human life on the planet, but would certainly compromise the current societal models. In particular, the Apocalypse, in the apostolic pen and incomparable perspective of John, concerns a time of wars and diseases, misery and famine, death in succession and redemption. The reference to this magnificent text of Western religious antiquity is obviously incorporated in all metaphorical shades, under broad literary, secular and concerned licenses.

This free evocation of religious tradition – to which the reader's imagination may add other meanings, including in the opposite direction, of frowning – does not fail to, at the foot of transcendence, make a symbolic echo, equally troubled and improbable, with the string of current events, due to local and global indicators of a totally unusual pandemic and a very slow vaccination process in the country, in sync with neo-fascist and incessant denialist tendencies.

The expression “beast of beasts” quoted in the previous block would, in fact, be the title of this text, had it not been changed, willingly, to a more sober alternative.(8) Three instructive reasons justified the procedure: first, to avoid personalizing the political and social process, already so bestialized on the bank; second, not to add citrus knick-knacks to the main executive table of the Republic (“talk badly, but talk about me”, says predatory Narciso), a job already accomplished, with competence and names in spades, by the national and foreign press; and, third, not to play with the same weapons used by the voluntary rusticity of the extreme right in attacking Universities and scientific knowledge, especially humanities: the guys know that this honorable loci, which she accuses of being “left-winged”, a cheesy and laughable neologism, is mostly convinced of her own power and anti-fascist light. In relation to this last reason, the flagrant weakness of fundamentalist ultraconservatives and, among them, still content Bolsonarists, does not demonize Universities and human and social sciences by chance: the horde also knows what corrodes their mock landfills, their insipid ruses , his plutocratic intentions. Strictly speaking, they accuse the Universities and science of what prevails exclusively in the political fantasy of their “imaginary communism”. From within the hallucination, they end up thriving on their legs before the very chimera that legitimizes their ways of distilling their liver.

The allegorical power is worth the bet. The title, if with beast it were essentially correct, would not fail, on the other hand, to overshadow the main tenant of hell, unchained in the national territory. The principles of prudence recommend not sparking Dante's stormy circles beyond the grave, in the midst of a pandemic. For so many crimes of responsibility, the guest of the Palace and his minions have already caused the devil too much envy, under the legitimizing cover of mega-companies of the reactionary and positivist faith.

The guest's psychopathy promotes him as if he had a predestined role in the country. This imaginary disturbance reflects (and matches) the vocal delusions of peers, many of whom are angry. The lucrative undertaking of fundamentalist transcendence, however, has designs that are beyond implausible – totally non-existent. The absence of these divine chances should already be obvious: the devil's own house, in the Old Testament as in the epic-medieval poem by Dante Alighieri, hell appears as an exception from the domains of the sacred.

By the way, if you were a Brazilian witness after 2018, the incomparable author of Comedy, in the prosperous pre-four hundred Italian – work to which Giovanni Boccacio, his admirer, predicted, years later, the happy preposition Divine, added to the work from 1555 onwards – would have no doubts, in its rigorous monarchism, of inserting the palace gendarme and his minions in the lowest circles among the nine stipulated for Hell. The intimate of more and more bereaved families in Brazil is not mistaken in assuming how much, in these abysmal levels, hangmans and bloodthirsty inspirers of the central clique and adjacencies.

This absurd scenario, as dishonorable as it is macabre, lashes out at sinister speculations. In small talk, under the conspiratorial stimulus of videos, texts, interviews and posts on the Web, it is said that 1/3 of the world's population has become the target of unconfessed necropolitical interests. From the point of view of the facts and trends of the time, this communicative and pragmatic atmosphere is at least faithful to some kind of logic, regardless of its expected impossibility. If tomorrow such fears prove to be true, Brazil will have competed, with the occupant of the Palace and its mortuary network, to provoke, monitor and complete this socio-Darwinist asepsis.

The growth of this historical circumstance counts, in its favour, with the structural help of a guiding thread that rushes into a dismal void as a naturalized value. The overwhelming spiral of deaths and mourning in the multimedia news involuntarily trivializes the lethal effects of the pandemic on the population, betraying any pedagogical intent of mass and interactive communication. This systemic occurrence, heightened by the proliferation of fake news, collaborates to narcotize and depoliticize the common sense perception: all the more so under fear of contamination, it somehow affects confidence in vehement mass actions in the streets as a way of overcoming the political and health calamity. The laudatory resonance of informative sameness aligns Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard in the ominous paradox of reversal effects: saturation ends up depressing even the critical monitoring of numbers, which will tell what is really going on. This random result coincides with the devastating will of the basements and of a good part of the federal government, to eliminate contradictory thinking, especially the most dissecting and organized, shouldered with social movements of anti-fascist opposition.

3.

The world watches, perplexed, the acute conflict of pistol, fundamentalism and tractor in the National Congress around the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) created last April to determine the responsibility of the federal government in the expansion of deaths by Sars-CoV-2 in the country. The war follows a well-known divisionist pattern: the traditional fracture between left, “centre” and right bleeds exalted polarities.

With regard to the fundamentals, the dichotomy prevails between, on the one hand, the claim for investigative progress, aiming to incriminate the chief militiaman of Brasilia and his destructive model of nationalist, populist and plutocratic administration and, on the other hand, the ostensive forms threats of kidnapping the CPI, with a focus on multiple objectives: diverting the course of the investigation (a fact, in part, consummated by the prediction, in the passive object, of dozens of state governments and city halls) and, with that, hindering undoubted accusatory results, in the prescribed statutory deadline. The maneuvers intend to smear the CPI in advance, with irresistible pizzeria aromas, on a happy hour.

A little over a month before the CPI, artists, intellectuals, jurists, religious people, journalists and professionals from various other areas of activity opened an international outcry to expose the genocide in the country.(9) The text, translated into five foreign languages, says, in its last paragraph: “We appeal to the national instances – STF, OAB, National Congress, CNBB – and to the United Nations. We urge the International Criminal Court (ICC) to condemn the genocidal policy of this government that threatens civilization.”

Top parliamentary and Federal Public Prosecution authorities seem to act as if they were, in fact, expecting external intervention, with unpredictable consequences, including for the very image of the Brazilian people. It would be a triple shame: not having acted at the right time, facing a certificate of incompetence and embittering the evils of an exogenous interference.

In addition to more than 60 (unique) requests for impeachment of the guest of the Palace filed in the Chamber of Deputies, in Brasília,(10), in mid-May, an Original Civil Action was presented to the Federal Supreme Court (STF) requesting his removal from the Presidency of the Republic due to his notorious incapacity for the position .(11) Unprecedented, the Civil Action, on the initiative of Alfredo Attiê, President of the São Paulo Academy of Law, had the support of important jurists, intellectuals and academics. Regardless of any controversy over the jurisdiction for processing and adjudicating the claim, the initial petition, well adapted to the STF, presents impeccable arguments and supporting evidence, pointing out constitutional, social and psychological reasons that are more than sufficient for the immediate interdiction of the guest, after the phases of contradiction and expertise.

In the same month, famous professionals from the media, cultural and sports scene, gathered in the “Vidas Brasileiras” movement, filed yet another request for impeachment in the Chamber of Deputies.(12)

The trend of constitutional rejection of the pro-pandemic federal horror is strengthening at a fast pace.

The credible seismograph of research institutes corroborates the demands: barely overcome a biennium of mismanagement, a growing half of the Brazilian population no longer supports so much institutional, administrative and sanitary vandalism.(13)

The historic embarrassment of political deafness and inaction at the top of the National Congress and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office - which a legitimate and remote suspicion could even take as evidence of the visceral fear of hidden militia forces - has already definitively stuck to the letters of the Republic.

Make no mistake about those who today intend to get away with it, such as those whose mandates have recently ended: the taint of complicity in genocide spills equally to each one. The boomerang has a precise radar: it involves the name, image and shoulders of positions of omission, paid with public money - the precious pecuniary of the same population that, in a very high percentage, evaluates the performance of an internally bleak government as bad and terrible and, in geopolitics global, eremitic.(14)

The responsibility weighs more on those who have a mandate under electoral rotation. In the next lawsuits, there will be how much, linked to conniving participation in the list of coffins.

The continuing gravity of morbid surrealism in the country re-environments and re-scales the procedure J'accuse, title of the famous open letter published by the writer Émile Zola, in the newspaper dawn, on January 13, 1898.(15) Zola's indignation, reported to the then president of France, Félix Faure, revolved around the defense of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus. Arrested at the end of 1894 for alleged treason and espionage on behalf of Germany, Dreyfus was exposed to anti-Semitic public execration and sentenced to exile and forced labor on Devil's Island, a penal colony of horrors in French Guiana, on the northern coast of Latin America. Twelve years later, he had his innocence recognized, with the right to reintegrate into the army and receive a state decoration. Internationally scandalous, the “Dreyfus case”, as it became known, involved systematic and blatant sabotage of elementary judicial guarantees. At stake, therefore, in addition to the treatment of a citizen and the institutional credibility of the Armed Forces, was the fate of the rule of law, with regard to the expected fair trial, in accordance with due legal process and through full defense.

The anti-fascist indignation in Brazil – I accuse – alleviates the health fragility of millions of poor and vulnerable people, humiliated by the contempt and sarcasm of networked genocides. Today, the indignation – I accuse – revolves around demands that are paradoxically regressive and, at the same time, urgent: the defense of the collective right – as obvious as it is boycotted – to public health and decent sanitary conditions; the defense of the desperate efforts of science and faster vaccination; the advocacy of extensive emergency relief for the unemployed and needy, and so on—in a word, the advocacy of life, as Dreyfus once was of liberty.

In honor of Zola and all the victims of Covid-19 in the country, including the photojournalist Lilo Clareto, at the age of 61 – I emphasize and extend Eliane Brum’s complaint(16), and accuse –, the significant collective revolt is directed , with obvious links, to the aforementioned leadership positions sworn in constitutional obedience: one by one, at the table of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate and at the top of the Public Ministry. With limited exception, all are, directly or indirectly, associated with the spectacular compromise with the corporal and psychological torment of the Brazilian population – in short, with the Great Illicit in the open, in the profusion of expanded cemeteries. It is the most voluminous political and judicial ignominy in the history of republican Brazil, regardless of sanitary rales.

The siege needs to close on the Palace guest and his minions.

Whoever hangs on that cord must pull him out of the State and the limelight of history by his own complicity.

He arrives!

Dethrone the gendarme as quickly as possible. Literally disarm the genocidal network – sigh the children who, underground, in their maternal wombs, were not even born.

* Eugene Trivinho is professor of the Graduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

Notes

(1) Current indicators inspire worrying speculation. See yourself at:

https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/economia/2021/03/desempenho-economia-brasileira-pib.

(2) For an overview of the conditions for the emergence of these viruses with the greatest deadly power, see the cover story of the magazine Fapesp Research n. 302, year 22, April 2021.

The lack of sanitary control also generated a super fungus resistant to the foreseen drugs. See this article from Fapesp Agency: https://agencia.fapesp.br/covid-19-criou-condicoes-para-a-emergencia-de-superfungo-no-brasil/35923/.

(3) See https://epoca.globo.com/economia/brasileiros-podem-viajar-sem-restricoes-para-apenas-oito-paises-24971989 e https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-56754365.

(4) Here are two works by Yara Nogueira Monteiro: From the Divine Curse to social exclusion: a study of Leprosy in São Paulo (Doctoral Thesis, USP, 1995); and the article “Violence and prophylaxis: São Paulo preventories for children of leprosy carriers”, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-12901998000100002. Two other doctoral researches should also be mentioned: by Dilma Fátima Avellar Cabral da Costa, Between ideas and actions: leprosy, medicine and public health policies in Brazil (1984 to 1934), 2007, available at: https://www.historia.uff.br/academico/media/aluno/826/projeto/Tese-dilma-fatima-avellar-cabral-da-costa.pdf; and Carolina Pinheiro Mendes Cahu de Oliveira, From leprosy to leprosy: more than a name, new discourses about the disease and the patient. 1950-1970, completed in 2012: https://repositorio.ufpe.br/bitstream/123456789/11000/1/Tese%20-%20Carolina%20Pinheiro%20Mendes%20Cahu%20de%20Oliveira.pdf.

See also the article by Abrahão Rotberg, “The pejorative 'leprosy' and the great victim of a serious medical-social-historical error: defenseless Latin America”, from 1975, in https://www.revistas.usp.br/revhistoria/article/view/132907/128970.

Additional information at: https://saude.abril.com.br/blog/tunel-do-tempo/hanseniase-e-as-historias-de-um-brasil-que-esta-na-idade-media/.

(5) See the Conjuncture Bulletin n. 27 (Feb. 2021), of the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE), in: https://www.dieese.org.br/boletimdeconjuntura/2021/boletimconjuntura27.html.

Compare with 63ª edition (Dec. 2020) of the Economics Conjuncture Bulletin of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l1aCa-0K5-uYnmdZQUPxKV2ike3MyMqK/view.

Additional information at: https://g1.globo.com/economia/noticia/2020/12/05/desemprego-alto-juros-baixos-inflacao-contida-veja-estimativas-para-os-indicadores-economicos-em-2021.ghtml.

(6) See, for example, https://www.oantagonista.com/brasil/brasil-e-ameaca-para-america-latina-e-para-o-resto-do-mundo-diz-oms e https://www.oantagonista.com/brasil/crise-sanitaria-no-brasil-virou-ameaca-para-o-mundo-diz-cnn-americana.

(7) Details on: https://valor.globo.com/brasil/noticia/2021/04/29/bolsonaro-criticado-por-gesto-criminosa-e-mortes-da-pandemia-no-parlamento-europeu.ghtml.

(8) From the conception to the last paragraph, plenty of reasons make the text the split version of “Dethrone the genocidal network”, published in Brazil 247.

(9) The document is available at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeAUTbllrhdBSuBMceaIxrzcSHff70-5uLxVM7LCIhlXWV9ig/viewform. Reporting in: https://www.cartacapital.com.br/cartaexpressa/intelectuais-fazem-carta-aberta-a-humanidade-contra-bolsonaro/.

(10) Cf. public information in https://apublica.org/impeachment-bolsonaro/.

(11) The full text of the initial petition is available at: https://apd.org.br/leia-a-integra-do-pedido-de-incapacitacao-do-presidente-da-republica-ao-stf. Journalistic context in: https://www.jb.com.br/pais/politica/2021/05/1030166-juristas-entram-no-supremo-com-pedido-de–declaracao-de-incapacidade-de-bolsonaro.html.

(12) More details at: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2021/05/4926680-artistas-e-youtubers-entram-com-pedido-de-impeachment-contra-bolsonaro.html.

(13) The survey was carried out by Atlas and Datafolha in different periods of the first half of 2021. Information at:

(14) According to Datafolha, disapproval of the country's administrative conduct reached 45% in May 2021. The data are at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2021/05/datafolha-aprovacao-a-bolsonaro-recua-seis-pontos-e-chega-a-24-a-pior-marca-do-mandato-rejeicao-e-de-45.shtml. In particular, 56% do not believe in the leadership capacity of the Palace guest. See yourself at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2021/03/datafolha-56-dizem-que-bolsonaro-nao-tem-condicao-de-liderar-o-pais.shtml.

Two months earlier, while the health portfolio suffered the fourth minister replacement, 54% perceived the management of the health crisis by the Planalto as bad or bad. More details at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2021/03/datafolha-rejeicao-a-bolsonaro-na-gestao-da-pandemia-bate-recorde-e-vai-a-54.shtml.

(15) The text is available at: https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/vents/Zola-jaccuse.pdf.

(16) A moving testimony of lucid mourning, in the deepest pain, with just aim: https://www.facebook.com/brumelianebrum/posts/299780034843162. Contextualization in:

https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2021-04-21/lilo-clareto-os-olhos-do-mundo-na-amazonia-morre-de-covid-19-em-sao-paulo.html.

 

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