By LUIZ MARQUES*
Denialism has a bitter bill to pay for bereaved families
A conceptual expansion, the explicit segregation defended in the insignia of a federal entity, the premeditated death by a ruler amid the proliferation of the virus and the disparagement of native cultures are evocations of a historical phenomenon. Faced with the PT's fourth consecutive presidential victory, the ruling classes generated an inheritance that accounts for two lethal plagues: Jair Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism. These plagues compounded the many-sided curse of "genocide."
Expansion of the concept
The crime of genocide is included in Resolution 96, of 1946, of the United Nations (UN). It linked a subjective intentionality to an objective act. The initiative echoed the Jewish Holocaust in the Nazi gas chambers of World War II. In Brazil, ten years later, the crime was typified by law as “the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. It illustrated: “(i) killing members of the group; (iii) cause serious harm to the physical or mental integrity of group members; (iii) intentionally submitting the group to conditions of existence capable of bringing about its total or partial physical destruction”. The causal link was reaffirmed.
In 1977, however, the leader of the black movement Abdias Nascimento sent a manifesto entitled Genocide of the Brazilian black: process of a masked racism, to the World Festival of Black African Arts and Cultures (Festac 77), in the city of Lagos/Nigeria, informs the Dictionary of negationisms in Brazil, organized by José Szwako and José Luiz Ratton. The concept was expanded.
In the libel, the organic intellectual accuses the State of erasing the formidable black contribution to the nation in all dimensions and, at the same time, problematizes the intentionality expressed as a criterion for a conceptualization. The deeds speak, per se, without the obligation of a purpose stipulated by the will of the subjects. To violence, in a broad sense, was added the genocide of people of African descent.
Humans are linguistic beings. The words spoken drive actions with the potential to attack, injure and kill, analyzes Judith Butler, in Hate speech: a politics of the performative. Femicide, homophobia and the bullying give full proof. The system inoculates institutional (structural) racism into social life and language. The counteroffensive of the “politically correct” narrative is justified to expel discriminatory expressions from the public space. Cynics mock.
Massacre of Porongos
Recently, the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul approved a Proposal for an Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) to make it difficult to change a racist passage in the anthem of Rio Grande do Sul: “People who have no virtue end up being slaves”. As if enslaved were people without moral qualities and, therefore, deserved to vegetate in captivity. Ultimately, the blame for slavery would lie with the victim, not the perpetrator. Reasoning is perverse; the decision of the deputies, ditto. A not-so-subtle way of blocking the debate about a genocide that persists in contemporary times.
The argument in favor of the permanence of the mystifying phrase of white supremacy recovers the authoritarian sociological thought of the beginning of the 1932th century, which incubated the totalitarian notion of “Integral State” of the Ação Integralista Brasileira (1835). "Tradition shows that we are one people," claimed the far-right spokesman. The reasoning is crude: the people are one, the nation is one, the State is one. Political parties, unions, ethnic groups, because they only represent parts, are disposable. “Our party is Brazil”. There would be no reason to tinker with the traditionalist lyric. The cowardly massacre of Porongos was updated, where the black lancers were decimated in the Farroupilha Revolution (45-XNUMX), due to the treacherous agreement reached between the provincial elite and the central government.
The inability to champion diversity in unity is inherent in closed regimes. PT, PSOL and PCdoB representatives voted against the PEC that erected barriers to prevent the story from changing the hymn lyrics. Driven by the new fascists, others joined in with savage discrimination. The infamous racialization was endorsed by Parliament. After the flagrant work analogous to slavery in large wineries, it was up to the neocolonialists to bury the memory of the egalitarian ideals of Giba Giba and Sirmar Antunes. Abdias Nascimento, who gives his name to an overpass in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, would refuse the official homage when confronted with the dagger in the heart of the appeal for recognition.
It is not surprising that Governor Eduardo Leite, of the PSDB, supports the setback endorsed by his parliamentary base which, hello!, encloses the PDT and the PSB. It also corroborates the employment hanger of the Armed Forces reservist cadres, the military colleges, whose indoctrination for discipline and obedience domesticates the workforce with a view to occupying low-skill positions in the labor market; instead of investing in a pedagogy of freedom, creativity and leadership of young people with the expectation of leveraging better job opportunities in the future. The toucan flatters neo-fascism, in the dangerous illusion of fishing for centrist votes in the swamp of Casa Grande.
Debt of denialism
The decision of the Supreme Court Minister, Gilmar Mendes, to unarchive the process that investigates the former president's omission or negligence in the pandemic opens the way to criminal responsibility for the 700 victims in the period. Denialism has a bitter bill to pay for bereaved families. Indeed, half of the deaths were preventable. It is up to the Attorney General's Office (PGR) to take a stand on whether or not to resume the issue. Previously, archived at her request.
The genocidal anathema, the ineligible already has. This category includes Deputy General Eduardo Pazuello (PL/RJ), the former Minister of Health who trivialized evil (“one commands, the other obeys”). Only a rigorous punishment of the hierarchy in the chain of command will bring peace to the souls of the survivors.
Those responsible, by law, adopted the strategy of herd immunity instead of immunizations. They boycotted social isolation for the sake of the economy. They delayed the purchase of vaccines at the cost of thousands of lives. They propagated medicines not recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). They prevailed when they were informed of negotiations by official authorities in the purchase of vaccine doses outside legal means, with billionaire bribes. As if that were not enough, they mocked lives the pain and suffering of patients with shortness of breath. “Little flu”, “Enough of mimimi”, “Country of sissies”, “Do you want to become an alligator?”, “It's fate”, “Everyone is going to die”, “I'm not a gravedigger, taokey? "
“Jair Bolsonaro was never a democrat and Bolsonarism, although vague and diffuse, is characterized by a racist, authoritarian, exclusionary doctrine and by the cultivation of hatred and lies as a way of mobilizing its militants”, writes Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva, in the article “Bolsonaro: three coups d’état and one genocide”, in Brazil under rubble: challenges for the Lula government to rebuild the country. It is not the absence of empathy that is in focus, but the responsibility for the extermination of those who were deprived of adequate and feasible treatment during the pandemic.
judge, condemn, punish
Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva adds another bestiality to the curriculum of the false messiah: “In addition to the urgent need for intervention in emergency situations, such as the case of the genocide of the Yanomami community”. The case involves the director of Funai, a fundamentalist Pentecostal pastor, and the former Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, who did not climb the guava tree to help the guardians of the forest. There is suspicion of diversion of financial resources and medication to NGOs linked to evangelical churches. The figures are being calculated, they have the exact size of the sin.
The former head of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), general Augusto Heleno, and the former vice president general and now senator, Hamilton Mourão (Republicanos/RS), are suspected of facilitating the invasion of prospectors in indigenous lands. Proceedings to annihilate the ancestors had the lieutenant's approval, and for good reason from mandatory retirement at age 33, captain, thanks to unearned promotion. The terrorist planned to detonate time bombs to pressure the corporation's salary increase. The dictator Ernesto Geisel considered his expulsion. In the end, he was rewarded.
The genocide (physical and symbolic) carried out by the civil-military plot made possible the horror against the ethnic population. Jair Bolsonaro deserves to be judged, condemned and punished for the perversions committed in the four years of misgovernment in the service of the Rastaquera nobility, who do not like the country or the people. The reconstruction of institutions under the bias of democracy requires that crimes against humanity leave anonymity and be exposed alongside the scoundrels, caught with their mouths in the can. Zero amnesty for them.
Nevertheless, justice is situated within the liberal worldview, focused on atomized individuals or on a gang formation. To raise plebeian perception to the level of dialectical criticism, it is necessary to point out the role, in necropolitics, of the ruling classes still unknown in public opinion.
The people versus the elites
The passage from real consciousness to possible consciousness is not mechanical, bookish, amateurish. It implies an active participation in social movements and ideological disputes with the guiding value of solidarity, as an alternative to the competition that converts the wolf man from the man (homo homini lupus), in the jungle of capitalism. More: it calls for engagement in the “wars of position” that forge consensus until exiting the genocide maze. Ariadne's thread is political praxis.
From progressive parties and entities (union, community, student centrals) street demonstrations are expected to challenge informality, drivers and application delivery people, telemarketers, cosmetics sellers, etc. It is in the strata affected and humiliated by capitalist overexploitation that utopia or dystopia develops. Today, the class struggle establishes a divide between the “people” and the “elites”. The facts support populist Manichaeism.
The extreme right has simplified the class struggle. “The conservative reaction seeks a profound transformation of the terms of political discourse and the creation of a new 'definition of reality' that, under the cover of 'individual freedom', would legitimize inequalities and restore the hierarchical relationships that struggled (emancipating) in previous decades had destroyed", according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical politics. Collective actors are now constituted by antagonism. Although questionable, it is true that the “political center” has evaporated. Moreover, it was not a civilizational factor, except in the myth of neoliberal modernization that widened the distance from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. See interview of Paulo Arantes, on the website the earth is round.
Under current conditions, the democratic revolution is not projected into intersubjective dialogic consensus. Lênio Streck is right: “CPMI treats the attempted coup d'état as theft from a supermarket”. It is a mistake to naturalize the gravity of the entanglement that culminated in the putsch failed. The next elections in the United States and Brazil will affect the outcome of the plot, which haunts the future with the climate crisis, the democratic crisis and the geopolitical crisis. The changes within reach of the Lula 3.0 government serve as a dam to a dynamic with international thrust. In our time, the fate of the world is decided by barbarism or socialism. As the poem, by Thiago de Mello, warns: “Time is for care, mate. / It is above all a time of vigil. / The enemy is loose and is disguised”.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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