By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBUQUERQUE*
The US hypostatizes, simultaneously, in the hearts and minds of most western populations, fatherhood and divinity
For the constitution and maintenance of authoritarian States, the emotional factor is decisive in conducting the manipulation of the psychology of the masses. The ability to manage the emotions of individuals and groups, mainly through the means of social communication, the deformation of objective arguments, through which human thought can take hold of factual reality in order to interpret and understand it, becomes the tactic used by these States when they do without reflection on the contexts and causes that provoke them – economic, political, historical – to point only to the “ultimate objective” of their actions in order to justify them and make them endorsed by populations.
Therefore, the management of human emotions requires teaching and propaganda, strong and constant, ranging from early childhood to the most mature age. In this, for example, religious precepts occupy a prominent place in this context of conscience formation as they instill in the genesis of the child's thinking concepts that are decisive for them, such as the concept of sin. A child who does not respect his father commits sin; or else, a teenager who secretly practices masturbation commits sin, because God sees everything. That is, the figure of the father is presented as someone unquestionable to whom one owes obedience. And from God's omnipresent watchful eye, no one can escape. Anyone who commits such slips is considered a sinner.
The slogan “Brazil above all” (hypostatizing the father figure), umbilically associated with its indivisible complement “God above all”, faces of the same medal, was built by the civil-military group that took power, with the Hybrid Coup of 2016, as being the programmatic synthesis for the ideological manipulation of Brazilian hearts and minds aiming at the construction of an authoritarian State, destroyer of a large part of the values, rights and democratic institutions in force in Brazil, since the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution , whose improvement was developing in a dynamic and exemplary way during the Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma (2011-2016) governments.
With the civil-military coup, the ruling class interrupted the Brazilian democratic process, through strong moralist and fundamentalist propaganda, supported by hate speech and intolerance towards “sinners” who disagree with it. From this comes the mantra, in temples and barracks, to identify Bolsonaro as an anointed of God, a new Messiah. And from this propagandistic orchestration stems the mythological construction of the stabbing episode, widely questioned in various areas of critical thought.
A similar case of ideological manipulation is found in the propagandistic conduct of the US world power in relation to the war being waged in Ukraine, despite being a NATO war, subjugated by the US, against the sovereignty of the Russian State.
Two questions we would like to highlight in this article. Firstly, it concerns the economic sanctions imposed by the US against those nations that disagree with them (nations considered to be sinners). In February, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order confiscating US$7 billion (US$3,5 billion) in assets held by the Afghan Central Bank in US financial institutions. In addition, Biden seized US$20 billion (three and a half billion dollars) that would be used for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The economic war triggered by Joe Biden, as US president, means, in the Afghan case, that about one million Afghan children are at serious risk of dying from malnutrition. All this after a devastating XNUMX-year US invasion. What Biden does by ordering this further economic sanction is condemning huge numbers of innocent Afghans to a cruel and slow death by starvation. If this is not a war crime, what is? Where are the media going to denounce, through intense and continuous coverage, this US war crime?
Secondly, we refer to the episode involving the testimony of the US Under Secretary of State, the neoconservative Victoria Nuland (that lady filmed by social media distributing food in Maidan Square, in Ukraine, in 2014), before the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate of that country, on March 08 of this year. In response to Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who with his question – “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?” – hoping for an end to growing allegations of the existence of US-funded and coordinated chemical weapons laboratories in Ukraine, Nuland replied: “Ukraine has biological research facilities”. And she quickly added: "We are working with the Ukrainians to prevent any of these research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces."
Therefore, Victoria Nuland's admission that Ukraine has biological research facilities dangerous enough to justify concern that they might fall into Russian hands, lays bare the American cynicism in accusing Iraq of carrying out such research, which justified the invasion and destruction of that country by George W. Bush, when in fact the US develops and coordinates biological weapons research.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already stated that "the US has 336 biological weapons research laboratories in 30 countries under its control, including only 26 in Ukraine". Likewise, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia stated that “it is in possession of documents proving the existence of biological laboratories in Ukraine, working on the development of components of biological weapons, located near the borders with Russia”.
One wonders: what did Western media do and do in the face of such devastating sins? Shut up, omit. At the same time, no nation in the world invaded the US for developing such lethal weapons for humanity. The US hypostatizes, simultaneously, in the hearts and minds of most western populations, fatherhood and divinity. Consequently, for these hearts and minds, the US is pure, does not commit sins.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE).
