By TARSUS GENUS*
The return to democratic politics will not take place until we succeed in completely overcoming the significant remnants of fascist hegemony.
Today, two fundamental questions permeate the country's democratic recovery, where the sphere of politics – with its ills and greatness –, not the organized criminals with their armed minions who assaulted the institutions of the Republic, will decide where we are going in the world of tragedies that they overwhelm us.
The first fundamental issue is expressed in the murder of four children in Blumenau, by a Nazi sociopath, who was stimulated by someone and who accepted that murderous stimulus, as a result of a culture of death and “justice”, which came from the communicative power and the policy of a government of bandits. This murder is a singular barbarism coming from the collective barbarism that attacks the values of the Enlightenment in their democratic face.
The other fundamental issue is the dispute and discussion about the “new fiscal anchor”, by Lula, Fernando Haddad and Simone Tebet, as a moment of overcoming so that, maintaining the majority political front, we can seek a broader economic reform to allow financing from the national State, which can combine a certain fiscal stability with the fight against hunger and unemployment.
I consider this fiscal “framework” the only possibility, in the current correlation of forces, so that we can reduce the weight of the fascist and neo-fascist extreme right, in the bourgeois consortium of domination, which we are getting rid of, considering that what we have as a “center” , in our country of slave-owning descent, will not hesitate to ally itself with fascism, when necessary, to reduce political democracy to nothing and return to the total ideals of the “invisible hand” of the market.
I want to add, on this second point, that I support – until now – the process of composing the “anchor”, because I understand that the current situation in the country, even with Lula’s victory, is more favorable to fascism and death than to democracy and life. This implies recognizing that the minimum social cohesion we need to defeat it must be sought quickly to weaken the possibilities that fascist violence, which also conquered the spirit of the masses, could increase its chances of returning.
Let us remember a little more, at least, the history of barbarism, which is at the genesis of the bourgeois society of the modern market. In a session on March 31, 1821, the Portuguese “Constituent Courts” decreed the extinction of the Tribunal of the Holy Office, an institution born in Portugal in 1536. modern barbarism – there already juridically conformed by religion – organized the new European continent to receive, moderate and at the same time contain the “ethos” of the triumphant enlightenment.
This, at the same time that it imposed its strength on the rich European classes, to put the modern State at their service, unfolded – externally – as a colonial-imperial way of governing, whose barbarism refinements were sheltered by new legal statutes, which remain central to this day. The two great wars are the realization and implosion of the new-old European way of life, with its colonial reflexes: the English massacres in India, the continued genocide of King Leopold in Belgium, Hitler, Mussolini, the war with “Agent Orange”. ” in Vietnam (after the expulsion of the French), the indifference to hunger and tribal massacres in Africa, are contemporary examples of modernity tinged with barbarism.
I maintain that Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, in their own way, are explicit residues of it, and that they return boosted by the new info-digital technologies, absorbed and subsumed by the system of capital in crisis, but triumphant. The Enlightenment moderation of the Inquisition here in Brazil was based on “colonial slavery”, which laid the foundations of modern capitalist society after the Revolution of 1930, based on an agile combination of backwardness and late modernity.
Reorganized and revised by the 64 coup in Brazil, our western barbarism is present – with all its movements and ambiguities – in all the revolutions of the XNUMXth century. Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, however, are not just their residues, which come from within the old Inquisition, through the seal of torture and the absolute demonization of the enemy. They are, in fact, unhealthy compositions of a culture that remained, moving from the old European ruling classes to the global financial elites of armamentism, of the segregation of the unequal, defenders of the “necessary” massacres to maintain order.
In a “speech from the throne” Dom Pedro II had already made a brilliant summary of what our country would be like in this complex transition, in the style of the Rio Branco Law: “The servile element of the Empire cannot fail to deserve (...) your consideration (… ) so that current ownership (of slaves) is respected and without deep shocks to our first industry - agriculture - the high interests linked to emancipation are met”.
In the book's introduction century of lights by Alejo Carpentier, it is recorded that while still crossing the French Revolution, a slave ship whose name revered Jean-Jacques Rousseau passed through the Caribbean seas. Our crossing, to build a free, democratic and prosperous country, in the next 30 years – if that is possible – will not happen if we do not settle the accounts to understand how our slave-owning past – colonial, barbaric – generated the hearts and the minds that in all social classes, with the naturalization of death and pain, to be acceptable in the daily life of the order.
In this world, where insensitivity to the pain of others has also spread among the popular classes and the owners of money (and arms manufacturing) are indifferent to collective wars becoming singular barbarities (such as that of Blumenau) – no no matter how and no matter against whom – it is possible to state that the spirit of nazi-fascism is present and strong, either as complicity or as a threat.
We could succumb if we do not understand more comprehensively this world integrated by commutative transmission of signals and data, where slander and lies on an industrial scale, scientific truths, human grandeur and genocidal perversions of destruction of living conditions on the planet, remain stronger as a dominant, albeit diffuse, consciousness than the memory of the great social struggles of the last century.
Without recognizing that tragedy is waiting for us – stronger than ever – we will not cross this Rubicon, to restore the political struggle to its original dignity. Because the return to democratic politics will not happen without us succeeding in completely supplanting – with a broad political alliance of classes – the significant remnants of fascist hegemony, which still threatens us with its sharp claws by the new religions of money, which are very far away of God, but always very close to the Republic's coffers.
*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).