The three knights of freedom

Image: Lucas Vinícius Pontes
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By TARSUS GENUS*

Lumumba, Martin Luther King and Mandela, and the Brazilian dream for political democracy, respect for human rights and immediate social protection against genocide

The man dreamed that he was helping to build a bridge that was born from the sharpest point of a rock projected over an abyss. At the bottom of the abyss, the Hell described by Dante Alighieri: pain, torture, death, incandescent heat, rape, rape, lamentations of hunger and affection, desertions of the human condition promoted by slave drivers, as executioners accredited by the devil.

Behold, someone – a black man covered in a colored cape – approaches the man who was dreaming and speaks in a slow voice: “pay attention to the foundations of this immense mature wooden bridge, but above all, discover the moment when it is more bent over the abyss, without breaking, and from there measure the distance to the other side, because there will be the balance point, so that the meaning and providential destiny of the bridge is reached by your desire”.

The man who dreamed looks at the visitor – who smiles – and asks him: “who are you?, because I suppose you didn’t appear from the nothingness of history, because I identify you with the black features of Lumumba, Martin Luther King and Mandela, who only symmetry of words can compose, in a symphony of the melancholy Marxism of Walter Benjamin…”. The man who appeared in the dream, from the other man who dreamed, turns his back to leave and suddenly returns to finish: “I am nobody, I am just a metaphor of present history, which takes care that the bridges to the future are not just another bridge to hell.” The dreamer kept thinking of a phrase from Benjamin: “Whoever is fasting speaks of the dream as if he were inside the dream”.

Lumumba, Martin Luther King and Mandela are the metaphor men of the last century. Lumumba cowardly assassinated by the Belgian imperialists, who cut off the arms of black children whose parents had low productivity on the tea plantations of King Leopold, the Hitler of classic colonialism; Martin Luther King assassinated by the fascism predecessors of Donad Trump, in the course of racist and violent campaigns by white supremacists, the Klan and John Birch Society; Mandela, the man who began to govern from prison and said that he would not order an end to the armed struggle before all anti-war fightersapartheid were free and loose to form, in the immediate future, a black majority government in South Africa. These men and women from the last century and from other times, such as Rosa de Luxemburgo, Rigoberta Menchú, Anita Garibaldi, Antonieta de Barros, Dandara, Carolina de Jesus, Tereza de Benguela, are present in each gesture of the three leaders of the dream, in the speech of the unlikely visitor.

At a time when the struggle of leftist and non-fascist democratic parties, social movements and democratic intelligentsia managed to sensitize the most diverse business strata, the Globo and various institutions and leaders representing the state bureaucracy – to form a broad front for the defense of democracy, respect for election results and the defense of electronic ballot boxes (many of these even colluding with the country’s democratic suicide by helping to elect Bolsonaro) – we must celebrate and build this true bridge to the future.

It means a lot: either we have political democracy, respect for human rights and immediate social protection against genocide, also due to the hunger that is approaching, or the country will go into chaos: the perverted anomie of fascism and death at the gates of hell that this always represented are still at our doors.

Our dream is close to the aforementioned three knights of freedom and the utopias of women and men who built the ideas of equality and human dignity, but we are not indifferent to the fact that a large part of the Brazilian elite recognizes that it is better to obtain profits within democracy , removing the beast of fascism and Bolsonarica madness, which many of them gave birth to, than to remain only with dreams without democracy and without conditions to save lives, save institutions, affirm possible dreams, making them real and breaking with the fast of hopes without future.

We belong, most of us – respecting the differences imprinted by different dreams – to the camp that defends that Lula is what he is dreaming of, like us, close to that metaphorical bridge, which can become vivid with a great victory in the first round, for which Brazil reunites around public freedoms and governmental decency.

*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).

 

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