neighborhood parafascism

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By RICARDO SALLES*

Bolsonarist fascism is closer to a parasitic militia embedded in State Institutions

In a risky but calculated simplification, the assertion that Fascism is a Right Totalitarianism, as much as Stalinism is a Left Totalitarianism, is not entirely inaccurate. And nearby parafascism seems to be a caricatural attempt, a deformed test of what is intended as a Right-wing Totalitarianism, deprived, however, of the ideological apparatus of Fascism.

Something that is closer to a parasitic militia embedded in State Institutions.

That's right, a portrait shrouded in darkness of what is usually called the government of Jair Bolsonaro & family.

There are, in the specialized literature, works of excellent quality analyzing the origins and development of Fascism in different parts of the world, including Brazil, where Plínio Salgado's Integralism was able to move away from European racism and, abandoning the idea of ​​racial superiority white, elaborate a mestizo specificity of the ultra-right.

One thing, however, is undeniable: the European fascist variants and caboclo Integralism itself were, in origin, the work of intellectuals, evil people or non-believers of good, but intellectuals, even if they did not have the brilliance of a Gabriele d'Annunzio , poet and playwright, hero of Italian Fascism.

There were not, at the summit – I repeat, at the summit – of the great fascist movements, types similar, at their very low level, to Fabrício Queiroz, Captain Adriano de tal, Bolsonaro and family members, Pazuello, Damares, Mourão, Ronnie Lessa, Augusto Heleno, Weintraub (of sad memory…) and ogres and ogres of the genre. Unthinkable, with this directory of destruction that, associated with eucomiasts of stupidity and greedy profiteers, assaulted the State after the election of the retired captain, the conception of a philosophical superstructure that proposes, with some probability of theoretical consistency, a system of ideas like was Integralism. Greetings like Anauê!, the Amerindian 'hi', Vovô Índio, to replace Santa Claus, symbols such as the Σ (sigma), the version adopted in Pindorama of the Nazi swastika cross, finally an ideological background starting from an abstraction – the Nation –, as the ultimate caretaker of the interests of the people, the State, its uncontested representative, following the example of the Integralist creed, would never get out of the minds of such primitive people.

Say what you can against the military of the 64 Coup – and it will hardly have been enough – but the summit definitely had a much better level than Bolsonaro and his gang. There is deservedly bad talk about Castelo Branco and Golbery, but there is, in sight, no one with the intellectual level of those generals, who, in any case, were not sumptuous. They were just people of their time, adopters of the utilitarian Manichaeism imposed by North American neocolonialism. They were soldiers who, even if they had their own ideas, were professionally obliged to subordinate them to options dictated by the strategic interests of one of the Cold War powers, often disguised as struggles for freedom that were intended to be global, barely disguising domestic interests from the center of power to the detriment of peripheral countries, its compulsory customers. Their political preferences counted for little and, when they did not submit to Washington's dictates, their days at the decision-making poles were numbered. Evidently, aware or not of this limitation, they accommodated themselves to the ethos of colonized people and behaved with aplomb in what they incorporated as a pseudopatriotic duty and the task of defending an order that had little proximity to serious alternatives that any minimally critical reasoning would have allowed them to glimpse.

Even after the Cold War years, this intellectual limitation of the Brazilian military has stubbornly persisted, with greater or lesser intensity, depending on the governments of the time, both in the United States and here. It serves, on the one hand, the interests of Washington and, on the other hand, the convenience of a minority of officers in the armed forces, duly co-opted with luxury 'fish'. The price of accommodation, however, has varied over time, especially with a well-prepared military elite that has been decreasing in quantity and quality. The Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) itself, where what was intended as an intellectual cream, of senior military and civilians, was completely disfigured. I well remember a conversation I had, about 15 years ago, with a general officer who worked there, when I was told that the ESG had – already at that time – an important role in training and adapting senior officers to the civilian business world. , with the idea that they could aspire to jobs in senior management there, in particular to supplement their pay, since they retired very early.

Bolsonaro, today, attracts military with 'fish', that is, he implements a clientelistic substitute for what the job market should, under normal conditions, be offering in exchange for services from high-level people. As a result, the professional quality of the military remains low, making it increasingly difficult for them to be used other than as good order-followers or “door openers”. Well-informed decisions, following a model of deliberation by the General Staff, are not a luxury, but a necessity in any large-scale collective undertaking, something increasingly rare, given the lack of serious investment in higher education in strategic studies. It is a pity that institutions that would have been able to fulfill this role, such as ESG, are not even a shadow of what they could be today.

A person very close to me, an army reserve officer, once shrewdly summarized the profile of certain soldiers with whom he had shared experiences. It should be noted that his reference is to memories of more than 50 years ago, not to general officers, some of whom could even be distinguished, then, by intellectual level. Today, with the deterioration in training, the reference could be to a not inconsiderable amount of military personnel, of any rank. A feather. His testimony: most of the officers he had known in the former First Army (eastern region) came from the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, small towns in São Paulo, Ceará and the suburbs of Rio; I considered them unsuited to studies that were not covered by the handouts (very imbecile, my interlocutor said) distributed by the army; they had a primitive mentality and reasoning, inflamed by what they considered to be the “superior rights” of the military class, impulsive and tending to nationalist radicalism – at the door, I would add; ignorant of the most basic principles of economics, they were suspicious of private initiative, on whose resources they depend so much, firmly believing that state-owned companies were the only way for the country's development and always obsessed with the fight against international communism - which, in a In general, I add, they didn't have the slightest idea what it was...

Does anyone have any doubts that this is the head of Jair Bolsonaro, smelling of mildew and with a configuration typical of the 1950s? Does the musty mentality of Augusto Heleno, the general in pajamas tending to hysterical oligophrenia, who parasites next to Bolsonaro, differ from this?

Bolsonaro decided to equip the Republic with a horde of opportunistic military personnel, active or retired like him, who today hold public office, with a significant number in positions for which one should demand – or, at least, expect – great competence, such as this is the case of those awarded with the 'peixada' of the salary supplement in the Ministry of Health.

There is nothing against the fact that a certain public servant, in non-military functions, is a member of the military. It doesn't matter if the server is competent and performs his duties responsibly. Military or civilian should never be a criterion for filling civil public functions. Capacity and dedication should come first, but this is not exactly what happens in the camaraderie of Bolsonaro and his crowd. A great and very expensive pity...

Now, a theme that is absent in this type of discussion is the fact that, in the Democratic State of Law, Power, emanated from the people, as stated in the Constitution, is essentially civil. There are, in the structure of the State, military and auxiliary forces, but never a military power. That is why it is said that the military, armed forces and auxiliaries will always be subordinated to the political power, consequently civil. If, in a Modern National State – as opposed to Medieval Political Autarchy – there is military hegemony, even if juxtaposed to (civil) Power, it is because there was a coup-like usurpation of power by a uniformed gang. Simply this.

Finally, some linguistic information for anyone who might be interested in the subject.

The prefix par(a)-, which integrates the word parafascism, is of Greek origin, in which domain there is the adverb para, which, in one sense, means close, and there is also an identical preposition with the meaning of next to. As a compositional element placed before the root of a word, it translates the notion that there is proximity in meaning, similarity between the second element – ​​the root itself (or semanteme) – and the new term formed with the aforementioned prefix. Thus, parafascism is used to designate something similar to the philosophical movement, system of ideas or political regime called Fascism.

The suffix -ism (from the Greek –ismos, -Where), originally forming names of verbal action or its result (cf. katekhizo, catechize, katekhizmos, catechism), acquired a wider range of meaning, first in the field of medicine, to designate pathological states resulting from the administration of a toxic agent (cf. alcoholism, etherism) and, later, had widespread use to designate social, ideological, political movements, religious and even personalist (cf. Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Catholicism, Judaism, Stalinism, Maoism).

In the specific case of an alleged Bolsonarism, it will be difficult to determine some body of ideas, given its absolute lack in the commission of stupidity in which the movement is gestated.

*Ricardo Salles is a lawyer in Rio de Janeiro.