By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBUQUERQUE*
Bolsonarism wide open.
Some believe in Santa Claus. As Erich Fromm reminds us, in his classic work The fear of freedom (Zahar), in the space of escape from reality, authoritarianism in general arises as a response to those individuals who renounce their own autonomy, refuse the independence of the individual ego in order to merge it with something in the outside world to make the fantasy of feeling themselves supported by someone powerful and superior.
This escape mechanism presents itself through submission and domination, impulses also known as masochism and sadism, both serving as a response to an unbearable helplessness in the face of Existence. In this context, masochistic impulses tend to help individuals to escape their intolerable feeling of loneliness and impotence through submission to those who represent an authoritarian power that gives them security.
On the other hand, the term “malignant narcissism”, Fromm used to refer to someone with a serious pathological condition of “self-love”, which among the symptoms are feelings of grandeur, domination, impulsiveness, intolerance, indifference for others and lack of remorse for crimes committed. Dictators create a reality for themselves and begin to believe that the world is meant to be in their image and likeness, acting so that their subjects are their mirror. It is not by chance that they produce expressions such as “my party”, “my army”, “my constitution”.
This theory fits very well as one of the analytical supports for understanding the election of Bolsonarism in 2018, as a step towards deepening the hybrid coup of 2016, based on a strategic orchestration defined by the military establishment, conducted by the then commander Villas Bôas with its four-star generals; the hegemonic media, under the command of Rede Globo; sectors of the judiciary, under the media baton of Sérgio Moro (convicted for suspicion and incompetence by the STF); Christian religious sectors of Catholic tradition (Rede Vida, Rede Canção Nova, Charismatic Renewal, TV Evangelizar, Therapeutic farms, etc.) and of evangelical tradition (Igreja Universal, Igreja da Graça, Assembly of God and others); o National and international capital, through its representatives in the National Congress.
The coup electoral strategy in 2018 was based on the deconstruction and demonization of the leaders and public policies responsible for setting in motion the participatory and inclusive democratic process that governed the country from 2003 to 2015, in order to, at the same time, artificially create an incorruptible Myth, “unbroken ”, “inedible”, “chosen by the will of God” and “anointed by the people”, shielding him from any media opposition and investigation by republican police and judicial institutions. A string puppet, turned president, to distract the great mass of viewers through an ingenious policy of “fake news”, in the face of the destruction, by the extreme right in power, of the ongoing Brazilian social conquests.
The journalist Elio Gaspari, in his magnificent work in five books, “As Ilusões Armadas”, focused on the study of the military dictatorship established in Brazil from 1964, teaches that after the consolidation of a political coup, such as the one that occurred in 2016 in Brazil, its worst phase, which he calls the “phase of ambitions”, when the coup plotters installed in the government begin to define “with whom” and “where” the assaulted power will be sliced.
As an illustration, Gaspari's account of the maneuver carried out by General Amaury Krugel, then commander of the Second Army, headquartered in São Paulo, to neutralize the power of his historical enemy, General Humberto Castelo Branco, stands out. For this, Krugel formed an alliance with the tropeiro Costa e Silva, allowing him to wall up the dictator from Ceará to assume power in 1967.
Last Friday, 25/06, we attended the CPI on Genocide, in the Federal Senate, to the testimony of the Miranda brothers denouncing the strong corruption scheme devised in the Ministry of Health, reason for the installation of the CPI, in the event of overpricing in the importation of vaccine Covaxin, even mediated by a triangular operation by the presence of a third offshore company from Singapore.
We would like to highlight three brief aspects of that moment. Firstly, attention is drawn to the fact that heritage value has an ascendancy over the value of human life. Until then, the multitude of complaints presented and proven by the CPI in relation to negligence and deliberate attitudes on the part of the Ministry of Health operators, in obedience to the President of the Republic, which caused the death of 510 thousand people to date, have not were enough to cause commotion and the proper referral for the conviction of those responsible.
Only with the emergence of financial corruption, contained in the aforementioned import operation, is there a social motivation aimed at demanding the punishment of those responsible, including the President of the Republic. A clear demonstration of the inversion of values caused by the materialist culture produced by neoliberal capitalism, for which absolute value is Material Profit to the detriment of the intrinsic and irreplaceable value of human life. It is necessary to think critically about this data.
Secondly, in relation to the deponent Ricardo Miranda, public servant since 2011, with the legal guarantee of stability in the service, responsible for the ministry's logistics department. His condition as a servant of the Brazilian State – and not of governments, as the administrative reform of Paulo Guedes intends – allowed him to react firmly to the pressure of his corrupt superiors who required him to release an extremely irregular and illegal import, not corresponding to the signed contract. and homologated. Ricardo Miranda made the right choice, for what can be communicated to others. What is incorrect defended by corrupt superiors, as we already had the opportunity to reflect in another article, is exactly the opposite: what needs to be kept in the bush.
Finally, it is necessary to record the quality of political action contained in most members of the CPI on Genocide. Despite representing a minority in the Senate, they hold an invaluable political value by consistently and firmly assuming the role of representatives of the people who suffer from the suffering of the genocide of 510 Brazilian men and women, resulting from the necropolitics deliberately adopted by those responsible for the Executive Federal.
Since neither the Attorney General's Office (PGR) nor the Federal Police (PF) fulfilled their republican role in investigating the evident crimes committed by the Federal Executive, since always, in conducting the fight against the pandemic, popular sovereignty and civil society institutions , through the political action of the CPI of the Senate, were able to gain access, through facts and documentary evidence, to the crimes of prevarication and corruption – passive and active – present within the Bolsonaro government. The Senate CPI proves the importance and strength of political action as resistance to authoritarianism.
Now we have reached a new level with Bolsonarism being wide open. What will religious, military, capitalists, judges, prosecutors, supporters in general do, in the face of the Bolsonarist farce that day after day is stripped naked in front of TV cameras? Will they radicalize with the coup mounted by them or will they give in to the vexation of seeing the first images of their putrid wounds exposed?
String puppet mask is thinning. What will your mentor, General Villas Bôas, say? After all, the mask of Moro (Russian code name in the legal underworld), for whom Villas Bôas had deep admiration, has already been torn recently by the hands of the Federal Supreme Court (STF). And just remembering, on the PSDB side, at the time of Villas Bôas’s twitter threatening the STF, in April 2018, governors João Dória and Geraldo Alckmin said that that armed threat was just “a simple alert, serene words, manifestation of a ordinary citizens". But as mentioned above, there are those who believe in Santa Claus.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE)
