By CRISTIANO ADDARIO DE ABREU*
Considerations on the destruction of politics in Bolsonarist Brazil
The public space in Brazil, the Brazilian Polis, is being destroyed by the advance of an evangelical Talibanization, which seeks to submit the entire Brazilian public space to the fundamentalist sectarian parameters of some evangelical sects. This, in addition to a civilizing regression in itself, is an advance in a general privatization of mentalities, with this dystopia, of the private religious sphere of a still minority portion of society, seeking to be imposed as a public parameter for the whole of society.
The separation of the public and private spheres is the basis of the bourgeois State, and the secularity of this State is a cornerstone of a modern, free and affluent society. The historic disregard for Brazil's poor population, which urbanized rapidly, was taken advantage of by the expansion project of evangelical churches, coming from outside the country, previously tested in places in Latin America where the Marines disembarked, especially in Central America. The evangelical advance in Brazil has transformed us into a country that looks more and more like Guyana or Guatemala.
The Revolution projected by the Brazilian left, in the XNUMXth century, was not carried out, and the accumulation of public neglect over the humble portions of Brazil was taken advantage of by this evangelical movement, and today we witness a true counter-Revolution in Brazil, with violence of just historical resentments not being directed towards economic justice, but towards a moralistic and vindictive punitivism, with a private axis seeking to regulate the public space.
Pulpit cannot be a platform
The present text deals with the dangerous redirection of the political field in Brazil carried out by churches that should deal with the religious sphere of their faithful. Of course, here we are not dealing with all evangelical denominations, and we are not ignoring all the positive dimensions made by the missionary work of many of these evangelical organizations. But in 2022, there is a coordinated wave of absolute support, on the part of evangelical leaders, for a genocidal and anti-Christian president, because he is Malthusian, inhuman and perverse.
The accusation made here that Bolsonaro is someone anti-Christian is based on facts carried out by this president, who disdained science and scientific preventive procedures in the pandemic, who propagated quack treatments against Covid-19, delayed the purchase of vaccines, stole overpriced purchases of these, misgoverned Brazil against the policies of the governors to fight the pandemic, destroying the federative pact... as many Brazilians as possible. This is a proven fact![I]
Therefore, the almost unanimity of pastors of the so-called evangelical sects defend in a block that whoever does not vote for Bolsononaro[ii] this second round of 2022 goes to hell, it is proof of a suspicious, centralized, and oriented coordination of some planetary center: it is a political coordination of this evangelical movement that, by supporting Jair Bolsonaro in this bizarre and blind way, proves to be not at all Christian. It is lucky for Brazil that a good part of the evangelical faithful resist and vote according to their consciences. But the harassment of these pastors is certainly already an electoral crime against a population with many weaknesses, which is being politically coerced, under the criminal harassment and psychological manipulation of the pastors, who exercise psychic control over this population.
Because this current “evangelical” movement, organically linked to Bolsonarism, has nothing to do with Christianity: it is an evangelical Talibanization, a political/neocolonial movement, against all the religious, syncretic traditions of Brazil. Destroying the dialogue and plural coexistence of Brazilian social and cultural life. They destroy the civilizing base of cultural organization in Brazil, which is Catholic. They demonize Afro religions, spiritism and, increasingly, Catholicism itself. If a “Catholic” movement began to grow in the USA, claiming that the evangelical foundations of the USA are something demonic… Do you know what would happen there? The FBI would arrest every sect (disguised as Catholic) that preached like that. Point! In Brazil, the republican forces were lenient with this very dangerous uprising, and we let the public space be hijacked by fundamentalist sects, under external guidance, to destroy the Brazilian Polis. The uncontrolled proliferation of these sects, over a fanatical and ignorant population, is the greatest current problem and the greatest risk to democratic survival in Brazil.
They manipulate a fragile population, and show that they work in a single political direction: against Brazil's internal productive interests, and against the labor interests of the people. Therefore, against any economic interest of Brazil as a unit, and of the interests of popular social categories (where their faithful are) as a class. This unique anti-labor, anti-Catholic, anti-Afro synchrony… bears the mark of an external and colonial direction: it is not a coincidence. Steve Bannon, and his internationalized extreme right did not come to joke: they train and guide their colonial minions around the planet, and what happens in Brazil marks the end of republicanism as we knew it, and is a destruction of the Ibero-Catholic foundations of Brazilian society: they always talk about a “cultural war” because that is what they are doing against the civilizing foundations of Brazil. What happened to Sudan, Yugoslavia, Syria, is being cooked up for Brazil, in the fascist and neocolonial sewer of Bolsonarism.
The privatization of souls
The destruction of the Republic we are living, whose fundamentalist expression emerges in this Bolsonarist militancy of pastors, originates in a long campaign by the Brazilian monopoly media against the policy made for the side of work in Brazilian society: the defense of Labor Laws, the CLT, and the social rights… All of this has been criminalized by media neoliberalism.[iii] The regulation of capital flows, or the defense of directing capital towards production, via state-owned companies… They were also censored from public debate, also criminalized. Therefore, politics has to be curtailed, surrounded, castrated, by the single agenda of “neoliberalism” (gerontoliberalism) ideological, ghostly, ahistorical…
As seen in the presidential debates of the first round, with a generic “new” candidate, with the face of an actor from a six o’clock soap opera, I defend “economic opening”, for “capital flows”…. In a world that is at war! USA and China have nationalist policies: it is not possible to have a candidate for president who ignores such facts with impunity. but no Brave New World Post-modernism is indeed possible: because the media phantasmagoria, of the intellectual fraud of “neoliberalism”, for over 40 years repeated lobotomically by the monopoly media, has destroyed any collective intellectual capacity.
The moralist and privatist agenda of the evangelical churches, is the moralist radicalization, which reflects and tunes in, a long corporate media campaign for the restriction of politics within neoliberalism. The neo-scholastic doctrine of neoliberalism of the last 40 years is a process in tune with the evangelical Talibanization that Brazil is going through.
The end of historical memory and the death of politics
Politics is a dialogic art, in which through words we emit ideas and projects for the collective, for the whole, for the Polis… And in this Polis, others interact with their words, either agreeing or disagreeing, so that we can build a political project. With speech emitted in one direction, another speech in another direction is opposed... From a formulated thesis, an antithesis arises... And thus, from disagreements, synthesis is sought, for the construction of a political commitment: this is the policy.
For that, it is necessary to have some political and intellectual honesty in these formulations, in the speeches, however much sophism always exists. But when nothing but neoliberalism is accepted in the discussion, there is no more democratic politics, because there is no more discussion: there is neoliberal dictatorship. And to impose this neoliberal dystopia, the media, with their soap operas, privatized the cosmogonic conception of economic life: in soap operas, the poor get rich selling sandwiches on the beach for personal effort… There is no collective sphere, public sphere, developmental governments making public and state investments behind, during the years of the productive life of those who get rich in soap operas. There is no history, there is no collective memory of the years of collective development in Brazil, as in the years of Vargas, JK, Geisel, Lula, Dilma... No: everything is only private and individual, in this liberal dystopia, which denies the public sphere.
Today, all brigadeiro sellers on the streets of SP present themselves as “entrepreneurs”, with organic cocoa and other cumulative curiosities, in their self-illusion that they can get rich selling brigadeiros, in this reflexive illusion of television discourse: this is the novelization of reality in the ahistorical minds.
That is the death of politics! That on the other hand, in addition to individualizing soap operas, with evangelicals, they also campaign to hate politics: because it is “corrupt” and “dirty” (synchronic to the media discourse of “journalism”), with the “I will be rich with the grace of God.” And not with some politically constructed human collective coordination for national and individual development.
The neoliberal paranoia, the paranoia of soap operas, and with the help of the evangelical movement with this ritual sale of a fraudulent individual “predestination”, which would make Calvino shudder (who knew that individual predestination was not about turning his back on the collective), generated this dystopian reality of destruction of politics, which already puts Brazil as a political unit at risk. Such individualistic delirium would horrify any right-wing North American, who knows that his country is a Republic, with balances between capitalism (always linked to the State) and democracy.[iv] What the monopoly media forces in Brazil, anti-PT and, increasingly, evangelicals, are doing is a destruction of the Brazilian Republic, and within the limits of Brazil itself as a unit.
With Jair Bolsonaro being the maximum expression of a militia, Hobbesian, Malthusian neofeudalism, of this absolute privatist dystopia, unreal for the modern world, whose plan is the destruction of the national State, and of Brazil as a unit. The media, soap operas, and evangelical sects, have thrown us into this situation of anti-political regression, in which a president in a reelection campaign compulsively lies, leading a cognitive destruction against any collective communication with which we can collectively agree: we are in a Civil War against words and against logic under Jair Bolsonaro. Speech is murdered in Bolsonarist Brazil. And so politics dies. And the monopoly media and the evangelical sects are co-authors of this historic murder.
Sérgio Moro and the destruction of justice, Jair Bolsonaro and the destruction of politics
The corporate media built this monstrosity of Bolsonarism, beyond the neoliberal monodiscourse for 40 years. As when he deified Judge Sérgio Moro, who combined sentences with the prosecution, to attack the Brazilian political sphere (and destroy Petrobras, delivering the Pre-Salt), without assuming himself as a guided political agent (From where? By whom?). Such a legal crime, of a judge matching sentences with the prosecution, is a heinous crime anywhere. But above all in the North American contractualist political culture, which the so-called Brazilian corporate media pretends to adore.
The lie as a political weapon, disguised as justice, that Moro executed on Brazilian history is a shameful chapter. But even more shameful was when the site Intercept it proved what everyone inferred: it proved what everyone was convinced of, by showing Moro's conversations combining sentences with Dallagnol's prosecution and his cronies, who militiated the Public Ministry. So it was even more shameful, because all the “lava jet moralists” did not express any horror at what was revealed: they knew that it was just that, vicious legal processes, liars, manipulated, and that in no way shocked them, for being against the left . Point! That's where the Bolsonarist mythomania was born: the compulsive lie as a political weapon, which found its apex with Bolsonaro, but was openly launched by Moro, with his media and the “third way middle class”, who loved him, and never recanted after everything: there the gates of hell were thrown open!
manipulated eschatology
And on the side of the evangelicals, the privatization of society's cosmovision is carried out in a paranoia of bringing everything to the personal and the private: the public sphere is denied and devalued, and the themes of private life, morality and individualism are treated in a hyperbolic. Thus, popular revolt is stimulated and manipulated towards a regressive agenda, opposed to any rational overcoming of problems: revolt without revolution, revenge instead of justice, hate instead of love, private parameters to measure and regulate the public sphere.
This is the destruction of politics by an individualist privatist dystopia, disguised as religion. Ultraliberalism as ideological paranoia destroys public squares and political debate. And under Bolsonarism they build a dantesque spectacle of collective eschatologies. Bolsonaro, and figures like his minister Damares Alves, have long, and increasingly, been practitioners of a very dangerous anti-political eschatology.[v]
The speeches about pedophilia by Damares before, and by Jair Bolsonaro afterwards, in this second round, in addition to going beyond any limit of eschatological absurdity, show a disgusting planned synchrony. O timing of these repulsive lines by Jair Bolsonaro, with that of the psychopath Damares, is a synchronic project: the destruction of public space, by leveraging absurd eschatologies. It is the strategy of making an immense electorate vote with their liver, with their Id, with the underworld of their minds…. That's a project. Infantilized adults are taken to an emotional extreme, and governed by this manipulated emotion, thus ignoring any rationality when voting.
Let's see: people are led to revolt, with the perverse descriptions of pedophilia made by Damares (who lied in this speech, or omitted the crimes she described). Damares' perversion is evident in her speech: lying or silent in the face of bestial crimes. But it was all architected with its president Jair Bolsonaro. Next, Jair Bolsonaro comes and talks about a “painted atmosphere” between him and 14, 15-year-old girls…. Clearly, the strategy is to show him that sex with teenage girls is OK for him.
And the left that comes and calls it by name, which is Jair Bolsonaro's pedophilia, is then accused of identity. Voila! They call the lynching of imaginary pedophiles the psychopath of Damares, to later put a licentious Jair Bolsonaro, who was “harassed” by teenage girls. The dishonest handling of a sensitive issue is obvious. But the message is clear: lynching (without “anything from that human rights group”…) to imaginary pedophiles, but a man over 60 having sex with teenage girls is fine.
The sad thing is that this has popular support. And that's what they're doing in this stupid strategy of emotional scatological propaganda: there are cattle that are emotionally altered like that, and they vote even more for Jair Bolsonaro for that. And unfortunately it must be said: in this emotional manipulation against any political rationality, the evangelical leaders are an army against the political and emotional health of Brazil.
There is no doubt that the absolute majority of evangelicals are good and correct people, but the synchronic coordination of evangelical leaders shows that such leaders, under a unified coordination (from outside Brazil?), are at war against political rationality Republican in Brazil.
Rescuing the public and collective dimension of Politics, or rather: rescuing politics itself is already a question of Brazilian national salvation. Today, defending improvement for all goes against the ideology of individual victory over all, which is lunatically fed by the media, its soap operas and also by the evangelical churches. And large portions of the population remain fanatical in this sewer of lies: removing from the poor the illusion that they will have domestic workers in an imaginary future is an invitation for so many of them, intoxicated by this supremacist ideology, with hatred for themselves, with hatred for the truth, vote for Jair Bolsonaro.
He is the slave of Machado de Assis, who at the beginning of Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas he is beaten, and in the end he finds a weaker slave, and beats him a thousand times worse: this specter of slavery internalized by the humble, and projected in frustration, is the anti-revolutionary fuel of Bolsonarism, it is the victory of Bolsonarism echoing in large portions people of a poisoned Brazil.
To resume a constructive political renegotiation in Brazil today is to fight against ghosts and fantasies made real by the liberal ideology, reproduced in a totalitarian way by the monopoly media. Brazil has a successful history of development, with windows of inclusion, which need to be remembered, studied and valued. Since the end of slavery, the regulation of work has been the biggest struggle for workers in Brazil, and Labor, Vargas and Varguism, PT and Lulism, are concrete historical expressions of this.
Revaluing this history, against the historical denialism of the media, is the way to rescue the policy, based on real historical bases. As well as the regulation of productive capital, with the creation of State-owned companies, on the side of capital, the recipe for development and republican pact in the Brazilian twentieth century. With a mixed economy between public and private, with similarities (given all due proportions…) with what China has been doing since 1978: Brazil between 1930 and 1980 was one of the countries that grew the most in the world.
Brazilian society needs to study its own history, its words, its thinkers, and value itself more. And thus stop treating part of its professors, and academics, as ignored Cassandras in a public debate increasingly governed by ghostly Fake News[vi], while the Brazilian Troy is heading towards a terminal fire, due to induced ignorance.
*Cristiano Addario de Abreu is a doctoral candidate in economic history at USP.
Notes
[I] https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2021/06/24/pesquisas-apontam-que-400-mil-mortes-poderiam-ser-evitadas-governistas-questionam?fbclid=IwAR2o_JxcB4nOsVaURh1Ci5lm4_ZSym5gzTs9pko7SkIiDXoiyaZyJqI9a3Y
[ii] The name of the being appointed to the presidency in 2018 will be used in lowercase on purpose, so that we do not collaborate for its hyper exposure.
[iii] https://gmarx.fflch.usp.br/boletim-ano2-09
[iv] BRANDS, HW The Money Man. Capitalism, Democracy, and the hundred years war over the American dollar
[v] https://www.salon.com/2020/04/08/is-jair-bolsonaro-brazils-right-wing-president-the-new-jim-jones/
[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDXSfwk0g8I
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