By TARSUS GENUS*
Lula has already won the election in the first round and will also win in the second and this is a spectacular feat.
“The novelty came to the beach, in the rare quality of a mermaid \ half the bust of a Mayan goddess, half a great whale's tail, some wanting her goddess kisses others wanting her tail for supper” (Gilberto Gil, The new).
It wasn't as we expected, but the victory is there looking at us to ask ourselves what we will do with it. Lula will once again reach the government and the worst loser in national history, not just the worst president, will childishly leave the political scene, if he cannot strike a coup.
He wants to close an armored door of the house, behind him, with the residents inside, leaving them in the middle of the fire: without saying goodbye, just with the flames spreading and the asphyxiating smoke in the abandoned house of the nation. He is adept at asphyxiation without mercy, but he is wrong. Certainly the house will not catch fire, as its residents will acquire more rights to come and go and the firemen of hope will tie the invisible threads of history, through an unimaginable Political Front that surprised orthodoxy, stimulated the democratic imagination and attracted the thinking left, with famous and anonymous members, who will change the country to another horizon.
Max Horkheimer said – during World War II – a famous phrase that makes perfect sense for the present, since the new emergence of fascism in the world – especially here in Brazil – goes hand in hand with the most disqualified beings of the native bourgeoisies, dressed in parrots and militia financiers. “Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should remain silent about fascism” was the lesson of one of the great masters of the Frankfurt School.
The crisis of the global domination system with the affirmation of new poles of power, which make international relations more complex and stimulate a sequence of regional-global wars, not only spreads the war industry, but also the virus of the agency of death, as an ideology and constant elements of political power.
In the title story of your book years of lead, Chico Buarque introduces a fable, through an episode in the life of a lonely boy, who plays with his tin soldiers and accidentally starts a huge fire in his house, which ends up killing his parents, a couple of alienated people. supporters of the military dictatorship. I don't know if I've used Chico Buarque's fable on another occasion, but if I did, I'll use it again because it's appropriate for the times we live in: "On April 30, 1973" - writes Chico Buarque in the voice of the child – “General Custer's expedition took the Sioux village by storm, and in order to imitate the huts of the Indians I set up” – tells the child – “several cones with paper napkins. I struck a match and the fire in the huts grew larger than I had anticipated, creating a formidable effect. But the flames caught the fringe of the bedspread and began to spread…” (The fire burns the entire boy’s room and reaches the couple’s room, whose father had taught the child to be tough with “inflexible prisoners”). With some bewilderment, the boy runs out into the street and sees the silhouette of his dead parents, clinging to the bars of the window of the burnt-out house.
Not all Bolsonaristas are fascists or actual or potential assassins, but that – among them – based on the example of their boss, thousands are enthusiasts of death, there is not the slightest doubt. It is enough to see the violence unleashed in the current electoral process, where stabbing, clubs and shots make up the gruesome ritual of right-wing politics, which are always preliminary to wars, collective murders, moral putrefaction of the State and substitution of the argument by the facts.
Lula has already won the election in the first round and will also win in the second, and this is a spectacular feat for a man and a group of parties and personalities who are betting on a political unity against fascism, to win it at a time when the issue of defense of democracy and the republic became an essential political axis. In this axis, subsumed the essential problems of our “destiny community”, which will be unveiled already at the beginning of the next government: ending hunger and reducing poverty; institute a public security program based on an institutional renewal of the federative pact; and modulate the relationship between foreign policy and domestic policy, in order to develop and modernize the economy, with key international partnerships, economic and military, for continental security, for a leap beyond the global shoe of the classic industrial era.
South America was not, in this century or in the last century, a stage for regional national wars that left marks of insoluble disagreements between our peoples and their respective States, which makes us consider that we have an explicit asset, of a political nature , towards a new level of South American unity, respecting differences and seeking points of affinity to face together the challenges of this new global order.
The organic forms of capitalist development – within political democracy or even in an authoritarian-dictatorial regime – organize their way of producing (or recycle themselves) – when in crisis – especially forced by war or the threat of Revolution, but they can also do it by political decision, by attitude coming from a subjectivity rooted in our history and in our forms of resistance to the colonial-imperial process, in an era of diversity of support points in the world, which can favor this unitary ideal and, at the same time different, which gives us meaning.
The crisis is the lung of “sick” capitalism, which starts to breathe through management innovations, new techniques of domination and, in certain circumstances, through new messages of hatred or seduction, sheltered there in new forms of social control and exercise of power. power. Today, with new intelligent technologies, we are suffering the effects of an exponential leap that has occurred in the last 50 years, which has been designing a new world and a new sociability, within a more convulsive and violent world society. Are we understanding what happens to us? Are we registering the total lack of appreciation of a large part of the middle and business classes” for democracy? Do we understand that representative liberal democracy – either renew or die – because it is reaching its historical limits?
This new sociability assaults and unbalances us: how is it possible to select people to kill, exclusively because of political disagreements? How is it possible to present lethal weapons to children, encourage gratuitous violence against women, militarize schools, teach people to hate human beings because of their sexual identity? How is it possible to imitate the despair – due to lack of air – of people who are facing death on the way to a hospital? How was it possible for a “peaceful” and “orderly” people, as the old conservatives say, with good (or bad) intentions, to elect a person as President of their Republic, who makes death and torture his calling card on the political scene? Sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers – humanists and skeptics from all walks of life – have already given brilliant answers to these questions, but I – who thought I knew something more about my country and that the lessons of Treblinka and Buckenwald were enough to teach me something to about barbarism – I confess I know nothing else.
However, it is necessary to understand: as always – on the one hand – that the crisis and war sow more poverty and death, concentrate more wealth and – on the other hand – that they open up new (good and bad) political perspectives and also bring germs of fascism. This, now formatted as a policy and power bloc – as fascism at war against those who are different from it – begins to organize itself directly in the State, which, due to its original legitimacy, can merge its monopoly of violence with the desires and interests of violence specific to criminal organizations, already transferred to politics as neo-fascism.
When their delusions of power, exaltation of hatred and unhealthy sexual compulsion are expressed as a subjective element of the order, through lies and the war against those who are different, through harassment and praise for rape, through individual and collective murders, that new order has already penetrated the head. of millions. Then it can take part, or even dominate, in another victorious state order. Do we have a chance today to stop it?
As no social class, no political group, no party or social organization is immune to being recruited – partially or totally – to exercise the savage will to kill in extreme situations, as well as they are not immune to the perversions stimulated by historical crises, the rise Fascistism cannot be reversed by the struggle of a single sector of society. Resistance to fascism and the adventures of all types of war can only be strong through a policy with an ideological matrix of peace and solidarity, which crosses – to a greater or lesser extent – at least part of all classes, estates, groups and social sectors – inside and outside the State.
But the ideological messages of peace and solidarity quickly fade into the air if the winners do not assemble a government capable of isolating fascist murderers and delinquents from any influence in power, for the harm they have already done to our humanity and the invincible harm they will install if regain power and strength, as they had in the period that will end now, with the victory of democracy. It is not a matter of forgetting differences, sometimes of principles, that exist between the members of the new Political Front that will govern the country, whose most appropriate and compatible name, with the happiness that surrounds us at this moment, would be the front of tolerance, of happiness and popular unity, to save the values of our Constitution.
The name is impossible, because it would be glossed over by the marketers who today have acquired deserved importance in postmodern politics, but its content is not improbable. I would say – by the way – that it is the only possible way for us to reconnect the ties of our identity that are in the Pact of 88, restarting the republican search for our utopias.
*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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