Under the yoke of nazi-imperialism

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By ROBERTO BUENO*

The Brazilian people have witnessed, at different times in history, the repeated miracle in favor of the elite, the miracle that illusionism operates in their favor through the resignation of the mass of the population

“The conservative pendulum has stopped striking the time. He is still in the church tower. But everyone knows that he gives crazy, mismatched hours. The voice and weight of the possessing classes, mainly their “ruling elites”, seem to be intact. But this is a world of appearances, of ghosts that circulate in the cemetery of memory” (Florestan Fernandes, 1986, p. 54).

The struggle for the affirmation of independence is constant in the history of Latin American peoples. Dissociated and faced with the national elite of their respective countries, mostly of foreign descent, and their interests converging with the North American empire, they tirelessly pursue and through the most tortuous ways the affirmation of popular sovereignty and national sovereignty, an inglorious confrontation given the disparity of forces .

The cover of elite individuals occupies the position of delegates native to empire in Latin America. Historically, they played the role of intermediaries, overseers and well-paid stevedores for the shipment of wealth carried out on the continent towards the empire, at the expense and complete disregard of the allocation of resources for the basic protection of the living conditions and even the existence of the population. The contempt for the human lives of fellow native citizens stems from the self-image of foreigners in colonized land. Gaius Prado Jr. (2012, p. 24) recalls that in colonial Brazil “Being a sugar plantation owner [...] is a title that many aspire to because it brings with it being served, obeyed and respected by many”, being himself the alien individual, different from that one. supposedly inferior means, while he, superior, would be entitled to privileges. The other is res, the I, what is noble. Among human relations, the values ​​of Christianity were measured only among equals, from whom the people were distant.

The spiritual and material descent of the privileged planters is reflected in the components of the contemporary Brazilian elite. Unlike their ancestors, this group lost the aspiration of lordship, ardently taking refuge in the desire to become mere low-paid overseers of alien interests, strict executors of orders emanating from the offices of the North American empire and commercial offices of its transnationals that carry out its economic and geopolitical interests. This is the profile of the Latin American elite that, in relation to its people, plays a role of continued betrayal and, therefore, could not be another consequence than the notable distance between the elite and the people, as perceived by Celso Furtado.

The reversal of this picture of historical dominance presupposes the affirmation of popular and national sovereignty never completely assumed without all its consequences by the Latin American peoples. Doing so presupposes a willingness to confront its colonized state structures and coordinated according to interests alien to those of the population, such as the adoption of policies that encourage hyperconcentration of income in the hands of the very holders of absolute political power. The gradual national development throughout history alternated periods of greater and lesser intensity, experiencing various crises, in any case maintaining a constant, namely, that the privilege of economic gains from development remained under the strict control and benefit of the elite, while the losses and losses were distributed among the general population.

This process of social and political construction of the State reflects the Brazilian formation, whose development has not suffered a break since the colonial period, because when conflicting circumstances emerged, pacification and overcoming were disguised as transformations. A game of appearances coordinated by the elites to give a new appearance to what has always been old, similar to the maintenance of the privileges of the Portuguese commercial class in the Brazilian colonial period, which Caio Prado Jr. (2012, p. 39) recognized that it prospered “in the shadow of the oppressive commercial policy of the metropolis, thus becoming natural opponents of the other classes of the colony”. It follows the national elite articulated with foreign forces to impose public order, legislative and coercive, against the popular mass.

The degree of confrontation between the elite and the mass of the population was culturally masked by cultural and power structures duly mediated and hidden by the connection between politics and economics expressed by the corporate media. In the absence of rupture, there was space and place for continuity in the process of delay in human development identified by Furtado (1999, p. 34) as such in its historical dimension when pointing out how negative the consequences of the retraction were in terms of well-being of the mass of the population, a scenario contradicted by the light of day due to unacceptable high consumption, favors and privileges of all kinds enjoyed by the elite that in the capitalist system operates within the limits of provoking the death of the population in the face of spoliation, and that in a moment of crisis which mobilizes fascism in its favor, finally transgresses that border to impose genocide.

During the 2012th century, the Brazilian colony maintained a strict connection with the process of centralization of power in the Portuguese metropolis, depriving the Brazilian legislative chambers of any competences and vestiges of power and, with this, restricting the space of the owners (cf. PRADO Jr. , 31, p. 2015). The fact of this concentration of powers in the imperial metropolis projects a demand for executive agents in colonial territory, enablers of their interests, which in the case of Brazilian society had the effect of being led to tolerate extreme levels of inequality. This is the neocolonial capitalist model that Florestan Fernandes (107, p. XNUMX) identifies as being in a parallel condition to dependent capitalism with regard to the requirement of unequal sharing of wealth to an extreme degree, to the point that, in open dialogue with Frantz Fannon , admit that it is a conversion of the “disinherited from the earth into a new social outcast”. Among the latter, misery is radical and runs alongside unparalleled wealth, a phenomenon of concentration already pointed out by Furtado (1999, p. 32) as a central challenge for the structural reforms that must be carried out because it is in the "root of the social malformations that are observed in Brazil”. These structural reforms were always the target of very hard attacks by the elite and could not be implemented and when perfunctorily carried out, the elite immediately tried to impose the setback, as was the case of the João Goulart Government, in which Furtado himself served as Minister of Planning (1962-1963), and the last Dilma Rousseff Government.

The aforementioned malformation is rooted in national history is history, extensive and deep wound. It is a constant unsurpassed obstacle that hinders when it does not make national development unfeasible. An indispensable condition for the successful confrontation of the malformation identified by Furtado and the creation of a society with pretensions of allying democratic advances to the stability and permanence of this structural reform in the political, social-economic and institutional spheres, has on its horizon the consolidation of social and economic democracy. As Borón (2001, p. 191) suggests, a project of this kind has no feasible horizon and “cannot be sustained in societies marked by inequality and social exclusion”, which converges with the socioeconomic analysis by Florestan Fernandes (2015, p. 107) that “partial or total economic exclusion corresponds to the exclusion of all rights and social guarantees typical of bourgeois society”. Under this scenario designed by Florestan Fernandes, the absence of basic structural reform and the reconfiguration of the economic scenario that institutionalize basic parameters of equity and social justice remains as an unavoidable consequence of the unfeasibility of any democratic pretension.

The maintenance of occlusive paths to reforms is a reality connected to the imperialist interest in the recolonization of Brazil. Its bases reside in another Atlantic metropolis, a scenario that imposes on Brazil the same dilemma as before, namely, the incompatibility of national development with the interests and positive domain exercised by the imperial power. Regarding the national development dilemma, Furtado (1999, p. 60) warned that “The fight against underdevelopment is a process of building structures, therefore, it implies the existence of a political will guided by a project”, clearly existing will in the Goulart Government which he served. Then, as today, although under different conditions at the internal political level, the Nazi-imperialist scenario continues to virulently and voraciously impose the brute force that hinders the national development project. The empire replaced its brutal methods of domination and expropriation of wealth with crude Nazi-imperialism, whose human approach is compatible with genocidal practices. The empire's radical opposition mobilizes intervening agents in the bodies of national states, undermining both the process of building political will and interdicting the construction of these structures that are the target of reforms identified as essential by Furtado.

The realization of the ambition for the implementation of complete control and recolonization of Latin America by North American Nazi-imperialism has a much higher density than that imposed by the original Iberian colonizers, whose characteristic, according to Prado Jr. (2012, p. 29), was that “Everyone who sticks[se]m in your lands cedes[laughs]m, in exchange for the land that they cultivate for their sustenance and the protection that the lord grants them against other bosses of the sertão or the Justice itself, practically, all the freedom”. The empire surpasses this Iberian colonizing profile in its ability to impose evil insofar as it does not even have as its purpose the application of justice, nor the guarantee of freedom or the indispensable land from which to extract food, but intervenes in the most elemental, the Right to life. This is the political agenda that reinforces the absolute exclusion and confirms the necropolitical process, which has its way facilitated by the fact of the apathy provoked by the intensity of the exclusion that victims the mass of the population, removing from its direct angle of observation and, consequently, the mobilization of forces to face its dominator.

The logic of Nazi-imperial power forbids, by definition, and in a complete and irrefutable way, the implementation of the grammar of rights and their realization on the material level. Rights such as education and health, social security and security, as well as other related matters in the political and economic sphere, cannot transcend the plane of mere formality usually received in Latin American constitutional projects and which operates as a softening element of the material impact with which life runs to the mass of the population. Under the North American Nazi-imperial culture, Latin American riches cannot be translated into public benefits through state action, but this must be minimized as much as possible, opening space for the sale of these services to the population by the large transnational conglomerates. or his umbilical allies. According to Atílio Borón (2001, p. 256-257), it is about substituting rights for goods that can be acquired in the market, negotiated according to the value that the large transnational conglomerates and the controlling elite of national life impose, and under so much pressure and intensity is that the questioning of Darcy Ribeiro (1968, p. 217) is up to date, namely, whether the “increasingly oppressive conditioning to cultural environments cannot endanger human survival itself”. The positive response is evident these days, but in no case does it make back the Nazi-imperialist forces that give course to the process of maximizing the concentration of wealth and eliminating lives.

Under the Nazi-imperialist aegis, there are no human rights structurally guaranteed to society, if not classified as mere goods and products freely acquired on the market, always under the condition that each one has the equivalent amount in kind. Poverty in Latin America is not a coincidence, but a project, it is one of the wings of the Nazi-imperial capitalist business. The language of rights typical of a democratic society is dysfunctional for the Nazi-imperialist logic of complete expropriation of all the riches of the colonized territories and minimization of the population so that their demands are also diminished and they stop consuming the riches that should be sent to the metropolis.

The imminence of risks for such a project of power and wealth extraction is soon faced by Nazi-imperialism with only one answer: coups d'état. This movement has acquired different historical forms, from the co-option and blackmail of central figures in the colonial territories to the open use of the military and force, until more recently the combination of both previous elements with the extremely sophisticated digital technology available to sectors of Nazi-imperialist intelligence. . This purpose of power is incompatible with regional development, especially in countries with high growth potential and acquisition of a new geopolitical position such as Brazil, dependent on the assumption of power by popular-nationalist political forces. By the way, recalls Octavio Ianni (2019, p. 70) that “Faced with the possibility of forming a popularly based government, or the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks, with a worker and peasant base, the most reactionary forces in the country, allied with imperialism , organized and carried out the coup", and this is not a one-off response, but a historical succession of coups d'état in Latin America and Central America sponsored by the US, proving that the interests of regional development are irreconcilable antipodes with the economic interests of the Nazi -American imperialism.

Even when central political mandates are in the hands of political segments connected with the realization of popular aspirations, we find that the exercise of power is not and, on the other hand, obstacles to popular access and its influence on the hard core are maintained. of the institutions that actually decide or condition those who decide. In this regard, it is worth asking Borón (2001, p. 194) “To what extent can a state that presents such inequality in the exercise of political rights be considered democratic?” We can add, to what extent can a society be classified as democratic or claim to have sufficient bases to aspire to so much when the level of inequality of access to basic living conditions between social classes is marked by oceanic difference? Could we classify as democratic the institutions of society in which the distribution of access and interference in power is minimal, if not non-existent? This highly deficient model was always imposed from the top down in Brazilian society, and never built from the bottom up, which makes Florestan Fernandes' analysis extremely current (1986, p. 36-37) that “The ones from above have always dictated what kind of democracy suited Brazilian society”, this being a false description of “democracy” maintained through the apparatus of cultural reproduction controlled by the elite.

This scenario of disconnection of the mass of the population from the instruments of power that mirror sovereignty makes the Nazi-imperial domain project in colonial territories viable. Such distancing composes the frame of effectiveness of the political control and also cultural of the colonial territories, movement accomplished through the affirmation of the superiority of the culture of the metropolis over the autochthonous one when co-opting the elite to foment the contempt for the national cultural references. Mesmerized by values ​​and principles supposedly high and superior to those of the natives, the colonized elite envisioned European manners, fashion and customs as the current one emulates the North Americans. As observed by Furtado (1999, p. 65), “Despised by the elites, the values ​​of popular culture proceed with their melting with considerable autonomy in the face of the culture of the dominant classes”, and remain alive and pulsating under any attack because they possess the impetus of originality that other emulated values ​​and cultures lack.

Under this scenario of class confrontation in which the cultural factor was brandished as an efficient wall of separation between both, Furtado (1999, p. 64) interpreted that “The people were reduced to a negative reference, a symbol of backwardness, attributing meaning to itself. nullifying its non-European cultural heritage and denying its artistic creativity”. The reversal of this process of domination has as its imperative the imposition of a popular shock against the dense fog and the incessant suction of wealth perpetrated by Nazi-imperialism. There is no other effective way to respond to this process if not through mass mobilization, understanding such a phenomenon as popularism, avoiding the contaminated grammar of populism to which a pejorative meaning has been inserted.

Florestan Fernandes (2015, p. 106) noticed the Brazilian evolution since its formative colonial period, permeated by “a strong historical tendency towards the degradation of work and the worker”, something that did not suffer a solution of historical continuity insofar as popularism did not found its channel of expression. The crushing of the human was a remarkable characteristic that prevented the qualitative-inclusive evolution of the social model aspired by the popular-democratic segments, an interpretation to which the criticism by Florestan Fernandes (1986 p. 59) converges that “Democracy linked to economic oppression, social and political sphere must give way to democracy, which is linked to the civil emancipation of the oppressed and the autonomy of the proletarians”.

In a society articulated under a profound condition of expropriation according to the North American Nazi-imperialist project, the topicality of Borón's questioning (2001, p. 192) becomes remarkable, namely, “How to boast about these supposed economic “successes” when , in order to achieve them, was it necessary to build increasingly unjust and unequal societies, with poor people paying the costs of such experiences with their lives?” The only sector that can express receptivity and translate as “economic successes” any positive indices obtained under massive pain and suffering is a text that can be written and published only by sectors absolutely linked and subordinated to the achievement of the interests of nazi-imperialism in its colonies.

Overcoming this reality of crushing Latin American societies points to the human scenario desired by Darcy Ribeiro (1968, p. 217) by advocating the stimulus of “their creative capacity and making the human person the norm and the end of the humanization process” . This path indicated by Darcy Ribeiro's genuine nationalism presupposes the decolonization of Brazil by returning it to its roots. This is the imperative imposed by the ambition to assert popular and national sovereignty, and for that it is imperative to de-state Brazil, its economy and its institutions, a path paved by the adoption of the same process applied to minds.

The first obstacle found for the successful enterprise of asserting popular and national sovereignty lies in the national elite. When constitutional democracy emerged after the Brazilian military dictatorship, Florestan Fernandes drew attention to the importance of resistance based on popular mobilization. It was a question of making use of the only effective instrument for reversing the anti-democratic order rooted during decades of dictatorial-military regime, and the task, then as urgent as it is today, was expressed by the fine grammar of Florestan Fernandes (1986, p. 33) when warning that “It is up to us to prevent the past from being prolonged and reproduced in the present and to make the future an expanded (and renewed) reproduction of the past, that is, it is up to us to extinguish a form of barbarism that should have disappeared with slavery or with the First Republic”. The huge, and urgent, challenge was not overcome. In that period of history, the rupture with the past was not carried out, not even with its most hateful wounds, keeping alive the flame of the opprobrium of torture as well as nostalgia for the slavery ethos, translated into the contempt for freedoms and individual, collective and human rights. of labor relations.

Overcoming the Nazi-imperialist order grounded in total control imposes the affirmation of the solidarity principle overcoming the market principle, the distributivity principle replacing the concentration principle, the social principle to the detriment of the destruction principle, in short, the humanism tempered by economic-popular democracy to the detriment of genocidal Nazi-fascism. Nazi-imperialist totalitarianism makes explicit the vision of other how pure rs, while in eu resides everything that is supposed to be noble and, therefore, worthy of all privileges. Being the popular mass conjugated as the other by the national elite and the transnational oligarchy, as despicable and disposable rs, under this path was paved the historic attack and objective defenestration of the ideal of economic and sociopolitical restructuring in Brazil based on social justice and equity. This historic ban made possible the terms of the recolonization of Brazil by the forces of Nazi-imperialism.

The Brazilian people have witnessed, at different times in history, the repeated miracle in favor of the elite, the miracle that illusionism operates in their favor through the resignation of the mass of the population. As when the game starts and the cylinder slides across the smooth surface of the roulette wheel, all that is known is the uncertainty of the outcome, and so in politics, where no movement is certain or eternal, even when terrifying and genocidal are its intermediate results. , for neither his effects nor his power are imperishable.

* Roberto Bueno is a professor of philosophy of law at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU).

 

References


BENAVIDES, Lourdes; CAVERO, Theresa. Lasinaceptables delhambre ciphers. Claves de laRazónPráctica. At the. 231, noviembre-diciembre, p. 40-51, 2013.

BORON, Atilio. Minerva's Owl. Market versus democracy in contemporary capitalism. Petrópolis, RJ: Voices, 2001.

FERNANDES, Florestan. New Republic. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1986.

_______ .Power and Counterpower in Latin America. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Popular Expression, 2015.

FURTADO, Celso. the long dawn. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, 1999.

IANNI, Octavio. The dictatorship of the great proletariat. São Paulo: Popular Expression, 2019.

PRADO Jr., Caio. Political evolution of Brazil and other studies. Sao Paulo: Cia. of Letters, 2012.

RIBEIRO, Darcy. The Civilizing Process. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1968.

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