By ROSIMAR GONCALVES*
When Lula refuses to make a statement that is worthy of what the office of President of the Republic demands, he is politically failing in his obligations to keep society aware of the dangers it faced with the coup attempt.
Since Roman times (Pliny the Elder – Natural History) It was said that ostriches buried their heads in the ground believing that their entire body was hidden. But as myths without scientific basis are frequent in human perception, not everything we assume to be or, at least, not all the interpretations we construct from what we have seen correspond to factual reality.
In this case, it is true that ostriches are often seen with their heads in holes in the ground, however, the reason is zeal and not stupidity. Since their nests are built on the ground, the constant repositioning of the eggs is done with their heads, demonstrating that the construction of the theory of denialism or escape from reality about this customary action of this bird is nothing more than a myth.
But it is also a fact that this falsification of the truth has been repeated for so many generations that it has become a popular saying that associates the practice of running away from the truth to be faced by a person with the equivalent of the bird that would stick its head in a hole (its protective niche) to escape the outside world.
In this regard, I have been wondering whether it would be fair to attribute this saying to President Lula…? In my perception, by avoiding any political clash at all costs, Lula would be practicing an escape from reality, that kind of denialism that is commonly attributed only to the political field of the extreme right.
After its victory in the elections, in a government composed of the left diluted in a broad front (right-wing parties), it was decided that the discussion on National Defense and Public Security should not be the object of a Specific Group (in its more than thirty technical groups formed in the transition phase) that would evaluate the structures, training, activities, programs, projects, ongoing actions, costs, among other points related to the Armed Forces.
Now, if the Brazilian Navy, the Brazilian Army and the Brazilian Air Force are institutions funded by public money and allocated under the command of the Ministry of Defense, consequently and obviously all three are the supreme competence and responsibility of the elected President of the Republic and, if the regime is truly democratic, it denied the civilians who elected it the exercise of this democracy by not even opening the possibility of discussions on national defense and public security, the results of which are precarious and harmful to the country.
The total number of generals in Brazil is equivalent to that of the most, if not the most, powerful Armed Forces on the planet: the United States, which is an aberration, since the position of the two countries in the international economic division of the capital-labor relationship is antagonistic: they are the empire, we are the mere underdeveloped and dependent country that is not, like them, on a continuous mission of invasion and occupation of foreign territories. An endless list of privileges paid for by Brazilian civilians is completely shielded by President Lula, who repeats every day that he is a defender of democracy, forgetting that the meaning of the term is people in government and not simply the defense of the tools that supposedly provide this: public institutions and the democratic rule of law.
By denying society access to data and redefining what constitutes national defense and public security by not creating a transition group for the topic, Lula diminishes the position of Brazilian civilians to mere funders of the Armed Forces, in a condition of detachment and total submission (without the right to make any intervention or question) to what, within, is decided exclusively by the corporations themselves about their direction, objectives, structure, training, privileges and the like.
Lula prevents Brazil from being truly cleaned up, as he proclaimed in his electoral campaign when he said he would do more and better, when he constantly denies the political aspect that his position as President of the Republic represents and when he limits himself merely to acting as a neutral national administrative manager restricted to the implementation of public policies that avoid the fundamental premise of a President of the Republic, which is to face conflicting issues between antagonistic forces that dispute their interests.
On one side, historically dominant groups full of privileges (including the Armed Forces), on the other, Brazilians who want: what was promised in their electoral campaign (review of labor and social security reforms, recovery of Petrobrás for the country, taxes for large fortunes, social welfare, etc.) and to stop being burdened with the obligation of this endless funding of privileges for the dominant class, which incorporates the Armed Forces.
The President's cowardly stance at the beginning of this year, which prevented demonstrations against the military dictatorship, claiming that the past is of no interest and that everything should be forgotten and pacified, was only the continuation of his declared subordination during the transition that denied Brazilians the presentation of, at the very least, a diagnosis of the Armed Forces, which continues to be a “black box” for civilians. We know about their villas, hospitals, social security, pension and retirement systems, justice, perks in salaries that are completely exclusive and very expensive for the federal budget, but nothing is made transparent. If we are in a democratic regime, the Ministry of Defense itself should have a civilian minister who would put the modernization and optimization of these structures on the agenda for discussions, and not a spokesperson for corporations that are only very expensive and backward in every sense, putting, on top of everything else, the country at a complete disadvantage in the international panorama in this area.
In recent days, unsurprisingly for anyone with more than two brain cells, definitive proof of what was obvious was released: the existence of a military mutiny that was underway in the previous government so that, regardless of the election results, the military could perpetuate itself in the Presidency of the country by force. The plan included three assassinations: that of the elected president and vice president and that of a Supreme Court justice.
Lula once again denies the centrality and national political gravity of what was revealed in these investigations by treating everything as just another police case to be resolved by the Federal Police and the Judiciary. He did not make a statement on national television to Brazilians about this attempt to destroy the freedom guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution, won with much blood spilled over the years by many combative Brazilians.
Lula simply made fun of the explosive revelations, claiming to be lucky to be alive. In addition to being disrespectful to the democracy he claims to defend, he also reveals his high degree of vanity, since the main objective of the military mutiny that was discovered, if the murders were carried out, would not be the deaths themselves (in this case, just circumstantial needs) but the resumption of the Brazilian government to subject it once again to the totalitarian, reactionary and military regime, which involves the interests of the entire population, which continues to be alienated by Lula's absurd political decision that camouflages the truth of the facts with silence.
The same personalist reaction was in 2016, when the PT said that the coup was against Dilma, but the facts show that it was against Brazilians who lost their labor and social security rights and much of their wealth in public companies built with taxes paid (mostly by the working class) handed over to foreign capitalists and whose effects are still being suffered by the working class while Dilma remains light and happy as President of the BRICS. Politically, was the 2016 coup against her or against us, the Brazilian working class? Obviously, the President who is in office will be removed, but the objective never ends with his removal, it begins with it! The objective is always the country and its wealth.
Killing the winners of a presidential election is a blow against the millions of voters who elected him. Therefore, the core of the case is the annihilation of the democratic rights of millions of citizens who decided who they wanted to be represented by. By not making this fact explicit, Lula denies the basic concept of democracy: the people in government. Lula and the PT insist on the cult of personalism that reduces all movements of class war to mere disagreements between leaders of one camp or another. However, what is always at stake are the collective public goods, rights and wealth, not those of one or another figure at the time.
The targets to be eliminated at first were not the “CPFs”, but the positions in the Republic occupied by these three people, which, taken by brute force by the mutiny of the armed forces, became the most serious and nationally important recent political fact.
A president who shirks his official duty of raising political awareness among his people is not worthy of the office he holds. Putting the nation's freedom at risk is much greater than threatening one's own life, at least for any president whose political goal is to transform the social reality in which he lives, and not for those who truly believe that the power of the presidency lies within themselves and not because their voices represent the voices of millions of Brazilians who elected them.
To try to impose a version that it was people and not military corporations who mutinied is to underestimate national intelligence and also deny the factual reality. We are not talking about a private soldier in a fit of courage who came up with a poorly made plan, but about months in which the highest ranks of the previous government were planning inside the presidential buildings, with strategies and tactics thought out and monitored by agencies of the government of the Republic itself, which included the dissemination of false truths and moral terrorism to the people, in order to obtain their support in any situation of institutional abnormality that culminated in the arrests and deaths of many people who were victims of this manipulation.
Trying to protect the commanders who now claim to have denied participating in the military mutiny, but who until now had not reported the incident to anyone, is to condone the military's lack of commitment to the nation, reinforcing and encouraging their cowardly behavior of protecting their own corporation in a differentiated class system that is above the country, reinforcing that, in this way, each soldier's loyalty is only to his or her fellow soldiers. So if someone proposes a triple murder and you deny participation, but do not report anything, are you a hero? And if you are holding a high-ranking military public office, what should your loyalty be: to the traitors of the country or to the people you swore to defend?
Lula is building another farce that sanctifies armed forces that are completely devoid of respect before any citizen who knows history and sees reality as it is.
When Lula refuses to make a statement that is worthy of what the office of President of the Republic demands, he is politically failing in his obligations to keep society aware of the dangers it faced. He denies the pain and effects of the dictatorship, saying that it is in the past, but by avoiding a necessary political position, at this moment, that contextualizes the military mutiny as something that put our freedom at risk, he is collaborating for this to continue happening, therefore compromising our future, because without this collective awareness about the traitorous Armed Forces, it will continue to be untouchable and self-managing, demanding only that we continue to bear the costs of corporations devoid of structural intelligence.
Questions: could my perception also be mistaken, as most people still are about ostriches? Could Lula not be burying his head in the sand to deny reality, but rather waiting for the right moment to reconfigure the constituent structures of the FA, and could his conduct, which appears to be a betrayal of the working class, be just an impression that masks his true intention of transforming the country into a fair and equal society in terms of opportunities?
I don't know how to answer!
Rosimar Goncalves is a master's student at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism at Unicamp.
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