By TARSUS GENUS*
Our (proto) fascism retains two characteristics of Mussolinist-Hitlerian fascism: violent hatred of enlightened humanism and contempt for other people's lives.
Utopias are not dangerous, as Isaiah Berlin wanted. They become dangerous in people who, by decision or fanaticism, want to impose their utopias on others, without respecting the human integrity of those who reject them. Thus, they force their reception – as if they were truths of a reason without humanism – or even as if they were a dogmatic-religious program with the authority of a God who does not understand humans. I am referring, on the issue of utopias, to that polemic between Berlin and the Marxists of his time, at a time when the rationality of democratic utopia – in its liberal-representative form – was already being successfully blocked by emerging fascism.
Our (proto) fascism retains, however, two important characteristics from the old Mussolinist-Hitlerian fascism: violent hatred of enlightened humanism and contempt for other people's lives. However, it does not consciously defend – this atypical fascism of ours – a State conceptually different from the one that exists there, forged in an idea coherent with its European tradition. Nor is it sustained by a vision of a sovereign nation preparing for a war of conquest.
Our local fascism, although at once less barbaric than its counterparts, is nevertheless more difficult to be fought in the sphere of politics, since it does not oppose the current social and economic order, but lives through production a sequence of movements - apparently irrational – that exacerbate the hatreds that are already contained in ordinary sociality. In the Brazilian case, these movements are adapted to the demands of global financial capital – to carry out “reforms” – without being based on an organic conservative thought, but supported by a barely overcome slave ideology.
Unlike its European predecessors of the XNUMXth century, it is a “hound” fascism: it does not dare to say its name and expresses its identity – no less hateful or necrophiliac – through certain symbolic behaviors, present in conduct and props, whose impacts on the anti-humanist militant are quickly mimicked.
On June 9, when the country was approaching 40 deaths recorded by Covid 19, the President of the Republic appeared in public with a tie decorated with rifles; and the “number 2” of the Ministry of Health appeared sporting a skull on the lapel. Indifference in the face of death and indifference in the face of pain, as if the victims of Covid were the defeated enemies and those who support them were their reserve army.
These events could just be singular manifestations of an extreme right of psychopathic adventurers, if in a framework of political normality they were perceived as residues of the past. In the current context, however, no: the President arrived at the Government through an election, the outcome of which was the product of a detailed political articulation that fertilized an explicit alliance of business groups, national and global, with agribusiness, added to broad sectors of the social classes. high averages – oriented by the successive anti-left campaigns of the media oligopoly – whose purpose was and are the reforms that extinguish our social protection system.
If this is true, it is possible to say that our fascism is a “hound” fascism, not an “action” initiative of an organized fascist party, which would have gone to the ruling classes to make them hostages of a specific project of nation . On the contrary, it would be an inorganic action group – usable by political mandate – included in a power pact to promote the “reforms” of the Welfare State and that only in the Government began to organize itself as a “part”, to detach itself from the its “masters”. That is why the anchors of our fascism “henchmen” are planted – to remain in power – in the sands of militia marginality and are seeking alliances with military groups that still live the Cold War paranoia.
“Henchman” fascism is pure action, not doctrine; it is offensive violence, not defense of ideas; it is a political flow not organized by thought, not a “war of position” with a view to conquests in the political sphere. This seems to be – these days – also the strong internal contradiction that runs through the articulation of the proto-fascist power of the Bolsonaro Government: the very “diversity” of the needs of the bourgeois classes that guaranteed him the Government, also creates the conditions that prevent him from formulating of a unitary program, with a minimum of political coherence. Thus, the original proto-fascist group – in order to maintain governability – needs to maintain its commitment to ultraliberal “reforms”, which is a universal project of rentier capital, which guarantees the tolerance of rentier elites to continue governing.
Italo Balbo, intellectual of action and superior companion of Mussolini, sociologist, military, politician of elaboration and action – one of the four organizers of the March on Rome (1896-1940) – member of the Great Fascist Council, was one of the important guarantors of Mussolini with the Italian economic elite, just as Guedes is Bolsonaro's technocratic guarantor with the rentier elite. Balbo was a guarantor for political action, Guedes is a bureaucratic guarantor – coming from the bloody Pinochet experience – but both represent the same thing, the first in classic fascism, the second in proto-fascism “hound”.
Gramsci, in his Prison Letters (Brazilian Civilization) recalls Balbo's performance on the way to power from the March on Rome, visiting a text by Balbo himself, which praises rationalized action post fest (Magazine Gioventú Fascist, ninth anniversary, 1931): “Mussolini acted”, writes Balbo, “if he had not done so, the fascist movement would have perpetuated civil guerrilla warfare for decades (…) “that is, without the March on Rome, without the revolutionary solution, our movement would head towards those fatal crises of fatigue, tendencies and indiscipline, which were the tombs of the old parties”.
Friday, June 13, 2020. The President's guidance to his action groups circulates on the networks and is printed in the newspapers, so that they enter the Hospitals and check the availability of ICU beds, after having mocked the predictions of the scientists about the imminence of the health catastrophe and blaming the Governors and Mayors for the dramatic advance of the Pandemic.
On June 11, in Copacabana, two “good citizens” attack a tribute to those killed by the coronavirus, which some people carry out – silently and peacefully – by nailing crosses in the sand and crying for the death of their loved ones. It is indifference to the pain of others, which becomes violent and necrophilic: the crosses are toppled and then rebuilt, by a lonely individual, who lost his only 25-year-old son.
The President's “natural” call shows that the concrete legal order no longer works with the “norms and sanctions” of the “written” constitutional text. Its wavering validity is incapable of discouraging a Head of State from mobilizing “irregular” hordes to invade hospitals and to repress the primitive action of “good citizens” celebrating indifference to death, thus demonstrating that a fascist sociality is already alive and crystallized . And that it operates, more and more, with its arrogant gangs stimulated from the “de facto state”, which tends to become hegemonic, guaranteed by the voice of the “Leader”: it is another (real) order already present in everyday life. of the masses harassed by poverty and disease.
Thug fascism, before being a technical structure of power, is a spiritual and moral state that releases the most primitive instincts from action. And that – in fact in fact – is occupying the whole of society, which starts to accept the security that is forged out of fear and silence. It overcomes its obstacles not within the ruled political game of the Rule of Law, but through selective strokes that, framing each part of the fragmented society – social movements, citizenship groups, artists, intellectuals, academia, jurists, unions, party segments, apparatuses bureaucratic state – revokes the Law through fear and co-opts cowardice and vileness to monopolize crime and murder.
However, when the fascism already experienced in history constituted itself as a possibility of power, as Mussolini did, he called for adhesions and prepared to express himself as a supreme state force. Their class relations and with common life, formed a new leading group that at some point (April 1st and 2nd, 1921, in Italy) already included several peasant leagues coming out of socialism, which started to stand shoulder to shoulder in unity with the “Chiefs ” from Agrária, from the big landowners.
Italo Balbo then begins his period of glory and expresses, symbolically – in his relationship with Mussolini – with whom he walked the streets of Ferrara, the force of “action” that has always been the primary foundation of fascist politics. When an unsuspecting admirer got in the way of the leaders, it was Balbo's turn, “amused by his triumph”, to clear the route with angry strokes of his famous cane.
He thus showed that life was worthless, as everyone was destined to share, within a total organism – independently of his body and his will – the new unique whole that is called Italy, now recovered in its ancient luminosity that built the world western.
The following day (April 4) Mussolini would say, already at the Teatro Comunal in Bologna, that “we were slandered: they did not want to understand us and, as much as violence may be deplored, to plant our ideas in refractory brains, we had to be on guard. them to the sound of blows”. Balbo had won, Mussolini too.
June 13, Saturday morning in Brazil, a note from two generals and a captain issues a fulminating and preliminary judgment on any other judgment of the STF, from now on, classifying it previously as illegal, if the decision does not please them: E say: The FFAA “also do not accept attempts to take power by another Branch of the Republic, contrary to the Laws, or due to political judgments.” These three soldiers frankly invoked themselves as a “moderating power”, through this evident political judgment of convenience, which transforms Brazil into a protected Republic. The Balbo of fascism “henchman”, a Guedes, may have won without even taking the field.
*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.