Text by Luciano Martins Costa*, originally published on 07/04/2017
The ongoing political process in Brazil since the 2014 presidential election is a project in which fascism infiltrates power. Put that way, crudely, it may seem like one of those manifestos that circulated in university and union circles during the military dictatorship.
The wary reader will say, then, that this is an exaggerated alarmism, since those militias that precede totalitarian regimes are not seen out there.
It happens, however, that throughout contemporary history, since modern representative democracies, fascism has been introduced in a subtle way, but no mucho.
Fascism infiltrates power
The militias have already taken to the streets, manipulated by the most astonishing media campaign recorded on this side of the world. They went out, banged pans, showed their rosy cheeks and were duly discarded, as silent minorities are after they've been used. Now they only frequent digital social networks.
Power was then handed over to the so-called “lower clergy” of Congress. What was seen was the sequence of revelations escaped as methane gas from the sewer, of a police operation whose objective was only to criminalize one side of ideological diversity – exactly the one that could contain the domination of the central power by fascism.
The deposed group had certainly committed their follies, allowed themselves to be deliciously fattened by the molasses of the court and closed their eyes to the evident signs that there was something rotten in their domains.
But pragmatism, ah, always pragmatism, advised softness with its corrupt people, and the president was deposed believing that she was being the victim of a “communication battle”.
What is taking place is not a simple battle: it is a war of extermination against the project of capitalism with social guidelines experienced in the first decade of this century.
It is curious to observe that even outstanding agents of this project of reversion to “pure and hard” capitalism, individuals qualified by decades of decent exercise of their activities as jurists, communicators, community leaders or educators, candidly follow the herd, without realizing it. that they are clearing the ground where all intelligence will be buried.
How can one explain, for example, that an avowedly Nazi parliamentarian is invited to preach his doctrine of violence and intolerance in a Jewish club, provoking sympathetic laughter and enthusiastic applause? What is most significant? The applause of the idiots present or the silence of those intellectuals from the Jewish community who claim to be managers of the collective conscience?
The most significant is certainly this drowsiness, this lack of political action in the terms proposed by Hanna Arendt, that is, political action is inherent to the human condition.
Fascism is exactly the opposite side of this coin: the imposition of a human condition of submission through the denial of politics.
The fascist project underway in Brazil has few possibilities of establishing itself in the long term, and who says this is the guru of the managers of this process, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.
Von Mises defended the admissibility of fascism (exactly like the Jews who applaud Bolsonaro), in his book entitled “Liberalismo”.
But readers of von Mises often omit that their guru advocates fascism only as a short-term means of intervention, “an impromptu meeting in the face of an emergency” – in the author's own words.
In this case, the “emergency” is the destruction of all state intervention projects in the social field, offering the territory for privatization.
What comes after is the devastated field on which it will be necessary to build again a project of collective, inclusive, democratic well-being.
As History is full of ironies, the irony in the present case is the fact that the builders of this demolition project use the urban middle classes, manipulated by an irresponsible media, as a maneuvering mass. Who will pay the price of this adventure.
This is one of the reasons why we call these individuals “idiots”.
*Luciano Martins Costa is a media critic.
