Thursday, July 20, 2023

New Age and Cultural Revolution, by Olavo de Carvalho

The ‘New Age’ of which Fritjof Capra has become a celebrated spokesperson, and Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ have something in common: both aim to introduce vast, profound, and irreversible changes in the human spirit. Both call for a break with the past and propose a new heaven and a new earth to humanity. The former has been making immense repercussions in Brazilian scientific and business circles. The latter, without making as much noise, has been exerting a significant influence on the course of political and cultural life in this country for three decades. Neither of the two has ever been subjected to the briefest critical examination. Accepted out of mere first-sight sympathy, they penetrate, propagate, gain power over consciousness, and become decisive forces in the lives of millions of people who have never heard of them, but suffer the effects of their cultural impact. For the conscious adherents and propagators of these two new proposals, nothing is more comforting than the astounded passivity with which the literate Brazilian public receives, admits, absorbs, and copies everything, with that talent for mechanical imitation that compensates for the lack of true intelligence.

Epigraph

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
The Second Coming

General Introduction to the Trilogy

User Manual of The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian Incultural Current Affairs and the preceding volumes: The New Age and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci and The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar – Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion.1

THE COLLECTIVE IMBECILE concludes the trilogy that began with The New Age and the Cultural Revolution (1994) and continued with The Garden of Afflictions (1995).

Each of the three books can be understood independently of the others. What cannot be done is to grasp the essence of thought that guides the entire trilogy through only one of them.

The purpose of The Collective Imbecile in the collection is quite explicit and was stated in the preface: to describe, through examples, the extent and seriousness of a state of affairs – current and Brazilian – which The New Age had alerted to and whose precise location in the overall evolution of ideas in the world had been diagnosed in The Garden of Afflictions.

Therefore, the meaning of the series is clearly to situate contemporary Brazilian culture within the broader framework of the history of ideas in the West, in a period that goes from Epicurus to Chaim Perelman’s “new rhetoric.” To my knowledge, no one has made an effort to think about Brazil on this scale before. My only predecessors seem to have been Darcy Ribeiro, Mário Vieira de Mello, and Gilberto Freyre, the first with his tetralogy starting with The Civilizing Process, the second with Development and Culture, and the third with his entire work. However, I differ from them in essential differences: Ribeiro employs a much larger scale, starting with Neanderthal Man, but at the same time, he seeks to encompass this immense territory from the perspective of a particular empirical science, Anthropology, based on a disappointingly narrow philosophical foundation, which is naked and crude Marxism. Vieira de Mello, with much greater philosophical breadth, does not venture back beyond the period of the French Revolution, with a few incursions into the Renaissance and the Reformation. As for Gilberto, the cycle that interests him is the one that begins with the great navigations. In general, scholars of the Brazilian identity have assumed that since Brazil entered History in the so-called “modern” period, there was no need for Brazil to try to see itself in a broader temporal mirror. Therefore, I am alone in the game, and I can claim in my favor the formidable merit of originality.

Formidable because originality is singularity, and the human mind is ill-equipped to perceive singularities as such: either it immediately expels them from the circle of attention to avoid the discomfort of adapting to an unknown form, or it apprehends them only through partial and superficial analogies that incorrectly assimilate them to some class of known objects. Between silent rejection and loquacious deception, my trilogy does not have many chances of being well understood.

But singularity, in it, is not only in the subject matter. It is also in the philosophical postulates that underlie it and in the literary form that I chose to present it, or rather, that was imposed on me by the nature of the subject matter and the circumstances of the moment.

Regarding the form, the reader will notice that it differs in the three volumes. The first one consists of two medium-sized essays, placed between two introductions, several appendices, a handful of footnotes, and a conclusion. At first glance, the whole gives the idea of texts of diverse origins brought together by the fortuitous coincidence of subject matter. Upon closer examination, it reveals the unity of the underlying idea, embodied in the symbol that I had printed on the cover: the biblical monsters Behemoth and Leviathan in William Blake’s engraving, the former heavily ruling over the world, the massive power of its belly firmly supported by four legs, the latter writhing in the depths of the waters, defeated and fearsome in its impotent rancor.

I used Blake’s engraving not for its beauty but to indicate that I attribute to these symbols exactly the meaning that Blake attributed to them. This is an important detail because this interpretation is not a poetic allegory, but, as Kathleen Raine noted in Blake and Tradition, the rigorous application of the principles of Christian symbolism. In the Bible, God shows Behemoth to Job, saying, “Behold Behemoth, which I made with thee” (Job 40:10). Taking advantage of the ambiguity of the Hebrew original, Blake translates “with thee” as “from thee,” indicating the unity of essence between man and monster: Behemoth is at once a macrocosmic power and a latent force in the human soul. As for Leviathan, God asks, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?” (Job 40:21), making it clear that the force of rebellion lies in the tongue, while Behemoth’s power, as stated in Job 40:11, lies in the belly. There could not be greater clarity in the contrast between psychic power and material power: Behemoth is the massive weight of natural necessity, Leviathan is the diabolical infranature, invisible under the waters – the psychic world – that it agitates with its tongue.

The meaning that Blake records in these figures is not an “interpretation” in the negative sense that Susan Sontag gives to this word: it is, as should be all good readings of sacred texts, the direct translation of universal symbolism. For Blake, although Behemoth represents the set of forces obedient to God, and Leviathan the spirit of negation and rebellion, both are equally monsters, cosmic forces disproportionately superior to man, who fight against each other on the stage of the world, but also within the human soul. However, it is not up to man, nor to Behemoth, to subjugate Leviathan. Only God Himself can do it. Christian iconography shows Jesus as the fisherman who pulls Leviathan out of the waters, tying its tongue with a hook. However, when man shies away from the inner struggle, renouncing the help of Christ, the destructive struggle between nature and the rebellious antinatural or infranatural forces is unleashed, transferring from the spiritual and inner sphere to the external stage of History. This is how Blake’s engraving, inspired by the biblical narrative, suggests with the synthetic force of its symbolism a metaphysical interpretation of the origin of wars, revolutions, and catastrophes: they reflect man’s resignation in the face of the call of inner life. By shying away from the spiritual struggle that frightens him but that he could overcome with the help of Jesus Christ, man exposes himself to dangers of a material order in the bloody scenario of History. In doing so, he moves from the realm of Providence and Grace to the realm of fate and destiny, where the appeal to divine help can no longer have an effect because there, the truth and the error, the right and the wrong, are no longer confronted, but only the blind forces of relentless necessity and impotent rebellion. In the context of more recent History, that is, in the cycle that begins more or less at the time of the Enlightenment, these two forces clearly assume the meaning of rigid conservatism and revolutionary hubris. Or, even more simply, right and left.

The entire drama described can be iconographically summarized in the cross diagram that I placed afterwards in The Garden of Afflictions, but which is already implied in The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, as it constitutes the very structure of the analytical approach by which I seek to grasp the significance of the two currents of thought mentioned in the title: Fritjof Capra’s neocapitalist holism and Antonio Gramsci’s cultural devastation enterprise.

In this first volume, the initially adopted form could not be clearer and was imposed by the very nature of the subject matter: an introduction, one chapter for Capra, another for Gramsci, a comparative retrospective, and an inescapable conclusion: ideologies, whatever they may be, were always limited to the horizontal dimension of time and space, opposing the collective to the collective, the number to the number; lost was the vertical dimension that linked the individual soul to the universality of the divine spirit, the singular to the Singular. Along with it, the sense of scale, the sense of proportions and priorities, was lost as well, so ideologies tended to totally occupy the entire stage of spiritual life and simultaneously deny metaphysical totality and the unity of the human individual, reinterpreting and flattening everything into the mold of a one-dimensional worldview.

The footnotes and appendices, which apparently bring some disorder to the form of the whole, serve two opposite and complementary purposes: on one hand, they indicate the broader foundations that the argument kept implicit, showing the reader that Capra and Gramsci’s analysis was just the visible tip of a much broader investigation that, at that time, only my students knew through the lectures and handouts of the Philosophy Seminar, but which, under the conditions of an abnormally busy life, I was not sure I would ever be able to write in full; on the other hand, they indicate that my analyses do not hover in the realm of mere theories, but that they apply to the understanding of political facts unfolding in the Brazilian scene at the very moment I was writing the book – hence the polemical edges that give certain passages of this essay the appearance of combat journalism. If some readers saw in the book no more than this surface – just as others will see in The Collective Imbecile only a timely critique of certain public figures of the day and in The Garden of Afflictions an attack on the USP establishment – I cannot say that they have missed anything because the rest and the best of what these books contain were not really made for those readers, and it is good that it remains invisible to their eyes.

If in the first volume I allowed the central idea to be only outlined in fragments, somewhat minimalist in style, so that the reader, rather sensing it than perceiving it, had the task of seeking it from the depths of himself instead of simply taking it from the surface of the page, in the second volume, The Garden of Afflictions, I followed the opposite strategy: to be as explicit as possible and give the exposition the maximum unity, forcing the reader to follow a dense argumentation, without leaps or interruptions, over four hundred pages. But in order not to give the illusion that this complete form encompassed the totality of my thinking on the subject, I scattered throughout the text hundreds of footnotes that indicated the implicit theoretical assumptions, the possibilities for further exploration (already accomplished orally in lectures or yet to be done), and a thousand and one seeds of possible and interesting developments that I would accomplish if I had an endless life, but which intelligent readers can well accomplish on their own. The unity of argumentation in The Garden of Afflictions, which in my intention, confirmed by some readers, gives this otherwise extremely heavy and complex book the readability of a detective novel, thus shows that it is not the closed unity of a system, but the unity of a holon, as Arthur Koestler would say: something that, seen from one side, is a whole in itself, and from the other side, is part of a larger whole. This homology of part and whole is, in turn, repeated in the internal structure of the book, where the apparently insignificant event that serves as its starting point already contains, in its microcosmic or microscopic scale, the general lines of the global interpretation of the history of the West, which is presented in the remaining chapters. Those readers who complained that such a substantial book began with the polemical comment on a minor event did not understand well one of the main messages of the book, which is that, in light of a metaphysics of History, there are no properly insignificant events – the great and the small are cohered in the organic unity of a Meaning that pervades everything. What weighs nothing in the causal order can reveal much in the order of significance.

And, indeed, if there were perfectly insignificant events that deserved nothing but contempt and silence, the third volume of the series, The Collective Imbecile, could not even have been written: because what I present there is a commented showcase of cultural banalities that carry much significance precisely because they are worth nothing. And if I decided to gather them in a volume, giving them the dignity of being remembered when their authors are nothing more than shadows in Hades, which is the grave of the irrelevant, it was precisely because I understood that, starting from each of them, and turning in ever-widening concentric circles, one could arrive at visions of universal scale similar to the one in which, starting from a cultural squabble that occurred at the São Paulo Art Museum in 1990, I showed the readers of The Garden of Afflictions the combat of Leviathan and Behemoth on the entire horizon of Western history. And since I cannot undertake such a hermeneutic effort with every new cultural idiocy I read in the newspapers, I decided to gather some of them and offer them to readers as samples for the purpose of exercise. The Collective Imbecile is, therefore, the book of tasks that accompanies the basic text brought in The Garden of Afflictions, with The New Age as an abbreviation for beginners. Whoever reads The Collective Imbecile in this way, seeking there the homework to reconstruct, from thirty examples, the outlines of the vision of History and the interpretive method exposed in the previous volumes, and always seeking the organic unity between the part and the whole, between the philosophical vision of a millenary culture and the samples of the momentary inculture of a country forgotten on the fringes of History, will have won for himself the best part of what I have given him. For that is how one reads the books of philosophers, even when it is only a little philosopher like this one who is speaking to you.

I admit that if I had adopted a more academically favored expository form in any of the three books, I would not need to draw attention now to a unity of thought that would be apparent at first glance. But this visibility would come at the cost of losing all references to authentic life and the imprisonment of my discourse in a linguistic bubble that does not match either my temperament or the rule that I imposed on myself some years ago of never speaking impersonally or in the name of some collective entity, but always directly in my own name alone, with no more respectable backing than the mere honorability of a rational animal, as well as never addressing abstract collectivities, but always and only addressing individuals made of flesh and blood, stripped of the temporary identities that office, social position, and ideological affiliation superimpose upon the one they were born with and with which they shall appear one day before the Throne of the Most High. I am deeply persuaded that only at this level of discourse can one philosophize authentically.

Furthermore, there is some pedagogical merit in not being too tidy, in being able to present the data not in the most customary order that a lazy viewer would desire, but intelligently disarranging them in a way that forces the reader to actively participate in the investigation. And there is immense pleasure in mixing literary genres when one is the author of a booklet that previously distinguished and cataloged them with refined formal rigor.2

I am immensely pleased to have been able to complete this trilogy and to be here today, in this celebration that, to me, is less about the book launch and more about the conclusion of a part, of a stage of the task that falls upon me in this life. The task, essentially, is to break the circle of limitations and constraints that ideological discourse has imposed on the intellect of this country, to connect our culture to the ancient and higher currents of spiritual life in the world, and, in short, to make Brazil, instead of only looking at itself in the narrow mirror of modernity, imagining that four centuries constitute the entire history of the world, be able to see itself on the scale of the human drama in relation to the universe and eternity. The task, in its highest and most ambitious intention, is to remove the mental obstacles that currently prevent Brazilian culture from receiving a stronger inspiration from the divine spirit and from flourishing as a magnificent gift to all of humanity.

Preface to the Second Edition

After a few months from the first edition, which quickly sold out, events have only served to rapidly confirm the diagnoses I presented in this book.

On one hand, Brazil is experiencing a profound crisis of intelligence, reflected in the foolish enchantment with which we receive and exalt the most senseless and absurd ideas that come to us from abroad, considering them as high intellectual achievements. Mr. Capra was not the last in this series. After him, we welcomed the visit and insights of Mr. Richard Rorty, whose proposal, philosophically indecent and morally repugnant, local thinkers dared to criticize only with precautions and apologies that bordered on servility.3

This phenomenon is, in part, a passive effect of the crisis of American intelligence, as I explain in another book that will be published soon after this second edition.4

However, on the other hand, it is also the result of a deliberate policy pursued by leftist movements interested in reducing all Brazilian intellectual life to a unanimous chorus of complaints. The debasement of the arts, philosophy, and even some sciences to the condition of megaphones for revolutionary propaganda, a temptation that the best Marxist thinkers always rejected as demeaning, has become the established practice that no one dares to question. This is less due to fear of explicit retaliation than to the absolute certainty that the listeners are now incapable of understanding, so far are they from imagining that culture can have other and higher purposes. The dogma of militant culture was not adopted as a conscious option, victorious in a confrontation with other possible conceptions; it stealthily infiltrated, as an implicit assumption, taking advantage of the ignorance of the new generations, who, upon awakening to the world of “culture,” already find it identified with ideological propaganda as if this were its natural state and eternal destiny. What is worse is that this propaganda no longer even conveys ideas or symbols of a revolutionary doctrine; it merely repeats, in a shallow, literal, and direct manner, the demands of the day: down with Collor, death to the corrupt, long live Betinho, we want sex. All the dwarfs in Congress, united and combined, have not caused as much harm to this country as this complete prostitution of intelligence to immediate political ambitions and the most commonplace passions. Lost money can be regained; when the spirit departs, it does not return. Abandoned temples, as universal experience shows, become forever dens of sorcerers and bandits.

Due to the combined effect of American decline and local action aimed at molding and merging all the minds in this country into the faceless mold of the Gramscian “collective intellectual,” the fact is that national intelligence is spiraling downward while a somber rumbling of revolution is rising from the streets and fields.

Yes, Brazil is unequivocally entering an atmosphere of communist revolution. Imbecilization is just a symptom: the temporary obscuring of light mentioned by the I Ching, in which, among the folds of the night, monsters are generated that will populate the visions of a fearsome awakening.

These monsters are no longer so small that a discerning eye cannot see them and be astonished at how quickly they are growing in the womb of national unawareness.

The very unanimity of the intellectual elite is one of the signs. But another seemingly contradictory sign is the proliferation of guild demands, the spirit of division, at a time when the country most needs the sacrifice of its parts for the good of the whole. In every class, in every region, in every union, in every company, in every family, in every soul, one notices an acute and exasperated sense of one’s own rights and a complete dulling of the sense of duty. It is the disastrous predominance of demanding and protesting over creating and offering. The less one fulfills their obligation, the more they believe they have the right to accuse others. The government represses excessive price increases while protecting high interest rates and fueling the gigantic petroleum tapeworm, which, through periodic fuel price hikes, sets the pace for the generalized rise in the cost of living. The head of the household rants against political corruption while asking an accountant to “touch up” their income declaration to make the lie more plausible and exempt them from taxes. Companies censure the government while raising the prices of their products and services above what the law allows and decency recommends. The left cries out against the oligarchies while organizing strikes by public employees directly aimed at the rights of the population. Intellectuals and artists decry injustices while living like princes at the expense of public funds. The press accuses, denounces, and exposes individuals and institutions to infamy while discreetly, in professional congresses away from the public eye, confessing its own lack of decorum, ethics, and dignity. Landless workers display their touching poverty before the cameras while spending fortunes on paramilitary operations that the army itself would not have the budget to sustain. The discourse of unanimity, like the enthusiastic chorus of fans during the World Cup, is nothing but a substitute, the ostentation of a feigned unity that conceals the cowardly and ruleless struggle of all against all. Selfishness, unawareness, and malice gain ground with each new onslaught of the “Campaign for Ethics.”

Quia bono? Who benefits from the crime? Who profits from the tearing apart of the national soul in a vile confrontation of all selfishness and unawareness? Opinion polls respond that, of all Brazilians, the only one who is not afraid of being happy has already gained forty percent of the intentions to vote for the Presidency.

This could be a coincidence, an accidental effect of circumstances. However, if we step back and search for its roots, we see that this effect has long been desired and meticulously prepared by the most skillful and talented generation of activist intellectuals ever born in this country. It is the generation that, defeated by the military dictatorship, abandoned the dreams of attaining power through armed struggle and silently dedicated itself to a revision of its strategy in light of the teachings of Antonio Gramsci. What Gramsci taught them was to renounce overt radicalism in order to broaden the margin of alliances; to relinquish the purity of apparent ideological schemes in order to gain efficiency in the art of enticing and compromising; to withdraw from direct political combat and delve into the deepest zone of psychological sabotage. With Gramsci, they learned that a revolution of the mind must precede the political revolution; that it is more important to undermine the moral and cultural foundations of the adversary than to win votes; that an unconscious collaborator, whose actions the party can never be held responsible for, is worth more than a thousand registered militants. With Gramsci, they learned a strategy so vast in its scope, so subtle in its means, so complex and almost contradictory in its simultaneous plurality of channels of action, that it is practically impossible for the opponent not to end up collaborating with it in some way, unwittingly weaving the rope with which they will be hanged, as Lenin prophesied.

The formal or informal, conscious or unconscious conversion of the left-wing intelligentsia to Antonio Gramsci’s strategy is the most relevant fact in the national history of the last thirty years. It is in this conversion, as well as in other concurring and converging factors, that one must seek the origin of the far-reaching psychological mutations that are pushing Brazil into a clearly pre-revolutionary situation, which until now only two observers, besides the author of this book, have known how to indicate, and moreover very discreetly.5

The expectation, hope, and longing for revolution are so old, so deeply rooted in the soul of the national intelligentsia6 that, even in the face of the worldwide failure of socialism, it will not have the strength to resist the temptation to carry it out now that the local situation, for the first time in our history, offers the means to seize power. Brazil indeed has a chronic mismatch with the time of universal history. The global recognition of the debacle of communism resonated in this country—paradoxically, according to human logic, but consistently, according to the constant line of national history—as a touch of hope: our turn has come to achieve what no one else wants anymore.

For some time, I nurtured the senseless hope that the Workers' Party (PT) would expel the Gramscian poison from itself and become the great socialist or labor party that Brazil needs to counterbalance the seemingly irreversible neoliberal advance in the world. By the healthy play of forces, it could provide the regular and harmonious movement of power rotation that is the normal pulse of a democratic organism. Driven by this illusion, I voted for Lula as president. Today, I wouldn’t vote for him even as a city councilor in São Bernardo. It’s because, through the succession of events since the impeachment campaign, the PT has shown its surprising vocation to me as a manipulative and coup-minded party capable of leading the country down the fraudulent paths of Gramscian “passive revolution.” It employs the most cowardly and illicit means—political espionage, psychological blackmail, the prostitution of culture, the sabotage of corrective measures, hysterical agitation that appeals to the lowest sentiments of the population—and adorns this package of filth with a moralistic discourse that reeks of the sacristy. The party that, to sabotage a candidate, promotes something like a “preventive strike” during the launch of a new currency under the astonishing claim of a “theoretical possibility” of future wage losses, knowing that this strike will result in an increase in fuel prices and a resurgence of inflationary cycles, factitiously confirms retroactively the announced damages. Frankly, it has decided to imitate the devil: it produces evil in order to generate hatred within it and accusation speeches from that hatred. The strike of the oil workers failed, but it is the purest example of what the people call “an appeal”: an extreme recourse used for frivolous purposes.

If the PT does this, it is because it has lost confidence in the majestic future to which our developing democracy destined it. Excited by signs of a momentary success that it fears will never be repeated, it has decided to bet everything on the voracious and suicidal game of “it’s now or never.” It no longer wants only to elect the president, govern well, subject its performance to the popular judgment in five years, and make history at the slow and natural pace of the mills of the gods. It wants to seize power, make the revolution, dismantle its adversaries, and permanently expel those who could defeat it in future elections. In the words of Murillo Mendes’s poetry, it has chosen “the swift propellers of evil over the slow sandals of good.” The Gramscian mythology, pompously diagnosing the “transition to a new historical bloc,” has given verbal legitimacy to these aspirations, and now Brazil, having barely embarked on the path of democracy, hastens to abandon it for the shortcut of revolution. Where it leads, the world knows, but what does the world’s knowledge matter to the hordes of underage voters whom the leftist flattery, consecrated in constitutional norms, has turned into the decisive portion of the electorate, giving them power before giving them education? What matters is to seize the moment, at any cost, carrying Lulalá on the shoulders of angry, insolent, and illiterate boys, and before the “passive consensus” of the population has time to assess what is happening, irreversibly hitch the country to the car bomb that hurtles downhill toward revolution.

The generation that reached adulthood at the moment when the dictatorship closed the doors of political life is now fifty years old. Throughout the last thirty years, they waited, dreamed, planned, desired, and coveted with tears of impotent rancor, and above all, they read a lot of Antonio Gramsci. The fact that the socialist revolution has already shown its true face to the world, that it has already proven unequivocally that “it’s not worth it,” matters little. The generation of guerrillas will do what it has long prepared to do. It matters little that, according to the world’s clock, the hour has passed. For the garbage collector, the end of the party is the signal that “his” party is about to begin.

For these reasons, this book, seemingly made up of disconnected fragments, is starting to show, through the force of external events, the unity that the author did not have the time or ingenuity to give it on the literary plane. Under the compromising appearance of a historical salad that mixes Lenin, the I Ching, Max Weber, Freud, and the Red Command, it points out, in order and, I believe, logically, the symptom and the cause of the Brazilian intelligentsia’s illness: at least part of the origin of our vulnerability to Mr. Capra’s false message lies in Antonio Gramsci’s ideas, put into practice by the generation of leftist intellectuals who, on Ilha Grande, acted as midwives to the Red Command and who now set the tone of mental life in this country. If in the first edition, I couldn’t provide a continuous and cohesive exposition of this phenomenon, having to adopt instead a prismatic and unbalanced approach, suggesting it in fragments rather than declaring the meaning of the whole explicitly, it was not due to any profound intention; it was due to a genuine inability to do otherwise. But I don’t believe I deserve censure for it. After all, here, in a rough and fragmented manner, I said what no one else said in any way. The first one to outline the unity of a confused picture is not expected to be complete, and the first one to announce a terrible danger is not expected to speak clearly and orderly according to good style. Breathless and stuttering, half-crazy and abstruse, it finally provides an emergency service. As an Arab proverb says, "Do not look at who I am, but receive what I give you."7

Rio de Janeiro, June 1994.

Prefatory Note [from the 1st edition]

The “New Age” of which Fritjof Capra became a celebrated spokesperson and Antonio Gramsci’s “Cultural Revolution” have something in common: both aim to introduce vast, profound, and irreversible changes in the human spirit. Both call for a break with the past and propose to humanity a new heaven and a new earth.

The first has been gaining immense repercussion in Brazilian scientific and business circles. The second, without making as much noise, has been exerting a marked influence on the course of political and cultural life in this country for three decades.

Neither of the two has ever been subjected to the briefest critical examination. Accepted by mere first sight sympathy, they penetrate, spread, gain power over consciences, become decisive forces in the conduct of the lives of millions of people who have never heard of them, but who suffer the effects of their cultural impact.

For the conscious adherents and propagators of the two new proposals, nothing is more comforting than the stunned passivity with which the Brazilian educated public receives, admits, absorbs, and copies everything, with that talent for mechanical imitation that compensates for the lack of true intelligence.

But Gramsci’s Cultural Revolution and the New Age movement are not simple trends that can be adopted and abandoned at will, with the nonchalance of someone changing underwear. They are proposals of immense scope that, once accepted, even implicitly, informally, hypothetically, lead to consequences of incalculable reach. These consequences will certainly not spare those who have adhered to their causes as a mere pastime, without clear consciousness of the responsibilities at stake. They will spare no one within their radius of action. And we all are.

It is therefore a suicidal frivolity to absorb ideas like these without a preliminary critical examination. It is this examination that I inaugurate in this booklet, aware that in doing so, I anticipate a sluggish public opinion that has not yet remotely raised the issues discussed here, but not for this reason do I do it with less delay in relation to the demands of my own conscience, which has demanded this work from me since I first spoke in public on these matters in 1987. A prolific speaker, I am slow to write, which is why my sense of urgency sometimes turns into a feeling of guilt. The urgency, in this case, was to clarify the connection between those two streams of thought; a connection that, once perceived, reveals the inconsistency of both, and frees us from both. By not perceiving it, the Brazilian mind today spins futilely around the axis marked by these two poles. By the number of adherents and the strategic positions that some of these occupy in society, Capra and Gramsci dominate the two most active mental currents in this country. The fact that they have never been confronted and that the very idea of confronting them sounds strange only shows that the country is not clearly aware of the alternatives in which it struggles, and that mental life in it tends to split into separate devotions to gods who do not know each other and who mutually antagonize each other in the dark, like blindfolded swordsmen. It is therefore a question, here, of clarifying a subconscious conflict, in which the fate of a country is decided among the shadows of a dream. Sleepwalking Brazil: why do you support your intellectuals with money and flattery, if not to reveal yourself, to tell you what is going on with you beyond the surface of the news?

The three chapters that make up this book reproduce, as much as possible, the content of classes and lectures I gave on their respective topics, whether in the Permanent Seminar on Philosophy and Humanities, which I direct at the Institute of Liberal Arts,8 or outside of it. The chapter on Fritjof Capra was written and distributed to my students in September 1993, when the upcoming visit to Brazil of the New Age guru, promoted by the Holistic University of Brasília, was announced. The others, their natural complements as will be seen, were written now in February 1994, especially for this book. The appendices illustrate details that matter to the understanding of chapter II.

I recognize that, at least as far as Gramsci is concerned, the examination I present is superficial, that there would still be thousands of things to say that have not been said here.9 But someone has to start, and in the absence of better brains willing to digest the subject, it fell to me. As for Capra, he is far from representing the “New Age” in its entirety; although some see him as a synthesis of this movement, he is just one of its symptoms, albeit acute and sonorous. Therefore, no one should censure me for the incompleteness of these analyses: my samples bear the label of samples, with proud modesty. Also, this work has no pretension whatsoever to interfere in the course of things. Its only desire is to provide, to those who have a sincere desire to understand events, some means to do so. Now, those who have this desire are always few, amidst the clamor, enthusiastic or threatening, of those who believe they already know everything and who are impatiently waiting for the world to bow to their proposals. To those few and quiet, therefore, this work is dedicated. Among them, I highlight the novelist Herberto Sales, who read in typewritten version the first chapter and made generous references to it, which I thank with emotion. All the more moved because, if I had to choose a stylistic guru, it would not be another, in the present phase of our literature, other than Herberto Sales. I also highlight the brave group of students and listeners who have been following my work for years with an interest that comforts me.

Rio de Janeiro, February 1994.

I – Lana Caprina, or: The Wisdom of Mr. Capra

In the beginning of November10, Mr. Fritjof Capra will be arriving in Brazil, invited by the Holistic University of Brasília to speak about the New Age that he announces in his book The Turning Point.

Mr. Capra’s voice will not cry out in the wilderness. The Holistic University has already gathered a congregation of local intellectuals to say amen to him. Among the acolytes are Frei Betto and the former rector of UnB, Christovam Buarque. Mr. Capra, as you can see, is not a writer like the others: he is a leader, a spiritual authority and, let’s admit it, a prophet.

The content of his prophecies is well known: The Turning Point is even in the hands of children, who discuss it in schools. But, according to the Holistic University, this is not enough. Mr. Capra must be heard by all friends of the human species. Because, even though he shares a name with a filmmaker who became famous for his happy end films, he does not guarantee any happy ending for our century unless humanity follows his advice. Let’s therefore proceed to examine them, with the urgency required by the case.

According to Mr. Capra, the history of the world has reached a turning point, and must change its course. The three main changes at hand are as follows: first, humanity will stop consuming fossil fuels (oil); second, patriarchy will end; third, the current scientific paradigm will be replaced by another, holistic one. These three things are already happening, but, assures Mr. Capra, it is urgent to hasten their consummation, which will mark the advent of the New Age.

When talking about the first item, Mr. Capra is very brief, as befits prophets. Instead of the long analyses he grants to the other two themes, he only issues this prophecy: “This decade will be marked by the transition from the fossil fuel era to a new solar era, powered by renewable energy from the Sun”. Having the book been published in 1981, the decade Mr. Capra refers to ended in 1990. Well, not all prophets are lucky. But, if the mentioned prophecy is fulfilled four, five or nine decades late, Mr. Capra can always argue that St. John the Evangelist was not very accurate about the date of the Apocalypse either.

Like many other prophets, Mr. Capra can complain about being misunderstood. I, for example, do not understand how the world could have jumped directly from the fossil fuel era to the solar era, without passing through the atomic age, in which we were at the time of the prophecy and in which we continue to be after its due date. But perhaps Mr. Capra’s prophetic intuition operates at the speed of light, skipping stages. This is indeed a good reason to jump straight to the next item, since the first chapter of mutation did not have a happy end.

Patriarchy consists, according to Mr. Capra, of three elements: first, the domination of man over woman; second, the domination of the human species over nature; third, the predominance of reason (male faculty) over intuition (female). These are three sides of a unique phenomenon, which Mr. Capra summarizes as the supremacy of yang over yin.

As you can see, it is a special kind of patriarchy, quite different from the one we can find in history and sociology books. For these tell us that the increase in technical power over nature shook the rural property regime in which patriarchy was established; and that the advent of the Empire of Reason, brought about by the French Revolution, soon promoted equality of rights for men and women, dealing a merciful blow to the authority of the pater familias. In short, two of the three things that Mr. Capra groups under the common label of “patriarchy” are precisely the opposite. But prophets do not care about profane sciences. Non enim cogitationes meae cogitationes vestrae, the Bible had already warned us. Mr. Capra, indeed, does not think like us.

But there is something in him that at least some of us can understand perfectly well. Since logic, in his understanding, is an expression of the abominable patriarchy whose end he desires, he could not obey it without becoming, ipso facto, illogical. It is then for a simple matter of logic that he chooses to be illogical. Any baby can understand this. The difficult thing is to understand him when one is no longer a baby. To be admitted into the heavens of the New Age, the reader must therefore become like the little ones.

Here is a typical case. To rid ourselves of the hateful patriarchy, says our prophet, humanity should be inspired by the example of Chinese civilization, whose conception of human nature, especially expressed in the I Ching, “stands in stark contrast to that of our patriarchal culture”. Now seeking anti-patriarchal ammunition in the pages of the I Ching, the reader will find, in hexagram 37, the following recommendations: “The wife should always be guided by the will of the master of the house, that is, by the father, the husband, or the adult son. Her place is inside the house”. The life that Betty Friedan asked God for. Moreover, according to Marcel Granet’s classic La Civilisation Chinoise,11 Chinese feudalism, the period during which most of the I Ching commentaries were written, “rests on the recognition of male dominance”. The China that Mr. Capra refers to must therefore not be the same one that profane geographers know by that name.

What Mr. Capra really cannot be accused of is sinophile partisanship. For, if he rejects Western logic, he does not bow to the demands of the Eastern one either. According to him, the yang represents the analytical reason, which divides, and the yin the intuition, which unifies. The Chinese, understanding nothing of these subtleties, represented the divisive yang with a continuous line, and the unifying yin with a line divided in half. In the New Age, editions of the I Ching will come duly corrected.

While these editions do not appear, Mr. Capra is already taking care, on his own, of introducing some more serious modifications into Chinese thinking. For example, he says that in Chinese civilization, man does not seek to dominate nature, but to integrate himself into it. Once again, Mr. Capra’s Chinese wisdom caught China off guard: a Chinese person wouldn’t even understand this sentence, because in their language there is no word that means “nature” in the Western sense, that is, both the visible world and the invisible order that governs it (an ambiguity inherited by modern languages from the Greek “physis”). The Chinese language is, with all due respect, more “analytical” in this regard: it has one term to designate the visible world (khien) and another (khouen) for the invisible order. To compensate, the visible world or khien encompasses, “synthetically,” both the earthly nature and human society. Mr. Capra does not specify which of the two “natures” man should integrate into, but it is clear that no one could integrate into both simultaneously and in the same way. The ancient Chinese had already warned about this and resolved the contradiction by proposing a duality of attitudes to face this double aspect of nature: the sage, says the I Ching, must actively seek to integrate himself into the invisible order or khouen (called “active perfection”) and gently navigate the demands of earthly nature (khien or “passive perfection”). In other words, integrate into the celestial order, integrating the earthly order within oneself and dialectically transcending it (thus absorbing it in turn into the celestial order). In this sense, the “celestial” and the “earthly” respectively correspond to the dharma and karma of Hindu tradition. Man does not “integrate” into karma but “absorbs” it to the extent that he integrates into dharma: he frees himself from the weight of the earth to the extent that he heeds the celestial call. Christianity says exactly the same thing: man overcomes natural necessity to the extent that he follows the paths of Providence. That is not what Mr. Capra says.

The ideogram Wang (“the Emperor”) clarifies this better. It constitutes, by itself, a compendium of Chinese cosmology. It is composed of three horizontal strokes—the Heaven above, the Earth below, and man in the middle—forming the triad Tien-Ti-Jen, “Heaven-Earth-Man”—intersected by a vertical stroke, the Tao, which is somewhat conventionally translated as “law” or “harmony.” Harmony consists of each thing occupying its proper place, so that behind all the changes the world undergoes, the supreme order is not violated (although in this world of appearances it is necessarily violated, for as the Gospel says, “it is necessary that there be scandal”;12 but in the end, all partial disorders are reintegrated into the total order).

In the Chinese triad, man is called “son of Heaven and Earth.” Since Heaven is the father, it is easy to see, from hexagram 37, who is in charge. Therefore, man governs the visible world, but not on his own authority, but in the name of a transcendent order. Tien does not mean “sky” in the material sense, but the “celestial perfection” or more precisely the “will of Heaven”; in English, which Mr. Capra understands better, not the sky but heaven,13 the abode of the Holy Spirit. The sage or emperor apprehends the will of Heaven in the invisible and implements it on Earth. In the central hall of his palace, he performs daily rites of complex geometric and numerological symbolism (similar to Pythagoreanism), through which the celestial archetypes “descend” (just as in the Mass the Holy Spirit “descends”) to bring order and harmony to Earth. If the emperor ceases to perform the rites, the Earth—both society and nature—falls into convulsions, ignorance, fear, violence, hunger, and plague spread everywhere.

It was not only the interruption of the rites that could bring catastrophe. “The emperor,” writes Max Weber in The Religion of China, “had to conduct himself according to the ethical imperatives of the classical scriptures. The Chinese monarch remained essentially a pontiff. He had to prove that he was indeed the ‘son of Heaven,’ the ruler approved by the heavens, so that the people, under his rule, would live well. If the rivers burst their banks or rain did not fall despite all the rites, this was proof—explicitly believed—that the emperor did not possess the charismatic qualities required by Heaven.”

Man governs the Earth, but in the name of Heaven. He governs as a pontifex, a “bridge builder,” who links Earth to Heaven through the Straight Path, the Tao. If he deviates from the Straight Path, he loses sight of the Will of Heaven and can only rule in his own name, as a tyrant and usurper. Then, in a backlash, he loses his power and falls under the dominion of the earthly powers he once commanded. Since Earth designates both physical nature and human society, the clash can mean either a civil revolution or a military coup, as well as a storm or an earthquake. The fallen monarch represents, by analogy, any man who, by breaking with the celestial order, loses sight of his ideal destiny and falls prey to abyssal passions. This is the situation described in hexagram 36, “Darkening of the Light”: “At first, he rises to Heaven, then sinks into the depths of the Earth.” The traditional commentary, summarized by Richard Wilhelm, is as follows: “The power of darkness rises to such a high position that it can bring harm to all who stand on the side of good and light. But in the end, the power of darkness perishes by its own obscurity.”

It is clear that Mr. Capra’s advice, affected by the ambiguity of the word “nature,” can have two opposite meanings: by “integration,” does he mean that we should obey the Will of Heaven or that we should plunge into the depths of the Earth? When the words of prophets are obscure, they require interpretation. Let’s interpret.

In Mr. Capra’s version, Heaven is not mentioned. The triad is reduced to a duality: on one side, man, and on the other, visible nature. The male and the female. The yang and the yin. Each one is left with the alternative of subjugating the other or “integrating” into it. The man of industrial civilization opted for the first hypothesis. Mr. Capra advocates the second.

It is true that the Western civilization chose to dominate nature, as Mr. Capra says. But it is also true that, since at least the Renaissance, it has erased (just like Mr. Capra) any reference to a transcendent order (Tien) and left man alone, face to face with material nature. Since then, the history of Western ideas has been marked by a pendulum swing between the ideologies of domination and the ideologies of submission: classicism and romanticism, revolution and reaction, historicism and naturalism, scientism and mysticism, Promethean activism and quietistic evasion, Marxism and existentialism, and last but not least, socialist cultural revolution versus the ideology of the New Age.

It is in this last pair of opposites that the key to understanding our prophet lies. Mr. Capra hits the nail on the head (no prophet can achieve the miracle of always being wrong) when he says that his vision of cultural history is an alternative to Marxism. For Marx and his epigones, nature is nothing more than the backdrop of human history. It is there not as a “being,” an ontological substance that man must contemplate and respect in its objective constitution, but as raw material to be appropriated and freely transformed according to human whim. Nature, in Marx, is ancilla industriae. Marxism continues the revolutionary Promethean tradition of the Renaissance, enhancing it by fully and explicitly subjugating nature to history. This is what the ideology of the New Age opposes.

But it does not only oppose Marxism in general, but a specific form of Marxism that, like it, sought to bring about a “mutation,” a 180-degree turn in the orientation of human thought. The founder of this Marxist current was the Italian ideologue Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramscism proposes a cultural revolution that subverts all accepted criteria of knowledge, establishing in its place an “absolute historicism,” in which the function of intelligence and culture is no longer to grasp objective truth, but merely to “express” collective belief, placed outside and above the distinction between true and false. It is the total subjection of the “object” (nature) to the “subject” (historical humanity). In this new paradigm, the emphasis of scientific activity no longer lies in the objective knowledge of nature (the exact description of its visible appearance and the investigation of the invisible principles that govern it), but rather in its transformation through technology and industry. Correspondingly, in the realm of ideas, there is a kind of “permanent revolution” of all categories of thought that succeed one another in a vertiginous acceleration of historical becoming.

Against this, the ideology of the New Age arose. In response to revolutionary Prometheanism, it advocates “integration with nature”; against the acceleration of history, it proposes the “ecological” balance of the New World Order; and against absolute historicism, it heralds the “end of History.” Capra is inconceivable without Fukuyama. Capra is the shell, while Fukuyama is the core. All the flashy “esotericism” of the New Age, with its secret initiations, gurus, magicians, and rituals, constitutes nothing more than the exoteric, the external and social religious apparatus, whose interior, the “esoteric meaning,” is actually a very modern, rational, and secular science: strategic planning. Fukuyama is to Capra exactly what esotericism is to exotericism, as the Church of John is to the Church of Peter. But both, each on its own level and by its own means, fight against the same adversary.

Gramscism was very successful in the 1960s, inspiring the passing fever of Eurocommunism and revitalizing certain communist hopes. In Brazil, it conquered practically the entire left, and the Workers' Party (PT) is essentially a Gramscian party, whether it explicitly admits it or not. But the attempt at renewal was weak and belated: communism was ultimately defeated by the worldwide rise of the ideology of the New Age. After all, the mixture of quantum physics and Eastern symbolism, psychic experiences and free sex, promises of peace and mirages of self-realization offered by this ideology is infinitely more seductive than any “absolute historicism.” Brazil, always lagging behind, is one of the few places in the world where the battle still continues, with a fierce core of Gramscian remnants offering a quixotic local resistance to the triumphant armies of the New Age.

But if revolutionary Prometheanism represented the peak of hubris, of man’s dominion over nature, the ideology of the New Age is nothing other than the backlash announced by the I Ching.

The New Age has defeated the Gramscian revolution. But it was a teratomaquia: a combat of monsters. The Chinese would say that it was a suicidal struggle: that without common obedience to Tien, the struggle between Ti and Jen can only end in the “obscuring of the Light.” The victory of the New Age therefore heralds the next step in the cycle of mutations: humanity will fall from Promethean self-glorification into helpless passivity; it will “ecologically” integrate into the balance of the New World Order, where collective conformity will be ensured by the just distribution of means to satisfy the basest passions and by a semblance of external religiosity that will give these passions a flattering aura of “depth” and “self-knowledge.”

This can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Gérard Mendel, in his book The Revolt against the Father, one of the most important contributions of recent decades to Freudian psychoanalysis, says that throughout history, man’s impulse to overcome the father has been, as Freud claimed, one of the most powerful drivers of progress. But this impulse, he continues, can take two directions: either man overcomes and surpasses the carnal father by integrating himself into the rational order represented by the ideal father, or he disregards the ideal order altogether and, free from all moral constraints, kills the carnal father and takes possession of the mother. This latter alternative is the Promethean revolt, which is followed, in a backlash, by a fall into the irrational, a uterine regression, the “integration” of man into darkness. Hence, according to Mendel, the anthropological and also psychotherapeutic importance of the words of the most famous Christian prayer: the “revolt against the father” is only healthy and fruitful when undertaken “in the name of the Father.”

In Chinese terms, the carnal father is, for the adult man (Jen), nothing more than an aspect of Ti, the Earth. It must be subjected to the celestial order, Tien or the ideal father, so that man can then assume, without usurpation or violence, the just and harmonious governance of the Earth. I have always thought that Dr. Freud had something Chinese about him.

In Mendel’s terms, the Gramscian revolution is the destructive revolt against the father, and the ideology of the New Age, with its appeals to the fusion of individual consciousnesses in a soup of holistic illusions, is the uterine regression that follows it. All uterine regressions are heralded by an exacerbation of fantasy, the hypnotic call of senseless hopes, and the psychic foresight of endless delights. They all end in abject slavery, helpless passivity in the face of the aggression of abyssal forces, and the obscuring of the light.

It is inevitable that there be scandal. The New Age has defeated the Gramscian Prometheanism, and here comes hexagram 36. “There’s coming a shitstorm”,14 and Fritjof Capra is its prophet. But in the end, which certainly does not announce itself soon, the power of darkness will succumb under the weight of its own obscurity.

After the period of darkness, the Apocalypse assures, the madness of the new prophets who dragged humanity into error will be displayed in the full light of day, and everyone will see it.

As the New Age has barely begun, it is not time to do the complete show. For now, all we can do is give some preliminary samples, attesting to the reality of a past that will seem incredible to future generations. As the wise Richard Hooker said before the advance of Puritan nonsense in the 16th century, when all this has passed, “posterity will know that we did not let things happen like a dream through negligent silence.”

Mr. Capra’s book is full of such samples. But fairness demands that we select them according to the degree of importance given to them by the author himself. We must now examine the third “turning point”: the revolution of the scientific paradigm.

In this field, Mr. Capra does not seem to be at a disadvantage as in the Chinese world, which he only knew through third-hand sources. A doctor of physics from the University of Vienna, he cannot ignore the history of Western science as he ignores Chinese civilization. But who says he can’t? To the prophets, everything is possible.

According to Mr. Capra, "the paradigm now in transformation has dominated our culture for many hundreds of years"; it “includes a certain number of ideas” that “include the belief that the scientific method is the only valid approach to knowledge; the conception of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary material units; the conception of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence”. These conceptions have the respective names of: scientism, mechanicism and social Darwinism. I repeat: according to Mr. Capra, they have dominated our culture for many hundreds of years. This suggests two questions. First: what does it mean to “dominate a culture?” Second: how much is “many hundreds”?

We say that a certain idea dominates a culture when: first, it is believed by the most important intellectuals from all sectors; second, the competing ideas are either no longer fertile, that is, they no longer express themselves in powerful and meaningful works, or they have completely disappeared from the scene. Thus, for example, Christianity dominated the Middle Ages because, on the one hand, all philosophers and cultured men in general were Christians and, on the other hand, non-Christian currents of thought, although still alive at least in the collective subconscious, produced no work worthy of attention during this period. We say that Marxism dominated Soviet culture until the 1960s because during this period no eminent intellectual living in the USSR produced any idea outside the conceptual framework of Marxism, and because non-Marxist sub-currents (except in exile and in Western languages) created nothing significant.

In this strict sense, none of the three ideas that make up the “dominant paradigm” was ever dominant anywhere in the West. Since they appeared, all three have been incessantly contested, fought, refuted, rejected in whole or in part by important intellectuals. On the other hand, currents openly hostile to these ideas remained fertile enough to produce some of the most significant works in their respective fields.

Let’s look at mechanism. How can a current that, since its birth, has been rejected by giants such as Leibniz, Schelling, Vico, Schopenhauer, Driesch, Fechner, Boutroux, Nietzsche, Weber, Kierkegaard and many others, until it was overthrown in the 20th century by Planck’s theory, be “dominant”?

Strictly speaking, mechanism was only dominant, and even so with reservations, in a certain part of the world, which for Mr. Capra is “the” world: the Anglo-Saxon academic circles. That this traditionally presumptuous and self-confident little world is opening up to new ideas today, even being willing to listen to the Easterners without the traditional colonialist misunderstanding, is undoubtedly an auspicious novelty. But a local novelty. There is no surer way to make a people provincial than to persuade them that they are the center of the world. From that moment on, it declares everything that falls outside its field of vision to be nonexistent or irrelevant, and when it finally discovers something that the rest of the world already knew, it gives this discovery the air of a world revolution.

As for scientism, so much has been written against it that it is perfectly wrong to consider it dominant even in an attenuated sense of the term. To do so, one would have to exclude Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, neo-Thomism and existentialism, at least, from the foreground of culture. Here, again, Mr. Capra takes the opinion of a restricted group as globally dominant.

Social Darwinism, in turn, only became dominant, as a public belief, in a single country in the world: the United States. It never entered, for example, communist countries and the Islamic world, which together make up almost two-thirds of humanity. In Catholic countries, it was initially received as a perverse anomaly, causing scandalous reactions that are evidenced in the social encyclicals of the popes since at least Leo XIII.

But, besides affirming that these three beliefs “dominate the world,” Mr. Capra also asserts that they have done so “for many hundreds of years.” Let’s recount the history.

The oldest of the three is Mechanism. Foretold by Descartes, it was fully formulated by Isaac Newton (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687), but only became known to the general European intellectual community from 1738 when Voltaire disseminated in layman’s language the Elements of Newton’s philosophy.

It was not only through scientific dissemination that Voltaire promoted Newton’s victory. He so slandered with crude irony Newton’s principal opponent, G. W. von Leibniz, that contemporaries stopped paying attention to what he was saying. Leibniz fell into almost disrepute until the 20th century when the rediscovery of his ideas caused prodigious advances in mathematics, logic, and the natural sciences. The new physics of Planck and Heisenberg turned out to vindicate Leibniz against Newton, replacing mechanism with probabilism. This replacement could have happened two centuries earlier if Voltaire, the emperor of public opinion in the 18th century, had not woven around Leibniz a web of lasting prejudices. Ironically, Voltaire entered History as the enemy of all backwardness and all prejudice.

But anyway, Voltaire’s opinion did not spread at the speed of light. It took two or three decades, at least, to become the dominant belief in all of Europe. By around 1780, Mechanism enjoyed an enviable prestige, and it could be said, since then, dominant, if dominant does not mean unanimously accepted or accepted without reservations. One must not forget the opposition that was moved against it by the vitalism of Goethe and Driesch, the contingencialism of Boutroux and many other currents, until the coup de grace delivered by Planck and Heisenberg.

At the moment Mr. Capra was writing The Turning Point, Mechanism was thus completing two centuries of incessantly contested glory and of precarious reign over the majority factions of the academic world. This is very different from a dominion of many centuries over the whole world.

As for social Darwinism, it is a product of biological Darwinism and could not have been born before its father. The principle of “survival of the fittest” emerged as a biological theory and only later, gradually, transformed into an ideological argument for the retroactive legitimization of capitalist competition.

The Origin of Species is from 1859. Herbert Spencer, in his First Principles, published in 1862, expanded the scope of evolutionary ideas, making them a sociological principle. At the same time, occultists like Allan Kardec and Madame Blavatsky picked up the term “evolution” and gave it a mystical or mysticoid meaning: it’s not only the amphibians that evolve into reptiles, and these into mammals; it’s the disembodied souls that, in the other world, evolve into “beings of light,” ascending the cosmic scale while monkeys descend from trees. Cloaked in a thousand and one meanings, the word “evolution” spread, and public debates arose, attracting intellectuals' attention to the political-ideological potential of evolutionism. The debates reached a peak of success with Thomas Henry Huxley’s lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,” in 1892. The way was then open for the legitimization of liberal capitalism by the “survival of the fittest.” The rest comes with the books of Gustav Ratzenhofer (Nature and Purpose of Politics, 1893) and William G. Sumner (Folkways, 1906), which explicitly underpin the notion of “social evolution,” giving capitalist ideologues the precious slogan they needed. Social Darwinism, therefore, has a little more or a little less than a century. It was even younger when Mr. Capra was writing his book.

Finally, Scientism. The formal and complete rejection, in the name of science, of any philosophical or theological explanation of reality, was proposed for the first time by Auguste Comte (Discourse on the Positive Spirit, 1844). But Comte still reserved for philosophy the task of synthesizing and ordering scientific knowledge, and Comte was accepted without contest in only one place on this planet: Brazil! (In 1914, the positivist Alain attributed the world war to the fact that no other country on the globe had followed Brazil’s example, which had adopted on the republican flag positivism as the official doctrine of the State: Order and Progress is, indeed, the summary of Comte’s philosophy). A formal and categorical declaration of Scientism, with the complete dismissal of all other forms of knowledge as empty or insignificant, only really came in 1934, with Rudolf Carnap, in Logical Syntax of Language. But Carnap was no Voltaire, to count on the immediate approval of a vast audience. The majority of 20th-century philosophers categorically rejected Scientism, which only exercised dominion over specific groups, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Contemporaneously with Carnap’s declaration, the mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology — a school that would generate Heidegger, Scheler, Hartmann, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, among others —, gave at the University of Prague the famous lectures later collected in the book The Crisis of European Sciences, in which he denied Scientism from the base and from within: the physical sciences, he said, had lost their essential scientific foundation and no longer served as a model of knowledge of reality. Husserl was and is at least as influential as Carnap, although not so much in the Anglo-Saxon world that is the limit of Mr. Capra’s mental horizon.

In short, Scientism, which “dominates our culture for centuries,” is celebrating sixty springs in this year of 1994. But, to top it all off, its first ostentatious manifestation was already three decades later than the publication of Max Planck’s first works, whose indeterminism would become one of the bases of the “new paradigm” whose advent Mr. Capra has now come to announce. The new paradigm is somewhat prior to the old one.

Mr. Capra, as it can be seen, understands little about the subjects in which he exercises, as a prophetic authority for a multitudinous audience. He excels in lacking elementary information about Chinese cosmology, on which he claims to base his view of cultural history, as well as about cultural history itself, which he tries to forcefully fit into a preconceived model through gross generalizations and scandalous alterations of chronology.

I do not question the validity of the holistic proposal in general here. I reserve the right to do so in another work. I just believe that it should have defenders who are somewhat more qualified than Mr. Capra.

My purpose was to testify about a globally relevant fact that is happening right before our eyes, and future generations will have the right to doubt its reality. Because, for reason and common sense, it is not plausible that thousands of prestigious intellectuals, in their right minds, can accept and applaud a work like “The Turning Point” as a landmark in the history of thought, which does not even meet the minimum requirements of reliable information, authenticity of sources, and conceptual rigor that are demanded of a master’s thesis. Among the many other flaws a book can have, this one suffers from the only one that cannot be tolerated under any circumstances: the ignoratio elenchi, complete ignorance of the subject. Mr. Capra defines his book, pretentiously, as “a new model of cultural history” based on “Chinese conceptions” of man and the universe. But he has not studied cultural history or Chinese conceptions enough for his opinion on the matter to have any objective importance outside his personal circle. The content of his proclaimed knowledge on the subject is pure lana caprina.

The success of this book can only be explained by a single factor entirely unrelated to its intrinsic value: its timeliness. It says what people want to hear at the moment they want to hear it. It offers a seductive perspective to an audience that seeks to be seduced.

This audience includes not only uneducated masses but also prominent intellectuals, who readily accept the author’s promises without even demanding the scientific credentials required of a college student. It is truly an implausible occurrence.

But, as Aristotle said, it is not always plausible that everything should happen in a plausible manner. The implausible has happened. It attests that after centuries of iconoclastic fury directed against all past beliefs and the values of other civilizations, the educated opinion of the West has finally tired of being arrogant. However, instead of genuine remorse, it is staging before us a semblance of conversion, which reveals all the marks of hysteric feigning. Dazzled by the sudden sight of its own guilt, it renounces all critical caution as one would reject a vice of the past and surrenders, defenseless and credulous, to the worship of the first idol that offers a promise of relief. It thinks or pretends to think that this idol is its savior. In truth, it is its nemesis.

But it is not only the opinion that is deceived. The prophet of deceit is also deceived: he imagines that he brings wisdom to the world when he brings obscurity and confusion. He imagines that he brings a new prophecy when he fulfills an old curse.

But I cannot conclude these considerations on the prophet of the New Age without making a prophecy myself: in future centuries, when they can view our time with some objectivity, the phenomenon of the New Age will be considered a scandal that testifies against human intelligence.

The scandal is inevitable. Nothing can be done to avoid it. I will not even suggest, as Jesus did, that a heavy stone be tied to its bearer and thrown into the depths of the sea. Because, as hexagram 36 says, it is already at the bottom. All I can do is leave to posterity, if it comes across these pages, a personal testimony of these dark times: not everyone believed in the false prophet. 15

Addendum

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There are countless errors and contradictions in Mr. Capra’s book, in addition to the ones mentioned. Pointing them out and correcting them all would require a voluminous commentary: a constitutive law of the human mind grants error the privilege of being briefer than its rectification.

But it is worth giving a few more examples so that the reader can see how fertile an error in the premises can be in its consequences:

1. Mr. Capra opposes the use of nuclear energy, even for peaceful purposes, but at the same time, he makes modern physics one of the foundations of the “new paradigm” he proposes. He separates physics as a modality of theoretical knowledge from the nature of its practical applications, as if one did not necessarily stem from the other.

In this regard, Mr. Capra is perfectly inconsistent with the holistic method he advocates. According to holism, any rigid separation between an idea and its practical manifestations is nothing more than an abstraction. Holistically speaking, the beneficial or destructive effects of nuclear devices must be rooted in the very modus cognoscendi that produced them. If Mr. Capra sees connections even between mechanistic thinking and the structure of the patriarchal family, how can he be blind to the much closer relationships between the theoretical content of a science and its practical applications?

2. In our society, Mr. Capra claims that entropic work (repetitive work that leaves no lasting effects, such as cooking a meal that will be immediately consumed) is devalued and therefore assigned to women and minority groups. He states that this devaluation is typical of industrial society.

In this case, should we consider tribal societies in the Upper Xingu, the city-states of ancient Greece, or European society in the Middle Ages as industrial societies? There has never been a society in which entropic services were more valued than others.

However, according to Mr. Capra, such a society did exist. He gives examples of Buddhist and Christian monasteries where cooking is an honor and cleaning toilets is an enviable merit. Will it be necessary to explain to Mr. Capra that a monastic order does not constitute a “society,” but rather a minority community that presupposes the existence of a society whose values it can oppose? If entropic work is valued within a monastery, it is precisely because it lacks value in the larger surrounding society. Humble tasks acquire spiritual and disciplinary value inside the monastery precisely to the extent that they have little social prestige or economic value in the “world.” The social devaluation of entropic work is not characteristic of industrial society but of human society in general. Conversely, its spiritual valorization is a distinguishing feature of spiritualized minorities involved in some form of religious rejection of the “world.”

3. “Traditions such as Vedanta, Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism resemble psychotherapies much more than philosophies or religions,” says Mr. Capra. Well, if there is one characteristic trait of the modern West that radically distinguishes it from Eastern traditions, it is precisely the development of psychology as an independent science without any mystical or religious reference, and as a result, the effort to give a “psychological” explanation of all spiritual phenomena. By encompassing the spiritual traditions of the East within the concept of “psychotherapy,” Mr. Capra demonstrates the typical incapacity of the modern scientist to grasp everything in them that is purely metaphysical and non-psychological.

Moreover, to say that these traditions “are based on empirical knowledge and thus have more affinities with modern science” is an attempt to forcibly fit Eastern ideas into a Western and modern framework, in order to make them acceptable to academic provincialism. The problem is that, in this operation, everything that is essentially Eastern in them is completely lost. Vedanta, for example, categorically affirms that “experience cannot bring any kind of spiritual knowledge,” and this affirmation is even one of the fundamental points of the doctrine, which Mr. Capra seems to be completely unaware of: all experience is action, and action, not being the opposite of ignorance, cannot destroy it.16

From this example, it can be seen that Mr. Capra is much more tied to the mental frameworks of the average Western academic than he would like to let transpire. Someone closer to the Eastern perspective would never try to explain the wisdom teachings of India or China in light of modern Western psychology, but instead would pass a rather severe judgment on it in their name.17

4. After emphasizing the holistic sense of Hippocrates' physiological conceptions, Mr. Capra suggests that this sense has completely disappeared from Western medicine, and now we have to find it in the Chinese tradition: “The Chinese notion of the body as an indivisible system of interconnected components is much closer to the modern systemic approach than to the classical Cartesian model.” If Mr. Capra did not follow the modern Western habit of jumping directly from Greek thought to the Renaissance, he would have noticed that the same holistic conception dominated all medieval Western medical and biological thought, notably in St. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. In fact, Chinese conceptions are much more similar to those of the Middle Ages than to the “modern systemic approach.”

5. When explaining Arthur Janov’s psychotherapy, Mr. Capra says that according to this eminent psychiatrist, neuroses are symbolic types of behavior that “represent a person’s defenses against excessive pain associated with childhood traumas.” Anyone who has read Janov knows that in his theory, the etiology of neuroses is not traumatic but rather lies in the constant and habitual frustration of basic needs, a frustration that sometimes is not even perceived at the conscious level. In Janov’s psychopathology, trauma is nothing more than a supervening factor. Minimizing the etiological importance of trauma is precisely what distinguishes Janov’s system. Although Mr. Capra seems to have a superficial knowledge of the subject, he does not hesitate to express his opinion on it in a professorial manner: "Janov’s conceptual system is not broad enough to explain transpersonal experiences…". What is certainly not broad is Mr. Capra’s knowledge of Janov’s system.

Reading Suggestions

In addition to the works mentioned in the text, the reader may find the following helpful:

  1. For those who appreciate holism and wish to have serious information on the subject, free from Caprine aberrations and with valuable teachings, read the book by Joël de Rosnay, Le Macroscope: Vers une Vision Globale (Paris, Le Seuil, 1975). Prof. de Rosnay taught at MIT and works at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. It is also interesting to read the works of Edgar Morin, who, incidentally, coined the phrase “new paradigm.” See, especially, La Méthode, in two volumes (I, La Nature de la Nature, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977; II, La Vie de la Vie, ibid., 1980).

  2. The I Ching has three famous Western translations: James Legge’s (Brazilian version by E. Peixoto de Souza and Maria Judith Martins, São Paulo, Hemus, 1972), Richard Wilhelm’s (English version by Cary F. Baynes, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951, several reprints; Brazilian version by Lya Luft and Alayde Mutzembecher, São Paulo, Nova Acrópole), and P. L. F. Philastre’s Le Yi King. Livre des Changements de la Dynastie des Tsheou. Annales du Musée Guimet, t. huitième, 2 vol. (Paris, Adrien Maisonneuve, 1975). A serious study of the subject requires examination of all three. Wilhelm’s translation is more didactic and easy to consult. Legge emphasizes the structural connections between the parts and opens up for a more in-depth study. Of the three, Philastre’s is by far the most interesting, as it is the only one that transcribes in full and in order the glosses of the ten “generations” of Chinese commentators.

  3. Regarding the symbols of the Chinese tradition, see René Guénon’s classic book, La Grande Triade (Paris, Gallimard, 1957). It is also useful to refer to the monumental work of Fr. L. Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification. A Thorough Study from Chinese Documents, translated by L. Davrout, s. j. (New York, Dover, 1965; the first edition is from 1915).

  4. To delve deeper into Chinese thought, the following works are essential: for cosmological concepts, Marcel Granet, La Pensée Chinoise (Paris, Albin Michel, 1968) and La Réligion des Chinois (Paris, Payot, 1980). Regarding institutions and government, Granet, La Civilisation Chinoise (Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1929). On morality, law, and social classes, Max Weber, The Religion of China, translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, The Free Press, 1951).

  5. A “new model of cultural history” based on Eastern conceptions is something that has already been accomplished at least since 1945 in Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps by René Guénon (Paris, Gallimard). A monument of wisdom.

  6. To read about the Leibniz-Newton dispute, you can refer to: José Ortega y Gasset, La Idea de Principio en Leibniz y la Evolución de la Teoría Deductiva (in Obras Completas, Vol. 8, Madrid, Alianza, 1983); Paul Hazard, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne: 1660-1715 (Paris, Gallimard, 1961); Edwin A. Burtt, As bases metafísicas da ciência moderna, translated by José Viegas Filho and Orlando Araújo Henriques (Brasília, UnB, 1983).

II – St. Antonio Gramsci and the Salvation of Brazil

Anyone wishing to reduce the chaotic agglomeration of elements shaking up the Brazilian scene to a coherent framework must begin by centering it around a character who has never been here, whom the majority of Brazilians have never heard of, and who, moreover, has been dead for over half a century, but who, from the realm of shadows, secretly directs events in this part of the world.

I am referring to the Italian ideologue Antonio Gramsci. It has become a practice among the leftists to never mention Gramsci’s name without adding that he was a martyr, so I hasten to declare that he spent eleven years in a fascist prison, from where he sent to the world, through some trick, the thirty-three notebooks that today constitute, for the remaining faithful of Brazilian communism, the bible of revolutionary strategy. But that alone is not the reason for the beatific aura that surrounds this character. The strategy, as he saw it, included an important chapter on the creation of a new calendar of saints, which could overthrow, in popular imagination, the prestige of the Catholic hagiologion (since the Church, in his view, was the greatest obstacle to the advance of communism). The new pantheon would be entirely made up of famous communist leaders, based on the criterion that “Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are greater than the greatest saints of Christ” — Gramsci’s actual words. The followers of the new cult, quite logically, placed even higher on the celestial scale the one who instituted the calendar, which is why one cannot speak of him without the corresponding anointing. And I, fearful as I am of all things from beyond, could not begin this brief exposition of Brazilian Gramscianism without the preliminary invocation to its patron, in whom many hopes of Brazil’s salvation are placed at this moment. So I say: Sancte Antonie Gramsci, ora pro nobis.

Having met this devotional formality, I return to the facts. Gramsci, I was saying, meditated in jail. Mussolini, who had him arrested, believed he was providing a service to the world by silencing this brain that he deemed fearsome. It happened that in the silence of the prison, the said brain did not stop working; it just started to germinate ideas that hardly would have occurred to him in the agitation of the streets. Solitary men turn inward, become subjectivists and profound. Gramsci transformed the communist strategy, from a crude amalgam of rhetoric and brute force, into a delicate orchestration of subtle influences, as penetrating as Neurolinguistic Programming and more dangerous, in the long run, than all the artillery of the Red Army. If Lenin was the theorist of the coup d’état, he was the strategist of the psychological revolution that must precede and pave the way for the coup d’état.

Gramsci was particularly impressed by the violence of the wars that the revolutionary government of Russia had to undertake to subject the recalcitrant masses, attached to the values and practices of an old culture, to communism. The resistance of a deeply religious and conservative people to a regime that claimed to be destined to benefit them jeopardized the stability of the Soviet government for almost a decade, causing, in reaction, the dictatorship of the proletariat — intended by Marx as a brief transition to the paradise of communist democracy — to threaten to become eternal, blocking the path to any future evolution of communism, as indeed happened.

To circumvent the difficulty, Gramsci conceived one of those ingenious ideas that only occur to men of action when the impossibility of acting compels them to profound meditations: to train the people for socialism before making the revolution. To make everyone think, feel, and act like members of a communist state while still living in a capitalist external framework. Thus, when communism arrived, possible resistances would already be neutralized in advance and everyone would accept the new regime with the greatest naturality.

Gramsci’s strategy turned Lenin’s formula upside down, in which a highly organized and armed vanguard seized power by force, self-appointing itself as the representative of the proletariat, and only afterwards trying to persuade the bewildered proletarians that they, without the slightest suspicion, had been the authors of the revolution. The Gramscian revolution is to the Leninist revolution as seduction is to rape.

To achieve this turnaround, Gramsci established one of the most important distinctions between “power” (or, as he prefers to call it, “control”) and “hegemony”. Power is the control over the state apparatus, over administration, the army, and the police. Hegemony is the psychological control over the crowd. The Leninist revolution took power to establish hegemony. Gramscianism conquers hegemony to be smoothly, imperceptibly, carried into power. Needless to say, power, founded on prior hegemony, is absolute and uncontested: it dominates at the same time by brute force and by popular consent — that deep and irrevocable form of consent that rests on the strength of habit, especially of acquired mental automatisms that long repetition makes unconscious and places beyond the reach of discussion and criticism. The Leninist revolutionary government represses opposing ideas by violence. Gramscianism hopes to come to power when there are no longer any opposing ideas in the people’s mental repertoire.

That this business is tremendously Machiavellian, Gramsci himself recognized, but made it a title of glory, since Machiavelli was one of his gurus. He simply adapted Machiavelli to the demands of socialist ideology, collectivizing the “Prince”. Instead of the individual condottiere who, to come to power, uses the most repugnant expedients with the calm conscience of someone saving the country, Gramsci places a collective entity: the revolutionary vanguard. The Party, in short, is the new Prince. As men’s cool-headedness grows cooler as they feel supported by a collective, the New Prince has an even calmer conscience than the old one. The Renaissance condottiere had no support other than himself, and in the cold nights of the palace he had to endure alone the conflicts between moral conscience and political ambition, finding in patriotism a compromise solution. In the New Prince, the production of conscience analgesics is a team effort, and among the ranks of militants, there is always a huge reserve of theoretical talents that can be summoned to produce justifications for anything.

Intellectuals therefore play a prominent role in the Gramscian strategy. But this does not mean that their ideas are important in themselves, for, to Gramsci, the only importance of an idea lies in the reinforcement it provides, or takes away, to the march of revolution. Gramsci divides intellectuals into two types: “organic” and “inorganic” (or, as he prefers to call them, “traditional”). The latter are eccentrics who, based on criteria and values from other eras, and without a defined class ideology, emit ideas that, ignored by the masses, have no influence on the historical process: they end up in the trash bin of oblivion, unless they have the shrewdness to quickly adhere to one of the “organic” currents. Organic intellectuals are those who, with or without formal ties to political movements, are aware of their class position and do not waste a single word that is not for the elaboration, clarification, and defense of their class ideology. Naturally, there are both “bourgeois” and “proletarian” organic intellectuals. The latter are the cream and brain of the New Prince, but the former also have some use for the revolution, as it is through them that revolutionaries come to know the ideology of the enemy. Gramsci mentioned Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile as prototypes of bourgeois organic intellectuals: the anti-fascist liberal and Mussolini’s minister.

The Gramscian concept of an intellectual is based exclusively on the sociology of professions and, for this reason, it is quite elastic: there is room in it for accountants, bailiffs, post office workers, sports announcers, and the show business staff. All these people help to elaborate and disseminate the class ideology, and, as elaborating and disseminating the class ideology is the only intellectual task that exists, a star shaking their flesh in a protest show can be far more intellectual than a philosopher, if it is an “inorganic” one, such as, for example, the author of these lines.

Intellectuals in the elastic sense are the true army of the Gramscian revolution, charged with carrying out the first and most decisive stage of the strategy, which is the conquest of hegemony, a long, complex, and subtle process of gradual and increasing psychological mutations, which the seizure of power only crowns as a kind of political orgasm.

The struggle for hegemony is not only about the formal confrontation of ideologies, but penetrates a deeper terrain, which is that of what Gramsci calls — giving the term a peculiar connotation — “common sense”. Common sense is a conglomerate of habits and expectations, mostly unconscious or semi-conscious, that govern people’s daily lives. It is expressed, for example, in ready-made phrases, typical verbal turns, automatic gestures, more or less standardized ways of reacting to situations. The set of contents of common sense identifies itself, for its human bearer, with reality itself, although it actually constitutes only a very partial and often imaginative cutout. Common sense does not “grasp” reality, but operates in it at the same time a filtering and a montage, according to patterns that, inherited from ancestral cultures, remain hidden and unconscious.

As what matters is not so much the expressed political conviction, but the unconscious background of “common sense”, Gramsci is less interested in rational persuasion than in psychological influence, in acting on the imagination and feeling. Hence his emphasis on primary education. Whether it is to form future “organic intellectuals”, or simply to predispose the people to the desired feelings, it is very important that the communist influence reaches its clientele when their brains are still tender and incapable of critical resistance.

Common sense does not coincide with class ideology, and that is precisely where the problem lies. For most people, common sense is composed of a soup of disparate elements gathered from the ideologies of various classes. This is why, driven by common sense, a man can act in ways that, objectively, contradict his class interest, as for example when a proletarian goes to Mass. This simple Sunday routine hides a mixture of the most surprising elements, where a typical value of the feudal-aristocratic culture, reprocessed and put at the service of the bourgeois ideology, appears transfused into a proletarian habit, thanks to which a poor wretch, believing he is saving his soul, actually only commits a gross indecency against his fellow class members and against himself.

This is where the providential mission of intellectuals comes in. Their role is precisely to put an end to this ideological orgy, reforming common sense, organizing it so that it becomes coherent with the respective class interest, clarifying it and spreading it so that it becomes more and more conscious, so that increasingly the proletarian lives, feels, and thinks according to the objective interests of the proletarian class and the bourgeois with those of the bourgeois class. To this state of perfect coincidence between ideas and class interests, when realized in a given society and crystallized into laws that distribute to each class their rights and duties according to a clear delineation of the respective ideological fields, Gramsci calls an Ethical State. This is the final lineup of the two teams before the decisive match that will bring the Party to power begins. The Brazilian public has heard this term, pronounced in a context of combating corruption and restoring morality. But it is a technical term of Gramscian strategy, which designates only a certain stage in the revolutionary struggle — a stage, incidentally, quite advanced, in which the radicalization of the class interest conflict prepares the beginning of the orgasmic stage: the conquest of power. The fact that, in the chaotic Brazilian common sense, the term Ethical State has moralizing resonances entirely alien to its true intent, only shows that the national public is unaware of the directly Gramscian inspiration of the Movement for Ethics in Politics and does not remotely suspect that its only objective is to politicize ethics, channeling the more or less confused moral aspirations of the population so that they serve objectives that have nothing to do with what a common citizen understands by morality. The Ethical State, in fact, is not only compatible with total immorality, but indeed requires it, as it consolidates and legitimizes two antagonistic and irreconcilable morals, where the class struggle is placed above good and evil and becomes the supreme moral criterion itself. From then on, lying, fraud, or even murder can become praiseworthy, when committed in defense of “our” class, while decency, honesty, compassion may have something criminal about them, if they favor the adversary class.18 That the traditional moralist discourse of the Brazilian bourgeoisie could be thus used as a weapon to deliver a mortal blow to bourgeois hegemony, shows less the cunning of the Gramscian left than the elephantine stupidity of our ruling class. That, on the other hand, the very agents of Gramscism pretend to believe in the apolitical and purely hygienic character of the moralizing campaign — thereby appeasing the fears of those who will be their first victims — is nothing more than an expression of double-talk, inherent in a strategy in which camouflage is everything. They are lessons from Antonio Only-the-Head Gramsci.

At this point, it is almost impossible that the expression “value inversion” does not occur to the reader. This inversion is, in fact, one of the priority objectives of the Gramscian revolution, in the phase of the struggle for hegemony. But Gramsci is, at this point, quite demanding: it is not enough to defeat the expressed ideology of the bourgeoisie; it is necessary to eradicate, along with it, all the values and principles inherited from previous civilizations, which it somehow incorporated and which are today at the bottom of common sense. It is ultimately a gigantic operation of brainwashing, which must erase from the popular mentality, and especially from the unconscious depth of common sense, all the moral and cultural heritage of humanity, to replace it with radically new principles, based on the primacy of the revolution and what Gramsci calls “absolute historicism” (I explain later).

An operation of this magnitude infinitely transcends the plane of mere revolutionary preaching, and encompasses psychological mutations of immense depth, which could not be carried out on the spur of the moment or in broad daylight. The struggle for hegemony requires a plurality of informal channels of action, seemingly detached from all politics, through which a range of new feelings, new reactions, new words, new habits can be imperceptibly injected into the popular mentality, gradually changing the direction of conduct.

Hence, Gramsci gives relatively little importance to open revolutionary preaching, but places great emphasis on the value of camouflaged and subtle penetration. For the Gramscian revolution, a discreet journalist is more valuable than a notorious speaker or agitator, who, without taking an explicit position, delicately changes the content of the news, or a filmmaker whose films, without any ostensible political message, shape the public to a new imaginary, generating a new common sense. Journalists, filmmakers, musicians, psychologists, children’s educators, and family counselors represent an elite troop of the Gramscian army. Their informal action penetrates deeply into consciences, without any declared political intention, and leaves in them the marks of new feelings, new reactions, new moral attitudes that, at the right time, will harmoniously integrate into communist hegemony.19

Millions of small changes are thus being introduced into common sense, until the cumulative effect condenses into a sudden global mutation (an application of the Marxist theory of the “qualitative leap” that occurs at the end of an accumulation of quantitative changes). To the systematic effort to produce this cumulative effect, Gramsci significantly calls “molecular aggression”: the bourgeois ideology must not be fought on the open field of ideological confrontations, but on the discreet terrain of common sense; not by massive advance, but by subtle penetration, millimeter by millimeter, brain by brain, idea by idea, habit by habit, reflex by reflex.

Of course, the desired mutation not only encompasses the field of political convictions, but mainly targets spontaneous reactions, fundamental feelings, chains of reflexes that unconsciously determine behavior. Behaviors entrenched in the human unconscious for centuries or millennia must be uprooted, to make way for a new constellation of reactions. It is important, for example, to sweep away from popular imagination traditional figures of heroes and saints that express certain ideals, for these figures are imbued with a motivating force that directs men’s conduct in a direction hostile to the Gramscian proposal. They must be replaced by a new pantheon of idols, in which, as seen above, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Stalin, and obviously Gramsci himself, take the places of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Therese of the Child Jesus, and tutti quanti. Gramsci copied from Auguste Comte the idea of replacing the church’s calendar of saints with a pantheon of revolutionary heroes. However, Comte’s idols were those of the French Revolution: Gramsci updated the calendar.

A brainwashing of such vast scale could certainly not be limited to removing religious beliefs, images, myths, and traditional feelings from the human mind: it should also extend to major philosophical and scientific conceptions. To these, Gramsci wanted to destroy completely, all at once, to replace them with a new worldview inspired by Marxism, or rather, a hypertrophic caricature of Marxism that Marx himself would reject with contempt. For Marx considered himself, above all, the heir to great philosophical traditions such as Aristotelianism, and built his philosophy with the aim of making it a science, an objectively valid description of the basis of the historical process. For Gramsci, philosophical traditions should all be swept away at once, along with them the distinction between “truth” and “falsehood”. Because Gramsci is not a pure-blood Marxist. Through his teacher Antonio Labriola, he received a strong influence from pragmatism, a school for which the traditional concept of truth as a correspondence between the content of thought and a state of things should be abandoned in favor of a utilitarian and merely operational notion. In this, “truth” is not what corresponds to an objective state, but what can have useful and effective application in a given situation. By grafting pragmatism into Marxism, Labriola and Gramsci proposed that the concept of truth should be thrown in the trash: in the new worldview, all intellectual activity should no longer seek objective knowledge, but rather the mere “adequacy” of ideas to a certain state of social struggle. This Gramsci called “absolute historicism”. In this new worldview, there would be no place for the distinction — bourgeois, according to Gramsci — between truth and lie. A theory, for example, would not be accepted because it is true, nor rejected because it is false, but it would only require one decisive thing: that it was “expressive” of its historical moment, and mainly of the aspirations of the revolutionary mass. To put it more clearly: Gramsci demands that all cultural and scientific activity be reduced to mere political propaganda, more or less disguised.

Gramsci’s “philosophy” is thus resolved into a theoretical skepticism that completes the denial of intelligence by its total submission to an appeal for practical action; action that, when carried out, will result in sweeping intelligence from the face of the Earth, by suppressing the conditions that make its exercise possible: the autonomy of individual intelligence and faith in the search for truth. With the first replaced by the regimentation of card-carrying “organic intellectuals”, and the second by the concentration of all intellectual energies in the noble task of revolutionary propaganda, what will remain of the human ability to discern between truth and lie?

Gramsci is, in short, the prophet of stupidity, the guide of hordes of fools for whom truth is a lie and lie is truth. Only another fool like Mussolini could consider him “a dangerous intelligence”. The danger in it is that of malice that obscures, not the intelligence that enlightens; and malice is the simian counterfeit of intelligence. But Mussolini’s reaction is significant. In it is the typical morbid envy of the right-wing brute for the left-wing intellectual, his Jungian shadow that he does not understand and that therefore seems to him, for his flashy abilities, the very prototype of intelligence. The attraction is mutual, as seen by the cult of Nelson Rodrigues among the leftists whom he mocked like no one else. Between right-wing rudeness and left-wing pseudo-intellectualism, the relationship is the love-hate of a sadomasochistic marriage. A marriage between le genti dolorose / C’hanno perduto il ben dello intelletto… Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.

For anyone who thinks with their own mind, Gramsci’s theories hold no interest, just as the old Greek skeptical schools hold none, of which Gramscianism is a poorly updated reissue. The refutation of skepticism is, as is known, the first test of the philosophy apprentice. Just as skepticism — the denial of all certainty — is refuted by the simple assertion that denial is also uncertain, Gramscianism likewise does not withstand confrontation with itself: having denied objective truth, it reduces itself to an “expression of aspirations”. Having reduced all culture to propaganda, it exposes itself as mere propaganda. It does not even pretend to be true: it intends to prove or demonstrate nothing; it just wants to seduce, induce, lead. The type of mentality interested in such thoughts is certainly immune to any concern for truth, but is driven by an insatiable ambition that makes it tirelessly stir up the darkness, in a sterile, nervous, destructive “action”, from which it vainly promises to give birth to a world. By an inevitable and tragic compensation, the less a man is able to see the world, the more eager he becomes to transform it — to transform it into the image and likeness of his own inner darkness.20

If we ask ourselves now how it was possible for such a crude philosophy to achieve such a vast audience in Brazil to the point of inspiring a political party’s program, the answer must take into account three aspects: first, the predisposition of the Brazilian intellectual class; second, the conditions of the moment; third, the very nature of this philosophy.

Throughout our intellectual history, only three currents of thought have succeeded in exerting a lasting and profound influence on the Brazilian intellectual layers: Auguste Comte’s positivism, Leo XIII’s neo-Thomism, and Marxism. What they have in common is that they are not properly philosophies, but programs of collective action aimed at shaping or reshaping the world according to the aspirations of their times and mentors. Positivism starts from the observation that the French Revolution, by overthrowing Christian conceptions, left its work halfway done, as it did not replace them with a new religion; positivism constitutes this new religion, with a temple, a calendar of saints, rituals, and everything else. The philosophical theories are nothing more than the support for the new theocratic state that Comte intends to establish. Neo-Thomism is the reaction that opposes the new theocratic state and calls for a return to the old, duly revised and updated. Finally, Marxism is the program of action of the socialist movement. In all three cases, ideas and theories do not have intrinsic value but only serve as psychological support for practical action. The three do not want to interpret the world, but to transform it. (A clarification should be made regarding neo-Thomism: it should not be confused with Thomism, understood as the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomism is philosophy in the fullest sense; neo-Thomism, on the other hand, is a cultural and political movement — ideological, in short — devoted to the dissemination of that philosophy, taken as the ready-made solution to all problems and therefore emptied of much of its philosophical substance. After all, everything that is neo-something is, by definition, just a new shell of which that something is the core. Similar observations, with reservations, could also be made about positivism and Marxism: in both, there is something of authentic philosophy at the root, stifled by the hypertrophic development of a practical action program, deduced in a haphazard manner.)

Philosophies that retreat from theoretical speculation to the proposition of practical actions are philosophies of decadence; they mark epochs in which people can no longer understand the world and begin to struggle to escape an incomprehensible world. Sophistry was born in Greece from the failure of the early cosmological speculations of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. Unable to resolve the contradictions between the theories, sophistry shifts the axis of human concerns to immediate practical life: to the politics of the day. The sophists are teachers of rhetoric, who teach young politicians the means to act on consciences. Against sophistry, Socrates opposes dialectic and the ideal of apodictic demonstration, which will guide Greek efforts towards scientific knowledge. Five centuries later, after the forgetfulness of Plato’s and Aristotle’s great theoretical syntheses, practical schools again become dominant: the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Megarians, and to some extent the Stoics. And so the history of Western thought continues, pulsating between the commitment to theoretical understanding and the fall into practical skepticism. The common background from which positivism, Marxism, and neo-Thomism emerge is the dissolution of classical rationalism, led to a dead end by Kantian criticism and finding its swan song in German Idealism. Positivism, Marxism, and neo-Thomism are the philosophies of an era that has no philosophy at all; of an era that yearns to transform the world to the same extent that it is incapable of making the theoretical effort necessary to comprehend it.

In a classic text — “Crisis of Western Philosophy” (1874) — the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov predicted that philosophy, as an essentially individual intellectual activity opposed to the collective thought of religion and science, was about to come to an end, to be replaced by something completely different. He hoped for the advent of a great synthesis, but what was seen was the advent of the “century of ideologies.” Now, Brazil enters the spiritual course of the world precisely at the moment when Solovyov makes this diagnosis: we receive massively the impact of new ideologies before we have been able to experience the philosophical tradition that preceded them. Our contact with the philosophical sources of Western civilization remains superficial, while we give ourselves body and soul to collectivist rhetoric. More than a century has passed, and we still do not have a good translation of Aristotle, but in the 1960s, we published the complete works of Antonio Gramsci.

On the other hand, every attempt of ours to penetrate more deeply into the field of philosophy itself has been limited by the timidity, the insecurity that made us cling like children to the protection of some fashionable foreign super-ego. Five decades of philosophizing activity at the University of São Paulo were summed up in the overwhelming title of Paulo Arantes' recently published book: “A French Overseas Department.” Import offices, authorized representatives, imitation, pedantry, oscillation between false consciousness and guilt consciousness mark all our university philosophical efforts towards independent thought. In the end, the intellectual with philosophical pretensions finds relief only when he gives up those pretensions and falls back into collective thinking; when, by renouncing the interpretation of the world, he aligns himself, contrite and obedient, with one of the currents professing to transform it: conversions to Catholicism, communism, and the scientistic ideologies originating from positivism are — regardless of personal motives in each case — a melancholic refrain in the history of our philosophical ambitions' failures. The fall into collective thinking is experienced as a return of the lost sheep, as a liberation from guilt, as a reunion with lost childhood. By reintegrating into an ideological community, the repentant philosopher finds relief for the isolation that surrounds the intellectual in the underdeveloped world, and joining the supportive group mimics the discovery of a “meaning of life.”

The Brazilian intellectual class was deeply predisposed to Gramscian appeal precisely due to all these factors, where intellectual life ceases to be the solitary effort of those who “search while groaning” and becomes participation in a “meaning of life” supported by collective solidarity. The Party is sometimes called by Gramsci the “collective intellectual.” It is the refuge of the weak. The ascent to the status of intellectual is cheapened there: it no longer requires the painful acquisition of knowledge, personal investigation, or direct struggle with uncertainties. It is achieved through passive contagion of beliefs, a common vocabulary, distinctive mannerisms.21 The surrounding society legitimizes the parody: in the face of these external marks, the right-wing brute sincerely believes he is in the presence of an intellectual. The media does the rest.

The second factor, the current situation, can be described roughly as follows: since the defeat of the armed struggle, the left had been searching for a strategy to guide itself. Unable to create a new one and not finding any other available in the world repertoire, it almost automatically, sleepwalkingly, embraced Gramsci, driven by a lack of options.

In fact, international communism has had only a small number of strategic proposals throughout its history. Marx did not present any. The first successful one was Lenin’s, which consisted of the formation of a self-appointed elite, the seizure of power through a sudden coup, and the subsequent forced conversion of the proletariat to a winning cause that presented itself as its own. Lenin’s proposal came to prevail over Edward Bernstein’s “evolutionary socialism,” which caused a split between the communist parties and social democracy, which advocated the peaceful, electoral, and gradualist seizure of power. Nowadays, social democracy is the great winner, dominating all of Europe, but at the time of Lenin, its rejection by the communists seemed to foreshadow its failure, which the fall of social democratic governments in the face of the advance of Nazism apparently confirmed. The third major strategy was Mao Zedong’s. In the conditions of China, there was not even a sufficient urban proletariat to provide moral support for the revolutionary war, and since the revolutionary army, banned from the major cities, ended up initiating a “long march” through the countryside, the support of the peasant population became crucial. Mao theorized this afterwards, transforming the proletarian revolution into an “operational worker-peasant revolutionary war” — which would have made Karl Marx sick, as he saw the peasants as a horde of incurable reactionaries. In parallel, the submission of the international communist movement to the interests of Soviet foreign policy gave birth to a fourth strategy, which found its clearest expression in the “Popular Front,” consisting fundamentally of an alliance between the communists and the “progressive elements” of all other currents, including the right-wing. There, under the pretext of anti-fascism, even Benedetto Croce became sympathetic. Finally, the fifth strategy of the communist movement emerged from the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam War. Without a defined author, resulting from grafts and mixtures from various sources, it merged rural and urban combat in a vast guerrilla plan. One of its versions was the “foco theory” propagated by a crazy guy named Régis Débray, which gained wide acceptance in Latin America and proposed the formation of various simultaneous “foci” of guerrillas to confront the massive power of American imperialism. The theory could be summarized by the slogan then graffitied on the walls of all universities: “One, two, three, many Vietnams.” Look where it got us. Among the many mixtures, one particularly interesting fusion was the merging of the communist strategy — fundamentally proletarian and peasant up to that point, at least in name — with the heresies of Herbert Marcuse, who believed that proletarians and peasants had integrated into the “system,” and that the revolution had no authorized representatives other than students and intellectuals on one side, and the mass of the wretched and marginalized, the vast “lumpenproletariat,” from which old Karl Marx advised communist militants to flee as if from an armed assailant. One of the local results of this graft was that, after the defeat of the armed struggle, Brazilian militants in prison began to entertain a vague hope in the revolutionary potential of the “lumpen,” and to expedite matters, they started teaching guerrilla tactics to the criminals they lived with on Ilha Grande prison. (Later on, the fusion of Gramscism with remnants of Marcuseism would transform the defense of the legitimacy of banditry as “social protest” into one of the staple dishes of the leftist menu, which, forming a polarity with the wave of moral combat against “white-collar criminals,” established a double standard for judging crimes: lenient towards the “lumpen,” even when they kill or rape, strict towards the rich and middle class when they commit property crimes — the most curious inversion ever observed in the history of morality.)

Where does Gramscism fit into this review of communist strategies? It doesn’t. It was left out, restricted to local Italian circles, and only gained greater dissemination, even in Italy, after the 1950s with the publication of Gramsci’s complete works by Einaudi. Starting in 1964, the Brazilian communist faction that remained faithful to the Moscow orientation of alliance with the bourgeoisie believed they saw in Gramsci a potential renewal of this strategy, with which he coincided, at least regarding the eminently non-violent nature of the revolutionary struggle and the careful exclusion of any radicalisms that could narrow the basis of possible collaborations. As the spokesperson for this current, the editor Ênio Silveira then undertook the publication of at least Gramsci’s major works: “The Dialectical Conception of History,” “Machiavelli, Politics and the Modern State,” “Intellectuals and the Organization of Culture,” “Literature and National Life,” and “Prison Letters.”

These works were widely read, but in an atmosphere dominated by the obsession with armed struggle, they did not have an immediate practical influence. Their potential remained latent until the defeat of the armed struggle, which inevitably led to a widespread return to the peaceful and alliance-based combat the pro-Moscow Communist Party advocated. The rekindling of the romance between the armed and disarmed left naturally took place against a musical backdrop orchestrated by Maestro Antonio Gramsci. Simply put, there was no other capable of composing this scene. The left became Gramscian almost unwittingly, driven by the collision of events like billiard balls that, by impelling each other, ultimately end up in the pocket.

Now, the Brazilian press has just discovered, with a ten-year delay, that the PT’s program is Gramscian. But, aside from being late, this discovery is inaccurate: it’s not just the PT that follows Gramsci; all left-wing individuals in this country have been doing so for a decade without even realizing it. Gramscism dominates the atmosphere simply due to the absence of other proposals and also for a special reason: acting less in the field of explicit ideological combat and more in the conquest of the subconscious, it spreads through the mere contagion of fashions and mental habits, enlisting a legion of people who have never heard of Antonio Gramsci. Gramscism relies less on the formal adherence of militants than on the epidemic propagation of a new “common sense.” Its ease in recruiting more or less unconscious collaborators is, therefore, simply prodigious.

This is the third factor I referred to. Gramscism is less a philosophy than a strategy of psychological action aimed at predisposing the background of “common sense” to accept the new set of criteria proposed by the communists, abandoning, as “bourgeois,” millennial values and principles.

The fact that this “philosophy,” in order to propagate itself, relies less on rational persuasion than on the effectiveness of subtly penetrating the masses' subconscious, is clearly seen in its emphasis on the conquest of young minds — a field where the advance of the left has caused incalculable harm to millions of Brazilian children, who are used as guinea pigs in a disastrous Gramscian experiment. The fact that this current has succeeded in Brazil testifies to the intellectual poverty of an environment where the educated, unable to withstand isolation, seek not so much truth and knowledge as an intellectual membership card that guarantees them the psychological support of a large supportive group and the halo of ambiguous prestige in the eyes of right-wing brutes, their poorly disguised passion.

This could only happen here.

Addenda

1

The number of conscious and declared followers of Gramscism is small, but that does not prevent it from being dominant. Gramscism is not a political party that requires registered militants and loyal voters. It is a set of mental attitudes that can be present in someone who has never heard of Antonio Gramsci, placing the individual in a position towards the world where they collaborate with Gramscian strategy even without the slightest awareness of it. No one will understand Gramscism unless they perceive that its level of operation is much deeper than any competing leftist strategy. In other strategies, there are specific political objectives, for which various instruments, including propaganda, are employed. Propaganda remains in all of them a means perfectly distinct from the ends. Therefore, the actions of Leninism or Maoism are always outlined and visible, even when underground. In Gramscism, on the contrary, propaganda is not a means of implementing a policy: it is the very policy, the essence of politics, and furthermore, the essence of all human mental activity. Gramscism turns everything it touches into propaganda, contaminating all cultural activities with propagandistic objectives, even the most seemingly innocuous ones. In it, even simple turns of phrase, styles of dress or gestures can have propagandistic value. It is this ubiquity of propaganda that sets it apart and gives it a strength that its adversaries, accustomed to measuring the scope of political movements by the number of formally committed followers, can hardly evaluate.

One detail that clearly marks the differences is the attitude of Gramscism towards engaged art. Other strategies require the artist to imbue their works with a specific political meaning, or at least have their worldview expressed in each work be consistent with the Marxist interpretation. Engaged literature in Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism, therefore, is a collection of works where each one, individually, is a piece of propaganda with autonomous value. In Gramscism, what matters is only the collective effect of the mass of literary works in circulation. This collective effect must tend towards the desired change in common sense by the Party, regardless of whether each work, taken individually, has anything Marxist or even lacks any propagandistic value.

Thanks to this, the Gramscian judgment of each work is much less rigid and dogmatic than that of other Marxist currents, which greatly contributed to raising its prestige among intellectuals eager to reconcile their Marxist ideals with their personal desire for freedom.

In Gramscism, any literary work can contribute to Marxist propaganda, depending solely on the context in which it is disseminated—just as in a newspaper, the content of individual news items is less important than their placement on the page next to other news items that collectively give them a new meaning.

The primary objective of Gramscism is broad and general in scope: no politics, no revolutionary preaching, just a 180-degree shift in the worldview of common sense, changing moral sentiments, basic reactions, and the sense of proportion, without the direct ideological confrontation that would only prematurely incite undesirable antagonisms.

The changes operated there can be, however, much deeper and decisive than the conscious adherence of an electorate to communist theses. Changes in moral criteria, for example, have explosive effects. These changes can be induced through the press without any frontal and explicit attack on accepted criteria. A case that perfectly illustrates this and demonstrates the reach of Gramscian strategy in Brazil is the news coverage of corruption. The campaign for Ethics in Politics did not arise with a moralizing intention but as an anti-liberal political proposal. In an interview with the Jornal do Brasil, one of the founders of the campaign, Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho, made that perfectly clear. The campaign emerged in a meeting of left-wing intellectuals in search of a formula against Collor long before there were any corruption allegations against the government. Later, these allegations unexpectedly gave the campaign strength, attracting the adherence of masses of moralistic middle-class people who, politically, would have every reason to oppose any explicitly leftist proposal. Now, the campaign exerted decisive influence over the direction of news in newspapers and on TV. This influence was such that it introduced a profound change in moral judgments. Impressed by the scandalous content of the news, the public did not notice that the editing implied this change, which consciously they would not approve. It consisted of making crimes against public property seem infinitely more serious and revolting than crimes against human beings. PC Farias, a trembling swindler incapable of kicking a dog, was presented as an Al Capone, while the seriousness of armed banditry was minimized. If, on the one hand, left-wing journalists launch a massive attack on white-collar criminals, and on the other hand, left-wing intellectuals strive for the recognition of armed gang leaders as legitimate “popular leaders,” the combined effect of these two operations is quite clear: to attenuate the seriousness of crimes against individuals when committed by the lower class and politically exploitable by the left, and to emphasize the seriousness of crimes against property when committed by members of the ruling class. Thus, the class struggle is transformed into the supreme criterion of morality, displacing the age-old precept rooted in common sense that life is a more sacred good than property.

For these two operations to occur simultaneously, producing a unified result, it is not necessary for them to emanate from an organized central command. It is enough that the intellectuals involved in one and the other vaguely share a Gramscian revolutionary spirit, so that, in a sort of implicit complicity, each one carries out their task, and all the results converge in the direction of Gramscian ends. This does not exclude, of course, the hypothesis of a unified command, but for the success of the Gramscian strategy, ostensible unity of command is quite dispensable in the phase of the struggle for hegemony.

It is interesting to know that, in the Constitution of the Soviet state, intentional homicide was punished with only ten years in prison, while crimes against public administration subjected the culprit to the death penalty. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the little value that, from the Marxist perspective, individual life has when it is not placed in the service of the revolution. Now, the news about corruption managed to introduce into the Brazilian mindset the habit of judging things according to a Soviet moral scale, and it did so with much more efficiency than it could achieve through explicit debates for years on end. Once made explicit, this change would be rejected with horror by a people whose Christian sentiments are still alive deep down. Introduced from below, as an underlying criterion, it stealthily penetrates common sense and perverts it to the core, preparing it to passively accept even greater aberrations in the future that may be imposed by a socialist state.22

The spontaneous and seemingly disconnected actions of thousands of intellectuals – in the Gramscian sense – in different sectors of public life can be easily directed to where the Gramscian revolution desires, without even needing a hidden Central Committee of superbrains to command the whole operation. It is enough for an initial complicity to be established among certain groups so that, especially in the absence of any critical confrontation with other currents, Gramscism advances like a well-oiled train on the road to hegemony. It has already deeply penetrated Brazilian mentality through this path. When a political party publicly assumes its Gramscian identity, it means that the phase of informal combat – the decisive one – is about to end because its results have been achieved. The struggle for power is about to begin. What marks this new phase is that all ideological opponents have already been defeated or are dying; no other ideological discourse opposes Gramscism, and the remaining political adversaries provide even greater reinforcement, to the extent that, not having a mental alternative, they think within the conceptual and evaluative frameworks demarcated by Gramscism and can only combat it in its own name. This is hegemony.

2

Gramsci swears that he is a Leninist, but as he attributes to Lenin some ideas of his own invention that Lenin never heard of, the relations between Gramscism and Leninism are a thorny issue that scholars seek to unravel by sifting through the texts with the patience of Catholic exegetes. One of these ideas is “hegemony,” central to Gramscism. Gramsci claims that it was Lenin’s “greatest contribution” to Marxist strategy, but the concept of hegemony does not appear anywhere in Lenin’s writings. Some exegetes have tried to solve the puzzle by identifying hegemony with the dictatorship of the proletariat, but this doesn’t work very well because Gramsci states that a class only implements a dictatorship when it does not have hegemony. The relations between Gramsci and Marx are also tangled, as seen in the use of the term “civil society”: for Marx, civil society is the opposite and complementary term to the “State,” and therefore, it is identified with the realm of economic relations or infrastructure. In Gramsci, civil society, together with political society or the State, forms the superstructure that rests upon the economic base.

These and other difficulties in interpreting Gramsci’s thought stem, in part, from the fragmentary and scattered nature of his writings. Perhaps they can be resolved, but what is truly astonishing is that, a few years after the tangled mass of Gramscian texts was revealed to the world, and even before any serious examination produced an acceptable interpretation of their meaning, it was already adopted as a guiding norm by various organizations, beginning to produce practical effects over which no one, under these conditions, could have the slightest control. This hasty adherence to an idea that was barely understood marks tremendous political irresponsibility, a keen desire to act upon human society without measuring the consequences. There is no doubt that no one embraces Gramsci with any purpose other than to implant communism somewhere in the world. However, since Gramscism is an obscure and sometimes incomprehensible thought, there is no reason to believe that its application will produce even that result, lamentable as it may be. It may happen, for example, that the Gramscian strategy produces no other effect than making bourgeois individuals atheists, removing the restraints that religion imposed on their greed and Machiavellianism. Something very similar happened in Gramsci’s own land: there is an undeniable connection between the decline of the Catholic faith and the transformation of Italy into a capitalist Sodom. The new materialistic and Gramscian culture that dominated the Italian intellectual atmosphere since the 1960s contributed greatly to this outcome; it’s just that no advantage can be seen that the communists could have derived from it. Brazilian leftists should consider the Italian experience before embarking on Gramscian adventures that, in education as well as in politics, can lead to results as confusing as the ideas that inspire them.

3

The term “Ethical State” itself is one of the wonders of ambiguity found in the Gramscian mishmash. Sometimes it designates the communist state, other times the advanced capitalist state, and at times any state. More generally, Gramsci labels as “ethical” any state that seeks to elevate the psyche and morals of its citizens to the level achieved by the “development of productive forces,” assuming that the communist state does this better than anyone else. The idea is inherently immoral: it consists of subjecting morality to the demands of the economy. For example, if a certain stage of the “development of productive forces” requires that all inhabitants of a region be relocated to the other end of the country, as happened many times in the Soviet Union, the conduct of a boy who denounces his father to the authorities for attempting to escape to a nearby city becomes “ethical.” The repulsive admiration that Brazilians have been demonstrating in recent times for brothers who denounce brothers, wives who denounce husbands, is an indication of a new morality inspired by Gramscian values. There is no doubt that the new criterion is “ethical” in the Gramscian sense, that is, economically useful, since the widespread denunciation of fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers can compensate for some losses suffered by the state. But this does not mitigate its intrinsic immorality.

423

In courses and conferences, I have been speaking about the PT’s Gramscianism since at least 1987, to audiences that included journalists. However, the Brazilian press, resistant to anything new, only informed the public about the Gramscian inspiration of the Workers' Party (PT) in 1994, when it was no longer a latent tendency and had already been externalized in the party’s official program. The first to sound the alarm was Gilberto Dimenstein, in Folha de S. Paulo, shortly after the publication of this book, which I don’t even know if he read; but he merely mentioned the name of the Italian ideologue, without saying anything about the content of his ideas. It had no repercussion whatsoever. Later, I read two or three sentences alluding to Gramsci in other newspapers and in Veja. It was all very summary, in a tone as if the audience were highly versed in Gramscianism. It is the old game of Brazilian histrionics: assuming that the listener knows what we are talking about is a way to induce them to believe that we know what we are talking about. In reality, outside the circles of educated PT members, only a few academics know about Gramsci, among them Oliveiros da Silva Ferreira, who defended a thesis on the subject at USP laden with Gramscian odors, in the 1960s. Gramsci remains esoteric, read only within the family, immune to any criticism except friendly criticism—a criticism of the means, complicit with the ends, in an atmosphere of cult and devotion that borders on pure and simple foolishness. But devastating criticisms circulate in the civilized world, which will probably never reach the knowledge of the Brazilian public. I point out the criticisms of Roger Scruton24 and Alfredo Sáenz,25 who approach the subject from very different sides than the one I address in this book but arrive at no less reproachable conclusions.

I must point out a notable exception, albeit belated, an article by Márcio Moreira Alves.26 He partially redeems the honor of the Brazilian press, showing that there is at least one brain capable of knowing more than just the name of Gramsci and at least one reporter who does not shy away from the news. He explains in broad terms the Gramscian strategy and its current state of application by the PT leadership, leading to the conclusion that instead of creating a democracy as the party promises, it will produce here the dictatorship of a clique of intellectuals. It is regrettable, however, that in the limited space of his column, the always surprising Moreira Alves could only cover such a vast subject in heavily technical abbreviation, which is difficult for the public to assimilate. O Globo should give him two full pages to explain in detail the teachings contained therein, perhaps the most important and urgent that the Brazilian press has transmitted to the public in recent years.

Particularly relevant is the observation in that article that the PT’s program itself recognizes—officially, so to speak—the hegemony of the left, mainly in the cultural field but also in politics, as it proclaims Brazil’s current entry into a new “historical bloc” (a closed system of relations between the economy and the cultural, moral, and legal superstructure). The part of the PT program concerning the “passive revolution” deserves the greatest attention. The transition to the new “historical bloc” will be carried out by the activist elite based on the “passive consensus” of the population. This means, in summary, that the people will not need to express their support for the PT’s program for it to feel authorized to promote the revolutionary transformation of society. The mere absence of hostile reaction, not to mention rebellion, will be interpreted as popular approval: silence implies consent, in short. The proposal is shamelessly cynical. It invests the PT with the divine right to act on behalf of the people without needing to listen to them, since silence will be interpreted as applause. For seven decades, the silence of an oppressed people was interpreted as “passive approval” by the government of the USSR. In technical but incisive language, Márcio Moreira Alves shows that this path cannot lead to democracy. I only disagree with him on one point: he thinks that the PT’s strategy is a betrayal of Gramsci’s ideals, and I am certain that it is the purest embodiment of universal Gramscianism27.

The most lamentable thing in this whole story is that the mass of PT militants is intellectually incapable of understanding the subtleties of Gramscian strategy, and they let themselves be led somnambulistically by enlightened guides without questioning the true goal of the journey.

III – The New Age and the Cultural Revolution

The ideas of Capra and Gramsci are pure fictions, but the similarities between them are not mere coincidence. The simple listing is enough to reveal a common root:

  1. Both currents are radically “historicist” – that is, for them, all “truth” is merely the expression of the collective sentiment of a particular historical moment. What matters is not whether this collective sentiment captures an objectively valid truth, but, on the contrary, it is valued in and of itself as the only criterion for correct thinking.

  2. In both, the active subject of knowledge is not individual consciousness, but collectivity. They only differ, on the surface, in the delimitation of this mystical “collective subject”: for Capra, it is “humanity,” or even more vaguely, “we” (it is characteristic of New Age doctrinaires like Capra or Marilyn Ferguson to address a universal audience in the first-person plural, so we don’t know if the speaker is a divine Author hiding their supra-personality in majestic plural, or if it is the collective self-consciousness of humanity). For Gramsci, the collective subject is the “proletariat,” or more properly, the set of organic intellectuals who “represent” it, that is, the Party.

  3. Both insist less on proving a thesis than on inducing a “change of perception,” a sudden turn that makes people feel things differently. With Capra and Gramsci, one cannot discuss, thesis by thesis, demonstration by demonstration: conversion must be integral and sudden, or it never happens. Capristas and Gramscists are “converted” or “reborn” individuals who, at a certain moment in their lives, “see the light” through an instantaneous rotation of their worldview axis. In both cases, the decisive factor is not rational argumentation but a prior volitional or sentimental commitment: the subject suddenly “feels” as a whole, identified with the New Age or the cause of the proletariat, and then begins to see the details according to the new frame of reference.

  4. Both are “cultural revolutions.” They intend to inaugurate a new mental scenario for humanity, in which all previous views and opinions will be implicitly invalidated as mere subjective expressions of a bygone time. As, on the other hand, the new worldview is not presented as objectively valid truth, but only as an expression of a “new time,” one can no longer compare today’s ideas with those of the past to determine who is right: the criterion of truth has been replaced by that of “timeliness,” and since every era is current to itself, each constitutes a closed unity with its ideas that are only subjectively valid for it. Plato had the ideas of “his time”; we have those of “our time” – each in its own.

  5. The dimension of “time” is thus absolutized, reigning alone in a world from which all sense of permanence and eternity has been extirpated. In Gramsci, the amputation is explicit; in Capra and the New Age in general, it is implicit and disguised by mystical verbosity. After this surgery, the human mind becomes incapable of grasping anything of the ideal relationships that, beyond empirical reality, point to the realm of possibility, infinity, and the universal. The empirical, the accomplished fact, the immediate horizon of practical concerns – personal or collective – becomes the utmost limit of human vision. Capra’s “cosmos” and Gramsci’s “History” are leaden bells that confine the human imagination to a small world artificially enlarged by rhetoric.

  6. With the sense of eternity and universality, the sense of truth also disappears, and human capacity to distinguish the true from the false is replaced by a collective feeling of “appropriateness” to “our time.” The “supra-consciousness” of the New Age and Gramsci’s “collective intellect” share the most absolute lack of intelligence. For both, what journalist Russell Chandler said about one of them applies:

"The greatest capacity of the human mind is its ability to discriminate between what is true and what is false, to distinguish what is real from what is illusory or apparent. But the ‘supra-consciousness’ of the New Age is programmed to ignore these distinctions."28

  1. Reflexive and critical self-awareness also dissolves, through which the human individual is capable of rising above collective illusions and judging their time. Closed within the bubble of historical moment, individuals are forbidden to see beyond it, to exercise the privileges of autonomous intelligence, or to be right against majority opinion – whether it be the conservative opinion of the establishment or the collective yearning of ambitious dissatisfied individuals.

  2. The devaluation of individual consciousness comes with the denial of intuitive evidence as a basis for judging truth. Reduced to its psychological, immanent aspect, intuition becomes just an internal experience like any other, incapable of apodictic evidence. It is confused with feeling, premonition, vague impression, and fantasy. Hence the need for a new criterion, which in the New Age is fantasy itself, adorned with the title of mystical intuition, and in Gramsci’s Cultural Revolution, the collective feeling of the Party, the prophetic holder of the sense of History.

The similarities are so substantial that, compared to them, the differences become merely adjectives. The common affiliation dates back, at the very least, to the dearest myth of modern illusion: the myth of Revolution, of the “earthly apocalypse” that, in a sudden turning of all appearances, will transfigure the world, inaugurating Heaven on Earth. The myth of Revolution is the carrot-stick that has kept humanity chasing the train of History for centuries, unable to achieve any result other than the acceleration of becoming, which, going nowhere, ends up being enthroned as the supreme goal of life itself: happening for the sake of happening, the eternalization of the flow of impressions, the reduction of man to the empirical being trapped in an endless whirl of “experiences” and atomistic “moments.” In Eastern terms, which the language of the New Age repeats without understanding their meaning, it is the absolutization of Maya, the eternal imprisonment in the cycle of samsara.

Neither Capra’s nor Gramsci’s ideas require refutation. Their ordered and clear interpretation is already worth refutation. The simple desire to understand them is enough to exorcise them. These are ideas that can only thrive under the protection of a fog of ambiguities and can only find fertile ground in souls yearning for flattering illusions, in whose soft lap they can forget their own misery, the misery of all vanity.

Final Remarks

Expounding the ideas that I would later record in this book during conferences, I often received from the listeners the demand for a “political definition”. They felt uncomfortable with an interlocutor without identifiable affiliation, something like an ideological UFO, and they wanted to know who they were talking to.

My answer, invariably, has been the following:

The assumption behind this demand is that one cannot criticize an ideology except in the name of another ideology, among those recognized in the catalog of the moment. This assumption, in turn, is based on a somewhat historicist, somewhat sociologist prejudice, according to which all individual thought is merely an “expression” of some collective longing, and owes its validity to it. In opposition to this prejudice and that assumption, I am deeply convinced that only the thought of the individual as such can have objective validity, because there is no truth except for reflective consciousness, which only exists in the individual. Collective currents of thought only manifest desires, longings, fears, and never rise to the level of critical self-awareness in which the distinction between truth and falsehood can have any meaning. Only the self-awareness of the individual can grasp this distinction, ascend to the sphere of universally valid judgments and objective truthfulness. Therefore, it is the individual who is the judge of collective thought.

The monstrous inversion that submits the judgment of individual consciousness to the criterion of collective ideologies stems from a mutilation of the modern mind, incapable of conceiving any “universality” that is not merely quantitative, therefore reduced to “generality” and, ultimately, to purely statistical validation. Since, on the other hand, all statistical evidence presupposes the universal validity of the laws of elementary arithmetic, whose foundation is the apodictic evidence only accessible to individual consciousness, the primacy of collective thought rests on a self-contradiction by which it denies its own validity.

To make matters worse, collectivist thinking, not having access to the sphere of objective validity, soon loses all reference to the “object” as such and closes itself in collective subjectivism: from the statistics of “facts” we fall into the statistics of “opinions”, and vote counting becomes the supreme criterion of truthfulness. This process, which begins in the sphere of politics, ends up contaminating science itself, where nowadays we hear widespread calls for the acceptance of purely rhetorical criteria of argumentation as legitimate foundations of scientific credibility. Marketing, in short, is elevated to the supreme science, the model and judge of all other sciences.

Either we accept this result, or we must deny the primacy of collective thought at its root, restoring individual consciousness to the position of dignity it deserves. And in this case, we must admit that the human individual can rise above ideologies and judge them, as long as he does not do so in the name of personal and subjective protest, but in the name of universal and apodictic truth, of which he, with all his weaknesses, with all his limiting conditions, remains, after all, the only representative on Earth.

In the twentieth century, individual consciousness suffered, from the emerging pseudosciences, the most violent attacks, which intended to deny it, reduce it to an epiphenomenon of introjected social roles, to a projection of the instinct of survival, to a grammatical fiction, to a thousand and one forms of the false and the illusory. On the other hand, in the field of psychological techniques, no effort was spared to subjugate individual consciousness, break its autonomy, and force it to mechanically repeat the collective discourse. If ours is the century of Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, it is also the century of hypnosis, subliminal influence techniques, brainwashing, “behavior modification”, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. If, on the one hand, everything is done to theoretically demonstrate the futility of individual consciousness, on the other hand, no effort is spared to repress and subjugate it. Now, when these two sets of facts are confronted, they suggest a question: why so much effort to defeat in practice something that, in theory, does not exist? If the horse is dead, why flog it so fiercely?

This is indeed the theme of a book I am preparing, “The Alienation of Consciousness”. It is a review of the theoretical and practical attacks directed by pseudoscientific doctrines, in alliance with totalitarian governments or with the technocratic establishment, against the autonomy of individual consciousness. It was precisely this study that led me to the complete and unequivocal rejection of all ideological thought. Therefore, do not ask me, in the name of which ideology I fight against this or that ideology. I fight against it from a plane that is not accessible to ideological thought, and that only exists for individual self-awareness, when firmly determined not to abdicate its right—and duty—to truth and universality. Consequently, I also do not address listeners and readers as representatives of this or that faction or group, but as bearers of a universally valid intelligence, capable of surpassing the discourse of factions and groups and judging it objectively. I do not converse with collective puppets, but with human beings, invested with the supreme dignity of self-awareness, which makes them images of God. If, while clinging to biological identity and therefore subject to passionate illusion, the consciousness of the individual is pure Maya, on the other hand, it is only the individual, not the statistical conglomerate of collectivities, that can ascend to the realm of universality where it is permissible to say: I am Brahman.

Rio de Janeiro, March 1994.

Appendices

The Left and Organized Crime

Comando Vermelho. A Secret History of Organized Crime, by Carlos Amorim,29 is a work of exceptional value, recommended reading for all Brazilians concerned about the future of this country. A future that can be glimpsed through the words of William Lima da Silva, known as “Professor,” founder and guru of Comando Vermelho, quoted on page 255:

“We achieved what the guerrilla could not: the support of the underprivileged population. I go to the slums and see children with initiative, smoking and selling drugs. In the future, they will be three million teenagers who will kill you [the police] on the streets. Have you ever thought about what three million armed teenagers and ten million unemployed people can do?”

Some may interpret this as mere expression of megalomania, but Carlos Amorim’s book shows that the sinister prophecy is already being fulfilled: Comando Vermelho not only controls two-fifths of the Greater Rio territory, monopolizing kidnappings, stolen car trade, and drug trafficking, but it also exercises governing functions in the area through terror alternated with paternalistic flattery. It also leads in the smuggling of heavy weapons, making it better equipped than the police or even the local army garrisons. Authorities acknowledge that the power of the hillside mafia is absolutely uncontrollable, and it continues, from victory to victory, stunning the police, humiliating the government, and attributing an epic sense of a struggle for the liberation of the oppressed to its criminal operations.

I won’t summarize the book here because I want you to read it. In the following pages, I will concentrate my observations on what seems to be its only weak point. I will do this not to diminish the merits of the work, which are high, but precisely to highlight them. This gap, which lies in the diagnosis of the deep causes and origins of organized crime, could only be filled by an investigation that goes far beyond its scope. The author does allude to some probable causes but focuses his attention on the phenomenon of Comando Vermelho itself, without extending his examination to the set of historical factors that surrounded, facilitated, and ultimately determined its emergence. Therefore, it is not a matter of pointing out a defect in the book but suggesting additional investigations that would provide material for another book or several.

One certainty that Amorim’s book definitively establishes is that Comando Vermelho was born from the coexistence between common criminals and political activists inside the Ilha Grande prison between 1969 and 1978. There, leftist militants taught the bandits the guerrilla techniques they would later use in their criminal operations and the principles of political-military organization on which Comando Vermelho would be structured, as well as the revolutionary phraseology with which the gang glamorizes its exploits today.

What is not clear at all is the extent and nature of the involvement of left-wing organizations in the creation of Comando Vermelho, their historical responsibility for the emergence of the phenomenon that now terrorizes the population of Rio de Janeiro and jeopardizes the survival of the young and fragile Brazilian democracy.

Regarding this point, the author contradicts himself: his narrative of the facts points in one direction, his opinions in the opposite direction. Here is one of these opinions:

"The revolutionaries never intended to teach criminals to conduct guerrilla warfare. In over a decade of research, I have never found the slightest evidence that there was an intention – let alone a strategy – to involve crime in the class struggle."30

According to the author’s interpretation, the guerrilla teachings would have been passed on to the bandits in a natural, spontaneous, unpremeditated way, through fortuitous contacts between individuals, without any responsibility of the leftist organizations.

However, the facts narrated by Amorim himself blatantly contradict this interpretation. While they do not support the police thesis that sees Comando Vermelho as an extension or intensification of the old revolutionary guerrilla, they indicate that what happened in Ilha Grande was far more compromising than mere casual conversations. Powerful interests currently prevent a deeper investigation into these episodes. The political prisoners of that time have become important figures, deputies, ministers, prosecutors, with enough power to dissuade any curious look at a past they prefer to keep shrouded in mist. I have no doubt that the ambiguity of Amorim himself stems from the prudent desire to avoid confrontation with these people, whose supporters and sympathizers exercise complete hegemony over his work environment: the newsrooms. As for me, I expect nothing from them. When they were persecuted political activists, I helped them as much as I could, hiding fugitives and weapons, drafting and distributing propaganda against the dictatorship, because I saw in their faces the emblem of truth, which was antagonized by official lies. Today, as they are one step away from power, I already see in their countenance the mask of hypocrisy, which announces a new empire of falsehood in this country. Every priesthood sooner or later becomes a cult of itself: having once served the truth, they now take its place on the altar of a degenerate cult.

Investigating the meaning of the episodes in Ilha Grande means breaking a taboo, violating the established precept that evil, baseness, and hypocrisy are the monopoly of the right.

The coexistence between political prisoners and common criminals has a long history in Brazil, as recognized by Amorim. It dates back to 1917 with the first arrests of unionist and anarchist agitators. It intensified during and after the communist uprising of 1935. Since then, there has been a constant and systematic effort by communists to indoctrinate criminals and incorporate them into the political struggle. One of the leaders of the 1935 uprising, Gregório Bezerra, recounts in his memoirs how he “turned prison guards and criminals into communist militants.” During the Estado Novo years, according to Amorim, "contacts with intellectuals, radical military personnel, politicians, and unionists influenced pickpockets and crooks. From this coexistence, many men left behind their criminal careers and opted for revolutionary militancy."31

However, none of this caused any significant change in the world of crime as a whole:

On the streets, crime remained the same: random, violent, disorganized. The phenomenon of consciousness-raising and the emergence of the so-called organized crime only appeared in the 1970s.

Therefore, there was the introduction of a new factor, a specific difference in the type of influence exerted by militants on the criminals. This difference resided essentially in the content of the information transmitted: instead of simple ideological indoctrination, the criminals received practical teachings that they could put into action as soon as they left prison. What were these teachings?

First, organizational principles that included hierarchical structure and discipline within the armed group, as well as communication systems using codes.

Next, propaganda or “agitprop” techniques that allowed them to turn robberies and kidnappings into protest spectacles – “armed propaganda,” as it is known in leftist jargon – which gained at least partial sympathy from the population and the intelligentsia.

Third, armed action tactics. The list is extensive. Among the procedures used by the guerrilla and copied by Comando Vermelho, the following can be highlighted:

  1. Simultaneous bank robberies to confuse the police.

  2. To achieve the same goal, bombarding police stations with dozens of false alarms on planned robbery days.

  3. Not going on an armed operation without setting up a “medical station” to treat the wounded (previously, the bandits left them to their own fate, exposing themselves to revenge and potential betrayal).

  4. In case of emergency, invading pre-selected small private clinics, forcing doctors to provide medical assistance to the wounded.

  5. Planning and organizing kidnappings.

  6. Assigning a “critic” to each operation, someone who does not participate in the action but only observes and points out mistakes to improve the next action.

  7. Precise planning of armed actions to achieve maximum results in minimal time with minimal bloodshed (today, Comando Vermelho completes a bank robbery in four or five minutes).

  8. Techniques for the gang to leave the scene of the action in record time, taking advantage of street layouts, traffic congestion, deliberately causing traffic accidents, and more.

  9. Careful planning of all actions based on Carlos Marighela’s principle: “We are strong where the enemy is weak, that is, where we are not expected.”

  10. Information and counter-information as the basis for planning.

  11. “Apparatus” system – houses strategically purchased throughout the city to hide fugitives after operations, store weapons, etc.

The fourth and final group of teachings concerned the selection of the best weapons for each type of operation, as well as the manufacturing of explosives suitable for urban guerrilla warfare, such as Molotov cocktails with a special formula prepared by chemistry students and "fragmentation bombs with nails packed together with gunpowder and sulfur in a PVC tube or a beer-sized can."32

Together, these teachings formed a complete course on urban guerrilla warfare, supported by specialized literature that included “Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla” by Carlos Marighela, “Guerrilla Warfare” by Che Guevara, and “Revolution within the Revolution” by Régis Débray, as well as “Guerrilla Viewed from Within” by Wilfred Burchett. The latter is just a report from Vietnam by a British war correspondent, but among the militants, it was as highly regarded as the works of professional guerrilla fighters, and its circulation was even banned in Brazil during the military governments because "it shows how the Viet Cong manufactured ammunition, including a formula for homemade gunpowder production. It also explains how the tunnel system for the escape of guerrilla units worked, with lighting provided by generators powered by bicycle wheels. The book also talks about codes, mail based on notes delivered by hand from village to village. A manual of revolutionary warfare containing extensive explanations of tactics and strategy. In short, pure dynamite."33 The bibliography also included classics of Marxist literature, such as Marx and Lenin, as well as minor works of indoctrination.

All these teachings were later put into practice by Comando Vermelho, demonstrating an even greater mastery of them than the guerrilla organizations themselves: "Organized crime went much further than armed struggle had achieved in the 1970s, both in terms of infrastructure and internal discipline and organization."34 As the bank robber Vadinho (Oswaldo da Silva Calil), who witnessed everything up close in Ilha Grande, aptly summarized it, “the students became the teachers.”

Amorim strongly opines that there was “no intention” to teach guerrilla warfare to the criminals, that the transmission of these teachings occurred “involuntarily,” as a spontaneous result of “occasional coexistence in prisons.” Faced with the facts narrated, it is difficult to believe in this opinion, and it is even difficult to admit that Amorim himself believes in it. It is wiser to see it as a verbal concession: having dared to disclose facts that are deeply compromising for the left, Amorim preferred to let the narrative speak for itself, without personally endorsing the conclusion it imposes. It’s the cunning of a reporter who, with great caution, fears the tongues of his fellow colleagues more than the bullets of the Red Command.

What leads me to interpret things in this way is the disproportion between the strength of the narrative and the timidity of the arguments on which Amorim supports his opinion. Any journalism novice knows that the exposition of facts has a deeper influence on the reader than the expressed opinion. The true intention of a newspaper lies in its way of selecting and ordering news, and not in what it states in its editorials. Reporters' minds work in a similar way: as more narrative than analytical intelligences, they express themselves more fully by telling the facts than by lining up arguments.

The main argument that Amorim presents in defense of his thesis is that, over twelve years, he found no evidence or proof “of an intention, much less a strategy” to teach guerrilla warfare to the criminals.

The argument destroys itself. Firstly, there is no proof of intention, except for the very logic of the act, through which we can trace back to the causes from the consequences. Every human act that cannot be explained by mere chance presupposes an intention, and every accident is, by definition, momentary: there are no “continuous accidents”; mere coincidence does not persist, unchanged and uniform, over the years, like a pair of dice that endlessly roll sixes. Any repeated act is, in itself, proof of its intention. If a man gets drunk once, twice, it may be unintentional and simply the cumulative effect of poorly measured drinks. But if we find him turning the glass and stumbling again four or five times a week, some other “proof” will be needed to certify that he intended to get drunk, right? Well, the transmission of guerrilla teachings continued on Ilha Grande for no less than nine years. What more is needed to prove an intention?

One can see the matter from another angle. An intention is nothing more than the anticipation of a consequence, combined with the desire to provoke that consequence. Therefore, we can only suppose the absence of intention when a person is incapable of foreseeing the consequences of their actions. If a furious husband slaps his wife and sends her to the hospital, we can assume that the brute did not measure his strength. But after a long series of hospitalizations for the unfortunate woman, should we assume that he still has not correctly assessed the proportion between the force of the blow and its hospital consequences, or that he intended to trigger precisely those consequences? As for our guerrillas, the hypothesis of the absence of intention presupposes that they were incapable of foreseeing how their disciples would use their teachings. If one of them occasionally let slip a few words, it could be a coincidence. But several of them consistently transmitting information over the years without ever realizing the consequences of their actions is more than human credulity can admit.

External evidence is only necessary when the logic of the facts does not speak for itself, when there is something ambiguous in the facts that allows for varying interpretations, which is not the case here. But Amorim absolves the guerrillas precisely based on the absence of this type of evidence. And it turns out that even this evidence is not truly absent. Want to see?

There are only three types of evidence in the world: material, documentary, and testimonial.

Material evidence is there: the presence of books, guerrilla manuals in the hands of the criminals is proof that someone gave them to them. Delivering a book evidently proves the intention to transmit information and to do so more comprehensively than could be done in mere casual conversations.

The books mentioned by Amorim were rare works, with limited print runs and prohibited circulation, which, if found, were only in the hands of militants directly involved in armed leftist organizations. Régis Débray’s book circulated in a volume clandestinely printed by the Marighela wing of the Communist Party, and Guevara’s book was a mimeographed booklet with very few copies. Even Burchett’s book (Amorim writes “Bulcher,” but the correct spelling is Burchett), which was published by a commercial publisher (Civilização Brasileira), had a limited print run and was quickly confiscated, leaving only a few copies circulating among left-wing militants. These were not general-interest books given to someone to read for mere pastime but technical teaching manuals aimed at a specialized audience. Transmitting these books to the criminals is more than just manifesting an intention to teach guerrilla warfare; it is fulfilling that intention.

As for documentary evidence that would attest to a decision by leftist organizations to promote guerrilla teaching, it could only consist of minutes from meetings of committees of political prisoners formally declaring such an intention. But the political prisoners would have to be crazy or suicidal to record a decision of this nature in minutes that would certainly end up in the hands of the prison authorities sooner or later. In fact, they never took minutes for the very same reason. If historians today were to depend on minutes to study this period, they would not even have proof that the committees of political prisoners existed. Documentary evidence, in this case, is not demanded. Political prisoners do not take minutes, just as minutes are not taken for a meeting of criminals planning a bank robbery. Therefore, the argument of lack of evidence does not apply to documentary evidence.

The remaining evidence is testimonial. These are ambiguous. Amorim only mentions two. Vadinho claims that there was teaching. José Carlos Tórtima, a former political prisoner and later (in the Brizola government) director of the same prison on Ilha Grande, declares otherwise:

— It’s a lie, this story that common prisoners learned how to organize and gained knowledge of urban guerrilla warfare from political prisoners. Their ideological content is so individualistic that they could not absorb the proposal of collective support in any way… I clearly reject any insinuation that common prisoners were shaped by politicians. This is a myth spread by the right. 35

Dr. Tórtima is, apparently, one of those leftist devotees for whom the sentence “It’s right-wing!” constitutes, in and of itself, decisive evidence against any argument. Something like Roma locuta, causa finita, a fatal label that, when attached to an idea, is enough to invalidate it forever.

If he didn’t think this way, he would have sought to better support his testimony by citing facts instead of exempting himself from doing so, relying on the exorcising power of a magical phrase.

Indeed, his is not a testimony; it is an opinion, an opinion that opposes the abominable right-wing thesis with an argument of logical probability: fiercely individualistic individuals could not, in principle, absorb a proposal of collective action, or at least it is highly unlikely that they would.

From a hypothetical and abstract point of view, we must agree with Dr. Tórtima: the law of probabilities is on his side. But first of all, it is strange that a witness, called to demonstrate the falseness of a claim, limits himself to demonstrating its improbability. We reason by probabilities when we do not have access to facts, when, not knowing for sure, we can only conjecture sensibly. Witnesses do not conjecture: witnesses narrate.

If we move from conjecture to facts, the conversation changes. Hypothetically, the absorption of the proposal for collective support by the individualists was indeed improbable, but Amorim’s own book clearly shows that the improbable occurred: not only did the criminals absorb the proposal, but they also put it into practice with more rigor, efficiency, and scope than the political militants themselves. And by organizing themselves better than them, they even managed to coordinate the “collective support” of the poor population in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, surpassing everything that the guerrillas had ever dreamed of in terms of popular recruitment: “The students became the teachers.”

What is the value of the argument of improbability in the face of the proof of the accomplished fact? Faced with this fact, what we see is Dr. Tórtima’s argument turning in favor of the thesis that he emphatically repudiates, against the one he defends. If it was unlikely that anarchistic individualists would absorb the proposal of collective support even when it was transmitted to them by skilled and solicitous guerrilla teachers, much less, to say the least, would be the probability that they would do so solely by their own effort and without any pedagogical assistance. The effort required to learn alone is significantly greater than that required to follow the lessons of a good teacher. Therefore, if disorganized individualists became efficient collective organizers, the merit is most likely not solely theirs, nor solely theirs the blame for the kind of thing they came to organize.

Incidentally, Dr. Tórtima’s clumsy argumentation also undermines Amorim’s own opinions regarding the fortuitous and unplanned nature of guerrilla teachings. If the common criminals were anarchistic individualists, how could they put together fragments of information gathered here and there in casual conversations in good order, so as to compose with them a rational technique capable of developing into broad and remarkable practical applications? It would require an extraordinary IQ, but even geniuses would have some difficulty in haphazardly learning organization to such an extent. Honestly, asking us to believe that primitive, barbaric, undisciplined, and fickle men managed to grasp the complex principles of political-military organization of urban guerrilla warfare merely by picking up bits and pieces of conversations and then transforming this shapeless mess into a highly effective technique is truly an insult to our intelligence.

Counting on the credulity of others is indeed a vice of the Brazilian left, acquired in the years following the fall of the dictatorship. The revelation of torture and hidden corpses, confirming allegations that the official opinion had previously disqualified as agitators' fabrications, demoralized the right and elevated the credibility of the left to great heights. Since then, the left has been abusing the credit given to them to make us swallow all sorts of lies and slanders, with no guarantee other than being uttered by someone who told us the truth once. How long will the atrocities of the right be the guarantors of the left’s lies?

What Dr. Tórtima imposes on us as testimony could not be worth anything because the “witness” was released from prison in 1971, before the decisive phase of the formation of the Red Command, about which he knows only what he read in the newspapers, if he even read them. This also confirms the likely slanderous nature of insinuations accusing him of personal involvement in teaching guerrilla warfare to the criminals. But the fact that he is innocent does not qualify him to exonerate others about whom he knows nothing. Which Brazilian leftist, however, will refuse to speak publicly on a subject of which they know nothing if the invitation serves as an opportunity to take a few jabs at the “right”?

To believe that Dr. Tórtima’s “testimony” is sufficient to absolve anyone other than himself would require that our faith move mountains. Devoid of faith, let us do something that has become a sign of impiety in Brazil today: let us reason.

Reasoning I: Carlos Amorim’s book informs us that leftist militants, once imprisoned, sought to strengthen the disciplinary unity of their organizations in order to resist the hostile environment. On the other hand, the same book wants us to believe that men accustomed to such Spartan discipline let slip, in casual conversations with common inmates, all the secrets of military technique and political organization that were the lifeblood and sinews of the revolution. It wants us to believe that these iron men, capable of resisting physical and psychological torture to not reveal any secrets to the police, freely gave everything to the criminals, by mere inattention; that from conversation to conversation, they allowed Marxist theory, agitprop principles, military techniques, organization methods, and all the knowledge of urban guerrilla warfare that was available at the time to leak out, without ever realizing that they were teaching guerrilla warfare or having the slightest intention of doing so. I have never heard anything crazier in my life.

Reasoning II: If, unlike the common prisoners, anarchistic individualists, the militants were socialized, politicized, and disciplined, then they certainly did nothing of importance without prior consultation with the “collective.” Therefore, there are two possibilities: either the transmission of guerrilla teachings to the criminals was authorized by the collective, or it was done in flagrant disobedience to its prohibition. In the latter case, we must understand that, despite the high degree of politicization prevailing there, complete anarchy also reigned, so that the collective could not control the individual whims of its members and let them roam freely so that, like true anarchistic individualists, each one could do as they pleased. Of course, in this case, the political prisoners would not have been able to resist the pressures of the environment, much less, as Dr. Tórtima said, “to make the criminals accommodate to our rules.” So there is no doubt: transmitting guerrilla teachings to the criminals cannot have been a decision left to individual arbitrariness. Amorim clearly states that, at least from 1975 onwards, a decisive stage in the formation of the Red Command, the relations between common prisoners and political prisoners did not occur between individuals, but between committees.

Reasoning III: If books and guerrilla manuals were prohibited from circulating throughout the national territory, they were even more so within the prison walls. To introduce them there and make them circulate, even exclusively among militants, would be a great recklessness. To transfer them to common criminals, people devoid of any ideological commitment and moral reliability, would certainly expose them to the risk of denunciation, unless there was a prior agreement between the committee of the political prisoners and that of the common prisoners, with severe sanctions against those who failed to comply. The only two alternative hypotheses are: either the political prisoners were giving Che Guevara and Carlos Marighela’s works to the criminals by sheer carelessness, casually distributing them to children like copies of Luluzinha and Tio Patinhas comics; or the common prisoners had an extremely organized espionage service capable of bypassing the surveillance of the political prisoners and stealing a few copies of the zealously guarded explosive works. However, if it was unlikely that such careless militants would survive on Ilha Grande, it would be even more improbable that the anarchistic “individualists” could set up such an efficient espionage service.

Therefore, Tórtima’s testimony and Amorim’s opinions fall apart. What stands is Amorim’s narrative, supporting, with terrifying eloquence, the conclusion that the author did not want to personally endorse: either the left-wing militants deliberately taught guerrilla tactics to criminals, or the acquisition of this knowledge by the Red Command leaders is the most prodigious miracle of spontaneous absorption ever recorded in the annals of universal pedagogy. I leave this hypothesis for the adherents of the thesis according to which God is Brazilian. As for the other, it remains to be discussed whether the purpose of the leftists was to co-opt the criminals for armed struggle under their command or simply to avenge themselves for the defeat of the guerrillas by leaving for the military government the seed of future torment of organized banditry. It may have been a mix of both36. Some police officers bet on the first, swearing that the Red Command is an extension and intensification of urban guerrilla warfare, a new armed wing of the left. This certainty is based on the same foundation as that of Dr. Tórtima: a prior ideological option that distorts perception, or makes it tortuous37. I will leave this question for another opportunity, merely warning that it cannot be resolved by the method of sentimental bets. But whatever the case, one thing is certain: if the militants of the armed left trained guerrilla-criminals inside the prison, those of the unarmed left, outside of it, are giving consistent follow-up to their initiative, as they help the Red Command to conquer a position of strength as an “artificially legitimized popular leadership,” and thus integrate it into the global strategy of the left, no longer as a military force, but a political one. If the young guerrillas of 1968 did not have a defined strategy to politically take advantage of banditry, the old left-wing politicians of 1994 are giving them one, retroactively. This is not about a bridge between generations: it’s that these old men are simply those young men, trained by time. The young killed and stole for the revolution; the old ones reap political dividends from assaults and murders committed by others. They use banditry twice: by protecting it and by denouncing it. In the first case, they gain — or at least intend to gain — the votes of the poor population, who they suppose obey the Red Command; in the second, they use it as a pretext to denounce the corruption of capitalist society. They feed the evil to be able to accuse it, which is, without exaggeration, the type of malice properly diabolical, imitating the devil in his double and inseparable role of tempter and accuser38. If the idea of co-opting criminals for armed struggle was a senseless fantasy, if the desire for revenge against the dictatorship was a juvenile tantrum, a more mature and experienced left is knowing how to reap and take political advantage of what was generated, in the mist, on the Big Island. To whom could this fruit be sweet if not to those who, with an eye on the future, planted its seed?

The PT’s Brazil

The interview with PT theorist Marco Aurélio Garcia in the “Jornal da Tarde” on January 12th shows that behind a soothing modern facade, this party has nothing to propose other than good old communism.

  1. According to the interviewee, the PT government will not be socialist. The naive take this promise as a guarantee. However, Marco Aurélio continues, this government will be a “popular democracy” and will constitute an “improvement of capitalism” with a view to a “socialist horizon” — a vague and indistinct horizon enough not to alarm the electorate. What the electorate, new and uncultured, completely ignores is that improving capitalism to reach socialism is not a new proposal, but rather the only communist government strategy that has ever existed and the only one that could exist, since, according to Marx, socialism cannot be implemented until capitalism develops its potentialities to exhaustion. The function of the transitional “democratic-popular” government is to accelerate this exhaustion. In Russia, this intermediate phase was called the New Economic Policy (NEP), implemented by Lenin shortly after the communists took power. If Lenin himself, rising to power in the midst of an armed revolution, did not immediately implement communism, but only an “improved capitalism,” why would the PT do more, having come to power through the gradual and peaceful path of Gramscism?

  2. Marco Aurélio Garcia, continuing in his soothing tone, assures that businessmen will lose nothing and will have everything to gain in a PT Brazil: “If we want to develop a large mass market, it is clear that a large part of the bourgeoisie will benefit from it.” But that is exactly what Lenin said: the transition to socialism cannot be done without the bourgeoisie making a lot of money from increased business. This was precisely the essence of the NEP. However, it should not be thought that the communists are unhappy with the sudden prosperity of their adversaries.39 On the contrary, by waving the promise of quick gains, the communist government exploits the immediate greed of the bourgeoisie, working in favor of the revolution and fulfilling Lenin’s prophecy: “The bourgeoisie prepares the rope with which it will be hanged.” The trick is simple: with the rapid progress of capitalism, the proletariat, the support base of the communist government, also grows rapidly. As soon as this base is strong enough to sustain the government without the help of the bourgeoisie, the government tightens the noose. Then the dead or banished bourgeoisie is replaced in their leadership roles by a new class of nominally proletarian bureaucrats.

  1. Garcia says that the PT wants a “strong state,” equipped with “mechanisms to control the Parliament, the Judiciary, the Court of Auditors, and state-owned companies.” But what the hell is this if not the most blatant totalitarianism? In democracies, the autonomy of the three powers has been a reliable and sufficient mechanism for controlling power. What the PT advocates is that two of these powers be controlled by a third, the Executive, from the moment it falls into the hands of Mr. Luís Inácio Lula da Silva. In this hypothesis, it makes no difference whether the Executive directly polices the other two powers, in an overt dictatorship, or whether it does so through self-appointed organizations representing civil society—unions, NGOs, groups of intellectuals, student unions—that are in turn controlled by the dominant political faction, i.e., the PT. In both cases, what we will have is the hypertrrophic growth of power and its absolute lack of control.

  2. When asked about the fate of the Armed Forces under the PT government, Garcia responds, with all the clarity of someone saying exactly what they think: to change the Constitution so that the Armed Forces no longer have, among their responsibilities, the task of combating internal enemies and instead exclusively focus on defending national borders. Well, sent to the border, detached from the fight against internal enemies, the Armed Forces will be doubly impeded—by constitutional obligation and by distance—from lifting a finger against organized crime, which, to the applause of a certain leftist intelligentsia, already dominates a State in the Federation. If, expanding what is happening in Rio, an alliance between politicians and criminals sets the entire country on fire, the Armed Forces will be powerless to do anything about it because they will be, faithful to their constitutional duty, quartered in some remote Amazonian location, guarding against an imminent Bolivian invasion or perhaps giving the Marines a thrashing to envy the Viet Cong.

But isn’t it strange that a PT leader harbors such an insane project when his party also has among its main theoretical figures a certain Mr. César Benjamin, biographer and apologist of the founder of the Red Command? Let us remember: written with the help of this PT theorist, the book in which the gangster William Lima da Silva extols crime was published by Editora Vozes, a Catholic leftist publishing house, and launched with a book signing and much fanfare at a ceremony held at the headquarters of the ABI in 1991. Despite what Article 287 of the Penal Code provides, no one was prosecuted. Some see in facts like this dangerous signs of connections between the left and organized crime. Whether or not there is an underground political alliance there is something that only time will tell. But it is beyond doubt that the left is connected to the Red Command through a common past and a deep “spiritual” affinity based on the worship of the same myths and the same resentments. And how could the lords of crime not feel this affinity as a true comfort in the face of the PT’s promise to remove the only obstacle that can still inhibit their ambitions?40

The PT’s proposal to increase the budget allocation for the Armed Forces in exchange for relieving them of the responsibility for combating internal enemies is pure bribery, in which the PT implicitly assumes the role of internal enemy. If there is still strategic awareness among the military, this indecent proposal will be rejected.

  1. Finally, if Marco Aurélio Garcia seeks to appease the fear of the communist specter by saying that the PT regime will not be socialism but rather a “popular democracy,” there is also nothing new in that: all communist regimes called themselves “people’s democracies.”

Following Hitler’s lesson, the PT doesn’t even bother to hide what it intends to do: it openly announces its plans, counting on the popular wishful thinking to give its words a softened and innocent meaning, without perceiving any danger even in the most explicit threats. After all, the more a people are overwhelmed by evils, the more eager they become to believe in something and the less inclined they are to realistically confront the imminence of even greater evils. In these moments, the safest way to conceal a malicious intention is to proclaim it cynically, so that, taken as implausible in its literal sense, it is interpreted metaphorically and accepted by all with that compulsive benevolence that arises from the fear of being afraid. When Hitler promised to put an end to the Jews, it was also interpreted metaphorically.

The predisposition of public opinion to not perceive the evident risk arises, on the one hand, from the hegemony that left-wing ideologies exert on our cultural landscape, imposing psychological blinders even on people who politically diverge from the left. Politics is just a surface of social life, and it is useless to disagree on the surface if, deep down—within moral convictions, basic feelings, and fundamental vital attitudes—we slavishly copy the mental pattern of the adversary.

On the other hand, it arises from the illusion that communism is dead. It is an excess of naivety—or perhaps fear of being afraid—to suppose that the failure of communism in Eastern Europe has definitively extinguished the ambitions of communists everywhere. Resentment moves mountains, Nietzsche said. Particularly in Brazil, the left has a deep-seated aspiration to achieve a local victory that, due to its unexpected and belated nature, can redeem the honor of the communist movement humiliated worldwide. Allowing the PT to carry out its plans for “popular democracy” under the pretext that communism is a dead horse is risking a kick that will prove the vitality of the deceased.

Furthermore, the movement of ideas in Brazil does not progress pari passu with the evolution of the world but always lags behind. In 1930, when Auguste Comte’s positivism was already a museum piece in its country of origin, a revolution took power in Brazil inspired by the positivist model of the state. Spiritism, a European fad that died out around the time of the First World War without ever reincarnating, is still in Brazil almost an official religion. Our intellectuals are still engaged in combating Lusitanism in literature, almost a century after the literary exchange between Brazil and Portugal was broken. The old African religions, which blacks around the world are abandoning to join Islam, are here conquering new masses of believers among whites. In short, time in this part of the world runs backward. Why couldn’t communism, dead or dying everywhere else, resurface in this country, faithful to the chronic delay of our mental calendar? At least that’s what Marco Aurélio Garcia’s interview promises us: if it’s up to him, we won’t fail in our cosmic mission as collectors of the trash rejected by history.

Men with deeply rooted Marxist backgrounds, insensitive throughout their entire lives to any other currents of thought, simply cannot have made a profound and serious revision of their convictions in the short period since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Any changes, if there were any, were superficial, not to say simulated. The attractive force of communist messianism has not ended; it has receded into obscurity, from where, vitalized by nostalgic appeal and the longing for a transformative renouveau, it is ready to resurface at the slightest sign of an opportunity. Impromptu declarations of repentance mean nothing, especially in men who, accustomed by the communist ceremonial practice to using “self-criticism” rituals as instruments of political survival, have deeply assimilated the vice of duplicitous language to the point of making it a second nature. A century of communist history proves that nothing compares to the left’s ability to plug its own ears to the truth, except its ability to avert the gaze of others from the truth. The very haste with which some communist leaders appeared before TV cameras to declare the bankruptcy of communism is suspect, since in none of them was the disillusionment deep enough to make them want to abandon politics. Overnight, they took off their Soviet shirts, put on a new outfit, and without further ado reappeared, ready for another round, with great vigor and enthusiasm, speaking with that certainty, with that confidence as if they had never been contradicted by the facts. Believe those people if you want.

As for me, I do not doubt all of the communists. I believe Antonio Gramsci when he says that the Party is the new “Prince” of Machiavelli, and I believe Bertolt Brecht when he says that for a communist, truth and lies are just tools, both equally useful to the practice of the only virtue that counts, which is to fight for communism.

Note

To those who, having read this appendix, see in the author an anti-PT (Workers' Party) fanatic, I warn that I voted for Lula for president and would do it again, with pleasure, if he took the following actions:

  1. Banish from his party the lineup of intellectual vedettes who, formed in a Marxist atmosphere, and clinging to it like a baby to its mother’s skirt, insist on keeping the socialist movement imprisoned in it that longs for new ideas. To finally exorcise the ghosts of Marx, Lenin, Débray, Althusser, Gramsci and tutti quanti, and allow the socialist idea to grow free of gurus and totems. When Lula says that our elites lived “with their eyes turned to France and their asses turned to Brazil”, does he not realize that this is an exact description of the PT’s intellectual elite, and the leftist one in general?

  2. Repress the use of clandestine and revolutionary movement tactics, which are indecent in a party that professes to democratically coexist with other parties in a rule of law state. Infiltration, espionage, denunciation, moral boycott may be necessary and inevitable for an opposition movement that wants to survive in a dictatorship. In a regime of freedom, they are intolerable practices, especially in politicians who pose as ethics teachers. When the apostles of ethics cite as an example for Brazil what the Americans did with Nixon after the Watergate case, they forget to say that Nixon did not fall because of a diversion of funds, but because of the practice of espionage. If corruption is a crime, espionage is an act of war, which destroys, at its base, the democratic edifice.

Lula is a decent man and, as Francisco Weffort said, he is bigger than his party. If he uses the tremendous force of his prestige to exterminate these two vices, Marxism and clandestinism, the Workers' Party will transform into what its name promises, ceasing to be merely the party of communist nostalgia.41

Bandits and Scholars42

Among the causes of Rio’s banditry, there is one that everyone knows but is never mentioned, because it has become taboo: for sixty years our writers and artists have been producing a culture of idealizing trickery, vice, and crime. How could this not contribute, at least in the long term, to creating an atmosphere conducive to the spread of banditry?

From Captains of the Sand to the novel Endless War, passing through the works of Amando Fontes, Marques Rebelo, João Antônio, Lêdo Ivo, the theater of Nelson Rodrigues and Chico Buarque, the films of Roberto Farias, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Rogério Sganzerla, and countless others, the watchword is one, repeated in chorus from generation to generation: thieves and murderers are essentially good or at least neutral, the police and the upper classes they serve are essentially bad.43

I do not know of a single good Brazilian book in which the police are right, in which the virtues of the orderly and peaceful middle class are exalted, in which thieves and murderers are presented as worse men than others, from any aspect whatsoever. Even a superior artist like Graciliano Ramos did not escape the commonplace: Luís da Silva, in Anguish, the most pathological and ugly criminal in our literature, ends up being more likable than his victim, the fat, satisfied, and rich Julião Tavares — guilty of the crime of being fat, satisfied, and rich. From Graciliano’s perspective, Luís da Silva’s only mistake is his isolation, is acting on his own in an impotent outburst of petty-bourgeois despair: had he hanged all the bourgeoisie instead of just one, he would be a hero. The homicide, in itself, is fair: it was bad to commit it on a small scale.

To humanize the image of the offender, to distort, caricature to the limits of the grotesque and animality the middle and high class citizen, or even the poor man when religious and fulfilling his duties — who in this case appears as a contemptible conformist and virtual traitor of the class —, this is the mandate that a significant portion of our artists has faithfully followed, and which an army of sociologists, psychologists and political scientists discreetly supports from the rear, with a semblance of “scientific” backing.

According to the resulting “ethics,” there is no evil in the world except “conservative morality.” What is an assault, a rape, a murder compared to the satanic wickedness that lurks in the heart of a family man who, by educating his children in respect for law and order, helps maintain the status quo? In this culture, banditry is essentially either the passive and innocent reflection of an unjust society or the active expression of a fundamentally just popular revolt. It doesn’t matter that murder and robbery are intentional acts, that the maintenance of an unjust order is far from the calculations of the family man and only results as an undesired sum of millions of automated actions and omissions by the anonymous masses. The universally accepted connection between intention and guilt is repealed among us by a Marxist atavism erected into law: according to the “ethical” criterion of our intelligentsia, a man is less guilty for his personal acts than for those of the class to which he belongs.44 This distorts the entire scale of values in judging crimes. When a resident of a slum commits a murder, they should be treated with clemency because they belong to the class of the innocent. When a company director evades taxes, they should be punished rigorously because they belong to the guilty class. Those who demand imprisonment for corrupt politicians campaign for the release of the leader of the Red Command. Those who have always vehemently opposed the death penalty for murderers cite as exemplary the Chinese law that orders the shooting of corrupt individuals and reprimand Deputy Amaral Netto, an advocate for the death penalty for murderers, for being against the same penalty for “white-collar crimes.” Congress, preoccupied with punishing common embezzlers, shows a sovereign indifference towards armed banditry. Thus, our public opinion undergoes reeducation that will ultimately persuade it that embezzling state funds is more serious than threatening human life—a principle that, enshrined in the Soviet Penal Code, punished homicide with ten years in prison and imposed the death penalty for crimes against the administration: tell me whom you imitate, and I will tell you who you are.45

If taken further, this “cultural revolution” will ultimately pervert the entire moral sense of the population, establishing the belief that the duty to be good and just falls primarily and essentially on society and only secondarily on individuals. Many Brazilian intellectuals take this monstrous precept as an infallible dogma, resulting in the abolition of all duties of individual moral conscience until the day when the “just society” is finally established on Earth—an ideal that, if not utopian and fantastical in itself, is at least rendered unfeasible by the practice of the same precept, making men increasingly unjust and evil the more they bet on the future just and good society.46 One of the greatest ethical thinkers of our century, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, showed that throughout history, the moral standards of societies—and especially of states—have always been much inferior to those of concrete individuals. A society, any society, can allow acts that would be considered immoral or criminal in an individual. Therefore, according to Niebuhr, the essence of moral effort is to try to be just in an unjust society.47 Our intellectuals have reversed this formula, dissolving all sense of personal responsibility in the magical potion of “social responsibility.” Some even consider this to be very Christian, forgetting that if Christ thought like them, He would postpone the healing of lepers, the multiplication of loaves, and the sacrifice on Calvary until after the advent of the “just society.”

It is absolutely impossible for the dissemination of so many false ideas not to create an atmosphere conducive to fostering banditry and legitimizing the omission of authorities. A ruler elected by a leftist party, for example, cannot help but be paralyzed by a dual loyalty—on one hand, to the public order they professed to defend, and on the other hand, to the cause of revolution to which their heart committed itself since youth, and for which disorder is an indispensable condition. The almost complicit omission of figures like Brizola or Nilo Batista—men who are not inclined to take an active part in cultural production but are educated enough to avoid the influence of the produced culture—is nothing more than a reflection of a set of values, or counter-values, that our educated class has enshrined as laws, and which have been shaping the minds of Brazilians for many decades. If support for strong measures against crime always comes from the lower classes, it is not only because they are the first victims of criminals but also because they are outside the sphere of influence of educated culture. From the middle class upwards, the acquisition of higher culture is identified with adherence to the established prejudices of the national intelligentsia, including hatred of the police and sympathy for banditry.

It would be plausible to suppose that these prejudices arose in reaction to the military dictatorship. However, they are actually older. The image of crime in our culture ultimately consists of a set of mannerisms and clichés whose initial origin lies in the instruction transmitted by the Comintern on April 24, 1933, to the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party, urging them to take the leadership of criminal gangs, imbuing their conflict with the law with a “class struggle” character.48

The instruction was promptly followed by the communist intelligentsia, which produced a multitude of books, articles, theses, and speeches for this purpose. The communist writers were not numerous, but they were the most active: by taking over the representative organs of intellectuals and artists,49 they raised their voice above all others, and soon their ideas prevailed to the point of occupying the entire mental space of the educated public. Today we see how deep the mark left by communist propaganda is in the consciousness of our intellectuals: none of them utters a word about the problem of crime in Rio de Janeiro except to repeat the old clichés about poverty, about wicked rich people, and to blame the “elite” for all the robberies, homicides, and rapes committed by the slum inhabitants.

No one dares to question the truthfulness of the premises on which these reasonings are based—which proves how much they have influenced the minds of our intelligentsia, how much they, without even knowing the origin of their ideas, continue to repeat and obey, out of mere automatism, out of mere mental laziness, the slogans that the Comintern ordered to spread in the 1930s.

The universal experience teaches us in vain that the connection between poverty and criminality is tenuous and uncertain, that there are thousands of causes for crime, which even the prosperity of a welfare state does not eliminate, that among these causes is anomie, the absence of explicit moral rules common to the whole society, that a culture of “subversion of all values” and the glamorization of banditry by the educated elite help to remove the last scruples that still hold thousands of young people about to plunge into criminality. Contrary to the lessons of history, science, and common sense, our intellectuals remain trapped in the legend that portrays the criminal as the collector of a social debt. Some even believe in it, with a kind of pathetic masochism, a residue of sickly sentimentality inoculated by the communist discourse into the fragile souls of “progressive bourgeois”: the writer Antônio Callado, seeing his house burglarized, his precious paintings taken away, repeated to himself, defenseless and astonished, Proudhon’s sentence: “Property is theft.” Instead, he should recite Heine’s poem, in which a man who sleeps is tormented in dreams by a figure who, threatening him with a weapon, says: "I am the action of your thoughts."50

Unfortunately, the thoughts of intellectuals not only bring material effects against their authors. Erected as a common belief, the legend of the “Collector” — the title of a memorable short story by Rubem Fonseca — has devastating real consequences for the entire population. It transforms the delinquent from an accused into an accuser. Sure of himself, strengthened in his self-esteem by the flattery of the intelligentsia, the murderer no longer points only the barrel of a gun at us, but the finger of justice; a strange justice that casts blame on the victim for the errors of an abstract entity — “the system,” “an unjust society” — while exempting the criminal from almost all responsibility for his personal acts. Pursued on one side by gangs of bandits, cornered on the other by the discourse of the literati, the population falls into the most abject moral debilitation and no longer dares to express its revolt. Like a raped woman, she is ashamed of her suffering and absorbs in herself the guilt of her aggressor. She may still demand action from the authorities, but she does so in a weak and unconvincing voice — and surrounds her request with so many precautions that the authorities, after hearing her, will fear more to act than to remain silent. After all, it is politically less risky to displease a multitude of secretly moaning victims than a handful of intellectuals who shout in public.

Intellectuals in this country are the first to denounce immorality, the first to take the stage to speak in the name of “ethics.” But ethics basically consists of each person taking responsibility for their own actions. And I have never seen a Brazilian intellectual, much less a leftist one, examine their conscience and ask themselves: “Could it be that we too have contributed to the tragedy in Rio?”

No, none of them feels the slightest pain in their conscience when they see that sixty years of literary apologia for crime suddenly materialized in the streets, that the images came to life, that words turned into deeds, that the characters jumped from the stage to reality and are stealing, killing, and raping with the good conscience of being “popular heroes,” of “fighting against injustice” with combat techniques they learned on Ilha Grande. Intellectuals literally do not feel that they have contributed anything to this outcome. They don’t feel it because decades of false consciousness fueled by Marxist rhetoric have immunized them against any protests of moral conscience. They possess the dialectical art of suffocating the inner voice with arguments of historical opportunity. Moreover, they detest the feeling of guilt — which they suppose was invented by the Catholic Church to keep the masses under tight control. Therefore, not wanting to assume their own guilt, they exorcise it by projecting it onto others and, by a well-known hysterical symptomatology, become public accusers, spokesmen for a resentful and vengeful moralism. With the dogmatic conviction that guilt always lies with others, they are pure of heart and ready to fulfill their duty. What duty? The only one they know, which they consider the main mission of the intellectual: to denounce. To denounce others, of course. And the one who denounces, by doing so, while being on the side of the “progressive forces,” is automatically exempt from giving any account to the “abstract morality” of the bourgeoisie, which, without understanding anything about historical dialectics, continues to proclaim that there are inherently evil acts, regardless of social and political conditions: “hypocritical morality,” against which — pah! — the intellectual scrunches his nose with the infinite superiority of one who knows the teleology of history and has already overcome — or rather, is now transcending in the dialectic of becoming — the false conflict between good and evil…

But the collaboration of these dialectical gentlemen in the growth of criminality in Rio went far beyond mere psychological preparation through literature, theater, and cinema: specimens of their kind taught the future leaders of the Red Command the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare that turned it into a paramilitary organization capable of posing a threat to national security, in the prison of Ilha Grande. It doesn’t matter whether the imprisoned militants had in mind the future integration of criminals into the revolutionary strategy or whether, acting blindly, they simply desired a suicidal revenge against the dictatorship that had defeated them: what matters is that by teaching guerrilla warfare to the bandits, they acted consistently with the teachings of Marcuse and Hobsbawm — then highly influential in our left-wing movements — who, even contravening the old Marx, extolled the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat.

None of these servants of history feel the slightest remorse, the slightest disturbance of conscience when they see that their lessons were learned, that their theories became practice, that their science of revolution armed the hand that now terrorizes the population of Rio with assaults and homicides. No, they have done nothing but accelerate historical dialectics — and there is no evil except in opposing History. With the cleanest conscience in the world, they continue to blame others: capitalism, the government’s economic policies, the police, and they vilify as “reactionaries” and “fascists” the citizens, rich and poor alike, who want to see murderers and drug dealers behind bars.

But the left-wing intellectuals did not stop at creating the favorable cultural background and raising the level of danger of banditry through technical teachings; they went further and reaped the political fruits of the long courtship with delinquency: the support of the game runners — which is the same as saying: the traffickers — was the main popular basis on which the empire of Brizolism, the most traditional and populist wing of the Brazilian left, was built in Rio.

Under the aegis of Brizolism, the relationship between the leftist intelligentsia and banditry turned into a blatant love affair, with the ABI (Brazilian Press Association) supporting the promotion of the book “Um contra mil” (One Against a Thousand), in which the gang leader William Lima da Silva, known as “Professor,” leader of the Red Command, apologizes for crime as a legitimate reaction against an “unjust society.”

A little later, when organized crime had already grown to the point of requiring federal government intervention, what was found was that the left had not only collaborated with the criminals but also weakened their persecutors; that the CUT and the PT, infiltrating the Federal Police, had made this organization more threatening to the federal government than to drug traffickers and gangsters.51

And finally, when the federal government, overcoming prodigious resistance, finally decides to act and entrusts the Army with directing the repression of banditry in Rio, the left-wing intelligentsia, as expected, initiates a silent campaign to discredit the military command of the operations, either with alarmist warnings about the possibility of “abuses” against the favela residents or with all sorts of jokes and speculations about the weaknesses of the adopted strategy, or with pseudoscientific arguments about the inconvenience of the remedy adopted, implying that the risks of a military intervention are infinitely greater than the bloody anarchy installed in Rio. All of this prepares the ground for a major onslaught, in which self-appointed entities representing “civil society” — the same ones that promoted the elevation of the leaders of the Red Command to the status of “popular leaders” — will unite to demand the withdrawal of the Armed Forces and the return of the hills to their eternal rulers, there enthroned by the grace of the goddess History.52

In summary, in chronological order: the left, first, created an atmosphere of idealization of banditry; second, taught criminals the techniques and strategy of urban guerrilla warfare; third, openly defended the power of gangs, proposing their legitimization as “popular leaders”; fourth, weakened the Federal Police as a repressive body, simultaneously strengthening it as an instrument of agitation; fifth, sought to psychologically sabotage the repressive operation mounted by the Armed Forces, attempting to attract popular antipathy towards it. It is not humanly conceivable that all of this is merely a succession of fortuitous coincidences. If the perfectly logical continuity of the left’s initiatives in favor of banditry does not reflect the unity of a conscious strategy, it at least expresses the unanimity of a state of mind, the strong cohesion of a knot of prejudices against public order and in favor of delinquency. For our left, undoubtedly, murderers, thieves, drug dealers, and rapists are aligned with “progressive forces” and destined to be redeemed by History for their collaboration in the cause of socialism. As for their persecutors, they are clearly identified with “reactionary forces” and will go straight into the garbage bin of History. Regarding the victims, well, they can be lamented, but as Uncle Vladimir used to say, what can be done? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs…

To top it off, it is well known that artists and intellectuals are one of the wealthiest consumer markets for drugs and do not wish to lose their suppliers: when they advocate the decriminalization of drugs, they advocate for their own cause. But they are not only consumers: they are propagandists. Anyone with a bit of memory will remember that in this country, the drug trend in the 1960s did not start in the lower classes but in universities, theater groups, psychology circles, surrounded by the prestige of an elegant and enlightening vice. It was thanks to this artificial embellishment undertaken by the intelligentsia that drug use ceased to be a habit restricted to small circles of delinquents and spread like metastases of cancer throughout society: Si monumentum requires, circumspicii.

Is it surprising that under these conditions, banditry grew as it did? Is it surprising that while the population overwhelmingly clamors for authority intervention and now applauds the arrival of marines in the favelas, the intelligentsia seeks to diminish the role of the Army and is only concerned with safeguarding the civil rights of potential suspects to be detained, as if the elimination of armed banditry is not worth the risk of occasional abuses?

What would be surprising is if the allegedly scientific studies on the causes of banditry never highlighted the complicity of intellectuals, as if economic factors acted on their own and as if cultural production did not exert the slightest influence on social order or disorder, even when this complicity goes from words to action and becomes overt political support for the actions of the gangsters. It would be surprising, I say, if we did not know who the authors of such studies are and the entities that finance them.

For decades, our intelligentsia has lived on fictions that fuel their hatred and resentment and prevent them from seeing reality. At the same time, they complain about their isolation and dream of the utopia of a broad popular audience. But it is the lack of culture in our people that protects them from the contamination of intellectualized stupidity. “Lack of culture” is a manner of speaking: is it really a lack of culture to deprive oneself of consuming false values and lying slogans? No, but when this country has an intelligentsia worthy of its mission, it will be heard and understood. For now, if we want to see our Rio free from the scourge of banditry, the first thing to do is not to listen to those who, because they actively collaborated in the spread of this evil, because they have shown a complete inability to repent for their mistake, and finally because they have the audacity to still pretend to be advisors and saviors, have lost any trace of authority and revealed their lamentable moral ugliness.

Gramscian Mafia53

Every passing day, the so-called “cultural debate” in Brazil is increasingly reduced to a mere electoral debate, lowering everything to the level of slogans and stereotypes, and worse still, inducing the new generations to believe that ideological passion is a legitimate form of intellectual activity and a superior expression of moral sentiments.

Such is the seriousness of this state of affairs, and so fearful are the developments it portends, that all those responsible for its production – starting with the faithful followers of the Gramscian strategy, for whom this reduction is an explicitly desired and sought-after objective – should be publicly exposed as murderers of intelligence and destroyers of the Brazilian soul.

For Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary propaganda is the sole objective and justification of human intelligence. “Absolute historicism,” a Marxism heavily imbued with pragmatism, reduces all cultural, artistic, and scientific activity to the expression of the collective desires of each era, abolishing the canons of objective evaluation of knowledge and replacing them with the criteria of political utility and strategic opportunity.

This is an inherently monstrous idea, which becomes even more repugnant when adorned with the prestige associated, in childish minds, with words like “humanism” or “democratic consensus” (naturally emptied of any identifiable content), as well as with the insinuations of sanctity linked to the narrative of Antonio Gramsci’s sufferings in prison, which give Gramscism the unmistakable tone of a pseudo-religious cult.

Recently, a major newspaper in São Paulo, which prides itself on always “listening to the other side,” dedicated an entire section to Antonio Gramsci, lavishly praising him to the point of insanity, without a single mention of the devastating criticisms of Gramscism by Roger Scruton, Francisco Saenz, or even Lucio Coletti from within the Marxist circle. This gives the reader the false impression that this ideology dominates world thought when the truth is that it occupies a very modest place, and even the Italian Communist Party, under a different name, no longer speaks of its founder without a certain embarrassment.

That journalism has reduced itself to propaganda is entirely consistent with the spirit of Gramscism, which does not seek to impose itself in the arena of debates, from which it could only emerge demoralized, but rather through the tactic of “occupying spaces,” gradually and almost painlessly excluding dissenting voices, so that the doctrine that remains alone in the spotlight can pose as the peaceful result of a “democratic consensus.”

With shameless audacity, the proponents of this current will attribute this denunciation of mine to morbid right-wing ideology, without taking into account what my regular readers know perfectly well: that I would denounce with the same vigor any right-wing ideology that attempted to impose itself through such deceitful and perverse stratagems.

If I say little against the right at the moment, it is because its public intellectual expression is almost nonexistent, not due to a lack of qualified spokespersons, but due to a lack of space. Liberals, banned from any moral, religious, or aesthetic-literary debate, have retreated to the specialized ghetto of the pages dedicated to economics, which greatly favors the opposing side by leaving the impression that liberalism is the poorest and driest of philosophies. As for the remaining conservative currents, such as Catholics and Evangelicals, their exclusion has been so radical and complete that the mere hypothesis that a religious conservative might have something to say in the cultural debate is now a subject of ridicule. Ridicule, of course, from presumptuous ignoramuses who, having never heard of Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, Malcolm Muggeridge, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, firmly believe that there can be no intelligent life outside their Gramscian little minds, thus proving themselves to be the first victims of the mental censorship they have imposed on the entire country.

In the intellectual field, attacking the “right” today would be more than cowardice: it would be condoning the farce that there is a normal cultural debate in Brazil when all that exists is the mafia-like mutual support of Gramscians for Gramscians, which deprives Brazilians of access to essential ideas and has the audacity to pose as democratic.

The reason why there is no and cannot be any philosophical debate in this country has become clear: a group of unscrupulous activists has taken over the means of cultural dissemination to turn them into stepping stones for their political ambitions, closing off the channels through which opposing voices could be heard and imposing the Gramscian farce of “hegemony” on the entire country.

The very word they so venerate, pretending it to be a clear and unambiguous term, already carries the lethal ambiguity of great lies. In the intellectual sense, it designates the breadth of the horizon of a worldview that encompasses competitors without being encompassed by them. Hegel, for example, is hegemonic over all forms of Marxism, which, the more they seek to surpass him, as Lucio Coletti observed, become entangled in the metaphysical commitments of Hegelianism, and by vowing to turn it upside down, they end up doing headstands themselves (see the excellent study by Orlando Tambosi, The Decline of Marxism and the Hegelian Legacy, Florianópolis, UFSC, 1999).

When the Gramscian mafia refers to Gramsci as hegemonic, they want to induce us to believe that he is hegemonic in that sense. But they know that he is not, for a brief examination of 20th-century philosophies shows that there are vast worlds invisible to the eyes of this poor philosophical toad, a slavish spirit that, pretending to be free and universal, compresses everything and reduces it to the petty dimensions of its dark well, proclaiming that the sky is nothing more than a little hole in the ceiling. Gramsci was never a philosopher; he was merely a systematizer of sordid tricks to falsify knowledge and turn it into an instrument of power in the hands of the Party.

If Gramscism were hegemonic in the intellectual sense, it would impose itself through the force of its demonstrations, as the philosophies of Aristotle and Leibniz, for example, imposed themselves. But they never needed an army of “space occupiers” to serve them, silencing opposing voices and winning through the false impression of spontaneous unanimity. When, in the Middle Ages, an Aristotelian wanted to defeat an adversary, they did not think of taking away their employment, of covering up their discourse with the unison shouting of a mob of paid militants. They invited them to an open-field debate, even if it meant, as it did for Saint Albert, incurring the wrath of the powerful. To defeat the empiricists, Leibniz did not attempt to boycott them in the distribution of research funds, to omit their names from cultural publications, or to monopolize the millionaire support of the media moguls against them. He simply wrote a devastating book in the form of a debate with their prince, John Locke, even if it meant subjecting himself to the crude mockery of salon philosophers.

The Scholastics and Leibniz were unaware of hegemony in the Gramscian sense, and if they had known, they would have seen in it nothing but the diseased creation of a base mentality.

To illustrate what this is about, nothing is more enlightening than the recent conduct of a certain Mrs. Marilena, who, when I exposed her as a practitioner of the characteristic elliptical-mystificatory style of Gramscian reasoning, remained silent before the public in the city where she lives but went far away, to Goiás, to say that she does not know me and has not read me, but according to reliable information obtained from an anonymous source, I am undoubtedly “a scoundrel.” The journalist José Maria e Silva, from the Opção newspaper in Goiânia, has already given this creature the proper response, and I mention the case only as a sample of the Gramscian methods of achieving hegemony: a power game, a sinister maneuver to frustrate debate, boycott the opponent, and win through the false impression of spontaneous unanimity.

When these people trumpet that a complete edition of Gramsci will “renew national thought,” what they are announcing is nothing less than “renewal through strangulation.” So let them strangle as much as they want. As for me, I will tell you what I am going to do: I will break through the blockade, through the JT and whatever other remaining ventilators there may be in the national press. For every new volume of writings by this crazy little dwarf that you publish, I will respond with arguments that will demonstrate their total philosophical vacuity and the brutal nature of their supposedly humanistic doctrine. You, as always, will be snarling in the corners, plotting mischief. And you will speak ill of me far away from Goiás because you have already seen that Goiás people are not fools.

Effects of the “Great March”54

The Electoral Justice exists, as the name itself suggests, to ensure fair elections. However, it is composed of public officials, and since the phenomenon called “the great march of the left into the apparatus of the State” appeared in this country, this class has become increasingly suspicious of being interested in everything but fair elections. The “great march” consists of occupying as many public positions as possible with the purpose of putting the apparatus of the State at the service of a party, which then takes over the government without being the government, enjoying the privileges of power without its corresponding responsibilities.

This operation was calculated by its inventor, Antonio Gramsci, to be carried out slowly and stealthily, so that the rulers themselves end up being held responsible for the global harmful effects of the actions of infiltrated bureaucrats who demoralize and weaken it.

An example of the astonishing effectiveness of this procedure was already obtained during the military government. The regime, being authoritarian and not totalitarian, desired the political apathy of the people and made no effort to indoctrinate them according to the values of the 1964 movement (totalitarianism, on the contrary, requires massive indoctrination). This attitude left the network of editorial, journalistic, and educational instruments that shape public opinion at the mercy of the left-wing opposition (which, among other things, resulted in a tremendous expansion of the market for leftist books). One of the few attempts at indoctrination made by the military was the introduction of “Moral and Civic Education” classes in schools. However, this attempt was so careless that the Communist Party took advantage of the opportunity to fill the chairs of the new discipline with well-trained agitators, turning them into a network of communist propaganda subsidized by the government. Of course, many ideologically uncommitted teachers also applied to fill the vacancies, but militants did the same as a party task, so overall, the communist plan to take over the newly opened channels of indoctrination did not compete with an equal premeditation of the opposite ideological sign, but only with the amorphous resistance of a politically indifferent and directionless mass. The Marxist politicization of schools, which culminates today in the ideological atrocities imposed on children by textbooks published by the Ministry of Education itself, began precisely there.

What is most notable is that, preoccupied with repressing the guerrillas, the military government not only gave free rein to the “peaceful” and Gramscian wing of the left but even granted it substantial incentives. The main communist publisher of the time never stopped receiving official subsidies until, with the political opening, he began to face financial difficulties and ended up selling his company.

Never interrupted, rarely denounced, the “great march” finally seems to have reached the Electoral Justice, which, in recent times, has made at least three highly suspicious decisions. First, it prohibited adverse mentions of the PT alliance with the “gay” movement (see my article in JT on September 20); then, it ordered the distribution of posters encouraging voters to vote “for change,” which is an ideologically clear message; finally, it banned advertisements by the candidate of the PPB for the Mayor’s Office of São Paulo that portrayed his opponent as a supporter of the pro-abortion cause—an assertion whose veracity is empirically confirmable by anyone.

Each of these decisions, individually, carries little weight. Combined—if there are no others—they may not be capable of deciding an election. However, in the minimalist scale of a strategy that relies on the accumulation of thousands of imperceptible actions rather than the risks of spectacular propaganda, they contribute to the swelling of the Gramscian “cultural revolution,” the subtle and persistent mutation of the perception patterns of the Brazilian people, whose results, in São Paulo and other important cities, are on the verge of translating into superficially clean but deeply dirty electoral outcomes.

It is impossible not to simultaneously see an effect of the “great march” in the strike of the police force in Pernambuco, which is clearly illegal and insurrectionary, and in a thousand and one other facts that seem isolated but whose common origin is always found in a public bureaucracy well-trained to work against those who pay their salaries.

Measuring Words55

Have you noticed the discreet, soft, almost gentle treatment that the talking classes have given to Fernandinho Beira-Mar since he was arrested? Press, politicians, intellectuals—no one seems to have an ounce of anger towards this man responsible for so many deaths, so much suffering, so much iniquity. No one calls him a murderer, a genocidal, a monster, or any of those names that easily come to everyone’s lips when referring to unarmed white-collar swindlers or even to the person of the President of the Republic. No furious mob, summoned by self-proclaimed spokesmen of popular sentiment, gathers at the police station’s doorstep to insult him as Luiz Estevão was insulted. No moralist, with tears of indignation in their eyes, condemns as an insult to the memory of countless victims the paternal care that the drug trafficker receives in prison, as many considered it an affront the special confinement that, in compliance with the law, the authorities granted to Judge Lalau, a septuagenarian scoundrel incapable of killing a chicken.

However, the man who distributes drugs to children in schools and kills those who try to stop him is obviously a murderer, a genocidal, an amoral and cynical sociopath. Applied to suspects of bloodless crimes, these terms are figures of speech, enormous hyperboles, plastic flowers of false rhetoric. Used to describe Luiz Fernando da Costa, they are accurate terms, precise, almost scientific. The tropical liberality in the use of hyperboles to speak of those who steal singularly contrasts with the inhibition to use words in their literal sense to speak of those who kill.

Where does this frightening inversion of the valuations of words, men, and crimes in Brazilian language come from? In general, it unequivocally reflects the influence of the Gramscian “cultural revolution,” which for 40 years, with the subtle obstinacy of bacteria and viruses, has contaminated the feelings and reactions of our public opinion with communist anti-values—without that name, of course.

But in this case, there is something more, something infinitely more sinister. There is an instinctive fear of revealing in a very direct and crude light the ugliness of a FARC associate. Because that light would threaten to reflect on the image of the guerrilla and, therefore, on all its friends and apologists: Fidel Castro, President Chávez, Lula, Governor Olívio Dutra, MST, almost the entire left.

Speaking of Fernandinho Beira-Mar with language proportional to the seriousness of his crimes would—using the consecrated expression of militant jargon—be “providing ammunition to the enemy.” In what, within a leftist’s mind, plays the role of a moral conscience, there is no greater sin. Therefore, moderation in words! Abandoned long ago in the name of “ethics,” “participation,” and the “duty to denounce,” the cold, factual, comment-free news style is suddenly taken out of the drawer and shows all its unexpected usefulness: in an environment of moralistic fury and oratorical indignation, the neutral, aseptic narrative almost sounds like praise.

And do not think that, in order to activate these verbal antibodies, it was necessary to issue a watchword, distribute warnings from a central committee, or set in motion some complex chain of command. None of that. The reaction occurs spontaneously, automatically, almost unconsciously. Everyone lies in unison—and no one is to blame because no one told anyone to do anything.

It is precisely this tacit control over consciences, this collective reduction of opinion makers to the sleepwalking state of useful innocents, that Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony”—the psychological prelude to the seizure of power. Hegemony has already been conquered, therefore. Whether definitively or not depends on it. It depends on no one saying what is happening. And that is precisely why I insist on saying it.

Trying to See56

A recent Ibope survey, in which 55% of voters clamor for a socialist revolution in Brazil, speaks for itself. However, to better grasp the significance of its meaning at this historical moment, it is necessary to emphasize the following points.

First: the surveyed population did not simply say “socialism” (the item “socialism” was the subject of a separate question), much less “peaceful transition to socialism.” They said “socialist revolution,” which clearly indicates their willingness to accept, as normal and desirable, the whole series of cruelties and horrors inherent in this type of political and social transformation. No socialist revolution has ever occurred without genocide, which, in the Chinese case, led to the extermination of ten percent of the local population. That would be equivalent to sixteen million Brazilians. The death of these people already seems, to the majority of our electorate, a modest price to pay for the pleasure of living in China.

Second: no socialist revolution has ever taken place with such popular support. This guarantees the first revolutionary government in Brazil the means to impose, without much adverse reaction, the laws and controls it deems appropriate. The refractory minority will have not only the repressive force of the State against them but also popular wrath. For example, the establishment of an internal espionage network, with civilian volunteers, will have at least as much support here as it had in Chávez’s Venezuela, which is rapidly approaching the Cuban rate of one government spy for every 28 inhabitants.

Third: reflecting the success achieved by thirty years of “cultural revolution” inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the massive conversion of the Brazilian electorate to revolutionary socialism is itself a pivotal moment in the revolutionary process, which is already fully underway, as anyone who knows something about the strategy outlined by the founder of the Italian Communist Party will understand.

Fourth: by advocating a socialist revolution as a “solution” to the country’s current problems, imagining it as an ideal to be realized in the future, that majority portion of the electorate shows no inkling that they are already in the midst of a revolution, much less that the problems currently distressing them, far from being ills that the revolution can cure, are symptoms and stages of the revolutionary process itself. Again, the formula announced by the Italian strategist is strictly followed: what he calls “passive revolution” is precisely this stage of twilight, this night of consciousness, this restless and gloomy torpor in which a semi-hypnotized population makes the revolution without realizing it and, when they wake up, finds themselves under the dominion of the communist State. Since the Gramscian strategy has never been attempted on such a large scale, there has also never been, in the history of modern times, such a vast phenomenon of collective blindness.

Fifth: once constituted, the communist government will immediately have, in addition to popular complicity, four decisive instruments to quickly consolidate its power, disarticulating any possibility of opposition: (a) control of the media, propaganda, and education through the organized militancy entrenched in the media and the network of schools at all levels; (b) the guaranteed and zealous obedience of the state bureaucracy, already duly indoctrinated and trained through the public employees' unions; (c) control of rural areas through the well-trained militancy of the MST; (d) a tax legislation capable of “bringing the business community to its knees” at the speed with which Hitler, the author of that expression, did in Germany.

Sixth: with the exception of media control, all the other items mentioned in the previous paragraph, including the domination of the education system, have been handed to the Gramscian leadership on a silver platter by the current government. Therefore, far from being “the adversary” to be overthrown by the revolution, it has been, in the strictest sense of the term, what in revolutionary jargon is called a “transitional government to socialism,” and thus it has played exactly the role that some years ago the political scientist Alain Touraine, so respectfully listened to by our president, recommended that he consent to play on the stage of history if he did not want to be the helpless victim of an irreversible process. Being a president well-versed in Gramscian strategy—and he boasts of being one of the most versed—it is impossible for him not to be aware of the role he has chosen; and he has given further proof of this by explicating his acts in words, advising the nation not to hesitate to bow to the predicted destiny, as he himself has bowed.

The only thing missing for the complete perfection of the revolutionary power is the support of the Armed Forces. It is difficult to obtain due to historical wounds that have not yet healed, but perhaps it can be partly achieved through the manipulation of nationalist resentments and ambitions—which skilled civilian agitators are working on—and partly substituted by the neutralization and weakening of the military class, which the current government has already arranged.

If you ask me how this process can be stopped, I will respond that, obviously, I do not know. Changing the course of history is beyond my pretensions; they are currently limited to trying to see it. And note that, in the midst of general blindness, that is already a lot for a poor human observer.

An Enemy of the People57

In Dostoevsky’s The Demons, published in 1872, one revolutionary says to another: "Did you know that we are already tremendously powerful? Pay attention. I have added them all up. A teacher who laughs at children’s God with them is someone who is on our side. The lawyer who defends the educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims… is one of us. The prosecutor who, during a trial, trembles with fear of not appearing progressive enough, is ours, ours… Do you know how many of them we will conquer little by little, through ready-made ideas?".

Nearly half a century before the storming of the Winter Palace, a century before the worldwide dissemination of Antonio Gramsci’s works, the novelist had already grasped the macabre strategy of “cultural revolution,” to which the founder of the Italian Communist Party gave only a theoretical embellishment but which, in essence, was already in action since the 18th century, in salons where aristocrats delighted in the ideas of Diderot and Rousseau without realizing that their sole purpose was to legitimize their own decapitation.

Those who boast of being practical men—businessmen, politicians, military commanders—are the slowest to perceive the practical significance of certain cultural fads without overt political content, in which they see nothing but academic curiosities or even legitimate moral demands, but whose effect, temporarily obscured by the variety and confusion of the words that convey them, sooner or later ends up manifesting itself in the most brutal manner. Invariably, this effect is one and the same: political mass murder, genocide.

In general, only two types of observers are aware of this connection: activist intellectuals who wish to produce it, and independent scholars. The former have every interest in keeping it hidden under a veil of diversionary pretexts—moral, aesthetic, pedagogical, economic, etc.—under the profusion of which the victims fail to grasp the unity of the underlying revolutionary process. The latter, when they try to alert society to what is happening, are almost invariably rejected as alarmists and paranoid by that very segment of the social fabric that the revolution will ruthlessly and bloodily extirpate.

Indeed, the mere observation of this fact is enough to demolish the Gramscian theory of the “organic intellectual,” according to which classes create intellectuals tailored to the defense of their interests. With sinister regularity, from Voltaire to Antonio Negri, it is always the enemy of the ruling class who is courted by it, while the intellectual who wishes to preserve the system, because he disbelieves in the goodness and utility of revolutions, is stigmatized at the very least as eccentric and marginal.

Dostoevsky, who defended monarchy and religion, always remained an “outsider,” while revolutionary writers were received in elegant circles, where they enjoyed all esteem and consideration—if not blind trust—from their future victims. Nikolai Berdyaev, an aristocrat by birth and a revolutionary by conviction, recounts in his memoirs how, in his youth, he liked to scandalize princesses and countesses with fiery speeches against morality and hierarchy. Only later, upon learning that they had all died in the Revolution, did he realize that he had irresponsibly contributed to the achievement of a heinous crime. The case shows that not even the most active collaborators of the “cultural revolution” need to have full awareness of the purpose to which their seemingly harmless acts, or acts surrounded by an aura of pious idealism, contribute when added to millions of similar acts, currently being practiced by a dispersed legion of militants, collaborators, and sympathizers who are oblivious to one another. At the top, only a very restricted elite has the intellectual vision of the whole, which does not need to be “directed” like an organized conspiracy but only subtly guided from time to time by timely interventions. Automatism, the spirit of imitation, and the incoercible attraction of fashions do the rest.

Even when it does not directly result in the seizure of political power, cultural revolution leaves profound and indelible marks on the fabric of society. Two recent studies by Roger Kimball, editor of New Criterion—Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and The Long March: How The Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s Changed America—show how the tireless psychological warfare waged by activist intellectuals against religion, morality, logic, and common sense has produced in American life practically irreversible catastrophic results: the collective loss of the most elementary standards of judgment, the premature intellectual decay of students, the endemic spread of drugs, and rampant crime. Not coincidentally, the same intellectuals who consciously endeavored to create this state of affairs (many of them in the service of the KGB or Chinese espionage, as is now known thanks to the opening of the Moscow Archives) are the first to derive political advantage from their own actions, attributing the results to the “system,” to the “intrinsic corruption of capitalism,” and so on.

One would have to be very blind not to perceive that the same thing is happening in Brazil, with the aggravating—truly despairing—factor that studies like Kimball’s (and hundreds of other similar ones) are neither translated nor are there local equivalents produced by the intellectual class, divided between the majority of furious activists and the minority of cowardly, silent, or complacent accomplice observers. As a result, the mere attempt to diagnose the state of affairs is rejected—even by the “establishment”—as impudent audacity and intolerable abuse, and even as a far-right conspiracy.

The cultural revolution has already achieved its greatest triumph in Brazil, which is to make its own discussion prohibitive. I will spare the readers the account of the constraints, threats, and boycotts I have endured in response to my simple initiative to analyze and expose in broad daylight the march of a revolution that would like to continue flourishing in the protective shadow of the implicit, the nebulous, and the undeclared. But when an independent writer, isolated, without political connections or any kind of protectors, is fought not through arguments but through backstage maneuvers and collective mobilizations of hatred, as if he were a ruler or a powerful mass leader, it is then that intellectual activity is entirely subjected to the canons of the “cultural revolution,” and anyone who dares to contradict them, even in theory alone, even on a personal level without any pretense of reacting politically to the course of events, is already considered a dangerous element and an enemy of the people.

Diffuse Indoctrination58

A public that is permeated with Marxist indoctrination to the core has no idea whatsoever that it is being indoctrinated. The first stage of indoctrination is purely cultural, diffuse, and does not aim to instill in the individual any explicit political conviction, but merely to shape their worldview according to the basic lines of Marxist philosophy, without this name, of course, and presented as if it were “the” general knowledge. With the exception of a very small number of intellectuals who have critically studied the communist movement and the extremely poor people who have received no education at all, it is rare to find Brazilian citizens who are not already won over to this view of the world, at the very least by being unaware that it is a particular view and not the world itself.

In particular, the explanation of history based on the Marxist schema of economically defined social classes, which is the preliminary ground for a more active indoctrination, can now be considered definitively integrated into the thinking patterns of the media and the educated population, to the point that no one there is aware that it is merely one theory among others, and everyone takes it as if it were a direct translation of lived reality. Even if it is far from coinciding with the actual distribution of forces in the Brazilian social landscape, citizens spontaneously appeal to its basic concepts—if not its nomenclature—to express what they think is happening in society. Thus, for example, the state bureaucracy, instead of being seen as an autonomous force—which is a characteristic trait of Brazilian society—and although it recruits most of the leftist militants, has become invisible enough for the effects of its actions to be attributed to the “ruling class,” understood in the sense of “the rich” or “the capitalists.” The middle class, which encompasses 46% of our population and includes almost all politically active people (especially on the left), has no awareness of itself as a distinct entity. Instead, each person within it spontaneously divides the social landscape between “the rich” and “the poor,” taking partisan speeches as if they were faithful translations of the underlying sociological realities and categorizing themselves as poor, without realizing that the poor place them in the rich class and, in fact, envy and hate them more than any banker. The alienation between social reality and the discourse of self-explanation, in such circumstances, is total.

With equal ease, the understanding of ideas as stereotyped expressions of class interests is projected onto the image of our historical past, steamrolling over the fact, easily verifiable but marxistically inexplicable, that in Brazil ideological discourses almost never coincide with the objective interests of the social classes involved. In public education, in books, in supposedly educational TV programs, the Marxist reduction of cultural creations to superstructures of class interests is so deeply ingrained in everyday vocabulary that anyone wishing to present some other version of history has no starting point for explanation and may even be ridiculed for clashing with the “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense of the term).

Quite understandably, but no less ironically, the more limited a person’s horizon is to the canons of the Marxist vulgate, the more vehemently they will react to the denunciation that there is Marxist propaganda in Brazil and, furthermore, to the idea that the communists have any power among us. Being invisible, as René Guénon used to say, is intrinsic to power itself.

A second phase of indoctrination is the one that associates, with the stereotype of classes, the moral and emotional values necessary to elicit reactions of approval or disapproval depending on how the heard discourse seems to be associated with the “class interests” of the benevolent poor or the evil rich, even if objectively they have little to do with it. The discourse in favor of free enterprise, for example, although objectively speaking in favor of the immense poor population living in the informal economy, is rejected as a defense of the interests of the “elite” and multinational corporations, while the discourse of statism, although not even scratching the interests of the rich classes and effectively strengthening the omnipotent bureaucracy that impoverishes the country through exorbitant taxation, is easily accepted as a translation of the interests of the “excluded.” From alienation, one then proceeds to hallucination, but not coincidentally, the very anguish resulting from the vague premonition of madness is subsequently exploited to generate more hatred towards the stereotyped image of the “ruling class,” held responsible for all evils and personified in individuals and groups that are not dominant in any way and function as pure scapegoats, such as the military. To such an extent do conventional symbols replace the perception of facts that an event like the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre is passively accepted for its nominal value as an antiglobalist manifestation, despite the support it receives from the UN, the heart of the New World Order, as well as from the global network of NGOs that are to the UN what veins and arteries are to the heart.

The Gurus of Crime59

“Enlightened intellectuals are not harmless curiosities. They are dangerous maniacs.”

– Eric Voegelin.

All the social sciences in the world, including Marxism, teach that material and economic conditions never directly determine human behavior, but rather do so always and only through the interpretation that individuals give to them, that is, through the ideological, cultural, moral, and psychological factors involved in the process.

An example will make this clearer. Every now and then, highly cultured, knowledgeable, and enlightened people appear on TV and in newspapers assuring us, with an air of infallible certainty, that poverty produces criminality. The person traffics, robs, kills, and rapes because they are excluded, impoverished, from the slums. That’s what they say. But – I say and the facts say – if the excluded, the impoverished, the slum-dweller is also an evangelical, they do not traffic, rob, kill, or rape. If they were engaged in these activities before their conversion, they immediately stop doing them upon conversion. What’s the difference? It’s certainly not economic. It’s cultural, moral, psychological, and spiritual. The individual, upon conversion, still suffers the cruel impact of poverty, exclusion, and the constriction of their possibilities for action in society. They are still in the same material situation, so to speak. They simply no longer add to these ills the even greater evil of engaging in criminal activities. The difference between the criminal and the righteous person lies in their interpretation of their circumstances, according to different values, symbols, and criteria. The experience of thousands of evangelizers and evangelized individuals, including those within prisons, confirms that in both the production and suppression of criminality, the weight of moral and cultural factors is infinitely more decisive than the material situation itself. That is why, in prisons, the management of crime hates those whom they pejoratively call “the bibles.” That is why, in Colombia, the FARC has already killed 70 evangelical pastors and, through their spokesperson Mono Jojoy, announced that they will kill all the others.

These observations are enough to make us realize that the most audible and visible part of the discussion on the problem of criminality in Brazil is pure fraud. This discussion is characterized, in the most general and evident manner, by the effort to explain everything directly through material conditions, omitting the other mentioned factors. And it is like this for a very simple reason: these factors are not produced by the material situation itself, as a natural and spontaneous emanation, but are introduced into it from outside and from above, by the action of culture creators, the “intellectuals” (in the Gramscian and elastic sense of the term). Now, who are the enlightened minds that, in times of crisis and agony, appear on TV and in newspapers to prescribe solutions? They are the very same activist intellectuals. When these men, in analyzing a catastrophic situation, omit the cultural element, they are hiding the contribution that they themselves made to the production of the catastrophe.

If they were honest, they would never do that. The first obligation of a society’s interpreter is to discern their own position, their own role in the described scene, in order to neutralize as much as possible the subjective or self-interested distortion. However, in Brazil, the primary concern of commentators is to pretend that they are outside the frame, to attribute everything to external causes precisely so that no one realizes that they themselves are the number one cause.

The debate surrounding criminality has been a gigantic machine for self-concealment of the guilty parties. For fifty years, the culture they produce, falsely interpreting banditry as a direct and legitimate expression of just revolt against an unjust society, has acted as a powerful mechanism of emotional blackmail that morally disarms the repressive apparatus, while instilling in delinquents unlimited self-confidence and providing them with the discourse of ideological self-legitimization for the abandonment of the last scruples, for the transition from chaotic and impulsive violence to organized, politicized violence, as seen in the simultaneous rebellion of 29 prisons in São Paulo.

Some of these gurus of crime go even further, teaching delinquents the forms of revolutionary organization they learned in their parties or in Cuba. Afterwards, they appear before the cameras, pretending to have a generous lack of interest and superior scientific impartiality.

All these facts are empirically verifiable, and the conclusion they lead to has no rational means of being challenged: the bloody events of last week were – as will be the next events of the same nature – the logical and inevitable effect of a coherent, continuous, and persistent action undertaken by activist intellectuals with the intention of fomenting revolt and transforming Brazil first into a Colombia, and then into a Cuba.

The deplorable conditions of the prison system, the tremendous economic difficulties of the population, the frustrations of millions of excluded individuals, the injustices and evils of the system did not produce the organized and politicized rebellion of prisoners: what produced it was the belief, artificially inculcated in delinquents by intellectuals, that these depressing circumstances justify detainees politically organizing for violent action. What produced it was not any sincere desire to suppress or remedy those ills, all of which are remediable, all of which can be eliminated, but rather the desire to add to them the most irreparable and irreversible evil of all: the revolutionary organization of collective brutality.

Those who, for five decades, have desired and fostered this prison rebellion are guilty of it, whether by voluntary decision or cunning complicity. Those who, although nominally rejecting these discourses, abstain from combating them under the infamous excuse that they have become harmless after the fall of the Berlin Wall are guilty. Those who, knowing that lethal doses of revolutionary hatred are daily injected into the minds of millions of Brazilian children, do nothing to expose this pedagogy of the abyss are guilty. Those who, out of complacency, paternalism, fear of being labeled negatively, or the abject desire to appear fashionable in the face of chic leftism, do not lift a finger to prevent our people’s culture and psyche from being infected with the germs of the lowest instincts of political revenge, adorned with edifying labels as if they were the highest expression of human morality – they are all guilty.

Cultural Marxism60

According to classical Marxism, the proletariat were natural enemies of capitalism. Lenin added to this idea the notion that imperialism was the result of capitalist struggle for the conquest of new markets. The inevitable conclusion was that the proletariat were also enemies of imperialism and would refuse to serve it in a generalized imperialist conflict. Being more attached to their class interests than to those of their imperialist bosses, they would evade conscription or use their weapons to overthrow capitalism instead of fighting against their proletarian comrades in neighboring nations.

In 1914, this syllogism seemed to all Marxist intellectuals to be a clear and certain thing. What a surprise it was, then, when the proletariat embraced patriotic propaganda, enlisting en masse and fighting bravely on the battlefields for “imperialist interests”!

The general astonishment found brief relief in the Bolshevik success of 1917 but soon worsened into panic and depression when, instead of spreading to the developed capitalist countries as the manuals predicted, the revolution was suffocated by the general hostility of the proletariat.

In the face of such magnitude, a normal brain would immediately think of correcting the theory. Perhaps the interests of the proletariat were not as antagonistic to those of the capitalists as Marx and Lenin had claimed.

But a Marxist brain is never normal. The Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukács, for example, thought it was the most natural thing in the world to share his wife with someone interested. Thinking with this mindset, he reached the conclusion that it was not the theory that was wrong, but the proletarians. These idiots couldn’t see their “real interests” and happily served their enemies. They were insane. Gyorgy Lukács was the normal one. It was up to him, therefore, to discover who had produced proletarian insanity. A skillful detective, he soon discovered the culprit: Western culture. The mixture of Judeo-Christian prophecy, Roman law, and Greek philosophy was an infernal potion manufactured by the bourgeoisie to deceive the proletarians. Driven to despair by this distressing discovery, the philosopher exclaimed, "Who will save us from Western culture?".

The answer did not take long to emerge. Felix Weil, another remarkable mind, found it very logical to use the money his father had accumulated in the grain trade as an instrument to destroy, along with his own domestic fortune, that of all other bourgeoisie. With this money, he founded what came to be called the “Frankfurt School”: a Marxist think tank that, abandoning the illusions of a universal proletarian uprising, devoted itself to the only viable enterprise that remained: the destruction of Western culture. In Italy, the founder of the Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, came to a similar conclusion when he saw the working class betray revolutionary internationalism and massively adhere to the ultra-nationalist variant of socialism invented by the renegade Benito Mussolini. In truth, the Soviets themselves no longer believed in the proletariat: Stalin recommended that Western Communist parties recruit millionaires, intellectuals, and show business celebrities above all. Discredited by facts, Marxism would take revenge through self-inversion: instead of transforming social conditions to change mentalities, it would change mentalities to transform social conditions. It was the first theory in the world to claim to demonstrate its truth through proof to the contrary of what it said.

The tools for this soon appeared. Gramsci discovered “cultural revolution,” which would reform the “common sense” of humanity, leading it to see the martyrdom of Catholic saints as a sordid capitalist publicity maneuver, and would make intellectuals, rather than proletarians, the chosen revolutionary class. The men of Frankfurt, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, had the idea of blending Freud and Marx, concluding that Western culture was a disease, that everyone educated in it suffered from an “authoritarian personality,” and that the Western population should be reduced to the condition of patients in a mental institution and subjected to “collective psychotherapy.”

Thus, after classical Marxism, Soviet Marxism, and the revisionist Marxism of Eduard Bernstein (the first “tucano”), the fourth form of Marxism was inaugurated: cultural Marxism. Since it did not speak of proletarian revolution or openly advocate violence, the new school was well accepted in the circles responsible for defending the Western culture it professed to destroy.

Expelled from Germany due to unfair competition from Nazism, the Frankfurt School found in the United States the ideal atmosphere of freedom for the destruction of the society that had welcomed them. They then engaged in demonstrating that the democracy they had fled to was just like the fascism that had driven them away. They called their philosophy “critical theory” because it abstained from proposing any remedy for the world’s ills and sought only destruction: to destroy culture, to destroy trust between people and groups, to destroy religious faith, to destroy language, to destroy logical capacity, to spread an atmosphere of suspicion, confusion, and hatred everywhere. Once this objective was achieved, they claimed that suspicion, confusion, and hatred were proof of the evil of capitalism.

From France, the school received invaluable help from the “deconstructionist” method, an academic charlatanism that allows one to impugn all products of human intelligence as wicked tricks used by white males to oppress women, blacks, gays, and everyone else, including domestic animals and plants.

The American contribution was the invention of the linguistic dictatorship of “political correctness.”

In a few decades, cultural Marxism became the predominant influence in universities, the media, show business, and publishing circles in the West. Its macabre dogmas, presented without the label of “Marxism,” are foolishly accepted as supra-ideological cultural values by the business and ecclesiastical classes whose destruction is its only inexorable objective. Today, it is hardly possible to find a novel, a film, a play, or an educational book in which the beliefs of cultural Marxism, often unrecognized as such, are not present with all the virulence of their slanderous and perverse content.

The propagation of this influence has been so extensive that everywhere the old idea of tolerance has been transformed into the “liberating tolerance” proposed by Marcuse: “Complete tolerance for the left, none for the right.” Those who veto and boycott the dissemination of ideas that displease them do not feel that they are practicing censorship: they consider themselves paragons of democratic tolerance.

Through cultural Marxism, all of culture has become a war machine against itself, leaving no room for anything else.

Revolutionary Transition61

The national media has gone too far in labeling the “tucanato” as “right-wing,” a trick invented by the left to condemn as extremism and fascism anything to the right of FHC, or in other words, to the right of center-left.

While it is true that the current president has generally complied with the economic demands of the IMF – something that anyone else in his position would do and that Lula himself promises to do the same, which does not make either of them right-wing – on the other hand, the present government has generously subsidized the growth of the most powerful mass revolutionary organization ever seen in Latin America with public money, introduced or at least allowed Marxist indoctrination in schools, instituted the official beatification of retired terrorists and the simultaneous demoralization of the Armed Forces, generalized the use of “politically correct” moral criteria for the judgment of public issues, dismantled one by one the remaining more or less “conservative” regional leaderships, and set up the entire legal and fiscal apparatus that its successor will need to criminalize capitalist activity, suppress opposition criticism, and, having done everything within the law, be able to pose as democratic. Democratic in the sense of Hugo Chavez, of course.

Without touching on international interests, but strictly following the leftward turn recipe prepared for him since 1998 by Alain Touraine, FHC has done more for the advance of the communist revolution in Brazil than João Goulart himself, who only made threats.

If, nevertheless, his government is still labeled as “right-wing,” it is solely thanks to a phenomenon well known in the mechanics of revolutions: whenever a revolutionary faction takes power, its own internal dissent replaces the divisions of existing parties and factions in the previous regime. Thus, for example, after the 1917 revolution, the Menshevik revolutionary wing was attacked by the radical wing as right-wing and reactionary. Obviously, the meaning of “right-wing” had completely changed: before, it meant being against the revolution; now, it meant not being revolutionary enough. The difference between the Russian and Brazilian cases is that in Russia, the change was declared and conscious, whereas here it is prohibited from being mentioned in public.

One of the fundamental elements of the ongoing Gramscian cultural revolution is the slow and inexorable shifting of the entire reference axis of public debates to the left, in order to narrow down the possible margin of right-wing positions and gradually replace genuine right-wing with the right-wing faction of the left itself or some stereotyped hydrophobic fanaticism that is easy to discredit. The process must be conducted tacitly, and if anyone denounces it, it must be vehemently denied. Things must happen as if they were not happening. Those who disagree and resist, more than being censored, are thrown into the abyss of nonexistence and become so displaced that they seem insane.

Few Brazilians realize the depth of the political changes that this country has undergone over the past fifteen years. They can be summarized as follows: the left-wing opposition to the old military regime took power, occupies all positions in government and opposition, and leaves no room for anyone else. The few remnants of the old regime desperately cling to the last vestiges of power they have at the regional level, while at the national level, they can only aspire to be assistants and errand boys for one of the warring leftist factions. The recent elections made this very clear.

The complete liquidation of the right is almost instantly followed by the institutionalization of one of the left factions in the role of the “right” – a right artificially manufactured ad hoc to suit the needs of the left.

The process has been greatly facilitated by the fact that in the federal, state, and municipal legislative elections, Brazil has one of the highest rates of replacement of politicians ever observed in the world. The transfusion of leadership, the complete destruction of a class, and its replacement by another are already accomplished facts. The revolution is underway. Whether it will degenerate into the violent destruction of institutions or achieve its goals through an anesthetic route is something only the future will tell. But to deny the revolutionary character of the observed changes is truly an abuse of the right to blindness.

Some people perceive these changes, but only partially and with a predetermined bias. They notice, for example, the destruction of old leadership, abhorred as “corrupt,” and see it as progress for democracy – without realizing that there is no progress in hunting down small-scale corrupt individuals, which only serves as a disguise to conceal the infinitely greater crimes committed by the most enthusiastic moralizers themselves: narco-guerrilla, international terrorism, continental revolution.

It is natural that some paradoxical situations arise in the midst of this – such as the fact that the Communist Party itself, under a different name, ends up appearing as the only alternative to the rise of the revolutionary left. This is part of the inherently nebulous nature of the process. And the fact that no one is capable of discerning beneath the paradox the implacable logic that leads this country day by day into the international terrorist bloc is a symptom of the general clouding of consciousness, without which no revolutionary process could ever be carried out in the world.

Antonio Gramsci and the Theory of the Scapegoat62

In a debate I participated in at the Federal University of Paraná Law School, as I was explaining Gramsci’s strategy of occupying spaces and manufacturing consensus, my opponent, wanting to praise the Italian ideologue whose words I seemed to depreciate, claimed that he is now the most cited author in academic works in Brazil and the world.

The audience couldn’t resist: it burst into laughter. Never had a supposed refutation so literally confirmed the refuted statements.

But the claim in favor of Gramsci is correct. If there is a prevailing consensus in the academic circles, at least in Brazil, it is that the founder of the Italian Communist Party is the most important thinker, more important, in certain aspects, than Karl Marx himself.

This consensus has been produced, moreover, by the same means advocated by Gramsci for the imposition of any other idea: first, the adherents of the idea “occupy the spaces,” appropriating all means of dissemination; then they talk among themselves and claim that the conclusions of their conversation express universal consensus.

Stated like this, it seems like a gross fraud. It is indeed a fraud – and in the invention of this fraud lies all the supposed genius of Antonio Gramsci – but it is not at all crude: the fabrication of the simulacrum of debate goes so far as to prearrange a whole gallery of admitted oppositions, precisely those whose confrontation will inevitably lead to the desired conclusion. The others are excluded as aberrant, criminal, sectarian, or non-representative. Needless to say, in the national intellectual debate, I myself belong to these four categories, either simultaneously or alternately, depending on the needs of the moment, which has led more than one Gramscian to condemn me as both an isolated oddball and a spokesperson for the media owners…

That this cynical engineering of mental dirigisme now passes as synonymous with “democracy” is something that conscious perfidy can only partly explain. In the minds of the Gramscians, a very strange phenomenon also occurs, exemplifying the famous “theory of the scapegoat.” You have problems, so you bring a goat into your house, and soon your problems disappear, obscured by the presence of an animal that eats all your clothes, furniture, money, and documents. Then you send the goat away and are left without a goat and without problems. These communists experienced the worst humiliations in the twentieth century. Every party they formed immediately turned into a machine of internal repressive control, more suffocating than the Inquisition. If they were persecuted by the right, it would instill pride and self-confidence in them. Oppressed by their own leaders, what happened to their self-image? No one in the world has killed more communists than Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. They surpassed, in this regard, all right-wing dictatorships combined. That gives you quite a complex, doesn’t it? Well, compared to the physical horrors of “real socialism,” mere psychological oppression seems like a relief. Any of us would gladly choose the latter, between the firing squad and Gramscian manipulation, and even celebrate it as a form of “freedom.”

Treated like dogs by their own mentors and leaders, when communists and socialists enter the Gramscian atmosphere, they are like a dog that has been taken from the pound and leashed to its owner. Their new subjugation is the height of freedom they can conceive. It is life without a scapegoat.

The problem is that these individuals with a slave mentality, considering themselves, in their own understanding, the pinnacle of human intelligence, cannot conceive that other people have experienced much greater doses of freedom. Liberated from Stalin and Mao, they find their new slavery beautiful and comfortable, and sincerely believe that the rest of humanity aspires only to bow servilely to the demands of the Gramscian “consensus.” Hence the pride, joy, and feeling of sincere generosity with which they offer us this garbage, convinced that it is the most precious thing in the world.

Some of us are foolish enough to accept the contemptible offer out of mere politeness and end up trapped in the meshes of the “consensus.” As for me, I want nothing to do with any of it. Let them offer their miserable freedom of satisfied slaves to someone else.

What Is Hegemony?63

Two important events of last week received little or no attention from the Brazilian media: the resounding success of George W. Bush’s visit to Romania and the 70th anniversary of the Soviet genocide in Ukraine. Of course, no fact that speaks in favor of the United States or against socialism is admitted by our journalistic class, which is increasingly reduced to the role of a mere auxiliary force of the Gramscian “cultural revolution.”

Few peoples have the historical consciousness of the Romanians. I have made several trips to Romania, I have a multitude of friends there, and all of them, from the top stars of the intelligentsia like philosophers Andrei Pleșu and Gabriel Liiceanu to taxi drivers and housemaids, from centenarian patriarchs to high school boys, know by heart the epic of the struggles and sufferings of their country over six decades of totalitarianism, first Nazi, then communist. Furthermore, they have a keen awareness that no nation that has experienced these experiences can joyfully leap into the future, sweeping the past under the rug. When Pleșu, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, discovered documents incriminating his friend and mentor Dan Lazarescu as a collaborator with the secret police of the defunct regime, the decision to disclose them must have pained him as if he were cutting into his own flesh. Lazarescu, dean of the Senate, historian and scholar, was a national idol, as well as the grand master of Freemasonry – and through him, hundreds of Masons and non-Masons had found their way to imprisonment and death. The revelation of his crimes was a trauma that few nations would endure without immediately falling into unsettling doubts about their own future. The enthusiastic reception of George W. Bush shows the unchanging firmness of the Romanian people’s choice for the Western model of democracy, without concessions to the easy anti-Americanism of many European peoples. The French and Germans may have forgotten that they owe their freedom to the Americans. The Romanians will not forget it easily.

The massacre of Ukrainians by the “weapon of famine,” undertaken by Stalin between 1932 and 1933, will also not be forgotten, despite the censorship efforts of our media. Denied for decades by the “chic progressive” press in the West, it is now a fact perfectly assimilated by world historiography, especially after the opening of the Moscow Archives and the work of the Commission of Investigations based in Montreal confirmed the account presented by historian Robert Conquest in the classic Harvest of Sorrow. Last Tuesday, at the Society of Friends of Ukrainian Culture in Curitiba, I watched a film produced by the Commission with excerpts from documentaries filmed on-site at that time. Seven million people died, most of them children – a giant-sized Biafra, but created intentionally for the elimination of resistance.

This difference, of course, does not absolve African socialism. In a survey conducted in 1985 by the UN in twenty African countries plagued by poverty and famine, all without exception had adopted socialist agrarian policies, price controls, and the suppression of intermediaries in the previous decade – all the statist paraphernalia that some still present as a “humanizing” solution in a country with enormously productive agriculture like Brazil. Add to that tens of millions of victims of the Chinese “Great Leap Forward,” and you will see that, whether by design or by the ineptitude of its economic policies, no regime, at any time, has killed as many people from hunger as socialism. These are things that need to be discussed at a time when Governor Germano Rigotto, revealing a morbid socialist scruple in his democratic mindset, hesitates to cut subsidies for the next World Social Forum. He should not only cut them but also open an inquiry to ascertain whether the two previous Forums were an abuse, a waste of public money on ideological propaganda of a genocidal regime. Why so many deferences, so many salutations, so many obscene genuflections by democrats to socialist propaganda, as if it, with all the heinous crimes it has legitimized over a century, were invested with sublime moral authority for that reason? Would the state government subsidize a congress of liberal or conservative propaganda? And if it did, wouldn’t it be immediately faced with the clamor from the Workers' Party for investigations and punishments? Why do democrats use double standards against themselves, favoring the adversary “so as not to give a bad impression”? Who does not perceive in this fear, in this weakness, the triumph of leftist hegemony, which has psychically disarmed the adversary, reducing him to a collaborator and a slave?

To those who believe that the Gramscian project is a painless transition to socialism, it is good to remember that Gramsci never renounced the Leninist strategy of violence and terror. He only deemed it convenient to postpone its application until the complete ideological destruction of the “class enemy.” In this sense, he added nothing to the Stalinist technique. The Ukrainian example shows this clearly: first, Stalin demolished the religion, culture, and morality of the Ukrainians. Only then did he launch the assault on property and finally the confiscation of food reserves, killing his opponents through famine. The timing of the operation was perfectly Gramscian.

The demolition of the ideological defenses of the democrats in Brazil is already well advanced. So advanced that they bow spontaneously to the arrogance of the new masters, avoiding hurting their sensitivities with reminders of their past crimes and perversions. A left-wing party changes its name, and voila! In an instant, it is absolved of four decades of moral support for genocide. Who on the “right” enjoys such privilege?

Such subservience not only shapes the present but also reshapes the past. In a recently released book by a renowned journalist, with pretensions to meticulous historical record of the military regime, I do not find the acronym “KGB” mentioned even once. At that time, Soviet espionage had hundreds of agents of influence, paid, in the national media. They even installed a wiretap in President Figueiredo’s office. It was one of the basic forces that created the history of the period, incomprehensible without knowledge of this factor. And all of this disappears, radically distorting the picture. The Cold War narrated to our public was not fought between two world powers, one democratic and the other totalitarian, but between evil Yankee imperialists and heroic Brazilian democrats – exactly as Soviet propaganda portrayed it at the time. That is hegemony.

Our Media and Its Guru64

The most beautiful spectacle of recent times was not Lula’s inauguration, escorted by Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and a bunch of veterans of terrorism, in a square adorned with thousands of red flags and none of Brazil. The most beautiful spectacle of recent times is the tranquility with which, in the face of this, the national media assures us that there are no longer any communists in action in the world and that the country, under the new government, has the future assured of a genuine democracy. Never before has such an obvious lie been sustained with such overwhelming unanimity, in a collective insult to popular intelligence, which, by not feeling offended by it, shows that it does not have much respect for itself.

I find no historical precedents for such a strange phenomenon, but I find parallels in others that are happening at the same time in the same media. Want to see one? The wave of general indignation against Chávez is a thousand times greater, and the accusations against him are a thousand times more serious than everything that was enough in Brazil to justify Collor’s downfall. Nevertheless, the latter is celebrated to this day as an apotheosis of democracy, while the movement of the Venezuelans is pejoratively labeled as an “attempted coup.”

The double standards are so evident, so shameless that they suffice to show that the national journalism is dying, replaced by pure and simple propaganda. Many journalists will deny this, pretending to be scandalized, but their feigned dignified expressions will not convince me. For they themselves do not hide their pride in having abandoned the old rules of objectivity and impartiality to adopt an ethics of militant direction. They no longer want to be mere carriers of news. They want to be “agents of social transformation.” An agent of transformation is not satisfied with providing information: they manipulate it to produce a calculated effect. Brazilian journalists are so trained for this that they do it even without realizing it.

How did they come to this point? One clue lies in the influence exerted on them, as on the entirety of the speaking classes, by the reading of Antonio Gramsci, today the central and almost sole obligation of those who pass through so-called “higher” studies in this country. Why would they immerse themselves so much in Gramsci’s ideas if they were not going to put them into practice? But these ideas have a remarkable property: the more a man becomes intoxicated with them, the less he perceives their immorality and perversity.

Seen without the lenses of foolish devotion, Gramscism is nothing more than a systematization of trickery. According to him, hegemony must be conquered by left-wing parties through the “occupation of spaces” in the media, education, etc. Now, what is “occupation of spaces” if not mutual mafioso protection between militants, denying employment to adversaries and institutionalizing ideological discrimination as a principle of professional selection? Thirty years of this practice and there is no longer an anti-communist in the newsrooms. With the space divided among leftists, sympathizers, and the indifferent, no one complains, and everyone feels they are living in the most comfortable democracy. The moral conscience of today’s journalists is pure perverse innocence.

But Gramsci was not only a trickster in political strategy. Manipulative, he did not hesitate to tell his young daughter old fairy tales emptied of their spiritual symbolism and adulterated into crude communist propaganda. His own historical image is a farce. Beatified as the incarnation of the proletarian intellectual, he only worked in a factory for a very short time.

To call Gramsci Machiavellian is not an overstatement. The son of a corrupt man, he was the spiritual grandson of the Florentine megacorruptor. He prided himself on being a disciple of Machiavelli and described the “Party” as the “New Prince,” the collective incarnation of the astute palace coup plotter who seized power by stepping on the corpses of those who had helped him rise. When the Party is weak for a direct assault on power, Gramsci said, it must form a broad “social pact” based on “consensus,” while maintaining for itself hegemony, the primacy of the ideas and values that weld the alliance. The allies, believing they are acting in their own interest, will be led to shape their thinking according to the categories accepted by the Party, which, parasitizing their energies, will get rid of them at the appropriate moment.

Gramsci is not Machiavellian only in the vulgar sense of The Prince, but also in the more subtle and malicious sense of the Discourses. In this little-read work, Machiavelli reveals his intention to replace the State with God Himself. Gramsci merely adds that, for this to happen, a Party-god is necessary first. This is where his malice reaches almost diabolical refinements. He considered Christianity the main enemy of socialism. He dreamed of a world in which all transcendence would be abolished in favor of an “absolute secularization,” in which the mere idea of God and eternity would become inaccessible.

But he did not want to destroy the Church as an institution; he wanted to use it as a facade. For this, he proposed that communists infiltrate it, replacing the old faith with Marxist ideas adorned with theological language. Thus, communist preaching would reach the masses under another name, enveloped in an aura of sanctity.

Double Blindness65

Drug trafficking and the kidnapping industry in Latin America are not “common crimes” in the sense of being apolitical. They are activities of war, coordinated by the same international communist movement for which Mr. Luís Inácio da Silva openly thanked for their collaboration in his election as president of the Republic.

The FARC almost completely dominate the drug market on the continent, and each major tracked kidnapping leads directly to the Chilean MIR or other organizations affiliated with the São Paulo Forum.

These facts are so evident, so abundantly proven, that their absence from public debates can only be explained by the conscious or unconscious complicity of the media and established powers.

But that does not explain everything. A long and complex conjunction of causes has made Brazilians blind to the immediate forces that decide the course of their destiny, while hypersensitive to trivial diversions that provide fodder for national chatter. The distance between the Brazil that exists and the Brazil that is spoken of has never been greater.

Of the causes I mentioned, two should be highlighted.

On one hand, the lasting articulation of skeptical relativism and devout dogmatism in the education of the educated classes, aimed at neutralizing certain ideas through insulting questioning and keeping others safe from all examination, shrouded in an aura of untouchable sacredness.

The reader will easily understand what I mean if they notice that, in the educated circles of this country, the most scandalously derogatory and even pornographic hypotheses regarding Our Lord Jesus Christ are accepted with the greatest naturalness, while the slightest suggestion of any blemish on the moral character of Antonio Gramsci or Che Guevara is received with scandal and horror as if it were blasphemy. There is no exaggeration in what I say. Things are exactly like this, and if the way I describe them seems like a caricature, it is because the situation is inherently caricatural.

In the abstract, sectarian faith and relativistic doubt are incompatible. In the fragmented and centrifugal mind of the literate Brazilian, they coexist without major problems, dividing their jurisdiction into separate and incommunicable territories. The criterion of division follows the canons of cultural Marxism. Anything that seems associated with the traditional values of Judeo-Christian civilization must be dissolved in an acid bath of malicious suspicion, even at the price of exceeding the limit of rational criticism and entering the realm of pure and simple defamation. Conversely, symbols, slogans, and images that point to the beautiful future of the socialist utopia must be preserved in a reliquary, under the guard of a squad of zealots who oppose the first onslaught of critical gaze with a barrier of indignant exclamations and tears of humiliation, making the intruder aware of the magnitude of the suffering they inflict with their impious questions and blasphemous observations. Few critics resist such forceful moral blackmail. Hence the difference in language: the priests of the supreme cult can hurl the full range of outrageous invectives at their opponents, calling them dogs, thieves, lackeys of imperialism, while the opponents must enter the scene as if entering a sanctuary, limiting themselves to polite theoretical objections preceded by ceremonious displays of politeness.

The instrumentalization of culture for the purposes of socialism has reduced Brazilian intellectual activity to a monkey-like game of posturing and gestures aimed at making evil and crime invisible when serving the hegemonic political faction.

Hence the general evasiveness regarding the political command of drug trafficking and kidnappings. Crimes are bad things, therefore the mind shaped by this type of culture refuses to associate them with the image of the good, which is identical to socialism.

The second cause comes from another source.

During his eight years as President of the United States, Bill Clinton did everything to “depoliticize” the image of criminality in Latin America, that is, to limit repressive action to the periphery of criminal organizations, without ever touching their vital center.

Relying on the triumphalist rhetoric of the “end of the Cold War,” he helped the communist movement to play dead in order to better assault the gravedigger. Among other measures that would take too long to enumerate here, he tied the hands of the Colombian government, conditioning all American aid to a clause that only allows its use against drug trafficking as such, not against the political and military organization that directs it. The result: the FARC, while their popularity in Colombia dropped from 8 to 2 percent, were accepted as a political representation, grew to become the richest and most powerful armed force in Latin America, and now dominate half of Colombian territory, imposing a bloody communist regime similar to that of Pol Pot in Cambodia.

To say that Clinton acted this way out of incompetence is to underestimate the intelligence of a brilliant Harvard alumnus. But his motives matter little. What matters is that his policy set a standard for approaching the problem of criminality in Latin America. Endorsed by the elegant US media and imitated by the Brazilian media, thus ingrained in the “common sense” of our population, this standard can be summed up in a simple formula: it is forbidden to investigate the masterminds behind the crime.

There are other factors, but the association of a cultural habit with legitimization from official US policy is enough to make the Brazilians, from both sides, inaccessible to the view of a reality that is in itself obvious and clear. The convergence of causes in the production of double blindness is also not a mere coincidence. However, exposing the connection between the Clintonian elite circles and the revolutionary intelligentsia of Latin America is a time-consuming task that will have to wait for another day.

Invisible Dominator66

The Marxist doctrine of “ideology” has so permeated the culture that even individuals completely detached from any leftist militancy find it natural to expect that every idea or theory is ultimately explained as an instrument of the ambitions of a class or group, therefore as self-interested distortion, self-justifying myth, or propaganda.

From this perspective, there is no longer objective knowledge. The only way for a subject to escape ideological imprisonment is to accept it as an unavoidable fate and incorporate it into their habitual view of the world, like a horse that eats its own reins hoping, thereby, to become a rider. The new objectivity of the “organic intellectual” no longer consists of seeing the world as it is but of transforming it into something else in order to be able to say afterward that it is exactly that.

Strands of thought entirely unrelated to Marxism inadvertently provided this insane doctrine with some accidental legitimization.

Nietzsche abhorred socialism. However, by rejecting any claim to truth as a self-flattering illusion of sickly contemplatives and by consecrating the “will to power” as the ultimate foundation of reality and human action, he ended up giving both Bolshevik and fascist socialism an admirable pretext to dismiss the scruples of rational argumentation and gladly embrace the brutality of “direct action” advocated by Georges Sorel.

Freud, politically a conservative, contributed to the destruction of faith in knowledge by vilifying all manifestations of human intelligence, whether in art, science, philosophy, or religion, as camouflages of sexual repression. And he unwittingly placed the power of sexual fantasy at the service of socialist propaganda as soon as the Frankfurt School believed it had discovered in repressed desire the genetic equivalent of the proletariat’s labor power “exploited” by the capitalist superego. From then on, all sexual frustrated individuals in the world became potential leftist militants.

Many other intellectual trends and schools, sometimes highly anti-Marxist, contributed to the goals of socialism: nibbling at the popular credibility of Western philosophical and religious tradition, but not having any distinctive political expression themselves, they ended up being absorbed as tools of ideological warfare by the only current of thought that, besides being a doctrine, was a political strategy and organized militancy. Thus, as it became intellectually demoralized, Marxism renewed itself in an almost inexhaustible manner, calling upon new and new pretexts adapted from pragmatism, analytic philosophy, or even the lysergic and anarchic messianism of the New Age. The most recent acquisition was the anti-Western rhetoric of Islamic radicalism. And now even the “traditionalism” of Guénon and Evola can serve to help it a little…

No doctrine can withstand so many incorporations without losing its identity. But sometimes that is useful. As it adapted its organism to so many foreign foods, Marxism, already in its Gramscian version, flexibilized its organizational structure, dissolving the old monolithic parties into a complex network of associations and channels with infinitely varied labeling – from political associations to welfare organizations, “encounter groups,” and abortion clinics, in addition to drug trafficking and kidnapping gangs – which the advent of computers and the internet now allows to be united and ready at any moment for sudden global actions, as seen in the “peace” marches that almost succeeded in saving, in extremis, the most tyrannical and genocidal regime on the planet.

Unrecognizable as an individualized doctrine, Marxism continues to be politically the only globally organized force. In the cultural sphere, it has become the dominant influence that, namelessly and almost invisibly, moves currents of opinion in the world.

Every time you ask to whom an idea serves before asking whether it is true or false, you are serving that invisible master. The Marxist doctrine of ideology, a lie in the service of the will to power, sees lies in everything as instruments of power, and like any self-fulfilling prophecy, it has the gift of making those who follow it, even without knowing that they follow it, become exactly what it says they are.

The Clarity of the Process67

As the disagreements within the PT [Worker’s Party] have become the sole mold of national political debate, I ask readers to reexamine my article “Revolutionary Transition,” published in this newspaper on August 25, 2002.68 In it, I described the basic mechanism of Brazilian politics in recent decades: the shift of the axis increasingly to the left, so that leftism ends up occupying all the space, while imposing on the public the false impression that the scenario continues to be divided, normal and democratically, between a left and a right.

I do not cite my own article to act as a prophet. I cite it to show that the line of evolution of things is too clear, that one does not need to be a prophet to see it, and that the fact that so few see it is a fundamental component of the process. For this process takes place through the numbing of consciousness, culminating in general blindness: the right unable to perceive its impotence, the left denying its manifest omnipotence and pretending to be the victim of nonexistent adversaries to prevent the birth of future adversaries.

Since 1988, each new government has been a little further to the left, dismantling the SNI, fattening the MST, rewarding terrorists with official funds, endorsing one by one all “politically correct” demands, disseminating Marxist propaganda in schools, etc., etc. Instead of rejoicing in this, leftists become increasingly irritated and their discourse more violent. The escalation of verbal brutality, with Mr. Caio César Benjamin telling the president to “go f… himself,” shows that leftism becomes even more arrogant the more victorious it is, that nothing can satisfy it except total and unconditional obedience, that each concession, instead of appeasing it, only further excites its hunger for absolute power.

Inspired by the Leninist formula of the “scissors strategy,” the left grows through cissiparity, or schizogenesis, dividing itself against itself to take the place of any possible competitors, which today amount to almost nothing.

He who dominates the center, dominates the whole. The left invents its own right, criminalizing and excluding from the game all imaginable right-wing factions. Some years ago, it became unbecoming to be to the right of FHC. Now it is unthinkable to be to the right of Lula. The entire national politics is nothing but a byproduct of the leftist strategy, implementing Gramsci’s formula that the Party must reign over all of society, not with an external authority that overtly oppresses it, but with the invisible and omnipresent force of a natural inevitability, a “categorical imperative, a divine commandment” (sic).

Therefore, those who, seeing leftism divided, celebrate its weakening and its imminent defeat are crazy and deluded. A party can only be defeated by another party, never by its own internal confusion, which is the ferment of its unlimited expansion. And the fact is that no other party exists. For forty years, only the left has had a global strategy, long-term objectives, and a firm determination to reshape society in its image and likeness. The other factions have only loose ideas and temporary partial objectives, which are easily absorbed or neutralized by the triumphant and irreversible wave of petista neo-communism.

Fattening the Pig69

Aware that our business classes are incapable of seeing the world except through the lens of naive economism, the leftist leadership has managed to turn them into helpful instruments for the implementation of a communist dictatorship in this country.

The most foolish and servile ones are precisely the businessmen inflated with intellectual pretensions, who have read a few entries from Norberto Bobbio’s Dictionary of Politics and immediately start stroking their own egos with pompous recitations of the newly learned terms – ethics, civil society, external control, participatory democracy, etc. – whose strategic significance they do not even remotely grasp, because for that they would need to have studied Antonio Gramsci extensively after acquiring the solid Marxist-Leninist foundation necessary to understand what he is talking about.

For example, they hear that the only remedy to end corruption is “external control” of the police and judiciary by the “organized civil society.” Deceived by the nominal value of the expressions, unaware that they are technical terms from the Gramscian vocabulary with a very precise semantic load, different from what the words suggest in the general sense, they are moved almost to tears by the rosy image that seems to be announced in them. Therefore, they willingly collaborate in the revolutionary endeavor as if they were fighting for their own most visceral interests. One group among them, totaling a quarter of the GNP, has already put everything at the service of realizing such sublime ideals.

However, anyone who has studied Gramsci knows that “organized civil society” simply means the Party, massively expanded to the point of losing its apparent identity, spread through its agents to the most peripheral sectors of social life, and therefore transformed – in the terms of Gramsci himself – into an “invisible and omnipresent power” capable of dominating society with the simultaneously overwhelming and imperceptible force “of a categorical imperative, of a divine command” (sic). It is the complete dictatorship of the Party, not imposed from top to bottom by an explicit authoritarian decree that would risk provoking resistance, but gradually injected into the veins of society like a hallucinogenic drug that the victim herself will end up demanding in increasingly larger doses. Anyone who, in light of the teachings of Gramsci, observes the daily practice of the Workers' Party (PT) will see that it is guided by the original sense that these terms have in Gramsci, and not by the second layer of spurious meanings created for the purpose of self-intoxication of useful idiots. That these idiots occasionally and fleetingly receive the stimulus of minor advantages is nothing strange: no one kills the pig before fattening it.

And the proposal they embrace is not just for “external control” of the police and judiciary, but of the legislative, the ministries, the companies, the religious and educational entities, the welfare organizations, and the media. Never have such sweet and enticing words been used to disguise such a brutal and heinous reality. Never has a communist tyranny been offered with such a flashy packaging, with such an innocuous appearance. And the business class, with its typical nouveau riche self-delusion, buys it all. They buy and pay.

Cooking the Frog70

The national media has adopted the custom of designating the ruling PT (Workers' Party) as “right-wing,” so that Heloísa Helena and João Pedro Stedile can pose as representatives of the only authentic “left.” It is a dirty trick, and its effect is obvious: the portion of the public that fears abrupt changes rushes to support the government, hoping it will contain the “radicals,” while the dissatisfaction of the rest with the government’s mistakes is channeled in favor of the “left of the left,” without the risk of it being capitalized on by liberal or conservative opposition.

Every revolutionary movement has within it a right and a left. The left strives to expand the scope of the movement and radicalize revolutionary transformations at any cost, unconcerned about losing control of the situation or, even better, imagining that perfect confusion is the best control. The “right,” on the other hand, seeks to consolidate the victories achieved and maintain strict strategic and tactical control of the movement, even at the cost of slowing down the process and having to purge and punish “leftist” indiscipline.

This has been the case in all communist revolutions. The differential detail is that in the Brazilian revolution, an “painless” transition based on Antonio Gramsci’s strategy is being attempted on a large scale for the first time. This makes the revolution, in the eyes of the ignorant, not appear as a revolution, and the most disastrous changes are accepted, imperceptibly, as routine details. Not that Gramscism is pacifist. It simply does not allow violence before the right moment, that is, when public opinion is mature enough to at least approve, out of indifference, the bloody elimination of the few remaining adversaries. Gramscism is like a spider that anesthetizes its victim before killing it.

In the anesthetic process, Gramsci emphasizes control of the media and, therefore, of the vocabulary. It is essential that the population becomes accustomed to using words in the desired sense by the Party so that, at every moment, they think what the Party wants them to think. This has nothing to do with explicit persuasion: it does not aim to make the people “agree” with the party’s instructions but rather seeks to induce them to behave in the desired manner, even when they believe they are opposing the established authority.

At the present moment, when the rise of the Party is still recent, it is important to ensure that no one in society can sound a general alarm and abort the process. Firmness and discretion are essential.

This is the wolf’s hour, the twilight before dawn, when the predator lurks in the surroundings, not yet knowing whether what it will encounter ahead is prey or hunter.

At this moment, everything in the Party’s conduct is camouflage and pretense. Everything should appear as something else, nothing can be called by its name, every conclusive reasoning must be neutralized by a storm of evasions, every real diagnosis of the situation must be bypassed through intense verbal confusion. The very identities of the characters must be blurred so that no one can distinguish the predator from the prey. Working to make the “right” and the “left” of the revolutionary movement be taken by the public as the conventional right and left, so that the latter occupies all existing political space and a revolutionary transition passes as the normal routine of democracy, is the way to make the frog, which would jump out of the boiling water if thrown into it, adapt to the slowly heated water until it dies without realizing it has been cooked.

The Masters' Recipe71

Karl Marx taught that even when invested with that absolute power guaranteed only by armed violence, the revolutionary left should never rush to nationalize the means of production overnight, risking capital flight and the dismantling of the economy. According to him, the process should be extended over one or two generations, preferably using the anesthetic expedient of progressive taxation. Even more prudent and cunning should be the approach if the left wins through elections, which only guarantee limited access to power.

Lenin added that the capitalist class itself, attracted by the bait of immediate profits offered by the socialist state and blind to the deeper currents of revolutionary transformation, would happily collaborate with the slow and inexorable expropriation of its property.

Antonio Gramsci completed the syllogism, concluding that the Party should not risk any more drastic changes in the social structure before ensuring three conditions: (1) complete hegemony over culture, public vocabulary, and prevailing moral criteria; (2) the establishment of an informal one-party system through the suppression of all ideological opposition, reducing the other parties, almost voluntarily, to the subordinate task of criticizing administrative details; (3) the fusion of Party and State through the “occupation of spaces.”

By faithfully following the recipe of these masters, the ruling PT has acquired rights and privileges never dreamed of by any communist party in the world, such as: (1) the right to never be called communist, even when effectively inserting Brazil into the international communist strategy in broad daylight; (2) the ability to self-finance with increasing and unlimited public funds through the deceit of the “tithe” that, if used by any other party, would provoke a storm of accusations and lawsuits; (3) the ability to act in close strategic partnership with terrorist and drug trafficking organizations, such as the Colombian ELN, the FARC, the Chilean MRI, and the Tupamaros, without ever being accused of complicity with terrorism or drug trafficking; (4) the ability to create within its own ranks a histrionic opposition that accuses it of being “right-wing” without the broader public grasping the very special, almost like a password, meaning that this term has in internal left-wing discussions, thus further camouflaging the real course of the political process.

Never, in five centuries, have lies and dissimulation so completely dominated the panorama of public debates in this country, bestowing upon the leaders of the process that “invisible omnipotence” to which Gramsci referred and condemning all other Brazilians to mental and political immaturity.

One of the most ingenious instruments used for this purpose has been the duplication of party actions, one national and overtly called “PT” or “government,” the other international and extremely discreetly called the “São Paulo Forum,” the most important and powerful Latin American political organization, whose mere existence the journalistic class continues to criminally conceal – I repeat, criminally – from the knowledge of its readers. Within the solemn sphere of the Forum, the PT coordinates its actions with those of other continental leftist movements. Among them, obviously, is the MST. At the national level, that is, in the eyes of public opinion, the PT and the MST appear as separate and disconnected entities. The omnipotent party is, therefore, enabled to promote agitation in the countryside through its invisible arm, while, with its visible arm, it stages gestures of appeasement and upholds order.

Undoubtedly, there are many people within the PT who are aware of all this, and it is impossible for at least some of them not to be secretly ashamed of collaborating in such perfidy and ignominy. But when will they dare to publicly renounce the macabre communist heritage that makes their party an ally and accomplice of Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Kim Il Jong?

The Unity of Duplicity72

How is it possible that a party filled with former terrorists, associated with the FARC drug traffickers and the MIR kidnappers in the São Paulo Forum, accused of overpricing in public works and garbage collection in several of the capitals it governs, suspected of complicity in the murder of a mayor, nourished by obligatory tithes from the public positions it distributes, and last but not least, the inventor of an “anti-hunger campaign” with 45 percent of irregular bids, manages to make a scandal involving a deal with illegal gambling bosses appear as a sporadic stain on its unimpeachable reputation, as an isolated act of “betrayal” of its “high ethical standards,” and not as the normal and predictable continuation of a long career of crimes and lies?

“Hegemony” is precisely that: cornered by the display of overwhelming evidence, the dominant faction still has the strength to transform political loss into ideological victory, making the general belief in the intrinsic goodness of the left emerge unscathed and elevated from the revelation of any dirt. It is a prodigy in terms of damage control.

These two phenomena – involvement in crimes of uncommon magnitude and control over the moral criteria of public opinion – are deeply interconnected. It is impossible to elucidate the Waldomiro case without examining the internal structure of the PT, which inherited from the revolutionary organizations that gave birth to it the technique of articulating legality and clandestinity, core and façade, reality and appearance.

The party that benefits from the gambling bosses is, after all, the same party that, with the help of a network of informants spread across all levels of public and private administration and the support of various sister organizations, has long acquired true police power, endowed with the means to subdue and destroy adversaries as it pleases and, by the terror it inspires through its moralizing rhetoric, to block any serious investigation of the crimes in which it is involved. And Mr. José Dirceu, who sponsored Waldomiro, is the same person who shone with spectacular revelations in the CPI of the “budget dwarfs,” even citing the serial numbers of banknotes received as bribes by certain individuals – information only accessible to those who had spies hidden everywhere.

These two faces do not exclude each other but mutually demand one another. The fearsome judge and the sneaky thief are the same character. As Lenin taught: “Foster corruption and denounce it.” There is no good PT and bad PT: what exists is strategy, organization, information, planning, the convergence of all licit and illicit means toward the ultimate goal: the conquest of power, the fusion of Party and State, domination over the “organized civil society” (as Gramsci called it), the total demolition of institutions and their replacement with a “new model of democracy” that was already old when Fidel Castro wore diapers.

The skills required to conduct such a complex operation are beyond the reach of “ordinary” politicians, whose knowledge goes no further than the electioneering, marketing, and parliamentary tricks necessary for the routine exercise of provincial politics.

Almost all PT leaders have extensive experience in clandestine action, and not coincidentally, precisely the one who recently gained the saddest notoriety is an agent trained by the Cuban military intelligence service, the most powerful and effective on the continent. His skills in this field include organizing underground networks of espionage and propaganda, infiltration, terrorism, as well as all the arts of disinformation and camouflage that the average national politician only has a distant and fanciful idea of, acquired, in the most erudite of cases, from James Bond films.

Between the PT and its accusers, the only possible struggle is that of organized cunning against a chaotic multitude of blind indignations. Without an awareness of what is truly at stake, these indignations run the risk of crumbling into a dust of futile protests.

Calling Things by Their Name73

Senator Jefferson Perez is absolutely right in affirming that “for the first time in Brazil, a party dominates both power and organized civil society.” Where he goes wrong is in the general term he uses to synthesize the state of affairs. “Mexicanization” is not even a descriptive concept; it is a figure of speech that alludes to a phenomenon due to vague similarities with another.

However, what is happening here is not so mysterious that it lacks an appropriate name. Mr. Perez comes close to it by using the expression “organized civil society,” but he quickly loses track by deviating into an improper analogy. “Organized civil society” is the technical term that Antonio Gramsci uses to designate the network of non-party entities controlled by the Party. Therefore, saying that the Party controls them is redundant: according to Gramsci, they constitute the “expanded Party.” When this network encompasses the main channels of expression in society, there is no longer public opinion; there is only the voice of the Party, echoed in many tones and octaves that simulate spontaneous variety. It is the materialization of the “cultural hegemony” that monopolizes the circulating ideas and even forges the vocabulary of public debates, acquiring over the general mentality “the all-pervasive and invisible power of a natural law, a categorical imperative, a divine commandment” (sic).

The mere fact that this expression is used by many as a neutral term, without the slightest awareness of its origin and strategic implications, is enough to demonstrate the extent of this “hegemony.”

According to Gramsci, the organization of civil society must precede the conquest of the State. During the dictatorship, when the generals believed they controlled everything because they had the guerrillas under their feet, the elite of the Communist Party, tolerated by the government because it was not involved in armed violence, studied Gramscian strategy and put it into practice right before the blind eyes of authority. That is how today’s Brazil was born. Mr. Perez himself admits that during that time, the left had already gained control of civil society.

But he also errs when he limits the possibilities of explaining the phenomenon to a paralyzing alternative: “conspiracy” or “coincidence”? What exists is neither one nor the other. It is the “grand strategy.” The Brazilian Communist Party’s adoption of Gramscism followed the new “general line” adopted by the Soviet Politburo between 1958 and 1960,74 which, inspired by the example of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, recommended to all communist parties the end of Stalinist monolithism, concessions to private capitalist interests, the eventual abandonment of explicit communist identity, and fragmentation into an apparent multi-party system. It called for broad penetration of civil society to absorb all usable currents of opinion in order to marginalize anti-communism and seduce even conservatives into the beauties of “socialism with a human face” embodied in perestroika.

Internationally, this policy, calculated to last four decades, aimed to create a social-democratic “united Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” isolating the United States and inducing them to disarm ideologically (and militarily) in the name of the announced “convergence” of capitalism and socialism in a “new global order” sponsored by the UN. With anti-communist sentiments anesthetized, the United States celebrated the “end of the Cold War” without realizing that they were merely ceding the enemy the right to unilaterally continue it under ideal conditions, in which all resistance was already condemned in advance as nostalgia, lack of love for “peace,” and, of course, paranoia.

With a few visible setbacks that did not shake its guiding core, the strategy achieved its desired goal, as seen today in the global anti-US and anti-Israel hostility. In Stalin’s time, this would have been too much to dream of. Today, it is a reality.

Compared to that, the Mexican Revolution was just a rural commotion. What is happening in Brazil is the Gramscian Revolution, a local manifestation of the global communist grand strategy. One must be very, very alienated not to see such an evident thing.

The Outsourced Gestapo75

Alfredo Sáenz, S.J., in La estrategia ateísta de Antonio Gramsci (Córdoba, 1988), observed that Gramsci’s path to socialism, avoiding the Leninist practice of physically eliminating enemies, gave preference—although not exclusively—to moral assassination. This reflected the new structure of the revolutionary Party, which, evolving from an armed coup elite, was transforming into a diffuse and omnipresent network without a face or limits, imperceptibly reigning over the psychology of the masses and even shaping the minds of its adversaries. These adversaries would then become so isolated, so ideologically disarmed, that they could barely defend themselves without accusing themselves at the same time due to the lack of their own language. The few who would be saved from mental shipwreck would be neutralized through professional boycotts and defamatory massacres—tools, of course, handled in an impersonal and camouflaged manner. The Party leaders, as well as the leftist government itself, would not expose themselves in the frontline of the attack; they would hide behind a multitude of anonymous young militants, giving the impression that the victim had not fallen under the blows of a party line but under the weight of public opinion, progress, or the nature of things. The idea was to use civil society itself, instead of the State, as an instrument of repression.

The outsourced police persecution, the Gestapo, is already functioning with resounding success in Brazil. The more gullible adversaries—the majority—no longer dare to criticize the government except in the name of leftist pretexts that drag them along in the same condemnation. The intellectually active minority is cornered by job loss, psychological aggression, veiled or explicit threats, judicial harassment, and relentless and cruel defamation.

Examples?

Journalist Reinaldo Azevedo lost his job because advertisers were afraid to appear on the pages of his publication, Primeira Leitura. Later, his mother’s house was invaded and vandalized.

Anchor Boris Casoy was fired from TV Record due to discreet political pressures.

Columnist Diogo Mainardi groans under the weight of lawsuits for the crime of denouncing federal corruption.

Father José Carlos Lodi da Cruz, harassed by international NGOs, was sentenced by a grotesque Brasília court to pay a fine for calling an abortionist an abortionist.

Writer Júlio Severo suffers all sorts of judicial and administrative humiliations for having written a book against the homosexual ideology and for wanting to educate his son in the Christian religion.

Professor Francisco Pessanha Neves, from the Colégio de Aplicação of UFRJ, was beaten by his students for insisting on teaching them Greek philosophy instead of Marxism.

As for me, everyone knows: scatological insults and death threats have become banal routines, defamatory intrusions into my family’s privacy have become customary rights exercised by battalions of juvenile imbeciles instigated by professors who would not dare to confront me in a debate. They were so committed to my destruction that they ended up betraying themselves by publishing, with sinister Goebbelsian humor, a caricature in which I am crucified—a eloquent statement of intentions, only frustrated in extremis by my timely departure from the country.

What Gramsci did not explain is what kind of society could arise from a generation in which young people imagine themselves as heroes of freedom when they join groups of hundreds or thousands to serve as political police and ruin the lives of a few isolated and resourceless enemies. It is a society of cowardly and psychotic swindlers. It is today’s Brazil.

But none of this is exclusive to Brazil. Venezuelan opposition figure Alek Boyd, editor of the website www.vcrisis.com, self-exiled in England, without money to pay for a lawyer, is subjected to a defamatory bombardment by the Chavista lobby, sponsored by the Mayor of London himself. Everywhere, brutally unequal combat is the preferred weapon of the apostles of equality.

Why Brazilians Vote for the Left76

If in Brazil, this aberrant phenomenon occurs where a conservative electorate massively votes for left-wing candidates, the reason for this apparent contradiction is very clear and is composed of the confluence of three factors.

First and foremost, conservatism does not have any partisan or cultural channels for expression and has become politically null. There are no conservative politicians: no one can vote for non-existent candidates.

On the other hand, leftism uses one language in its internal discussions, another to communicate with the people, and only in the former does it assume its true ideological identity. In the latter, it dilutes its image in moralistic, nationalist, and populist generalities. It is a slyly slippery discourse that avoids Marxist jargon and prevents the people from identifying the Brazilian left with the continental neo-communist revolution. Even qualified foreign observers who are unaware of the internal documents of the PT and the São Paulo Forum, such as Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Otto Reich, and even Undersecretary Tom Shannon, have been deceived by this false appearance, imagining Brazilian leftism as populist instead of communist. The local population, of course, falls into the trap even more easily. Even among educated individuals, the common reaction is: “Lula, a communist? Are you crazy?” Lula himself could say, without anyone contesting him, that not only has he never been a communist but he is not even leftist. This statement would be considered cynical, unacceptable, and even criminal if the audience were not ignorant that the speaker was the founder and president of the largest pro-communist organization in the continent.

Thirdly, the success of forty years of Gramscian “cultural revolution” was so overwhelming—given the complete lack of resistance—that the values, criteria, and even mental habits of the international communist movement have become incorporated into Brazilian “common sense” and are no longer recognized as such; they are passively accepted by society without an awareness of their ideological implications.

Combine these three factors, and you will understand why a conservative people vote for communist candidates: they don’t know they are communists, they are unaware that there is a highly active communist movement on the continent, and they have no idea about the consequences of their vote. Brazilian elections are a farce in the most accurate and complete sense of the term.

With no right-wing parties or politicians in Brazil, the entire right-left confrontation that is currently seen is a social engineering work created by the left itself with three objectives: (1) to hide its hegemony and monopolistic power under the appearance of normal democratic dispute; (2) to neutralize any right-leaning tendencies, channeling them towards a prefabricated right, the “right of the left,” which was clearly observed in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s two electoral campaigns—a Gramscian Marxist who was happily accepted as the (unfaithful, of course) depositary of the trust of the right-wing electorate; (3) to dominate all political space through the game of two party currents loyal to the same ideological scheme, only separated by the competition for positions, as explicitly acknowledged by Fernando Henrique himself and Prof. Christovam Buarque, one of the PT’s mentors at the time. These three lines of action precisely define what Lenin called the “scissors strategy,” a term inspired by the idea of cutting with two blades.

The PFL could have been a right-wing party, but since it only wants positions and has no prospect of power, it agreed to become a branch of the PSDB. The PMDB has been leftist from the beginning and is filled with communists. The PSDB, the “right of the left,” is the funnel where any hypothetical right-wing remnants in these other parties converge. Like the PT, this party was born at USP, and its only function within the entire USPian communist strategy is to prevent those dissatisfied with the PT from coalescing into a genuine right-wing movement.

From Depressing Fantasy to Fearsome Reality77

The sentence by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, already mentioned in this column – “Nothing exists in the political reality of a country if it is not first present in its literature” – is so true and profound that it can be applied to the analysis of political situations from various different angles, always yielding some knowledge.

Take, for example, what happened in Russia between the mid-19th century and the fall of the USSR. Around 1860-1870, Russian culture, previously lagging behind Western European cultures, began to gain momentum and achieve great accomplishments. The driving inspiration behind this movement was primarily the mystical confidence in the nation’s destiny as the bearer of an important spiritual message to an Old World weakened by scientific materialism. Preserved from revolutionary corrosion by a strongly theocratic political regime in which the official beliefs of the court and the religious sentiments of the population confirmed and reinforced each other, Russia contrasted dramatically with Western nations, where the elite and the masses lived in a perpetual ideological divorce and therefore only modernized at the expense of repressing and marginalizing the religious sentiments of the population. The Tsarist regime, despite the weight of its bureaucratic stagnation, had managed to find a path for reforms that did not contradict the teachings of the Orthodox Church, but rather emerged from them. The future of Russia seemed to emerge directly from the Christian messianism of the two leading figures of Russian intellectualism, the novelist F. M. Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.

Compared to the great national culture of the period, the contribution of the Russian communist movement can be summarized as reducing everything to the level of miserable dialectical automatism, if not pure propaganda literature. The reduction of high culture to an instrument for shaping militancy neutralized the beneficial effects of the university reforms undertaken by the government and turned a large part of the educated Russian youth into a crowd of delusional chatterboxes that populate the novels of Dostoevsky, especially Crime and Punishment and The Demons. Try reading any page of Vladimir Solovyov or Dostoevsky himself, and then compare it to the revolutionary platitudes of George Plekhanov – considered the most capable Russian communist intellectual at the time – or the grotesque philosophizing of V. I. Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and you will understand what I’m talking about. The communists began by destroying the higher intelligence of a great nation before creating the most stupid and bestial political regime ever known in history. Anyone who wanted to predict the future of the Russian economy under the communists at that time could easily do so by simply evaluating the literature they produced. Even the most talented fiction writers among the revolutionary ranks, such as Maxim Gorky, were tremendously inferior to the previous generation. Nowadays, he can only be read as a historical document. Needless to say, the same applies to the literature produced under the governments of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and so on. Even the best novels of that period – those by Sholokhov – have become unreadable due to an excess of revolutionary nonsense. Not to mention the philosophers and essayists, a subsidized crowd that time has thrown into the trash can. Russian thought only survived abroad, integrated into European or American culture, with Berdyaev, Chestov, and Sorokin. Literary imagination only began to recover underground in the 1950s, far from official culture, with Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, and Zinoviev. And needless to say, the inspiration for this came mainly from the ancient messianism of Dostoevsky and Solovyov.

What happened in literary and philosophical culture was replicated with millimeter precision in the economy. Those who got used to imagining Tsarism through the stereotypical lens of “repression,” “backwardness,” and “decadence” blatantly ignored the main facts of the period: the progressive opening of the bureaucracy to elements from outside the aristocratic class (including Jews) and accelerated industrialization. In the fifty years preceding the communist revolution, the Russian economy experienced the highest growth rate in Europe, surpassing by far England and Germany, which at the time seemed to embody progress and enlightenment, and only finding a rival on the other side of the ocean, the United States of America. If the Tsarist regime had not been destroyed by World War I and the subsequent rise of the communists, the mere vegetative growth of the economy would have eventually provided Russians with a standard of living comparable to that of Americans by around 1940. In contrast, in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, the average citizen consumed less meat than a poor subject of the Tsar a century earlier and had less access to cars, healthcare, and public services in general than black South Africans living under the humiliating apartheid regime. Nothing exists in the political reality of a country that is not first present in its literature.

The Russian example is just one among many. The abstract utopianism of the French Revolution, which in a clash with reality led to paradoxical results such as terror, Napoleonic dictatorship, and the restoration of the monarchy, was preceded by at least half a century of abstract, forced, artificial, and artificialized language that suffocated direct experience under tons of idealistic constructions without foundation. This process was described and analyzed with great insight by Hyppolite Taine in Les Origines de la France Contemporaine (6 volumes, 1888-1894), one of the most remarkable historical works of all time. In Germany and Austria, the long degradation of public language, against which Karl Kraus and Stefan George futilely protested, is now recognized as one of the factors that made the rise of irrational Nazi ideology possible. In general, the explosion of cacophonies in modernist literature announced and paved the way for the invasion of totalitarianism: this cannot be denied after the historical tour de force presented in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1989). No, Hofmannsthal did not make an arbitrary guess: if nothing exists in politics that does not first exist in literature, it is simply because imagination precedes action. If there is a “historical law” that works, it is this one. I put it in quotation marks because it is not a historical law but a structural aspect of human action that no historical mutation can alter.

If the reader has understood this, they will easily perceive the suicidal madness of entrusting Brazil’s destiny to a political-ideological current that, from the 1970s to the present day, has systematically worked to destroy the country’s superior culture, especially its literature, by subordinating everything to the strategic and tactical demands of Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural revolution.”

The Gramscian drug entered the national brain through the publication of the works of the Italian ideologue by the communist publisher Ênio Silveira shortly after the coup of 1964. In the general confusion that overwhelmed the left-wing movements following the failure of their hopes for a rapid and painless Cubanization of Brazilian society, one faction immersed itself in reading the nonsense of Régis Débray and Che Guevara, wasting their energies on the “impossible revolution” of guerrilla warfare. Another, more cunning faction, retreated and bet on a long-term strategy that proposed to gradually conquer the entire universe of arts, education, culture, and journalism – discreetly, as if they weren’t doing anything – before risking direct confrontation with political enemies. The military government, obsessed with suppressing guerrilla movements, couldn’t care less about these peaceful and seemingly harmless undertakings. They turned a blind eye and even supported them as a diversion and an acceptable alternative to violent opposition. The Gramscian idea was so successful that, even during the military dictatorship, the left-wing held sway in newsrooms, marginalizing prominent right-wing figures like Gustavo Corção and Lenildo Tabosa Pessoa, eventually completely excluding them from newspaper columns. Leftism effectively controlled the education system, to the extent that even the discipline of Moral and Civic Education, timidly introduced by a government that refrained from extending its authority from the police-military field to the cultural sphere, ended up providing a platform for disseminating “politically correct” concepts that shaped the mentality of subsequent generations. In theater, cinema, and television, the authority of the left can be measured by the unquestioned ideological veto power exercised by communist militants Dias Gomes and Janete Clair in the selection of Globo network soap operas – the most extensive apparatus for shaping popular imagination. A similar filtering process occurred in the publishing industry. Gradually, all authors disapproved by the Communist Party disappeared from bookstores, school libraries, and university curricula, even under a regime whose reputation for intolerant anticommunism was loudly proclaimed by the communists who benefited from its deceptive tolerance and ideological omission. In all cultural, artistic, educational, and journalistic spheres, the only difference seen after the end of the dictatorship was the transition from tacit left-wing hegemony to explicit and now truly intolerant dominance. The comfortable hospitality with which notorious leftists were accepted in top positions in journalism, education, and show business during the military era contrasts so sharply with the complete exclusion of right-wing figures today that applying the term “dictatorship” to the former period and “democracy” to the latter sounds remarkably ironic. At the time, there was, of course, “alternative” journalism, so-called “nano” journalism. But the mainstream media was almost entirely in the hands of leftists like Cláudio Abramo, Luiz Alberto Bahia, Alberto Dines, Luiz Garcia, and many others, so the difference with the “nano” media was more a matter of style than content. Nowadays, right-wing journalists are all confined to the “nano” media. The few who still appear in the pages of major newspapers are only hired collaborators. They don’t even enter the newsrooms.

The complete dominance of a specific political current in culture, regardless of its orientation, is already a problem in itself. But what happened in Brazil was far more serious:

  1. That dominance entailed, from the outset, the intentional lowering of standards, due to the semantic expansion of the term “intellectual” within the Gramscian context, which encompasses all individuals, regardless of their level of education or IQ, who can engage in ideological propaganda. This led to the promotion of samba singers, rock musicians, advertisers, and striptease performers to the status of “intellectuals,” ultimately resulting in the absurdity of appointing Gilberto Gil as the Minister of Culture.

  2. The very term “culture” lost all qualitative and pedagogical meaning, reducing itself to its anthropological usage as a neutral and general denomination for popular “forms of expression.” In this sense, according to that minister, the samba-de-roda from the Bahian Recôncavo region should be included among the great cultural treasures of humanity, along with Aristotle’s philosophy, Chartres Cathedral, and quantum mechanics. Everything is equal, nothing is better.

  3. More generally, any differentiation between the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest, was condemned as discriminatory and even racist. Thousands of books and university theses were produced to establish the prohibition of making distinctions as the foundation of Brazilian culture (which, however, continued to be used against “the right”).

  4. To legitimize the resulting state of total mental confusion, the principles of relativism and deconstructionism were introduced, which, under the pretext of promoting supra-logical thinking, destroyed even the students' capacity for elementary logical reasoning, replacing it with pretentious verbosity that gives them an illusion of superiority precisely when they sink to the depths of stupidity.

  5. Once the capacity for distinction was dampened, it became easy to disseminate throughout society the counter-values that shaped the Child and Adolescent Statute and other legal instruments that protect criminals against society, deliberately creating a state of violence, terror, and anomie in which we now live, and from which the left itself benefits as a propitious atmosphere for the trade of new saving proposals.

A political current capable of lowering a people’s intelligence and discernment to such a point will not hesitate to destroy the entire country in order to gain more power and carry out the plans conceived in semi-secret meetings with revolutionary movements and criminal organizations abroad.

The Brazilian left – all of it – is a band of ambitious scoundrels, amoral, Machiavellian, liars, and absolutely incapable of being held accountable for their actions before the tribunal of a conscience they don’t possess.

It is time for the country to withdraw the vote of confidence it once gave to these people in a moment of weakness manufactured by themselves.

Losing the Culture War78

“Culture is the new name for propaganda,” explained the Portuguese literary critic Fernando Alves Cristóvão. Well, when he said that, the name wasn’t really that new. It had been almost seventy years since the communists had reduced culture to an instrument of propaganda and manipulation, rejecting all its other uses and meanings as bourgeois superfluities punishable, eventually, by imprisonment. The novelty, in the 1990s, was that this concept had become universalized, becoming the usual rule in circles that would have previously disregarded it as a mere symptom of communist barbarism. The most visible expression of this phenomenon is the drastic change in the meaning of the term “intellectual,” now automatically attributed to anyone who contributes in writing to a political-ideological propaganda campaign, even if they do so in intellectually contemptible terms and with sloppy language.

The plan to place Mr. Lula in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, launched years ago by the late political scientist Raymundo Faoro, was not pursued, but it was already a visible sign that the elastically Gramscian conception of the term “intellectual” had become commonplace outside strict communist circles. Around the same time, Mr. William Lima da Silva, leader of the Red Command, for having written a memoir claiming that the real criminals were others, received the treatment of a respectable author at the Brazilian Press Association, while at Folha de São Paulo, journalist Marilene Felinto granted the status of a philosopher to the rapist and murderer Marcinho VP, who, if I am not mistaken, also had green eyes. The underlying syllogism merged Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci. The former said that criminals were revolutionaries. The latter said that revolutionaries were intellectuals. Therefore, criminals were intellectuals. The Brazilian Press Association and Folha were not formally communist institutions. They had simply allowed themselves to be dominated by the communist mentality to the point of obeying its commandments without consciously adhering to its political proposal.

But the worst came a few years later when reducing culture to propaganda began to seem natural and desirable in the eyes of conservatives – or “liberals,” as they are usually called in Brazil (yet another curious inversion in a republic where everything is upside down, like bananas). It so happened that Brazilian conservatism was essentially a creation of small business owners. These poor creatures, harassed by the tax authorities, labor laws, competition from multinational corporations, and the state’s belief that capitalists don’t eat children only because they prefer to sell them as sausages, were so preoccupied with their immediate survival that they barely had time to think about anything else. Their conservatism – or liberalism – was thus reduced to its most frugal, ascetic, and fleshless expression: the pure and simple defense of the free market, taken as if it were a reality in itself, separate from the civilizational and cultural conditions that make it possible.

The primacy of the economic, initially adopted out of practical urgency, ended up acquiring, through habit, the status of an axiomatic truth, from which the most absurd and dangerous conclusions were deduced. Perhaps the worst of them was the idea that economic progress is the best vaccine against social revolutions. The fact that a social revolution had never occurred in a declining economy did not shake the progressive optimism of those cheerful entrepreneurs who judged the general state of the nation by the balance sheet of their respective companies and considered themselves tremendously realistic for doing so. Nor did historical obviousness, already recognized by the Marxists themselves, dissuade them from their belief that the revolutionary class is not formed among proletarians or peasants, let alone among the destitute and unemployed, but among the affluent masses of the middle class nourished on communist doctrine in universities.

On the other hand, it happened that the liberals, while swelling with enthusiasm over the country’s modest economic recovery, were increasingly excluded from political representation. The 2002 presidential elections offered the electorate a choice of four leftist candidates, none of whom uttered a single word in favor of free enterprise throughout the campaign. In the subsequent years, the nominally liberal party – PFL – adapted to the circumstances by accepting its role as a mere supporting player of the light left, changed its name to resemble the American Democratic Party (the preferred party of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro), and did not even complain when it was declared by the reelected leftist president “a party without prospects of power.”

Condemned to political marginality but simultaneously anesthetized by the increasing signs of capitalist economic recovery in the country, the liberals clung even more to their economism, giving up the fight on other fronts, and sometimes even embracing the leftist program on all points without immediate economic relevance, such as gay rights, abortion, racial quotas, and militant anti-Christianity, in the crazy hope of competing with the left on its own turf, without realizing that by doing so they granted the adversary a monopoly on ideological propaganda and became docile instruments of the Gramscian “cultural revolution.”

Understandably, in these conditions, all the mental activity of the Brazilian “right” ended up being reduced to economic analyses and the propaganda of a single product – the free market – losing all relevance in the cultural debate and lowering themselves to the point of accepting as a “representative intellectual” any idiotic kid capable of saying a few words against state intervention in the market.

Ironically, during the same period, the left declined intellectually to the point of pure and simple barbarism. However, since the liberals were not interested in the cultural struggle, the left continued to enjoy the unaltered prestige of supreme intellectual authority in the country, without suffering any major setback since the publication of my book The Collective Imbecile (1996).

Never before, as in the last decades, had leftism been so intellectually weak: a massive attack on this flank would have shattered the leftist indoctrination machine in universities and the media, destroying the budding militancy and changing the course of subsequent elections. I tried a thousand times to show this to the liberals, but they only listened to those who spoke of GNP and investments. They locked themselves in their ivory tower of economism and remain there to this day, losing more ground to the leftists with each passing day and resigning themselves to their condition as auxiliary forces, destined to become increasingly unnecessary as the non-Petista left accumulates victories against the ruling party.

Outside the circles of official liberalism, I note with satisfaction some new initiatives aimed at forming a conservative and liberal intelligentsia capable of offering serious resistance to the “cultural revolution.” These initiatives come from students, isolated intellectuals, and have no support from either the “right-wing” parties or the business community. But it is upon them that the future of the country, if it exists at all, depends.

Rounding the Squares79

The premises of Marxist-pragmatism are senseless nonsense. If something is nothing in itself, how could we transform it into something else?

Among the innumerable rules that govern human stupidity, these two, opposite and complementary, are of special importance in elucidating the conduct of intellectuals, politicians, and opinion makers in general:

Rule #1 – if a person is convinced that squares are round, they will do everything possible to round them.

Rule #2 – if the same individual or a similar one has an interest in rounding the squares, they will swear that squares are round by nature.

Pragmatism, a particularly elegant form of stupidity, merged these rules into one and elevated them to the fundamental principle of knowledge: the concepts of things do not indicate what they are, but what we plan to do with them.

To justify this assertion, which sounded somewhat paradoxical and self-serving at first hearing, this charming philosophical school argued that thought is action, and therefore thinking about something is already doing something with it. All cognitive acts thus became a form of manipulating reality, which resulted in the suppression of all possibility of theoretical knowledge and the resolute affirmation that only practical knowledge exists.

While in America, Charles Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce delighted in these reflections so pleasing to men of industry, for whom everything that exists is nothing more than raw material for the production of something else that also will not exist except as a projection of what consumers intend to do with it, on the other side of the ocean, a citizen who hated men of industry was inventing some very similar ideas.

For Karl Marx, a science that claims to describe the world as it is is nothing more than a bourgeois illusion, born of the division of labor. Since the bourgeoisie remains in the office or at home, without dirtying their hands in direct struggle with industrial matter, they imagine that there is a difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. But the proletarians, who toil to execute the plans of the bourgeoisie, know that their daily efforts are the living embodiment of bourgeois ideas, which therefore have no independent existence and are only malicious plans to force the proletariat to do this or that. True science, Marx concluded, does not consist in knowing reality but in transforming it. The bourgeoisie already practiced this science, but they could not confess that they did: to preserve their self-image as decent people while sucking the blood of the proletariat, they had to deceive themselves by imagining that their worldview was pure theoretical contemplation, free from lesser interests. Hence, the bourgeois cult of “science” as a kind of secular religion, personified in the university clergy who, from the Enlightenment onwards, superimposed their authority on that of medieval priests and bishops.

It didn’t take long for these two similar currents of thought, coming from distant continents, to merge in an especially imaginative mind, that of the Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola, who argued that Marxism is a kind of pragmatism and vice versa. Labriola passed on this discovery to his disciple Antonio Gramsci, who turned it into a brilliant strategy of revolutionary propaganda: since things are not anything in themselves, they can be whatever the Party determines them to be. Consequently, there is no knowledge of truth, only a “collective construction” of the one true reality: the conquest of power, the ultimate glory of the revolutionary party.

Gramsci’s ideas penetrated so deeply into the soul of universal leftism that even the most naive militants, incapable of grasping any subtlety, end up being led by them in practice, through a kind of unconscious mimicry. It is with complete naturalness that these people speak all the time of the “construction of truth” and the “construction of memory,” without having the slightest suspicion that these turns of phrase actually imply the denial of all objective truth, the intent to transform facts rather than understand them.

In a paper published in 2002, advocating the creation of “business memory centers,” historian Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, with that touching candor, declared that the goal of these entities was "to accompany the permanent work of memory construction by selecting what should be valued and what should be forgotten."80

In 2007, at the First Congress of Former Political Prisoners and Persecuted Individuals, speaking in favor of what would become the ill-fated “Truth Commission,” prosecutor Marlon Weichert bravely advocated for the “construction of truth through the opening of archives.” When the proposal took shape, becoming evident to everyone that it involved investigating half of the crimes and burying the other half, no one remembered to observe that distorting selectivity was not a distortion of the original idea, but its literal and exact realization, perfectly consistent with the doctrines of Labriola and Gramsci. Not by coincidence, the same event at which the prosecutor presented his proposal ended with a moving tribute to the murderers Pedro Lobo and Carlos Lamarca, the latter being the noble holder of the merit of having smashed the head of a bound prisoner with the butt of his gun.

But it was not only in the most obviously militant circles that the spirit of Marxist pragmatism left its mark. In literature faculties, the belief that texts have no inherent meaning, that each reader “constructs their own interpretation” as they see fit, has become an unyielding clause of literary studies. If a student protests against some cretinous interpretation, claiming, “That’s not what the author intended to say,” a guaranteed zero awaits them. Authors don’t say anything, my child: you “construct” their works. In early childhood education, the long hegemony of “constructivist” doctrines by Jean Piaget, Emilia Ferrero, Paulo Freire, and others consecrated the general stupefaction of children as a great pedagogical achievement: don’t be surprised when your child comes home from school convinced that the Pythagorean theorem is an arbitrary cultural imposition, that Jesus Christ was gay, or that there are concentration camps in Israel. After all, reality is pure construction.

The premises of Marxist pragmatism are senseless nonsense. If something is nothing in itself, how could we transform it into something else? If concepts say nothing about reality, they cannot say anything about our knowledge of reality, which is also a reality. If our apprehension of things does not give us knowledge of what they are but only of what we plan to do with them, how could we know our own plan without inventing another plan about it, and another, and yet another, ad infinitum? Like so many intellectual fads, Marxist pragmatism is a technique of filling the void with emptiness.

But when an idiotic doctrine permeates an entire culture as it has permeated contemporary culture, idiocy itself becomes the founding premise of innumerable arguments in circulation, invested with automatic probative force, and any resistance offered to it takes on the appearance of extravagant and abominable heterodoxy.

Social Revolution81

Social revolution is not, as Marxists claim, the replacement of one “dominant class” with another. That is merely a figure of speech, a metonymy. At the end of a social revolution, the same groups or individuals may remain in power. This makes no difference whatsoever. Substantively, literally, social revolution is a radical change in the means of attaining wealth, prestige, and power. Those in control may continue to hold power, but through other avenues. For example, in medieval Europe, there were the following means of upward mobility (or maintaining one’s position): land ownership through conquest or inheritance, military profession, and a successful ecclesiastical career. Outside of these means, even if one had considerable wealth or was a genius, they would not reach the highest echelons of power. When modern nation-states were formed, kings needed money to create armies that could override local powers, as well as an administrative and legal-police bureaucracy that would give the central government control over the entire country. As a result, bankers and bureaucrats suddenly held more power than barons and cardinals. Does this mean a new “social class” came into power? No. In England, the old aristocratic class occupied positions in the new hierarchy and continued to rule. In France, they made way for a horde of social climbers who took their place. In both cases, there was a social revolution. Social revolution is not a change of dominant class; it is a change in the means of becoming (or remaining) the dominant class.

In Brazil, a clear, evident, manifest process of social revolution is taking place, and apparently, nobody, except for the leaders of the process—who, at least for now, have no interest in proclaiming it—seems to realize this.

Until a few years ago, making money in industry, commerce, or agriculture was a secure means of attaining power or at least influencing those in power. A successful military career had the same result. Being a scientist, technician, scholar, writer, or top-notch jurist yielded similar outcomes.

Now, all these traditional means of advancement are being replaced by a new one that dominates and controls them. This doesn’t mean they no longer work. They do, but as auxiliary instruments to the main means, which is rapidly becoming the only legitimate one, the only socially approved one. To acquire or preserve power and prestige in today’s Brazil, even to maintain some degree of freedom and security, you must belong to the ruling Party, one of its associates, or the influential groups orbiting around it. Let’s call this pool of organizations, for simplicity, the Scheme. In the most tolerant of hypotheses, you must negotiate with these people and yield. Yield to the extreme limit of degradation and humiliation. Then, they allow you to retain your place in society, but always as a provisional concession, never as an acquired right.

Suppose you are a judge. Until some time ago, being a judge guaranteed power, security, and freedom. Now, it depends on you ruling in accordance with the Scheme’s will. If you oppose it, you soon discover that pressure groups wield more power than a judicial ruling. Somehow, all the sentences come ready, signed by the Scheme. The others are inconsequential.

I won’t even mention the entrepreneurs. They can amass fortunes, but all their influence in power consists of trying to be useful to the Scheme, which tolerates them as a temporary evil.

And if you are an Army general, be thankful that the Scheme still guarantees you a little spot on the podium in exchange for the decorations you bestowed upon retired communists, terrorists, and notorious thieves.

A simple position in a “social movement” directorate grants more power than all of that combined. It places you above the laws, human rights, the Constitution, the Ten Commandments, and the demands of elementary arithmetic (in a country with 50 thousand homicides per year, are the deaths of two hundred homosexuals in the midst of this mass of victims not officially recorded as evidence of an anti-gay violence epidemic?).

The new means of rising and falling are already a reality; they are already the new social structure. Forty years of cultural revolution have anesthetized the population to accept it without a peep, without even a vague feeling of discomfort. That stage is over. The social revolution has already come, it is already here, and the only reaction from the people and the elites is to desperately seek a little spot in its shadow, the blessed protection of the Scheme.

Useless Memories82

A chronic weakness of liberal thought is that, in its stubborn and often heroic resistance to the growth of state power, it ends up turning a blind eye to the fact that revolutionary and dictatorial movements do not always concentrate power within the state, but sometimes outside of it. In fact, no movement could seize control of the state without first becoming more powerful than it, creating means of action capable of neutralizing and surpassing any adverse state interference, as well as, of course, maneuvering the state from the outside and using it for their own purposes. Any beginner studying Leninism knows this.

That the petista (referring to the Brazilian Workers' Party) and pro-petista left was destined to completely dominate the Brazilian state without encountering the slightest resistance was something that was clear to me at least since 1993, when the famous Congressional Investigative Commissions (CPIs) revealed our Parliament to be nothing more than a pet, docile to the injunctions of the mainstream media, fed and manipulated in turn by the all-present and all-knowing information service of the Workers' Party. It was in that year that I published “The New Era and the Cultural Revolution”, informing – those who did not wish for any information, thinking they already possessed all – that the total takeover of Brazil by the Workers' Party was just a matter of time. Among liberals, there were barely any who could even imagine that the Workers' Party might have any chance of electing a president. And everyone looked at me as if I were an escapee from Pinel (a mental institution) when I told them that when this happened, as it inevitably would, it would be at a time when the state was already completely dominated from within and without, the conquest of the federal government merely constituting the final officialization of a long-accomplished fact.

Meanwhile, the liberal intelligentsia exhausted all their neurons in the idealistic effort to defend the market economy and democratic freedom on a doctrinal level, two things that the left would not think to attack very seriously at that time, as they needed both to parasitize and continue growing until they were strong enough to subjugate them, deform them, and in due course (which is only now arriving) extinguish them.

There were even those who celebrated the proliferation of NGOs as a remarkable progress of liberal democracy, as it endorsed non-official channels of social and political action, strengthening civil society against the overwhelming ambitions of state gigantism.

I vainly warned these creatures that “civil society” was the terrain of choice for the penetration of revolutionary forces, determined to only launch their conquest of governing power when they were sure to control, through unofficial means, all possible means of shaping public opinion, as well as all channels of state and private funding for a multitude of larger and smaller revolutionary enterprises, sectorized and discreet enough so that their combined effect simulated a spontaneous transformation of popular mentality. The very dissemination of the term, insisted this insane columnist, reflected the growing and anonymous influence of Antonio Gramsci’s thought, by that time already the most studied and most cited author in all humanities and literature faculties in Brazil, only ignored by those who should have the most interest in defending themselves from the Gramscian revolution.

The first sign that anyone had paid any attention to me did not come until almost a decade later, and it did not come from the liberals. A memorable article by General José Fábrega, published in a small circulation newspaper, showed that there was still some intelligence awake among the military, which was confirmed in the following years with the two spectacular, technically perfect books by General Sérgio Augusto de Avelar Coutinho, “The Gramscian Revolution in the West” (Rio de Janeiro, Estandarte, 2002) and “Notebooks of Freedom” (Belo Horizonte, Inconfidência Group, 2004), unfortunately published too late to inspire any effective action against the project of hegemonic control of Brazilian society, by then already practically victorious. General Coutinho passed away on December 27, 2011, bitter to see the dizzying ease with which organized malice – that is what Gramsci’s strategy amounts to – had taken over the country. What saddened him most was that such an obvious, patent, well-explained domination process, and so easy to understand, could have been applied to an entire nation so anesthetically and imperceptibly that any moan of protest ended up sounding like an intolerable extravagance and almost a sign of madness. If in the rest of the world life imitates art, in Brazil it imitates the joke: our democracy strictly carried out, centuries late, Jonathan Swift’s boutade about the citizen who died but, not having been told so, continued to believe he was alive.

The Camouflage of Camouflage83

I repeat, for the umpteenth time, Georg Jellinek’s advice: in the study of society, politics, and History, the number one precaution is to distinguish between processes that arise from conscious action and those that result from the unforeseen confluence of various factors.

Throughout my life of studies, I have gathered here and there some precepts that, due to their utmost evidence and elucidating power, have become permanently incorporated into my faculties of perception and continue to guide the steps of my wavering ineptitude amidst the mists and smoke of contemporary confusion.

This is one of them.

The vice of wanting to reduce everything to “historical laws,” “structures,” “causes,” and other anonymous forces, suppressing conscious agents and any element of premeditation from the panorama, has nothing scientific except for the deceptive appearance that dazzles and fascinates crowds of students devoted to achieving, as the supreme goal in life, the perfect mimicry of pedantic discourse, without which one does not advance in an academic career.

This is as detrimental to the understanding of facts as the old Carlylean myth that made the entire historical universe the passive stage for the creative action of a few notable individuals, superhuman heroes, or monsters.

Jellinek hit the nail on the head when he transposed to the larger scenario of history and society a common-sense fact that even the dumbest and most inexperienced know how to apply in everyday existence, and which Ortega y Gasset later summarized in the exemplary formula: “La vida es lo que hacemos… y lo que nos pasa” (Life is what we do… and what happens to us). Our life results from the mixture of what we do and what comes to us from outside without any initiative on our part.

The unilateral cult of impersonal causes partly results from a positivist and Marxist prejudice that neither Comte nor Marx would ever subscribe to, and partly from an instinctive human desire to escape from any concrete personal responsibility (making criminals, for example, the defenseless and saintly victims of income inequality). But it also often results from the cunning of historical agents themselves, who hide behind anonymous forces to avoid being caught red-handed while implementing some plan that depends, for its success, on discretion and secrecy. There is nothing strange about these agents resorting to the infamous label of “conspiracy theory,” with that unmistakable expression of offended dignity that only the most consummate hypocrites can imitate to perfection, whenever someone accuses them of doing what they are doing. It is also understandable that no one has made a more reiterated and constant appeal to this camouflage than that movement which, from its origins, assumed clandestinity as an essential condition of its mode of action and slippery duplicity of dialectics as its official language. I am referring, of course, to the communist movement. And even more understandable is that this systematic self-occlusion has doubled in effectiveness since the moment Antonio Gramsci taught his comrades that lies and pretense were not only a tactical instrument, as obligatory and consecrated as it may be, but rather the intimate nature, essence, and key to the revolutionary process as a whole.

Yes, that is the truth. Stripped of the humanitarian adornments that beautify it ex post facto, and which, compared to the gross and crude brutality of its Soviet predecessors, give it an angelic appearance, Gramscism is nothing more, nothing less than the most complete, comprehensive, and meticulous systematization of deception as the essential method of political action—and it is on an even larger scale and in an even more radical sense than Machiavelli’s The Prince, which served as its remote inspiration and primitive sketch.

How else to describe, if not in these terms, a subtle strategy planned so that all people gradually become socialists without realizing it, and overnight awaken in the midst of a socialist dictatorship without the slightest idea of how, when, and by whose hands such a tremendous miracle was accomplished?

That is, without any imprecision or exaggeration, the definition and formula of Gramsci’s strategy for the conquest of absolute power by the communist movement.

But every worthy camouflage is twofold: it first conceals the object it wants to hide and then camouflages itself to go unnoticed. As soon as Antonio Gramsci’s works began to be published in 1947, the leftist intelligentsia hastened to classify them—and the conservative elite silently accepted them—as expressions of an original “Western Marxism,” non-dogmatic, marginal, and independent of the official trunk of the communist movement.

What happened was that, after being officially rejected until Stalin’s death in 1955, the Gramscian strategy was fully and enthusiastically adopted by the KGB and, since the early 1960s, applied throughout the West with the plethora of financial resources and action instruments available to what was, and still is under another name, the largest and most powerful organization of any kind that has ever existed in the world. In fact, Stalin himself only rejected the part of Gramscism that advocated the independence of national communist parties but did not refrain from using techniques of the “cultural revolution” from the 1930s, especially in the USA.

These two facts could have been foreseen in time with a little intelligence. However, even after being well proven by the documents of the Moscow Archives, there are still those who stubbornly ignore them.

Afterword: A Conversation with the Author Two Decades Later, by Silvio Grimaldo

Silvio Grimaldo – This year, The New Age and the Cultural Revolution celebrates two decades.84 Many things have happened in these twenty years. The most notable was the rise of the PT (Workers' Party) to power in 2002 – 8 years after the publication of the book – and its 12-year tenure in government. At the time of its publication, the book sounded like a warning, an alert. Today, ignored by those who could have prevented the worst, the book points to an accomplished fact. How do you assess the development of the Gramscian cultural revolution in Brazil over these two decades?

Olavo de Carvalho – The Cultural Revolution actually began much earlier, in the 1960s. With the 1964 coup, the left divided: one part went to guerrilla warfare, and another studied Antonio Gramsci and attempted to implement the Cultural Revolution. This second faction emerged victorious and had become a dominant force by around 1980, a time when Gramsci was the most cited author in academic papers in Brazil. I believe that subsequent generations are not so impregnated with conscious Gramscism, but rather with residual Gramscism. There are people who are clearly working towards the Cultural Revolution but do not recognize themselves as Gramscian agents. They are not lying; they simply do not know. This indicates that Brazil has already reached the stage described by Gramsci, where people are socialists without knowing it, and where the Party has the omnipresent and invisible authority of a categorical imperative. In other words, reasoning according to what the Communist Party determined 30 years ago now seems natural and inevitable. People no longer know whom they are obeying; in fact, they don’t even know they are following someone. They simply act according to what seems to them the natural course of things. It is at this point that Brazil has arrived, and in this respect, we can say that the Cultural Revolution is completely victorious in our country.

When I published this book, and later The Garden of Afflictions, there was not a dissenting voice in the entire national panorama. What I was saying was so strange that no one knew what to make of it. Everything seemed like the exotic opinion of a madman. Gradually, what I was saying proved to be true; things were really going in that direction, but the reaction was very slow. In the military sphere, for example, the first sign that someone had read and understood what I had said came only 8 years later, with an article by General José Fábrega in a military newspaper, followed by the publication of two very good books by General Sérgio Augusto de Avellar Coutinho.

At the time this book was published, the common view was that the PT represented no danger, that it would always remain between 15 and 20 percent of the electorate, with no chance of rising. For the well-thinkers, the newspaper owners, communism was extinct, and talking about it was flogging a dead horse. In fact, until the eve of the 2002 elections, people thought that way. Some time before the election, the Los Angeles Times brought together 12 experts on Brazilian affairs, some of them Americans, and they all assured that the PT would not win. At the same time, I was writing that the victory of the PT was not only certain but inevitable. I took into account all this preparatory work for the Cultural Revolution, which converged to the advantage of the PT. In other words, the cultural atmosphere was already completely dominated. It was difficult to find someone who could think outside the canons of the left, even without knowing they were left. And that is precisely the problem. The most terrible characteristic of Gramscism is that it is not indoctrination, it is not preaching; it is the preparation of more or less automatic and unconscious reactions through imitation, according to what Willi Münzenberg called “creation of rabbits.” The process is unconscious, and it was designed to be that way.

Silvio Grimaldo – Is it more a system of replacing habits than beliefs?

Olavo de Carvalho – Certainly. And this was further aided by the new education techniques that were implemented in Brazil, which are techniques of modifying behavior without changing opinions. The opinion, the judgment that a person forms about a particular situation, no longer matters. The only thing that matters is conduct. Once the conduct of an individual is determined in a certain direction, their ideas will follow their conduct. They will reason backward in defense of what they have done. Since this was massively adopted in Brazil – not directly influenced by Gramscism, but through international organizations and large foundations – the two things converged, and the entire country became, as Gramsci said, socialist without knowing it.

Silvio Grimaldo – The Gramscian revolutionary strategy is divided into two phases: the first is the preparation in the cultural field, as we have just seen, and the second is the effective seizure of power. Can we say that this second phase began to occur when the PT won the elections and implemented various strategies to control the State, such as the bloating and infiltration of the executive bureaucracy and the Mensalão scandal, which was an attempt to control the Congress, which was still reluctant to the PT? This, in my view, shows two important things about the Cultural Revolution in Brazil. Firstly, that the PT has cultural hegemony but does not have complete political control (or did not have it during Lula’s first term); secondly, that the Cultural Revolution does not stop even after the seizure of the State. How have the directions of the Cultural Revolution changed since the PT’s victory in 2002?

Olavo de Carvalho – Indeed, the Cultural Revolution does not stop, but there is a contradictory aspect to the process. For the Cultural Revolution to work, it needs to be almost imperceptible, acting through infiltration in schools, the press, and churches, and through the gradual alteration of values and symbols, without preaching socialism or talking about communism. However, once power is seized, actions need to be more explicit. So, in a way, the Cultural Revolution loses strength from the moment the Party dominates the State. It would be necessary to continue it, but at the same time, it is impossible because its objectives become increasingly explicit. However, please note that its objectives become increasingly explicit for those who know how to observe, as there are people who have not noticed any of what we are talking about until today.

Silvio Grimaldo – When a Party takes power and tries to advance an agenda such as the implementation of gender ideology in schools, can we say that this action is both a deepening of the Cultural Revolution and an expression of the Party’s political hegemony?

Olavo de Carvalho – There is obviously an institutionalization of the Cultural Revolution, but it is not possible to do this, to transform this agenda into laws, imperceptibly. For that, a public debate must be raised, but the previous technique was to circumvent the debate as if nothing was happening. Since the revolutionary action was disseminated throughout society without coming from above, it was possible for it to continue for many years without anyone being aware of what was happening. But from the moment the Party has power in its hands and needs to create laws and change the rules of the game, it necessarily creates a debate. In fact, since the beginning of the government, the PT has generated resistance and opposition within the ranks of the left itself. They were accustomed to doing everything slowly and subtly and suddenly found themselves faced with the imposition of power. Dissensions began to arise, such as Fernando Gabeira, Hélio Bicudo, Chico de Oliveira, etc.

Silvio Grimaldo – But in a way, doesn’t this deepen the Gramscian strategy, since in the public and intellectual debate, the left in power becomes the acceptable right, and the left outside the government comes to represent the true left, closing the political discussion around various leftist currents?

Olavo de Carvalho – The right and the left are replaced by the right of the left and the left of the left. This is a natural part of the process and already indicates the possession of hegemony because the debate is completely controlled. But this was already happening before the seizure of power, as in the 2002 election – and also in 2006 – all the candidates were leftists. What could be called the right was completely excluded from the process; it no longer existed. So, in a way, the objective of the Cultural Revolution was fully achieved just before the election that brought the PT to power.

Silvio Grimaldo – Lula himself enthusiastically admitted that, for the first time in history, we would have an election without a representative from the right…

Olavo de Carvalho – Yes, they started to come out of the closet. And you see, when he said that, no one found it strange, no one was shocked. The entire population was ready to accept an election in which only one political current was vying for power. It was already normal for all the candidates to be leftists. National politics became the internal dispute of the left. And it remains that way to this day.

Silvio Grimaldo – So, do you believe that we can still speak of a Cultural Revolution today?

Olavo de Carvalho – No. For the following reason: a Cultural Revolution is carried out through intellectuals, and the left no longer has them. Gramsci gives a very broad definition of an intellectual, which is anyone who works for Party propaganda. But stricto sensu intellectuals are also necessary, people who have media projection, such as Luiz Fernando Veríssimo, Arnaldo Jabor, etc. Public intellectuals, so to speak. And the fact is that the PT failed to renew its army of intellectuals. They are all decadent today. If we look at what was there before and compare it with Fernando Haddad, Vladimir Safatle, Leonardo Sakamoto, it is clear that there has been a precipitous decline. These people cannot be compared to the leftist intellectuals of the 1960s. At that time, there were Otto Maria Carpeaux, Leandro Konder, Ênio Silveira, etc. Emir Sader himself, who belongs to a generation prior to the current one, has declined greatly.

Since there has been no renewal of intellectuals, the left now has dominion over educational apparatuses but no longer has cultural leadership. No one has taken that leadership; the left simply fell, and no one took its place. There is a generation of young people who have emerged from my courses and who are occupying some positions, but they still do not have the relevance that the intellectuals of the 1960s had.

Silvio Grimaldo – Why has the left failed to recover culturally? Aren’t left-wing intellectuals necessary anymore for maintaining power?

Olavo de Carvalho – The decomposition of Marxist intellectuals is a global phenomenon. Today, the remaining Marxist intellectuals are people who are 80 or 90 years old. Some others are very peculiar types that nobody understands well, like Zizek or David Harvey. There are only two or three left, there is no longer that plethora of intellectuals as there was in the past. This happens due to the internal contradictions of the Marxist system itself. To what extent can an ideological machine recover after the embarrassment of its own crimes and failures? One, two, three times, but at some point, it exhausts itself. The fact that many people have left the left and become staunch anti-communists, like Stéphane Courtois, author of “The Black Book of Communism,” is a sign of the decomposition of Marxist intellectuals. There are many contradictions in Marxism, it is impossible not to see certain things. There will always be believers, of course, who continue to affirm it until the grave, who do not want to see the facts, like Eric Hobsbawm and Oscar Niemeyer, but they become only folkloric figures, without an organic function in the system of the Cultural Revolution. They become mere symbols.

In Brazil, the effects of this decomposition of Marxist intellectuals are noticeable. There is not a single Marxist intellectual today capable of sustaining a discussion for five minutes. What they do is close the debate around themselves but do not expose themselves to the adversary.

The left has conquered power in an external sense but has lost inspiration.

Silvio Grimaldo – Does this make the future of the Cultural Revolution uncertain because it requires the constant creation of myths, values, and unifying symbols?

Olavo de Carvalho – That’s why I say that there is no more Cultural Revolution. That’s over, the left no longer has the conditions to create those values.

Silvio Grimaldo – So, is the only remaining alternative the violent Leninist Revolution?

Olavo de Carvalho – That’s what the left will have to do, but accomplishing that is difficult, perhaps impossible. To impose a dictatorship, it is necessary to have an organized and docile police force, and the left does not have that. What exists are the state police forces, which are generally hostile to this policy. There is an attempt to unify the police under federal command, but it is only an attempt, and it does not mean that when they assume command, the police will be docile and allow themselves to be used to repress the ideological enemies of the government. It takes time to build such a police force. Everywhere there has been a revolution, the police have been recreated with new officers. Where there was a police chief, there was also a people’s commissioner to supervise them. In Brazil, there are no people for that.

That’s the problem. The left is the only political force that exists in Brazil, but this force is weak, it is not strong enough to promote profound changes as it desires. It is only in power due to the absolute lack of opposition. The left managed to destroy the competition, but it has a very precarious control over the course of things. What really remains is this predatory element, a blood-sucker, draining the country. That’s all they can do.

The situation is not like in Venezuela, where there is an armed Chavista/Madurista militancy ready to arrest and kill, and on the other side, an opposition ready to resist and die. In Brazil, there is neither one nor the other: on one side, the right is non-existent; on the other, the left is weak.

The left has the government but does not govern. They are only living off tricks and expedients, waiting for an opportunity to do something.

Silvio Grimaldo – Are they living off the inertia of the victory that occurred 10 years ago?

Olavo de Carvalho – Yes. It is an inertial movement. And I don’t believe they are capable of renewing themselves. In fact, the left is as incapable of renewal as the right is incapable of constituting itself. We can say that there are no longer any political forces in Brazil, only an administrative force in the government. There is no politics in Brazil, only a little internal discussion within the left, which wants to do something. Lula himself said, “We don’t know what kind of socialism we want.” They don’t know, and they will never know. In reality, they will not achieve any socialism, they will just continue parasitizing the weaknesses of the system and stealing like crazy.

Silvio Grimaldo – The Brazilian revolution clearly demonstrates the disintegrating and destructive aspect of the revolutionary movement, which is incapable of building something in place of the society it destroys.

Olavo de Carvalho – This is even more evident in Brazil. Strictly speaking, the government is not doing anything to implement socialism; its actions are only very timid attempts. What it is imposing is still only the residue of a radicalized Cultural Revolution: gayism, feminism, racialism, gender ideology, etc. But the government is not necessary to advance these agendas because international organizations already do it. So, practically the only political initiative seen in Brazil comes from international organizations. The government merely carries an agenda that is not its own.

The communist mentality of the 70s and 80s had nothing to do with this program. They jumped on the bandwagon because they thought it was advantageous and because it was a way to express their revolt against bourgeois society and against the Church. But it was secondary. Today, however, that is the only item on the agenda. In fact, it is a middle-class revolt that has nothing to do with the proletariat, much less the poor population.

Another phenomenon that occurred in Brazil was the “lumpenization” of the left. Nowadays, thanks to this type of agenda, which supersedes any economic order or even the idea of socialism, the concept of “the people” that the left has is the lumpenproletariat, that is, the criminals, prostitutes, addicts, traffickers, etc. It is this social stratum that the left defends today and on behalf of which it speaks. Even from an aesthetic point of view, the trend is for the middle class to imitate the habits of the lumpen, to dress like the lumpen, speak like the lumpen, etc. Marx was quite right when he said that the lumpen is not a revolutionary force, but it is certainly a force of decomposition. And what is observed in Brazil is the phenomenon of decomposition: financial, administrative, moral, cultural, etc. Brazil is a country that is falling apart before us. The rampant corruption that no one can stop, the magnificent purchase of consciences that turns the Supreme Federal Court into an office of the Party, these are just symptoms of moral decay.

Every revolution needs a certain amount of decomposition, but at a certain point, it needs to move, alchemically speaking, from mercury to sulfur, that is, from dissolution to fixation. But the left has no way to transition to fixation. Therefore, this decomposition will continue. And how far can we go? Well, I think they will turn the entire country into a brothel.

Silvio Grimaldo – Or will fixation come from external forces…

Olavo de Carvalho – Of course, that’s possible. Russia has its eye on Brazil. Military intervention is not possible, but it doesn’t cost Russia much to fill Brazil with agents. Professor Alexandre Duguin is always in Brazil, speaking at universities. His Eurasian proposal can become the new unifying myth of the national left, transcending the divisions between right and left and replacing them with Eurasia and the West. For Duguin, Eurasianism is so elastic that Brazil is in Eurasia. The division is not geographical but ideological—or mythological—therefore any country can be part of Eurasia.

Silvio Grimaldo – Speaking of Duguin and Eurasianism, we enter the second point I would like to hear about, which is the issue of the New Age. In the book, you analyze a work by Fritjof Capra, an author who passed through Brazil like a comet, shone for a few moments but was quickly forgotten, or at least never exerted a relevant influence on the intellectual scene. Capra was a fad, like all the others, short-lived. However, the New Age phenomenon has deep roots worldwide and has grown tremendously with the support of international organizations for proposals of global religions alternative to Christianity, as described, for example, in the books of Lee Penn,_85 Mons. Sanahuja,86 _and many others. How do you see the development of the New Age in Brazil in the last 20 years?

Olavo de Carvalho – The New Age was just one stage of a vast movement of de-Westernization and de-Christianization of culture, opening it to Eastern influences, which are valued not in themselves but in their corrosive elements. Curiously, behind the New Age movement is the Islamic hand. Islam did not directly commit to the movement but tried to control it from afar. The idea is that the individual follows the following trajectory: first, de-Christianize yourself. Then become a scientific atheist. At another moment, lose interest in that because, after all, scientism is something from the 19th century and already surpassed, and start to approach the Tao of Physics and similar things. Then the individual enters some occult organization and after becoming disillusioned with it, reaches the top. But what is the top? The top is Sufism, Islamic esotericism, which more or less controls this entire process from a distance through the discreet influence of the tariqas.

We can ask ourselves how to Islamize a person. Well, you can’t Islamize a typical Westerner overnight. You have to make him go through a series of processes of dissolution. The New Age is one of the components of mercury, a dissolving force. What comes next is Islam, which dresses the person in a jilbab, puts a turban on their head, and gives them a form, framing them.

When René Guénon starts his work in the West, he is against all occult organizations, but it is in them that he seeks his audience. He wanted to operate a transmutation, to pull all that dissolving force towards Islam. He and Fritjof Schuon did that.

What people see in the cultural scene, initially, has nothing to do with Islam. It takes decades to realize that there is an Islamic hand behind it.

Some time ago, Tony Blair made a statement saying that what is observed in the Middle East is the conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and the modern world. Many people think that is how it is, as there is a very clear contrast there between a society shaped by a very strict religious law that must be obeyed in its entirety and a society marked by democracy, freedom of the press, pluralism of ideas, etc. The thing is, these two things are not on the same level. Islam is truly a monobloc, despite its internal disagreements. The law that structures behavior in 28 countries is the same. It is never discussed, but everything is discussed in relation to it. The Quran is not up for discussion. On the other hand, in the Western world, there is the secular state, which abstracts from values and presents itself only as a formal rule, although this rule is clearly directed against the Christian root of civilization. So we cannot say that there is competition between equals, as it would be between Islam and Christianity, between two spiritual powers. What we have is a spiritual power on one side and, on the other, a system of self-dissolution, which is Western democracy.

Therefore, it is impossible to speak of competition between Islam and the modern world because it was the modern world that opened the doors to Islam since Islamism was one of the Eastern elements used to corrode Christianity. And Islam does indeed come with a far superior spiritual message than other Eastern traditions that do not have propaganda agents. You don’t see Buddhist or Hindu agents, for example. From the moment Muslims see themselves from the perspective of the transcendent unity of religions, they position themselves as the general managers of Eastern spirituality. Anything done to facilitate the entry of this Eastern spirituality into the West ends up favoring Muslims. So, the modern world that Tony Blair speaks of is not a competitor of Islam but its godfather. Even the British Royal Family protects Islam. Not to mention that nowadays there is a huge number of laws in Europe and the US that protect Islam and boycott Christianity. The modern world is nothing more than the self-destruction of Christianity and, therefore, it is vulnerable to any external spiritual influence. And the only organized anti-Christian force in the East is Islam.

Silvio Grimaldo – Now, does this process of spiritual crystallization managed by Islam not seem to have occurred yet in Brazil? Is the effect of the New Age still in its dissolving phase?

Olavo de Carvalho – Exactly. There hasn’t been an effective Islamic advance in Brazil yet, which is entirely normal since everything happens with delay in our country.

Silvio Grimaldo – And despite the crisis that marks our left-wing intellectualism, we see that it hasn’t made much progress in the New Age, in pseudo-spirituality, as one would expect.

Olavo de Carvalho – No. Left-wing intellectuals have clung more to the aspect of the sexual revolution. And that is ongoing in Brazil.

Silvio Grimaldo – But isn’t the sexual revolution an aspect of the New Age?

Olavo de Carvalho – Certainly. But it is a temporary aspect. The New Age enters with the dissolving force to ultimately Islamize everything. Islam is the sulfur that will give shape to that chaos. But in Brazil, although the process of dissolution is very intense, it has not yet reached the point where people despair and start wanting something else. In Brazil, the legalization of drugs will still come, the legalization of pedophilia, the adoption of new models of family with the simultaneous dissolution of family rights. This will go much deeper. The chaotic impulse of Brazilians is not yet satisfied.

At the time, I used the expression New Age because it was the aspect that things assumed then, it was the fashion of that moment. Today, a more generic designation would be needed, such as Orientalism or something similar, which is the deeper force behind the New Age or Islam itself.

Silvio Grimaldo – Regardless of the name we can give to the phenomenon, it is clear that it is an anti-Christian force. It seems to me that if the Catholic Church in Brazil had not disintegrated so much, the Cultural Revolution would not have as much strength, especially because one of the pillars of Gramscism is infiltration into the Church.

Olavo de Carvalho – Without a doubt. The New Age was a dissolving element and helped prepare consciences for the idea that evolved people are not Catholics or Christians but rather Buddhists, spiritualists, or syncretistic in some other way. Brazil has always had a syncretic tendency, so our culture was fertile ground for these things. Furthermore, Catholicism in Brazil has never been a profound institution. As Pope John Paul II said, Brazilians “are Christians in sentiment but not in faith.” Since colonial times, Catholicism has always been a superficial religion. Added to this is the highly sexualized aspect of Brazilian culture, which is inviting to all these programs of changing the family structure, implementing gender ideology, etc.

It is important to note the following: all the points of the Cultural Revolution concern morality and the creation of new habits. Economically speaking, no one has any proposals. This is because the communists have already concluded that complete nationalization of the means of production does not work. Arrangements need to be made, as in China. It is the same kind of arrangement that is established in Brazil, where the government and a handful of large business groups that live parasitically off the state are in control of the economy. This will not change. What can change is society and culture. Therefore, a deepening of the sexual revolution will certainly happen in Brazil. Everything will be definitively and aggressively carnivalized.

I don’t see how the direction of things can be changed in Brazil. The left cannot advance much, and it cannot retreat because there is no one to take its place. And from an economic point of view, they cannot do much either. So, since the revolution has stagnated economically, the left will go all out with the Cultural Revolution, now understood in the strictest sense of moral change, especially sexual morality. We can add to that the legalization of drugs, which will certainly come. Then we will have a country of drug addicts, pedophiles, and everything that comes with these changes. These are the only things the left can do today, and these are the only items on their agenda; it is only for these things that the left is currently fighting.

Silvio Grimaldo – In 1994, you were not aware of the existence of the São Paulo Forum, or at least of its purposes and strength. Today, the São Paulo Forum is the main revolutionary force on the continent, of which the Cultural Revolution is just one of the available strategies. How does the Forum alter the analysis of the Cultural Revolution?

Olavo de Carvalho – I became aware of the São Paulo Forum in the late 1990s, thanks to Dr. José Carlos Graça Wagner, who had a vast collection of documents about the organization. When I learned about these documents, I was astonished because until then I still saw the PT (Workers' Party) as a kind of labor party infiltrated by communists but not entirely involved in the international communist movement. When I discovered the São Paulo Forum, I realized that it was exactly the opposite. And when I saw that Lula himself was the founder of the Forum, in association with Fidel Castro, I realized that I had a very rosy view of Lula. He seemed to me like one of those leaders of the old PTB (Brazilian Labor Party), a union leader, a left-wing man, obviously, but not a communist.

When I say communist, I am not talking about ideology. Ideology only matters in the mind of someone who is capable of having an ideology, and Lula is not that person. Ideology is for those who have ideas. So when I say “being a communist,” I mean being within an integrated communist system and working for it, regardless of the individual’s convictions. I believe that Lula has no convictions; he just adapts to the demands of the movement. What matters, therefore, is to know which movement he belongs to. At the time I wrote The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, I only thought of Lula in terms of the PT, but later, the São Paulo Forum showed me that he was part of something much bigger, which was the revolutionary communist system in the continent, of which he became the leader, by delegation from Fidel Castro. He is not a proper leader, nor has he ever been; he never makes decisions. Lula is an agglutinating symbol. And he performs this function very well. His most notable characteristic is the absence of enemies. He says that his political ideal is Getúlio Vargas, who in turn said he had no enemy who could not be turned into a friend. Lula does this; he manages to calm people down and represent the whole. He never seeks confrontation with anyone and is more interested in his political survival. From this perspective, he is an artist. And it was thanks to this that he rose within the movement and symbolizes the unity of the national left. To perform this function as an agglutinating symbol, he had to give up being a leader in the positive sense, of being a man who decides and commands.

He did the same thing within the São Paulo Forum. Although he was the president of the Forum, he was not one of its most active members; he simply let others speak. And he was always seeking agreements, trying to bring everyone together despite their differences. Gilberto Carvalho and Marco Aurélio Garcia were much more active within the Forum than he was.

From then on, I began to understand Lula in a different way. He cannot be understood solely within the national framework, where he seems to be just an old labor leader. One must look at the mechanism to which he belongs, which is the mechanism of the continental revolution, where he occupies a considerable position.

Therefore, to understand the Brazilian revolutionary process, it is necessary to know the development of the São Paulo Forum, which operates not only through the Cultural Revolution. There is also a military proposal supported by drug trafficking. The organization and instrumentalization of banditry are fundamental elements of the Forum. Meanwhile, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) managed to dismantle all the other competing cartels and gained an absolute monopoly on cocaine trafficking in the continent. Local networks of drug traffickers are dismantled by national police apparatuses, but the FARC continues to monopolize drug trafficking. And since Brazil is one of the countries that consume the most cocaine, the FARC desperately needs us. Therefore, in Brazil, no one does anything against the FARC. No FARC member is arrested there, and when it does happen, the government itself takes care of releasing them. The FARC operates under the protection of the Brazilian government and other governments around it. We can say that the FARC is the main force of the São Paulo Forum, which in turn is the only political force that exists in Brazil. The entire Brazilian left is committed to it; they sign unanimous decisions, and no one disputes them. There has never been a division within the São Paulo Forum, which is impressive.

So, we have reached this point. We have a weak government that will not be able to make significant structural changes in the economy or Brazilian society, and for that reason, it insists only on the sexual revolution and gradually tries to build a police force to implement a dictatorship. But that will take a long time. The creation of an external military force, through multimillion-dollar loans to Cuba and Bolivia, that can militarily occupy Brazil will also take a long time. In the meantime, what the left will do is deepen the sexual revolution. And nothing else. The perspective for Brazil is total demoralization.

Silvio Grimaldo – Is there any way to reverse the situation, considering that now resistance requires, due to the situation itself, a continental articulation?

Olavo de Carvalho – You see, the situation we have is curious: the only force that exists, the left, is a weak force that is fighting against a nonexistent force. And obviously, the weak will defeat the nonexistent. In other words, it only has some strength due to a complete lack of resistance.

To organize a political force, it is necessary to first create leadership in society: in trade unions, neighborhood associations, schools, churches, etc. This requires organized activism, which the right does not have. In other words, there is no minimum social base to organize a right capable of resistance. Perhaps it would be possible to organize something based on churches if religious people were aware of what is needed, but they are not. Religious opposition, which does exist, is specific, as in the case of the campaign against abortion. And in that sense, it is very effective, actually. But there is no proposal for power because the only thing they want is for certain laws not to be approved. And if the right has no chance of organizing in Brazil, even less so internationally.

Silvio Grimaldo – What is needed, then, to create a political movement?

Olavo de Carvalho – The steps are as follows: initially, it is necessary to create a movement of intellectuals who intensely discuss the situation and create a kind of consensus diagnosis. In the second stage, it is necessary to raise funds to form activism. The third stage is the actual formation of activism. The fourth stage is penetration into society.

How long would it take to do all this? Twenty years.

Silvio Grimaldo – A political movement needs intellectuals, leaders, cadres, and activists. And the right has none of this.

Olavo de Carvalho – Exactly. It has none of this. We will hardly see a situation of social decline that is so obvious and clear. In a way, Brazil is crying out for foreign intervention. The country is ready to undergo complete cultural disfigurement, to be dissolved in some way.

Culturally, it is already dissolved. We see this dissolution even in the national language. Today, people are incapable of mastering their own language, and I am not talking about the inability of the masses, but of writers, journalists, and intellectuals in general. When the language ends, the national identity ends. Brazilian culture until the 1960s has become incomprehensible to subsequent generations; it appears as distant as Portuguese culture. We have lost the connection with our own cultural past.

In conclusion, what I see in Brazil is a dying person agitating against a ghost. The dying person is the left, and the ghost, which only exists in the mind of the dying person, is the right. Brazil is decomposing, and the only thing the left can do is deepen this decomposition.

Credits

Credits

The New Age and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci
Olavo de Carvalho
Published in Brazil
4th edition – July 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Olavo de Carvalho
Cover Image: Behemoth and Leviathan, engraving by William Blake

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International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

Carvalho, Olavo de

The New Age and the Cultural Revolution: Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci [electronic resource] / Olavo de Carvalho – Campinas, SP: VIDE Editorial, 2014.

eISBN: 978-85-67394-34-3

  1. Culture (Deterioration) 2. Intellectuals I. Olavo de Carvalho II. Title.

Library of Congress Classification – 306.01
305.553

Index for Systematic Cataloging

  1. Culture (Deterioration) – 306.01

  2. Intellectuals – 305.553

  1. Text read at the launch of The Collective Imbecile at Faculdade da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro, on August 22, 1996.↩

  2. Cf. Literary Genres: Their Metaphysical Foundations. In Symbolic Dialectics – Collected Studies. São Paulo. É Realizações, 2007.↩

  3. See José Arthur Gianotti, “Conversa com Richard Rorty,” Jornal do Brasil, May 26, 1994. It is at least strange that a man like Gianotti, so courageous in expressing political ideas even when they attract the anger of the high priests of the national left, takes such precautions when criticizing a vulnerable thought like Rorty’s. This may be explained by the chronic timidity of the University of São Paulo (USP), an intellectual inhibition that has become, in its fetishized version, the Brazilian caricature of the “rigor” taught by the early French founders of USP. The USP rigor is actually softness, a tremor of third-world jelly before the authority of fashionable idols—a Jungian compensation for audacity in the face of the spiritual legacy of the past. Even in its original European version, inherited from noble philosophical traditions, academic rigor often becomes inhibitory and serves as a communal refuge where the intellectually ill-equipped seek shelter from the dangers of solitary investigation—in other words, from the very exercise of philosophy. True philosophical rigor, on the contrary, is pure inner courage; it bends only to evidence and has nothing to do with reverential teenage (or colonial) fear of academic prestige of the day. With the rise of the São Paulo intelligentsia to the forefront of national life, the inversion of USP’s notion of rigor, which devotes itself to prestige while denying truth, threatens to infect Brazilian thought as a whole, sealing the death of intelligence in this part of the world. This is not directed against Gianotti, a capable and upright man, who only errs by admiring those who do not deserve it—or by pretending to admire, perhaps, since the inadvertently ironic sycophantic flourish is another trademark of the USP style, where it substitutes for academic politeness.↩

  4. O Imbecil Coletivo. Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras, São Paulo. É Realizações, 2006, which, together with this volume and O Jardim das Aflições, forms a trilogy dedicated to the study of Brazilian cultural pathology in the present phase of our history.↩

  5. One of them was Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Jornal do Brasil, November 11, 1993), a man who knows the left very well and who, for this reason, felt obliged to oppose them at the moment when he could have helped them the most. The other was Oliveiros da Silva Ferreira, who has been exploring the subject in various articles published in O Estado de São Paulo.↩

  6. The myth of the “Brazilian Revolution” has been an active component of the leftist pathos since the 1930s. “Destined for a great future, Brazil would be the third great revolution of this century. The first, the Soviet Union; the second, the People’s Republic of China; and the third, the People’s Democratic Republic of Brazil” (Luís Mir, A Revolução Impossível, São Paulo: Best Seller, 1994, p. 10).↩

  7. In this second edition, I made no omissions or alterations from the original, I simply corrected spelling errors, added this Preface, a few appendices, and appendices to the appendices, and many footnotes. The austere reader may find them complicating excrescences, but I like them precisely for that reason because they eliminate deceptive linearity from the text and give it that living aspect of a nervous network, of a vegetal structure, that makes a text a text.↩

  8. Currently, the Seminar is maintained online, with weekly classes broadcasted on the website www.seminariodefilosofia.org [Editor’s note].↩

  9. I limit myself to the study of strategy and, more briefly, some aspects of gnoseology, without touching for example on Gramscian sociology, which would deserve — not for its scientific value, but for the persuasive force of its hallucinating falsification of reality — a more attentive examination. I promise to do it in the book The Cannibal Anthropologist: The Misery of Social Sciences, to be released next year. I also could only mention from afar Gramsci’s aesthetic and literary conceptions, so influential to this day, but about which I do not intend to write anything ever, if the gods spare me this punishment. [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  10. Written in September 1993.↩

  11. Book I, chap. III.↩

  12. Translator’s note: Luke 17:1.↩

  13. Translator’s note: In the original Portuguese, both words are “céu”, and cannot be distinguished without explicitly making the distinction, as here.↩

  14. Translator’s note: Said literally in English.↩

  15. Having sent a copy of this chapter to Friar Betto before its publication in book form, I received from him a two-line response, which is a singular psychological document. It says: “Despite your reservations, the event [Editor’s Note: reception of Mr. Capra] was good for those who were there.” It must have been quite a trip, I imagine. But the distinguished friar did not understand me. Far from me to disparage the event itself – the organization of the program, the sound system, or the flavor of the snacks. What I said is that Mr. Capra’s philosophy is worthless, implying that celebrating it at an intellectual congress is a waste of money; and the better the event, the more lamentable the waste. However, if the letter writer intended to argue that the quality of the event is an argument in favor of Mr. Capra, it would be like saying that the price of a candle proves the quality of the deceased. Furthermore, what opinion could one have of a thinker who argues in favor of a philosophy by claiming that it gives him the opportunity to frequent pleasant places? [Note from the 2nd edition]↩

  16. Cf. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, book 10.↩

  17. See, for example, Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, New York, 1970, or Titus Burckhardt, Scienza Moderna e Sagezza Tradizionale, Torino, 1968.↩

  18. For Karl Marx, those who grasp the meaning of the movement of History and represent the “progressive forces” are ipso facto freed from any duty with the “abstract morality” of the bourgeoisie; their only duty is to accelerate historical becoming towards socialism, regardless of the means. Based on this principle, Lenin codified party morality, where the only duty is to serve the party. This morality, in turn, gave rise to Soviet law, which placed above basic human rights the duties to the revolutionary state. Denouncing corrupt or traitors, for example, was a basic obligation of the citizen in the Soviet Union. But it’s not only in theory that communism is immoral. In the socialist state, everyone is a public servant, and this is enough for corruption to become institutional. In the Soviet Union, nobody could get a document or fix a telephone line without bribes: when socializing the economy, corruption is socialized. Dishonesty descends from the ruling layers to corrupt the whole people. The same happened in China, a country that also distinguished itself as the largest distributor of narcotics on this planet. The justification at the time was that drugs would weaken the “bourgeois youth” and facilitate the advance of socialism, thus being beneficial to human progress. Drugs only became a problem of global scale thanks to Chinese communism, which thereby became guilty of a crime of genocide for which, to this day, no one has had the courage to accuse it.

    Still according to communist morality, people deeply attached to bourgeois ideals are incurable sick, and should therefore be isolated or exterminated. Sixty million people were killed in the Soviet Union in the name of rebuilding culture and personality. In Cambodia, genocide was adopted as a normal and legitimate procedure.

    It was the communists who, based on Pavlov’s discoveries, developed the system of brainwashing, to depersonalize prisoners and lead them to confess crimes they had not committed.

    It was also communism that instituted the system of breaking international agreements, peace treaties, and commercial commitments without prior notice, institutionalizing gangsterism as a standard of diplomatic conduct in the world, later copied by Hitler. Concentration and extermination camps are also a communist invention copied by Nazism.

    The communist government of the USSR created the largest internal espionage system in human history, the KGB, and through it became the first essentially police government in the world.

    Communism was also the first regime to establish systematic lying as a standard of public education on a continental scale, and the falsification of science as a means of opinion control.

    That all this can be a huge web of coincidences, that there is no intrinsic connection between all these horrors and socialist ideology, is just another lie propagated by activist intellectuals whose Marxist training has made them forever cynical, hypocritical, and incapable of any moral feeling.

    The intense participation of Marxist intellectuals in the campaign for “Ethics in Politics” is a sure sign that this campaign will not moralize politics, but will simply politicize ethics, making it a servant of intrinsically immoral objectives. Whoever lives, will see [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  19. A characteristic example of the mutation of the moral scale is the campaign against AIDS. It is more than evident that sexual liberation promotes the spread of this disease. However, journalists and cultural agitators around the world are leading people to believe that moral conservatism, particularly Catholic, is to blame for the spread of AIDS, insofar as it opposes the distribution of condoms. Making a disastrous effect of sexual liberation an argument against conservative morality is a sophistical trick that would only occur to entirely perverse minds. Liberationists thus give a horrendous example of moral insensitivity, of cynical hypocrisy. Hiding their own faults behind the accusation launched at an innocent is one of the lowest behaviors one can conceive. On the other hand, from a purely practical point of view, hoping in the power of condoms is nonsense, to say the least. Along with it comes the refusal to see the share of reason that religious people have in this matter. What is the AIDS rate among practicing Catholics, evangelicals, Buddhist monks, orthodox Jews, devout Muslims? It’s practically nil. A good moralist campaign, however unpleasant it might be (and it would be for me too, as I am personally more for liberation), would do more to contain the advance of AIDS than the distribution of trillions of condoms. At this point in history, any moralist campaign, however silly it may seem to us, is a praiseworthy endeavor, a contribution to the salvation of the human species. If tomorrow or the day after the population of Brazil adheres en masse to the Pentecostals, to Bishop Macedo or to the Charismatic Renewal, AIDS will be defeated among us. This is an obviousness that only intellectuals do not see [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  20. Do you want a moral portrait of Antonio Gramsci? You can find it in one of the fables that, from prison, he sent to be read to his daughter:

    “While a boy slept, a rat drank the milk his mother had prepared for him. When the boy woke up, he started to cry because he couldn’t find the milk; his mother, on the other hand, also cries. The rat has remorse, bangs its head against the wall, but finally realizes that it’s of no use. Then, it runs to the goat to get more milk. But the goat tells the rat that it will only give it milk if it has grass to eat. So, the rat goes to the field, but the field is arid and can’t give grass if it’s not watered first. The rat goes to the spring, but it has been destroyed by the war and the water is lost; the mason needs to repair the spring. The mason needs stones, which the rat goes to fetch from a mountain, but the mountain has been entirely deforested by speculators. The rat tells the whole story and promises that the boy, when he grows up, will plant new trees on the mountain. And so the mountain will give the stones, the mason will rebuild the spring, the spring will give the water, the field will give the grass, the goat will provide the milk, and finally, the boy will be able to eat and will cry no more” (Laurana Lajolo, Antonio Gramsci. A Life, trans. Carlos Nelson Coutinho, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1982).

    Fables have always been, over time, a deposit of symbols carrying spiritual teaching. Through them, the child had access to the knowledge of higher human possibilities, and this knowledge, all the more powerful because it was crystallized in a magical and allusive language, was enough to protect their soul from total immersion in the sterilizing banality of the adult environment. They thus represented the thread of continuity of the purest core of the human soul amid the alienating agitation of “History”.

    Gramsci manages here to invert the function of the fable, turning it into a means of teaching the child, with literal realism, the process of capitalist production – from raw material to commercialization – and to inoculate in them, in one fell swoop, hatred for the damned speculators and hope in the future socialist utopia, where “everything will be more beautiful”.

    What Gramsci did with his own daughter, why wouldn’t he do with other people’s children? Communist preaching must hit the brains while they are still tender and defenseless, and, by closing their access to any conception of spiritual order, it forever locks them within the iron circle of “historical” mundanity (see below, chap. III).

    Gramsci reveals here the pettiness of his conception of the world, where the economy is not only the engine of History, but the final horizon of the human.

    That such a character can be the object of sentimentalistic cult among activists, shows that communist ideology carries within its bosom a perversion of feelings, a mutilation of the human soul. It takes a lot of agitprop to make Gramsci a character worthy of admiration. But among leftist activists I have seen people capable of uttering all sorts of blasphemies against other people’s religion having tremors of religious emotion before the holy name of Antonio Gramsci. This pseudo-religious sentimentality is not an excess of zeal: it is the very essence of Gramscianism, which beatifies the mundane to suppress and pervert the religious impulse and transform it into partisan devotion. Want to see what happens? Narrating Gramsci’s death, the hagiographer Laurana Lajolo (op. cit., p. 148) ends up talking about the notebooks “in which Antonio Gramsci had deposited, in a secular and historicist sense, the immortality of his soul, the possibility of intellectual survival in history”. Only a die-hard Gramscian is incapable of seeing the ridiculousness of theologizing literary fame to this extent. If the idea were valid, the immortals of the Academy would not figuratively be immortal, but literally – and our prayers for eternal life should not be directed to Jesus Christ, but to Mr. Josué Montello [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  21. The phenomenon of pseudo-intellectualism is one of the most striking features of the so-called Third World, and it is this, not the proletariat or the hungry masses, that forms the social base of revolutionary movements. Eric Hoffer, who examined the subject more seriously than anyone else, explains this phenomenon by the peculiar conditions in which, in this part of the globe, the modernizing reform undertaken by Western powers took place, leading to the breakdown of the communal-patriarchal way of life. Writing in the early 1950s, and specifically mentioning Asia, he speaks in terms that accurately apply to Brazil today: "Throughout Asia, before the advent of Western influence, the individual was integrated into a more or less cohesive group—the patriarchal family, clan, or tribe. From birth to death, one felt part of an eternal and continuous whole. One never felt alone, never felt lost, never saw oneself as a floating piece of life in an eternity of nothingness. Western influence [...] destroyed and eroded the traditional way of life. The result was not emancipation, but isolation and helplessness. An immature individual was torn away from the warmth and security of collective existence and left orphaned in a cold world.

    "The newly emerged individual can achieve some degree of stability [...] only when abundant opportunities for self-assertion or self-realization are offered to them. Only then can they acquire self-confidence and self-esteem [...]. When self-confidence and self-esteem seem unattainable, the developing individual becomes a highly explosive entity. They try to gain an impression of confidence and value by embracing some absolute truth and identifying themselves with the spectacular acts of a leader or some collective body—whether it be a nation, a congregation, a party, or a mass movement.

    "A rare constellation of circumstances is necessary for the transition from communal to individual existence to proceed without being diverted or reversed by catastrophic complications. [...] The emerging individual in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages saw breathtaking panoramas of new continents, new trade routes, new knowledge. The air was filled with new expectations, and there was a sense that the individual alone was capable of any undertaking. The change [...] produced an explosion of vitality [...].

    "This exceptional combination of circumstances was not present in Asia. There, instead of being stimulated by dazzling prospects and unprecedented opportunities, [the individual] found themselves facing a stagnant, debilitated, and extraordinarily poor life. It is a world where human life is the most abundant and cheap thing. Furthermore, it is an illiterate world. [...]

    "The educated minority is thus prevented from acquiring a sense of usefulness and value by participating in the world of work and is condemned to a life of chattering pseudo-intellectuals full of pretense.

    "The Asian extremist today is generally a man of some education who abhors manual labor and harbors a deadly hatred for the social order that denies him a commanding position. Every student, every low-ranking clerk and official feels like a chosen one. It is this verbose and futile people who set the tone in Asia. Living sterile and useless lives, they lack self-confidence and self-respect, and yearn for the illusion of weight and importance.

    “It is primarily to these pseudo-intellectuals that communist Russia directs its appeal. It brings them the promise of becoming members of a ruling elite, the prospect of taking action in the historical process, and with their doctrinal prattle, it provides them with a sense of weight and depth.” (Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1952; Brazilian translation by Sylvia Jatobá, O Intelectual e as Massas, Rio, Lidador, 1969, pp. 16 ff.) It is an exact description of the leadership of the Workers' Party. [Note from the 2nd edition.] [Translator’s note: I was not able to find the original text, so I simply translated the Portuguese translation back into English, which might not correspond to the original text’s wording.]↩

  22. The proposal by the Workers' Party (PT) to reward citizens who report cases of corruption would be repelled with horror if presented a few years ago when corruption was no less but the moral sentiments of the Brazilian population still retained some traces of normality because they had not yet been corrupted by the “Ethics Campaign.” Today, it is accepted with applause by those who do not perceive in it what it truly is: the establishment of a police state in the name of morality, the corruption of all human relations through the universalization of suspicion, the encouragement of spying on everyone by everyone. In order for the state not to lose money, it will be necessary for all Brazilians to lose their dignity and self-respect, becoming rewarded informers [footnote from the 2nd edition].↩

  23. Written for the 2nd edition.↩

  24. Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left, Harlow (Essex), Longman, 1985 [2nd edition note].↩

  25. Alfredo Sáenz, S.J., “La estratégia ateísta de Antonio Gramsci,” in Ateísmo y Vigencia del Pensamiento Católico. Actas del Cuarto Congreso Catolico Argentino de Filosofía, Córdoba, Asociación Católica Interamericana de Filosofía, 1988, pp. 355-366. [2nd edition note].↩

  26. “A revolução passiva,” O Globo, June 28, 1994.↩

  27. There are thinkers with whom one disagrees with the utmost respect. Among Marxists, this is the case for me with Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, or even Lukács. But as you may have noticed, I cannot feel the slightest respect for Gramsci because he respects nothing and behaves towards two millennia of civilization with the impudence of the ignorant. I think it is foolish to show greater reverence to any writer than the reverence he shows to Moses, Jesus Christ, or the Virgin Mary. But the cult-like atmosphere surrounding the name of Antonio Gramsci is so zealous that it unconsciously inhibits even the best minds, preventing them from arriving at an objective and critical understanding of Gramsci’s thought [2nd edition note].↩

  28. Russell Chandler, Compreendendo a Nova Era, trans. João Marques Bendes, São Paulo: Bom Pastor, 1993, p. 47.↩

  29. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1993.↩

  30. Ibid., p. 197.↩

  31. Ibid., p. 51.↩

  32. Ibid., p. 67.↩

  33. Ibid., p. 44.↩

  34. Ibid., p. 70.↩

  35. Ibid., p. 77-78, emphasis added.↩

  36. In writing this Appendix, I did not intend to positively diagnose the intention with which the militants taught guerrilla warfare to the criminals; I just wanted to remove, as absurd, the hypothesis of absence of intention. Some readers later asked me for positive conclusions, which I was not and am not in a position to offer, since they can only be obtained through a historical and documented investigation, which surpasses my scope and resources. As a mere hypothesis, note well, and without any pretense of being right, I conjecture however that there may have been, among the leftist militants, a duplicity or obscurity of intentions — some explicitly proposing the integration of banditry into the class struggle, others rejecting it as unfeasible but desiring it at heart and, ultimately, collaborating with it more or less blindly. The subsequent refusal to admit the intention would then arise, not so much as a conscious lie but as a clear case of false consciousness, so common among the militants of a false cause. This, of course, would not diminish in any way the moral guilt of the left as a whole, but perhaps, at least in part, that of its members individually considered. And there would be no great novelty here, since for a century communism has lived by leading good men to compact with evil, corrupting them through the appeal of group loyalty. But all of this, I stress, is mere hypothesis. What is certain is that some intention existed, and it was an intention to do precisely what was done [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  37. The myths and illusions of the right would give a much thicker volume than this one. They have already been inventoried and exhaustively dissected, over three decades, by an army of leftist researchers armed with the best cutting-edge diagnostic tools, and I am not willing to beat a dead horse. Leftists who read this book will now see how good it feels to be probed, turned inside out, to have their most hidden intentions displayed in public. What they did to the right was fair and deserved, but they too deserve their share of compulsory moral striptease, which I provide here in even modest doses [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  38. Is it strange that people capable of this kind of cunning manipulation tend to a paranoically conspiratorial view of political life, seeing everywhere — projectively, as Dr. Freud would say — hidden plots and “parallel governments”? If there is a secret power in this country, it is the left, in fact, who exercises it, through Gramscian hegemony, deceiving public opinion to lead this country from crisis to crisis and from astonishment to astonishment. The use and abuse of political espionage, the control of the flow of information, the hidden control over the imagination of the masses are, by definition, the exercise of a secret power, which today counts on the services of highly trained professionals in information and counter-information, such as Deputy José Dirceu, for example.↩

  39. Above all, the bourgeoisie that can profit greatly from this transition is the foreign bourgeoisie with business interests in the country. Of course, the money will leave with them. Read Armand Hammer, “A Capitalist in Moscow,” trans. Alberto Magno de Queiroz and Jusmar Gomes, São Paulo, Best-Seller, 1989. With what he earned during the NEP, the American Hammer, a friend of Lenin’s, founded Occidental Petroleum, which became the 12th largest industrial complex in the United States. It is extremely naive to believe that the PT government will not be able to join hands with foreign capital: the fight of the PT is against the local ruling class, and one of the objects in dispute is precisely foreign support. The days of the old nationalist left, the alliance between communists and the “national bourgeoisie” against imperialism, are long gone. The international situation is different, and the leaders of the PT are not nationalists: they are simply communists. In order to take power, they will not hesitate to form an alliance with international capital against the local bourgeoisie, reversing the old formula. It is obvious that they are at least trying [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  40. Just as I am sending this second edition to print, the July 1994 issue of “Interview” magazine begins a campaign for the release of “Professor” William Lima da Silva. The chic left-wing intelligentsia is fertile in producing false “popular heroes” when it suits them. But if criminals of the “Professor’s” ilk were as beloved by the people as they would have us believe, the Army would not be so well-received when it goes up into the favelas [note from the 2nd edition].↩

  41. Analysts of the PT phenomenon all fall into elementary errors. The first is to try to understand the party by its program and not by its current practice. The most primitive common sense indicates that one knows a man less by his declared intentions than by his effective behavior. The PT’s program, the result of a thousand and one agreements between conflicting tendencies, reveals less about this party than its organization and its mode of action. The program can be the same as that of any socialist or social-democratic party in the world, and even be milder at certain points. But the PT’s organization is not that of an electoral party, made to enter and exit power at the normal rhythm of election results, but rather that of a revolutionary party, built to take power. An electoral party does not need cells organized in companies, it does not need to infiltrate the offices of opponents, it does not need to spy, it does not need to support paramilitary movements, it does not need to sabotage the administration by encouraging the hostility of armed police against the government. If it does any of these things, it will automatically be outside the democratic legality that constitutes it as a party. But these procedures, abnormal in a normal party, are the norm for revolutionary parties, hostile to any rotation of power and prepared to install themselves in it once and for all. Probably the majority of PT militants are not at all aware of this difference, and in fact do not need to be to docilely collaborate with the purposes of a ruling elite that knows what it wants and that, knowing it, does not declare it. The militants are to the elite as the Mensheviks were in Russia for the Bolsheviks.

    The second mistake is to suppose that the plurality of conflicting currents within the PT weakens it in some way. Only democratic and constitutional socialist parties, made to compete with others in a system of power rotation, as well as communist parties already installed in power and busy unifying a nation under the banner of a single doctrine, need doctrinal unity. A revolutionary party struggling for power operates exactly the opposite: it needs the plurality of tendencies, partly to take advantage of the confusion, partly to widen its margin of alliances until the taking of power, when the dissidents will then be banned and a monolithic unity will be installed.

    A third mistake is to look for signs of financial corruption to attack the PT in the same way it attacks its opponents. Nonsense. Financial corruption is characteristic of those in power, and the PT has never been. The PT’s corruption is not financial: it is political, moral, and psychological corruption. It consists of perverting to the core the means of political and even cultural action, the criteria for judgment, and the moral consciousness of individuals and the masses. If no one among their opponents perceives this, it’s because they are also people insensitive to any moral demand outside the routine canons of commercial ethics. In a way, they deserve the beating they are taking.

    If, seeing that I speak ill of both sides, they now ask me what I propose, I say nothing. Only, if it were permissible to dream, I would not dream of either the permanence of the oligarchy in power or the victory of the PT as it presents itself today. I would dream of a moral reform of the PT itself, which, renouncing the revolutionary purpose of “taking power” and any coup d’etat or revolutionary method of action, could transform itself into the great socialist party that, in a future and ideal Brazilian democracy, would alternate in power with a right-wing party, each one compensating and correcting the other’s errors. If there is anything that the history of democracies teaches us, it is this: it is good that there is a left, it is good that there is a right, and it is not good that one of the two definitively remove the other from power. All of this is simple, practical, and truthful, that is: in Brazil, it does not work.↩

  42. Published in Jornal do Brasil on December 26, 1994 and reproduced in The Collective Imbecile, Rio de Janeiro, Faculdade da Cidade Editora, 1997. [Translator’s note: The original title, “Bandidos & Letrados”, has the effect of literally meaning “Bandits and the Learned” but sounding like “Unlearned Bandits” when spoken aloud.]↩

  43. The rappers arrested in São Paulo on November 27 for inciting violence sang: “I don’t trust the police, fucking race.” It is the culmination of six decades of anti-police culture, which had another memorable moment with “Call the thief” by Chico Buarque. But after Gabriel o Pensador was applauded by the intelligentsia for “artistically” expressing his desire to kill a President of the Republic, what more can be expected? According to the former Attorney General, Saulo Ramos, there is no crime of incitement to violence “in artistic works”. But does it make sense to demand good services, integrity, and patriotism from a professional class whose constant and systematic detraction has already been incorporated into the national culture, under the protection of the State? Doesn’t this constitute a discriminatory violation of a fundamental right, in clear violation of Art. 5, § XLI of the Federal Constitution? If the rap lyrics do not typify the crime of incitement to violence, they are a clear apology for prejudice. Why is it not a crime to call an entire professional category a “fucking race,” if it is a crime to use the same epithet against Jews or blacks? Is the racial bond more sacrosanct or worthy of official protection than the community of profession, even when it is a category of state servers? Another thing: is any crap put into music an “artistic work”? Anyone familiar with the nature of at least eighty percent of popular music, which is more advertising and commercial than artistic, understands that the term “art” has only served as a free pass for the practice of crime. The people, in any case, have already judged the rappers: they stoned them.↩

  44. The loss of the sense of the connection between intention and guilt is a grave symptom of personality pathology. However, I saw on TV Record (program “25th Hour” on November 28th) Deputy Irede Cardoso defending the legalization of abortion under the argument that when it occurs due to natural causes, it is not a crime. Therefore, in Her Excellency’s opinion, it is an odious discrimination to punish it only when performed at the woman’s free will—a reasoning that, although Her Excellency does not realize, applies verbatim to death in general. I consider it truly serious that there are people willing to seriously argue with someone capable of saying such a thing, which can only be answered with a strong dose of trifluoperazine.↩

  45. A year after the publication of this article, I see that it somewhat inhibited the apologia of banditry, but it did not completely eliminate the prejudices on which it is based. In an interview in the yellow pages of “Veja” in November 1995, Delegate Hélio Luz, a person far from any conscious complicity with anything illicit, falls into a scandalous contradiction when describing the present situation in Rio de Janeiro, precisely because his view is distorted by the bias of a class prejudice. On one hand, he affirms that the biggest problem of the Rio de Janeiro police is that the criminals have better and more numerous weapons than the police officers; on the other hand, the priority in combating crime is not direct confrontation with the armed gangs but the investigation of prominent figures, the high-class men who finance organized crime. Now, an individual with a head full of criminal intentions but armed only with a checkbook represents nothing more than a virtual and long-term danger: to realize their intentions, they must contact, recruit, equip, and train a squad of petty criminals, which cannot be done in two days. Moreover, to complicate matters, they have to do all this indirectly, through intermediaries, to maintain their respectable identity hidden. Those who are out on the streets robbing and killing, those who pose an immediate danger to the population, are petty criminals armed with grenades and machine guns, not the white-collar individuals who hired them ten or twelve years ago. Second, it is absolutely impossible for gangs in the employ of some rich man not to have, after so long in the profession, acquired financial autonomy to dispense with their former employers and operate on their own. Third, if the police arrest a white-collar criminal, the petty criminals who worked for them will immediately seek employment with another crime entrepreneur—exactly as the Mafia thugs would change families in case of the death or imprisonment of their boss—or they establish themselves independently, so that once the upper classes are cleansed, the life of the street people will continue to be hell. There is in Delegate Luz’s reasoning the typical confusion of a man with a Marxist background between causes and facts, between the social roots of crime and crime itself. Based on this confusion, he believes that the primary mission of authority is to eliminate the remote causes of crime, rather than combating actual criminality. Now, I ask: if a ferocious dog bares its teeth and attacks Delegate Luz, what is the most urgent reaction at that moment: to subdue the dog or fine the owner? And if the streets are infested with rabid dogs, what can we say about a police force that, instead of tying them up, first investigates who their owners are? Banditry is not a structure, a monarchical institution in which, when the head is cut off, the entire body collapses—it is a chaotic and protean being, capable of instantly reorganizing itself in millions of different ways, through millions of unforeseen artifices. Therefore, it is utopian to attempt to eradicate it en masse by attacking only the command centers—it must be fought retail, criminal by criminal, street by street, bullet by bullet. Here it is exactly like certain diseases that, once established, can no longer be attacked at their deep causes before eliminating their more immediate and dangerous effects and symptoms. The doctor who, faced with a patient with diarrhea caused by poor diet, tried to remove the causes first by feeding the patient before eliminating the immediate symptom would achieve only one sure result: the patient’s death.

    On the other hand, only the most foolish demagogy can pretend to eliminate banditry through marches and protests, as if robbers and kidnappers were white-collar individuals concerned with their respectable image. All of this reveals an obstinate refusal to address the problem of banditry on the level on which it exists—which is obviously the police-military sphere—and an obsessive desire to view it through a political bias, a territory where our intelligentsia feels safer but is far from where the problem lies.↩

  46. The evil that is legitimized under the claim of fighting for a just society is the very essence of socialist morality. Those who want to know more about it should read “The Demons” by Dostoevsky, who discovered the nature of this perversion when it was still in its infancy.↩

  47. See Reinhold Niebuhr, “Moral Man and Immoral Society. A Study in Ethics and Politics,” New York, Scribner’s, 1960 (1st ed., 1932).↩

  48. Cf. the document cited in William Waack, “Camaradas. Nos arquivos de Moscou. História secreta da Revolução Brasileira de 1935,” São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1993, p. 55-56.↩

  49. A famous episode of this epic had the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade as its hero. As the secretary of the National Congress of Writers, he had to defend the minutes of the meeting with kicks to prevent them from being stolen by the communists interested in falsifying the results of the elections for the ABDE.↩

  50. Writer Antônio Callado, upon reading these lines, had an outburst of anger and wrote to JB (newspaper) protesting against the publication of my article, in which I pointed out three infamous sins: 1st, being signed by an illustrious unknown; 2nd, making an error in the qualification of the stolen objects, which were not actually paintings but optical instruments of little value; 3rd, not understanding the ironic meaning of Proudhon’s quote. Disregarding the first accusation, which was too foolish, I responded that: 1st, the stolen objects could have been socks or billiard cues, which would make no difference to my argument; 2nd, if there was any irony, it was involuntary. Callado, seeing the ambiguity of his attitude towards violence in Rio de Janeiro exposed, and having nothing to counter my arguments, clung to silly details in an attempt to discredit me.

    After a few days, columnist Joyce Pascowitch, in Folha de S. Paulo, reported that from the heights of his chateau-sur-mer on a Bahian beach, Caetano Veloso was “outraged” by my accusations against the intellectual elite — as if foaming with rage were a refutation. O Globo, in turn, carried a statement by anthropologist Gilberto Velho, who summarily condemned my article (without alleging any reason for doing so, perhaps considering his opinion self-proving), and took the opportunity to speak ill of my book Uma filosofia aristotélica da cultura, which, surprisingly, he admitted not having read. The complete irrationality of these three reactions is the best evidence that the thesis of The Collective Imbecile is unfortunately correct: something is wrong with the national brain.↩

  51. “The Federal Police has lost all its potential for action. Smuggling has been widespread at all borders. Thousands of investigations expire in police stations due to neglect and lack of personnel, increasing impunity.” The picture, outlined by Prof. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (“Crime and governability,” Jornal do Brasil, November 14, 1994), is perfectly accurate. However, if the professor tells the general truth, he conceals the specifics. The decline of the Federal Police coincides with its massive infiltration by agents of the PT and the CUT, who turned this repressive organization into an agitation machine incapable of fulfilling its legal duties but capable of intimidating the government with strikes, protests, riots, threats, and firecrackers fired at the windows of ministries. By arming the Federal Police against the authorities, the agitation of the Workers' Party disarms it, ipso facto, against banditry. As it is not convenient to say this, the professor generically accuses “the government” of a police scandal of which the government is, in fact, the victim. It is not today that the left has resorted to the expedient of causing disorder to then accuse the government of not maintaining order.

    Blaming the left on “the government” seems to be the professor’s mental strategy:

    “Organized crime and gangs were able to take control of many spaces only with the consent of various levels of the public power. State governments do not disarm the gangs because it is not in the interests of various groups embedded within the state apparatus or in social groups that provide them with a political base.”

    The professor does not clarify which groups these are. The vague and imprecise way of speaking leaves the impression that he is referring to something already known and assumed, to a commonplace. “Groups embedded in the state apparatus” is an expression that commonly designates bankers, capitalists, contractors, right-wing politicians who supported the dictatorship. Is the professor talking about them? It cannot be. There is not the slightest news of a connection between these people and the hillside bandits. But the groups that actually have this connection cannot be mentioned by name by the professor — because they are leftist groups: they are former guerrillas and some old leaders from the time of Jango, who, after exile, rebuilt themselves in politics with the help of the bandits and now continue to be “embedded in the state apparatus.” Accusing these groups would not be appropriate: it would divide the forces of the left, something that a gentleman like Prof. Pinheiro would never allow. So he prefers to speak vaguely, so that, through automatic association of ideas, the bad impression ends up going to the right and the “elite” — which obviously does not include the intelligentsia.

    The professor does not hide his intention to undermine the work of the Armed Forces: “Let us free ourselves from the fantasy of useless war choreography.” And he offers, in place of fantasy, the real, “scientific” solution: “The participation of the Armed Forces must be subjected to civilian command.” Which civilian command? The state government that, through omission and complicity, generated the current state of affairs? Or the federal government that, by determining the intervention of the Armed Forces, is already commanding the process? Between absurdity and redundancy, the professor’s proposal remains undefined. Undefined, but not entirely. A few lines later, he finally reveals his game: “In Rio de Janeiro, it is unthinkable to consider any consistent initiative without the participation of the entities that make up Viva Rio.” There is the secret: the command of the fight against crime cannot be left to the Armed Forces or to elected civilian authorities, state or federal; it must be transferred to the self-appointed entities “representing civil society” — that is, ultimately, to the leftist intelligentsia. My God, does everyone in this country only speak pro domo sua? The atavistic mentality, which fears the outdated hypothesis of militarism more than the real and present threat of armed delinquency, ends up reinterpreting the situation according to the perspective of the interests of its own group, taken as more urgent and important than the needs of the population: instead of helping in the fight of a people against banditry, let’s divert our energy to the old conflict between the intelligentsia and the military — a closed chapter in history that Prof. Pinheiro intends to resurrect to the detriment of today’s tasks. Looking at the present with the eyes of the past, he shows that he is less interested in the fight against crime than in ensuring a command post for the caste to which he belongs, which he assumes to be more reliable than the Armed Forces or the elected federal government. The intelligentsia is the most corporatist of corporations.↩

  52. This is indeed what happened a few months after the publication of this article in Jornal do Brasil.↩

  53. Published in two parts in the Jornal da Tarde: November 25 and December 9, 1999.↩

  54. Published in Jornal da Tarde on October 26, 2000.↩

  55. Published in Época on May 5, 2001.↩

  56. Published in O Globo on July 7, 2001.↩

  57. Published in O Globo, on December 22, 2001.↩

  58. Published in O Globo, on January 27, 2001.↩

  59. Published in O Globo, February 24, 2001.↩

  60. Published in O Globo, on June 8, 2002.↩

  61. Published in Zero Hora on August 25, 2002.↩

  62. Published in IEE, edition no. 31 on October 29, 2002.↩

  63. Published in Zero Hora, on December 1, 2002.↩

  64. Published in Folha de São Paulo, on January 7, 2003.↩

  65. Published in O Globo, on February 1, 2003. [Translator’s note: the original title does not evoke “double-blind” trials.]↩

  66. Published in Jornal da Tarde, on April 24, 2003.↩

  67. Published in Zero Hora, on June 15, 2003.↩

  68. Cf. page 163 of this book.↩

  69. Published in Zero Hora, November 30, 2003.↩

  70. Published in Zero Hora, January 11, 2004.↩

  71. Published in O Globo, January 31, 2004.↩

  72. Published in O Globo, February 21, 2004.↩

  73. Published in O Globo, February 28, 2004.↩

  74. See Anatoliy Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, London, Edward Harle, 1995.↩

  75. Published in Jornal do Brasil, July 13, 2006.↩

  76. Published in Zero Hora, September 1, 2006.↩

  77. Published in Diário do Comércio on September 11, 2006.↩

  78. Published in Diário do Comércio on February 18, 2008.↩

  79. Published in Diário do Comércio on January 8, 2010.↩

  80. Cf. “História, tempo presente e História Oral” Topoi – Revista de História, Rio de Janeiro, December 2002, pp. 314-332.↩

  81. Published in Diário do Comércio on August 10, 2011.↩

  82. Published in Diário do Comércio, on March 7, 2012.↩

  83. Published in Diário do Comércio, on June 12, 2012.↩

  84. This text is a transcription of a conversation between the author of the book and the editor of this edition, held in Olavo de Carvalho’s library at his residence in Virginia, USA, on May 6, 2014, with the intention of serving as an afterword for this fourth edition. The text is published here without the author’s review.↩

  85. Lee Penn, False Dawn. The United Religions Initiative, Globalism and the Quest for a One-World Religion, Sophia Perennis, 2005.↩

  86. Juan Claudio Sanahuja, Poder Global e Religião Universal, translated by Lyège Carvalho, Campinas, SP: Ecclesiae, 2012.↩

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