Intelligentzia (But You Can Call It Mafia), by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of thirty-nine newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.

Topics covered: 1. Illiteracy & Glory: Tutto è burla nel mondo; Academic glories of Lula; Phrases and lives; 2. People & Representation: Down with the Brazilian people; The esoteric obvious; Empire of pretense; 3. Media & Concealment: Who were the rats?; The price of collaborationism; The greatest of dangers; Nostalgia for stupidity; It is forbidden to stop lying; The technique of reverse labeling; The enlightened ones; 4. Morality & Inversion: Teachers of corruption; It is forbidden to notice; The recycling of ethics (part of 500 Years in Five Notes); Brace for the worst; The pit of Babel; 5. University & Farce: A generation of predators; The option for farce; Academic deceit in action; The true black culture; 6. History & Deception: The official history of 1964; Summary of what I think about 1964; The time of the military and the present days (part of Drugs are culture); The year when time stopped; 1968, the deception that hasn’t ended; 7. Marxism & Deceit: Devotees of a swindler; The plan and the fact; Weaknesses; 8. Decadence: Nostalgia for journalism; Where the fall began; From depressing fantasy to fearful reality; 9. Asylum: Speaking Brazil; Geese that speak; The revolution of the madmen; 10. Conspiracy: Conspiracy theory; False secrets; Zero credibility.

• 1. Illiteracy & Glory
• Tutto è burla nel mondo
• Academic glories of Lula
• Phrases and lives
• 2. People & Representation
• Down with the Brazilian people
• The esoteric obvious
• Empire of pretense
• 3. Media & Concealment
• Who were the rats?
• The price of collaborationism
• The greatest of dangers
• Nostalgia for stupidity
• It is forbidden to stop lying
• The technique of reverse labeling
• The enlightened ones
• 4. Morality & Inversion
• Teachers of corruption
• It is forbidden to notice
• The recycling of ethics
• Brace for the worst
• The pit of Babel
• 5. University & Farce
• A generation of predators
• The option for farce
• Academic deceit in action
• The true black culture
• 6. History & Deception
• The official history of 1964
• Summary of what I think about 1964
• The time of the military and the present days
• The year when time stopped
• 1968, the deception that hasn’t ended
• 7. Marxism & Deceit
• Devotees of a swindler
• The plan and the fact
• Weaknesses
• 8. Decadence
• Nostalgia for journalism
• Where the fall began
• From depressing fantasy to fearful reality
• 9. Asylum
• Speaking Brazil
• Geese that speak
• The revolution of the madmen
• 10. Conspiracy
• Conspiracy theory
• False secrets
• Zero credibility

1. Illiteracy & Glory

Tutto è burla nel mondo

(Everything is a joke in the world)

Zero Hora, December 15, 2002

When I inform that, in December 2001, Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a solidarity pact with the Colombian narcoguerrilla, I’m told that I am an angry and very wicked person. If from that fact I draw the logically inescapable conclusion that the elected president cannot suppress the activities of the Farc in Brazil without breaking the agreement and attracting against himself the wrath of his former allies, then I’m diagnosed as a hopeless case of rabid rightism, satanic, genocidal.

And these answers do not come from illiterates or 12-year-old children. They come from grown and graduated people. They come from the so-called superior, leading, aware, and knowledgeable class.

What else can I conclude from this but that many members of this class no longer even know how to distinguish between a fact and a personal opinion, much less between a logical analysis and the expression of a sentiment?

The name of this inability is functional illiteracy. The problem with the speaking classes in Brazil is that, excluding everyday messages, they do not understand what they read, therefore much less understand the real world, whether on the macroscopic scale of world events or on that closer and humbler of their direct experience horizon. Because the meaning of a text, which comes already hierarchized into categories — pre-chewed, so to speak — is infinitely easier to grasp than the connection between real events, where the observer’s intelligence has to do all the work on its own, from primitive analogies to the latest logical accuracies. Someone who is dumb in front of a writing is necessarily dumber in front of life, except, of course, in the limited circle of their repetitive experience, where the effectiveness of inherited solutions gives an illusion of intelligence.

To make matters worse, the more an individual proves unable to grasp the mere factual reference of what we tell them, the more they feel qualified to diagnose, by guesswork, the inner feelings and hidden motivations of the speaker — as if linguistic ineptness were a certificate of special psychological acuity.

Upon reading this same article, certain readers, precisely because they lack the concentration to compare with the data of their inner experience the reactions described in it, to see if the marked case is precisely their own, will instantly feel qualified to proclaim that I wrote it for such and such sordid or sick motivations, solely to insult them for no reason, out of sheer sadism. Every functional illiterate I’ve met in this life imagined they were Dr. Freud himself. A small stock of psychological ready-to-wear clichés is the best defense against the risks of self-awareness, always somewhat humiliating.

When, in a reading comprehension test among students from 32 countries, Brazilians came last, I firmly stated that the result would be the same if instead of students the examinees were adult professionals — including academics, journalists, educators, parliamentarians, Ministers of Education and (why not?) presidents of the Republic. Students should not be considered a priori an exception due to accidental factors, but a significant sample of the general population.

As reasonable as it was, the conclusion seemed hyperbolic and dictated — of course — solely by my bad instincts. The idea of confronting it with objective data did not even cross the minds that repelled it with grimaces of moral indignation. Obviously, the first and most evident objective fact to be taken into account would have to be precisely this one — the fact that, at that very moment, they were not understanding what they were reading.

This whole state of affairs, which was already alarming a few years ago, has worsened greatly with the national wave of enthusiasm around Mr. Luiz Inácio da Silva, whose victory was, explicitly, a revenge of resentful ignorance against the supposedly real and supposedly sinful erudition that, without the slightest plausible reason, was associated with the image of his opponents.

It seems incredible, but in a country where the greatest achievements of intelligence were the merit of the destitute — a Machado de Assis, a Capistrano de Abreu, a Cruz e Souza, a Farias Brito and tutti quanti — culture continues to be seen, especially by those too lazy to acquire it, as a luxury reserved for the upper classes, a chic emblem with which the pedantic humiliate the little ones. Hence the ambiguity of the feelings it evokes: everyone desires it, but only to use it, without it affecting them inside. Culture must remain external, like a wig or a bra, which beautify without substantially modifying the beautified thing. Culture is the ability to express with academic language refinements the same crude opinions and irrational preferences that the person already had before acquiring it. No object of desire could be more ambiguous and disturbing: the more intensely coveted, the more absurd it seems, and the more revolting the social charge that requires it for certain roles. Hence the inevitable backlash: exhausted from fighting in vain for the possession of a hollow simulacrum, the citizen finally revolts and proclaims, from the rooftops, the superiority of explicit ignorance, now labeled “life experience” and ennobled by an honorary doctorate. The farce, tired of itself, assumes itself as such and obtains a Pyrrhic victory in the glorious assertion of the falsehood of everything. Like Verdi’s Falstaff, who, doomed to always be the clown of the story, finds relief in the proclamation of universal buffoonery: Tutto è burla nel mondo.

Academic glories of Lula

Diário do Comércio, December 27, 2011

Mr. Paulo Moreira Leite, who, in the pursuit of journalism, assumed as his particular mission and glory to never understand anything, writes that the complaints against the plethora of university titles awarded to former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reflect a prejudice, an academic pedantry that cannot accept seeing a self-made man whose poverty prevented him from acquiring formal education rise in life.

Years ago, I gave Mr. Moreira the nickname “Mr. Moleira,” as it seemed to me that the development of his cranial apparatus had been even more incomplete than Mr. Lula’s education. His current guess suggests that it may have regressed a bit further.

Anyone who knows the intellectual history of our country is aware that a constant in Brazilian society is the hatred of intelligence, a mixture of fear and resentment, accompanied by a compensatory neurotic devotion to external titles, positions, and honors that effectively replace it in academic festivities and parliamentary tributes.

The general mentality, long-standing and well depicted by Lima Barreto, follows that of the gossiping neighbors of Major Quaresma, who, upon seeing the library of that unfortunate patriot through the window, commented: “Why so many books if he isn’t even a bachelor?”

On the other hand, the lack of books on the shelves of bachelors and doctors, where bottles of whiskey and photos of international trips abound, is something that doesn’t offend or shock the national soul. The average Brazilian university student reads less than two books a year, and yet they still receive their diplomas and eventually become department heads, chancellors, or ministers.

A friend of mine, born and raised in the Rocinha hillside slum in Rio de Janeiro, confessed, “I faced more discrimination in the slum for reading books than here in the city for being black.”

Everyone knows that in this country, to climb the academic ladder, knowledge is not required. It’s only necessary to have the right connections and express the recommended political opinions at decisive moments. Distinguished individuals like Dr. Emir Sader, former Minister of Education Fernando Haddad, former UNB Chancellor Cristovam Buarque, as well as countless others whose thoughts and works I praised in The Collective Imbecile, have already provided ample evidence that a solid lack of culture and persistent ineptitude are not only useful but indispensable for academic success, as long as they are accompanied by a membership card from the Workers' Party (PT) or an equivalent document.

If academic titles are considered absolute values in themselves, regardless of any corresponding intellectual merits, and if these merits are worthless without those titles, the reason lies in the deep democratic sentiments of the Brazilian people. Intelligence and talent are innate gifts that nature or providence distribute unevenly among humans, creating a hierarchical differentiation among them, which, from the perspective of the less endowed, is a permanent humiliation, an intolerable offense, and a mechanism of true exclusion. Academic titles were invented to level this difference, giving the incapable and mediocre an opportunity to feel, at least publicly and officially, equal to the greatest creative geniuses of arts, letters, sciences, and philosophy, if not even to the saints of the Church, the angels of heaven, and even the second person of the Holy Trinity, precisely the case with Mr. Lula.

Contrary to what Mr. Moleira says, what eluded the latter was not formal education; it was precisely informal education, the kind that a worker prevented from attending school acquires at home, on buses, trains, or the subway, by reading books. Mr. Lula has expressed his invincible aversion to this painful activity more than once, in which many Brazilian writers, as poor as he or even poorer, acquired the only education they had.

The difference between them and Mr. Lula lies precisely here: they earned their intellectual merits through their own solitary efforts, without the help of teachers, the state, or any entity, whereas Mr. Lula chose to climb the ladder of success without needing any intellectual or moral merits, relying solely on the assistance of dozens of billion-dollar organizations—companies, banks, unions, parties—and the money from the mensalão scandal.

This doesn’t make him any different from bachelors and doctors; it merely shows that he perfected the dream of all of them: to display a handful of university titles without needing to have studied or learned absolutely anything except the sublime art of social climbing.

When university-educated citizens complain about Lula’s academic glories, they don’t do so, as Mr. Moleira imagines, out of genuine intellectual elitism, which at least implies some love for knowledge. They do it out of sheer envy for an unfair competitor who earned more titles while knowing even less. The voice speaking through them isn’t the intelligence humbled by the success of ignorance; it’s the corporatism of the academic establishment, which would like to reserve for itself the monopoly of producing degreed illiterates without sharing it with the media and political parties.

Mr. Moleira imagines he opposes these creatures, but in reality, he expresses their feelings better than anyone, by proclaiming that Lula’s academic titles should be a source of national pride. What greater source of pride exists in the soul of a Brazilian than the title itself, the title alone, the title with nothing inside?

Phrases and lives

Zero Hora, March 25, 2001

Abraham Lincoln, who transformed from a woodcutter into a president, still found the energy to become one of the greatest stylists of the English language by studying the classics. Theodore Roosevelt, amidst political struggles and military adventures, wrote literary essays that are still read with benefit today. I won’t even mention Jefferson, one of the most notable intellectuals of his time, let alone the Adams, a dynasty of scholars. Shifting continents, I admit that I owe Sir Winston Churchill some of the most enjoyable and stimulating reading hours I’ve ever had, and I regret only that such a fine author wrote so little of Lord Balfour’s moral philosophy.

In France, no one became president or prime minister without a respectable record of literary accomplishments paving the way. I need not mention geniuses like Clemenceau or de Gaulle. Even the humble Georges Pompidou, while campaigning, never failed to pause and deliver scholarly lectures on Racine or Victor Hugo. It has been said that a French politician doesn’t care about corruption accusations but will duel if accused of a grammatical mistake. But these things don’t only happen in foreign countries.

Ancient Brazil set excellent examples of literary consciousness in eminent politicians. The tradition began with the very founder of our country, Andrada. He set a level of demand under whose authority endless intellectual personalities of high caliber flourished in national politics, from José de Alencar to Joaquim Nabuco, from Oliveira Lima to Ruy Barbosa. The Republic, the 1930 Revolution, and the military regime maintained the standard, albeit in decline. But this Brazil died abruptly in the 1980s. Under the pretext of democratization, the doors were opened to a veritable “vertical invasion of barbarians.”

In the new wave of politicians that emerged from nowhere at that time, the just pride of representing the “popular classes” came to be proven by presenting a new and unusual type of credential: the right to ignorance, based on the humble origin of their excellencies.

Despite the fact that throughout our history, the growth of corruption paralleled the upward curve of popular participation in politics, the refrain that “bad examples come from the top” continued to be proclaimed as an unquestionable dogma. No harm was seen in the massive presence of semi-literate individuals in positions of responsibility. On the contrary, it became customary, even a moral obligation, to allow people of humble origins, upon ascending to higher echelons of power, to continue cultivating, at least publicly, a self-image of the poor and oppressed, as if their salaries as deputies or governors were insufficient to fund their education and free them from their cultural poverty.

As for me, who, as the grandson of a washerwoman and the son of a laborer, believed I had a duty to study to defend the honor of my humiliated class—and by doing so, followed in the footsteps of Machado, Cruz e Souza, Lima Barreto, and many others whom I naively believed to be exemplary—I began to feel like an anomaly in the new environment. The trend now was for individuals to emerge from ignorance and, as they rose, to remain within it, cultivating it and throwing it in society’s face with the masochistic pride of a victim displaying their wounds to torment the guilty. But all forced exhibitionism has its limits. The pride of ignorance is so hypocritical that, to the same extent that it’s displayed, it seeks to conceal itself.

The proof is that many of these individuals alternate their populist performance as proud illiterates with attempts to pass themselves off as journalists and writers, publishing articles and books written by anonymous third parties. Busy or lacking specific talent for certain matters, rulers have always relied on assistant writers. The difference now is that nearly all politicians, even insignificant and idle ones, have their ghostwriters, not because they lack time or expertise in specialized subjects, but simply because they lack knowledge of Brazil’s common language.

They trumpet their defense of “national identity” on podiums but don’t even spare a few minutes' attention for its primary and essential component: language. This usage, becoming habitual, appears innocent. Few realize that it reveals the grotesque and ultimately tragic charade assumed for some years now by the entire so-called “national political debate.” A person who doesn’t master words is mastered by them: they live in a world of verbal illusions, mistaking them for realities. When they manage to put together a sentence, they imagine they’ve proven a fact. Instead of being a window to the world, speech substitutes for the world. It’s verbal self-hypnosis replacing knowledge.

It’s parroting elevated to the status of supreme science. Whenever I find myself in the circumstance of debating with one of these individuals, I’m tempted to give up due to the futility of the endeavor. In the best-case scenario, the unfortunate person will grasp the logic of the words, with not even the slightest intuition of the implied realities, and construct sentences, thinking they’ve refuted me. Hence, instead of debating with them, it might be better to simply describe them, hoping that they recognize themselves in the description and, in an instant, gain a saving glimpse of the immeasurable ridiculousness of their pretended lives.

2. People & Representation

Down with the Brazilian people

Diário do Comércio, August 24, 2009

Once again, for the umpteenth time, it is confirmed what I have been saying for years:¹ the absolute majority of Brazilians, especially the youth, form a massively conservative electorate devoid of political representation, entry into intellectual debates, and space in the “mainstream media.” They are a marginalized people, driven away from the public scene by those who promised to open the doors of democracy and participation for them.

While the upcoming elections announce a traditional family dispute among left-wing candidates, yet another survey, this time conducted by the Federal University of Pernambuco, shows that among young university students, 81% disagree with marijuana legalization, and 76% are against abortion. “It’s a behavior of accepting the laws… we see religion influencing the lives of the youth a lot,” explains the survey coordinator, Pierre Lucena, in the small, almost confidential note with which O Globo, reluctantly, provides this abominable news to its readers.²

In Folha de S. Paulo, Estadão, and Globo, anyone who thinks like these young people — in other words, the entire national electorate — is considered a right-wing extremist, unworthy of being heard. During elections, no party or candidate dares to speak in their name. The chattering intellectual class refers to them as fundamentalist rabble, degenerates, madmen, syphilitics. Any politician, journalist, or intellectual who speaks like them immediately becomes part of the eccentric and grotesque types, if not retroactively guilty of the “crimes of the dictatorship,” even if committed when the poor individual was 3 years old.

Never before has the abyss between the chattering elite and the reality of popular life been so deep, so vast, so impassable. Everything the people love, the bien-pensant despise; everything they venerate, they disdain; everything they respect, they reduce to a subject of mockery, if not indignant denunciation, as if they were talking about a public health risk, an imminent threat to the constitutional order, an epidemic of crimes and horrors never seen before.

Thirty years ago, I already knew this would happen. It was the most obvious of the obvious. When a revolutionary vanguard professes to defend the economic interests of the people but, at the same time, despises their religion, their morality, and their family traditions, it’s clear they don’t want to do good for this people, but only use those interests as bait to impose values that are not theirs, firmly determined to throw them into the trash can if they don’t agree to reshape themselves in the image and likeness of their new mentors and bosses. This is precisely what’s happening. They throw the crumbs of Bolsa Família at the people, but if, in return for this misery, the people don’t start renouncing everything they love and loving everything they hate, if they don’t consent to becoming supporters of abortion, LGBTQ rights, racial quotas, Castro-Chavism, terrorism, drug legalization, and lovers of criminals, they marginalize them, exclude them from public life, and still believe they deserve gratitude because every four years, generously and democratically, they grant them the right to vote for parties that represent the opposite of everything they believe in.

Think about it. If someone promises you some money but doesn’t hide their disdain for your convictions, your sacred values, everything you love and venerate, can you believe they have any sincere friendship for you, however minimal it may be? Isn’t it obvious that this is a degrading and corrupting friendship, and that accepting it means throwing honor and soul out the window, submitting to an abject sacrificial ritual in exchange for a clearly deceptive promise? Only a compulsive flatterer, a soul of a dog, would accept such an offer. But the enlightened minds who govern us want not only for the people to accept it, but to accept it while wagging their tails with happiness.

The esoteric obvious

Diário do Comércio, October 31, 2012

The defeat of Mr. José Serra in São Paulo³ demonstrates, once again, that it is impossible to defeat the PT and its allies without doing precisely the two things that the opposition has been avoiding at all costs: (1) getting rid of the “politically correct” ideological residue, adopting an uncompromising conservative discourse; (2) tirelessly denouncing the criminal alliance between communist parties and drug trafficking gangs — the São Paulo Forum.

Who doubts that Magalhães Neto’s success,⁴ on the other hand, owed much to the nostalgia for a hard-line conservatism that his family name still evokes in the imagination of the electorate of Bahia? Antônio Carlos Magalhães⁵ was never a strict conservative, but, faute de mieux, the left made him the quintessential symbol of the right, and, at least in his later years, he wore the shirt with some bravery,⁶ whose prestige now benefits his grandson.

One of the most obvious reasons for the triumph of the left, not only in Brazil but everywhere, is the deep solidarity, the unbreakable alliance between its moderate and radical sectors, always coordinated to attack the opponent with both hands. On the contrary, in the right, the moderates, less concerned about their political future than about the image they present in the leftist media, try to distance themselves from the radicals, either by pretending to ignore them or even insulting them, at least superficially.

The message this conveys to the voters is clear: leftism is a good medicine, the dosage of which can be discussed at most; rightism, on the other hand, is a poison that can only be good in minimal doses.

One must have climbed high on the scale of idiocy not to understand that this is the politics of those who have become so accustomed to defeat that they can no longer live without it.

The PT doesn’t hesitate to ally itself with the PSOL, the PSTU, the landless movement, and even more discreetly, with the FARC. But who can imagine the men from DEM — not to mention José Serra — posing in a photo while visiting, even out of pure courtesy, the Plínio Correia de Oliveira Institute or the Military Club? I mention these entities deliberately: they have nothing radical about them, but the leftist media labeled them as such to isolate them from the official right, which, as always, obediently played by the rules imposed by the adversary.

The most elementary political common sense teaches us that every moderate majority needs radicals — or those who appear to be — to publicly say what it cannot. It also teaches us that the irate minority can only be controlled when included in an alliance. The left learned this decades ago. The right hasn’t even started thinking about it.

In France, the victory of the left was mainly or solely due to the impossibility of a dialogue between the Gaullist right and the Front National. In the US, in 2008, John McCain would not have lost the election⁷ if he hadn’t indulged so much in that centrist do-goodism that conservatives abhor. And in Brazil, Mr. José Serra would have had a more brilliant career if he had thrown into the trash can of history a leftist past that, the more displayed, honors and elevates the image of his enemies.

Excuse me for insisting on the obvious,⁸ but in this country, the obvious is becoming more and more of an esoteric secret, accessible only to a circle of initiates: in a competition of leftism, by definition, the most leftist wins. The Brazilian electorate is massively conservative, but not having anyone to represent them in politics, they end up voting randomly, according to momentary sympathies or occasion-driven interests that ultimately make them as corrupt, at least psychologically, as the politicians they disdain. The self-interested vote necessarily goes to those in power, to those who control the favors mill.⁹ The opposition would have much to gain if they opposed this state of affairs with an ideologically charged discourse, restoring the sense of politics as a conflict of values rather than a mere competition for positions. But they won’t do that. They have long persuaded themselves that accumulating defeats is more comfortable than engaging in self-reflection.

Empire of pretense

Jornal da Tarde, June 20, 2002

The public’s perception of the reality of the world depends on what reaches them through the media. Depending on the selection of news, popular criteria will distinguish the real from the illusory, the probable from the improbable, and the plausible from the implausible.

Goethe was one of the first to highlight one of the most characteristic effects of the rise of modern media. He said, “Just as in Rome, besides the Romans, there is another population of statues, so also there exists, alongside the real world, another world made of hallucinations, almost more powerful, in which the majority of people are living.”

There is no doubt that the progress of the media itself, stimulating a variety of perspectives, partially neutralizes this effect, but from time to time it reappears, during the periodic takeovers of the media by ideologically oriented groups, imposing their own guild fantasy as the only publicly admitted reality.

The control of the media by an ideologically homogeneous class inevitably leads popular opinion to live in a false world and to reject as madness any information that does not align with the narrow pattern of plausibility approved by the holders of the microphone.

Who are these holders? Leftist journalists continue to play the role of oppressed victims of media companies. But the fact is that today no media company, whether in Brazil, the USA, or Europe, dares to try to control the wild leftism that prevails in the newsrooms. The “occupation of spaces” by leftist activism has grown alongside the power of the journalistic class itself, and today both, merged into an indivisible unity, exert a mental tyranny over public opinion that only a handful of dissenters dares to challenge. When this state of affairs lasts long enough, even those who created it no longer remember that it is an artificial product: they live in the fictional world they conceived and adapt all distinctions between reality and fantasy to fit its dimensions, in turn turned into pure fantasy.

So, everyone has already forgotten that the PT (Workers' Party) and the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party) were essentially creations of the same group of leftist intellectuals committed to implementing in Brazil what Lenin called the “scissors strategy”: the division of political space between two leftist parties, one moderate and the other radical, in order to eliminate all conservative resistance to the advance of leftist hegemony and to shift the entire frame of possibilities in dispute to the left. Having forgotten this, they interpret the temporary predominance of moderate leftism, which they themselves established for transitional purposes, as an effective empire of “conservatism,” and then they sincerely feel oppressed and sidelined at the very moment when their strategy triumphs completely.

Now, calling a government that spreads Marxist preaching in schools, that rewards pro-Cuba terrorists from the 1970s as national heroes, and that financially supports the armed agitation of the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) “right-wing” is clearly delusional, but this delusion has become the prevailing criterion of reality, preventing the perception of anything else. The only thing that could effectively distinguish between moderate leftism in government and radical leftism in opposition would theoretically be their slight difference in economic policy. But even this difference is virtually annulled by the promise of candidate Lula to fulfill the nation’s commitments to foreign creditors. The obstinate denial of the essential identity between the PSDB government and the PT opposition has only one foundation: the desire to further expand leftist hegemony, a desire that determined, from the beginning, the creation of both. The global growth of the left is thus fed by its own hysterical denial by the radical wing, dialectically complemented by its momentary “neoliberal” camouflage, represented by the PSDB in power.

Hence the grotesque farce of the current election,[^9] in which all the competitors are from the left and all speak against a nonexistent conservatism that, without even having the strength to field a candidate, must nevertheless nominally represent the role of a powerful dominant establishment to be destroyed by any of the four heroes[^10] who may be elected. What sanity, what instinct for reality can survive such a complete and perfect empire of pretense? In its race for unlimited power, leftist voracity does not hesitate to destroy, in passing, the soul and consciousness of an entire people.

3. Media & Concealment

Who were the rats?

Diário do Comércio, December 7, 2012

The luminous epochs of history are those in which the same body of beliefs is shared by the people and the wise, differing only in the degree of reflected understanding with which they substantially grasp the same truths.

In times of obscurity, on the contrary, what scholars know becomes hardly communicable to the general population, not due to a mere mismatch of technical vocabulary, but due to an abyss of difference between two mutually incompatible and untranslatable conceptions of the world. We live in one of those times.

One area of human experience where this becomes evident is the sciences. While in the circles of “high-brow” scholars, nobody is unaware that a science increasingly less intelligible and more reduced to producing practical applications instead of theoretical explanations represents, in the end, a colossal failure of human intelligence, in the media and popular education, these same applications are celebrated as the final proof of the authority of science, of its dominion over the mystery of the world. Scientists live in a hell of doubts, perplexities, and fears; the masses, in a paradise of unshakable, guaranteed certainties, according to their imagination, by those very scientists.

It’s as if in the 13th century, the faithful population continued to pray devoutly while in monasteries and cloisters, monks and saints were plagued by all sorts of skeptical doubts and atheistic rejections. Of course, this didn’t happen. The religion of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the nearly unreadable John Duns Scotus was no different from that of the illiterate peasant. It was just more intellectually elegant. But today, a “big shot” like Brian Ridley, a member of the Royal Society and a recipient of the Paul Dirac Medal for his contributions to theoretical physics, can confess that he finds relativity and quantum theory increasingly incomprehensible, while the same confession, published in the popular media, would bring all sorts of invectives and ridicule upon him. Definitely, Brian Ridley and the newspaper reader do not inhabit the same universe of beliefs, just as Saint Thomas and the medieval peasant didn’t.

In the realm of politics, the difference between the world of the connoisseur and that of the layman has widened to such an extent that facts become all the more implausible and unacceptable to the general public, the more scientifically documented and proven they are. When mathematician Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, calculated that the probability of the small and large defects in Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate being accidental was of the order of 1 in 75 trillion,¹⁰ this statistically impeccable calculation didn’t affect the sense of credibility among the public, which, without any calculation, continues to swear that the possibility of a forger being elected President of the USA is even smaller or non-existent.

This was how, in Brazil in 2002, Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president with the image of a democratic reformer, a legalist, and a champion of morality, when twelve years of performance in the Forum of São Paulo already showed him as a cynical Leninist, willing to use all lies and tricks to keep his group in power for centuries. A video from the PT’s 2002 campaign shows a group of rats gnawing at the national flag, while in the background a somber voice warns: "Either we finish them off, or they finish off Brazil."¹¹ The video, authored by Duda Mendonça, was seen by everyone; the minutes of the Forum of São Paulo,¹² by a few curious researchers whose word, at that time, sounded like the purest and craziest “conspiracy theory.” Today, even children know that the rats were the PT members themselves, but why wait a decade to admit what was already well proven in 2002?

The Chinese book The 36 Stratagems,¹³ which I’ve mentioned here before, teaches: “Every phenomenon is at first a germ, then it ends up becoming a reality that everyone can observe. The wise person thinks in the long term. That’s why they pay great attention to germs. Most people have short sight. They wait for the problem to become evident, only then to attack it.”

The worst part is that, in the time it takes for the problem to become visible in the public square, the means to attack it may have become scarcer, weaker, or inaccessible. If challenged by the parliament and the OAS, will our Supreme Court still have the power to enforce the conviction of the “mensaleiros” (corruption scandal participants)? Will it have the support of the Armed Forces, or will they, fearing the label of coup-makers, take the side of those who speak more forcefully?

The fact is that the germ has grown too much, become an arrogant monster, self-assured and hardly controllable. This would never have happened without the protection of complicit media, which for sixteen years refused to tarnish the reputation of their favorites with any mention of the criminal plans of the Forum of São Paulo. Even now, when they tremble under the threat of state control, newspapers and TV channels still withhold from the public the essential aspects of the story, so as not to confess their share of blame in beautifying the rats.¹⁴

The “means of diffusion” have become “means of concealment” on such a scale that there is no longer any exaggeration in saying that the popular media’s main or sole mission today is to make the truth seem implausible or unattainable. Anyone who relies on newspapers and TV as their main source of information is excluded in limine from the possibility of reasonably judging the veracity and relative importance of news. Politics has become an esoteric subject, where only a small circle of scholars can fathom what is happening.

The price of collaborationism

Diário do Comércio, December 17, 2012

There is nothing a communist hates more than the faint-hearted or scrupulous fellow traveler who does not accompany them in all their follies, does not endorse all their lies, and does not cover up or applaud all their crimes.

Once you have given them some understanding and assistance, they will never forgive you if you don’t continue to do so for centuries on end, sacrificing honor, conscience, and even the elementary capacity to perceive the moment when tolerance of an error transmutes into complicity with a crime.

If there is one right that every communist systematically denies to their friends and benefactors, it is the right to say, “It’s too much. I’ve reached my limit. I can’t give you anything more.”

For a communist, friendship that does not consent to transform into slavery is not friendship: it’s betrayal.

That’s why Carta Capital, Portal Vermelho, Hora do Povo, and all the other channels through which the printed and electronic communist fecal mass flows, are now pouring all their hatred onto the “bourgeois media” or "coup media,"¹⁵ the very same media that, with its obsequious and complicit silence, reinforced from time to time by explicit denials, helped the São Paulo Forum grow in peace and security, hidden away, far from the eyes of the curious crowd, until it became the almost monopolistic dominator not only of Brazilian politics but also of half the continent.

This media pretends surprise and scandal now when Marcos Valério’s testimony¹⁶ and the Rosemary case¹⁷ finish revealing the oceanic dimensions of the Petista filth and break through even the carefully constructed and maintained armor around Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s figure for at least sixteen years.

But whoever read the Foro’s minutes, where the immaculate gentleman appeared presiding over assemblies alongside Mr. Manuel Marulanda, commander of the largest terrorist and drug trafficking organization in Latin America, would immediately understand that they were not facing any proletarian saint, but rather a cynical Leninist, willing to use all lawful and unlawful means, moral and immoral, to increase his group’s power.

If the population had been alerted to this in time, the “Lula era,” with all its train of crimes and abjections, would have remained in the realm of hypotheses, never descending and materializing on planet Earth. Not only the mainstream media, but the “right-wing” parties, business leaders, churches, military commands, and even the overt proponents of the “liberal” cause, all united, withheld from the people this vital information that would have put the country on a less depressing and less shameful path.

But it was not just the Foro or the secrets of Saint Lula that these people hid. For at least two decades, the leftist version of the history of the military regime was endorsed and faithfully repeated in all newspapers, TV channels, schools, and parliamentary speeches, until it became part of the popular imagination as a kind of sacred dogma, the very embodiment of objective truth, above parties and ideologies.

No “investigative reporter,” of the kind who delved into the darkest recesses of Mr. Collor de Mello’s private life, ever had the curiosity to ask what the Brazilian terrorists who sought asylum in Cuba did there for thirty years or more. How many, for example, like Mr. José Dirceu, integrated into the political police and espionage services of the Fidelist dictatorship, becoming accomplices in acts of persecution, torture, and political murder incomparably greater and more cruel than those for which they would later whine and demand compensation in Brazil?

By omitting this and other decisive parts of history, our media and our “dominant classes” allowed a monstrously distorted view of the past to become part of the usual language of our politics, allowing amoral and cold criminals to display before the people the image of innocent sacrificial victims and reap incalculable advertising and electoral profits from it.

What are these attitudes called, if not “collaborationism”? All those who had the power and means to stop the communo-Petist ascension did exactly the opposite: they rolled out the red carpet and, with gentle bows and nods, allowed as many Lulas and Dirceus as there were, applauding, as proof of great democratic evolution, the takeover of the country by a band of psychopathic, insensitive, and tough delinquents, as adept at simulating good intentions as they were incapable of the slightest feeling of shame and guilt, even when caught red-handed.

But of course, one day even the most impervious collaborationist’s ostrich stomach reaches the limit of its digestive capacity. With all the goodwill in the world, smiling, between flattery and obsequiousness, the individual swallowed frogs and more frogs, then snakes and lizards, and finally alligators. But then they’re asked to swallow a dinosaur, and they finally collapse: “No, I can’t take it. This is too much.”

That’s what happened to our media (and the class it represents) when the evidence of the mensalão came.

The brutal reaction of the Lulocommunist bloc expresses the indignation of the spoiled child at the sudden withdrawal of the usual caresses, which time had established as acquired rights.

The greatest of dangers

Diário do Comércio, October 24, 2012

Everything in the life of a democracy depends on the following: Do citizens allow themselves to be more easily persuaded by evidence and documents or by a sarcastic smile of vaguely intimidating superiority?

The success of Barack Hussein Obama in the USA, as well as that of the Foro de São Paulo in Latin America, was entirely due to the predominance of the second hypothesis. Both there and here, the major media, en masse, avoided the elementary obligation to investigate and inform, preferring a theatrical performance aimed at inhibiting, through the veiled threat of humiliation and ridicule, all politically undesirable questions.

The well-disciplined uniformity of this behavior cannot be explained by any accidental convergence of prejudices. Without any visible exception, both companies and reporters, writers, and editors, definitively took sides and showed that they placed the interests of their preferred political factions above the journalistic duty to investigate, inform, and above all, listen to both sides. Divergent voices, very few and weak, could not be silenced altogether, but by exclusively manifesting themselves in opinion sections or blogs, they eventually became inaudible amidst the monstrous orchestration of evasions, cynical jokes, and derogatory labels in the news pages.

Few facts in history have ever been so well investigated, tested, and proven as the falseness of the American president’s documents and the scheme of continental domination of the Foro de São Paulo, in which criminal organizations and nominally legal parties unite, as always in communist strategy, thus becoming criminals themselves. Therefore, both of these facts were systematically suppressed from the news long enough for the beneficiaries of the curtain of silence to achieve their most ambitious objectives under its protection. And precisely because they are certain and irrefutable, they were not challenged through open and honest discussion, but rather summarily withheld or minimized through expressions of disdain, affected certainty, and subtle mockery – the broadest, most organized, and abject pantomime ever seen in the world.

The media, as the name itself suggests, is what is in the middle, in the center, connecting classes, groups, regions, and families in the simultaneous view of a set of information available uniformly to all. It is par excellence the “common ground” (locus communis, tópos koinós), the source of generally accepted premises in a human community, as guarantees of plausibility and reasonableness, the foundations of all argumentation and belief. Thus, it enjoys a broader and more overwhelming authority than any priestly caste has ever wielded in the past, anywhere on the planet.

Until approximately the 1970s, some integrity in the exercise of this supreme function was still guaranteed, in democracies, by the ideological diversity of the publications that freely competed in the market, such as, for example, in Brazil during the second Vargas administration, Samuel Wainer’s Última Hora on the left and Estadão on the right. Since then, not only in this country or the USA but throughout the Western Hemisphere, the concentration of companies in a few hands, combined with the progressive standardization of journalists' minds through university education, has reduced the media to an instrument of government and a uniformizing force of the popular soul, without losing any of the residual prestige of locus communis acquired in times of greater diversity and frankness.

Any attentive observer can notice that whenever a slogan or catchphrase of the new morality intended to be imposed on humanity appears in the Fabian globalist program, it is immediately adopted by the entire world media, and differing opinions that were previously circulated as respectable expressions are suddenly marginalized and exposed to public vilification as symptoms of radicalism or mental illness. Today, merely being against abortion is enough to immediately be suspected of Nazism or terrorist intentions. The increasing speed with which the most extravagant and incongruous ideas establish themselves overnight as mandatory standards of normality indicates the imminent extinction of any possibility for genuine debate on anything. Needless to say, these ideas are creations of psychopathic minds and, as they contradict the most direct and obvious real experience, they result, when they become entrenched in everyday language and extinguish any inclination toward alternative thought, in spreading hysterical pretense as the norm of behavior and the formative standard of personalities throughout society, inevitably leading to the coarsening of moral consciousness and the spread of criminal behavior. It’s also needless to say that the ensuing chaos is then repurposed as a pretext for the imposition of even more psychopathic and destructive norms.

Therefore, Daniel Greenfield was even euphemistic when, writing in David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, he stated that the major media is now “the greatest threat to the integrity of the political process.” It has indeed become a threat to intelligence, civilization, and all of humanity.

Nostalgia for stupidity

Diário do Comércio, January 17, 2011

If you expect to find any honest coverage, no matter how minimal, in the national or international mainstream media nowadays, you’re begging to be deceived. The forgery, once limited, discreet, and at least partially counterbalanced by semblances of good journalism, has become overt, cynical, and widespread. It’s as if the professionals know that they can rely on the passive obedience of millions of suckers they themselves have trained for that purpose over the last two generations.

Jared Lee Loughner,¹⁸ who shot congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, is a leftist fanatic educated in a school whose mentors were Barack Obama and the terrorist Bill Ayers – but this decisive fact was omitted by nearly all major newspapers and TV channels in the USA. They preferred to explain the motive for the crime through the magical action of an illustration placed on Sarah Palin’s Youtube page, where Giffords' district and its twenty deputies are highlighted on the map of America by a target-shaped frame. It’s not even known if Loughner saw this illustration, and it’s clear that interpreting it as an even indirect and subtle encouragement to political assassination rather than simple electoral competition strains the imagination to the border of insanity – yet the psychotic hypothesis that the figure displayed on Youtube was more determining in the shooter’s conduct than all the ideological training received throughout his life is being imposed on the American public as if it were the most banal truth in the universe. And those responsible for this charade have no qualms about drawing from it the most virulent political conclusions. Keith Olbermann, an MSNBC columnist, went so far as to say that if Sarah Palin does not renounce the “call for violence” posted on her channel, she should be “excluded from politics”. Among media figures, no one, of course, remembered to ask Obama and Ayers to repent for putting revolutionary ideas into Loughner’s head, even though it’s obvious that without these, he would never have had the desire to commit a political assassination.

The journalism practiced today has exceeded even the limits of premeditated forgery. What was premeditation has become an automated habit, a semi-conscious state, like hysterical pretense where the patient, initially aware of lying, later deludes themselves with their own words and, amidst tears and protests of indignation, ends up “feeling” that they are telling the truth – feeling it all the more intensely the more they struggle with themselves to suppress the memory of the initial lie. As Eric von Kunhelt-Leddin used to say, hysteria is the basis of the leftist personality.

Who doesn’t know, for example, that Brazil’s economic situation improved in recent years solely because international bankers decided to use the country as a safe haven for their investments while they strive to demolish the American economy? Brazil’s history has always been written from abroad, but in this case, the same foreign decision-making centers that have an interest in hiding behind praises for the Brazilian government, attributing to it actions that are entirely theirs and in which Lula and his ministers' involvement was at best as active as that of a tube of lubricant in a sexual relationship.

Explaining the modest increase in Brazilians' purchasing power through Fome Zero is like thinking that water increases in volume when transferred from one bucket to another, but even “opinion makers” considered conservative feel obligated to repeat this idiocy as a captatio benevolentiae before attempting even a mild and timid criticism of the petista elite that inspires them with as much hidden hatred as displayed reverential fear.

Journalism, as Joseph Conrad said at the beginning of the 20th century, is something written by idiots to be read by imbeciles. Those were the good times. Today, it’s something written by compulsive pretenders to be read by masochists who only respect those who lie to their face. The world public opinion has evolved from foolishness to psychosis.

It is forbidden to stop lying

Diário do Comércio (editorial), June 27, 2008

Whether in political science or mere journalistic commentary, the analysis of a candidate for any elected office, in order to have the minimum reliability, must encompass the following aspects and their interrelations:

1. Their advertising image, the “character” created by their campaign, which may coincide more or less with their real personality.

2. Their government program or action plan, considered in its pure internal logic.

3. The comparison between this plan and the objective external situation it promises to change or correct.

4. The current or past currents of thought that, in a closer or more remote way, are reflected in this plan.

5. The political, economic, and cultural groups that overtly or discreetly support the candidate.

6. The candidate’s actual position with regard to these groups, whether as their effective leader, as their permanent or temporary partner, or as their agent and servant.

7. The real or potential alternatives that their candidacy explicitly or implicitly opposes.

Only when these seven factors are clarified can you reasonably be sure that you know the candidate and understand their purpose. This is the sine qua non condition of the vaunted “informed vote.” And needless to say, this condition fundamentally depends on the “opinion makers” — public intellectuals and the media.

Well then: in two successive elections, Brazilians voted for Lula without having the slightest idea that he was the founder and president of the largest revolutionary organization that ever existed in Latin America. Completely missing from the candidate’s public image were items 5, 6, and 7 from the list. This information was intentionally and systematically withheld from the voters by party propaganda and the entire “mainstream media,” with the passive complicity of the so-called Electoral Justice.

These two elections were illegal in the strictest sense of the word. They did not meet the minimum conditions of accurate information that the public needs to choose a car brand, a refrigerator, or a remedy for hemorrhoids. All owners of newspapers, magazines, and TV channels knew this perfectly well. Electoral Justice knew this. The Armed Forces knew this. The general complicity gave the crime an air of legitimacy, marking the definitive rupture between public discourse and the reality of national life, and creating an atmosphere of alienation and madness from which corruption and violence, in quantities never before seen in the world, are merely the most visible and scandalous symptoms.

Never in the history of any nation has the talking elite, out of love and fear for an ambitious and cynical political group, so completely betrayed and deceived its people.

It is not surprising that, after a few years, the habit of conscious and cold deceit has become so deeply ingrained in the morality of this elite that even when speaking about other countries, they compulsively lie — and lie in the precise sense that serves the dominant group’s interests. Just to give an example, the media coverage of Barack Obama’s candidacy in the Brazilian media is strictly limited to selling his advertising image — item 1 on our list — without even delving into his government program. It lies in favor of Obama even more spectacularly than it did for Lula. No Brazilian newspaper or TV channel has ever reported that Obama is an apostle of Media Reform, calculated to eliminate freedom of opinion on the radio, an ardent advocate for the total prohibition of firearms by the civilian population (following the same line as Hitler in Germany), a fervent supporter of the immediate dismantling of American anti-missile defenses (therefore, unconditional surrender to any foreign nuclear power). Nobody has ever reported that he voted against the prohibition of killing babies who survive abortion, and that he is a disciple of the most radical and extreme version of “liberation theology.” Nobody has reported that the groups supporting him are billionaire globalist circles for whom he serves as an agent for the destruction of American sovereignty and the immediate establishment of a world government through the most undemocratic means imaginable. And nobody has reported that his biggest advantage over the Republican competitor¹⁹ lies precisely in the superiority of his campaign funds ($400 million to $85), which is enough to show that Obama is by no means the candidate of the poor and oppressed.

Against all these essential pieces of information, the Brazilian media hammers and re-hammers the advertising image based solely on skin color. If Obama were a presidential candidate in Brazil, he would have the highest vote in our history.

The technique of reverse labeling

Diário do Comércio, January 19, 2011

What is called “international news” in Brazil consists of repeating, amplifying, and radicalizing the most cynical lies of the American leftist media, with the reassuring certainty that they don’t have to face, as the American media does, the energetic conservative reaction from half the population, which only listens to the radio and doesn’t believe a word of the newspapers and TV. The life of the “white-label” media in the US is not as easy as that of its Brazilian counterpart: on Sundays, the New York Times sells a million copies — one-thirtieth of the number of listeners of Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host whom the Sulzberger family loves to hate. In Brazil, there’s a clone of the New York Times, which is the Folha, but the radio stations, federal concessions, are well defended against the mere possibility of a Rush Limbaugh emerging there. Against the general farce of the media, all that’s left for us is to grumble on blogs or, with more luck, in this Diário do Comércio. The rest is silence — sometimes indignant and impotent, sometimes fearful and servile.

In the US, the more the journalistic establishment loses its audience, the more it resorts to resources of hysterical defamation that even Dr. Joseph Goebbels himself might find a bit too crude to persuade an adult audience.

One of these tactics is to shower odious invective on the characters one intends to label as hateful. There’s no need to provide, to sustain the attack, a single hateful appeal that has come out of the victim’s mouth. There’s no need to twist their words, giving a hateful sense to what has none. On the contrary: it’s enough to foam with hatred against the individual, and it’s proven — or hoped — that they are hateful. Everything is done with the insane expectation that the public’s mental automatism will lead them to feel that people who elicit so much hatred must have even more hatred in their hearts than the journalists who hate them. There’s always a group of student militants and NGO activists who, out of an infallible spirit of collaboration, pretend to believe in this, reinforcing the attack with scatological insults and death threats, so that the raw violence poured onto the defenseless target becomes so intimately intertwined with their image that it seems to originate from them.

Launched by the “mainstream media” in tones of posed neutrality and superiority, the extremely artificial attempt to blame the “hateful right” and especially Sarah Palin for the deadly actions of a leftist fanatic in Tucson, Arizona, was immediately reinforced by these and other appeals circulating on YouTube:²⁰

Why wasn’t Sarah Palin shot (instead of the Democratic representative)?

I hope Sarah Palin dies a horrible death and takes her stupid hatred with her.

Can someone please shoot Sarah Palin?

I hope Sarah Palin gets cancer and dies in the next two years.

Sarah Palin should be shot for encouraging fanaticism against Democrats.

Join us in praying for Sarah Palin to get cancer and die.

Sarah Palin is the most dangerous threat to the future of the human species. Someone, please shoot her.

Without being able to find the slightest hint of hatred in Sarah Palin’s words towards anyone, it is hoped that the virulence of the attacks she endures will serve as evidence against her. The implicit premise relies on the public’s stupidity, and sometimes it succeeds: if the woman were not really a nuisance, she wouldn’t be so hated. Those who are not foolish enough to be deceived by this semblance of demonic malice still have a more “adult” refuge to not entirely escape contamination: at the very least, someone who elicits so much hatred is, even without fault, a divisive force, someone who, for the general happiness of the nation, must be kept away from the White House, perhaps even from politics altogether. As Talleyrand recommended: “Calumniate, calumniate, something will always stick.”

In both cases, both the accusers and their audience of useful idiots faithfully follow the mechanism of revolutionary inversion: for you to have a reputation for being hateful, you don’t need to hate anyone; it’s enough for them to hate you.

The Brazilian imitation of the process sinks even deeper into infamy, because Sarah Palin is a distant character, unrelated to national debates. Only through a good dose of histrionic fantasy can our compatriots come to personally hate her. It’s also clear that in the US, no one reads the Brazilian press: the lives of our journalists consist of pretending to themselves that they are auxiliary forces of the American left, which doesn’t even know they exist. Ah, how right the Argentinians were to nickname our compatriots “los macaquitos” (the little monkeys)!

The enlightened ones

Diary of Commerce, November 7, 2005

The advent of the internet has so greatly multiplied the data sources available to the public that, for the scholar able to benefit from them — a rare type, I admit —, the daily experience of reading newspapers or watching TV news has become a lesson in social psychopathology, such is the gap between reality and the subjective universe of “opinion formers”. This includes not only journalists, of course, but also the set of individuals and groups they usually listen to: politicians, business leaders, university professors, people from the show business, and so on.

The conversations of these people constitute the focus of public attention. Everything that escapes their usual interest is, for the general public, as if it did not exist. Even patent realities that the ordinary citizen observes and verifies in their daily life can be relegated to the background and disappear completely from their conscious field of vision when their importance is not legitimized by the common recognition of chatterboxes. If something doesn’t appear in the newspapers and isn’t discussed on TV, it doesn’t weigh in when drawing conclusions. At the very least, what does not enter into the debates of the “educated” classes lacks a stabilized language in which to express itself. It would be ridiculous to expect the average man, devoid of the support of well-worn clichés, to invent on the spot the means to convey direct personal impressions. What cannot be spoken ends up being forgotten. The mediocre man believes not in what he sees, but in what he learns to say.

The general premise underpinning the tremendous authority of the “speaking classes” — as Pierre Bourdieu called them — is that, by the law of probabilities, it’s unlikely that something very relevant can escape the keen eyes of the supposedly more enlightened portions of the population. The problem is that they believe in the same premise, and therefore only receive information from their own circle, ignoring everything else and imagining they know everything. Every relative truth, when it becomes a general belief, ends up donning a feeling of absolute certainty that almost automatically turns it into an error more than relative.

A minimum of prudence would advise these people to doubt their group beliefs a bit and try to take a peek into the underbelly of the dominant conversation, in the humbler zones of reality, where the seeds of the future sprout. All gestation is shrouded in shadows. Those who only look where everyone looks are doomed to ignore powerful historical forces that are rising from the depths right now and risk, from one moment to the next, bursting onto the stage, brutally destroying the usual sense of the spectacle. When you hear some big shot expressing, with superior tranquility, the certainties of the moment, remember this: the petista corruption machine, the largest ever assembled throughout the entire epic of national mischief, was denied by the know-it-alls for more than ten years, no matter how many insiders offered firsthand information about it. They denied it with the same tone of superior authority with which they now deny Fidel Castro’s illegal help in Lula’s campaign. Cervantes, in the meantime, just took off. A single opinion expressed in actions is worth more than a thousand in beautiful words.

It’s not even worth discussing the allegations of this orchestra of silencers. Cuba doesn’t have money? Fidel Castro does. The FARC have even more. The operation is too crude for the high level of Cuban strategy? Only those who are unaware of Fidel Castro’s military biography, a succession of childish mistakes transformed into public relations victories, believe in this excuse. Is Cuba keeping to itself, not meddling in the politics of other countries? Read the minutes of the São Paulo Forum.²¹ Cuba governs the continent.

The naive subterfuges are only effective because they are backed by three decades of fantasies transfigured into common sense by the magic of the media. There is not a single luminary in Brazilian journalism who does not believe, for example, in the nonsense of conquistas de la revolución. In 1957, two years before Fidel Castro came to power, Cuba already had twice as many doctors per capita than the USA (and not with the current salary of thirty dollars a month), its infant mortality rate was the lowest in Latin America (the thirteenth in the world, lower than that of France, West Germany, Belgium, and Israel), its per capita income was double that of Spain, the share of Cuban workers in the GNP was proportionally greater than that of the Swiss, and the national literacy rate was 80%. And Cuba was teeming with immigrants, not potential runaways.

These data never appear in newspapers and on TV. Without them, it really seems that Fidel Castro did something for the Cubans. He did nothing, other than sending about 100,000 of them to their deaths, imprisoning another 500,000, and tormenting the population so much that a fifth of it fled to Miami, where today it forms one of the most prosperous communities in the USA, while those who remained on the island achieved the only two spectacular records that can be attributed to the communist regime: the quota of vigilantes, police, and lookouts rose to 28% of the population, while the suicide rate reached 24 for every thousand Cubans in 1986 (having since then disappeared from official statistics).

These data, I repeat, never appear in the popular Brazilian media. Their sources are numerous: the Black Book of the Cuban Revolution, reports from the UN and Amnesty International, books by Armando Valladares, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Humberto Fontova, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Luís Grave de Peralta Morell, and the Cuban press exiled in Miami. Who, in the national media, reads these things? Never. Reliable sources on Cuban affairs for Brazilian journalists come only with the imprimatur of Fidel Castro. The rest is dismissed with three words: “Miami mafia”. Accompanied by a snort of disdain, this expression has an immediate proving effect. As if the mafia wasn’t in Havana, as if successive Cuban traffickers arrested in the USA hadn’t already denounced Fidel Castro’s central role in continental banditry, as if an American federal prosecutor hadn’t told the Miami Herald in July 1996 that he had “more evidence against Fidel Castro than was used to indict Manuel Noriega in 1988”. All CIA propaganda, of course.

But don’t think that the blindness of the speaking classes is limited to events in a country without a free press, where unofficial information is non-existent. They don’t even know what’s going on in the USA. And they don’t know because, in this respect too, they only trust their peers: the major American media and “public intellectuals” like Chomsky and Michael Moore.²² That’s why they believe, for instance, that leaking information about the identity of a CIA agent is indeed a serious case, one of those government-toppling affairs. From within the USA, the matter looks much smaller. All that the fierce prosecutor Fitzgerald has managed to do so far is to indict an advisor to an advisor to the vice-president. And to indict him for perjury, a personal crime that cannot involve the accused’s superiors. Fitzgerald clung to this precisely because, on the central issue of the inquiry, he could do nothing beyond media noise. Milton Temer, one of the on-call wise men in the village, says that the leak “is considered one of the most serious episodes in US legislation, an act of abominable treason, punishable by thirty years in jail, plus a heavy fine”. Patience is required. Giving out an agent’s name is only a crime when the person is abroad, on a confidential mission, protected by the government, and under explicit confidentiality. The lady was at home, without any mission. Legally, no one can do anything against Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, or Lewis Libby himself. The attempt is to make it look like a serious crisis to see if it becomes a real crisis. I know that what I’m saying isn’t what appears in the New York Times. But who, here in the USA, takes the New York Times seriously? This is reading for pseudo-intellectuals from the third world. A recent survey by the newspaper itself showed that only 30% of its readers trust it. And 30% of how much? Of a little over a million copies, in a country of 300 million people. That’s one believer for every thousand skeptics. If you want to know what the American electorate believes, tune in to Rush Limbaugh’s program: 38 million daily listeners. Or Sean Hannity’s: 18 million. The major American newspapers are like the Brazilian intellectual elite: a handful of idiots rubbing against each other like druggies in an orgy, disregarding everything around them, and imagining, out of sheer madness, that they are at the top of the universal hierarchy.

The collective self-deception, which, starting from the mainstream American media, penetrates Brazilian brains like a massive dose of cocaine, reaches the point of stubbornly and criminally muffling the most essential facts of the time, replacing them with clichés that, after a few repetitions, become public opinion dogmas and premises responsible for supporting, with their unshakeable solidity, the silliest and most mechanical conclusions a chicken-brained person could produce. An example of a syllogism:

Major premise: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Minor premise: Bush said there were.

Conclusion: therefore, Bush lied to kill children and fill Halliburton’s coffers with Iraqi money.

Well, who said there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? The enlightened court. Military reports state that they have found:

— 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium;

— 1,500 gallons of chemical agents used in weapons;

— Seventeen chemical warheads with cyclosarin, a poison five times deadlier than sarin gas;

— A thousand radiological materials in powder form, ready to be scattered over populous areas.

— Bombs with mustard gas and sarin gas.

If these things are not weapons of mass destruction, what are they? Parts of a “Little Chemist” kit?

No one at the Pentagon is unaware of them. But in the media war, the Pentagon is nothing. I only learned about these findings because I read about them in Richard Miniter’s book, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror. Miniter, a veteran investigative journalist, was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He also wrote for the New York Times, which might not like what he says now but cannot remove him from its bestseller list, where he is making his third appearance.²³ Miniter also shatters two articles of faith of the chattering classes: he shows that Bin Laden was not trained by the CIA and that Halliburton is not making money in Iraq.

But by no means think that in the US, only the left intoxicates itself with its myths. George W. Bush’s entourage managed to convince the president that in Latin America, the only venomous snake is Hugo Chávez and that the antidote to its bite is… Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The cunning folks reached this conclusion by assessing the situation with petty trader eyes. They believe there’s no problem that a good trade deal can’t solve. Too bad they didn’t tell Lenin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol-Pot, or even Fidel Castro. They don’t even understand that Latin American politics doesn’t operate on a state-by-state basis, but rather through a continental alliance forged by Fidel Castro, which preceded and led to the rise of Lula, Chávez, Kirchner, and the like, over whom he has absolute authority rooted in the financial and military power of the FARC. The mad economism, which celebrates an economic victory when providing atomic weapons to Chinese generals who promise to destroy America,²⁴ has also been the basic orientation of Washington’s policy towards Latin America for over a decade, and its results are evident: the entire continent under leftist domination and filled with unprecedented anti-American hatred. Bush was persuaded to continue in the same vein, and the unreality of his position is such that he is compelled, in a masochistic ritual, to take as a close friend the very leader of the party that organizes against him the largest anti-American demonstrations ever seen in Brazil.

Karl Marx, the author of so many absurdities, said one very correct thing: “The majority, almost always, is wrong.” He forgot to clarify that this observation does not apply to the majority of people in general, but especially to the majority of “intellectuals”, in the broad sense that Gramsci gave to the term.²⁵ They create “public opinion” and then appeal to its authority to feel secure. They paint a donkey-god on the wall and kneel before it, asking for the revealed truth.

It was these guys who convinced Chamberlain that Hitler was a perfect gentleman, Roosevelt that Stalin was an honorable man of the people and Mao Zedong a Christian reformer. They convinced America that Soviet troops would leave Europe once American soldiers returned home. They announced to the world that Fidel Castro would restore democracy in Cuba and that the Vietcong communists would be kind to the populations of South Vietnam and Cambodia once they saw the damn Yankees off their backs. They persuaded humanity that Africa would become an industrial powerhouse within a few decades if it just got rid of “imperialism”. They created the legend of the “ethical party” here and repelled, as malicious insinuation, every denunciation of PT (Workers' Party) corruption between 1990 and 2005. Now they assure that Fidel Castro did not give Lula any money under the table.

4. Morality & Inversion

Teachers of corruption

Diário do Comércio, May 7, 2012

No one is more immoral, nor more dangerous to society, than the judge of others' conduct who takes his own corrupted soul as the ultimate measure of human morality. The man who judges by this standard — even worse, the one who teaches to judge in this way — is a dissolving and corrupting force even more harmful than the practicing immoralist, the bandit, the thief, who at least doesn’t turn his personal vileness into a theory, a criterion, and a law.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who abandoned his children in an orphanage, lied more than a campaign worker, regularly went to bed with his benefactors' wives and even spoke ill of them afterward, swore that there was no one better than him in all of Europe — and, when speaking of his high moral qualities, shed tears of emotion.

Rousseau had at least the excuse of being mad, but his madness inaugurated the universal fashion of taking one’s own navel as the culmination point of human perfection and measuring everything by the distance from there to the ground.

There is no shortage of examples of this in the national media. In a recent article, Mr. Paulo Moreira Leite swears that all moralizing discourse is false because “it is based on a fanciful view of human societies. It assumes that there are people of unblemished character… incapable… of having unconfessable secrets and ambitions they condemn in public but cultivate in private… Real life is not like that…”

What he is saying is that, in real life, there are not — pay attention: absolutely not — people “without unconfessable secrets and ambitions they condemn in public but cultivate in private.” The conclusion is unavoidable: if these people don’t exist, Mr. Moreira Leite, who does exist, cannot be one of them. Therefore, he has unconfessable secrets and ambitions that he condemns in public but cultivates in private. And note well: he didn’t say “nurtures in secret,” which could still have the connotation of mere fantasy; he said “cultivates in private,” that is, practices in secret. He doesn’t limit himself, therefore, to merely dreaming of one day being as successful as the villains he criticizes in public: he actively dedicates himself to emulating them when no one is looking. And not only is he like this, but he can’t conceive of anyone better than him, anyone free from these abject moral defects.

No one asked Mr. Moreira for this confession of baseness. He made it because he wanted to. If he understood what he wrote (as if this didn’t require too much!), he should admit that it automatically disqualifies him from speaking ill of people who, in the end, have no other fault than being as bad as he is.

After all, if there are no better human beings who can serve as a measure of virtues and sins, then there are only two alternatives: to condemn vices in the name of admittedly unattainable abstract standards, or to delight in criticizing evil in the name of evil. The first hypothesis is called insane moralism; the second, cynical pretense. Mr. Moreira criticizes the first in the name of the second.

Every sensible moral judgment must start from certain obvious and self-evident observations. Since infinite good and absolute evil are metaphysical entities that elude human experience, all that’s left for our poor brains is to reason in relative terms, to weigh things on the scales of better and worse. To do that, one has to expand their moral imagination through study, experience, and meditation, on a scale that ranges from proven maximum sanctity to the most extreme wickedness recorded in the annals of history. Only someone who has engaged in this exercise for years on end is capable of objectively judging others' conduct, and even then with some risk of error. The others offer arbitrary opinions, based on silly prejudices, subjective preferences, passing caprices, or hidden interests.

In this sense, Mr. Paulo Moreira Leite’s moral imagination is the most atrophied and petty imaginable. At the top of his value scale is himself. Below, someone who isn’t worse than him. In Greek, idios means “the same.” Idiotes, from which our term “idiot” comes, is the person who sees nothing beyond himself, who judges everything by his own pettiness.

That someone so obviously unqualified to opine on matters of morality has at his disposal a nationally circulated magazine, through which he infuses the misery of his judgments into the public’s mind, is, in itself, a symptom of a moral debacle much more alarming, due to its social effects, than any specific case of corruption, theft, obscenity, or even violence. Plato already taught that disorder takes hold in society when many people begin to ascend to positions of importance and prestige for which they have absolutely no qualification. This mainly refers to those we would now call “intellectuals” or “opinion leaders.” Delinquents, swindlers, and thieving politicians may cause material harm to their victims, but they only corrupt themselves. When corruption penetrates the souls of social critics, of moral teachers, it spreads throughout society.

It is forbidden to notice

Diário do Comércio, September 19, 2011

Have they already forgotten? The bill that gives corruption the status of a “heinous crime” did not have an innocent origin, nor even a decent one: it was sent to the Chamber in 2009 by that very individual who, accused of being the inventor and manager of the biggest corruption scheme ever seen in this country, bet on the slowness of the Justice system as a guarantee of his eternal and very peaceful impunity.

Nothing is more typical of the criminal mentality that affects him than the affected excessive, hyperbolic, histrionic honesty. Concealing with a mask of severity the cynical smile that lies within, the capomafioso is not content with displaying the average integrity of the common citizen. No. He has to be the most honest, the purest, the supreme model of civic virtues, and ultimately, the hunter of wrongdoers, the living guarantee of law and order.

Confident, as always, in the effectiveness of his performance, the individual allowed himself to bluff discreetly, knowing that in the atmosphere of reverential worship built around his person, no one would allow themselves to realize that he was talking about himself: “The corrupt person is the one who denounces the most because he thinks he won’t be caught.”

This was, in fact, more than a synthetic summary of thirty years of struggle by a party that climbed the steps of power by ascending piles of embalmed political corpses with corruption accusations. It was the definition of what that man was doing at that very moment. But who, in this country, is still capable of comparing speech with situation and distinguishing between sincerity and pretense?

I read a study the other day about the harms of Botox, which, by freezing the natural movement of facial muscles, destroys spontaneous emotional expression and confuses the immediate reading of signals on which all human interaction is based.

More than Botox, however, the legal and moral impositions of a psychologically overbearing and invasive State, which extinguishes the right to natural reactions in the name of human rights, have this effect.

If by law it’s forbidden to distinguish, in speech and treatment, between a woman and a man dressed as a woman, or between a female voice and its male imitation, if the mere association of the color black with fear of the night is considered a racist allusion, if designating an animal species by its male specimen is an act of male oppression, then all other spontaneous, natural, self-evident distinctions, deeply ingrained in the human subconscious by the nature of things and by a millennial experience, automatically become suspicious and must be restrained until sufficient proof is provided that they don’t violate any code, offend any interest group, or hurt any sensitivity protected by the State.

The more personal conduct is regulated by legislative bureaucracy, the more complex and difficult human perception becomes, until all instant intuitions are paralyzed by morbid and stupefying scrupulousness, and the fear of arbitrary conventions suppresses, along with spontaneous reactions, all genuine moral sentiment.

It’s not surprising that, in this atmosphere of general inhibition of consciences, the moralistic combat staged by a notorious corrupt individual doesn’t even evoke laughter, and that the cynical proposal with which he covers up his own crimes is taken literally seriously in the very moment when he, playing with the audience like a cat with a mouse, allows himself to show his hypocritical accuser’s face without the slightest fear that anyone will compare his words with his actions.

The misery goes even deeper. Little by little, the code of inhibitions manufactured by pressure groups is being elevated to the status of the only prevailing moral system, and no one seems to realize that the level of corruption has something to do with common morality. As consciences become dulled, moral aspirations lose all connection to reality and harden into a mechanical ritual of poses and meaningless grimaces. Everyone seems to imagine that, in an environment of general degradation where 50 thousand homicides per year are accepted as a banality not worthy of discussion, it’s possible to preserve one single good — public money — isolated and protected from all sins. In a state where sexual fantasies are holier, more worthy of protection than religious conscience and principles of popular morality, any official anti-corruption effort can never be more than a grotesque farce.

The recycling of ethics

[from: 500 Years in Five Notes]

Bravo!, April 2000

Hidden away, the elite can secretly nurture the most perverse intentions, always posing as angels of virtue.

Thus, for example, a few years ago, the idea occurred to them that all the positive values still endowed with credibility in a time of general degradation could be recycled to serve the immediacy of their political ambitions.

The most notable of these values was “ethics.” It’s natural that a people who feel deceived without knowing by whom would have a deep and painful yearning for morality. With a bit of cleverness, this yearning can be perverted into suspicion, suspicion into hatred, hatred into an instrument for the systematic destruction of undesirable leadership.

The existence of the vast political espionage machinery that has been set up since then to set in motion the factory of denunciations and keep the nation on edge constitutes, in itself, the complete corruption of the system. The more intensely this machinery operates, the more the atmosphere becomes laden with blackmail, disloyalties, lies. Yet the machinery remains invisible, launching volleys against the corruption it itself feeds. Its first effect is to dull the public’s sense of the relative gravity of evils. Today, an employee who misappropriates funds, corrupting a department, seems more criminal than the spy who wiretaps phones, diverts papers, usurps the police function of the State, and corrupts the entire system.

Ethics is not an exact science. Its practice depends on a esprit de finesse capable of evaluating immeasurable quantities. There exists in every human being a spontaneous knowledge of moral principles. These principles are not rules: they are formal criteria that underlie the rules. The rules vary according to times and places, but they always imply the same principles. Any savage knows that which endangers the entire community is more serious than what harms only a part of it. Any illiterate understands that which is more basic and general should be preserved with more care than that which is peripheral and particular.

The moral virtues of a people can be scratched here and there by the violation of specific rules. But if the perception of general principles is dulled, it’s not one virtue or another that falls: it’s the very possibility of distinguishing between virtue and vice. It is precisely at this moment that the discourse of moral accusation transforms into the opportunistic hunt for scapegoats. So confused and bewildered by opportunistic moralists has the Brazilian people been that it is beginning to accept as normal and praiseworthy the denunciation of relatives, widespread wiretapping, and the new scale of values in which embezzling money from the State is more criminal than killing, raping, selling drugs to children. Beliefs like these destroy, at their foundation, any possible order and perpetuate criminality ad infinitum.

It wasn’t just “ethics.” Similar recycling processes were applied to notions of charity, peace, rights, and history. All the words that express the highest aspirations were prostituted, lowered, ground down in the machinery of opportunism. And the alliance of the banker with the murderer shines on the altar of “solidarity.”

The destruction of language precedes the dulling of consciences. To elevate the morality of a people, it’s necessary to sharpen their sense of values, not dull it. Whoever, under the pretext of punishing corrupt politicians, destroys the very foundations of public morality, is either an irredeemable idiot or has a hidden agenda. The difference is that idiocy feels some shame for itself; political ambition does not.

Brace for the worst

Jornal do Brasil, May 6, 2006

It doesn’t make sense to expect that the State, the government, or the political class would have a higher level of morality than their inspectors and critics—the intellectuals and the media.

No one has ever refuted the thesis of Reinhold Niebuhr, presented in Moral Man and Immoral Society, that society and its state representation necessarily allow behaviors that, in an individual, would be condemned as immoral.

The critic who rises against state corruption thus has the obligation to be more demanding of themselves than of the object of their criticism.

In Brazil, the greatest proof of general immorality is not the success of the petist corruption machine; it’s the presumption of angelic impeccability with which those who helped construct it speak against it, in the tone of innocent victims rather than repentant accomplices.

The first step toward the institutionalization of state gangsterism in this country was the destruction of traditional morality and its replacement by the murky cluster of politically correct slogans and casuistries that, being empty and moldable to tactical conveniences of the moment, serve only to concentrate power in the hands of the most cynical and shameless.

When simple notions of truthfulness, honesty, and sincerity are neutralized as mere ideological constructs, and in their place, hypnotic verbal fetishes like “social justice,” “inclusion,” and “diversity” are consecrated, what can be expected other than the general confusion of consciences and the unstoppable rise of trickery?

And how to avoid moral dullness when two generations of students are vampirized by insane professors who, after proclaiming the total nonexistence of truth, immediately arrogate to themselves the absolute credibility of truthful discourse and suppress as “authoritarian” any inclination to see this as a contradiction?

Who among journalists and intellectuals can honestly say they haven’t contributed to this mass imbecilization, celebrated over the years as a meritorious advancement of “critical consciousness”?

Who among them now recognizes in the petist debacle the result of their own actions, instead of hiding their past under others' ugliness that can no longer be camouflaged?

When, in the early 1990s, the “Campaign for Ethics in Politics” was launched with triumphant fanfare, which I was the only one to denounce as a Machiavellian scheme invented to prostitute ethics in the bed of politics,²⁶ Brazil’s fate was sealed: beatify the worst, elevate them as models of good conduct, project all hopes of a redeeming transfiguration of nationality onto them, and finally, hand them a dose of power greater than that of any political group in our entire history.

Who, at the time when Dirceu and Mercadante shone as apostles of virtue in the circus of the parliamentary inquiries, took the time to examine the intrinsic morality of their accusations, often fueled by the petist espionage apparatus whose mere existence was already an established illegality, the usurpation of state prerogatives by the party-prince appointed to exercise, in the words of its guru Antonio Gramsci, “the omnipresent and invisible authority of a categorical imperative, of a divine commandment”?

Who, knowing of the connections between this party and the FARC, did not consider it legitimate and morally defensible to hide them in order not to give strength to the Malufs and Magalhães, the pre-selected objects of hatred to serve as sacrificial victims in the grand spectacle of the purifying ritual, officiated with discreet chuckles and winks by a clergy of tricksters?

Many today point fingers against government corruption. Few among them are less guilty of it than Lula himself. Even rarer are those who have the integrity to clean themselves before revealing the dirt of others.

The general tone of the anti-petist polemic nowadays does not foretell any restoration of morality, only another remake of the customary farce. Brace for the worst, and you won’t be disappointed.

The pit of Babel

Diário do Comércio, June 12, 2006

The two little heroes of the week were Mr. Fernando Gabeira and Antônio Carlos Magalhães²⁷ — the former for having fulfilled the commonplace duty of being kind to the security guards who, to protect him, had their arms broken and heads cracked in the invasion of the Chamber; the latter for having clamored for a necessary, belated, and more than improbable intervention of the Armed Forces in the bloody circus of national reality²⁸.

“Poor is the country that needs heroes,” said Brecht. But Brecht was a cynical liar. Every country needs heroes. So much so that, when in a crunch it finds none, it promptly invents some pathetic sham and clings to it with that hysterical hope born from the marriage of cowardice with stupidity.

Genuine heroes are made from within, in the soul’s struggle for the truth of existence. Before shining in spectacular actions, they must overcome the inner lie and pay, with extreme moral loneliness, the price of sincerity.

Those who cannot do this take advantage of general despair moments to say opportune little words that make them appear what they are not.

Messrs. Gabeira and Magalhães, as founding fathers of the very state of affairs they denounce, should cleanse themselves of their past before presenting themselves as saviors of the present. The Church, inspired by eternal wisdom, instituted confession before communion. The two chanchada heroes from Atlântida want to ascend to the heavens of national glory before descending to the hell of their inner misery. They want to be exalted without having to humble themselves.

Mr. Gabeira labels the current petista arrogance as a betrayal of the beautiful ideals of his youth’s dawn. What ideals were those, that, according to the retired kidnapper and terrorist, the years no longer bring? They were those of Fidel Castro’s continental socialism, modeled by the Cuban regime and spread across the continent, in the form of bombs and assassinations, by the Latin American Solidarity Organization, OLAS, the first edition of the São Paulo Forum. Nobody involved in this could honestly say they fought for freedom of expression. Now Mr. Gabeira complains that the party imposes ready-made decisions on him, doesn’t let him vote as he sees fit. But in Cuba, at the time he enjoyed the hospitality and protection of the Castro regime, could anyone vote as they pleased? From this perspective, today’s PT (like today’s Cuba, by the way) is not the opposite of Mr. Gabeira’s youthful dreams: it is their realization. As for physical violence, the green deputy won’t want to persuade us that the MST troublemakers are a match for the Cuban secret police. On the island where Mr. Gabeira found refuge from a dictatorship that had killed a couple of hundred armed terrorists, another dictatorship had already killed, by then, over 10,000 unarmed civilians, but he found it beautiful. It’s impossible that a few dozen police officers killed by the PCC are too shocking a reality compared to the model he then worshiped. Moreover, it was Mr. Gabeira’s fellow ideologues who began to prepare common criminals on Ilha Grande for the ideologically trained upgrade that transformed them into urban guerrillas. He never even said, “We shouldn’t have done that.” On the contrary, he takes pride in his generation’s deeds. How can he then feel scandalized that, in due time, they bear fruit? There remains the aspect of honesty, of integrity. Fidel Castro, in the 1970s, had already begun to amass, through deals with drug traffickers allowing their planes to fly over Cuban airspace with impunity, the fortune that would place him on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men. If Gabeira never repented for having served the maximum gangster of Latin America, it’s not credible that he feels so ashamed of having contributed to the rise of petty criminals like Delúbio and Valério.

No, there isn’t a drop of sincerity in Mr. Gabeira’s criticisms, nor in his self-criticisms. There’s just the desire to exploit the weakness of popular memory, to spread the impression that the cause was nobler than the effect, that the builders of the present woe are actually its poor disillusioned victims or its heroic denouncers.

This is certainly not a big novelty. Since the decapitation of Louis XVI, the global revolutionary movement has lived off pimping its own crimes and embarrassments, attributing them to its victims, to fortuitous circumstances, or to the actions of traitors. So many repeated confessions of the inability to govern the course of things are enough, of course, to challenge the presumption of absolute and infallible power to forge a better future. But the public that hears them does not seem to relate one to another. It takes each one in isolation, as if it were the first, and invests over and over in the serpent of Eden.

As for Mr. Magalhães, the sentiment that inspires his outburst of anger is not patriotic zeal; it’s the resentment of a spurned sycophant. In 2002, besieged by leftist hostility, crushed under endless accusations, foreseeing the imminent end of his glory days, the Bahian senator, in extremis, bet everything on the card of adherence and flattery. He bet and lost. It did him no good to lick the boots of those who had called him the worst names just the day before. Despised and humiliated by the object of his sudden affections, he retreated into resentful silence, preparing for petty revenge.

Four years ago, the exposure of the PT’s corruption machine was already over a decade old, the MST was already setting farms on fire, the connections between the national leftist elite, Cuban espionage, FARC narcotraffickers, and local organized crime were already a well-established tradition. Half a dozen witnesses from the Celso Daniel case had conveniently been assassinated, and Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as the chief officiant of the macabre rites of the São Paulo Forum, was already the undertaker of national dignity and sovereignty.²⁹ Why applaud all of this back then, and now step onto the Senate podium with scandalized looks to denounce something that was already known and more than proven?

The change in Mr. Magalhães' attitude towards Lula didn’t come suddenly, triggered by punches and kicks delivered to the Congress security. It came right after the elections when, frustrated by his attempt to win through adherence, the former governor of Bahia had to step down from his pedestal as the supreme arbiter of Brazilian politics and retreat to the modest position of a provincial leader, a position he should never have left.

Descendants of Macunaíma and Tartuffe, Magalhães and Gabeira are the Laurel and Hardy of the grand epic of national anti-heroism.

But what annoys and depresses me is not that types like these sprout like mushrooms from the general decomposition. It’s the obscene haste with which they are applauded by educated people who should at least have some memory, and they become models of patriotic conduct. Note well: I said that this annoys and depresses me, not that it surprises me. For decades, I have been observing the progressive, firm, and seemingly irreversible decline in the standards of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic judgment in this country, a degradation—strictly and etymologically speaking—never before observed anywhere or at any time in world history. Not long ago, a cunning strategist, Mr. Herbert de Souza, was seen as an improved reissue of St. Francis of Assisi due to the divine merit of having turned charitable institutions into tools of leftist propaganda. In the 2002 elections, the journalist Hélio Fernandes, who had never been notable for gullible naivety, wrote with all seriousness that Lula was the providential savior announced in St. John Bosco’s prophecy. Silly windbags like Mr. Leandro Konder, Emir Sader, Luiz Eduardo Soares, and Gilberto Felisberto de Vasconcelos (Gilberto Felisberto, can you believe it?) shone in the sky as supreme stars of intelligence. Simple legal witnesses who told the truth to avoid perjury charges were canonized as pinnacles of honesty. And right after that, a singer just like any other, whose maximum originality was having posed in a collant alongside Roberta Close and her husband at the Scala’s gay ball, was consecrated with a ministerial position as the epitome of “national culture”—whatever that means.

Seeing all of this, I couldn’t help but recall Antonio Machado’s haiku:

“How difficult it is When everything falls Not to fall oneself.”

Worse than the degradation of reality was the lowering of ideal expectations. The measure of maximum altitude conceivable by popular imagination kept lowering, adapting to the increasingly ordinary available material.

Not that Brazilian aspirations had ever been very high. We have always been, in this respect, well below the human average—so much so that we cannot conceive the heroes, saints, and sages of other times and cultures except through the reductive and caricatural prism that is our own. That’s why I consider “Desenvolvimento e cultura. O problema do estetismo no Brasil” (Development and Culture. The problem of aestheticism in Brazil) by Mário Vieira de Mello,³⁰ and “Psicologia do subdesenvolvimento” (Psychology of Underdevelopment) by José Osvaldo de Meira Penna,³¹ to be the most useful studies ever written about the nature of national culture. The first discerns in the European sources that have most influenced us, the predominance of aesthetic pleasure over moral consciousness. The second shows that this pleasure doesn’t even reach the aesthetic level: it’s playful and erotic. Brazilians in general, even the educated ones, don’t grasp the specific requirements of the moral, intellectual, and religious domains. They decide the weightiest questions of human destiny by the same criterion of immediate attraction and repulsion they use to judge the quality of spirits or evaluate the profiles of behinds at the beach. Hence their uncontrollable tendency to take personal sympathy, identity of tastes, or conformity with the preferences of the artistic class as infallible signs of high moral qualification. Mr. Gabeira, for instance, parades around in a thong and says he smokes marijuana. Therefore, he must be a “good guy.” Magalhães dances the samba and is friends with the mothers of saints. Despite being politically hated, he remains a popular figure, familiar to all. Conversely, men of the highest moral stature, like Gustavo Corção or Prince D. Bertrand, were hated and despised, less for the content of their political beliefs (the same as Nélson Rodrigues, who everyone likes) than for the hieratic rigidity of their style of living, incompatible with the minimum promiscuous familiarity required to be admitted to the pantheon of “good guys.”

Now imagine what can happen to a country so psychologically defenseless when an entire generation of ambitious activist intellectuals, driven by pestilence-like ambition, decides to suck the tiny bit of moral values still disseminated in society as residues of nobler times and downgrade them to tools of communist indoctrination, if not to slogans of electoral propaganda. It’s as Raymond Abellio would say, “the abyss of Babel”: it’s a general competition for the cup of universal vulgarity, each one trying to show that they are more rotten, more sordid, more degraded than their neighbor, and calling it ethics, patriotism, and culture. This is how we explain the contrast, as noted in a previous article, between the Brazil of now and that of the 1950s. Back then, it was already a mess, but within it, a few hundred writers and artists were still struggling to stay afloat, preserving the dignity of intelligence. Now, the very healing sense of superior culture is lost. Those who still have a bit of education are ashamed of it, they want to be “common folk” like Lula, court the mass’s flattery, and adapt as quickly as possible to the reigning trashiness, as this prehistoric survivor, Bruno Tolentino, calls it.

I believe that unintentionally, this answers the kind and perplexed letter I received from a reader in the South:

For quite some time, I’ve been reading your articles in the press and following your weekly opinions on the internet blog you maintain. All your authored texts are always accompanied by a warning or a future prediction. Everything is incredibly clear, to the point of making it seem like you have a crystal ball, play tarot, or dream like a prophet, given how accurate you are. Even a simple title like “Expect the Worst,” published in JB on May 6th of this year,³² (considering this attack on Congress) reveals your ability to predict future events, lucidly and convincingly. But something intrigues me… Why, even with all the clarity you provide in explaining the unfolding political events, does no one listen to you or take your articles into consideration? Does Brazil perhaps have a satanic hatred for the truth?

If I were a right-wing politician, I would conceal what I know about Gabeira and Magalhães and make tactical use of their anti-PT performances. But I wasn’t trained for that. All the training I acquired was to perceive the course of events amidst confusion and lies, and to express it as clearly and directly as possible. I never studied to shine, to build a career, but to see reality, perhaps to overcome the oppressive feeling of ignorance and confusion that plagued me in childhood. Since I can remember, I’ve repeated Muhammad’s prayer daily: “Lord, show me things as they are.” And as soon as I learned to express myself as a writer, I realized that if I sacrificed my verbal intelligence for other purposes, saying what seemed convenient rather than what I saw, it would eventually be lost completely, and I would become just another campaign worker, another cheap seducer, another party writer. In my adolescence, a reading that inspired me greatly was the page in Julián Marías' delightful “Introducción a la Filosofía” (Introduction to Philosophy), where he showed the essential connection between the three basic terms of Greek philosophy: “theoréin,” “ón,” and “logos”—“to see,” “to be,” and “language.” The philosopher, originally, didn’t see himself as the author of complex speeches, but as someone with a precise role: to see being and say things exactly as they are. When I read that page, I said to myself, “This is what I want to be when I grow up”—the person who knows what’s happening and explains it the best way I can. I don’t know how to do anything else. If my abilities are less valued than those of Gabeira, Magalhães, Sáder, and Gilbertos Felisbertos in general, that’s part of the very reality I’m trying to grasp, and it impresses me no more than the rest of the panorama of spiritual misery in which applause, if received, would have on me the effect of a spit, and vice versa.

It’s true that not everyone complains about what I write. Some people like it. But a good portion likes it in the same playful key where acquired knowledge is a form of entertainment, without any impact on practical life and real decisions. When I give advice to these people, I often feel like a doctor who, after prescribing emergency medication, finds it forgotten in a corner of the room where the family pays their last respects to the patient’s corpse. I don’t feel like a misunderstood genius, I don’t have the slightest pity for myself: I pity those to whom I extended the rescue of my knowledge and who only used it as a passing dazzle. They didn’t understand that I didn’t want their applause, but their salvation.

5. University & Farce

A generation of predators

Diário do Comércio, June 3, 2011

Ever since I distanced myself from Brazil, I have witnessed the intelligence of my compatriots plummet to levels that sometimes threaten to border on the subhuman. I cannot gauge it by literary production, which has been dwindling to near nonexistence in a country that once boasted some of the world’s finest writers. I measure it by the university theses that come my way, increasingly filled with glaring solecisms and absurd contradictions, by newspaper comments, by the pronouncements of so-called “authorities,” and, in general, by public discussions. Among all this material, what stands out the most is not the absence of ideas, not the stupidity of reasoning, not even the poverty of language; it is the general incapacity to distinguish between the essential and the accessory, the decisive and the irrelevant. No problem, no subject, no matter, once brought onto the stage — or the circus — is not endlessly nibbled at around the edges, as if it had no center, no meaning, no sense around which to articulate a coherent discussion. Everyone who opens their mouth only wants to express some displaced and untimely subjective feeling, display virtue, garner sympathy or votes, as if they were engaged in a round of personal presentations in a psychotherapy group rather than a sensible conversation about — let’s say — something. The thing, the object, the fact, the topic, poor thing, is forgotten in a corner, as if it didn’t exist, and after a while, it ceases to exist altogether. The impression that remains with me is that the entire reading and writing population is suffering from attention deficit syndrome. No one can hold an object in their mind for ten seconds; imagination quickly flies off to the sides, weaving, enraptured, a filigree of frivolities around nothing.

If you ask me what the essential problems of Brazil are, I will answer without the slightest difficulty:

1. The killing of Brazilians, between 40,000 and 50,000 per year.

2. Drug consumption, which increases more than in any neighboring country, and which some lunatics intend to increase even more by legalizing drug trafficking — the greatest prize that the FARC could receive for decades of bloodshed.

3. The complete absence of education in a country where students consistently rank last in international tests, competing with children from much poorer nations; in a country, moreover, where a person who never learned to spell the word “header” is accepted as the Minister of Education because they never had a head, and where it is understood that the greatest urgency of the school system is to teach children the delights of sodomy — undoubtedly a practical solution for students and teachers, as engaging in this activity requires no knowledge of Portuguese, mathematics, or anything except the approximate location of the involved anatomical parts.

4. The increasing shortage of qualified higher-level skilled labor, which has to be imported because universities don’t produce any literate individuals.

5. The monstrous debt accumulated by a criminal government that has no qualms about strangling future generations to win the votes of the present, and is still celebrated as the savior of the national economy.

6. The complete impossibility of democratic competition in a scenario where the government and opposition have allied themselves, with the help of the mainstream media and the complicit omission of the wealthy class, to censor and prohibit any political discourse that defends the majority ideals and values of the population, which are abominable to the elite’s taste.³³

7. The alarming weakening of national sovereignty, already condemned to death by the rising international bureaucracy and the continental encirclement of the São Paulo Forum (that entity that until yesterday didn’t even exist, right?).

8. The complete destruction of high culture, in a catastrophic state of intellectual slumification where the role of providing an outlet for the circulation of ideas in the world, which should belong to the academic class as a whole, is practically carried out by a single individual, a last survivor, who in return gets pelted with stones and spat on from all sides, especially by the plagiarists and usurpers who thrive by parasitizing his work.

If you ask me the cause of these eight colossal disgraces, I’ll tell you it’s the most obvious thing in the world: forty years ago, the institutions that boast of being Brazil’s greatest universities unleashed a generation of morbidly presumptuous pseudo-intellectuals, who in their youth already paraded themselves as “the most enlightened segment of the population.” Today, these enlightened minds dominate everything — the educational system, political parties, state bureaucracy, you name it — shaping the country in their image and likeness. Killings, debts, general dumbing down, education debacle, it’s all the merit of a small group of poor-quality brains poisoned by foolish ideas and infernal vanity. Among all generations of Brazilian intellectuals, this is the worst, the most predatory, the most destructive.

If you want to know why fundamental issues cannot be seen and discussed in their essence, why attention is always diverted to peripheral details, and why, in short, no problem in this country has a solution, the answer is not difficult either: those who shape public debates, by definition, are the ruling elite, and they allow nothing to be discussed except in the framework of their vocabulary, their interests, their agenda, their psychotic irresponsibility, their megalomaniacal ambition, their abject self-worship.

Until you lose respect for these people, nothing serious can be discussed in Brazil.

The option for farce

Diário do Comércio (Editorial), August 22, 2008

The most salient and characteristic feature of the intellectual class in Brazil today (I mean, for the past thirty years) is their spirit of mafia-like group solidarity, much more cohesive, jealous, and impenetrable than similar corporations in other countries.

Several factors produce this phenomenon.

One of them is the indissoluble fusion of intellectual work with party militancy (leftist, of course). Some of this exists everywhere, but not in the Brazilian dosage. In this country, a professor’s rise in the academic ladder depends hardly at all on their intellectual achievements — generally null or negligible — and almost entirely on their position in the party hierarchy or, at least, in the affections of the leftist leadership. Careers like those of Messrs. Emir Sader, Quartim de Moraes, Fernando Haddad, Luis Felipe de Alencastro, and so many others would be inexplicable without this. The duty of party loyalty is transmitted through close interaction to the academic community, infusing it with a sense of unanimity and corporate self-protection, which, at the call of leadership, mobilizes, in an instant, an all-for-one, one-for-all, with almost military homogeneity.

A second cause is the promiscuous intimacy — also much greater than in other countries — between the media and the university. The latter dictates the norms of acceptability and unacceptability, and the former follows them faithfully and, in return, influences the rise and fall of academic stars, producing intellectual prestige seemingly formidable yet incomprehensible out of thin air, and condemning to obscurity those who fall out of favor with the provincial mandarinate.

But undoubtedly, the most decisive factor that binds and clings these individuals to each other like a colony of oysters is the secret awareness of their own ineptitude, which gnaws at each one from within and compels them to seek a talisman against the risks of solitary intellectual adventure in the group’s approval. Yes, what today’s typical Brazilian intellectual fears most, what they avoid like the plague, is delving alone into the search for truth, exploring unknown territories, without the maternal blessing of the community to comfort them, assuring them that they are not crazy and not dangerously verging on some heresy.

Interestingly, this uterine attachment, this pasty gregarism of atrophied minds, is sold to the public — and to the group members themselves — as if it were the same thing as academic collaboration, with apparently no one realizing the immense distance that separates these two things, as distinct from each other as a human face and an infernal caricature.

It is true that no progress in knowledge is achieved without dialogue, without personal intuitions, even based on deep investigations, being exposed to the examination of the scholarly community, knowledgeable about the state of the question. But this type of dialogue can only exist between personalized intelligences, each possessing their own mental universe, acquired in the audacity of solitary exploration, without the comforting support of collective beliefs.

This simply does not exist — or exists no longer — in the Brazilian intellectual milieu. Mentalities reduced to impotence by the vice of gregariousness need not and cannot engage in dialogue, for they have nothing to exchange except the like for the identical, the usual for the customary, and the banal for the ordinary. What they engage in is not dialogue; it’s collective monologue. So flat, commonplace, and base is the uniformity of their ideas that sometimes they have to grasp at small differences in style or vocabulary — if not some personal jealousy, which is always present — to give a semblance of color to the gray daily ritual of mutual confirmation. To call this environment mediocre would be to praise it undeservedly. Mediocrity is merely a statistical standard, anonymously distributed in the crowd. When mediocrities aggregate and condense into an organized corporation, the common weight becomes denser, and the whole sinks far below average. The average Brazilian is much, much more intelligent than the sixty academic advisors of the president,³⁴ collectively self-styled “the intellectuals,” to give the impression that they are the only ones who exist. The common man knows that the most serious problem in Brazil is crime. “The intellectuals” don’t know. The common man takes every opportunity research provides to talk about the subject. The latter meet with the president to methodically review the national ills, and not one of them remembers to even mention, even in passing, that 50,000 Brazilians are killed each year (apparently, as a way of glorifying the government for the intellectuals at court, crime doesn’t pay).

A particularly deplorable aspect of the phenomenon is that, as the pursuit of psychic security is sometimes stronger than the two political motives mentioned above, the esprit de corps of academic submediocrity automatically extends to non-leftist (or not very leftist) members of the community. Unable to actively adhere to the dominant politics, they resort to passive adherence, restraining any verbal conduct hinting at rightism, omitting any citation of authors deemed inconvenient, or, in extreme moments, signing one or another leftist manifesto, naturally for the most apolitical reasons that come to mind.

Most ironically, the group’s own mental wretchedness gives them a certain ad hoc self-confidence, inasmuch as, with all personal investigation of truth eliminated, what remains in the air is a bundle of comforting indiscutable collective certainties. Based on this confidence, each group member is fit to pose as a scientific authority to their students, imposing opinions on them with greater ease the more convinced they are that, as members of the enlightened community, they embody truth, goodness, justice, and beauty — precisely those things that, according to the prevailing Marxist and deconstructionist beliefs, do not exist at all and were only invented by the bourgeoisie to deceive the poor.

It’s not surprising that, with their psychological security entirely based on a blend of the existential lies of their members, such a cohesive community, so protective of its own imaginary importance, lives in constant fear of decomposition and becomes even more fearful as it leans on a rigid system of neurotic self-defense, believing they see apocalyptic dangers at the slightest sign that someone has criticized them beyond the admissible bounds of controlled, corporate, and communist self-criticism.

I’ve had the opportunity several times to be personally the terrifying factor that shook the self-confidence of the troupe to its foundations, occasions when I had the displeasure of seeing hundreds or thousands of venerable elders and grave middle-aged gentlemen running, like frightened children, to defend the community threatened by one (uh) attacker.

There was a time when I laughed at this spectacle. Today I know it’s not something to laugh at. The Brazilian academic farce not only reflects the terrifying intellectual poverty of the teaching elite, which, by itself, is enough to explain the disaster of national education. It also reveals an endless human misery, since no one chooses pompous pretense except to hide the contempt they ultimately feel for themselves — and in the Brazilian academic environment, this is the only kind of intellectual life that remains.

Academic deceit in action

Academic Chicanery in Action

Diário do Comércio (editorial), April 10, 2007

The scandalous statement by Minister Matilde Ribeiro,³⁵ openly encouraging hostility from blacks towards whites, is not an original product of her empty little mind. It is the passive echo of a long and highly active cultural tradition. Since Stalin ordered the communist movement to exploit all possible racial conflicts and imbue them with the sense of class struggle,³⁶ perhaps no one has obeyed that instruction with more promptness, fidelity, and consistency than Brazilian “social scientists.”

Practically all of our academic production in this domain consists of a long and noisy effort to instigate retroactive hatred in blacks and mulattoes, not only towards slave owners and the descendants of slave owners but towards whites in general, including those who fought for the liberation of slaves, those who married black individuals, those who never uttered a word against the black race or did any harm to them. According to the doctrine of our academic establishment, all of these are unconscious racists, virtually as dangerous as Joseph Goebbels or the Ku Klux Klan. Even blacks are somewhat racist against themselves. Innocent of the crime of racism are only the distinguished authors of these studies and the activists of organizations inspired by them. In other words: either you are an accuser, or you are guilty. Tertium non datur.

An incessant flow of master’s and doctoral theses, generously subsidized by the government and by billionaire international foundations, pours out from our universities to lend credibility to this beloved doctrine. The eight methodological precepts that underlie it are as follows:

1. Attribute the difference in economic patterns between blacks and whites to racial discrimination, omitting the fact that more than forty years elapsed between the abolition of slavery and the beginning of national industrialization, during which time the liberated black population reproduced incomparably more than the number of available jobs.³⁷

2. Depict blacks as the predominant victims of violent crimes, without asking whether they are also predominantly the perpetrators of these crimes. Every murderer, white or black, is a priori considered an instrument of white violence against blacks.³⁸

3. Similarly, explain all police violence against blacks as a result of white racism, without asking whether the police officers who committed it were black or white.³⁹

4. Always portray Europeans as enslavers and blacks as enslaved, systematically omitting the fact that Muslim troops, filled with blacks, invaded Europe and enslaved millions of whites eight centuries before the arrival of Europeans in Africa.⁴⁰

5. Explain the internal slavery in Africa as a mere effect of European slavery, reversing the order of historical time.⁴¹

6. Transform each race into a legal entity, holder of rights when black and liable for criminal responsibility when white.⁴²

7. Imply that every white person is guilty of the acts of slave owners, even when they have none of them among their ancestors and even if they arrived in Brazil as immigrants decades after the end of slavery.

8. Blame everything on the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” precisely the only one that, throughout human history, did anything in favor of enslaved races.⁴³

The word “bias” is too delicate and subtle to qualify the mental attitude that generates these studies. The sociology of races produced in our universities is pure propaganda material, deliberately deceitful and calculated to legitimize revolutionary violence against what former Governor Cláudio Lembo referred to as the “cruel and selfish white elite.” Social science, in Brazil, is organized crime.

The true black culture

Folha de S. Paulo, November 20, 1997

When I hear about “black culture,” I pull out my copy of History of Brazilian Intelligence by Wilson Martins and rub it in the face of the person speaking: “Black culture? Black culture for me is Aleijadinho, Gonçalves Dias, Machado de Assis, Capistrano de Abreu, Cruz e Sousa, Lima Barreto. Would Your Honor like to explain to me how these black and mulatto individuals managed to rise so high in a slave society, while their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, enjoying republican freedoms, pampered by university intelligentzia, can now produce nothing but samba, funk, and witchcraft, and still boast about their pitiable creations as if they were highly elevated culture?”

The interlocutor, terrified by the prospect of having to reason for a few minutes outside the safety zone of established clichés, remains silent. So, I provide the answer myself. It’s because those illustrious Brazilians didn’t drink the poison of American university education and kept their minds in good condition. They understood that their distant African origins had been neutralized by absorption into Western culture, that their racial identity was merely a biological fact without cultural significance in itself, that the culture they had integrated into was not white but universal, and that it was more useful and honorable for black individuals to succeed within the framework of the new global culture than to collectively lament the loss of extinct tribal cultures.

By asserting themselves as values of Western culture, these men provided it with the most relevant service: they demanded from it the universal commitment established at the Calvary cross, freeing it from the shackles of the false commitment it had later made with the white race. By elevating themselves, they elevated it. Who were, after all, in comparison to the blacks, the carriers of this culture? They were Portuguese — a Celtic race, belatedly Christianized by imperialist invaders. And where did the strength of the Portuguese come from? It came from the resourcefulness, optimism, and vigor with which, instead of succumbing to resentful nostalgia, instead of rebelling against the loss of their local and racial “roots,” instead of seeking false comfort in hatred towards the colonizers, they creatively integrated themselves into the Christian world and became, more than its spokespersons, its soldiers and its poets.

Analogous things can be said of the French, the English, the Danes, the Swedes, and ultimately all European peoples: they all abandoned their primitive cults to integrate into the new culture. Transformed by the universalizing culture that absorbed them, they could thus become great and powerful nations, gaining through renunciation and reclaiming their identity on a higher level. And where did the cultural tragedy of the German people come from if not from their imperfect Christianization, their deficient universalization, which, leaving the painful roots of the old barbarian culture exposed, led to the crisis of uterine regression that was Nazism? It’s precisely because they didn’t liberate themselves from their attachment to racial origins and mythological cults that Germany never achieved the leadership position in the world it ardently aspired to: there is no greatness outside the sense of universality, which by definition excludes the atavistic attachment to the community of blood. Germany’s fate is a lesson for blacks. And Mr. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is definitely not a mere coincidence.

If the Portuguese, instead of acting as they did, had listened to resentful nostalgia, clinging to barbaric cults and abhorring Christianity as the “religion of oppressors,” they would have been swept from the historical stage and would now have to rely on the charity of anthropology museums. The highest expression of their culture would not be Luís de Camões, but something like Mr. Pierre Verger. And Portugal itself, later on, by forsaking its universalistic vocation to embrace the atavistic cult of the past, exited history… The ingenious blacks who wholeheartedly westernized themselves, without a whimper of impotent resentment, and enriched Western culture with their immortal creations, did more for their brothers — of their own and all races — than the demagogues and clowns who today not only want to enslave blacks in regressive adoration of museum cults but also Africanize all of Brazil.

6. History & Deception

The official history of 1964

O Globo, January 19, 1999

If there was ever a unique episode in the history of Latin America, it was the March Revolution (or, if you prefer, the April coup) of 1964. In a decade where guerrilla warfare and attacks were rampant everywhere, kidnappings and bombings were part of daily life, and the rise of communism seemed unstoppable, the largest revolutionary scheme ever organized by the left on this continent was dismantled overnight and without any bloodshed.

This fact becomes even more unusual when considering that the communists were deeply entrenched within the federal administration, the President of the Republic openly supported the leftist rebellion in the Army, and in January of that year, Luís Carlos Prestes, after reporting the state of affairs in Brazil to the Soviet leadership, returned from Moscow with authorization to finally unleash a civil war in the countryside. Furthermore, the civilian far-right, led by governors Adhemar de Barros of São Paulo and Carlos Lacerda of Guanabara, had set up a vast paramilitary network, more or less clandestine, totaling no less than 30,000 armed men with helicopters, bazookas, and machine guns, ready to respond violently to the communist audacity. Everything was, indeed, prepared for a formidable bloodbath.

On the night of March 31st to April 1st, a somewhat improvised military mobilization blocked the streets, chased away the leftist leadership, and established a new regime in a country of continental dimensions — with no more than two casualties in the massive operation: a student accidentally shot in the leg by a colleague and the communist leader Gregório Bezerra, severely mistreated by a group of soldiers in Recife. The leftist leaders, who had boasted of their military support until the day before, fled in disarray into embassies, while the civilian far-right, who believed it was their turn to rule the country, was carefully immobilized by the military government and eventually disappeared from the political scene.

Any rational person can perceive that there was an extremely strange phenomenon here that requires investigation. However, the bibliography on this period, mostly retaliatory and incriminatory in nature, ends up dissolving the uniqueness of the episode into a reductionist soup where everything boils down to the clichés of “violence” and “repression,” tasked with magically characterizing a stage of history where blood and wickedness appeared much less than one would normally expect under those circumstances.

The three hundred leftists killed after the repressive crackdown the military responded with to the leftist terrorist reaction in 1968 represent a rather modest rate of violence for a country with over a hundred million inhabitants, especially when compared to the 17 thousand dissidents killed by the Cuban regime in a population fifteen times smaller. Even more starkly, in our demographic scale, the two thousand political prisoners who inhabited our prisons were practically nothing compared to the one hundred thousand filling the jails of that Caribbean islet. And it’s ridiculous to assume that, at the time, the alternative to the military coup was democratic normality. This alternative simply did not exist: the revolution intended to establish a Fidel-style regime here, with the support of the Soviet government and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, was already well underway. Far from being characterized by repressive cruelty, the Brazilian military response, whether compared to other right-wing coups in Latin America or to Cuban repression, stood out for the leniency of its conduct and its ability to navigate one of the most explosive situations ever witnessed in the history of this continent with minimal violence.⁴⁴

However, the official historiography — repeated ad nauseam in textbooks, on TV, and in newspapers — has enshrined an inverted and caricatured view of the events, emphasizing, to the point of obsession, unique acts of violence and systematically omitting the comparative numbers that would show — without softening their moral ugliness, of course — their historical insignificance.

Ironically, it is the very leniency of the military government that allowed the leftist lie to become the official history. Rendered ineffective for any armed action, the left sought refuge in universities, newspapers, and the publishing movement, establishing their main stronghold there. The government, influenced by the Golberian theory of the “pressure cooker,” which claimed the need for an outlet for leftist resentment, never made the slightest effort to challenge the left’s hegemony in intellectual circles, which were considered militarily harmless at a time when the government had not yet become aware of the Gramscian strategy and did not envision leftist actions other than of an insurrectional, Leninist nature.⁴⁵ Left to their own devices in their intellectual domain, the defeated of 1964 achieved literary revenge, monopolizing the interpretation industry of the accomplished fact. And when the dictatorship dissolved out of sheer exhaustion, the left, intoxicated with Gramsci, had already realized the political advantages of cultural hegemony, and clung with renewed fervor to their monopoly of historical past. This is why literature about the military regime, instead of becoming more calm and objective as the years passed, takes on a more polemical and accusatory tone the further the facts recede and the characters fade into the mists of time.

Even more ironic is that the hatred has not diminished even today, when the left, propelled by changes in the global landscape, is rapidly becoming exactly what the Brazilian military desired it to be: a parliamentary social-democratic left, European-style, devoid of Cuban-style revolutionary ambitions. The discourse of the present-day left coincides, in gender, number, and degree, with the type of opposition that, at the time, was not only permitted but encouraged by the military, who saw social-democratic activism as a healthy alternative to revolutionary violence.

Throughout the history of the global left, communists harbored a much deeper hatred for their competitors, the social-democrats, than for liberals and capitalists. But time gave the “renegade Kautsky” the victory over Leninist brutality. And if our military did everything precisely to hasten that victory, why continue to view them as ghosts from a dark past instead of recognizing them as precursors to a time that is better for all, including the left?

To top it off, many people on the left itself have admitted not only the malicious and suicidal nature of the guerrilla reaction but also the positive contribution of the military regime to the consolidation of an economy primarily oriented toward the domestic market — a basic condition of national sovereignty. Considering the modest price this nation paid, in human lives, for the elimination of that evil and the achievement of this good, wouldn’t it be time to rethink the Revolution of 1964 and remove the heavy crust of derogatory slogans that still obscure its historical reality?

Summary of what I think about 1964

Bah! (a university newspaper from Rio Grande do Sul), May 2004

Everything I’ve read about the events of 1964 can be divided into the following categories: (a) leftist distortions, camouflaged or not under a veneer of respectable academic appearance; (b) crude and unscrupulous apologia, often carried out by military personnel who were somehow connected to the movement and hold an idealized view of it.

All of this literature, taken together, holds no intellectual value whatsoever. It merely serves as very rudimentary source material for an in-depth understanding work that hasn’t even started yet.

For this work, the preliminary requirement, which has been neglected until today, is to distinguish between the coup that removed João Goulart and the regime that prevailed in the subsequent twenty years.

There’s nothing serious that can be claimed against the first. João Goulart was supporting Cuba’s armed intervention in Brazil since 1961, encouraging division within the Armed Forces to provoke a civil war, cynically disregarding the Constitution, and skyrocketing public spending, leading to an inflation that plunged the people into poverty. He promised to lift them from this misery through the deceitful tactic of salary increases that inflation rendered fictitious. The removal of the president was a legitimate act, supported by Congress and the entire public opinion, as demonstrated in the largest mass demonstration in national history (yes, the “March of the Family with God for Freedom” was much larger than all subsequent protests against the dictatorship combined). Just read the newspapers from that time — the same ones that now falsify their own history — and you’ll see that clearly.

The widespread clamor for the president’s removal reached its peak in two editorials in Correio da Manhã that directly incited the coup. Under the titles “Enough!” and “Out!” both were written by Otto Maria Carpeaux, a notable writer who later became the main critic of the new regime. This detail shows how extensive and widespread the rebellion against the government was.

The coup didn’t immediately lead to the military regime. It gave birth to a series of transformations — almost “internal coups” — whose consequences no one could predict in March 1964. In fact, there wasn’t a single “military regime.” There were four distinct regimes, very different from each other: (1) Castelo Branco’s cleansing and modernizing regime; (2) the period of confusion and oppression that started with Costa e Silva, continued with the Military Junta, and culminated in the middle of the Médici government; (3) the actual Médici period; and (4) the dissolution of the regime under Geisel and Figueiredo.

Anyone claiming that serious restrictions on freedom occurred during the first of these periods is lying. Castelo dismantled the communist political scheme without suffocating public liberties. There was far less physical violence during this time, apart from that initiated by the communists who carried out 82 attacks before the subsequent period brought forth full-fledged dictatorship, brutal repressions, and widespread abuse of authority. The Médici government is marked by victory against guerrilla warfare, a failed attempt to return to democracy, and an extraordinary economic success (Brazil went from being the 46th largest economy in the world to the 8th during the Médici era, only to fall to 16th from Sarney to Lula). Geisel adopted a socializing economic policy, the consequences of which we still suffer today, tolerated corruption, aligned Brazil with the anti-American Third World axis, and supported Cuba’s invasion of Angola, a genocide that claimed no fewer than 100,000 victims (the dictatorship’s most heinous crime and the only one that is truly repugnant — against which no one utters a word because it was in favor of the left). Figueiredo continued in Geisel’s footsteps, adding nothing of his own, but he can’t be denied the merit of relinquishing power when he no longer had the means to wield it.

It’s foolish to believe that these four regimes form a cohesive unit, deserving to be judged collectively. In my personal opinion, Castelo was a just man and a great president; Médici was the best administrator we ever had, despite being a poor politician. My opinion on Costa, the Military Junta, Geisel, and Figueiredo can’t be spoken publicly without offending decency.

In 1964, I was on the left. For twenty years, I hated and fought against the regime, but I never thought of denying its most obvious achievements, as is done today with complete disregard for historical reality, nor of concealing beneath its miseries the far graver crimes committed by communists who now distort national memory to pose as angels.

The time of the military and the present days

[from: Drugs are culture]

O Globo, January 1, 2005

From the perspective of the right to life, the difference between the era of the military and today is simple and self-evident: during that time, there was tranquility for the majority of Brazilians, but not for the small leftist elite that had good reasons to feel threatened. Today, this elite — at most 10,000 people — enjoys all the guarantees of peace and security that prosperity under the government’s shadow can offer, while the rest of Brazilians live exposed to daily terror at the hands of drug traffickers, robbers, murderers, and kidnappers.

We’ve transitioned from relative capitalist equality to cruel and cynical socialist inequality. At the top, the arrogant, presumptuous, all-knowing nomenklatura, secure in their existence, living off the state, protected by armed guards. Below, the people, without means of defense, at the mercy of bloodthirsty criminals.

So selfish and shameless is this elite that it sheds more tears — and spends more public money — for their three hundred old comrades, terrorists killed by military repression, than for the fifty unarmed civilians who are annually murdered by criminals in this country.

The year when time stopped

Jornal do Brasil, November 22, 2007

If 1968 is still called “the year that didn’t end,” it’s because it truly hasn’t ended — nor does it show any intention of doing so anytime soon. At least in Brazil, that’s the case. The mannerisms and verbal habits that dominate the mental landscape of “this country” are essentially the same as those that echoed through Maria Antônia Street and the bars of Leblon, the two neural poles, Chip and Dale, between which local idea exchange flowed.

This doesn’t mean that Brazil is stuck in the past. It’s outside of time. In France, our main supplier of intellectual gadgets, 1968 wasn’t exactly a chapter in history; it was a sudden crisis of forgetfulness, where cognitive access to millennia of cultural tradition became unfeasible due to the conspicuous consumption of two powerful intoxicants. On one hand, the abrupt replacement of traditional education, based on classical literature and physical sciences, with the new culture of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and Guevarism, tailored to an audience of teenagers who had become independent and voracious consumers due to the prosperity of the middle class in the post-war era (this process is relatively well documented in the apologetic work Linguistique et Culture Nouvelle, by Philippe Rivière and Laurent Danchin⁴⁶). On the other hand, the institutions ostensibly tasked with preserving the intelligibility of the past were rendered incapable of that duty due to the epidemic spread of “deconstructionist” fashion. If literacy involves building bridges between written symbols and the world of external and internal experience, then it’s clear that demolishing these bridges, turning language into a self-referential universe, can’t result in an elevation of cultural understanding. Instead, it leads to a higher form of illiteracy, practically irreversible since it’s legitimized by the approval of academic intellectuals, who happen to be the most presumptuous and pedantic in history. It’s also evident that, in the absence of appealing to the testimony of lived reality, the only remaining criterion for judgment is precisely the word of that intellectual elite, Gramscianly invested with the “omnipresent and invisible authority of a categorical imperative, a divine commandment.”

By severing communication with the past, 1968 destroyed the sense of historical continuity, so that all progress made since then in the realm of thought — and it has been considerable — took place outside the “deconstructionist” zone, rendering it incomprehensible or entirely invisible to those who remain within it. These perpetual adolescents remain enclosed in a bubble of artificial timelessness, cut off from history and current events, given over to morbid pleasures of psychotic self-referentiality that make them increasingly foolish and incapable, while reinforcing their devotion to the cultural and political myths of a legendary year transfigured into a grotesque caricature of eternity.

Thus, France departed from the intellectual history of the world, and Brazil, which had never truly entered that history except as a French appendix, departed with it without even noticing. The reign of unconsciousness that has since settled over the country, eliminating any possibility of genuine intellectual life at least within the boundaries of the establishment, is at the root of the astonishing moral and political degradation that everyone laments today, but ultimately chose as their destiny.

1968, the deception that hasn’t ended

Jornal do Brasil, May 29, 2008

If the celebration of six decades of Israel’s existence has essentially consisted of blaming it for all the harm inflicted upon it and fervently wishing for its imminent demise, then the forty-year commemoration of the student uprisings of 1968 has done nothing but accept as reality, a priori and without the slightest critical examination, the self-flattering interpretation its leaders gave to that movement at the time of its eruption.

One of the few dissenting voices was Nicolas Sarkozy, who recently stated:

May 1968 imposed moral and intellectual relativism on all of us. It imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and bad, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. Its legacy introduced cynicism into society and politics, contributing to the weakening of the morality of capitalism, paving the way for unscrupulous capitalism of privileges and protections for dishonest executives.

Reacting with indignation to these words, activist-historian Tariq Ali — himself one of the agitators of 1968 — exclaims, “Don’t give me that, Sarkozy!” And, imagining he’s wielding irrefutable arguments against the French president, asks:

So, are we responsible for the subprime crisis, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the free market, the culture infested with shameless opportunism, Enron, Conrad Black, among other things?

But the answer to that question is, inevitably, “yes.” The 1968 movement, which actually began at Harvard in 1967, marked the worldwide conversion of the left to the canons of the “cultural revolution” advocated by Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. The ambition of activism, from then on, was no longer to seize power, much less to implement socialism. These goals were postponed until after the primary objective was achieved: to destroy Western civilization, erode the cultural and moral foundations upon which capitalism was built, to complete extinction. Now, what is the most successful economic system, when stripped of its civilizational foundations and reduced to the mere mechanics of market laws? It’s a world of wealth without a soul, a gilded hell. The revolutionaries of 1968 achieved this effect through three avenues and on three fronts:

1. Spread through the media and cultural institutions, they launched a direct, persistent, and brutal assault on all the most venerable values and symbols of civilization, deliberately demolishing the education system, where Greek and Latin classes were replaced by anal sex seminars.

2. Infiltrated into the business world as technicians and consultants, they persuaded capitalists to “modernize,” abandoning the demands of traditional morality and acting according to the distorted model of unscrupulous money-changers. The Marxist caricature of the business class became reality, often embodied by the very people of 1968, whose ostentatious conversion to free enterprise was accompanied by a cynical emphasis on the amoral efficiency of the system, a sardonic propaganda that implicitly highlighted the moral superiority of socialism, unjustly defeated by the evil world.

3. As leaders and spokespersons of social movements, they condemned the effects of their own actions as if they were not their own but the work of a heinous abstraction, “capitalism,” and simultaneously exploited nostalgia for the destroyed cultural universe, recapturing old values and civilizational symbols, even religious ones, emptying them of their original meaning and reducing them to slogans of anti-capitalist propaganda.

With this triple operation, they acquired a terrifyingly convincing semblance of authority that still reaps moral profits from their own crimes, blaming them on the hypocritical bourgeoisie that lets itself be intoxicated by their discourse.

7. Marxism & Deceit

Devotees of a swindler

Diário do Comércio, May 13, 2013

The Folha de S. Paulo⁴⁷ asked four of its most typical mentors⁴⁸ why it is still important to read Karl Marx. None of them gave the right answer: because no one can ignore, without serious risk, the ideas that have killed more human beings than all earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics, and plane crashes of the last century, plus two world wars. Violating Karl Marx’s elementary rule that the true substance of an idea is its practice, not its mere conceptual formulation, three of them seemed to see Marxism as pure theory, separated from the action it had in the world, and thus fell into the offense of “bourgeois formalism,” the most abominable thing for a Marxist mind. I wouldn’t take Marxism classes with these individuals even if they paid me.

The fourth one, Prof. Delfim Neto, in his eagerness to redeem himself in the eyes of the leftist intelligentsia for having served the military dictatorship, exaggerated and attributed to Karl Marx the gift of eternity, which from a Marxist perspective makes no sense at all.

Prof. José Arthur Gianotti recommended carefully rereading Karl Marx because “his conception of history was adulterated, as it was mixed, without the necessary care, with a Darwinism sprinkled with religiosity.” Adulterated? Mixed? None of Karl Marx’s successors demonstrated as much intellectual indebtedness to Charles Darwin as Karl Marx himself did, who stated that his philosophy was nothing more than the Darwinian interpretation of history and only did not dedicate Capital to the author of On the Origin of Species because he didn’t allow it. As for the religious or pseudo-religious tone, it is more than noticeable in the 1944 Manuscripts and resonates in every line of the prophetic anticapitalist exhortations scattered throughout Marx’s work. It’s Prof. Gianotti who artificially wants to separate what was born together. “Reread carefully”? Not necessary. It would have been enough to have read.

But the most comical of the four was Mr. Leandro Konder, who intellectually left the world of the living three decades ago and didn’t need to leave his state of suspended animation to confirm, in the Folha, what he has already proven hundreds of times: his prodigious ignorance, his complete lack of knowledge about the subjects he opines on.

He said: “Great thinkers are great because they address vast problems and do so with great originality. The bourgeois, conservative perspective avoids discussing them. And that is what characterizes their conservatism.”

The knowledge that not only he personally, but the entire bunch of Marxist simpletons in this country have of what he calls the “bourgeois perspective” can be evaluated through the Critical Dictionary of Right-Wing Thought, in which 104 of these ridiculous creatures were filled with public money to display an ignorance show like nothing else ever seen in the world.⁴⁹

These people simply don’t study the thinkers who seem disagreeable to their party. They guess or create their ideas from a distance, based on gossip, jokes, preconceived fantasies, and urban legends that constitute, in their stiflingly provincial mental environment, the only required bibliography for anyone who wishes to pontificate about it. They even do this with me, who have a relatively scarce published work. So why wouldn’t they do it with authors who have written many dozens of volumes, like Leibniz, Husserl, Voegelin, or our Mário Ferreira dos Santos?

For a fool who is ignorant of everything he despises, it is necessary for Karl Marx’s horizon of problems to appear, in comparison to nothing, “vast.” But in truth, Karl Marx only thought about one problem: the class struggle. All the other concepts in his philosophy were received ready-made, like dialectics, alienation, or communism, or they are merely affirmed without any critical discussion, like “dialectical materialism” itself, or they derive from the class struggle by sheer automatism, like ideology, superstructure, etc. Far from broadening the horizon of philosophical problems, what Karl Marx did was restrict it with overwhelming dogmatism, instituting what Eric Voegelin characterized as the “prohibition to ask.” I won’t even mention the classic big problems like the foundation of being, the meaning of existence, good and evil, etc. Not even the concept of “value,” essential in his economics, is discussed. He postulates it at the beginning of Capital and moves on, without realizing he made a tremendous mistake.

Compared to Leibniz, Aristotle, or Plato (or even to figures like Eric Voegelin, Max Weber, Christopher Dawson, or Pitirim Sorokin), Karl Marx’s horizon of problems is deplorably limited. His literary culture is that of a high school teacher, his knowledge of painting, architecture, and music history is practically nonexistent, his notions of theology would not impress any seminarian. I wonder, for example, what relevance Karl Marx’s thought has for biological sciences, physics, or mathematics. None. His friend Engels' brief foray into these domains was a spectacular embarrassment.

In ethics, then, Marx’s treatment of the problem of human happiness is certainly the dumbest, most crude of all time: take the bourgeoisie’s money and everyone will be happy. No matter how embellished, that’s the argument. Just for this detail, the man would deserve the adjective that Eric Voegelin used to describe him: “charlatan.”

The plan and the fact

Diário do Comércio, March 11, 2013

The case of the Critical Dictionary of Right-Wing Thought, which I mentioned in the article "Devotees of a Trickster,"⁵⁰ is merely the most extreme, caricatural, and grotesque figure that the phenomenon assumes in the Third World, but ignoring the adversary’s thought and closing one’s ears to objections are general and infallible habits of leftist intelligentsia everywhere.

In Thinkers of the New Left,⁵¹ where he examines the main exponents of a school of thought that is still the most influential on the left today, Roger Scruton observes that none of them ever showed the slightest sign of wanting to respond to the Marxist theory’s criticisms by Max Weber, Werner Sombart, F. W. Maitland, Raymond Aron, W. H. Mattlock, Böhm-Bawerk, Popper, Hayek, or von Mises.

One could add Eric Voegelin, Cornelio Fabro, Rosenstock-Huessy, Norman Cohn, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alain Besançon, and countless other authors also rightly considered classics.

In Brazil, you won’t see any Marxists discussing the objections of Gilberto Freyre, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, J. O. de Meira Penna, Paulo Mercadante, Antonio Paim, Orlando Tambosi, Ricardo Velez Rodriguez, Gustavo Corção, João Camilo de Oliveira Torres, José Guilherme Merquior.

University Marxism thrives on ignoring the universal culture of ideas and denying it to students. At the same time, it instills in them the seductive and deceptive impression that, because they have read the authors approved by the Party, they are very educated. This is the most extreme and radical form of organized ignorance, mandatory ignorance, arrogant and intolerant stupidity.⁵²

While anticommunists of all shades continue to analyze and refute Marxism, writing thousands of books about it, Marxists systematically avoid debate.

When they don’t settle for casting the heaviest veil of silence over their adversaries, they engage in defaming them behind their backs, inventing the most scandalous stories about them, treating them as criminals, putting them on “enemy lists,” and faithfully following Lenin’s rule: not to debate with the challenger, but to politically, socially, and if possible, physically destroy them.

What greater proof could one demand that these people, who claim the monopoly of all virtues, are the most perverse, evil, and despicable that have ever infested the intellectual profession?

The rise of Marxist scum to the forefront of national life was and is the main or sole cause of the destruction of higher culture and the educational system in Brazil.⁵³

With scandalous airs and indignation, the Folha reports the discovery of a plan by the military government, conceived by Minister Alfredo Buzaid in the 1970s, to curb communist infiltration in universities and media organizations. The plan was not implemented, so the military era was the period of greatest prosperity for the leftist book industry in Brazil and the time of conquest of the media by the communists. But Mr. Frias' newspaper doesn’t forgive even the mere idea. How dreadful, how more tyrannical, more Nazi-like, to think of preventing communists from accessing all university chairs, all newspaper pages, all megaphones!

What Mr. Frias and his employees pretend to ignore is that what the dictatorship wanted to do and didn’t do is exactly what the communists have already done and that is already fully in force in this country, with a breadth and rigidity that surpasses anything the military could have dreamed of in terms of hegemonic control of communication and education channels. The younger generations, who didn’t know Brazil in the 1950s-60s, were born into this atmosphere, which seems normal to them, and they don’t notice the difference.

But a simple detail is enough to show what happened: the Christian-conservative point of view, which was officially that of Estadão, Globo, and partially Folha at that time, is entirely excluded, forbidden, and criminalized in all media today.

The editorials written by Messrs. Roberto Marinho and Júlio de Mesquita Filho could never be published today in the newspapers they founded, where the most that is allowed, in a minority space, is a bit of limp and harmless liberalism, and sometimes even pure left-wing criticism of some obvious government wrongdoing or corruption. If even this soft and partial opposition is now openly condemned as “right-wing extremism,” it’s clear that the general standard of evaluation has changed, and it was the media itself that changed it. And if newspapers and TV channels give any coverage to Ms. Yoani Sanchez,⁵⁴ it’s precisely because she is anti-Castro without being anti-communist, and her criticism of the Cuban government is mild and self-censored compared to that of other dissidents, who tell the whole story. These will never appear in O Globo or Folha. And can anyone imagine a Globo soap opera defending the Christian values that were so dear to Mr. Roberto Marinho?

Why should a simple, unfulfilled intention of the military government be considered more repugnant and frightening than the accomplished fact, the very same intention fulfilled on a much larger scale by the triumphant and dominant left, the absolute master of the pages of Folha itself? Does the mere wording of this same news not reveal the inversion of criteria, imposed as a universal and unquestionable norm that only madmen and extremists would dare to question? Doesn’t Mr. Frias know how to read his own newspaper? Can’t he see that he himself, in person, was one of the architects of Minister Buzaid’s plan, carried out with the opposite sign?

Weaknesses

Diário do Comércio, June 2, 2013

I have already explained⁵⁵ that one of the oldest tricks of the revolutionary movement is to clean itself in its own dirt, the existence of which it denied until the eve.

Since the fall of the USSR, the most common way to apply this trick is to swear that everything that for seventy years all the communists in the world called communism was not communism at all: it was capitalism. Through this simple change of words, the communist idea emerges clean and innocent from all the blood that was shed to achieve it, and kindly requests a new credit of trust from the audience, that is, more blood, swearing that this time it will be just a little bit, a tiny bit. For example, wiping Israel off the map or exterminating the white race.

The proponent of this modest suggestion never explains how billions of people, inspired by the most scientific historical theory of all time — unsurpassed, as Jean-Paul Sartre said — could be so deeply deceived about what they themselves were doing, nor how he himself, rising above Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and so many luminaries of Marxism, was the first to see the light.

Much less does he explain how it is possible, from a theory that teaches the substantial unity of idea and practice, to obtain such a radical separation of these two things that one of them comes out entirely clean and the other entirely dirty.

But that’s how these people are: when they get to the next page, they’ve already forgotten the previous one.

Two recent examples come from Mrs. Lúcia Guimarães, who is perhaps the most typical case of elegant ignorance in Brazilian journalism, and from Miss Yoani Sanchez, a selfless individual who seeks to save the image of Cuban communism by isolating it from a brief misstep of only half a century.

The argument of both is substantially the same: communism cannot be blamed for anything that happened in the USSR, China, Cambodia, or Cuba, because communism is the possession and control of the means of production by the proletarians, not by the State, as seen in those places.

Mrs. Lúcia even scolds playwright David Mamet because he says that Karl Marx’s sweet promise, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs,” is nothing more than a coded expression to justify the plundering of everyone by the State. In all communist regimes, this is what actually happened, but even so, Mrs. Lúcia assures that the playwright “would get a low grade in Marxism, because the scarecrow invoked by Mamet was thinking of a utopia of the proletariat, not of the State.”

Similarly, Yoani Sanchez declares that in Cuba there was never communism, only state capitalism.

It is needless to say that in this way, with the snap of a finger, the theory that presented itself as identical to its historical incarnation becomes a pure Platonic idea, a separate metaphysical being, immune to all contamination of this lower world.

I wouldn’t be cruel to expect these two individuals to understand this subtlety, but they could at least have read one of Karl Marx’s most famous paragraphs in the Communist Manifesto:

The last stage of the proletarian revolution is the constitution of the proletariat as the ruling class… The proletariat will use its political dominance to gradually wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all the means of production in the hands of the State, that is, of the organized proletariat…

There, in the smallest measure, the antagonism that those two enlightened intelligences believed they saw between the State and the proletariat does not exist: the State is the organized proletariat, the organized proletariat is the State. And the organized proletariat is nothing other than the Party.

The prophecy of the “self-dissolution of the State” in the apotheosis of times is merely a figure of speech, a play on words, an infernal prank. Marx explains that since everything will belong to the State, it will no longer exist as a distinct entity, but society itself will be the State. It is a curious inversion of the biological rule that when the rabbit eats lettuce, it’s not the rabbit that becomes lettuce, but the lettuce that becomes rabbit. If the State swallows society, it’s not the State that disappears: it’s society. The fact that the dominated, crushed, and annulled society no longer feels the weight of domination doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, but that the dominated is too exhausted and stupefied to become aware of it. It’s perfect totalitarianism in which, in the words of Antonio Gramsci, the power of the party-State is no longer perceived as such but becomes “an omnipresent and invisible authority like that of a categorical imperative, a divine command.”

A careful examination of Karl Marx’s texts would have been enough, in the middle of the 19th century, to perceive in them the Gulag, the Laogai⁵⁶, and hundreds of millions of deaths, all the terror and miseries of communist regimes as unavoidable consequences of the theory’s own internal logic, should it attempt to move from paper to history. Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves acknowledged this many times, praising genocide and tyranny as the "midwives of history."⁵⁷ That, after 160-something years, there are still so many people who insist on explaining as the result of unpleasant coincidences what the theory itself demands as a sine qua non condition of its realization is certainly one of the most compelling proofs of an intellectual weakness that may well reflect some weakness of character.

8. Decadence

Nostalgia for journalism

Diário do Comércio, April 23, 2012

Four or five decades ago, you’d open the newspapers and find substantive political analyses. Whether “left-wing” or “right-wing”, columnists still believed in something called “truth” and made some effort to find it. They were also men of good literary culture, knowledgeable and respectful of the language. I miss the lengthy articles by Júlio de Mesquita Filho, Paulo Francis, Antônio Olinto, Paulo de Castro, José Lino Grünewald, Nicolas Boer, Gustavo Corção; even Oliveiros da Silva Ferreira, who’s still alive but away from daily media. And so many others. So many.

Nowadays, we have pure polemicists who don’t investigate anything, don’t explain anything, make no intellectual effort, don’t try to understand anything; they simply take positions, pass judgments as if they were judges, and dictate rules. We had them back then too, but they wrote so well! Carlos Lacerda, Nelson Rodrigues, and Raquel de Queiroz were probably the best. Even Otto Maria Carpeaux was one of them. In contrast to the dizzying dialectical skill of his literary criticism, the political articles he published in the Correio da Manhã, churned out serially and almost automatically, were servile transcripts of the Party’s slogans. They are full of childish errors, coarse communist misinformation⁵⁸, but in them one can still recognize the steady pulse of the writer. On the other side was, for instance, David Nasser. You always knew in advance what he would defend or attack. But how gracefully he repeated himself, varying the forms to make even the most stereotypical opinions sound like novelties!

All of this is dead and buried. In all of mainstream media, only a few columnists still honor the language, and the best among them is not Brazilian, but Portuguese: João Pereira Coutinho. I enjoy reading Reinaldo Azevedo (the most informed) and Neil Ferreira (the funniest). The others worth reading are only on the internet. In all major newspapers, no one writes with the seriousness of Heitor de Paola, the elegance of Percival Puggina, the inventiveness of Yuri Vieira, the vernacular precision of José Carlos Zamboni, the good-humored erudition of J. O. de Meira Penna. Forgive me, the others: the list of the best excluded seems endless.

In universities, as incredible as it may seem, they study the decline of Brazilian journalism. But they blame everything except the journalists. As if bad painting was never the work of bad painters or the food was always bad despite excellent chefs. The profession has a strong esprit de corps when it suits, but never makes a serious judgment of its own actions, a realistic assessment of its impact on society. It narrates its history as if it were the author of all that is good, a helpless victim of all that is bad. Absolutely nothing weighs on its conscience. It doesn’t even consider the convenience of a vague mea culpa for having hidden the São Paulo Forum for sixteen years, practicing censorship more efficiently, broadly, and persistently than the Federal Police during the military era. Its false self-image borders on pure and simple sociopathy⁵⁹. During the dictatorship, as press freedom and the freedom of leftist action suffered the same official restrictions (largely ineffective in practice), journalism and leftism joined hands in the fight against the common enemy. It was fair and timely. But three decades after the end of the regime, this temporary alliance refuses to admit its time has passed. Back then, the left already dominated the media, but played the victim. Oppressed on the streets, they discriminated against rightists in newsrooms (as academia did in universities). Today they dominate the entire country, and what was understandable tactical caution has become a tool for perpetuating undeserved powers and prestige. The weapon of the weak has become a picklock in the hands of the strong. Never, throughout the entire military period, was the left as muzzled as the conservative right, especially the religious, is today in mainstream media. To camouflage this, they must perpetuate mourning, feeding and refeeding old sufferings and fears from over a quarter-century ago with a constant stream of forced tears and feigned expressions of horror. This structural lie is at the root of all degradations of Brazilian journalism. It’s the total prohibition of sincerity. The destruction of the language comes from this. No one can write correctly when living in self-denial.

Where the fall began

Diário do Comércio, March 4, 2010

To this day, in the USA, there is heated debate about whether Thomas Jefferson did or did not have a child with his slave Sally Hemmings. The suspicion, if proven true, would cast, as politically correct sensibility understands it, a shameful stain on the reputation of that Founding Father, who, to the greater embarrassment of all, was not an exemplar of religious conservatism that the current intellectual and media establishment would take special pleasure in criticizing, but rather a Voltairian deist, an Enlightenment thinker to the core, a radical secularist, a challenger of the Christian faith, and ultimately, the ideal patron saint of all the “progressivism” of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, leaving his family in need as he rapidly ascended in life riding on an assistentialist discourse, doesn’t fare any worse in a country where every politician, if they don’t want to be exposed to ridicule, must embody a new “woman of Caesar.”

In Brazil, no one even asks how many Black or Indigenous women passed through the beds of our counts, barons, and landowners in general, admitting, in fact, that the amorous excesses of these gentlemen not only didn’t give rise to a horde of renegades buried beneath the rug of history but quite simply formed the initial core of the Brazilian population. It’s a well-known fact that in our old ruling classes, predating the massive immigration of Italians, Germans, Japanese, and Poles, it was hardly possible to find a white individual without some trace of African or Indigenous blood. Even today, for a Brazilian president or senator to have one or many mistresses doesn’t tarnish their reputation, but even contributes to the greater glamour of their biography. More is spoken ill of Dom João VI for his excesses at the table than of his son Pedro I for his amorous adventures, even though the former was the true creator of the Brazilian state and the latter, the inventor of our first dictatorship. In popular preferences, the reputation of the latter surpasses even that of his son Pedro II, an example of tolerance and honorable administration, perhaps the best Brazilian ruler of all times, but a reclusive and distant man, locked in his library, devoted to scientific studies which the common people saw not as a merit but as an eccentricity.

These two series of facts symbolically condense an essential difference not only between Brazil and the USA but also between our country and most of the great Western nations. Each of these was born under the inspiration of a caste of clergy, who carried with them the civilizational memory and the principles of intellectual and moral education. When I say “clergy,” I use the term in the broad sense it had in the Middle Ages, including not only ordained priests but all educated men imbued with the spirit of religion. In this sense, the founders of the USA were all clergy, with the only exceptions — not due to lack of education but due to being anti-religious — of Jefferson and Franklin. Brazil, in contrast, was the creation of voracious landowners, uncultured, immodest, and brutal, who saw in religion nothing but an unavoidable inconvenience and in superior culture, an imported adornment barely covering the pettiness and ugliness of their customs.

Thus constituted, the nation could only nurture two types of intellectuals: the sycophants, protected by the ruling class, content with themselves, occupying the scant places open in rare institutions of high culture with gratitude verging on flattery, and around them, a multitude of failures and marginalized individuals, living off ignoble jobs and clamoring against the injustice of the world. Men of talent have always existed in both groups. The respective examples of Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto — or, a century later, the examples of Gilberto Freyre and Otto Maria Carpeaux — perfectly embody these two types. But it’s evident that the existential situation of both could, in the long run, corrupt both groups equally, denying each of them a decent historical role and gradually narrowing the horizon of their mental lives.

How could the first resist the temptation to produce literature that would merely be, in the famous words of Afrânio Peixoto, “the smile of society”? That it’s not easy is proven by the consistent affection of the Brazilian Academy for crowned mediocrities, to the detriment of genuine high culture. As for the latter, their fate was sealed as soon as, in the first decades of the 20th century, the revolutionary discourses of anarchism, Marxism, and fascism entered Brazil. Gradually, these men became convinced that the dignity of their existence should not be based on the outstanding quality of their intellectual creation, but on their collaboration or adherence to political movements committed, at least on the surface, to correcting the world’s wrongs. What could be more alluring than avenging a personal feeling of exclusion under the guise of fighting for the poor and oppressed? Gradually, the so-called “left-wing” writers and professors abdicated their intellectual duties and began seeking existential validation in the mere sympathetic approval of their fellow militants. The coup of 1964 provided them with the final pretext. The novels Quarup by Antonio Callado and Pessach: a travessia by Carlos Heitor Cony, both from 1967, sounded the falsely heroic call for intellectuals to become militants. The university was the alchemical oven where the transformation of intellectuals into “intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense of the term was consummated, that is, political activists with no specific mental obligations, distinguished only by the instrumentalization of their self-proclaimed artistic, educational, or scientific activity in the service of the leftist cause.

The reduction of intellectual life to a megaphone for partisan interests and the subsequent debacle of high culture in Brazil are well-documented in my book O imbecil coletivo (The Collective Imbecile), from 1996. However, much has happened since then. The Gramscian caste came to power, already during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government, and in Lula’s government, the Tupiniquim version of the trahison des clercs (betrayal of the intellectuals) was consolidated, at the moment when, finally unmasking themselves, the nominal representatives of high intelligence began to celebrate the abject presidential lack of culture as proof of sublime merit, if not some prophetic charisma. The triumphant revenge of the former resentful intellectuals transformed into arrogant apologists for ignorance definitively sealed, seemingly once and for all, the complete destruction of intellectual life and education in Brazil.

From depressing fantasy to fearful reality

Diário do Comércio, September 11, 2006

The quote from Hugo von Hofmannsthal mentioned in this column — “Nothing is in the political reality of a country if it is not first 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 insight.

For example, consider what happened in Russia between the mid-19th century and the fall of the USSR. Around 1860-70, Russian culture, previously meager compared to that of Western Europe, began to gather momentum to embark on great achievements. The inspiration that drove it was mainly the mystical confidence in the nation’s destiny as the bearer of an important spiritual message to a Old World debilitated by scientific materialism. Preserved from revolutionary corrosion by a strongly theocratic political regime, where the official beliefs of the court and the religious sentiments of the people confirmed and reinforced each other, Russia contrasted dramatically with Western nations where the elite and the masses lived in a permanent ideological divorce and, as a result, only modernized at the cost of suppressing and marginalizing the religious feelings of the population. The Tsarist regime, despite the weight of its stagnated bureaucracy, had managed to find the path to reforms that did not go against the teachings of the Orthodox Church but, on the contrary, were born from them. The future of Russia seemed to emerge directly from the Christian messianism of the two towering figures of Russian intellect, the novelist F. M. Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.

In comparison with the great national culture of the period, the contribution of the Russian communist movement was essentially to lower everything to the level of miserable dialectical automatism, and at times, to pure propaganda literature. The reduction of high culture to a tool for forming militants neutralized the beneficial effects of the university reforms undertaken by the government and transformed much of the educated youth in Russia into the kind of deluded chatterboxes that populate Dostoevsky’s novels, especially Crime and Punishment and The Demons. Try reading any page by Vladimir Soloviev or Dostoevsky himself, and then compare it with the revolutionary platitudes of George Plekhanov — considered at the time as the most capable Russian communist intellectual — or with V. I. Lenin’s grotesque philosophizing in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. The Communists began by destroying the higher intelligence of a great nation before creating the most idiotic and bestial political regime known in history. Anyone at that time who wanted to predict the future of the Russian economy under the Communists could easily do so by evaluating the literature they produced. Even the most talented novelist among the revolutionary ranks, Maxim Gorky, fell far short of the previous generation. Nowadays, he can only be read as a historical document. Needless to say, the same applies to literature produced under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and so on. Even the best novels of the period — those by Sholokhov — have become unreadable due to excessive revolutionary nonsense. I won’t even mention the philosophers and essayists, a subsidized multitude that time consigned to the trash bin. Russian thought only survived abroad, integrated into European or American culture, with Berdyaev, Chestov, Sorokin. Literary imagination only began to recover in the 1950s, but underground, far from official culture, with Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, Zinoviev. And it goes without saying that the inspiration for this primarily came from the former messianism of Dostoevsky and Soloviev.

What happened in literary and philosophical culture was replicated, millimeter by millimeter, in the economy. Those who got used to imagining Tsarism in stereotyped terms of “repression,” “backwardness,” and “decadence” are solemnly ignoring the main facts of the period: the gradual opening of the bureaucracy to elements from outside the aristocratic layer (including Jews) and the accelerated industrialization. In the fifty years leading up to the Communist revolution, the Russian economy experienced the greatest growth in Europe, leaving England and Germany far behind, which at the time seemed to embody progress and enlightenment, and only finding a rival on the other side of the ocean, in 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 given Russians, around 1940, a standard of living comparable to that of Americans. 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 South African blacks living under the humiliating apartheid regime. Nothing is in the political reality of a country that is not first 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 outcomes such as terror, Napoleonic dictatorship, and monarchic restoration, was preceded by at least half a century of forced, artificial, and artful abstract language that smothered direct experience under tons of idealistic constructions without rhyme or reason. This process was described and analyzed with great acumen by Hyppolite Taine in Les Origines de la France Contemporaine, 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 struggled in vain, is now recognized as one of the factors that made the rise of Nazi irrationalism possible. In general, the explosion of cacophonies in modernist literature announced and paved the way for the invasion of totalitarianisms. There is no denying this after the historiographic “tour de force” presented in Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins.⁶⁰ No, Hofmannsthal didn’t make an arbitrary guess: if nothing exists in politics that wasn’t first present in literature, it is simply because imagination precedes action. If there is a “historical law” that works, it is this. I say this in quotes because it is not a historical law; it is a structural aspect of human action that no historical mutation can alter.

If the reader understands this, they will easily perceive the suicidal madness of entrusting Brazil’s fate to a political-ideological movement which, from the 1970s until today, has systematically endeavored to destroy the country’s higher culture, especially its literature⁶¹, by subjecting everything to the strategic and tactical demands of Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural revolution.”

The Gramscian drug penetrated the national psyche through the publication of works by the Italian ideologue, courtesy of the communist publisher Ênio Silveira, shortly after the coup in 1964.⁶² In the general confusion that befell the left after the failure of their hopes for a swift and painless Cubanization of Brazilian society, one faction delved into the idiocies of Régis Débray and Che Guevara, expending their energies on the “impossible revolution” of guerrillas. Another, more cunning, retreated and embraced a long-term strategy that aimed to gradually conquer the entire universe of arts, education, culture, and journalism—discreetly, as if nothing was happening—before risking a direct confrontation with political adversaries.

The military government, obsessed with suppressing guerrillas, didn’t pay any attention to these seemingly harmless and peaceful endeavors. 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 controlled editorial offices, sidelining prominent right-wing figures like Gustavo Corção and Lenildo Tabosa Pessoa, and eventually excluding them entirely from newspaper columns. Leftism controlled the education system so effectively that even the discipline of Moral and Civic Education, timidly introduced by a government hesitant to extend its authority from policing to cultural matters, ended up providing a platform for the dissemination of “politically correct” ideas that would shape the mindset of future generations. In theater, cinema, and TV, the authority of the left was evident in the uncontested ideological veto exercised in the selection of Globo soap operas—the most extensive apparatus shaping the popular imagination—by the communist couple Dias Gomes and Janete Clair. Similar filtering occurred in the publishing movement. Gradually, all authors not approved by the Communist Party disappeared from bookstores, school libraries, and university programs, even during a regime whose reputation for intolerant anti-communism was loudly proclaimed by the very communists benefiting from its mild tolerance and ideological omission.

In every sphere of culture, art, education, and journalism, the only difference observed after the end of the dictatorship was the transition from tacit leftist hegemony to explicit and now truly intolerant dominance. The comfortable reception that prominent leftists received in journalism, education, and show business during the time of the military government contrasts so starkly with the complete exclusion of right-wingers today that applying the term “dictatorship” to the former period and “democracy” to the latter seems strikingly ironic. At that time, of course, there was the “small” journalism, supposedly alternative to the mainstream media. However, the latter was almost entirely in the hands of leftists like Cláudio Abramo, Luiz Alberto Bahia, Alberto Dines, Luiz Garcia, and many others, so the difference between the two was more of style than content. Today, the “right-wing” journalists are all relegated to the alternative media. The few who still appear in major newspapers are merely contracted contributors and are not part of the editorial staff.

The complete dominance of culture by a particular political faction, regardless of which one, is already a problem in itself. But what happened in Brazil was far more serious:

1. This dominance entailed intentionally lowering the level of intellectual rigor, due to the semantic expansion of the term “intellectual” in the Gramscian context, which encompasses all individuals, regardless of their education or IQ, who can engage in ideological propaganda. This led to the promotion of samba musicians, rock artists, 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 its qualitative and pedagogical connotations, reduced to its anthropological usage as a neutral and general label for “forms of expression” among the people. In this sense, the roda samba of the Baiano Recôncavo is placed, according to that minister, alongside treasures of human culture such as the philosophy of Aristotle, Chartres Cathedral, and quantum mechanics. All things are equal, nothing is better.

3. More broadly, 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 distinction as a foundation of Brazilian culture⁶³ (which nonetheless continued to be used against “the right”).

4. To justify the resulting state of total mental confusion, the principles of relativism⁶⁴ and deconstructionism were introduced, which, ostensibly promoting supra-logical thought, destroyed even basic logical reasoning in students, replacing it with presumptuous verbosity that gave them an illusion of superiority precisely as they plunged into the depths of stupidity.

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

A political movement capable of diminishing a nation’s intelligence and discernment to such an extent will not hesitate to destroy the entire country to gain more power and realize plans conceived in semi-secret meetings with foreign revolutionary movements and criminal organizations.

The Brazilian left—all of it—is a band of ambitious scoundrels, amoral, Machiavellian, liars, and utterly incapable of being accountable for their actions before a conscience they lack.

It’s time for the country to withdraw the vote of confidence it gave to these people in a moment of weakness they themselves manufactured.

9. Asylum

Speaking Brazil

Diário do Comércio, February 28, 2011

The more one looks at Brazil from afar, the more one sees that it’s not a country: it’s an asylum. An asylum without doctors, run by the very lunatics who imagine themselves to be doctors.

Nothing there functions according to the normal precepts of the human brain. It’s the perfect “world upside down” of Dr. Emir Sader — head of the medical council since Dr. Simão Bacamarte left this lower world.

The madness didn’t start today. One day, after one of my classes at PUC Paraná, a group of students gathered to listen and support the protest of one of them, who, in tears — yes, in tears — was lamenting what seemed to him a shameful depreciation of national culture. “How can you — sobbed the young man — call a country that has intellectuals of the stature of Chico Buarque de Holanda decadent and miserable?”

I heard about the case from others, but if I had been there, I would have recorded the episode on video to illustrate subsequent lessons when returning to the topic of Brazilian mental pathology. The destruction of higher culture is evident not only in the disappearance of creative minds but also in the inversion of the scale of judgments: in the absence of any greatness in sight, smallness becomes the measure of the highest conceivable greatness. For a teacher from Rio Grande do Sul didn’t proclaim the aforementioned Chico as a universal artist of the stature of Michelangelo? It would take years of exercises in perception to make these creatures see that in a single stroke of Michelangelo’s brush, there is more richness of intentions, more essential information, more intensity of consciousness than in everything published in Brazil under the label of “literature” since the 1980s, authored by countless “Chicos.” But the mere suggestion that they should subject themselves to this learning would sound brutally offensive to them — proof of fascist authoritarianism. The very idea that literature should reflect an intensity of consciousness, a richness of human experience, has become incomprehensible when all that is expected is, at best, for the artist to invent cute variations for the usual slogans (that’s Chico Buarque de Holanda’s definition, with the difference that he’s no longer as cute).

In recent years, however, the situation has worsened beyond the possibility of an overall description. The most that can be done is to draw attention to significant details, in the hope that the interlocutor glimpses the seriousness of the illness through isolated symptoms. One of these symptoms is the decomposition of the language. I thank the heavens for not being a fiction writer in today’s times when it has become impossible to reconcile colloquial language and correct grammar. Read Marques Rebelo or Graciliano Ramos and you’ll understand what I’m saying. Their characters spoke with extreme naturalness without falling into solecisms. Nowadays, all that can be done is to write like people in narrative and descriptive passages, leaving the characters to speak like nerdy monkeys in dialogues. It’s literature exemplifying the chasm between cultured language and everyday speech. But the existence of this chasm proves, at the same time, the social uselessness of a literature that can no longer be understood by its own characters.

Formerly, this extreme dualism of cultured and vulgar language only appeared when the author wanted to document the speech of the very poor classes, separated from civilization by insurmountable economic or geographical circumstances. In the Lula era, it became necessary to use it to reproduce the speech of a president of the Republic — and later, that of senators, deputies, business leaders, and so on. A decent journalist can no longer write in the language of their interviewees. There is no longer any common measure between consciousness and the data it apprehends. This is the same as saying that it’s no longer possible to intellectually elaborate reality, at least not without improvising linguistic arrangements that are beyond the reach of most.

Some listeners have already understood that the paradoxical language of my program True Outspeak — erudite explanations interspersed with coarse swearing — is a baroque effort, perhaps failed, to synthesize the unsynthesizable, to rescue the disfigured and almost animalistic speech of the new Brazil for the realm of high culture. Many don’t even perceive the difference between crude language and its caricatural imitation.

Geese that speak

O Globo, August 24, 2002

The uneducated worker is too attached to his customs to be influenced by novelties. The man of superior spirit has that direct and personal insight that dispenses with group approval and even despises it. In the middle remains the multitude of slaves to fashion: students, journalists, small literati, makers of partisan speeches — the “intellectual proletariat,” as Otto Maria Carpeaux called them. The greatest madness of the modern world was to have made this category of people, under the name of intelligentsia, the guiding and masterful force of its destiny. This supremely verbose, hollow, and imbued-with-self highest concept of itself returned the favor by creating fascism, Nazism, socialism, and by killing more people in one century than all ancient tyrannies combined, along with added earthquakes and epidemics.

All civilizations entrusted themselves to the luminous guidance of a few wise men and to the stubborn conservatism of common people. Only ours entrusted itself to an army of chatterboxes imbued with the sacred duty of destroying what they don’t understand. And then it complains that it’s being destroyed.

St. Paul the Apostle said that the devil would surround us from the right and the left, from the front and the back. Significantly, he didn’t say “from above” or “from below.” What elevates us to God or anchors our feet to the ground is free from demonic influence. What’s left, between heaven and earth, are the four horizontal directions, the “intermediate world,” the mezzo del cammin where the demons whirl the ambitions of vain intelligence that imagines itself as creative.

The democratization of education, abolishing economic barriers, should have established intellectual barriers in compensation, to prevent the lowering of the social standard from bringing with it a decrease in the level of consciousness. The new elite of paupers might have been less numerous, but it would have surpassed its predecessors in merit and quality. In reality, the opposite was done: since education is for everyone, why should it be an elite education? Anything is sufficient for anyone. The mass of neo-literates, flattered to the skies, rushes to schools, bookstores, media, theaters, and cinemas to receive their daily ration of garbage, which they imagine to be superior to the education of a nobleman from the Renaissance or a cleric from the 13th century. Any schoolboy, unable to spell, believes himself a bearer of knowledge, simply because he was born after Plato. Any provincial columnist speaks with disdain of the “darkness of the past.”

Between the person who knows and the one who doesn’t, Montaigne said, there is more difference than between a man and a goose. Whoever has some knowledge of what education was like in ancient centuries cannot help but be depressed to tears when looking at the multitude of talking geese today. And how they talk!

The most incredible thing is the ease, the fluency with which anyone, aware that they lack certain knowledge, attributes its merits to some form of mystical participation in the “spirit of the times,” based on the simple belief that they exist somewhere, in some library, in some database. Yes, they certainly exist, but the information that they exist should provide every citizen with a measure of their ignorance. Instead, it instills in them the insane feeling of their own wisdom.

If it weren’t for this false certainty, based on the argumentum ad ignorantiam which proclaims non-existent what the ignorant is unaware of, there would be no “alternative rights,” no “theology of liberation,” none of these monuments of imbecilic arrogance aimed at spiritual treasures which, being beyond the understanding of the average intellectual, can be easily denied, despised, or used as scapegoats for the crimes of the average intellectual.

For this intellectual, today, has become inaccessible and callous. Every class they receive, every book they read, every TV program the wretched person watches only reinforces their crazy certainty even more, by extolling the superiority of “our time” without reminding them that this superiority consists merely of accumulated material records, not transmissible by osmosis to those who don’t personally decipher them. Of course: such a reminder would be too embarrassing. The consciousness of millennial civilization values has become the most invaluable asset. Invaluable and almost inaccessible. Its price is too high: the humiliation of the child of the century. The rich pay fortunes to avoid experiencing this. The poor, to avoid it, shed their own blood in useless revolutions.

It’s not the least irony of the situation that, without completely recognizing it, the intelligentsia, instead of acknowledging it as their own work, blames some external socio-economic factor for it, promising something better for the next society, to be conjured from the hat of some “alternative right” or “theology of liberation.” And thus, evil perpetuates itself, strengthened by promises to extinguish it.

Against these promises, the question remains: what remains of eighty years of written production by the Soviet intelligentsia? Never before were there so many wise men as in that heavenly republic where vegetable vendors had Ph.D. degrees and in which, Trotsky prophesied, every car mechanic would be a new Leonardo Da Vinci. Where did those tons of treatises, academic theses, magisterial essays go? Nothing remained. Not even in China is that formidable nonsense read anymore. Nor in Cuba. But that’s not a problem: if the import of Soviet follies ended, the production of Western universities has become autonomous. There will be no shortage of Negris and Chomskis in the market.

The revolution of the madmen

Zero Hour, March 24, 2002

In the years preceding the Nazi revolution, the signs of rising madness were keenly observed by German intellectuals and artists. One of the revealing documents of that time is the novel Ulrike by Jacob Wassermann, the story of the bewitched young woman who, assuming the capricious authority of a malevolent goddess, infiltrates a family with the sole purpose of ruining it. The theme of the insane judge, who takes his arbitrary grudge as the earthly manifestation of a higher law, also appears in Wassermann’s masterpiece, the trilogy Etzel Andergast. Etzel is a dreamy teenager, the son of an important magistrate. One day, he discovers that his father committed a judicial error and decides to investigate on his own to rectify the mistake. He achieves his goal, destroying his father’s reputation. Just when the reader is persuaded that Etzel is the embodiment of authentic justice against the evil and madness around him, the hero suddenly reveals his own wickedness and madness, cowardly betraying and humiliating his kind mentor and protector, Joseph Kerkhoven: Etzel’s “justice” was merely sociopathic self-worship, an inability to respect any value or authority.

As a testament of the times, journalism did not lag behind great literature: in a series of brilliant articles, Karl Kraus pointed out the accelerated decline of the German language and the lowering of the national consciousness.

But the eerie creeping of demonic forces was also captured by cinema, especially that of Fritz Lang, whose Doctor Mabuse series presents the fantastic character of the evil genius who, confined to a judicial asylum, rallies the inmates for a revolution of the mad—and seizes power. In M — The Vampire of Düsseldorf, the inversion of values is complete: the police, unable to apprehend the terrorizing rapist murderer in the city, are replaced by organized banditry, which gathers to eliminate the solitary criminal who interferes with their business.

At the root of the rising madness was the fanatical politicization of human life, in the sense of Carl Schmitt. The great scholar, who flirted with Nazism enough to spend the rest of his days in perpetual mea culpa, defined (and appreciated) politics as what remains at the bottom of society when all rational arbitration of conflicts disappears and is replaced by the direct confrontation of “friends” with “enemies.” Then crime, sin, and lies are no longer evils; the only evil is committing them against “friends.” In the end, the “enemies” are suppressed. Only the tyranny of the “friends” remains, in a fierce celebration of triumphant unanimity.

No intelligence, no virtue, no sense of honor survive this. In the decade that paved the way for the rise of Nazism, everything became politicized in German life. To the same extent, everything became corrupted.

In Brazil, language, consciousness, security, and morality are crumbling before our eyes, just as rapidly as it happened in Germany. Everything is being politicized and corrupted, and the very ones who politicize, the agents of dissolution, are the first to denounce it as the work of “enemies,” so that all resentments end up converging into the insane hope of vengeful unanimity.

Everything in this atmosphere resembles pre-Nazi Germany. Everything, except for one thing: the signs of awareness are absent in literature, the arts, and journalism. There seems to be no single novelist, short story writer, filmmaker, or columnist among us who, swimming against the current of madness, is capable of understanding and describing it. Our literature merely echoes the clichés of enraged political discourse, contributing through obsessive redundancy and stereotypical indignation rhetoric to the boiling cauldron of the ongoing revolution.

The reason for this difference is obvious. German culture had a tradition of apolitheia, a noble lineage of apolitical writers and scholars who, precisely because of their detachment, understood the horror of politicization. At that moment, it was the great apolitical minds who knew how to practice superior politics—politics that serves intelligence and morality rather than exploiting them.

In Brazil, on the contrary, politics traditionally dominates everything. It was already the case during the time of the Empire—our writers were deputies, ministers, diplomats—and it became even worse with the advent of Marxist influence which, seeking not to “understand the world but to transform it,” manages only to turn it into an incomprehensible hell.

Therefore, our intellectuals, instead of bearing witness to the madness of the times, only nourish it with their own madness. Want an example?

The letter from the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) to the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), published in O Globo on March 9, reveals that organized criminal activity has absorbed the lessons of Marcuse and Hobsbawm⁶⁵ and already sees itself as a revolutionary force, invested with a transcendent historical mission and imbued with a sublime notion of its own moral superiority over the State and society. It is the spirit of Ulrike embodied in the national lumpenproletariat, ready to transform into Dr. Mabuse.

The leftist intelligentsia is morally culpable for this. The mentor of the Red Command, William Lima da Silva, known as the “professor,” would never have gone from being an obscure local figure to a national leader if his ambitions hadn’t been legitimized in 1996 by the enthusiastic reception of his book Um contra mil (One Against a Thousand), an idiotic glorification of his criminal career, endorsed with a preface by Dr. Rubem César Fernandes and a grand launch at the headquarters of ABI (Brazilian Press Association), under the centuries-old blessings of the untouchable Barbosa Lima Sobrinho. At the time, none of those involved in the episode had any doubt that the launch was a political act, intended, if not to consecrate criminality as a social protest, at least to undermine the legitimacy of state repression.

Today, no one will be held accountable for the heinous consequences of this political act. The intelligentsia cannot even become aware of the state of affairs, when the blame for its establishment lies squarely with them. Our Dr. Mabuses are rising to power with the help of thousands of Etzel Andergasts.

10. Conspiracy

Conspiracy theory

Jornal da Tarde, September 18, 2003

I don’t believe I deserved the mockery that the esteemed ambassador Meira Penna directed at me in the September 15th edition of JT, stating that I attribute the fervent leftism of our media to “a conspiracy centered in Moscow.”

Henceforth, my detractors might argue that even one of my closest friends, a respected intellectual, categorizes me among the theorists of conspiracy. But, of course, the ambassador didn’t mean any of that. He simply condensed excessively a reference that, when fully expressed, would have occupied his entire article. Compressed to absurdity, it turned into caricature, unintentionally facilitating the malicious denial of the facts that Meira Penna himself was denouncing.

The usual tactic of those who have no response to an irrefutable accusation is to distort it through a derogatory label—and “conspiracy theory” is derogatory enough to cast suspicion on the accused as suffering from paranoid delusions. Despite his precautions, the ambassador himself won’t escape this labeling.

It’s true that most people only came across this term through the movie with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, but that only makes its defamatory use even more effective. The audience is also unaware of the subject matter, and nothing has more persuasive power than the spontaneous complicity of two ignorances. If you want to be believed without any questioning, talk about things of which you know nothing to someone who knows everything about them. It’s foolproof. In the absence of objective references, feigned unanimity serves as a raft for the shipwrecked.

Clearly, I have never explained media leftism through any conspiracy but rather by the dominance of a mass movement that, due to its sheer size, is the opposite of a conspiracy. Leftist domination is glaring, blatant, and cynical to the point that it doesn’t even need to respond to its critics. A conspiracy, on the other hand, is a secret plot with specific objectives, devised by as few participants as possible to avoid leaks, and executed through the most discreet means available to those involved. A “conspiracy theory” is the exact opposite of an explanation based on a broad, long-term strategy like Gramscian “cultural revolution.”

But it doesn’t matter: in Brazil, the common terms of political vocabulary are never used to designate the objects they correspond to, but to express the crude and confused feelings of adhesion or repulsion that agitate the speaker’s soul. Consequently, genuine conspiracy theories are never challenged as such. On the contrary, they are accepted as common-sense truths, with the sole condition that the suspected conspirator is American. The Brazilian population is overwhelmingly convinced that the CIA killed Kennedy, that the Pentagon orchestrated the military coups of 1964 in Brazil and 1973 in Chile, and that a group of cunning oil capitalists planned the invasion of Iraq. However, if, contrary to these stereotyped coherences, you mention that Jimmy Carter used the IMF to strangle the Somoza government and hand power to the Sandinistas, that Bill Clinton shared vital nuclear secrets with China after being elected with Chinese propaganda funds, and that Al Gore is a shareholder in a company that laundered money for the Comintern, you are immediately stamped as a “conspiracy theorist,” even though you are far from talking about conspiracies and instead discussing official, public, and well-documented information.

“Conspiracy theory” is also any mention, no matter how slight or indirect, of the KGB’s actions in the world, even more so in Brazil. In the national imagination, the KGB is an ethereal and nonexistent entity, created by the wicked ingenuity of anti-communist conspirators. Documents, testimonies, analyses, entire libraries are powerless against the stubborn force of these magical symbols that have been injected into the depths of millions of Brazilians' souls since their school days.

In short, “conspiracy theory” is one of a thousand lexical crutches in service of verbose mental incompetents who guide and lead the country. If, in passing, a serious writer allows himself to use the term in the misleading sense consolidated by magical usage, this only proves that the dominance exerted by leftist shamans over the mental environment is not a conspiracy, but the diffuse effect of the slow and deep hegemonic impregnation of vocabulary. In a moment of distraction, even an honest man ends up speaking their language.

False secrets

Diário do Comércio, January 14, 2010

There is no more unworthy, despicable, and ultimately ridiculous attitude in journalism or in general debates than attempting to discredit an accusation under the pretext that it is a “conspiracy theory.” In an era where secret police, intelligence services, and clandestine organizations of all kinds have grown to global proportions and have acted more intensely than ever before in history, the presumption of explaining everything solely through the most visible and well-known facts is frankly an immeasurable stupidity. It’s not surprising that this dogmatic refusal to face the obvious has entrenched itself primarily in the media and educational institutions—the two pillars upon which the throne of contemporary ignorance is established. When immensely powerful entities like the Bilderberg Group⁶⁶ (or on a local scale, the Foro de São Paulo) are treated as nonexistent or irrelevant, while opinion makers attempt to impose upon themselves and the world the foolish lie that no power exists outside official entities and the most obvious financial interests, it is clear that public discourse has become merely a collective form of psychotic defense against reality.

However, like all foolish beliefs that take root in the masses, this one is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. The prohibition of seriously discussing an important issue allows charlatans, crazies, and jokers to take it over. Driven by their own impulses or even serving entities interested in disguising their secrets under layers of legends and lies, they inundate the market with an endless subliterature pretending to be “secret history.” This fuels the public’s most extraordinary fantasies and clutters the path of the serious scholar seeking to navigate this “savage jungle.” The proliferation of these phenomena imbues the term “conspiracy theory” with a negative connotation that the term itself doesn’t inherently possess, making it an almost infallible vaccine against the perception of genuine and well-established facts.

Much of this editorial trash can be identified at first glance by a common trait: it constructs mountains of information that are linearly coherent—yet shielded from any confrontation with contrary information—to prove that all the world’s evil originates from a particular source, which itself is not secretive. The perennial culprits are Jews, the Masons, the Catholic Church, the British Empire, and the CIA (curiously, the KGB is spared: books against it almost always accuse it of specific crimes and even downplay the scope of its overall power). The most effective remedy against these types of intoxications is to read several of these books together, mixed, so that the profusion of suspects dissolves the pending accusations against each one, and by the end of the reading, you’re forced to admit that you’re back to where you were before starting: you have no idea who is responsible for the world’s ills. This is all you can learn from this genre of books. In that sense, they’re even useful: the confession of ignorance is the beginning of science.

The second step is to admit something that should have been self-evident from the start: it’s not possible for all secret undertakings to be the work of publicly known entities. At least some secret organizations must be truly secret, which means that they don’t even resemble organizations. For instance, discreet agreements between archpowerful families, informal pacts among mega-businessmen, the obedience oath of a faithful Muslim to a sheikh unknown to outsiders, the most inner sections of intelligence services (ignored even by the majority of their official employees), the highest and most reserved spheres of certain occult societies, discreet connections between criminal organizations and legally constituted entities: none of these have a name, none of these are properly an “organization” or “entity,” but a bit of study is enough to reveal that these are the invisible sources of many historical decisions, often catastrophic, which proliferate into horribly visible effects when it’s too late to investigate their origins. Without a name to identify them, we generally designate these networks of connections by the names of the more ostensible entities that serve as their conduit, occasion, or camouflage. We say that a certain measure was imposed by the Bilderberg Group or by the Council on Foreign Relations, when in reality it originated from a few members of these entities, united without labels or flags, often behind the backs of the others. We say that a certain disaster was plotted by the Foro de São Paulo, but we want to refer to discreet conversations between figures like Fidel Castro, Raúl Reyes⁶⁷, or Lula, taking place far from the assemblies and working groups of that organization.[^62] This use of entity names—practically the only option for discussing these matters—is indirect, metonymic. It doesn’t designate the real subject of action but one of its appearances. Thus, for the guardian of the secret, absolving the culprit becomes easy through the verbal artifice of exonerating the appearances. Virtually everything written in the media about the Foro de São Paulo, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, global government, and related subjects is tainted by these intentional misunderstandings.

Devout occultists profess the belief that “the secret protects itself.” A false belief. False secrets protect the real ones.

Zero credibility

Diário do Comércio, August 14, 2012

Almost everything one reads in Brazilian media under the label of “political analysis” is nothing more than hastily constructed facts that the commentator extracted from the media itself. It is the popular image of the world disguised in the language of the style guide. Nothing more.

It’s not a serious matter. It’s show business, public entertainment, it’s circus. It doesn’t exist to guide the reader, but to keep him satisfied with a habitual state of disorientation in which he feels extremely informed and full of certainties.

Serious political analysis assumes information at the level of the best intelligence services, processed by a consciousness long trained in the meditation of history, philosophy, and political science.

This is so far above the possibilities of the ordinary commentator that, when confronted with something of the kind, the poor fellow feels perplexed by the novelty and reacts with that typical neurotic irritation of humiliated stupidity.

In such a circumstance, exclamations of “conspiracy theory!” emerge from their mouth almost as a conditioned reflex.

Calling an idea a “conspiracy theory” is not refuting it; it’s just insulting it. Insulting is what you do when you have reached the ultimate limit of your capacity and achieved nothing. (Please do not confuse insults with humorous swearing used for satirical purposes at appropriate times.)

Diagnoses of paranoia, delusional vision, to which many also resort on these occasions, are only valid when based on some knowledge of clinical psychology, which invariably lacks those who use these terms to discharge an unbearable feeling of inferiority.

Not coincidentally, serious analyses, so scarce in the political pages, abound in that specialized sector of journalism dedicated to economics and investments. This is because the public in this section is demanding, knowledgeable, pays well, and wants solid opinions. They’re not just a bunch of fools looking for relief.

No businessman or investor would accept as an economic analyst an amateur whose only or predominant source of information is the very popular media in which he writes. But the amateur thus described is the very definition of what is meant by “political analyst” in Brazil. It’s someone who doesn’t know the classics of political philosophy, doesn’t read scientific journals in his area, has no idea how the secret services of various countries work, doesn’t research discreet information sources, and, in short, believes the world is really as it appears in the media. In a nutshell, they practice what a real journalist, Rolf Kuntz, called journalistic self-cannibalism: he writes in newspapers what he read in newspapers.

When I say that this is “almost everything”, and not “everything”, it is because, excluding two or three survivors of old-school journalism, there is still a second group of notable exceptions: they are the professional disinformers or agents of influence. Paid by party organizations, foreign governments, billionaire elites, or international revolutionary organizations (sources that sometimes overlap and confuse), they lie more than the plague, but they lie methodically, according to a rational, sometimes very sophisticated plan, that the qualified analyst discerns between the lines and which is, in itself, reliable information, sometimes of the highest quality.

These professionals of misdirection are rare, but not non-existent in the national media. It takes a lot of practice to distinguish them from the mass of their parrots and clones, who accept their lies out of habit and pass them on by automation. When false information has become public domain, it is almost impossible to trace its source, which only appears, if at all, in the rare event of a repentant agent spilling the beans, almost always thirty or forty years after the matter has lost all strategic importance.

The occurrence of these cases allows us to measure the average reliability of political journalism, almost mathematically, by the time elapsed between the initial deception and the public acknowledgment of the mistake when the author of the feat, or the revelation of reserved documents, finally provides the journalistic class with the means to correct themselves.

For example, the wave of panic of the European media in the face of the “neo-Nazi threat” in Germany ceased when, with the country’s reunification, the Stasi documents came to light, showing that the main neo-Nazi movements in West Germany, and even some in neighboring nations, were puppets created and funded by the communist government of East Germany to divert attention from terrorist operations and political assassinations (the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II was a typical case: read The Time of the Assassins by Claire Sterling, and Le KGB au Coeur du Vatican by Pierre and Danièle de Villemarest).

And in Brazil? It was in 1973 that the former head of Soviet intelligence in Rio de Janeiro, Ladislav Bittman, confessed to having been, in 1964, the inventor and disseminator of the legend that the military coup had been plotted and funded by the American government. As 28 years after the revelation, no one in the local media gave the slightest sign of wanting to correct the general mistake, I wrote an article in Época to remind my colleagues that better late than never.⁶⁸ Eleven more years have passed since then, and to this day the talk that “the coup began in Washington” still reappears in our “major newspapers”, at regular intervals, in the tone of established truth. Credibility, in this country, is just that.

---

1. Editor’s Note: See, for example, “Why Brazilians Vote for the Left,” Zero Hora, September 1, 2006, at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060901zh.html.↩

2. See http://g1.globo.com/jornalhoje/0,,MUL1268367-16022,00-OS+JOVENS+ESTAO+MAIS+CONSERVADORES+E+PREOCUPADOS+COM+O+FUTURO.html.↩

3. Editor’s Note: José Serra, from the PSDB, lost to Fernando Haddad from the PT in the 2012 elections for mayor of São Paulo. In the second round, Serra received 44.3% of valid votes; Haddad, 55.7%.↩

4. Editor’s Note: Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto was elected mayor of Salvador in 2012.↩

5. Editor’s Note: Antônio Carlos Peixoto de Magalhães (1927-2007), known by the acronym ACM, was a physician, businessman, and politician, three times governor of Bahia, and elected senator in 1994 and 2002.↩

6. Editor’s Note: See “A fossa de babel,” in the chapter Intelligentzia.↩

7. Editor’s Note: The author refers to the 2008 American presidential election, in which Republican candidate John McCain lost to Democrat Barack Hussein Obama.↩

8. Editor’s Note: The author had already warned of this obviousness many times, such as in the articles “The Invisible Obvious” and “Professionals and Amateurs,” published in Diário do Comércio on December 17, 2007, and November 8, 2010, respectively, and available at the links: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/071217dc.html; and http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/101108dc.html.↩

9. Editor’s Note: “Everyone knows the prediction of General Olimpio Mourão Filho, published in his 1978 book, A verdade de um revolucionário: ‘Put any mediocre, crazy, or semi-literate person in the presidency, and 24 hours later the horde of flatterers will be around him, wielding praise as a weapon, convincing him that he is a political genius and a great man, and that everything he does is right. In a short time, an ignorant person is transformed into a wise man, a madman into a balanced genius, a primary person into a statesman. And a man in this position, wielding the reins of practically limitless power, intoxicated by flattery, becomes a dangerous monster.’ The Lula Era went far beyond the prophecy” [Olavo de Carvalho, “The Voice of Facts,” Diário do Comércio, October 7, 2010: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/101007dc.html].↩

10. Editor’s Note: Refer to “The Empire of Pure Coincidences” in the Obama section of the chapter on the USA.↩

11. Editor’s Note: The link to the video on Youtube is http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=0T7fA20S9ss.↩

12. Editor’s Note: The minutes of the Forum of São Paulo are available for download on the Mídia Sem Máscara website, created by Olavo de Carvalho, at the following link: http://www.midiasemmascara.org/arquivo/atas-do-foro-de-sao-paulo.html.↩

13. Note from the Editor: Olavo refers to the Chinese book, author anonymous, The 36 Stratagems — Secret Manual of the Art of War, published in Brazil by the Landy Publishing House.↩

14. Editor’s Note: “The analyst who wants to know where politics is heading, or where it came from, must be interested in a vast network of discussions that are entirely invisible to the usual media: they only appear in books with few readers, academic journals, tiny publications, specialized websites, personal conversations, confidential documents. When the opinions of intellectuals shine in newspapers or on TV, it’s because they are no longer germs: they are aspects and symptoms of the accomplished fact, sometimes committed, precisely, to camouflaging its origins. This is why the usual journalistic commentary, a simple stylistic recycling of the previous day’s news, almost never succeeds in predicting even the most inevitable developments of the situation.” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Short Sight and Shorter Sight,” published in Diário do Comércio on September 2, 2012, available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/120902dc.html].↩

15. Editor’s Note: See, for example, the articles “The Imbecility, According to Itself,” “Cause of Death,” and “Record for History,” published in Diário do Comércio on February 13, 14, and 27, 2013, respectively, and available at the links: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3. Excerpt from the first: “In a recent edition of Carta Capital, Mr. Mino Carta laments what he calls ‘collective imbecility,’ in a tone that sounds like a pioneering warning, pretending to ignore that this term, long ago, has ceased to be a generic expression and has become an allusion to one of the most widely read books of recent decades. Perhaps I should be content that, even without mentioning the tremendous effort I made to reveal it, the phenomenon itself would finally become the object of some attention. But Mr. Carta only touches on the problem in order to cover up its causes, cast blame on the usual scapegoats, and ultimately block any possibility of the serious discussion for which I have been clamoring since 1996.”↩

16. Editor’s Note: Advertising executive Marcos Valério, in a statement to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in October 2012, accused Lula of being responsible for the mensalão scheme.↩

17. Editor’s Note: The author refers to Rosemary Noronha, then chief of the Presidency’s office in São Paulo and very close to Lula, accused of using her influence with various PT and government leaders for corrupt practices.↩

18. Editor’s Note: In January 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, during a political event at a supermarket, Jared Lee Loughner killed six people and wounded 13 others – including Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.↩

19. Editor’s Note: The then-Senator John McCain in 2008.↩

20. See http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Palin-death-tweets-YouTube/2011/01/14/id/382872?s=al&promo_code=B79C-1.↩

21. Editor’s Note: I remind the reader once again that the minutes of the São Paulo Forum are available for download on the Mídia Sem Máscara website, at the link: http://www.midiasemmascara.org/arquivo/atas-do-foro-de-sao-paulo.html.↩

22. Editor’s Note: In a 2005 article about the Brazilian publishing market, Olavo explains the success of Michael Moore in Brazil. “There remains the phenomenon, morbid to the utmost degree, of one-sided controversy. Its formula is as follows: any discussion appears in the American media, conservatives and leftists produce dozens of books on the subject, and the leftist part is published in Brazil without its conservative responses, simulating universal consensus on issues that, at a minimum, remain disputed. The Brazilian cultural establishment thus embodies the Buddhist koan of clapping with one hand. (...) [T]he films Farenhype 9/11 (www.fahrenhype911.com) and Michael Moore Hates America (www.michaelmoorehatesamerica.com), devastating responses to the deception manufactured by Michael Moore in Farenheit 9/11, remain out of the public’s reach and did not even merit a mention in the newspapers. Result: the most notorious cinematic charlatan of all time, who in the USA is only famous for being a creative liar, is cited as a respectable source even in universities. It’s pathetic” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Endless Intellectual Misery”, Diário do Comércio, August 15, 2005 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/050815dc.htm].↩

23. His previous two were with Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror and Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror.↩

24. Editor’s Note: See “China at Walmart” by Olavo de Carvalho, published in Diário do Comércio on June 20, 2005, available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/050620dc.htm.↩

25. Editor’s Note: “The Gramscian concept of intellectual is based solely on the sociology of professions and, therefore, is quite flexible: it includes accountants, bailiffs, postal workers, sports announcers, and show business personnel. All these people help to develop and spread class ideology (...). Journalists, filmmakers, musicians, psychologists, early childhood educators, and family counselors represent an elite troop of the Gramscian army. Their informal actions deeply penetrate consciences, without any declared political intention, and leave marks of new feelings, reactions, and moral attitudes that, at the right moment, will harmoniously integrate into communist hegemony” [Olavo de Carvalho, The New Age and the Cultural Revolution, Instituto de Artes Liberais/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/negramsci.htm].↩

26. Editor’s Note: “[The] national public is unaware of the directly Gramscian inspiration of the Ethics in Politics Movement and scarcely suspects that its sole aim is to politicize ethics, channeling the more or less confused moral aspirations of the population in a way that serves objectives having nothing to do with what an ordinary citizen understands as morality. The ethical State, in fact, is not only compatible with total immorality, but actually requires it, since it consolidates and legitimates two antagonistic and irreconcilable moralities, where 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 can have something criminal about them if they favor the opposing class.” [Olavo de Carvalho, A nova era e a revolução cultural, Instituto de Artes Liberais/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/negramsci.htm].↩

27. Editor’s Note: The text is from 2006. ACM died in 2007, aged 79.↩

28. Editor’s Note: The speech, dated June 6, 2006, in which Senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães referred to Lula as “the biggest thief in Brazil” and called for the intervention of the Armed Forces can be found at various addresses on YouTube, such as, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGPtfmt_PaU.↩

29. Editor’s Note: Regarding the “grave” of national sovereignty, refer to the statements of former President Lula in the article “Lula, a Confessed Defendant,” in the Petism chapter.↩

30. São Paulo: Nacional, 1958.↩

31. Rio de Janeiro: Apec, 1972.↩

32. Editor’s Note: In this book, “Expect the Worst” is the text preceding this one.↩

33. Editor’s Note: See the “People & Representation” section of this chapter.↩

34. Editor’s Note: Referring to Lula at that time.↩

35. Editor’s Note: "BBC Brasil — And in Brazil, is there racism from black to white as well, like in the United States?

    Matilde Ribeiro — I think it’s natural that there is. But it’s not on the same scale as in the United States. It’s not racism when a black person stands up against a white person. Racism is when an economic, political, or numerical majority restricts or denies the rights of others. The reaction of a black person not wanting to associate with a white person, or not liking a white person, I consider a natural reaction, although I’m not inciting it. I don’t think it’s a good thing. But it’s natural for it to happen because someone who has been oppressed their whole life isn’t obligated to like the person who oppressed them" [Interview given by then-Minister Matilde Ribeiro, from the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Equality, to BBC Brasil, published on March 27, 2007 with the title “It’s not racism to stand up against white people, says minister” — http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2007/03/070326_ministramatildedb.shtml].↩

36. Editor’s Note: See William Waack, Camaradas, São Paulo, Cia. das Letras, 1993.↩

37. Editor’s Note: “They were not expelled from jobs for being black. There simply were no jobs. What does that have to do with racial discrimination? To avoid saying it has nothing to do with it, I launch the following hypothesis: we, white racists, deliberately decided not to industrialize Brazil in order not to give jobs to the damned blacks” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Gilberto Freyre: Ciência social e consciência pessoal”, Fundação Gilberto Freyre, Recife, March 24, 2000 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/freyre2.htm].↩

38. Editor’s Note: “The devoted efforts of intellectuals and the media to prove that Brazil is a racist country would be unnecessary if Brazil were racist. No one had to scientifically prove the racism of South Africa. When the proof has to be obtained through statistical contortions, what is proven is only the uncontained desire of a certain elite to produce, from above, a racial conflict that would never spontaneously arise from below, as indeed it did not” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Provas científicas”, Jornal da Tarde, May 28, 1998 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/980528jt.htm]. On statistical contortions, also see “Aritmética da fraude”, Jornal do Brasil, July 5, 2007 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/070705jb.html.↩

39. Editor’s Note: “It simply is not possible to study the racial factor in police conduct without simultaneously studying it in the phenomenon of criminality itself. To this day, no one has proved that the number of oppressed or murdered ‘Afro-descendants’ by the police is greater, proportionally, than their number in the contingent of criminals or, even more, in the racial composition of the police troops themselves. Without this proof, talking about police racism is pure and simple slander” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Inventando certezas: Brasil-Mentira V”, Diário do Comércio, April 30, 2009 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090430dc.html].↩

40. Editor’s Note: Regarding the slave trade in Islam, see the bibliography indicated by Olavo de Carvalho on his Facebook page on August 11, 2012: http://www.facebook.com/olavo.decarvalho/posts/10151088930482192.↩

41. Editor’s Note: “Europeans only arrived in Africa around the middle of the 15th century. Long before that, racist contempt for blacks was common among the Arabs, as seen from the words of some of their most prominent intellectuals (...). In contrast, theories asserting the racial inferiority of blacks did not spread in cultured Europe until the 18th century (...). In other words, educated Europeans became racists almost at the same time as the decline of the slave trade and the outbreak of abolitionist movements, for which there is no equivalent in the Arab world, as slavery is permitted by the Islamic religion and no one would dare confront a Quranic commandment head-on. Anti-black racism is pure Arab creation and in Europe, it contributed nothing to promoting the slave trade” [Olavo de Carvalho, “A África às avessas”, Diário do Comércio, September 14, 2009 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090914dc.html].↩

42. Editor’s Note: “Absolute and unconditional, racial law takes precedence over the constitutional rights of the individual citizen, which imply obligations. To worsen matters, racial law flagrantly violates a constitutional principle: if no one can be discriminated against on the grounds of race, it is absurd that, for the same reason, they enjoy special rights” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Direito racial é racismo”, supplement of the supplement to O imbecil coletivo, É Realizações, São Paulo, 2006 edition]. “What I think is simple: conferring special rights to citizens of a certain race denies them to citizens of other races; it is blatant racism” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Jurisprudência hedionda”, originally published in the magazine República in June 1999 under the editorial title “Só preto, com preconceito” — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/hedionda.htm]. On the disastrous consequences of racial quotas in universities, see note in item 3 of the article “A transfiguração do desastre,” present in the Revolution chapter of this book.↩

43. Editor’s Note: “Christianity was the religion of blacks long before it was the religion of European whites. There were churches in Ethiopia at a time when the English were still pagan barbarians. More than a thousand years before the great explorations, the oldest Christian kingdoms in the world were in Africa, some quite cultured and prosperous. It was the Arabs who destroyed them, in their frenzy to Islamize everything by force. Much of the region stretching from Morocco, Libya, Algeria, and Egypt to Sudan and Ethiopia was Christian until the Muslims arrived, burned the churches, and sold the Christians as slaves. Four-fifths of the prestige of third-worldist legends rest on the concealment of this fact. To the inversion of chronology is added, as invariably happens in revolutionary discourse, that of moral responsibility. It is not even necessary to say that the verbal fury of today’s Arabs against the ‘enslaving Judeo-Christian civilization’ is pure projected guilt: if the Europeans brought around 12 to 15 million slaves to the Americas, Arab merchants took roughly the same amount to Islamic countries, with three differences: (1) they captured them — something Europeans only did in Angola and for a brief time —; (2) they castrated at least ten percent of them, a practice unknown among European traffickers; (3) they continued practicing the slave trade into the 20th century. Arab slavery was a forbidden subject for a long time, but the taboo can be considered broken since Gallimard, the most prestigious publisher in France, consented to publish the excellent study by African author Tidiane N’Diaye, Le Genocide Voilé (2008)” [Olavo de Carvalho, “A África às avessas”, Diário do Comércio, September 14, 2009 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090914dc.html].↩

44. Editor’s Note: “Furthermore, ma’am, perform a brief calculation regarding the events of 1964-1984. On the government’s side, there were approximately 30,000 soldiers and police mobilized against rural and urban guerrillas. On the guerrilla side, there were no more than five hundred combatants. The government caused approximately three hundred casualties, while the guerrillas caused two hundred. This means an average of 0.01 casualties per government combatant, in contrast to the average of 0.4 caused by each individual guerrilla. This, ma’am, is a difference of one to forty, per soldier. Proportionally, if the left had the same number of combatants as the legal forces, retaining the firepower of each soldier, they would have killed 12,000 PEOPLE. Now tell me which of the two forces, the government or the leftist, was more murderous, and tell me if it’s excessive to kill three hundred to prevent the death of 12,000 people. These calculations, ma’am, are mandatory for anyone who pretends to be fair and impartial in the judgment of such facts, as you claim to be. Refusing this comparison is giving in to impressions laden with irrational hatred, something quite different from the reflected and just hatred referred to by Our Lord Jesus Christ” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Letter from an Awake Blind Man to a Sleeping Seer,” response to a lengthy email from a reader, received on May 28, 1999 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/cego.htm].↩

45. Editor’s Note: “What Gramsci taught them [the leftist generation defeated by the military dictatorship] was to abandon overt radicalism to broaden the scope of alliances; to forsake the purity of apparent ideological schemes to gain efficiency in the art of recruiting and compromising; to retreat from direct political combat to the deeper zone of psychological sabotage. With Gramsci, they learned that a revolution of the mind must precede the political revolution; that undermining the moral and cultural foundations of the adversary is more important than gaining votes; that an unconscious and uncommitted collaborator, whose actions the party can never be held responsible for, is worth more than a thousand registered militants” [Olavo de Carvalho, preface to the second edition of The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, Institute of Liberal Arts/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/neprefacio.htm].↩

46. Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1971.↩

47. See http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/1234518-intelectuais-brasileiros-explicam-porque-ainda-e-importante-ler-marx.shtml.↩

48. Editor’s Note: According to Folha’s presentation, they are: literary critic Roberto Schwarz, economist Delfim Netto, and philosophers José Arthur Gianotti and Leandro Konder.↩

49. Read at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/naosabendo.htm and then come back here. [Editor’s Note: The “ignorance show” that the author refers to is the Critical Dictionary of Right-Wing Thought, Rio de Janeiro, Faperj/Mauad, 2000, criticized by him in the article “Everything You Wanted to Know About the Right — and Will Continue Not Knowing,” published in the O Globo newspaper on September 22, 2000, and available at the indicated link.]↩

50. Editor’s Note: In this book, this is the previous article.↩

51. Harlow Longman, 1985.↩

52. Editor’s Note: “[M]arxism is not a political philosophy, it’s not an economy, it’s not a political party, it’s none of these things in isolation, but it is a culture, in the anthropological sense of the term. A culture means an entire universe, a complex of beliefs, symbols, discourses, human reactions, feelings, legends, myths, feelings of solidarity, action schemes, and, above all, devices of self-preservation and self-defense. [...] So, from generation to generation, we keep asking ourselves: when will the true Marxism appear? The answer can be given now: never. Because true Marxism doesn’t exist as any explicit formulation that can be rationally discussed. [...] Marxism is a culture, and in defense of the unity and preservation of a culture, all means are legitimate. [...] It’s as absurd to discuss with a Marxist about his culture as it would be to arrive in a tribe of Indians from Alto Xingu and tell them that one of their customs is immoral. They won’t understand what you’re saying, because for them, morality is precisely the customs of the tribe; there’s no supracultural morality to appeal to. We have the idea of a supracultural morality because we live in huge multicultural civilization blocks, we’re exposed to many cultures, and we can compare them to each other. On one hand, this leads us to relativism, and on the other hand, it leads us to seek higher, more scientific levels of abstraction and scope. But within the Marxist culture, only what it created itself prevails, and any external product will only be admitted there once it has been worked on and modified in its sense, so that it becomes harmless. For example, all conservative thought will be replaced by very low-level right-wing thinkers—preferably psychopathic Nazis who expose themselves in the first word, because then it’s easy to deal with them.” [Olavo de Carvalho, part 2 of “Marxism, Law, and Society,” a debate between him and Alaor Caffé Alves at the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo on November 19, 2003, available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/debate_usp_2.htm].↩

53. Editor’s Note: “It’s hard to find a novel, a movie, a play, a textbook today where the beliefs of cultural Marxism, most often not recognized as such, aren’t present with all the virulence of their slanderous and perverse content. So widespread has this influence become that everywhere the old idea of tolerance has turned into the ‘liberating tolerance’ proposed by Marcuse: ‘Total tolerance for the left, none for the right.’ Here, those who veto and boycott the spread of ideas that displease them don’t feel like they’re practicing censorship: they consider themselves paragons of democratic tolerance. Through cultural Marxism, all culture has become a war machine against itself, leaving no room for anything else.” [Olavo de Carvalho, “On Cultural Marxism,” O Globo, June 8, 2002 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/06082002globo.htm].↩

54. Editor’s Note: Born in 1975, Yoani Sanchez is a Cuban philologist and journalist who gained fame and international awards with critiques of the Castro dictatorship published on her blog Generación Y. Her controversial visit to Brazil in February 2013 also prompted the article mentioned in the following note.↩

55. Editor’s Note: See “Around Yoani Sanchez,” published in Diário do Comércio on February 25, 2013 and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/130225dc.html.↩

56. Editor’s Note: Laogai, the name for forced labor camps, true extermination camps in the 1950s and 1960s, still exist today in the People’s Republic of China, integrated into the country’s penal system, although they are called by a different name.↩

57. Editor’s Note: See “Enlightening Quotations” in the chapter on Socialism.↩

58. Editor’s Note: “For those who care about the survival of their brains in a time of universal intelligence shipwreck, nothing is more urgent than understanding what ‘misinformation’ really is. (...) The first type—and by far the most important—targets not the general public, the ignorant mass, but the men of power, the decision-makers. (...) The other type of misinformation is more of a social engineering work. (...)” [Olavo de Carvalho, “ABC of misinformation”, Diário do Comércio, January 10, 2013]. For a detailed analysis of these types, see the indicated text.↩

59. Editor’s Note: See the articles “The myth of the small press – I” (link); “The myth of the small press – II” (link) and “Communists in leadership” (link), originally published in the Diário do Comércio on November 24, 25, and 30, 2011, respectively.↩

60. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. In Brazil: A sagração da primavera. A grande guerra e o nascimento da era moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1991.↩

61. Editor’s Note: See the chapter “Language.”↩

62. Editor’s Note: The author refers to the works “Cartas do cárcere” and “O materialismo histórico e a filosofia de Benedetto Croce” (published under the title “Concepção dialética da história”), both released in Brazil in 1966; as well as “Maquiavel, a política e o Estado moderno,” “Os intelectuais e a organização da cultura,” and “Literatura e vida nacional,” published in 1968—all by Civilização Brasileira, under the editor Ênio Silveira. For a more comprehensive and recent edition, see Antonio Gramsci, “Cadernos do cárcere,” six volumes, Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1999-2002. The Prison Notebooks were written between 1926 and 1937, during Gramsci’s imprisonment in Italy.↩

63. Editor’s Note: "(...) this habit has an even deeper and more lethal consequence: it incapacitates us for choice and renunciation, which necessarily arise from the hierarchy of values (...)". [Olavo de Carvalho, “O futuro do pensamento brasileiro,” É Realizações, 1997.]↩

64. Editor’s Note: “Relativized means referred or conditioned to a situation. (...) Historicism is one of the parents of the generalized relativism reigning today. People are certain that all ideas have always changed and that there has never been a permanent idea throughout history, and this is completely false. But today it passes as if it were an absolute dogma.” [Olavo de Carvalho, second lecture of the course “Pensamento e atualidade de Aristóteles,” Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, Rio de Janeiro, March 22, 1994, available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/pensaris2_1.htm]. To better understand relativism and its origins, refer to this lecture.↩

65. Editor’s Note: Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was a British Marxist historian, highly regarded by the Brazilian intelligentsia. In an interview with the Times Literary Supplement on October 28, 1994, Professor Michael Ignatieff asked him the following, to clarify his already somewhat startling responses: “So in the end, what you’re saying is that if the bright future had been created [by the Soviet experiment], the loss of 15, 20 million people would have been justified?” Hobsbawm replied, “Yes.”↩

66. Editor’s Note: “In his book The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (Chicago, Independent Publishers Group, 2009), Spanish journalist Daniel Estulin shows how this globalist plutocracy, bent on constructing a world dictatorship, managed to remain hidden from 1954 to at least 1998, stigmatizing any attempt to reveal its existence as ‘conspiracy theory’: its components simply bought all the major newspapers and TV networks in the US and Europe. This determined a deeper change in the functions of journalism than most of the population can yet conceive. As the goal of the globalist elite is to undermine the American economy and establish upon its ruins a new system with a unified world currency, global taxes, and planetary bureaucratic administration, the news, in almost all of the media, are no longer selected by any criterion of objective importance, but by the service they provide to the mental programming of the masses, in order to make them passively accept drastic changes that under normal conditions would provoke explosions of hatred and revolt. Suppression and manipulation have become widespread and systematic, to the point of daily assaulting the dignity of human intelligence and transforming the electoral mechanisms of democracy into a mere game of appearances” [Olavo de Carvalho, “Horror and Insensitivity,” published in Diário do Comércio on June 22, 2009, available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/090622dc.html].↩

67. Editor’s Note: In an interview with Folha de S. Paulo on August 27, 2003, Raúl Reyes himself made the following statements:

    “Reyes: The FARC has contacts not only in Brazil with different political forces and governments, parties and social movements… Folha: Can you name the most important ones? Reyes: Well, the PT, and of course, within the PT, there are various forces; the landless, the homeless, students, unionists, intellectuals, priests, historians, journalists… Folha: Which intellectuals? Reyes: [The sociologist] Emir Sader, Friar Betto [special advisor to Lula], and many others.”↩

68. Editor’s Note: The author refers to the article “Suggestion to colleagues”, published in the magazine Época on February 17, 2001 and available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/sugestao.htm.↩