Petismo, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of 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”. It comprises two main parts, each containing a series of articles that critique the political landscape in Brazil, particularly focusing on the Workers' Party (PT) and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In the first part, titled “Lula,” Olavo dissects the personality and political maneuvers of Lula in four articles. “Lavish Praise” examines the exaggerated adulation Lula receives from both domestic and international media, comparing it to a false sense of patriotism. “Petty Kindness” critiques Lula’s selective emotional displays, arguing that his tears and public displays of empathy are politically calculated rather than genuine. In "Lula, Self-Confessed Defendant", Olavo discusses Lula’s involvement in the São Paulo Forum, presenting it as a clandestine organization influencing Latin American politics, which Lula openly admits to in a speech. The final article in this part, "Routine Act", highlights Lula’s decision to grant asylum to the terrorist Cesare Battisti, presenting it as consistent with his historical sympathies for radical leftist movements.

The second part, “Tradition & Strategy,” consists of five articles that delve into broader themes of leftist strategies and political maneuvers. “Nothing New” reflects on the predictable rise of corruption under the PT, rooted in a misinterpretation of ethical standards. “Excess of Delicacy” criticizes the naivety of those who believe that the PT’s involvement with international bankers signifies a departure from their revolutionary roots. “The Engineering of Disorder” explores how the PT’s social policies, particularly under Lula, have systematically undermined social and moral order to consolidate power. In "As Always", Olavo observes the diminished moral expectations in Brazilian society, where minimal adherence to legal standards by judges in the mensalão scandal is overly lauded. Finally, “After the Mensalão” argues that the PT’s corrupt practices are deeply ingrained in their revolutionary strategy, where the punishment of mensalão figures serves to protect the broader agenda of leftist dominance.

• 1. Lula
• Lavish Praise
• Petty Kindness
• Lula, Self-Confessed Defendant
• Routine Act
• 2. Tradition & Strategy
• Nothing New
• Excess of Delicacy
• The Engineering of Disorder
• As Always
• After the Mensalão

1. Lula

Lavish Praise

Diário do Comércio, June 2, 2010

Perhaps it was prophetic when the “Soldier’s Song” dubbed Brazilian patriotism a “feverish love”: fevers, by definition, either pass quickly or kill the subject after a few weeks.

As our fellow citizens lack any sense of historical traditions that could give substance to the notion of “homeland,” all their devotion to the abstract and elusive entity called “Brazil” consists of bursts of fleeting enthusiasm for occasional glories, generally nothing more than sports victories or self-serving international media praise for the small-minded creatures who govern us.

These ephemeral raptures coexist peacefully with disdain for genuine patriotic values and the most affected contempt for the heroes, saints, and sages who honored the nationality, creatures of mist who, when they become known, quickly dissipate before the brilliant and noisy presence of the media idols of the week.

The contrast with the USA could not be greater. Americans measure current politicians against the stature of Washington, Lincoln, or Jefferson. In Brazil, José Bonifácio or Joaquim Nabuco are mere retroactive shadows cast by the monumental figures of Lula, Netinho Pagodeiro, and Bruna Surfistinha.

Recent weeks have been generous with stimuli for national civic eroticism. The most piquant were the declarations of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praising Brazilian fiscal voracity and the hagiographic report by Spiegel magazine in which our president, like a resurrected Eagle of The Hague, soars to “the forefront of world diplomacy” for the umpteenth time, suggesting that the previous times were mere promises.

These are documents of exceptional importance, not for the veracity of their content, which is below Avogadro’s number, but precisely as pedagogical samples of how politicians and the media nowadays no longer need to attempt to deceive the audience with simulations of verisimilitude: they can lie frankly, with genuine and holy brazenness, confident that the listeners have already become so accustomed to the lie that they accept it precisely because it is a lie, like a victim of repeated rapes who ends up enjoying the game and offering herself eagerly to the blasé and lazy rapist.

Mrs. Clinton assures that the relationship between high income tax and high economic growth in Brazil is not a coincidence, but a curve of cause and effect. To grow more, therefore, other countries in the region should imitate the Brazilian example, heavily taxing the earnings of their entrepreneurs and workers.

Needless to say, with or without the Brazilian example, Mrs. Clinton has always loved high taxes and inflated government because, after all, she, her husband, her party, and her numerous left-of-center protégés live precisely off this (though they also know how to tactically adapt to the symmetrically opposite policy when the damage becomes evident). If Brazil, instead of growing, were to shrink, as usually happens to nations that strangle their populations with taxes, it would not change the Clintons' discourse, which is that of the entire world left.

The problem is that for a country that a quarter-century ago grew 15% a year without any fiscal gigantism, the 4 or 5% annually nowadays are, in the most triumphalist hypothesis, nothing more than signs of vegetative, spontaneous recovery, immune to both the stupidity and genius of governments; signs that only transfigure into memorable victories through the murder of memory capacity. Brazil, which was once the seventh economy in the world and then fell below the twentieth, is now the eighth. It hasn’t even returned to where it was,¹ but as it boasts that it will be the fifth around 2050, it is already proclaiming, by projecting the future onto the present, that it is better than it ever was. For new generations, who have the historical culture of an armadillo and imagine the military era as a time of indescribable hunger and misery, this talk is very persuasive. Endorsed by Mrs. Clinton, it then becomes as venerable as the principle of identity, the Ten Commandments, or the Code of Hammurabi.

Spiegel magazine goes further, proclaiming: “As Brazil grows to become a new economic power, the reputation of the Brazilian president grows at meteoric speed.” What kind of meteor is this, that drags across the sky with the pace of a cosmic snail for years? Since I became a reader of the mainstream media around the age of 15, Brazil has “grown to become a new economic power” at least thirty times. With the possible exception of what is observed in the efforts of senile erection, no other entity in the world grows so persistently towards a new state of existence without ever reaching it, despite the commemorative fanfares that echo at each new spurt and then fall silent as if nothing had happened. But I am mistaken: there is indeed another similar phenomenon, and Spiegel itself points it out explicitly: it is the reputation of President Lula. Since the 2002 election, it has been “growing at meteoric speed,” threatening to make him the most important politician in the world within a few weeks, and then repeating the threat again and again as the years go by and people forget the previous threat. As this happens in the pages of the international media at least once every six months, with faithful regularity, I begin to suspect that meteors do not fall but orbit eternally. But, as this explanation risks shocking astronomers for its excessive scientific audacity, I here preemptively note an alternative theory: as “reputation” means nothing other than appearing in the media, each report written to praise Lula’s prestige is proof of itself and a good reason to write the same thing again at the slightest provocation.

The agreement with Iran, I admit, is a great provocation, but is that a reason for Spiegel to write that Lula has become “a hero of the southern hemisphere and an important counterweight to Washington and Beijing”? Hero? The only one who knows, if he knows, about Lula’s heroism is the MEP boy.² As for being a counterweight, let’s see. The scheme Lula set up with Ahmadinejad had the short-term result of freeing Iran from possible sanctions, which was precisely China’s goal. As far as I know, a counterweight weighs on the opposite side, not the same side. Washington, for its part, does not need any counterweight: Hillary weighs on one side, Obama on the other. The Brazil-Iran agreement itself showed this. Hillary personifies traditional American leftism, which reconciles, as far as possible, the ambitions of absolute power of the world left with at least some national interests. Obama blatantly serves the interests of the most radical enemies of his country³ and counts Lula as one of his most opportune instruments in the enterprise. The obvious contradictions between the Secret Service’s recommendations and the famous personal letter to the Brazilian president only show that not everything in the high circles of Washington is in tune with Obama’s purposes, which are the same as those of China and Iran. But, to the extent that he collaborates with these purposes, Lula, once again, is the opposite of a counterweight.

But the sublime point of the Spiegel report is the passage where it points out one of the reasons for Lula’s success as his commitment to national education. This is a facet of our president that the Brazilian population was completely unaware of. Quantitatively, when Lula came to power, there were practically no Brazilian children without school. If the quality of education needed improvement, the success of Lula’s government in this endeavor is measured by the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exams, in which our students invariably have the worst scores in the world. But there is always a way around everything: one can look at the table of scores upside down and proclaim that, once again, the universe bows to Brazil.

Petty Kindness

Diário do Comércio, October 19, 2009

Our president, who has never shed a tear for the 40,000 Brazilians murdered annually and much less done anything to protect them, melted into tears over Rio being chosen to host the 2016 Olympic Games. It is not the first time he shows his remarkable capacity for crying. He cried twice upon being elected and inaugurated, cried countless times announcing his government plans from the podium, cried at the funeral of PT deputy Carlos Wilson, at the funeral of the rain victims in Santa Catarina, and at the Alcântara accident victims’ funeral, cried at the inauguration of the “Luz Para Todos” project, cried while praising his own achievements at a student meeting in São Paulo, cried in Senegal saying it was out of repentance for slavery, cried promising to end unemployment in 2003 and again in 2006 (the unemployed are still crying), and cried when deputy Roberto Jefferson told him about the mensalão scandal: he sobbed so convulsively it seemed he was the last to know about the imbroglio. These are just samples picked at random. Typing “Lula cries” on Google, I got 29,600 responses, and just the thought of examining them one by one makes me want to cry.

Faced with this torrent of tears, it would be unfair to deny that Mr. President has good feelings. He has them. The problem is that they are morbidly selective: for his comrades in militancy, for social groups where he hopes to recruit voters, and especially for himself, poor thing, it is an overwhelming emotion, an irresistible tenderness, an endless outpouring of compassion. For everyone else, all he has to offer is that refined form of passive cruelty called indifference. Included in this category are the 40,000 mentioned above, Brazilian children poisoned by Farc drugs, the damned 17,000 reactionaries shot by his friend Fidel Castro, and especially the victims of national terrorism, whose families live in the most abject oblivion while their parents' and grandparents' murderers gorge on federal funds, either as “indemnified,” or as ministers, senators, deputies, chiefs of staff, etc.

Far be it from me to suspect that His Excellency’s tears are fake. It is precisely their spontaneity that shows how selectively his good presidential instincts are, with that natural and even unconscious selectivity that reveals, in an instant, a personality, the whole form of a soul and a conscience. If this selectivity naturally privileges, emphasizes, and extols Mr. President’s political-advertising interests and simultaneously makes him blind and insensitive to everything else, it is not because there is some cunning premeditation in it, but, quite the contrary, it is because, simply, he is like that.

His moral conscience, in short, is deformed by the long-standing habit, half partisan, half mafia-like, of the airtight separation between the “friends” and the “others,” between “our people” and “those people.” If his fits of kindness always turn out to be politically opportune, it is not because he plans them, but because, deep down in his soul, he cannot conceive of good except in the narrow and specific form of a partisan strategy, being perfectly indifferent to everything outside or above it.

Especially above. The most evident proof of his insensitivity to any values that transcend partisan struggle came right after his audience with the Pope — a culminating moment in any faithful Catholic’s life — when, having taken communion without confession, he doubled the blasphemy by making a joke of it, saying he did so because he is a sinless soul. For this man, even the religion he professes ardently has no meaning in itself, the God he claims to worship has no moral authority to judge him, and must humbly fit into the role of an instrumental joke character ad majorem Lulis gloriam. That later, in Africa, he displays repentance for a slavery he never practiced, and accompanies his tears with a convenient papal quotation, is proof that, in the scale of his conscience, his Christian soul has more satisfactions to provide to the immediate audience than to the Final Judgment.

Subjecting even the highest and most venerable things to partisan opportunism, his outpourings of kindness are nothing but visible expressions of deep pettiness, of a smallness of soul that, to say the least, is not a good example for children.

Devoid, at least apparently, of the natural brutality of a Fidel Castro or a Pol-Pot, as well as the histrionic boastfulness of a Hugo Chávez, this man carries in his heart, like them, that typical mixture of moral insensitivity and kitsch sentimentality that characterizes sociopaths. His indifference to the real suffering of strangers to his circle of interests contrasts so starkly with his outbursts of obscene self-pity and his emotionalism on politically convenient occasions that I see no way to escape the conclusion that His Excellency is a deformed soul, whose ugliness, exhibited with naive shamelessness in each new statement, symbolically condenses the general misery of the era.

Lula, Self-Confessed Defendant

Diário do Comércio, September 26, 2005

I should be grateful to the President of the Republic. When practically the entire national media is committed to camouflaging the activities or even denying the existence of the São Paulo Forum, labeling as crazy or fanatic anyone who denounces them, the founder of the entity himself comes forward and provides all the information, confirming the most depressing suspicions and some even worse.

The presidential speech of July 2, 2005, delivered on the 15th anniversary of the Forum and reproduced on the government’s official website,⁴ is the explicit confession of a conspiracy against national sovereignty, a crime infinitely more serious than all the corruption crimes practiced and covered up by the current government; a crime that, by itself, would justify not only impeachment but also the imprisonment of its author.

From my distant position, I have only now become fully aware of this singular document, but the editors-in-chief of the major newspapers and all the radio and TV newsrooms in Brazil have been there all along. Knowing about the speech since the date it was delivered, they still remained silent, proving that their persistent concealment of the facts was not the result of distraction or pure incompetence; it was conscious, Machiavellian complicity with a crime from which they hoped to gain some unknown benefit.

The meaning of these paragraphs, once unearthed from the verbal garbage that serves as its packaging, is strikingly clear:

Due to the existence of the São Paulo Forum, comrade Marco Aurélio has played an extraordinary role in this work of consolidating what we started in 1990… It was thus that in January 2003 we proposed to our comrade, President Chávez, the creation of the Group of Friends to find a peaceful solution that, thank God, happened in Venezuela. And it was only possible thanks to the political action of comrades. It was not a political action of one State with another State, or of one president with another president. Those who remember, Chávez participated in one of the forums we held in Havana. And thanks to this relationship, we were able to build, with many political differences, the consolidation of what happened in Venezuela, with the referendum that confirmed Chávez as president of Venezuela.

It was thus that we were able to act with other countries with our comrades from the social movement, from the parties of those countries, from the union movement, always using the relationship built in the São Paulo Forum so that we could talk without it seeming and without people understanding any political interference.

What the president admits in these passages is that:

1. The São Paulo Forum is a secret or at least camouflaged entity (“built… so that we could talk without it seeming and without people understanding any political interference”).

2. This entity actively interferes in the internal politics of several Latin American nations, making decisions and determining the course of events, beyond the scrutiny of governments, parliaments, justice, and public opinion.

3. The so-called “Group of Friends of Venezuela” was nothing more than an arm, agency, or facade of the São Paulo Forum (“due to the existence of the Forum… we proposed to comrade President Chávez…”_).

4. After being elected in 2002, he, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, while formally stepping down from his position as president of the São Paulo Forum, giving the impression that he was free to govern Brazil without commitments to ill-explained foreign alliances, continued to work clandestinely for the Forum, helping, for example, to produce the results of the Venezuelan referendum on August 15, 2004 (“thanks to this relationship, we were able to build the consolidation of what happened in Venezuela”), without giving the slightest account of this to his voters.

5. The guidance on vital points of Brazilian foreign policy was decided by Mr. Lula not as president of the Republic in a meeting with his ministry, but as a participant and guide of clandestine meetings with foreign political agents (“it was a political action of comrades, not a political action of one State with another State, or of one president with another president”). Above his presidential duties, he placed his loyalty to the “comrades.”

The president confesses, in sum, that he subjected the country to decisions made by foreigners, gathered in assemblies of an entity whose actions the Brazilian people were not to know or understand.

The active humiliation of national sovereignty could not be more blatant, especially knowing that among the entities participating in these decision-making meetings are organizations like the Chilean MIR, kidnapper of Brazilians, and the Colombian Farc, a narco-guerrilla responsible, according to its partner Fernandinho Beira-Mar, for injecting two hundred tons of cocaine annually into the national market.⁵

Never has an elected president of any civilized country shown such complete contempt for the Constitution, laws, institutions, and the entire electorate, while placing all trust and authority in a clandestine assembly full of criminals to decide, far from the people’s eyes, the nation’s destiny and its relations with neighbors. Never before in Brazil has there been such a blatant, complete, and cynical traitor as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The greatest proof that he consciously deceived public opinion, keeping it in ignorance of the São Paulo Forum’s operations, is that, on the eve of the election, frightened by my constant denunciations about this entity, he sent his “advisor for international affairs,” Giancarlo Summa, to calm the newspapers with an official PT note stating that the Forum was merely an innocent debating club, with no political action.⁶

And now he boasts about the “political action of comrades,” carried out with Brazilian government resources hidden from Parliament, justice, and public opinion.

Compared to such an immense crime, what significance does the mensalão and similar phenomena have, except as means used to subsidize partial operations within the grand strategy of transferring national sovereignty to the secret authority of foreigners?

Can there be a greater disproportion than between vulgar episodes of corruption and this supreme crime to which they served as instruments?

The answer is obvious. But then why do so many readily denounce the means while consenting to continue covering up the ends?

Here the answer is less obvious. It requires a preliminary distinction. The denouncers are divided into two types: (A) individuals and groups committed to the São Paulo Forum scheme but not directly involved in using these particular illicit means; (B) individuals and groups unrelated to either.

The reasoning of the first is simple: the rings go, but the fingers remain. Since it became impossible to continue hiding the use of illicit instruments, they consent to throw their most notorious operators to the wolves, so they can continue practicing the same crime by other means and agents. The content and even the style of the accusations subscribed by these people reveal their nature as pure diversionary tactics. When they attribute the PT’s corruption, which dates back to 1990, to agreements with the IMF made from 2003, they show that their urge to lie is not inhibited even by material impossibility. When they blame “a group,” glossing over the fact that the criminal structure’s ramifications extended from the Presidency of the Republic to interior city halls, encompassing practically the entire party, they prove they have as much to hide as the accused of the moment.

The motivations of group B are more complex. In part, it comprises spineless characters, physically and morally cowardly, who prefer to cling to the smaller detail out of fear of seeing the continental dimensions of the total crime. There is also the subgroup of intellectually weak individuals, who bet on the nonsense of the “death of communism” and now feel obliged, not to contradict themselves, to reduce the largest coup plot in Latin American history to the more manageable dimensions of a banal corruption scheme, depoliticizing the facts and pretending Lula is nothing more than a Fernando Collor without a jet ski. There are those who, out of opportunism or stupidity, collaborated too much with the rise of the criminal party to power and now feel divided between the impulse to rid themselves of the stigma of bad company and the urge to minimize the crime to avoid feeling the weight of the complicit help they gave. There are the pseudo-smart ones, who comfort the enemy by deluding themselves that it is more viable to defeat him by nibbling at the edges than by striking a mortal blow at the heart. Finally, there are those who really don’t understand anything and, with the traditional simian automatism of Brazilian speech, simply repeat what they hear, hoping to make a good impression.

I earnestly ask all the inflamed anti-corruption accusers of recent weeks — politicians, media owners, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, judges, military — to carefully examine their respective consciences, if they have any left, to see in which of these subgroups they fit. For, excepting those few valuable Brazilians who promptly subscribed to the denunciations against the São Paulo Forum, all the others inevitably fit into some.

It would be absurd to attribute solely to Lula and the São Paulo Forum the blame for Brazilian moral decay, forgetting the contribution they received from these occasional moralists, so eager to denounce parts while solicitously hiding the whole. Nothing could have fostered national self-deception more than this prodigious network of complicities and omissions born from diverse motives but converging towards the same result: creating a false impression of transparent investigations, a facade of normality and legality at the very moment when, invisibly gnawed from within, the entire order crumbles.

The destruction of order and its replacement by “a new standard of relationship between the State and society,” decided in secret meetings with foreigners, was the confessed goal of Mr. Lula. This goal, he said in another passage of the same speech, should be achieved and consolidated “in such a way that it can be lasting, regardless of who is the country’s government.”

What can be inferred from the attitude of those critics and accusers is that, in this general objective, Mr. Lula has already emerged victorious, regardless of the success or failure he may achieve in the remainder of his term. The new order, whose name is forbidden to declare, is already in place, and its authority is so great that not even the president’s fiercest enemies dare to contest it. All, in one way or another, have already implicitly conformed to placing the São Paulo Forum above the Constitution, laws, and Brazilian institutions. If they complain about thefts, misappropriations, mensalões, and bribes, it is precisely so as not to have to complain about the transfer of national sovereignty to the continental assembly of “comrades,” like Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Colombian narco-guerrillas, and Chilean kidnappers. It is like a raped woman protesting against the damage to her hairstyle, forgetting to say anything, even delicately, against the rape as such.

Perhaps Mr. Lula’s deeds and his cursed Forum have not brought Brazil such vast damage as this total inversion of proportions, this complete destruction of moral judgment, this integral corruption of public conscience. Never before has there been such a deep agreement between accused and accusers to allow the crime, denounced with such fanfare in detail, to be so successful in its overall objectives “without it seeming and without people understanding.”

Routine Act

Diário do Comércio, January 7, 2011

Who did not know, months in advance, that Mr. Luiz Inácio would throw the full weight of his presidential authority in a final spectacular move in favor of international terrorism? Who did not know that Cesare Battisti, fleeing to Brazil, chose the best place in the world for types like him, the safe harbor, the unfailing shelter of terrorists and drug traffickers?

“Who did not know?” What an idiotic question. I knew, my colleagues and readers of Diário do Comércio knew, the tiny fraction of the Brazilian population that keeps informed knew, and, of course, the São Paulo Forum crowd knew.

The rest of humanity ignored it completely. They expected from Lula a different attitude, symmetrically opposite, compatible with the stereotypical image of a serene and pragmatic statesman that the international media forged to make him attractive to investors.

From all sides, indignant reactions to our ex-president’s paternal solicitude for a notorious terrorist and murderer came with that expression of surprise and disappointment of a betrayed husband who, until the eve, trusted his wife blindly.

Definitely, no one in the mainstream media or high circles of Italy, any other European country, or the USA has or wants to have the slightest idea of who Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is.

Without the slightest pretense of instilling in these delicate creatures' heads knowledge they do not desire and flee from as if it were the plague, I point out here some memorable moments from the ex-president’s curriculum vitae:

1. He had as his constant spiritual mentor, from youth to old age, the ex-friar Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, Frei Betto, a faithful collaborator of Fidel Castro’s government and co-author of the Cuban Constitution. He never renounced his guru.

2. Shortly after the fall of the USSR, our character adhered to the slogan “reconquer in Latin America what we lost in Eastern Europe” and to that end founded in 1990, and presided over for twelve years, the São Paulo Forum, the strategic coordination of the communist movement in Latin America, linking in a plan that encompasses legal parties and criminal organizations. In an official communiqué on the Forum’s 15th anniversary, the Farc, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, acknowledged that this initiative saved the international communist movement from imminent extinction.

3. Upon being elected president, he pretended to distance himself from the São Paulo Forum but continued unofficially in command of the entity through his minister Marco Aurélio Garcia and his advisor Gilberto Carvalho.

4. Swearing never to have had any contact with the Farc, he presided over Forum assemblies alongside the Colombian narco-guerrilla commander Manuel Marulanda, and allowed members of his government, along with stellar figures from his party, to associate with Marulanda in directing the most important internal debate magazine of the communist movement on the continent, America Libre.

5. During his government, many competitors and dissidents of the Farc were persecuted and arrested in Brazil, while the organization’s agents continued operating freely in national territory, not only distributing drugs but supplying weapons and training to local bandit gangs and MST militants, protected by the government. When the Farc representative in the country, Olivério Medina, was arrested by the Federal Police, Lula’s party and government immediately mobilized to release him, giving him, in addition, Brazilian citizenship and an official job for his wife in the ministry then headed by the current president of the Republic, Dilma Rousseff (she denied any involvement in the case until her signature on the appointment decree was published in the press).⁷ The only Farc militant who remained imprisoned in Brazil was Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía. This apparently mysterious exception is explained because he, evidently acting outside the Farc, got involved in a plan to kidnap Lula’s son, Luís Cláudio.⁸

6. The Lula government always rejected Colombia’s request to label the Farc an “official terrorist organization,” proposing instead that the drug trafficking gang be rewarded for their crimes with general amnesty and transformed into a legal political party.

7. In two official speeches, published on the Presidency of the Republic website but never reported by any media outlet in Brazil, he confessed to the direct interference of the São Paulo Forum and himself in the internal politics of Venezuela and other countries, to place and maintain in power people like Hugo Chávez, Morales, and tutti quanti.⁹

8. It is true that, in the economic field, Lula behaved properly and did everything the World Bank commanded. But he would only act otherwise if he were crazy. If Lenin himself did everything to calm and seduce international investors while consolidating the internal power of communists in Russia, why would Lula enter into a war with global capitalism while discreetly helping to hand over control of several Latin American nations to São Paulo Forum agents? The double-faced tactic worked so well that, in the same week, he was honored by the Davos Economic Forum for his adherence to capitalism and by the São Paulo Forum for his loyalty to communism. Those now exploding with rage at the protection he gave to Cesare Battisti only know, certainly, the first face. That is why they see in this obscene decision a sudden, incoherent, aberrant, inexplicable exception. Those who know the second face understand it was a routine act, the last in a long series. Incoherence is one thing; duplicity is another.

2. Tradition & Strategy

Nothing New

O Globo, June 25, 2005

Everyone seems surprised by the state of things, but it was more than predictable. Since the early 1990s, when the PT (Workers' Party) heavily invested in building an image of impeccable morality, I warned that the arrival of this party to power would inaugurate an era of corruption that would pale even the reddest scandals of previous governments. This prediction was received with as much incredulity as it was based on knowledge of facts no one wanted to see and the analysis of historical precedents that everyone preferred to bury in oblivion.

Right at the outbreak of the famous “Campaign for Ethics in Politics,” I observed that the PT cunningly manipulated the double meaning of the term “ethics,” publicly giving it the conventional meaning of honesty and integrity, and in their internal documents, the meaning that the term has in the Gramscian expression “ethical state,” a morally neutral expression that has nothing to do with virtues or sins but merely designates, technically, a certain phase of the process of power takeover by the “New Prince,” the revolutionary party. In short, it was about using the moralizing hopes of the middle class as a carrot, leading them to collaborate with an enterprise that pretended to “clean up Brazil” but was only concerned with growing the party’s power by all moral, amoral, and immoral means.¹⁰

I announced twelve years in advance, in my book The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, and later again in The Collective Imbecile, that this Machiavellian instrumentalization of popular aspirations would only result in more evil and filth since it constituted, in itself, a crime greater than all material acts of corruption, implying nothing less than the complete perversion of the very sense of morality.¹¹ One thing, I said, recalling an old Arab proverb, is to steal by weighing flour, selling 750 grams at the price of a kilo. Another thing is to alter the scale so that it never again shows the difference between 750 grams and a kilo.

The old corrupt politicians merely stole. The PT turned theft into a system, the system into militancy, and militancy into a substitute for laws and institutions, reduced to temporary obstacles to the construction of the great utopia.

The old politicians stole for themselves, individually or in small groups, moderating the audacity of their blows out of fear of denunciations. The PT steals with the moral authority of those who, arrogating the merits of a hypothetical future, are already absolved a priori of all present crimes; they steal with the tranquility and fearlessness of those who can lawfully use all means since they are the absolute masters of all ends.

Any party that turns against “society,” promising to reshape it from top to bottom — if not to reform human nature itself — places itself, instantly, above the moral criteria prevailing in that society and can only submit to them in appearance, laughing inwardly at the naivety of those who take it for a normal and loyal opponent. It is not possible to destroy the system and obey its rules at the same time, but only to use the rules as provisional camouflage for the destruction. Now, the system, like everything human, equally accommodates its share of injustices, errors, scandals, and its share of morality, order, and loyalty. Every system consists of a precarious balance between disorder and order. No sane intelligence ignores that it is only possible to repress or control the former by strengthening the latter. Any attempt to change the system entirely, whether by abrupt revolutionary subversion or by the slow and progressive undermining of institutional bases, begins by destroying the balance and therefore the order, under the vain promise of a future without imbalance or disorder. The modesty of objectives and the limitation of the political program to specific points that do not affect the system’s foundations are the marks of honest parties — and that is definitely not the mark of the PT. The dishonesty of this party is measured by the megalomaniac scope of its promises.

Excess of Delicacy

Diário do Comércio, September 17, 2007

There are still those foolish enough to, observing the conjugal fidelity that ultimately reigns between the PT government and international bankers, conclude that the communists have changed, become bourgeois, only think about money and no longer care about revolutions.

I do not contest the right to ignorance, even radical and complete. But why on earth must everyone who comes to me with this silly idea express it with a paternal air of wisdom, as if unveiling the reality of the world before my youthful inexperience?

At 60 years old, having spent a good part of my life studying revolutionary ideologies, I am no longer obliged to politely listen to this arrogant nonsense. Responding with swear words is already an excessive delicacy on my part. What is really deserved are kicks in the backside.

Anyone who has studied the history of the revolutionary movement knows that communists and bankers have lived in symbiosis, demonstrably, for at least a century. Since in Brazil no one studies anything, everyone believes they have the right to announce as explosive novelties the centennial obviousnesses that have just reached their ears.

The problem is that, when you do not know the date of the news you are touting, you cannot understand its meaning. If you think the conduct of the PT proves a change in communist mentality, it is because you imagine that the communists of yesteryear were different, pure revolutionary idealists who would never stoop to playing the game of big financial capital. Then tell me: who were Trotsky’s contacts in the USA during his first trip to America? Who financed the construction of the entire Soviet heavy industry, prolonging for decades the survival of an impossible regime that was already born moribund? Who feeds the entire American left with money and an infinity of anti-American movements worldwide? Who saved the Chinese Communist Party from collapse by fostering the recovery of an economy that until then only grew in the number of deaths from malnutrition?

If communists ceased to be communists every time they went to a motel to exchange caresses with bankers, Lenin would have gone down in history as the commander of the Salvation Army.

The love affair between these two apparently incompatible types of creatures has become even more intense since, in the 1920s, the most astute Marxist theorists — Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and Antonio Gramsci — started shouting that the primary enemy to be destroyed was not the capitalist economy, but “Judeo-Christian civilization.” The program they outlined, which at the time seemed distant from the immediate concerns of the average communist militant (and has still not reached the knowledge of the idiots mentioned above), is now being implemented on a planetary scale, and its accelerated implementation reflects the close collaboration between big financial capital and the global network of communist organizations — the two arms of the world revolution. Abortionism, civil disarmament, sex-lib, feminism, gayism, criminalization of religious morality, state control of private life, and similar topics are today infinitely more important for the revolutionary strategy than the stereotyped divergences between “populist” and “elitist” economic policies (or “progressive” and “neoliberal”). Where these divergences monopolize public discussions, as in Brazil, it is precisely because they serve to camouflage the essential, to expel genuine conservatism based on moral and religious values from public life and to divide all political and cultural space between the left and a fake “right,” specially created for this purpose, one articulated to the other in such a way that, either by the “populist” or “elitist” path, indifferently, the revolutionary mutation of the world continues to advance.

The very person of Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, simultaneously honored in Davos for his conversion to market economy and in the São Paulo Forum for his unwavering fidelity to communism, is the living symbol of this essential agreement, but the chatterboxes who talk about him all day, to praise or to curse him, seem unable to see the identity of the character. They also fail to see, for the same reason, the treacherous and complicit nature of an “opposition” that only fights petism in the field of economic discussions and moralistic demands, abstaining from all ideological criticism and any mention of the broader communist strategy behind everything; an opposition that, once in power, advances the social and cultural revolutionary mutation faster than the PT itself could.

Not by coincidence, but by a very precise psychological calculation, each new “politically correct” rule incorporated into social habits immediately loses its original communist appearance, so that the millions of fools under its jurisdiction feel increasingly distant from the communist danger the more they adapt to the type of revolutionary culture conceived by Lukács and Gramsci. This is precisely what the latter called the “invisible and omnipresent authority” of the Party Prince. Never has the word “subversion” so aptly described a strategy. It is the inversion from below, or, as Walther Rathenau called it, the “vertical invasion of the barbarians.” While the power of big capital remains intact, or even strengthens, the “cultural revolution” gradually reverses all the criteria of reason, morality, and law, creating around us an infinity of oppressive and absurd social controls that seem personally invented by the Queen of Hearts. And all carried out in a painless, imperceptible way. Within a few years, someone being arrested for reading certain Bible verses aloud will be considered the most natural thing in the world, and anyone who says that anti-religious persecution is the realization of an old communist plan will be deemed crazy. Sorry: this will not happen in a few years. It is already happening now.

From an economic point of view, the unity of the ongoing revolutionary process can be summarized as follows. At least since Stalin, no Marxist economist believes in the total nationalization of the economy. All know that a vast residue of market economy is impossible to eliminate.¹² The most that can be done, to persevere in the line of state control conceived by Marx, is to concentrate capital as much as possible while simultaneously tying its interests to those of a ruling elite that, in turn, concentrates the maximum political power. Now, who can be more interested in capital concentration than the concentrators of capital par excellence, that is, international bankers? And who can desire more political power concentration than the compulsive concentrators of political power, that is, communist parties? The path of collaboration between communists and monopolists was therefore opened by the very natural course of things, and through this channel, the history of the world has been flowing for many decades, before the blind eyes of the multitude — including almost all “opinion leaders,” business consultants, strategic analysts, and other enlightened people whose opinions generally cost about $10,000 per hour.

The fusion has become even more accelerated since the communist movement, thanks to drug trafficking, the ingenious exploitation of pension funds, the support of Arab countries, the network of activist NGOs that siphon funds from all the world’s governments, and the colossal amounts of money discreetly injected into the Western economy by the KGB since the days of Gorbachev, became as rich as the banking elite, negotiating with them as equals and having with them a vast and nebulous area of common interests where they become practically indistinguishable.¹³

The victims of the process are genuine liberal economics, millennial civilizational values, individual freedom, and religious conscience, strangled under increasingly comprehensive and oppressive state controls, always under the uplifting excuses of modernization, public interest, environmental protection, administrative efficiency, and — of course, wretched misery — civil rights. But the greatest victim of all is human intelligence, which, after being diverted, deceived, anesthetized for so long, gradually loses vigor and adapts to a twilight state of obfuscation and semi-consciousness.

The Engineering of Disorder

Diário do Comércio, September 12, 2012

Everyone knows that the electoral base of former President Lula, as well as that of his successor, lies in the lines of beneficiaries of Fome Zero funds. Although the origin of the program dates back to the FHC government, the chief trickster managed to fuse it so tightly with his image that the crowd of recipients fears that voting against him would kill the golden goose.

At first, he promised instead to get them jobs, but then he wisely refrained from doing so and preferred, with mafia-like shrewdness, to reduce them to chronic dependents.

A citizen who rises from poverty to enter the labor market may remain grateful, for a while, to the one who gave them this opportunity, but over the years, they realize that their fate depends on their own efforts and not on a favor received long ago. On the other hand, one whose subsistence comes from monthly renewed favors becomes a compulsive bootlicker, a devoted servant of the “Padim,” a professional hand-kisser.

A politician who builds a career based on this type of program is, quite evidently, a large-scale corrupter, who lives off the deterioration of popular morality. It is impossible that the growth of Fome Zero has nothing to do with the increase in crime, drug consumption, and depression cases. Turn the poor into well-off beggars, and in a few years, you will have created a mass of small cynical opportunists, committed to eternalizing the condition of dependence and extracting small but growing benefits from it, making their own degradation a means of living.

Vicious state assistance was not, however, the only means used by the PT elite to reduce Brazilian society to a state of moral uncertainty and anomie.

To the same extent that he refrained from creating jobs, Mr. Lula also avoided giving the poor any rudiment of education, however minimal, to guarantee them a more meaningful life in the long run.

During his two terms, the Brazilian educational system became one of the worst in the universe, a factory of illiterates and delinquents never seen before in the world.

At the same time, the government forced the implementation of new conduct models — abortionism, gayism, racialism, ecocentrism, extreme secularism, etc. — knowing perfectly well that the sudden breakdown of traditional moral standards produces that state of perplexity and disorientation, that dissolution of social solidarity bonds, which leads to moral indifference, selfish individualism, and criminality.

Finally, the dissolution of the capacity for moral judgment was followed by that of the legal order: the new Penal Code project, reversing the scale of crime severity, enshrining abortion as an unconditional right, facilitating pedophilia practice, decriminalizing criminals, and criminalizing honest citizens for trivial reasons, shocks the habits and values of the population so much that it equates to an open invitation to insolence and disrespect.

Only a morbidly naive observer could see in these phenomena a set of mistakes and failures. It would take a miraculous constellation of pure coincidences for all errors and failures to systematically always lead to the increasing success of their authors.

All this seems like madness, but it is premeditated, rational madness. It is a work of engineering. If there is one obvious fact never contradicted by experience, it is this: systematic disorganization of society is the easiest and quickest way to elevate a militant elite to absolute power. For this, it is not even necessary to suspend formal legal guarantees or openly implement a “dictatorship.” For many decades, sociology and political science have understood this process in its smallest details.

Read, for example, the classic study by Karl Mannheim, The Strategy of the Nazi Group.¹⁴ The formula is very simple: in the general confusion of consciences, all rational discussion becomes impossible, and then, naturally, spontaneously, almost imperceptibly, the decision-making center shifts into the hands of the most brazen and cynical, to whom the bewildered and insecure people will turn as the ultimate symbols of authority and order amid chaos. This is already happening.

The rise of leftist parties to the condition of exclusive dominators of the political landscape, practically without opposition, would never have been possible without the long work of destroying order in society and in souls. But it would also not have been possible if the chaos were complete. Complete chaos only suits basement anarchists, marginals, and the oppressed. When the revolution comes from above, it is essential that some sectors of social life, indispensable for maintaining government power, are preserved amid the general demolition.

The fields chosen to remain under the domain of reason were, understandably, the Federal Revenue, the Ministry of Defense, and the economy. The first, the most indispensable of all, because no revolution is made without money, and no one will ever come to dominate the State from within if they cannot make it finance the operation. The relatively sensible administration of the other two fields anesthetized and neutralized preventively, with undeniable efficiency, the two social classes from which some resistance to the regime could come, as seen in 1964: the military and the businessmen. A dog bitten by a snake is afraid of sausage.

As Always

Diário do Comércio, October 9, 2012

Living in a country where, despite corruption in high places, the daily effort to avoid evil and do the right thing is still a living reality within many families and an unavoidable reference even for the most lying and sold-out media, the degradation of moral judgment standards in Brazil appears to me with stunning clarity.

Note well: I did not say conduct standards, I said judgment standards. The practice of crime has become so normal and commonplace that it itself determines the criteria by which it will be judged, leveling everything downwards.

Goodness, heroism, and sanctity have disappeared from the repertoire of human possibilities, even imaginary ones, so much so that the most banal and obligatory virtues have become the highest measure of actions, and the simple fact of an employee following the rules is enough to elevate them to the heaven of divine models.

In the judgment of the mensalão (monthly payment) scandal, everyone expected the judges to act as usual, that is, to let themselves be bought. Since they did not do this, since they did not turn a blind eye to what even a blind person could see with crystal-clear clarity, they were instantly transfigured into the most sublime incarnations of national virtues, receiving praises never granted to José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, the Duke of Caxias, or the blessed José de Anchieta.

There is, of course, no criticism or attempt to deprecate the performance of Their Excellencies. Those judging wrongly are not the judges, but Brazilian society, which has elevated swindling and crime to conventional symbols of normality and already dazzles to the point of fainting and orgasm when someone simply refrains from committing the expected mischief.

In this diminished scale, it is not surprising that the very extent of the committed and punished crimes has been reduced to its minimum measure, as if they were mere individual sins and not the direct, rational, and inevitable expression of the global political strategy that has directed the course of events in this country for a decade.

None of the defendants in the process acted on their own account, nor in their exclusive personal interest. All had a clear conscience — and therefore, in their own eyes, totally clean — of working for the glory and power of their party, for the consolidation of leftist hegemony, which placed itself above the laws not by an accidental deviation but with the deliberate purpose of destroying the prevailing system and legitimizing, by repeated habit, the sovereign empire of a new authority: the “omnipresent and invisible power” that Antonio Gramsci spoke of.

Forgetting the strategic dimension of these crimes, using individual guilt as a smoke screen to cover up the global plan that generated them, is by no means doing justice: it is absolving the great culprit by punishing his collaborators instead.

The fact is that neither the judges, nor the media analysts, nor the opinion makers in general know either the strategic plans of the Brazilian left as a whole, nor, even more, the Marxist tradition that inspires and determines them. They all judge from a minimalist vision in which the details appear isolated, and the larger project remains unscathed behind the sacrifice of its agents and office boys.

Anyone who has studied a little communist strategy — which is not the case for any of these illustrious commentators — knows that the conduct of the revolutionary party is oriented with the purpose of temporarily using bourgeois law as an instrument not only to impose in its name a new and antagonistic right but to hasten the disappearance of all law, replacing it with the omnipotent decrees of the enlightened elite commanding the process.

Wherever a party imbued with the revolutionary ambition to change society from top to bottom rises to power, using for this the most respectable pretexts of conventional morality — as the PT did throughout its dazzling career of denouncing the corruption of others — immorality and crime will soon follow, not as deviations and aberrations but as preferred instruments to demolish the established sense of morality and justice and, in the subsequent general confusion of consciences, impose a new standard of judgment, where revolutionary will is the supreme and only criterion of good and truth.

All this is happening right before the dull and blind eyes of a public opinion that not only content itself but enters ecstasy when the criminal party hands over its minor agents to justice to preserve itself politically, cleaning itself in its own dirt, as always.

After the Mensalão

Diário do Comércio, October 17, 2012

Now that the mensalão figures are at rock bottom, there are still voices of indignant petistas, communists, and faithful socialists condemning them as opportunists and traitors. But why should any leader or militant be thrown into public execration for simply fulfilling their revolutionary duty to the letter? Isn’t it true that the Marxist-Leninist strategy orders and determines not only to attack the bourgeois state from outside but to corrupt it from within whenever possible, then accuse it of being depraved and thieving, and replace it with the party-state? Isn’t it notorious that, in the broader and subtler conception of Antonio Gramsci, the inspirer and guide of our left for half a century, the corruption of the state is not enough, and it is necessary to extend it to all society, to break and shuffle all moral and legal criteria so that, in the general confusion, only the iron will of the party vanguard remains as the last symbol of authority? Isn’t it obvious and evident that, if in the Gramscian perspective the Party is “the new Prince,” it has the strict obligation to follow Machiavelli’s teachings, using lies, fraud, extortion, theft, and homicide to the extent necessary to concentrate all power in itself, overthrowing laws, institutions, and values along the way?

From the Marxist perspective, none of the mensalão figures did anything wrong except the heinous crime of getting caught in the end, risking what is most untouchable and sacred: the good image of the Party and the left in general.

To not perceive such an obvious thing, one must divert one’s eyes to the most peripheral and folkloric aspects of the episode, erasing from memory the essence, the very nature of the crime committed. What was the mensalão, after all? A gigantic operation of buying consciences. And for what were consciences bought? To enrich Messrs. José Dirceu, Genoíno, Valério, and a few others? Not at all. They were bought to neutralize the Legislature and concentrate all power in the hands of the Executive, therefore of the ruling Party. What could be more loyal, more consistent with the Marxist tradition?

The entire generation that, in their fifties or sixties, came to power in recent decades was educated in a moral system where personal guilt is unsubstantial in itself, depending solely on political color and transforming into virtues as soon as it brings advantage to the “right side” of the ideological spectrum. Quite the opposite: according to what these people learned since university days, any concession to “bourgeois morality,” unless it is useful as a provisional stage performance, is a greater crime that the revolutionary conscience cannot tolerate. From this perspective, what could be wrong or condemnable about collecting money by illicit means to buy bourgeois consciences and force them to work, volens nolens, for the Prince Party? Once the armed revolution route was abandoned — not out of reverence for human life but mere strategic convenience — what other means is there to establish the “omnipresent and invisible authority” but the systematic corruption of opponents and competitors?

There will be no shortage of those who, moved by the general Brazilian incapacity to conceive that a politician, when getting involved in such a mess, does so driven by much vaster ambitions than the mere desire for money, raise here the objection: but didn’t the mensalão figures get rich?

Of course they did, but would you wish they deposited all the dirty money in the Party’s account, attracting suspicions about the organization itself instead of protecting it under their personal accounts as good agents and front men? Or would you wish that, possessing immense amounts, they continued to lead modest lives, indicating that they were mere pawns instead of exposing themselves as autonomous swindlers and common bandits without political color, as they are now seen by a supremely uncultured, dull, and — once again — duped public opinion?

For inducing the people to see them exactly this way, safeguarding the good reputation of the power scheme that created and served them, is precisely the objective of all this bunch of improvised moralists who now cover them with invective in the name of the purity and integrity of the left.

The mensalão figures are not, of course, innocent scapegoats. They are partial culprits tasked with paying alone for the general guilt of an organization that has been using moral discourse for thirty years, with notable efficiency, as a disguise and instrument of crime.

Those who now try to clean themselves on them are even worse. What they do is try to make the people forget that today’s mensalão figures are yesterday’s moralists, the same ones who shone as champions of law and order in the CPIs of the 1990s, while already preparing, under this pink mantle, the monopolistic power scheme of which the mensalão would be nothing more than an instrument. And why would they do that if not to pave the way for new and bigger crimes?

If the indignant spokesmen of anti-mensalism on the left had a shred of sincerity, they would have risen, years ago, against the PT’s cover-up of the FARC, a terrorist and murderous organization, compared to whose crimes the mensalão reduces to the proportions of stealing ice cream from a cart. As they did not, the Colombian narco-guerrilla grew until it became, under the protection of the São Paulo Forum, the largest drug distributor in the world, about to receive from Mr. Juan Manuel Santos, for who knows what in return, the keys to political power.

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1. Editor’s Note: The text is from 2010. Brazil returned to the seventh position in 2012, according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).↩

2. Editor’s Note: The “MEP boy” episode was revealed in 2009 by columnist César Benjamin, who helped found the PT, from which he disaffiliated in 1995. In 1994, according to him, during a lunch in São Paulo, “Lula started a conversation: ‘You were in prison, right, Cesinha?’ ‘Yes, I was.’ ‘How long?’ ‘A few years…,’ I evaded (I rarely talk about this subject). Lula continued: ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I can’t live without a woman.’ To prove this claim, he narrated fluently how he had tried to subdue another inmate during the thirty days he was detained. He called him the ‘MEP boy,’ in reference to a leftist organization that no longer exists. He was surprised by the ‘boy’s’ resistance, who frustrated the assault with elbows and punches” [César Benjamin, “Os filhos do Brasil”, Folha de S. Paulo, November 27, 2009 — http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/brasil/fc2711200908.htm]. Together with other unionists, Lula spent 31 days in Dops prison, in São Paulo, in 1980, for leading strikes in the ABC Paulista. The ‘MEP boy’ would be João Batista dos Santos, a former metalworker who lived and militated in São Bernardo.↩

3. Read The Manchurian President by Aaron Klein and tell me if I am exaggerating.↩

4. Editor’s Note: See: www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/ex-presidentes/luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva/discursos/1o-mandato/2005/2o-semestre/02-07-2005-discurso-do-presidente-da-republica-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-na-reuniao-do-conselho-de-cupula-do-mercosul/download.↩

5. Editor’s Note: “The existence of a deep, constant, and solidary connection between the PT and the Farc is a fact so well proven that anyone who insists on denying it can only be either part of maintaining the secret or an incurable idiot” [Olavo de Carvalho, “O perigo sou eu”, Diário do Comércio, September 24, 2007 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/070924dc.html].↩

6. Editor’s Note: See “Qualquer coisa e o sr. Summa”, article by Olavo de Carvalho published in O Globo, on October 19, 2002, and available at: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/10192002globo.htm.↩

7. Editor’s Note: “I make formal requests for transfers, but I do not make appointments,” said Dilma Rousseff, then PT presidential candidate, on August 5, 2010, explaining that ordering the hiring is not the same as appointing. Dilma was Chief of Staff in 2006 when the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture employed Medina’s wife, Angela Maria Slongo.↩

8. Editor’s Note: See the report “‘Chupeta’ delató plan para secuestrar a un hijo de Lula,” on the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo website, available at: http://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/chupeta-frustro-plan-de-secuestro-de-hijo-de-lula_8731901-4.↩

9. Editor’s Note: In a 2012 video supporting Chávez, Lula also said: “In 1990, when we created the São Paulo Forum, none of us imagined that in just two decades we would get where we are. At that time, the left was only in power in Cuba. Today, we govern a large number of countries and, even where we are still in opposition, the Forum parties have a growing influence on political and social life. Progressive governments are changing the face of Latin America. (...) In everything we have done so far, which was a lot, the Forum and the Forum parties played a major role that can be even more important if we manage to maintain our main characteristic: unity in diversity. (...) Under Chávez’s leadership, the Venezuelan people have had extraordinary achievements, the popular classes have never been treated with so much respect, affection, and dignity. (...) Your victory will be our victory.” The video with the full message can be found at various addresses on YouTube, such as: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD4mfCnugXo.↩

10. Editor’s Note: For a more detailed explanation of the “ethical state,” see Olavo de Carvalho, The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, Instituto de Artes Liberais/Stella Caymmi Editora, 1994; available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/livros/negramsci.htm.↩

11. Editor’s Note: See the note in the article “Await the Worst” in the chapter Intelligentzia.↩

12. Editor’s Note: See “Who Invented Brazil?” in the chapter Revolution.↩

13. Editor’s Note: “The PT is a thieving party because it is a revolutionary party, affiliated with a tradition of Machiavellian amorality that, at least since the French Revolution, with increasing intensity since the First International of 1864 and even more since the founding of Lenin’s Social Democratic Party, has always believed it has the right, and even the obligation, to finance itself through robberies, kidnappings, extortion, diversion of public money, as well as an infinity of legal and illegal capitalist businesses, whose total volume would make its most reactionary bourgeois enemies envious. (...) Revolutions are expensive. The revolutionary Parvus, who got rich with a thousand and one businesses in Turkey, already taught in 1914: ‘The best way to overthrow capitalism is for us to become capitalists ourselves.’ Lulinha did not discover this formula. (...) The rich will not be destroyed by the poor. They will be destroyed by the richest” [Olavo de Carvalho, “PT, the party of the rich,” Diário do Comércio, January 21, 2008 — http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/080121dc.html].↩

14. In the volume “Diagnosis of Our Time,” Zahar.↩