Caste of Phonies

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, September 22, 2001

�The greatest danger of a bomb
is the explosion of stupidity that it causes.�

(Octave Mirbeau, 1850-1917)

 

Following the September attacks, a wave of indignation has spontaneously washed over the hearts of Brazilian toward international terrorism. Since then, local academic leaders have dedicated themselves, with all their means and skills, to turn it against the victim. So vast is the mobilization of brain power to that end that, if the same energy were used on useful tasks, Brazil would break its long tradition of having won no prices in scientific research and, for a change, win them all. It�s frightening to see our society, always aghast at the disappearance of public money into the pockets of lawmakers, happily pay taxes to keep an even more useless and perverse caste in place than politicians. More useless, perverse, and expensive. Brazil has more university professors to students per capita than any other country: one for each eight students. One chief for eight little Indians. It might be said that we�re the most educated country on Earth. But, with some much honorable exceptions, each one of those chiefs has his own objectives, a secret agenda unrelated to teaching, culture, and civilization. Pretending to teach, each one merely attempts to promote a Socialist revolution that would make him, Mr. Little Joe, the Minister of State, an officer of the secret police, or at least a commissary of the people. Being an intellectual in this country is to conduct a Gramscian revolution, which is to put intellectuals in power. Being an academic intellectual is to do so while receiving public money. When one of these doctors, with an air of scientific superior impartiality, force into the reader mind the version that the attacks were the work of �extreme right-wing� Yankee forces, and not fanatics goaded by leftist international media, what he is doing is treating you, my friend, like Pavlov�s dog, a circus bear, a worthless little beast designed to dance and wag its little tail for the master, without being able or willing to think. He is lying and manipulating at the service of psychological warfare, which in this or all similar attacks serves to support terrorists and widen the political effects of their actions. He is not an analyst, a student, a professor: rather a celebrated terrorist, who is assigned to the misinformation section for being too cowardly, too old, or too smart to risk his life in truculent enterprises.

In other parts of the world, a counterfeiter would think twice before trying to pass off such a blatantly phony bill. In the world, there are people even in academic caste who know that extreme right militants in the U.S., including doomsday prophets, white supremacists and �tutti quanti�, number no more than 4,000, according to the FBI; that all of their steps are monitored by the police and, in the bottom line, represent the most insignificant political force on the planet; and who know that their only relevance is thanks to the leftist media, which uses them as a scarecrow... In the world, there are people who witnessed the fearful and boasted neo-Nazi movement in Germany dissolve alongside the Communist government in East Berlin that funded it� In the world, there are people who, in the face of the incriminating discourse of the �extreme right,� would soon realize the dubiousness of the term, used to fuse into a semantic cloud, from one side, those criminals accused by the establishment and, from the other, the very establishment: closet anarchists, Nazis and anti-Semites, conspiring with American capitalists and Jews in order to make Jews agree to blow themselves up in the pure goal of creating a wave of anti-left hatred. The image is so childish that a right-minded academic agitator would hardly dare to suggest it to a mature public. But in Brazil, we not only lend an ear to these people, we pay them to reduce us to mental childhood.

Equally powerful in making us complete imbeciles, while slightly less showy, is the general appeal of Fidel Castro�s argument regarding the attacks, which are evil per se, but morally justified as reactions to desperation amid the suffocating omnipresence of American power.

What omnipresence is that? No countries are currently under American occupation, while Lhasa, Tibet, has fewer Tibetans than Chinese soldiers; and in the very country that harbors Bin Laden, it was the Russians and not the Americans who killed a million Afghanis, halting the massacre only when American support tipped the scales toward the Muslims.

And what desperation is that, which turns against the most generous of benefactors? Excluding the events in Kuwait and Granada, the U.S. has for decades, manipulated by the UN, agreed to take part in foreign interventions only when they are intended to help Communists seize power or maintain it. This was what happened, for example, in the Communist aggressions in Angola and Goa. As in Katanga, where UN troops, subsidized and lauded by the U.S. government, laid waste to a rebel province only to integrate it into the bloody dictatorship of Patrice Lumumba, young son of KGB. As in South Africa today, where the UN and the New York establishment, underneath the anti-racist rhetoric, conceal the �ethnic cleansing� conducted by Communists against Boer farmers. And, when this type of policy leads to a massacre of colossal proportion on par with Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 people were slaughtered by hordes intoxicated by equalitarian ideology, not only the State Department and the UN Security Council kept quiet, but the U.S. media made it possible to rebuff the ideologic sense od the events, and reduce it to a �war among savages,� which was actually the logical and foreseeable effect of a long revolutionary indoctrination. With nearly obsessive regularity, since President Roosevelt ignored the Chinese revolution with the dazzling excuse that Mao Tse-Tung was not a Communist but a �Christian agrarian reformer,� and until the suicidal concessions were made in light of Chinese arms build-up by a president elected with Chinese campaign funds, U.S. politics cyclically and increasingly revisits this perfidious and masochistic conduct: support the Communists through nebulous operations which, in a culmination of cynicism or lunacy, are presented to the public as anti-Communist. For the Communists, the benefit is two-fold. On one hand, they receive resources: money, weapons, support from international organizations. On the other, each new event creates a new realistic pretext for the press to speak against the sordid investments in Yankee anti-Communist spending. How could any leftist be �desperate� in such a comfortable situation?