BRAZIL'S SHAM REVOLUTION

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Translated by Marcelo De Polli

There are Colombian guerrilla fighters roaming freely inside national borders and the government's effort to disarm them is but a tiny bit of the effort governor Garotinho makes to disarm the pacific citizens of Rio de Janeiro. The MST (Movimento dos Sem-Terra), Brazil's famous landless movement, tears off its mask, declaring they want not land but power, while members of the intelligentsia make an open invitation for the military to join the Left in a violent action against the government. The government of Rio de Janeiro teaches the Military Police soldiers how to disobey their officers, while in the press the growing level of verbal violence against the President has become an outspoken plea for his destitution no matter how. Mysteriously originated organizations spread e-mails claiming for a brutal purge in the political class — again, no matter how —, while on the streets a well-organized Leftist mob beatifies Fidel Castro on account of crimes four times as big as those that exposed Pinochet to universal scorn.

Does anyone doubt that there is a revolution brewing in this country? I won' t waste my time trying to prove what is obvious. I will go straight to the next item: revolution of who against who?

Carl Schmitt defined politics as the direct confrontation that aims at solving, by means of force — whether psychic or physical — a conflict that can no longer be judged by the rational examination of the contending theses. Politics is, in short, of the same nature as war. Human relationships become politicized when the mediating role of moral, religion, superior culture, customs and traditions, etc. are abolished. And the more they do, the more everything gradually assumes the features of a fight for life or death between irreconcilable factions. In the eve of a war or revolution, politics invades hearths, brings apart parents and children, breaks up friendships, vanquishes respect, sympathy, tolerance. All things become as clear-cut and linear as a sword's edge. Only one question becomes at all relevant: on which side you are. It's "us" against "them", friends against foes. The world has been split in two and you must decide, because your indecision is taken as a proof of your hostility. In this way you are put, under protest as it may be, in the party opposite to that of the person who posed the question in the first place.

Being things as they are, it is no surprise that, in order to win over the meek and the weak, the apostles of the revolution should present quite a simple picture of themselves and their adversaries: black on white, where everything is darkness on one side, and all the light is on the other side. The revolutionary discourse defines both itself and its adversary at the same time. Once the field has been divided, there's nothing left but to choose. It is therefore highly appropriate to examine the revolutionary discourse in order to make a conscious decision.

The two factions of the Brazilian conflict are already perfectly defined, according to the revolutionaries of the moment. On one side is the Right: the government, with the globalist powers as their allies, bent on imposing on the country a neoliberal capitalist model based upon giving away our assets to international birds of prey. On the other is the Left, nationalistic and progressive, intent on defending what's ours, willing to face the world, if needs be, to invert the terms of an unjust bargain that oppresses the people so that bankers may benefit.

That said, any citizen whose moral sense isn't clouded by selfish interests will undoubtedly choose the latter. If we judge the matter on the terms presented by the Left, there is no possible doubt. Even myself, who hate globalism as much as I love Brazil, will join the vanguard of the revolution to fire, if I can, the first shot on the damned foreign agents.

But then a problem comes up. What if the revolutionary equation, so sharp and clear in its verbal formula, does not actually correspond to the division of forces in dispute? What if, underneath the apparent factions, yet more powerful agents, whose many colors do not fit into the two-color spectrum of revolutionary discourse, are taking steps in the backstage to deviate both sides' actions from their overly plain and schematic course? What if, as so often is the case with human action, the confrontation of discourses does not reflect the confrontation of real forces? Then no one can be sure that the winning discourse will lead to power the faction it nominally represents, rather than, by the hand of the devil, the opposite faction or any other, of which nobody has ever heard. This is almost invariably the fate of revolutions. In the French revolution, the people were opposed to royalty. It was a military neo-aristocracy who eventually rose to power, and at the end of its reign returned to power the old aristocracy, which had only left it in order to make way for a bourgeois oligarchy that had already become noble by buying titles. In the Russian revolution, workers and peasants were nominally opposed to the feudal royalty and the army. It was the revolutionary middle-class intelligentsia who rose to power.

The slightest misplacement between discourse and reality, in these times, turns revolution into a bloody waste that produces no more than an even worse and more oppressive situation than the former.

Having chosen simply to listen to the discourse, let us take a step back and behold the gaping abyss between words and facts.

On one side is the government. It is true that, in the economic sphere, it favors international capitalism. But does it mean we have a Right-wing government? How can it be Right-wing if, more than any of its forerunners, it is earnestly dedicated to make the national education system into an official system of Marxist indoctrination? How can be Right-wing a government that sponsors and encourages all the boldest demands of international neo-Leftism, like abortion, feminism, and affirmative action? How can a President be Right-wing, who not only openly declares himself a follower of Antonio Gramsci, but also puts his teachings into practice more tenaciously and efficiently than the Left itself, handing over the government's psychological action machine to the "cultural revolution" destined to sweep away from people's soul all traditional values which oppose the revolutionary uprising?

On the other side is the Left. It is true that it is valiantly opposed to the selling of some State companies; remarkably, those that are now under control of its party members. But how can be nationalistic the organizations sponsored by Mr. David Rockefeller, one of the masterminds of capitalist globalism? How can the left-wing men who govern Rio de Janeiro be nationalists, whose first concern was to follow to the letter the firearm control program conceived directly by the New World Order headquarters? How can a young governor — Garotinho — be a nationalist, who having hardly begun his political career, has already been promoted by Time magazine to "great leader of the third millennium"? How can the men of the MST be nationalists, who are sponsored and spoiled by the British Royal House? How can the Brazilian movement of affirmative action be nationalistic, that not only directly imports a North-American legal model, but is also sponsored by Ford Foundation, by the European Economic Community and by BankBoston, and that denies national unity to affirm racial unity beyond it, in a policy of outspoken divisionism from which only international ambitions can benefit? How can the ecological and pro-Indian Left be nationalistic, that favors the occupation of our territory by international NGOs?

I regret to inform that this whole revolution business is not at all clear. There is no nationalistic Left struggling against an internationalist Right. There are internationalists everywhere — some trying, on the Right, to stifle Brazilian nationalism under liberal pretexts, and some, on the Left, trying to corrupt it, recycle it and induce it to serve, in full unconsciousness, the New World Order. The former call themselves conservatives, but do all within their means to stifle all popular economic initiative under a leaden bureaucracy. The latter call themselves nationalists, but their programs and pretexts are issued straight from the same headquarters that dictate the speeches of the former. Brazil is an island of naivet� surrounded by scoundrels in all directions.

Our so-called revolution will have only one winner, and it won't be us, Brazilians. Worse still, this winner will get the upper hand, no matter which one of the clashing armies wins the apparent battle. If the revolution is stifled or emptied, the present establishment will go on retailing the State. If it is victorious, it will receive the bill referent to all international help that made it possible, and there will be no compromise, no groveling, no submission enough to quench the thirst for recognition of the Left's globalist patrons, from Rockefeller to Prince Charles.

To those who, after all that, still use the nominal definitions of capitalism and socialism as a basis for their reasoning, objecting that the latter is essentially opposed to the interests of multinational capital, I ask that they step down for a while from their terminological pedestal, that they leave for a while the glass dome of their abstractionism, and agree to observe what is going on in China. For two decades the soi disant conservative academics, who are in fact as conservative as I am an Eskimo, have been promising us that the inflow of foreign capital would dissolve by itself the hard shell of Chinese bureaucracy. This would bring about, along with an increase on business, the end of communism and the dawn of Chinese freedom. With this pretext they have made a lot of money in dealings with China — and the old regime is still there, strong and steady, getting rich on account of its partnership with the international monopolist capital, which in turn is getting rich over the cheap workforce of a people disciplined by the most effective human being taming machine ever seen in this world, the communist dictatorship. China was the big political-economical laboratory of the 20th century. It was there that the formula of the "double regime" was successfully tested — which at the bottom line is not double at all; it is only the repetition of the classical alliance between the State and the monopolist capital. A regime we have been acquainted with for a long time, the good old fascist economy. That China needs to keep a fa�ade of nationalism, as harmless as a transsexual just gone out of surgery, is something that should not surprise us: the nationalistic discourse is still the easiest pretext of all forms of fascism. But how are we to believe in this nationalism if the President of the United States of America himself is suspect of participation in the transmission of nuclear secrets to China? No, nobody will mess with China nor will China mess with anybody. China is what it has always been and, now that it has found a new way to extend the life of its regime at the expense of other people's money, it will never come out from where it now stands. China will never oppose the New World Order, for the simple reason that it has been great for China, and that there is no incompatibility between global capitalism and a local socialism that is well integrated in the New Order.

If that kind of socialism can exist in China, why couldn't it exist here in Brazil? And by the way, what is actually easier for the globalist powers — to take risks on a Brazilian market economy tending to conquer new markets and therefore likely to become protectionist tomorrow or later, or a socialist economy where everything is foreseen and delimited beforehand, including the place of honor reserved to foreign capital? It is with these things in sight that the masterminds of globalism invest, fearless, on the future of our Left, advising Garotinhos, financing affirmative action activists, awarding land invaders.

Our revolution, alas, is a sham. By joining it, we risk wasting on a fraud the scarce reserves of our nationalism. And our nationalism will take on the responsibility of a violent transition only to find out, once it is done with, that there is no longer a place for it in the resulting new order. Brazil will have become socialist, yes, but this socialism will be very well integrated in the globalist scheme of those who have planned it, stimulated it and financed it from New York and London.

Disgracefully, the antagonist hypothesis to the revolution, the President's fake normality, is also a fraud. It is a fraud because, pretending to oppose the revolution, it rather fosters it by all cultural and educational means available. This is a proof that, under the disguise of conservative discourse, what it upholds is not classical capitalist liberalism, the true liberalism of free market and of incentive to the economic creativity of the people, but globalist monopolism. Which, as we have seen, far from having something to object to socialism, makes use of it right in front of our noses as a means to swerve, spend and wear down the small amount of nationalism we have left.

If they have got something above their shoulders, if they want to get to the 21st century politically alive, our nationalists will resign from any complicity with the Left, preserving their identity even at the cost of losing some misleading alliances. And the conservatives, if they do not want to serve as an instrument to the most violently commanding monopolism the world has ever known, they'd better stay away from all ersatz capitalism and get some dialogue done, as fast as they still can, with the sincere nationalists.

It is true that authentic liberals are as few and far between as authentic nationalists, and both of these factions together are the minority within the minority next to the two giant social-globalists: the government and the Left.

But he who sacrifices his identity so as not to lose the help of false sponsors sells himself for nothing. And he who resigns from all the misleading appearances of the moment so as to remain faithful to himself gets the realm of reality, from where he can wait until the two illusions destroy one another and it is his turn to win both sides of the field.

July 31st, 1999