Which is the crime?

OLAVO DE CARVALHO
Jornal da Tarde, August 30, 2001

Translated by Assun��o Medeiros

At a moment when the drug-dealing guerrillas of the Farc invade our schools in order to teach our children their genocidal doctrine; at a moment when an organization involved with guerrilla propaganda tries out its power of strategic action, simultaneously blocking almost all the roads in the country � at this moment, journalists and district attorneys join each other in an operation destined to incriminate and abort the investigations that the Army is making on the illegal activities of MST and of other left-wing non-governmental organizations.

If this is not an act of revolutionary misinformation in the best KGB style, then it is at least a substantial support, offered with prodigious lack of conscience and levity, to Fidel Castro�s plan of� "reconquering in Latin America what was lost in East Europe".

Numbed by 40 years of "Cultural Revolution", which � without finding the least resistance � made cat's-paw of its ability of thought, public opinion seems to accept by its nominal value the accusations against the investigation. And it does that without ever asking if the crime under investigation is not a million times graver than mere words, even if offensive, found in an investigator�s report.

When he cries out against the use of the expression "adversary power", the minister of the Superior Military Court (STM), Fl�vio Bierrenbach, a man that owes his political career to leftist support, shows no consideration to the fact that propaganda or the training of guerrillas really are things adverse to the democratic regime.

If the Army consents to "give explanations", instead of accusing those who tie the hands of the legal powers to give way to communist aggression, then we will have installed in this country, overnight, as if by magic, a new legal order, where the fomenting of guerrillas will be done under the protection of the State, and the opposition to it will be crime. We go to sleep in the arms of a decomposing democracy, and will awake in the claws of a newborn communist dictatorship.

I ask myself whether the newspaper that � in partnership with the district attorneys � created this Kafkian situation is not aware of the fact that, with this, it went far beyond mere journalistic defamation of the Armed Forces and became an instrument of the revolutionary mutation of the regime. I ask myself and I answer myself: it cannot be unaware of what it does, for, in its edition of July 7, 1993, the same newspaper gave the news, in alarming tones, of the infiltration of leftist agents in the Federal Police and in the Ministry of Justice. What pretext could it have now to ignore that it has become an accomplice of these same people to do what it was once afraid they would do?�

Instead of stopping its investigations, intimidated by the media, what the Army should do is to investigate further. It should investigate who are these district attorneys who, in an inquiry done "under secrecy of justice", invite journalists to violate this secret. What is the connection of these people with CUT, with PT, with MST? Did the espionage service from MST itself collaborate in this operation? Or is it licit for the MST to spy on the Army, but not for the Army to spy on MST? And those journalists, in their turn, are they collaborators, militants or �travelling companions" of the same organizations accused in the report from the Army? To make a long story short: under the appearance of a mere journalistic scandal, is what we see not a lethal blow destined to neutralize beforehand any possibility of anticommunist national resistance?

Or is it forbidden to ask these things?� Is the simple fact of speaking them enough to turn me into an �adversary force"? Are we already in the new Brazil announced by Fidel Castro, in which it will be crime to oppose communist action?

Two promising reasons suggest that it is not so. The courageous statement made by the commander of the Army in the Day of the soldier shows that our land force is not ready to be made an accomplice of the scheme set up against it. And the decision of the court, which determined the devolution to the Army of the documentation apprehended in Marab�, also shows that the Judiciary Power is not ready to be an instrument of its own destruction.

But � let no one doubt this � the scandal set up around the documents from Marab� might be only the first chapter of the story. After all, it was through the scandal industry that Adolf Hitler put the German Armed Forces on their knees and transferred to his party the control of the intelligence services. And if there is any trace that most clearly defines the mentality of revolutionary movements of all shades, it is their ability to try again.