I suspect that things have changed now, with the advancement of the progressive agenda; but if you are a Brazilian of at least 19 years, up to a few 50, you will have grown up with praise for Cuba. Brazil was crap, and Cuba is really good. As the scholars told us, in Cuba everyone has quality health and education. This would constitute the Standard for judging countries, and the fact that in Brazil people die in public hospital corridors and teenagers leave public school illiterate would make us useless, mutts.
The right looks at this past reality and thinks that the problem was just the leftism of the teachers. It is not. These professors of the old left committed an error that is practiced by literate Brazilians from all types of political currents, including the right. Since the end of the century 19, it has been a good idea to trample Brazil underfoot. They started with the fact that we are a monarchy, when it was good to be a republic, because Comte said that it is right to be a republic. Then came scientific racism, and we were a horrible country because our people are brown. Then came communism, and our country was horrible for being an agrarian and Catholic country, with a people very different from the English proletarian, prone to Revolution. Then came a Marxist hack based on a misunderstood Weber, and our country became horrible for being Catholic instead of Protestant. Then came Lavajatismo, and our country became horrible because of its Iberian patrimonialist tradition, which, together with the arrival of Portuguese exiles there in 50, makes us a den of corruption. The United States is really good, where everyone goes to prison and gets rich legally, because its settlers there in 1600 were, in the words of Deltan Dallagnol, “religious, Christian people, who they sought to fulfill their dreams.”
In common with all this, there is the fact that the election of the Standard implies the discarding of Brazil. It is one thing to consider that another country, or a given ideology, brings positive aspects that should be considered here, and, after a careful analysis of the national scenario, implemented slowly, with great attention to the consequences. Another very different thing is to say that if Brazil does not obey the current Standard, it is garbage.
Lack of appreciation
In all these intellectual endeavors, the lack of interest in looking for positive things in Brazil stands out. It is a revolutionary cosmovision, which considers our half millennium of History as an evil to be fought, a bush in which one must set fire to plant according to the Standard of the time.
Let’s pretend that everything that was said about Cuba was true. Let’s also pretend that there is a consensus according to which a state network of health and another of education are desirable things in themselves, regardless of context. Is the mere fact of having quality public services enough to make a slash in Brazil and plant Cuba? Can the cultural and political experiences of the countries be seen as rubble?
Instead of being dazzled by the little mirrors that the communists handed them, Cuba’s defenders should have kept a certain skepticism, and observed the existence of people who wanted to flee the island. They could be considered people of little sense, but a Brazilian advantage was revealed there: no matter how bad our country was, it didn’t prevent anyone from leaving it. They would understand that Brazil has a history of freedom that needs to be taken into account by whoever wants to rule the people.
It is clear that such consideration would lead the devout Marxist to reflect on the importance of freedom, thing that could shake your faith. But, more importantly, reflection on the local scenario would lead to a change of perspective; it would shift its point of view to that of the common citizen, a prosaic individual. Planners and revolutionaries have a bad habit of thinking sub specie aeternitatis, or, more prosaically, from the point of view of the bigwig. This speculative mentality makes us only realize our everyday pleasures and freedoms when we no longer have them.
When democratic freedoms were low in the market of ideas, nobody cared much about assess its presence in Brazilian culture. Later, when liberal democracy came into fashion and became Standard, its advocates were not subtle enough to assess the military period: if it wasn’t liberal democracy, it was Hell. But if the military period was Hell, we cannot distinguish it from the Estado Novo – a period much more harmful to democratic freedoms than the military period, which was bipartisan and had direct elections to the Legislative Power. The Estado Novo is a much better candidate for Inferno than the regime established in 64. But if we look at North Korea, we will certainly find democratic qualities even in the Estado Novo.
This is not about collective self-esteem. It is only a matter of the fact that knowledge of your own country is indispensable to improve it. He who only strives to know the bad things despises the good; without knowing the good things, he is deprived of cultural or political foundations on which to build his project. It is doomed to start from scratch, from the scorched earth.
Lack of love for the country on the old left
But I think it would be optimism too much for literate fadists to think that they are really interested in the betterment of the country. I believe they have been in the dynamics I described in my last text for a long time: they want to feel good with zero effort, so they start repeating slogans of good and , free of charge, get villains to oppose them. They want to feel good, they don’t want to do anything useful. Actions can be judged; those who are alone in the gogó are much less subject to evaluation.
If they limited themselves to polluting the public debate and giving bad History classes, it would be bad enough. The worst is when they are instrumentalized by external agents in order to surrender the country. It was like that with communism: the Soviets used all these people to plant instability in Brazil and try to put it under the yoke of Moscow. When the PCB broke up, the Brazilians leaving there were in doubt whether to hand Brazil over to Moscow, Beijing or – amazingly – Tirana, capital of Albania. They shouted a lot against Uncle Sam, calling the military thugs and lackeys of imperialism. As if imperialism’s lackeys and lackeys weren’t themselves.
In In Search of the Nation, Risério pointed out an exceptionality in the old Brazilian left, compared to the others. All the countries in which communism took hold passed from internationalism to nationalism. Brazilian communists never became nationalists. Instead, they began to speak ill of Brazil and treat our dear country as the worst in the world.
Lack of love for Brazil in antipetismo
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Until 2016, Brazil was divided between petismo and antipetismo. Those who liked Lula did not like Alckmin, Moro, or Bolsonaro. Today, Alckmin is about to be Lula’s deputy, and Moro is in open opposition to the Bolsonaristas – but not to Lula’s ally. In the end, Brazil saw that Olavo de Carvalho was absolutely right when he said that the PT and the PSDB were fighting in a pretense, as they had the same political ideology. Today we see that the problem was even worse, as the lavajatismo is closer to the PSOL than to the right. In fact, Luciana Genro defended Lava Jato and was able to bring to the PSOL the aura of an ethics party. It is possible to talk about PT “mistakes” repaired by Lava Jato and say that Bolsonaro, in turn, is Beelzebub incarnate. Because? Because yes.
Agora Moro paints the country as a terrible place, which mistreats forests, and has embarked on the green agenda, which is maintained by megacorporations ESG, the United States, Europe and supranational entities, such as such as NATO and the UN. Seeing his speech, we didn’t learn what Brazil has to offer. We only know that Brazil is a den of corruption and that it burns forests. In their eagerness to speak ill of Brazil, nobody pays much attention to possible attacks on national sovereignty based on a climate emergency (two exceptions are Comandante Farinazzo and Kim Paim, who have participated in video specials in this Gazeta). I also point out that megacorporations have the power to undermine the energy capabilities of countries by joining the ESG, as BlackRock did in the USA.
Classical liberals and conservatives, in turn, often Sometimes they imitate the very same vice of communists of not looking at what is good in our country, while they idealize the United States. It is true that the history of our brother in the north has a lot to teach us, especially with its revolution and its decentralized system of government. But it is possible that liberals and conservatives point to the good things in that country without noticing that they act in the same way as the communist who praises Cuban medicine: Cuba had good medicine since colonial times, and Fidel’s regime not only lacked merit , how it ruined Cuban medicine.
What is the USA today? Just look at the society they built in Afghanistan. When the Taliban regained power, one of the first things they did was erase a George Floyd mural – and then we wondered what the hell a George Floyd mural did in Afghanistan. One-off case? Spectator’s article shows no, as the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on gender studies in that country. I quote an excerpt: “A recent report by the Inspector General for Reconstruction of Afghanistan revealed the difficulties of the project. For example, in both Dari and Pashto there is no word for ‘gender’.Under US leadership, the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan has placed a 27% quota for women in Congress – higher than the current scenario in the United States!Good Samaritans created a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’ so that a few hundred Afghans could speak out about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.”
The USA are a joke, and we’re better than them at a number of things. For starters, we don’t have pipelines here being shut down for the sake of the green agenda, and – more importantly – our kids don’t learn gender in preschool. Any appreciation of our Western values has to be sought in the US in its past, and cannot be reflected in automatic alignment with whatever rotten thing calls itself the West.
