Hispanics tend to be much hotter than Brazilians and Portuguese. Thus, also in the intellectual sphere, the period of military dictatorships was hot. An example of this is the philosopher Jordán Bruno Genta, an apologist for the Army and the Church as pillars of the State, a staunch anti-communist and an opponent of democracy – which he believed would lead inexorably to communism. In 1943, the western powers pressured Argentina to enter World War II with the Allies, that is, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. A democracy full of suspicions of fraud was in effect, and adherence to the Allies was taken for granted. The Argentine military then staged a coup d’état and maintained neutrality. During this period, Jordán Genta becomes an intervenor in rectory and pursues the communists from within the university. The thing naturally must have left him very disliked in the middle.
After that dictatorship, the minister of labor, Perón, was elected and established himself in power through democracy. Jordán Genta then supports the Liberating Revolution, which overthrows Perón with the support of liberals and Marxists. The union leaders, previously empowered by Perón and the revolutionaries of 43, are repressed. Argentina is conflagrated and Genta abandons the boat, accusing the liberators of being in league with communists and freemasons.
A chair was created just for Genta, who started teaching at home for a select audience. On the day of October, 1974, on his way to mass with his family, he was shot eleven times. of a communist guerrilla and died.
Free examination leads to communism?
Jordán Genta is being edited in Portuguese by the Don Bosco Centre. In front of the publisher’s showcase, I opted for a secular philosophical book entitled Communism: The inevitable consequence of Protestant free examination. The cover, provocative, put the images of Luther and Stalin together. I, who have been a bit fed up with the defense of freedom of expression made by libertarians, which, in my view, only serves to free the propaganda of infamous ideas from the democratic brakes, bought the work right away. After all, now there is only one type of attitude towards censorship: to deny it absolutely, saying however that certain harmful speeches must be punished without prejudice to freedom of expression. The question is what each one considers as damage worthy of being avoided: some, that people are trampled in a theater after falsely shouting “fire”; others, that transsexuals commit suicide after hearing something they find offensive. The harm principle is an invention of utilitarianism, a philosophy that emerged in England in the nineteenth century. It generates more censorship than the Inquisition ever dreamed of; nevertheless, it is considered very natural and liberal. Anything that promises to escape this intellectual realm has my sympathy.
His thesis on “Protestant free scrutiny” is, in fact, a thesis on free scrutiny. Under his darts are Luther, but also Descartes, who first casts doubt on the existence of God in order to prove it through reason. I believe that the choice for the focus on Protestantism is due to chronology, since Descartes came after the Reformation. Protestantism has indeed opened the door to examination that purports to be merely rational and free of all other authority. As for its connection with communism, Genta quotes the text “On the community of goods” (1535), by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives. He had observed that after subverting all ecclesiastical authority and considering that all men were equal, the next step was to claim the commonwealth of all goods. In fact, the Reformation was followed by an Anabaptist movement that ended private property in Münster, as well as money, and imposed terror on the city. The movement was led by baker João Matthys and tailor João de Leyden.
However, the work does not explain why Protestant countries did not become communist. In fact, Marxist incursions were more successful in traditional Christian countries (Orthodox and Catholic) than in Protestant countries. Unless, of course, you want to call something communism.
Old-style communism
Fighting each other with definitions, anything can be called communism. For this very reason, the work has the value of refreshing the memory as to what communism is originally: a movement that wants to end private property and money, as well as all social classes. The USSR tried to do away with money and private property, but it failed. After that, the communists put the matter aside – and the anti-communism of the USA endeavored to confuse, under the same label of “socialist left”, everything that was not liberalism. Hence we are left watching sterile debates about whether Nazism is left or right: the debate is sterile because the answer varies according to the definition of right and left, which is arbitrary.
Furthermore, those of us living today, even the old ones, have had no contact with the original communist propaganda. The environment in which the book was written is quite different from what we are used to. We read, for example, that the motto of the communists was that “All work is equal human work”; therefore deserved equal consideration. In fact, as Genta denounces, communism is the subversion of all hierarchy and authority. But, as without hierarchy and authority nothing lasts, communism maintains in its ranks the authority that it denies to society: its armies are well ordered, its militants are evaluated.
This atmosphere it did not last in Brazil, but it existed. In Intentona, which took place in 1935, the two cities that suffered were Natal and Recife (in Rio de Janeiro, it was quelled in hours). In Natal, a soviet was formed, composed of a shoemaker, a civil policeman and a musician. This soviet decreed the confiscation of all cars and the break-in of public banks, distributing part of the money to the population.
It is curious that the original communism, aiming only at the Revolution, has passed by labor. We noticed that both in Brazil and in Argentina, in Europe and even in the USA (with Roosevelt’s
minimum wage, the laws to protect worker are the work of anti-communists, having as an important landmark Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro, which inspired our CLT. Fascism wanted class reconciliation, which communism rejected. For this reason, unlike communism, it was interested in promoting the well-being of the worker and moving him away from the condition of the Englishman of the Industrial Revolution, which Marx so excited for his revolutionary potential.
It is possible that the replacement of the revolution by labor rights only entered the Marxist lexicon thanks to the reformism of Eduard Bernstein (1850 – 43), the social democrat whose ideas were probably known to the former socialist Mussolini. When all attempts at revolution failed, Marxists were left to pretend that Bernstein was important within international or even German Marxism, instead of a kind of heretic, rejected in Germany by Rosa Luxemburg.
The atomized man
But the other thing that the Genta environment makes you see better is that communism, being against all authority and believing in a utopia of equal men devoid of institutions (much like John Lennon’s Imagine, is anti-state. Let’s remember: the proletariat, which would not gain any rights and would be increasingly plundered, would one day make the Revolution, kill the bourgeois, take the means of production and establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Then, God knows how, the State would wither – but it would wither, and then the
