Less than 80 years ago, as Adalberto Piotto’s cover article in the latest issue of Oeste reminds us, Brazil was a nation with a clean record in the international community. More than that: it was the epitome of a “good element,” as the police would say then, an individual decent enough to chair the UN session that created the State of Israel. Time passes, time flies, and what’s the outcome? Instead of improving, like most UN member states, Brazil has deteriorated so severely that it has become a rogue nation.
How could it be any different? The President of the Republic is a passive corruptor and money launderer, convicted in three instances and by nine different judges in the Brazilian criminal justice system. He was never acquitted of his crimes; he is the only officially recognized thief-president among the nearly 200 heads of state in the world today. He is the only semi-illiterate among them all. His government is dead in the water, and his foreign policy has been a serial crime. Today, we are the ally of terrorism, crime, and the most sordid dictatorships on the planet.
It’s harsh, but those are facts. The nation that made history as one of Israel’s founders is now its sworn enemy — not by the will of the Brazilian people, but because it has an antisemitic government committed, like Muslim tyrannies, to the genocide of the Jewish people. Lula, the far left, and the cultural elites have dragged Brazil into defending savagery. Out with Oswaldo Aranha. In come Celso Amorim and his dwarves, like ciphers executing orders at Itamaraty. And this is the outcome.
At the end of such dismal tale, not even the Brazilian dish “Oswaldo Aranha fillet” remains — and who, in their right mind, could possibly envision a “Celso Amorim fillet”? It’s simply inconceivable. The Lula government and its cronies lack the most basic capacity to create anything; it boasts the minister of Social Communicaation, Sidônio Palmeira, and his budget of billions, yet it’s suffering from brain death, and in such a state, nothing is ever worked out. The Brazil that could have emerged from what we were in 1947 no longer exists. It has been, from collapse to collapse and from shipwreck to shipwreck, relentlessly gnawed away by 40 years of politics revolving around, driven by, and in perpetual response to Lula.
It could not have turned out any differently — four consecutive decades, since the 1980s, of a metastatic cancer. Much like Mussolini’s fascist Italy or Perón’s Argentina, Brazil has spent 40 years fixated solely on Lula, and Lula alone. Now, it endures the worst phase of those 40 years. Openly, for all to see, and without any concern for disguising his true intentions, Lula is finally constructing what he has always desired: a dictatorship in Brazil.
Whether he will succeed or not remains an open question, but the attempt has never been as strong as it is now. It’s a phased coup d’état. The first phase, with the Supreme Federal Court (STF) assuming the role typically reserved for the Army, was to release Lula from prison, without any proper trial, and hand him the Presidency of the Republic — “mission given, mission accomplished,” as they themselves declared. The current phase involves the annulment of Congress as an independent branch of government and the elevation of the Lula-STF consortium to the position of Supreme Power.
It’s not merely a coup d’état, aided by the complicity of the Armed Forces — or their effective demotion to the task of painting sidewalks, which amounts to the same thing. It is a concerted effort to establish an entire fascist doctrine in Brazil. As justice Cármen Lúcia, acting as a giant billboard for official thought, proclaims, holding a personal opinion is a crime — “a characteristic of petty tyrants,” she asserts. Elected deputies are declared “enemies of the people” online by the government. “We all here admire China’s model,” states justice Gilmar Mendes.
This is the confirmation of the “apronto” (the final practice), as they used to say in horse racing. Lula always uttered these things publicly — and each time he did, the prevailing comment was: “Oh, poor guy, Lula is just an idiot, let him be.” Yet, what Lula had in mind all along was the dictatorship that today parades down the avenue during Carnival. “I always knew we wouldn’t reach power through the vote,” he once stated. “I’m proud to be called a communist,” he declared. “Covid was a blessing from God,” he claimed, to prove that the State must be the supreme entity.
The rest of Lula’s rhetoric, dating back to the 1980s, is more of the same, and increasingly worse. It’s now impossible to claim he has changed simply because he’s orchestrating a coup d’état in his own favor. He and the Brazilian far-left have always been opposed to everything associated with democracy: against freedom of the press, against election results when an adversary wins (“Out with FHC (former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso)!”), against the fundamental concepts of religion, homeland, and family (“values we’ve fought our entire lives”), and so on. Why, then, would they oppose their own dictatorship?
Dictatorship projects, no matter their disguise, rarely emerge in isolation — they invariably go hand-in-hand (and heart-in-heart) with periods of cultural collapse. This is precisely the situation in the Brazil of Lula, the STF, and the far-left. They fancy themselves as civilized. They have no idea how utterly predictable they are. Nothing could more accurately reflect a primitive, dark, ignorant, and change-averse Brazil than this chorus of intellectuals who blindly applaud the regime’s shamans. They are the Caeté canibals devouring Brazil’s first bishop, Dom Pero Fernandes Sardinha, all over again.
Brazilian intellectuals will forever bear the ignominious mark of their intransigent support for censorship — indeed, alongside the mainstream media, they were among the first champions of lynching free speech on social media. They are devotees of the “no amnesty” cry, a tribal shriek of hatred utterly devoid of intellectual merit. They consider it normal for the STF to condemn a hairdresser to 14 years in prison for merely painting a statue in Brasília with lipstick. They are, effectively, in favor of Congress’s practical dissolution by the very same STF.
Today’s archetypal Brazilian intellectual believes that justice Alexandre de Moraes is a Hercules of democracy and justice Gilmar Mendes a new King Solomon. They are convinced that Lula, an overt multi-millionaire, is spearheading a “war against the rich” — and that his wife, who flies solo on a 200-seat Brazilian Air Force jet, genuinely aims to redistribute wealth. They are convinced that a coup attempt took place on January 8th and deem the absence of evidence for it utterly irrelevant. They are absolutely certain that Bolsa Família is a social aid program.
The list could extend for hours, but what for? It’s painfully obvious that the so-called cultured classes who support this government reflect a world where culture has died — it hasn’t, then where is Brazil’s current cultural output? It simply doesn’t exist. A country that once boasted artists such as Pixinguinha, Noel Rosa, and Tom Jobim now has nothing but funk. Where there were economists like Eugênio Gudin, Roberto Campos, and Mário Henrique Simonsen, there is now an Armínio Fraga. Where there was dance, there is gymnastics. Where there was vibrant cultural life, there is only Rede Globo. Instead of writers, we have languages and literature faculties.
The Brazilian artist operating under the Lula-STF regime is consumed by a singular obsession, one that has nothing to do with books, music, or plays: it revolves, exclusively and obsessively, around the “denunciation of racism” in literature, songs, and theater. (Noel Rosa, for instance, has even been accused of racism for composing the song “Feitiço da Vila.”) Our contemporary composers haven’t penned a single notable piece in 30 years. Our architects churn out the drab urban landscape we see everywhere. Our artists paint walls. There is a hidden (and semi-official) resentment towards classical art, now branded as elitist, white, and exclusionary.
When it hears the word “culture,” the Brazilian regime, much like Goebbels, feels the urge to draw a gun — or at least launch an inquiry in the STF. University, especially the public one, has ceased to be a place of debate, ideas, and inquiry — in fact, it’s where the free flow of thought is most suppressed in this country. It’s simple. There is no culture where speaking is prohibited; there, instead of a university, what you see is the religion of the State, just like in Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela. Higher education, today, is a realm of darkness.
Democracy has shipwrecked in Brazil. Culture, too, has sunk. All that remains is the Rouanet Law and billions in public funds squandered to buy off artists devoid of work and intellectuals bereft of intellect.
