Brazil's PT: No News
By Olavo de Carvalho
Originally published by "O Globo", 06/25/2005 | "All people seem surprised with the state of things (the massive corruption accusations involving prominent government people, very close to president Lula da Silva) , but it was more than predictable. Since the beggining of the 90´s , when PT (Workers Party, instituted by president Lula) started to invest heavily on constructing an image of immaculate morality, I have informed that the arrival of this party to the power would inaugurate an age of corruption that would pale the glowing scandals of the previous governments. This forecast was received with such unbelief the more it was based in facts that nobody wanted to see and in the analysis of historical antecedents that everybody would rather bury into forgetfulness.
As soon the infamous "Campaign for the Ethics in the Politics"came out, I observed that PT managed the term "ethics" with malignant astuteness, giving in public the conventional meaning of idoneousness and honor, and in its internal documents the meaning that the term possess in the gramscist expression "Ethical state", a morally neutral expression, that does have nothing to do with virtues or sins, but only assigns, technically, a determined phase of the process of taking the power for the "New Prince", the revolutionary party. In short terms, the moralizing hopes of middle class were beeing used as donkey carrot, misleading them to collaborate with a fake enterprise "to clean up Brazil" but in reality it was just made to raise the power of the party by all means: moral, amoral and imoral.
I anticipated this , twelve years ago, in my book "the New Age and the Cultural Revolution", and later again in "the Collective Imbecile", that this Machiavellian instrumentalization of the popular yearnings would only result in more evilness and dirt, since it constituted, in itself, a bigger crime of the one than all the material acts of corruption, implying nothing more, nothing less than the complete perversion of the real meaning of the term "morality" . Something, said I, remembering an old Arab saying, is to steal in the weight of the flour, selling 750 grams for the price of one kilo. Another thing is to modify the scale so that never more it accuses the difference between 750 grams and one kilo.
The old corrupt politicians limited themselves to steal it. The PT transformed the robbery into a system, the system in political militancy, the militancy in a substitute of the laws and institutions, lowered to the condition of temporary impediments to the construction of the great utopia.
The old politicians stole for their own good, individually or in small groups, moderating the audacity of the blows from the fear of the denunciation. PT steals with a moral authority of someone , who arrogating itself the nobleness of a hypothetical future, is already forgiven a priori from all the faults of the present; with tranquillity and fearlessness from he who uses licitly all possible means, they steal since they are the absolute master of all.
Any political party that turns against "the society", promising to rebuild it from the scratch – if not to reform the human nature itself – places itself , instantly, above the effective moral criteria in this society, and it cannot submit to them unless in appearance, laughing to themselves, at the naivety of those who take them as a regular and loyal adversary. It is not possible to destroy the system and to obey its rules at the same time, but it's possible to use these rules just as a temporary camouflage until the destruction is completed. However, the system, as everything that is human, holds equally its dose of injustices, errors, scandals, and its parcel of morality, order, loyalty. All system consists of a precarious balance between disorder and order. No sane intelligence ignores that only it is possible to restrain or to control the former by fortifying the latter. All attempts to change the system integrally, either through the abrupt revolutionary subversion, either through the slow and gradual erosion of the institucional bases, starts for destroying the balance and therefore the order, under the vain promise of a future without disequilibrium nor disorder. The modesty of the objectives, the limitation of the political program to precise points that do not affect the beddings of the system, here is the mark of the honest parties - and this is not, definitively, the make of PT. The dishonesty of this party is measured by the megalomaniac amplitude of its promises.
Translated by Fernando de Souza and Luís Afonso Assumpção.
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