Brazil's left: from victory to defeat and to victory again
By Olavo de Carvalho*
19.09.05 | A brief presentation delivered at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Washington D.C., September 15th 2005. For fifteen years the Brazilian media refused to tell the public about the “São Paulo Forum”, the controlling center of communist and pro-communist organizations in Latin America, founded in 1990 by Fidel Castro and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva.
Far from the public’s eyes, the Forum has had time enough to prepare Lula’s ascension to the Presidency as well as to articulate it to the simultaneous victories of the leftist parties in the neighbour countries and to the growing power of Colombian guerillas.
It has had also time enough to set up, under the protecting mantle of general silence, the gigantic corruption machine that has been giving financial support to the Brazilian Workers’ Party and to other leftist organizations.
It is not at all a coincidence that the Workers’ Party politician more directly involved in the recent corruption charges, Mr. José Dirceu, was precisely the one that has the closest personal links to Fidel Castro and to the São Paulo Forum. Corruption is deeply rooted in the Workers Party, not as a vulgar way for personal moneymaking, but as a technical instrument to erode the moral basis of capitalistic society and to fund the revolutionary strategy. These two objectives are closely intertwined. Funded by corruption, the growth of leftist parties strenghtens the credibility of the attacks they make against society, as if capitalism was equally immoral without their own deliberate efforts intended to degrade the moral standards.
The articulation of a variety of leftist parties in the São Paulo Forum, added to the public’s ignorance of the very existence of that organization, allows them to follow a unified blueprint for the conquest of absolute power while at the same time simulating a pluralism of political discourses in a normal democratic competition.
This shrewd strategy got to isolate the conservative parties and to deprive them of any ideological substance, up to the point when they became inhibited to criticize the leftist ideology as such. Some degree of leftism became the first moral duty of every good citizen. Many conservatives turned into active allies of the government in order to ensure themselves a humiliating political survival. Those who had no stomach for that chose instead the strategy of passive adaptation. They made their best to hide their convictions and to pay large amounts of lip service to the honorableness of their adversaries’ ideas. Consistently, they tried to limit any criticisms to precise points lacking any ideological relevance, chiefly those concerned with administrative inefficiency and corruption, hoping these charges would so not offend any ideological susceptibilities in the left and could perhaps obtain some support from the best men in the left itself.
This self-weakening strategy was condemned to failure since the beginning. It got to destroy the conservative parties, but, when all seemed to be lost, it suddenly turned into a mortal poison inside the government’s belly. This happened because a conservative ally of the Workers’ Party, representative Roberto Jefferson, a strange and unpredictable character, decided to commit political suicide, confessing the crimes he and many other rightwing members of the Parliament had comitted in exchange of government’s bribes. By accusing himself, this ambiguous type, at once a swindler and a hero, exposed the huge government corruption machine in such a persuasive terms that nobody could any more deny its existence.
In the weeks that followed, the amount of attacks and evidences, including many murder charges, grew to astronomic proportions and the government’s moralistic façade fell down at once.
Should we commemorate it? Of course not, because between Lula’s election and the disclosure of the government’s crimes the leftist apparatus had the time and the means to spread its agents everywhere, to tear down any consistent opposition, to take absolute control over the judicial system, to corrupt the media, to strenghten the Brazilian ties to Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro and to allow the Colombian narcoguerillas to act freely in Brazilian territory under semi-official protection. The Workers’s Party may fall, but no conservative force will rise to its place. The sole beneficiaries of the main leftist party’s disgrace are the lesser leftist parties of the São Paulo Forum, kept and protected as in a freezer during all these years and now ready to present themselves to the public as the new incarnation of the highest morality.
In order to grasp the real intentions of these parties, you should only know that the most promising one, the PSOL, is under the ideological guidance of Mr. Achille Lollo, an Italian terrorist who some years ago set fire to one of his political enemies’ house in Rome, burning to death his two children. The spiritual highness of the master is the standard for the morals of the disciple. Look at Mr. Lollo and you will see the future of Brazil.
If now you are kind enough to hear me a few more minutes, I will tell you what all these things have to do with Americans.
Since the late Dr. Constantine Menges’s warnings against the Lula-Castro-Chavez “little axis of evil” were published in 2002, I have been expecting the American government to take a firm stand against the rise of neocommunist parties in Latin America and specially in my own country. As I personally had been uncovering the growing tide of leftist arrogance, being the last and only conservative voice in Brazilian big media, I was candid enough to fancy that the powerful support my opinions were receiving from an outstanding Hudson Institute scholar might be the sign of some auspicious changing in the U. S. policy towards Latin America. Perhaps the “scoundrel times” when Clinton’s Ambassador to Brazil proclaimed Lula to be “the Brazilian incarnation of the American dream” were at last approaching their end.
Instead, the American government went on and on dispensing a regular amount of flattering accolades to Mr. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, treating him as if he were the very antidote to Hugo Chavez’ revolutionary demagoguery and a champion of capitalist democracy in the continent.
At the same time, American official agencies and billionaire foundations continued to give full financial support to Brazilian leftists, allowing them to pose as harmless reformers and to deceive Brazilian voters.
Under the best of disguises, these people went on to implement the blueprint for general subversion designed by Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Colombian narcoterrorists at the annual meetings of the “São Paulo Forum”.
For Brazilian lovers of freedom, America’s unbroken support for Lula and his Worker’s Party was superlatively disappointing. As the reality of a communist conspiracy in Latin America was concealed from the public opinion for more than a decade by Brazilian big media, the whole country fell under Lula’s spell, believing him to be some kind of naïve Christian populist, too much unsophisticated to be conceivably mixed to a Macchiavellian plot. The few intellectuals and journalists who knew the truth were isolated, powerless, unable to spread it among the general public. I payed a high price for trying to do so as a press columnist, suffering insults and death threats for years and finally being fired from two newspapers and a magazine. The political inspiration of the dismissals was too visible to deceive my readers, who sent hundreds of letters protesting against the suppression of my columns. But the letters, of which I kept copies, were never published. The concealing of truth is never perfect unless it conceals itself.
Meanwhile, I and some of my colleagues did our best to use the internet as a means to fight the massive suppression of truth. But we were few and devoid of any financial support. We payed from our own pockets to keep the standards of real journalism alive, while a continuous cash flow from state banks and private corporations, both from Brazil and abroad, allowed communist and pro-communist websites, newspapers, magazines and TV shows to flourish everywhere. When, against all probabilities, our penniless electronic newspaper “Mídia Sem Máscara” (Unmasked Media) was chosen by popular vote to win the second prize in a national contest against its millionaire leftist competition, some of us could not avoid tears dropping from our eyes. But it was only a moral victory, with no practical results whatsoever. We were still so powerless that it was easy for our foes to deny publicly not only the communist continental strategy but the very existence of the “Sao Paulo Forum”. They were strong enough to triumph over truth even after we published in “Midia Sem Mascara” the complete proceedings of the twelve meetings of the Forum, the full proof of the intimate connections between the Worker’s Party and Colombian narcoterrorists.
Truth was everywhere downtrodden, derided, humiliated. Rejected and isolated in our own country, we turned our eyes to America, excited by George W. Bush’s second electoral victory and by Dr. Menges’ precise diagnosis of the situation.
America was our last hope, and America failed us
Now that the deep corruption in Lula’s administration became visible to the eyes of everybody and that Brazilian people are conscious of the awful trap set up to catch them, it is due time for the American government to reassess the gain it obtained from appeasing Lula and disregarding the true friends of America in Brazil. President Bush is now seen by every Brazilian voter as the main foreign supporter of the dirtiest and most despicable administration we ever had. Leftist parties, aware that it will be impossible to save Lula’s reputation, are managing to associate the government debauchery to its American links, in order to blame the “right” for the crimes comitted by the left. It is the most creative strategy of dammage administration ever seen, and it is working. For a whole decade, many Brazilians hated America because they loved Lula. Now they hate America because they hate Lula.
Perhaps there is still time to change the course of events, but action must be quick. The crimes of the Brazilian government are neither isolated facts nor the late results of Lula’s mythical “turning to the right”, but the natural implementation of the Worker’s Party plans for total dominination, devised in close association with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Why should America once more pay for the misdeeds of its foes? The American government has to chose between telling the truth or falling victim to a lie.
* Olavo de Carvalho (www.olavodecarvalho.org) is a Brazilian philosopher and writer and a columnist for the newspapers “Diario do Comércio” (São Paulo) and “Jornal do Brasil” (Rio de Janeiro). He teaches Political Philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana (South of Brazil) and is the author of a dozen books.
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