Rev Left Radio - Battleground Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro, the Military Dictatorship, & Fascism

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Diogo and Luiza, two professors from Brazil and members of “Professores Contra o Escola Sem Partido” (PCESP) join Breht to talk about the current state of Brazilian politics, the election of Bolsonaro, Fascism, Brazilian memory, the parallels between Brazil and the US, the importance of international solidarity, and what leftists abroad can do to assist our Brazilian comrades. It gets pretty emotional towards the end, but I hope you appreciate the love and value the discussion! Follow and contact our guests at the following links: www.facebook.com/contraoescolasempartido/ professorescontraoescolasempartido.wordpress.com https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorescontraoEscolaSemPartido twitter.com/profscontraoesp Instagram: @profscontraoesp Other Resources mentioned in the episode:  'What's happening in Brazil' (Thesis Eleven) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diap_PMN-p0 'Brazil's Ultra-Politics' https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/brazil-election-fascism-bolsonaro-haddad-pt Big business is salivating over fascism triumph in Brazil https://www.truthdig.com/articles/big-business-is-salivating-over-fascisms-triumph-in-brazil/ Here's a picture of of the shop we mentioned with the statue of liberty http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-auFXW1yaWu8/VYDcl-pvKrI/AAAAAAACBRU/W0g4ZQaMRuc/s1600/havan.jpg ----------------- NEW LOGO from BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your trusted host and comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we are doing an interview with Giogo and Louisa from Teachers Against Party Free Education, the PCESP in Brazil. We're going to be talking about Brazilian politics, Brazilian memory, the military dictatorship, and of course the election of the fascist Bolsonaro. I do want to give a shout out before we get to the episode to Guy Lerme. He is a member of our Patreon and was the person who allowed this entire interview to happen in the first place. He sent me the email to reach out to this organization.

And as you'll hear in this interview, it gets very emotional. The sort of solidarity and the emotive force, especially towards the end of this interview, is incredibly powerful. It's really moving for me and for our guests. And really, I hope, highlights the internationalism and the solidarity that we're dedicated to here at Revolutionary Left Radio. So thanks to Guillermo for hooking up this interview. And thanks to Giogo and Louisa from the Teachers Against Party Free Education, not only for coming on and educating us about what's happening in Brazil,

but for their courageous work in Brazil as teachers who are, you know, being cracked down on under the new regime. So with all of that said, let's go ahead and just go straight to the interview. Hi, my name is Diogo. I'm from Brazil. I'm a history teacher here in Brazil, and I'm part of a movement called Teachers Against Party Free Education. Just to clarify, I'm the one with the bad English. She's the one with the awesome English. So you have No pressure on me at this moment. You have the best of both words. Beautiful.

That's awesome. And I'm Louisa. I'm also a teacher here in Brazil, also a member of the movement. And I'm very happy to be here talking to you guys. Yeah, we're very, very happy to have you. As we were talking before we started recording, I think, you know, us in the U.S., have, especially on the left, have been watching Brazil very closely over the last few weeks. weeks especially and there's lots of interesting parallels between our countries but I'm really happy to have you two on to sort of have the first person perspective of what's going on in Brazil so you can

kind of educate the rest of the world on what's happening there and at the end we're also going to get into some advice for how we can help our Brazilian brothers and sisters in any way that we can whether we're in the US or Europe or wherever you're listening to the show from so having said that let's just go ahead and start with the basic question about your organization your is a response to a policy, I guess, in Brazil called School Without a Party. So what is School Without a Party, and why did you decide to start teachers against Party-Free Education? So the movement, and now it's on the way to become a policy, it's called Party Free Education.

It's a movement created in 2004. by a lawyer called Miguel Najeeb. And the main objective of the group is impose censorship to teachers here in Brazil. The movement's parifur education is based on, I don't know, I think you can call a conspiracy theory, that teachers across Brazil are part of a conspiracy. to indoctrinate children to follow left-wing ideologies. And for that movement, teachers are the enemy that must be eradicated and subjected

to a set of principles that they call the veres of professor. How do you? The educators' duties, you know. And they started. as a political movement, and now with the president-elected Jair Bolsonaro, they are on the way to transform the movement into formal laws across the country. And there's a very cool myth about the beginning of the party-free education movement, which was, there's this lawyer called

Miguel Najeebi, and he actually created the first drafts of the movement, and he's still very much a part of the movement, that he decided to create this movement when his daughter arrived from school, saying that her teacher had compared Che Guevado with San Francis of Assis. Like, those two historical figures could be compared, and how. both of them made sacrifices for the greater goods and after hearing that needless to say that Najib is a very religious man and religion plays a big part in the creation of and development of the movements yes so after after hearing this from his young child he decided he got inspiration to begin that movement

And it gained a lot of support from Bolsonaro's family, because it's important to say that his sons, he has three sons, who are currently elected congressmen in Brazil. And since the beginning of the movement, one of his sons, Flavio, was a very big supporter of the movement. So I think that the party-free education movement is very much on the base of what later on and what nowadays has culminated in the Bolsonaro election. And the teachers against party-free education, it actually began as a movement in the federal university in Rio de Janeiro state with one of the, of, our professors Fernando Penna and other members of the university faculty and the university students started getting together to... Initially as a study group and then we developed that idea. We started to understand the dimension of the problem with party-free education.

We started to perceive that the movement was growing faster, and faster, and if we did not organize ourselves and prepare for the worst, things could get serious. So we created a group, teachers against party-free education, so we could start thinking about strategies and mobilized politically to think, what can we do? And we are here now. Well, you know, I'm going to keep probably making parallels between Brazil and the U.S., but here in the U.S., there's also that sort of conspiratorial idea that universities are bastions of Marxism and what they call here as cultural Marxism, which is really an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And we have our own organization called Turning Point USA, which is really this top-down funded group,

which puts teachers that they deem to be two left-wing on a, you know, watch list, basically. And so there's been that sort of right and left, you know, battle here in the U.S. as well, though probably not as pronounced as it's becoming in Brazil, which leads nicely to this next question, which is why and how have universities specifically been targeted by the forces of reaction in Brazil, both before and after the election of Bolsonaro? Parifur education takes big inspiration from that William F. Buckley Jr. School of Thoughts. That universities are centers of left-wing communists or cultural Marxism. I mean, all the cliché.

They try to translate that to our reality here in Brazil. And that anti-intellectualism plays a big part in that one of the biggest intellectual reference of party-free education. Intellectual, there's air quotes there, but again. He's a writer called Olavut de Carvalio that lives there in the U.S. He lives in Miami currently. And he was one of the biggest influence of this. the movement. Olav de Carvalho, it's hard to explain. It's like William Buckley Jr. and Alex Jones had a child. Oh, no. That child was raised by David Duke. Oh, wow. So horrifying.

Yeah, it's that bad. Yikes. And Olob de Carvalio will inform the prerogatives of the movement. Teachers are the enemy, universities. are centers of communist propaganda, and Olav de Carvalho is probably the biggest, the daddy of our outright. Our, what we call outright here, it's not exactly the same as for you guys, but there are a lot of similarities. And Olav de Caravallio plays a big part. being that father of that movement.

He provides the intellectual baggage that people like Miguel Najibiu with party-free education. Jairo Bolsonaro, now president-elected, will use to inform their political ideology. And universities are the enemy. Yeah, I think that this thing, it's interesting the question about universities because they have been targeted and in Di Karvalu's speech is not only against the left within the universities, but there's also a very heavy moral compass in his speech that also universities are a center for, you know, the privacy. sexual deviant, homosexuality, homosexuality, and drugs, you know, like, and it culminated, like in Bolsonaro recently declared that Brazilian young people have an obsession with a college degree. isn't it fantastic to hear that we have an obsession with getting a college degree? But like as a bad thing, like, there are better things we've got to do

instead of getting a bachelor's degree. And right before the election period, there was lots of cases of universities being vandalized here in Brazil, like people writing swastikas on the restroom walls, books on human rights being torn and hate speech. And so because of this, some anti-fascist flags were being hung in public university buildings throughout Brazil. The week before the election happened, the electoral courts forcefully removed those anti-fascist. fascist flags claiming that it was negative propaganda against one of the candidates. Wow.

Wow. Which begs the question, if anti-fascist flags are negative propaganda, maybe we do have a fascist candidate after all. Right. Doesn't it? And after the election recently, our Supreme Court has revolved. revoked that order. So the anti-fascist flag have been hung again. And the, because the order, the initial order was claimed to be undemocratic. So the anti-fascist flag are back,

but the damage is done. And I think that it's, it has already proven to be, harmful for Bolsonaro's image as little as it was but I think it was already harmful Sure Yeah here we have you know this idea of like Oh you're against anti-fascism

Well that speaks volumes about what you're for And here in the US I don't know if you have it in Brazil But we have right wingers Calling themselves anti-anti-fascists Using this double negative So which cancels each other out And they don't see the irony that they're basically Calling themselves fascists

Yes, yes. But I think, you know, although the alt-right or the fascist right here in the U.S. may differ in some ways from their Brazilian fascist right, wherever fascist arise, there are a few things that are always present, which is a machismo, like an anti-feminist chauvinism, us versus them, racism, nationalism, nationalism, anti-progressive or anti-communism rhetoric, and conspiratorial thinking. Those things, I think, our fascist movements sort of share with one another. around the world really share that with fascist movements. Mm-hmm, definitely. So I want to go in now. We've kind of established sort of the organization that you're coming from and some of the attacks on universities from the Brazilian rights. So now let's go ahead and get into Brazilian history, right? Because I think the best way to start this conversation about Bolsonaro

and the situation in Brazil currently is to discuss and summarize the history of Brazilian politics that led up to this moment in Brazilian history, specifically the military dictatorship and what's happened between the fall of that dictatorship and today. So can you talk about this history so we can understand what Brazilians have been through leading up to now? Sure. We were under a military dictatorship here in Brazil from 1964 to 1989, officially. And it began with a coup d'attar by the military forces. And one of the main arguments that they used to actually do the coup d'etal was the Reds' care,

like the communists are trying to take over and we need to defend our country and our families. And this actually helped gather a lot of support from the civilian society to the regime because, you know, everybody's afraid of the commies. and and so although there were like years what we call the lead years as in the metal like the lead years which were the heavier years it was definitely

one of the most violent periods in Brazilian history and that's I don't know if that can be understood but that's saying a lot because we do have a history of authoritarianism governments here

in Brazil. So Diogo is he's actually a history teacher so he knows a bit more about the period than I do. Yeah, during the dictatorship we have the repression apparatus

of the states being used to torture, kidnap, and kill anyone who is considered political opposition. So, and that opposition, it isn't always seen as political. It can be a moral opposition. If you are homosexual, if you are deviant in any way, if you own the wrong books, you are considered opposition. And the anti-communism plays a big, paring that.

Communism is always used during throughout the dictatorship, the communism, the Redskirts is usually used as a reason to create harder laws to justify

more torture, more persecution, more censorship. It's always, it was usually justified by how we need to defend our country from the commies? And there is always an excuse so some political groups can impose their political agenda. So we have the military who had a project of national integration, of national progress and

development. We have big money, big businessmen, big enterprises. We have we had this the sport from the U.S. playing a big party in that too. So during those 20 and so years, we had that situation in which the state, our political system, turned itself against its own citizens. And that was the case for 20 years. But during the 60s and during the 70s, that started. to how

it started to take its tall so by the 70s the whole regime started

to kind of old you know it didn't fulfill the promises of economic growth

or stability so started to have we started to see civilians being organized against the

the dictatorship. There's a very important movement here called Directa Ja. That was a movement to ask for direct elections, for presidency, and for the

governors throughout Brazil. And at the end, it starts to crumble in itself. And the biggest consequences I think, of the regime were the economic instability that we were left in Brazil.

We had a lot of debt after the period. And social inequality was a problem that took us years to actually face. And the dictatorship also helped to create a culture of corrupt. within the Brazilian government because there was no fiscalization. There was no way that since it was a dictatorship, there was no way that we could, you know, say to the government, you know, what really has been going on. So when everything is done behind closed doors, it's so much easier to do all the wrong things that you should not be doing.

But when the transition came to be that was in the 80s, this transition was guided by the military forces. Even though there was civil society mobilization, the military forces very much guided this process of the democratic reopening. And one of the biggest problems that arrived in that period was the end. amnesty law in which was decided that all crimes committed during the detectorship were forgiven when democracy was reinstated in Brazil, meaning all the crimes from the military and all the crimes, air quotes here, of the resistance. So, I remember, like, when I was young, that was the Pinochet trial in Chile, and we never had that in Brazil. We never had a member of the military being tried by, basically by war crimes that were committed during the detectorships.

So I think you're going to talk about memory. while and this is something that I would like to bring back for the next question because this is important here okay but well so the dictatorship officially ended in 1989 and during the 90s Brazil during the 90s now fully democratic governments we had the PSDB administration who were social democrats and as like every good social democrats, they were liberal as they can be. And it also helped increase the social inequality in Brazil. But also, with the end of the dictatorship, we had the foundation of the workers' party.

During the dictatorship, there used to be only two formal parties in Brazil. And after that, other parties were created, and one of them was the Left Opposition Party, which was the Workers Party, led by our former president, Luis Nasu Lula da Silva. During the 90s, he was very much opposition to this liberal government that we had. he was only elected in 2002. We should clarify that. The Workers' Party were created in the late 70s by a reunion of social movements who were organizing during that period of transition.

So we had unions, we have movements inside the Catholic Church, we have all sorts of organizations thriving with the promise of democracy. And the Workers' Party is the product of that. But during the 90s and in the 2000s, there is a change in the guidelines of the party. The left-wing orientation that the party had to now will change in form and start to take a more conciliatory tones, trying to balance neoliberal policies with welfare state guidelines. And that's the Workers' Party who comes to power during the 2000s. I see. So they started off as a more militant, a coalition of left-wing forces.

that sort of coalesced under the military dictatorship as it was transitioning it out. And then by the early 2000s, it had sort of devolved into more or less a run-of-the-mill social democratic, you know, left liberal party that sort of tried to keep social welfare, but combine it with more or less neoliberal economics. Yes, yes. Pretty much like that. Pretty much like Labor under Tony Blair during the same time. that's the Workers' Party in the 2000s.

That's the Workers' Party that becomes the main political force in Brazil for the next 13 years. A party focused on conciliation and losing ground within the Brazilian left as a whole because, you know, conciliation has a price. and the workers' party stopped being opposition the moment it came to power. Yeah, so it's sort of like betrays its fundamental core. What allowed the party to be created in the first place is sort of betraying those core principles. Exactly, exactly.

And so as a consequence nowadays, there's a lot of disappointment with the Workers' Party in Brazil. And most of its traditional leaderships, the people who were there in the 80s and in the 90s are now in different parties. They have left the workers' party, especially because of that. We have now a more left-wing party, which is the Seoul. We have the Green Party here in Brazil, and they were all formed. by former Workers' party members disappointed by the Workers' Party government. And one of the biggest causes of disappointments is, in the 2010s, the corruption scandals, namely the Mansalong scandal and car wash investigations, led in part by,

judge Sergio Morrow, who is, has recently been appointed a minister of Bolsonaro, which is something that we're going to talk about in a little bit, but, you know, one of Bolsonaro's ministers is also one of the men who have arrested Lula. But again, corruption is something that is a historical problem here in Brazil. But the most important laws, the most fundamental laws against corruption, were created during the Workers' Party administrations. The former President Lula is arrested because of a law created during the Workers' Party administration. So sort of, in summary, I mean, Brazil has always had a history of corruption, but certainly under the military dictatorship, given its authoritarian and sort of behind-the-scenes nature, It really cemented a really bad current of corruption.

And then after that military dictatorship fell, the corruption that was really, you know, fomented during the dictatorship continued to live on. And even though the worker party did take some steps to address corruption, it couldn't totally avoid it itself. And now Bolsonaro, ironically, is sort of saying corruption is one of the things that he's aiming to get rid of while simultaneously praising the very military dictatorship that allowed corruption to take such hold in Brazil in the first place. place. I wish I could summarize thing as good as you're doing. I'm trying. I'm almost going like,

yeah, so, you know, about this thing that we're living in Brazil. Well, I do want to move on to memory because that's a really important part of this. And one thing we talked about in our latest episode on the Vietnam War was memory. The way people remember these horrific events and the way those memories are shaped by the ruling class, make it much easier for these crimes to be committed again. In the U.S., I mean, we obviously went from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War, and many of the same slogans and lies were used in both wars by the ruling class who were invested in them, and in the same way that Bolsonaro was sort of obscuring the memory of the military dictatorship in this way where he's trying to confront corruption and all this.

So I think that there's a parallel there. So the question is, how has the Brazilian memory regarding the military dictatorship, been shaped over the intervening years, and why is there so much apologia and outright support for it in Brazil today? Again, I bring the amnesty law. Since there were no investigations and there were no trials, it became much easier for the crimes of the military to be swept under the rug. and there is this whole nostalgia about the military regime because there is the sense of patriotism

that existed during that period and people don't seem to realize how fake, how force that patriotism was. there is this famous slogan during the dictatorship that was Brazil, love it or leave it. Ah, we've heard that here as well, yeah. And so it's very much, it's very much force. It's a very romantic idea of a country that never was. And during the dictatorship, we had educational policies who tried to impose that official memory. we had school curriculums organized with civic learning,

with subjects where you have to learn how to sing the national anthem, how to praise the flag, how to be a better citizen. And we never had atonement regarding that. We never had a moment as a nation where we could stop and really think about what those 20 years really represent for us. And now we have a president who praises the memory of a torture. Of a torture, Colonel Brilliant Eustra, yeah. Who became famous and notorious during the dictatorship for,

leading the torture sections in Operation Banderante, Banderante operation, which was one of the first and first great operations of suppression and repression against the political opposition in the state of Sao Paulo, and which later became one of the greatest, one of the greatest inspirations for the system of repression and censorship that the dictatorship imposed later on. And our nostalgia with the dictatorship is like our Make America Great again. We are constantly nostalgic about that mythic past that never was. But in our minds, we try to cover the problems with the presence with that nostalgia, romanticized version of the past.

And I don't think that nostalgia was true, that memory, that appreciation for the dictatorship was as great during the dictatorship as it is now. now we appreciate the dictatorship more than we ever appreciated during the dictatorship because now the dictatorship became a escape valve so we can't deal with our problems here now we blame it on the communists we blame it on the workers party we blame it on everyone that we deem opposition and That works because that is easy. And Bolsonaro is a symptom of that. Bolsonaro is our escape valve because we can't, we don't want or we can't deal with our own problems.

That's incredibly profound and also incredibly similar to what we deal with you. I mean, you even mentioned the slogan, Make America Great Again in this notion that they're nostalgic for a history that never was. And as you alluded to, I think a lot of that comes from both a fear of the present and a fear of the future and an inability to understand either of those things too. So instead of facing the reality of the situation and the challenges that you face as a society, a certain segment of the population would rather go back into a mythologized past that never actually existed rather than face the realities. And they do so in a hateful, angry and ultimately fearful way. One thing you said about Brazil that I also think really rings true for us here in the U.S. is this inability to ever properly address the crimes and the catastrophes that the nation went through

or that the nation committed on other people. Here in the U.S., we obviously have a history of slavery, genocide. I mean, countless wars where women and children were slaughtered en masse. And there has never ever been an attempt by our society to meaningfully wrestle with that. origins, instead the exact same thing happens. It's painted over with myths about who we are. We tell ourselves stories about what America is, that it has no alignment with reality, but it's a story that we believe and that it gets us out of having to face those, the consequences of those actions. And because we're never willing to address those things meaningfully, we're

never able to get past them. They're always haunting our politics. And the scapegoating, right, here, the scapegoats might be a little different in Brazil than they are here, but here it's depending on the decade we're in either terrorist or immigrants or now liberals are blaming Russians for Trump, you know, it's just this systematic inability to face reality. And it's horrifying because the underbelly of that are these violent, authoritarian fantasy movements that we're seeing in both our countries. Yes, and one thing that we also have in common is that whenever we try to address these problems. We get cold, you know, snowflakes and, you know, you're exaggerating. There is this whole

patronizing of people who are actually pointing fingers at the problems. It also happens here in Brazil. The right wing that supports Bolsonaro, accuses black people, indigenous people, homosexuals women are playing the victims you know we are exaggerating it's not that bad you know we have the snowflakes and it's like oh i want to curse you but i'm i won't it's okay it's like fuck you yeah exactly fuck you yes there's this huge problem that we all have to deal with And instead of dealing, you want to bury your heads in the past. You want to create knights in Shaniyama that are going to save our nations?

Fuck you. Like, let's get a hand dirty and deal with it, like adults, but no. And underneath all that condescension and all that machismo and all that posturing are really trembling little cowards, right? There's that great. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah, there's that great quote from Mao. He just talks, he says, reactionaries are paper tigers. They like to really act tough and present this menacing outward feel to the world.

But inside, they're scared, ignorant little children, you know, wetting themselves. And they lash out at a world they don't understand and can't grapple with. And sadly, the most marginalized, the least powerful people in those societies are the ones that that that anger and that lashing out comes down on. And it's, you know, for us on the left, it's like, we've put up with this for way to. too long. And now you want us to go through another round of this nonsense? No way. We're not doing it anymore, you know? Yes. Well, all of this history that both of you have wonderfully covered and educated our Western American, European listeners on, culminated in the election, as many of us know, of Bolsonaro. So maybe just talk about who he is more in depth. So who is

Bolsonaro? Where did he come from politically? And what sort of policy platform did he run on? So... Bolsonaro is a former army captain with a non-impressive military career that he later converted into a non-impressive political career. He spent most of the last 30 years as a representative for the state of Rio de Janeiro, initially getting elected with a discourse of supporting pay raises for members of the military, and not doing much else, I think. And not just supporting pay raises for the military,

not actually getting much done, you know. He didn't have, he had 30 years legislative career. He had one bill approved or two, one or two. Something like that. And it's amazing how his supporters used this, as to say how anti-establishment he is. You see, he...

He's so anti-establishment, he can't approve a bill of law. And I'm like, huh? Yeah, that will work. Yeah, but that works. That's the worst part of it.

However, that changed in the last few years. He became kind of a celebrity, a media figure, showing up on TV and radio programs. and promoting what we can basically classify as hate speech for entertainment purposes. Saying as it is, and condemning the politically correct, saying blatant racist, homophobic things in national television.

I remember that when it came out, the whole grabbing by the position, by Donald Trump and we had a grab them by the pussy moment and no we had many grabbed them we were grabbed our poissies in many many women

Bolsonaro every day sorry for the crew show it's okay that's okay Bolsonaro every day grab them by the pussy day oh man yeah but you know the the main difference was that

Trump apparently Trump didn't know that he was being recorded when he said that. Bolsonaro knows that he's being recorded and he says that openly in interviews, that he is in favor of torture, that he could never love a homosexual son, that his sons were worried so they would never date a black woman, that he wouldn't rape another congresswoman because she doesn't deserve it. Those things he had said with a camera pointed at him. And I know that there has been videos of interviews with him,

one by Alan Page, you know, my future wife, and one by Stephen Fry. And he seems, he doesn't show his true colors for the international, media. He knows how to kind of play a part for the international media because here in Brazil, trust me, the guy is psychopathic, the guy is unhinged and it's incredible how much hate speech can come from one person, you know, it's terrible. During that last election cycle, lots of people compared him to Trump and And that's not really accurate.

He's not our Trump. He's our Rodrigo Duterte. He's our Erdogan. He's our Orban. But the main comparison is Rodrigo Duterte, especially regarding the fascist undertones of his discourse. Trump is racist. Trump is misogynistic.

but Trump's not a fascist. Bolsonaro is a fascist because Bolsonaro thrives in that speech of condemning the opposition and saying that he will kill

all the worker parties, members and supporters. There's this great oh my God, I forgot his name. The British guy, that does the American show. John Oliver? John Oliver, yes, thank you. He did a little sketch on Bolsonaro,

and all I can remember is fucking finger guns. And he actually got the fucking finger guns all the time. That's like their sign, right? He does a little finger guns, and his supporters do it too. His supporters do it too. I hate that. You're all children.

We're not playing cowboys here. Exactly. You know, this is politics. This is. This is national security matters. Yeah. But the finger guns, it seems funny, but it's actually becoming our Zyghael. Right, right.

Because the finger guns, it's the banalization of violence. Of evil. It's the idea that when you buy a gun and one of his main policies he wants to implement is gun liberation, which we don't have in Brazil. We actually have, different from America, we have much, much more strict laws on gun purchasing here in Brazil. And I don't know if you heard, but before the elections, he actually was stabbed in one of his conventions. Yes. And the man has said that he actually wanted to buy a firearm to shoot him. But he couldn't because the law isn't reserved very strict on buying a firearm.

So basically, Bolsonaro's life was saved by the law that he's trying to bring down. Right, right. They are trying to replicate the model you have, you guys. have on Florida, for example, things like stand your ground laws that give to good citizens the right to defend themselves against the criminals and the bad people. Whoever you want to call a criminal. Right. And that's important because all that, the finger guns, the hate speech, all those things that Bolsonaro represents.

And I think that's important to emphasize that, although Bolsonaro is undeniably a fascist with a discourse that thrives on the hate direct to anyone, he deems opposition, the communists, the teachings, the teachings, the teachings, the teachings, the teaching. that indoctrinates the innocent child, the innocent children. He's more a symptom of fascism than a cause. He's a point of convergence that serves to represent and justify all the hate that some Brazilians feel toward difference, towards who is different. Our hatred, misogyny, racism, xenophobic. religious and cultural prejudice, fine in Bolsonaro, a escape valve. With him, we can blame all the economic, political and social problems, corruption

on what they call the extreme left, and everyone can be extreme left. You just have to be different or disagree with the egemonic discourse. That's enough to just fire your extermination, basically. It's how they used to say during the dictatorship and Louisa said it, Brazil love it or leave it. And now that guy is our president. And now that guy has the army, has branches of the police. He's our official representative in international affairs. And he's going to be the president of the... the country that has one of the largest biodiversity in the world, one of the largest mineral

resources in the world. And he's a guy that doesn't believe in global warming. And he's a guy that thinks that indigenous, that he's not going to give any more indigenous land. You know, that's how scary it is, you know, that's how, how terrifying, all of all of this is um there are moments when when we kind of we kind of laugh you know like is he is this is this is this really going on you know yeah yeah kind of feels like a nightmare but it's it's it's it's not a nightmare anymore right yeah well we we certainly um share those those like sometimes you just you'd laugh at the absurdity of it but at the end the underlying like sort of darkness to every chuckle is like oh god

This is real and this is happening and people are going to be hurt because of this. I did want to touch on a few things that both of you mentioned in that last answer. One, you were talking about the differences, right, between Bolsonaro and Trump. And I think Bolsonaro has been called Trump of the Tropics or the Tropical Trump. But you rightly pointed out that he actually has more in common with other actual fascists because Trump is a ignorant, narcissist, sort of, you know, crony weirdo who has these really reactionary instincts, but he doesn't really have an ideology. He's like if Fox News came to life, but, you know, ate so much KFC that he couldn't really

think about ideas too much, whereas Bolsonaro does have that actually focused ideological outlook that makes him, I think, even more dangerous than a Trump. So on another show, on another show that I do, I said, Bolsonaro is not so much of a Trump. He's more of a mixture. And, you know, Maybe you guys would disagree with me, but more of a mixture of Rodrigo Duterte from the Philippines and Pinochet from Chile, and that there is this attempt to, you know, talk about all these problems, but basically still serve the interest of the ruling capitalist class like Pinochet did. And then there's this fascistic lashing out at crime like Duterte, but as leftists, we understand crime has deeper social causes. is crime stems out of poverty, it stems out of inequality, it stems out of desperation. People who are happy, who have health care, who are well fed, who have life opportunities, don't tend to turn to crime.

But the fascist brain is incapable of understanding root causes of problems and what it wants to do instead is bash the symptoms over the head with a bat. And they're never actually going to solve the problems. The Trumps and the Bolsonaro's of the world and the Dutertees of the world will never ever be able to solve the problems they claim. to want to solve all they can do is unleash fascistic violence on the symptoms and never ever address the the underlying diseases and that makes them incredibly dangerous as much of a joke as they can sometime appear to be yes because they think those problems as

moral problems so you don't commit a crime because you are in a need or in a specific economic or social situation you commit a crime because you are evil and evil must be exterminated. And the religious discourse is really important. We said that religion played a big part in the creation of the party-free education movements

and religion also plays a big part in the ascension of Bolsonaro. Here in Brazil, we have what you would call evangelical evangelical movements, but what we call evangelical, it's not the same, it's not what you call

evangelicals. We call evangelicals a specific denomination of Christianism called Pentecostals and Neo-Pentecostals. I don't know if you had a translation for that. And those groups are deciding our election. Those groups are making voters by a moral discourse about good versus evil. Christianity is good. Israel is good because we need to guarantee that Israel has a Jewish population because when the apocalypse comes, one of the signs of the apocalypse is all Jewish.

Jews of the world will be in Israel. You guys have something like that with your evangelical movements. So our Christian rights organize itself around Bolsonaro. Because Bolsonaro started to represent that discourse of the banality of evil that our Christian rights, our conservative Christian rights embraced it in the last few years. And that is

the ground for our current brands of fascism. And I think when you compare Bolsonaro with Duterte, I think that we absolutely agree with you.

Whoever says that Bolsonaro is a Trump of the tropics doesn't really know who Bolsonaro is and how dangerous he actually is. And I think he's much closer to a Duterte than to Trump, unfortunately. Even though you said that he has an ideology and everything, I am of the opinion that Bolsonaro is, by himself, he's a very incompetent politician. As we talked about his history as a congressman, and he's a very incompetent politician.

The thing is that he gathered during the last few years, and I can say during the last, I don't know, eight years, he gathered so much gravity. towards him that he kind of surrounded himself with scholars and intellectuals and economists and people who actually know what they're doing and that's not to say that Bolsonaro is a puppet he's not a puppet he knows what he's getting himself into to, but he is his figure and his political power grows the more that those people come closer to him. Since we're talking about religion, there's this one very famous preacher in Brazil called Silas Malafaya, who's also very homophobic and right-wing.

personality. He is one of Bolsonaro's big supporters. He used to have billboards in Malafaya, that is, he used to put up billboards saying that God created man and woman to lie together and procreated. Like that was a billboard on my way to work. And so he is one of, one of Bolsonaro's supporters. So what makes Bolsonaro even scarier is the kind of people that are gravitating towards him. Yeah, and both of them are supporters of the Party Free Education Movement,

because one of the prerogatives of the movement is that the moral authority of families is above the duty. educational principles. The educational principles of schools and the liberties of the teachers to say and to teach what they consider best, what they consider correct for their students. And what the Parli for Education Movement really wants in the end is, a school, an educational system

that only reproduces those family values and family morals. A school that is... It doesn't question... It's indifferent to violence against women, violence

against LGBTQ people. It's a school that doesn't question racism. It's a school... It's a school stagnated. It's a school that has no social function. It's not a school at all at that point.

It's not a school at all at that point. No, it's basically that. You kind of like you bleed it out. You bleed the schools out. So earlier I was talking about Pinochet and sort of the combination between fascism and capitalism. Fascists also often like to portray themselves as anti-status quo or anti-elitist. But, you know, in reality, they sort of always serve the interest. of the already existing ruling class.

So what is the connection, in your opinion, between Bolsonaro's fascism and neoliberal capitalism? Is Bolsonaro going to quote-unquote challenge the ruling class, or is he going to help do their bidding? It's a rhetorical question. I think that Bolsonaro found a very comfortable position as a conservative liberal. You know, let's talk about the laws concerning,

concerning education and family values and everything is going to be more strict on the moral level. Meanwhile, economically, you guys, with the big businesses and with the big money, you can do whatever you want. You're a thus. You're our bros, so, you know, have it. And I think He's already helping the, he's already helping capitalism. He's already helping the big businesses. There is a big movement of flexibilization of workers' rights and labor laws here in Brazil. And it's nothing but a way to please the economic elite, you know. And this economic elite has been one of his big supporters in the elections.

And they even incurred in criminal police. political propaganda. There is this very, I'm using the word scary a lot today for some reason. There is this horrible video of the owner of Havana. Havana, thank you, which is a chain of big stores here in Brazil, which has all the Havana stores have a big statue of liberty. at their door. Liberty. Yes. We can totally send you a pick of that.

It's sad. It's sad. And so the guy basically called his employees to like a ballroom thing, a ballroom event. And he urged everybody to vote for Bolsonaro, otherwise. there would be mass firings and the stores wouldn't work so well so maybe a lot of people

get fired and maybe we that there would have to be cutbacks you know basically saying if you don't vote for him you're all fired you know you talk about Pinochet and Pinochet is one of the biggest one of the biggest inspirations for Bolsonaro Bolsonaro, whenever he has the opportunity, he praises Pinochet as a great political leader, as a great administration for Chile. And since we are talking about Pinochet, I think we have to talk about Paulo Gades. You want to start? No.

So, Paulo Gadis is the... His economic guru of... of Bolsonaro. In Bolsonaro. Paolo Gadis worked in the economic team of the Pinochet regime during the 70s in Chile. And Paulo Gades had an intellectual formation in the University of Chile during the time where the Chicago Boys ruled the floor around there in the economic faculty. And now he's one of the main advisors. He is one of the, how do you say, super

ministries, no? Yeah, it's a super minister. Because now we're not going to have ministries anymore. We're going to have super ministries. Yeah. Jesus. That in the U.S. sounds fun, right? Super fun. Like Jeff Sessions is chief of the DOJ. Right. It's not anymore, but Jeff Sessions. is chief of the DOJ, that's how you call it. Yep, the Attorney General. Yes, so when our departments here, we call ministers. I see.

And now we have Paulo Gedges who will control the department of industry, planning. The economy? Economic planning. Fazenda, what? I have no idea. Paulo Gedges will be the guy who will control basically all the aspects of our economic structure for the next four years. And that guy is basically a Brazilian Chicago boy inspired by what the Pinochet regime did in Chile 30 years ago, and he's trying to do that in Brazil right now.

So, yeah. So gay. So yeah, so that is pure neoliberal capitalism, and we've done an entire episode on Chile. We've talked about Milton Friedman going down to Chile to help Pinochet get his economy off the ground after the illegal and brutal overthrow of the democratically elected government. So if people don't know that history, I know probably Brazilians are more familiar with it than the everyday American, but we do do these episodes for a reason. So if you're interested in going back and listening to that, that is in our back catalog. But it's really interesting that you're talking about this capitalist getting up and telling his workers basically that they should vote for Bolsonaro or there's going to be massive layoffs. And that's totally fine, right?

That's not electoral propaganda, but a pro-democracy or an anti-fascist flag on a university, that's electoral propaganda. That's illegal electoral behavior. And so I think it's really interesting what is and isn't considered, you know, appropriate during an election there. It's obviously just a fucking farce. And that's the biggest fallacy of neoliberalism. You make it seems that defending capitalism is the same as defending democracy, which is not the case. And when you transform that into a moral discourse in the sense that capitalism is essentially good, and everyone that criticizes capitalism is essentially evil,

you have that happy marriage of fascism and neoliberalism. It's happening here, it happened in Germany, it happened in Italy, during the thirties, but now we have a form of capitalism, even more wild, savage, and violence than we ever had. Exactly, yeah. There's that great Lenin quote, which I never tire of saying, which argues that

fascism is capitalism and decay, right? It's fascism. Yeah, fascism is what happens when capitalism is mired down by economic crises and progressive social movements that seek to challenge the hierarchies of capitalism. Fascism comes out and is basically

capitalism with its fangs out. So there is no separation there. It's one. and the same. And you know, there's a whole idea that in Brazil there's this moralizing of capitalism, taking capitalism and turning it into a moral imperative here in the U.S., and I'm sure you probably have it in Brazil too. People even take it further to make an ontological statement about human nature. They'll say capitalism is synonymous with human nature itself. Yes, it's absurd. Absurd. Because all it takes for a liberal to become a fact,

fascist here in Brazil is to become scared, you know. Whenever a liberal in Brazil gets in Brazil gets a little bit scared, they turn into a fascist. Yep, yep, because liberals are fundamentally capitalists. And so that analogy holds quite well. So I want to kind of move into the conclusion part of this. And this was one of the questions that our listeners actually, you know, asked me to ask you, and I really loved it.

So how has the election of Bolsonaro? influenced or otherwise affected your pedagogy and your understanding of yourselves as teachers. I think that, me personally, if I can answer this question in a more personal level, I am now more than ever sure that of my role as a teacher, as an education, because if we are posing, if we teachers are posing that big of a threat that we are enemy number one to this cowardly regime to this cowardly ideas, if we are the enemy, if we are the number one enemy, then we're doing something right and we must continue to do something right. Absolutely. So I feel very strongly that I took the right decision when I became a teacher now, you know? Yes.

But at the same time, the threats have increased, especially because a lot of Bolsonaro supporters and party-free education supporters have been elected. So they are urging for teachers to be censored, for teachers to be filmed while teaching, for teachers to be persecuted. So even though I am sure of what we're doing here, the threats are increasing. Yeah, Bolsonaro's policy for education is the party-free education movement's policy. So what you basically have is if a student doesn't want you to teach him or her something that he or she doesn't want to know, he or she has the right to stop you. he or she has the right to film, record you, sue you. Accus you of indoctrination.

And why not beat you and why not kill you, murder you? That's the policy of the enemies that Bolsonaro is trying to impose inside and outside schools. So, not for Louisa, and not for me, either I'm, if anything, all those changes made me more certain about my part and my profession as a teacher, but for most people who are lost here in Brazil, who doesn't know what to do, I think that's the thing that changed the most in the most in that. pedagogy was fear. Now people teach teachers go into classrooms with fear, go work without knowing that they will be okay at the end of the day. There is this great fear of being fired. Even if you're not accused, even if you're not sued, even if nothing violent is done. against you. What if you're fired and what if you can't get a job because you are deemed to be opposition because you are deemed to be a leftist? And there's a video of you on Facebook

in WhatsApp groups. And the parents, you know, and the students' parents believe that you want to turn their children, you want to make them gay, and you want to make them transsexual, because that's really one of the things that that's being said. Teachers want to make students homosexuals and transsexuals, you know. And what if we're being accused of paedophilia, which is a very grave accusation in and of itself? But especially to a teacher, what if I am deemed to be that kind of person? And what if I don't get a job and, you know, and here's capitalism for you. Right, right.

Well, you know, it really, it's, you know, it's fucking heartbreaking to kind of hear what, you know, you guys have to go through and like the fear of losing your job and just trying to teach the next generation and then having this whole, new dynamic that you have to face down every day when you go into work. But it really also cements the idea I said earlier about reactionaries being paper tigers is that they're fundamentally scared of knowledge. And they're scared of true education. They're scared of progress and they take it out on the purveyors of knowledge because that is the base by which the new generation can become educated about where they come from and become educated about having a

different sort of future and that scares them and so they they sublimate their fear into violent anger and it's it's horrifying but damn our hearts go out to you because that is that's a situation that no teacher should ever have to deal with nobody should ever have to deal with yeah nobody so much well i guess the last question and this is incredibly important because you know this show and everything i i do is not just about getting information out there, although that's a big part of it, but it's also about inspiring people to do something about it, right? It's not just enough to say, yeah, this really sucks. I want to be like, okay, and here's something you can do about it. So, and, you know, this is a very difficult question, too,

given the geological, you know, distance that we have from one another. But what can we in the U.S. and around the world do to help our Brazilian comrades? And what would you like to see from us going forward? Before we answer that question, I think it's, It's very important for us to thank you for even asking, to thank you for reaching out. To let us know that we are not alone. To let us know that we're not alone. You have no idea how important it was, honestly. There is a saying that started to go around here during this time.

After the election, especially. the saying goes something like nobody lets anyone's hands go that's correct that's a good translation nobody let nobody lets go of anybody's hands you know we all we're still hands in hand and we're still

together because at the end of the day that's the only thing that makes it bearable and can make us keep going on so what you can do What you can do.

So, if you who are listening is part of any sort of association, organization that deals with human rights, that deals with disrespect to human rights, disrespect to minorities' rights, and hate... International laws. International laws. If you have any way to... reach international entities, international courts, international groups, any kind of of institution like that, we need your eyes pointing here. We need you looking here because without that, we are kind of behind a curtain and we are really scared about

what can go on behind that curtain. That happened during the dictatorship that might happen again now. And that's not just for us teachers. We really need some protections, we really need some support, international support, but also for indigenous people, we have 900,000 indigenous people living here in Brazil

that right now are with their lives on the balance because of Bolsonaro. We have 53% of our population here in Brazil are of black people who might be being threatened. So we need help, we need you to keep talking about us. If you are a researcher who are interested in, in researching our political situation here, come, come, reach out, talk to us and understand what we are going on, what we're going through, because we will need that, we will need

your eyes here with us, and I think that's it. Ah, we have a recommendation, if you want to know better what's going on here in Brazil. there is a YouTube channel there is a YouTuber here in Brazil called Sabrina Fernandez her YouTube channel is called Thesis 11

from Karl Marx and Philosophical Economic Economic Teases 11 she made a video in English she speaking in English

about our situation so if you want to know a little bit what's going on there is that and we can send you the link via chat here on on Skype yes yes please do okay if you if you want to know what's going on with our movements teachers against party free education you can reach us on Twitter but we tweet mainly we we we we we tweet in in in in Portuguese but DM us in English and yeah we will understand us Google

translates exists for a reason yes and I'm the one who will read your DMs I read in I read and understand English really really come as well bad now I read and understand English better than us than I talk so you'll be okay and You can reach us also on Facebook, Professors Contraultuels en Partido. No, let's leave it as a reference. And Instagram, also the same thing. Okay. We can send you the links again via chat.

Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, email me everything and anything, and I'll put it in the show notes. I'll share that video. I'll keep screaming about it. I have two shows. I was the last episode on my other podcast, I did an entire segment about Brazil. So we're going to keep talking about it for sure.

And, you know, you're talking about this phrase in Brazil about, you know, not letting go of each other's hands. And what that is, is that solidarity. When we're talking, you know, we're no longer Brazilians and Americans. We're human beings. And we share this vision of what the world could be. And in these dark times, we need to reach a. borders, reach across space and time, and grab on to one another's hands and get the voices out of the people who are, you know, in the headlights of fascism or in the headlights of danger

because that's what's essential. That's what keeps us alive. And that's what makes us different from the people who want to drag us back into an age that never really existed, but they want to do so violently. And I know this might seem a little dramatic or over the top or hyperbolic. But from the bottom of my heart, if situation ever becomes so bad in Brazil that you or your friends and family have to have to leave, you have a home here in the U.S., my home, David's home, and the thousands and thousands of people who are listening right now, I guarantee you have a lot more support here than you might even imagine. So from the bottom of my heart, love and solidarity, and keep up the good fight, keep being courageous. And, you know,

our hearts and our minds are with you, 100%. Man, I teared up a little bit now. A little bit. Me too, me too, but fuck. Thanks, Brad. You have no idea how important it is. You're hearing this right now. Thank you.

Thank you. Absolutely. And like I said, I promise I will have both you back on in a few months to catch up on what's going on. It was excellent talking to you. It was incredible Thank you

You guys are amazing Thank you guys Anyway I am I am being very Anyway All right Thanks a lot

Bradch If you need us You just email us And we will answer promptly Absolutely If whoever come to Brazil As a tourist

Please let us know Yes We'll have a coffee. Yeah, and show me the real Brazil, not the tourist facade. Yes. All right. That's right. All right, stay safe down there.

Let's keep in touch. Thank you, dear. Thanks. Thank you so much, this is a great experience. When the earth has been to, I was I, you were you. Oh, for you. Run for me too. When the wall rose and fell and the oceans, I swear,

I'll swear, I'll look for you, right for me too. Come on, sir, just give me an answer. Come on, sir, now I need an answer. I won't be gone with the garrants. Come on, sir, just give me the answer. I fear A future When the club

Come and go To the top of your skull I'm for you What can I do When the war Starting new In a room, I'll come for you.

Come for me too. Come on, sir, just give me the answer. Come on, sir, now I need an answer. My baby's lost to the monster. Come on, sir, just give me the answer. I feel... You'll change Thank you.