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Welcome to the Jungle
A
troubling new era has begun in Brazil with the election on Sunday of
the far-right Jair Bolsonaro as president, writes Pepe Escobar.
By
Pepe Escobar
29
October, 2018
It’s
darkness at the break of (tropical) high noon.
Jean
Baudrillard once defined Brazil as “the chlorophyll of our planet”.
And yet a land vastly associated worldwide with the soft power of
creative joie de vivre has elected a fascist for
president.
Brazil
is a land torn apart. Former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro was elected
with 55.63 percent of votes. Yet a record 31 million votes were ruled
absent or null and void. No less than 46 million Brazilians voted for
the Workers’ Party’s candidate, Fernando Haddad; a professor and
former mayor of Sao Paulo, one of the crucial megalopolises of the
Global South. The key startling fact is that over 76 million
Brazilians did not vote for Bolsonaro.
His
first speech as president exuded the feeling of a trashy jihad by a
fundamentalist sect laced with omnipresent vulgarity and the
exhortation of a God-given dictatorship as the path towards a new
Brazilian Golden Age.
French-Brazilian
sociologist Michael Lowy has described the
Bolsonaro phenomenon as “pathological politics on a large scale”.
His
ascension was facilitated by an unprecedented conjunction of toxic
factors such as the massive social impact of crime in Brazil, leading
to a widespread belief in violent repression as the only solution;
the concerted rejection of the Workers’ Party, catalyzed by
financial capital, rentiers, agribusiness and oligarchic interests;
an evangelical tsunami; a “justice” system historically favoring
the upper classes and embedded in State Department-funded “training”
of judges and prosecutors, including the notorious Sergio Moro, whose
single-minded goal during the alleged anti-corruption Car Wash
investigation was to send Lula to prison; and the absolute aversion
to democracy by vast sectors of the Brazilian ruling classes.
That
is about to coalesce into a radically anti-popular, God-given,
rolling neoliberal shock; paraphrasing Lenin, a case of fascism as
the highest stage of neoliberalism. After all, when a fascist sells a
“free market” agenda, all his sins are forgiven.
Bolsonaro:
Leader of trashy jihad.
It’s
impossible to understand the rise of Bolsonarism without the
background of the extremely sophisticated Hybrid War unleashed on
Brazil by the usual suspects. NSA spying – ranging from the
Petrobras energy giant all the way to then President Dilma Rousseff’s
mobile phone – was known since mid-2013 after Edward Snowden showed
how Brazil was the most spied upon Latin American nation in the
2000’s.
The
Pentagon-supplicant Superior War College in Rio has always been in
favor of a gradual – but surefire – militarization of Brazilian
politics aligned with U.S. national security interests. The
curriculum of top U.S. military academies was uncritically adopted by
the Superior War College.
The
managers of Brazil’s industrial-military-technological complex
largely survived the 1964-1985 dictatorship. They learned everything
about psyops from the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam.
Over the years they evolved their conception of the enemy
within; not only the proverbial “communists”, but also the Left
as a whole as well as the vast masses of dispossessed Brazilians.
This led to the recent situation of generals threatening judges if they ever set Lula free. Bolsonaro’s running mate, the crude Generalito Hamilton Mourao, even threatened a military coup if the ticket did not win. Bolsonaro himself said he would never “accept” defeat.
This
evolving militarization of politics perfectly meshed with
the cartoonish BBBB (Bullet, Beef, Bible, Bank) Brazilian
Congress.
Congress
is virtually controlled by military, police and paramilitary forces;
the powerful agribusiness and mining lobby, with their supreme goal
of totally plundering the Amazon rainforest; evangelical factions;
and banking/financial capital. Compare it with the fact that more
than half of senators and one third of Congress are facing criminal
investigations.
The
Bolsonaro campaign used every trick in the book to flee any
possibility of a TV debate, faithful to the notion that political
dialogue is for suckers, especially when there’s nothing to debate.
After
all, Bolsonaro’s top economic advisor, Chicago Boy Paulo Guedes –
currently under investigation for securities fraud – had already
promised to “cure” Brazil by bearing the usual gifts: privatize
everything; destroy social spending; get rid of all labor laws as
well as the minimum wage; let the beef lobby plunder the Amazon; and
increase the weaponizing of all citizens to uber-NRA levels.
No wonder The Wall Street Journal normalized Bolsonaro as a “conservative populist” and the “Brazilian swamp-drainer”; this fact-free endorsement ignores that Bolsonaro is a lowly politico who has only passed two pieces of legislation in his 27 lackluster years in Congress.
Even
as large misinformed masses progressively became aware of the massive
Bolsonaro campaign manipulative scams on WhatsApp – a tropical
post-Cambridge Analytica saga; and even as Bolsonaro pledged, on the
record, that opponents would have only two options after Sunday’s
elections, jail or exile, that was still not enough to arrest Brazil
from inexorably slouching towards a dystopian, militarized BET
(Banana Evangelical Theocracy).
In
any mature democracy a bunch of businessmen – via black accounting
– financing a multi-tentacle fake news campaign on WhatsApp against
the Workers’ Party and Lula’s candidate Haddad would qualify as a
major scandal.
WhatsApp
is wildly popular in Brazil, much more than Facebook; so it had to be
properly instrumentalized in this Brazilian remix of Cambridge
Analytica-style Hybrid War.
The
tactics were absolutely illegal because they qualified as undeclared
campaign donations as well as corporate donations (forbidden by the
Brazilian Supreme Court since 2015). The Brazilian Federal Police
started an investigation that now is bound to head the same way of
the Saudis investigating themselves on the Pulp Fiction fiasco in
Istanbul.
The
fake news tsunami was managed by the so-called Bolsominions. They are
a hyper-loyal volunteer army, which purges anyone who dares to
question the “Myth” (as the leader is referred to), while
manipulating content 24/7 into memes, viral fake videos and assorted
displays of “Bolso-swarm” ire.
Consider
Washington’s outrage at Russians that may have interfered in U.S.
elections allegedly using the same tactics the U.S. and its comprador
elites used in Brazil.
Crushing
the BRICS (Russian presidency)
On
foreign policy, as far as Washington is concerned, Reichskommissar
Bolsonaro may be very useful on three fronts.
The
first one is geo-economic: to get the lion’s share of the vast
pre-salt reserves for U.S. energy giants.
That
would be the requisite follow-up to the coup de grace against Dilma
Rousseff in 2013, when she approved a law orienting 75 percent of oil
wealth royalties towards education and 25 percent to health care; a
significant U.S.$ 122 billion over 10 years.
The
other two fronts are geopolitical: blowing up the BRICS from the
inside, and getting Brazil to do the dirty work in a Venezuela regime
change ops, thus fulfilling the Beltway obsession on smashing the
Venezuela-Cuba axis.
Using
the pretext of mass immigration from Venezuela to the Brazilian
stretch of the Amazon, Colombia – elevated to the status of key
NATO partner, and egged on by Washington – is bound to count on
Brazilian military support for regime change.
And
then there’s the crucial China story.
China
and Brazil are close BRICS partners. BRICS by now essentially means
RC (Russia and China), much to the disgust of Moscow and Beijing,
which counted on Haddad following in the footsteps of Lula, who was
instrumental in enhancing BRICS geopolitical clout.
That
brings us to a key point of inflexion in the rolling Hybrid War coup,
when the Brazilian military became convinced that Rousseff’s
cabinet was infiltrated by agents of Chinese intel.
Still,
China remains Brazil’s top trade partner – ahead of the U.S.,
with bilateral trade reaching $75 billion last year. In parallel to
being an avid consumer of Brazilian commodities, Beijing has already
invested $124 billion in Brazilian companies and infrastructure
projects since 2003.
Chicago
Boy Guedes has recently met with Chinese diplomats. Bolsonaro is
bound to receive a top Chinese delegation right at the start of his
mandate. On the campaign trail, he hammered that “China is not
buying in Brazil, China is buying Brazil”. Bolsonaro might attempt
to pull a mini-Trump sanction overdrive on China. Yet he must be
aware that the powerful agribusiness lobby has been profiting
immensely from the U.S.-China trade war.
A
mighty cliffhanger is guaranteed to come at the 2019 BRICS summit,
which will take place in Brazil: picture tough guy Bolsonaro face to
face with the real boss, Xi Jinping.
So
what is the Brazilian military really up to? Answer: the Brazilian
“Dependency Doctrine” – which is a true neocolonial mongrel.
On
one level, the Brazilian military leadership is developmentalist,
geared towards territorial integration, well-patrolled borders and
fully disciplined, internal, social and economic “order.” At the
same time they believe this should all be carried out under the
supervision of the “indispensable nation.”
The
military leaders reason that their own country is not knowledgeable
enough to fight organized crime, cyber-security, bio-security, and,
on the economy, to fully master a minimal state coupled with fiscal
reform and austerity. For the bulk of the military elite, private
foreign capital is always benign.
An
inevitable consequence is to see Latin American and African nations
as untermenschen; a reaction against Lula’s and Dilma’s
emphasis on the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and closer
energy and logistical integration with Africa.
Can’t
Rule Out Military Coup
Despite
this there is internal military dissent – which could even open a
possible way towards the removal of Bolsonaro, a mere puppet, to the
benefit of the real thing: a general.
When
the Workers’ Party was in power, the Navy and the Air Force were
quite pleased by strategic projects such as a nuclear submarine, a
supersonic fighter jet and satellites launched by Made in Brazil
rockets. Their reaction remains to be seen in the event Bolsonaro
ditches these techno-breakthroughs for good.
The key question may be whether there is a direct connection between the cream of the crop of Brazilian military academies; the “dependency generals” and their psyops techniques; different evangelical factions; and the post-Cambridge Analytica tactics deployed by the Bolsonaro campaign. Would it be a nebula congregating all these cells, or is it a loose network?
Arguably
the best answer is provided by war anthropologist Piero
Leirner,
who conducted deep research in the Brazilian Armed Forces and told
me, “there’s no previous connection. Bolsonaro is a post-fact.
The only possible connection is between certain campaign traits and
psyops.” Leirner stresses, “Cambridge Analytica and Bannon
represent the infrastructure, but the quality of information, to send
contradictory signals and then an order resolution coming as a third
way, this is military strategy from CIA psyop manuals.”
Brazilian
Military: Keeping an eye on Bolsonaro. (Wikimedia Commons)
There
are cracks though. Leirner sees the arch of disparate forces
supporting Bolsonaro as a “bricolage” which sooner or later will
disintegrate. What next? A sub-Pinochet General?
Why
Bolsonaro is not Trump
In The
Road to Somewhere; The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics,
David Goodhart shows that the driving force behind populism is not
the fascist love of an ultra-nation. It’s anomie – that feeling
of a vague existential threat posed by modernity. That applies to all
forms of Right populism in the West.
Thus
we have the opposition between “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”.
We have “Somewheres” that want their nations’ democracy to be
enjoyed only by the “home” ethnicity, with the national culture
not contaminated by “foreign” influences.
And
we have “Anywheres” who inhabit the roootless postmodern vortex
of multiculturalism and foreign travel for business. These are a
demographic minority – but a majority within political, economic,
educational and professional elites.
This
leads Goodhart to make a crucial distinction between populism and
fascism – ideologically and psychologically.
The
standard legal distinction can be found in German constitutional law.
Right populism is “radical” – thus legal. Fascism is “extreme,”
thus illegal.
Trump
being labeled a “fascist” is false. Bolsonaro in the West has
been labeled “The Tropical Trump.” The fact is Trump is a Right
populist – who happens to deploy a few policies that could even be
characterized as Old Left.
The
record reveals Bolsonaro as a racist, misogynist, homophobic,
weaponizing thug, favoring a white, patriarchal, hierarchical,
hetero-normative and “homogenous” Brazil; an absurdity in a
deeply unequal society still ravaged by the effects of slavery and
where the majority of the population is mixed race. Besides,
historically, fascism is a radical bourgeois Final Solution about
total annihilation of the working class. That makes Bolsonaro an
outright fascist.
Trump
is even mode moderate than Bolsonaro. He does not incite supporters
to literally exterminate his opponents. After all, Trump has to
respect the framework of a republic with long-standing, even if
flawed, democratic institutions.
That
was never the case in the young Brazilian democracy – where a
president may now behave as if human rights are a communist, and UN,
plot. The Brazilian working classes, intellectual elites, social
movements and all minorities have plenty of reasons to fear the New
Order; in Bolsonaro’s own words, “they will be banned from our
motherland.” The criminalization/dehumanization of any opposition
means, literally, that tens of millions of Brazilians are worthless.
Talk
to Nietzsche
The
sophisticated Hybrid War rolling coup in Brazil that started in 2014,
had a point of inflexion in 2016 and culminating in 2018 with
impeaching a president; jailing another; smashing the Right and the
Center-Right; and in a post-politics-on-steroids manner, opening the
path to neo-fascism.
Bolsonaro
though is a – mediocre – black void cipher. He does not have the
political structure, the knowledge, not to mention the intelligence
to have come so far, our of the blue, without a hyper-complex, state
of the art, cross-border intel support system. No wonder he’s a
Steve Bannon darling.
In
contrast, the Left – as in Europe – once again was stuck in
analog mode. No way any progressive front, especially in this case as
it was constituted at the eleventh hour, could possibly combat the
toxic tsunami of cultural war, identity politics and micro-targeted
fake news.
They
lost a major battle. At least they now know this is hardcore, all-out
war. To destroy Lula – the world’s foremost political prisoner –
the Brazilian elites had to destroy Brazil. Still, Nietzsche always
prevails; whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The
vanguard of global resistance against neo-fascism as the higher stage
of neoliberalism has now moved south of the Equator. No pasarán.
Pepe
Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the
correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia
Times. His
latest book is 2030. Follow
him on Facebook.
