Brazilian Paratroopers on Exercise.

What Crime?

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At a time when FARC narcoguerilla fighters invade our schools to teach their genocidal doctrine to Brazilian children, at a time when an organization involved in doing propaganda for guerrillas tries out its power of strategic action, blocking almost every road in the country simultaneously—at a time like this, journalists and public prosecutors gather together in an operation designed to criminalize and abort the investigations that the Army carries out about the illegal activities of the Landless Movement and left-wing NGOs.

If this is not an act of revolutionary disinformation, in the best KGB style, then at least this is a substantial support that is offered, with prodigious unconsciousness and levity, to Fidel Castro’s plan of “reconquering in Latin America what was lost in Eastern Europe.”

The “cultural revolution,” without encountering the the slightest resistance, has easily duped public opinion (after having numbed it for 40 years). So much so that the public now seem to take the allegations against the investigation at face value, without even wondering whether the crime under investigation is not a million times more serious than mere words, however offensive, found in an investigator’s report.

In protesting against the use of the term “adverse force,” Flávio Bierrenbach, a Justice of the Superior Military Court and a man who owed his political career to leftist support, shows that he does not find that propaganda in favor of guerrillas or preparation for guerrilla warfare are adverse to democratic rule.

If the Army consents to “give explanations,” instead of accusing those who tie the hands of the legal forces to give leeway to Communist aggression, then, a new legal order will be introduced in this country overnight, as if by magic; an order in which the preaching of guerrillas will be done under the protection of the state, and to oppose it will be a crime. We fall asleep in the arms of a decaying democracy; we will awaken in the claws of a nascent Communist dictatorship.

A question that I ask myself is whether the newspaper that, in partnership with the public prosecutors, has created this Kafkaesque situation is not aware that, in doing so, it has gone far beyond mere journalistic defamation of the Armed Forces and become an instrument of the revolutionary mutation of the regime. I ask myself this question and I answer it myself: the newspaper cannot be unaware of what it does because, in its issue of July 7, 1993, it reported, in alarming tones, the infiltration of leftist agents in the Federal Police and the Ministry of Justice. What excuse does this newspaper now have for not knowing that it became itself an accomplice of those same people in the doing of what it feared they would do?

Instead of stopping its investigations, intimidated by the media, the Army must carry them further. It must investigate who are these prosecutors who, in a police investigation conducted under a “judicial secrecy” order, invite reporters to violate the order. What connection do these people have with The Brazilian Central Workers’ Union, the Workers’ Party, the Landless Movement ? Did the Landless Movement’s own spy service not cooperate in the operation? Or is it lawful for the Landless Movement to spy on the Army, but not the Army on the Landless Movement? And are those reporters not collaborators, militants, or “fellow travelers” of those same organizations accused in the Army’s report? In short: under the guise of a mere journalistic scandal, is what we are seeing now not a deathblow to neutralize in advance any possibility of national anti-Communist resistance?

Or is it forbidden to ask these questions? Does the simple fact of raising them make me an “adverse force”? Are we already in the new Brazil announced by Fidel Castro in which to oppose Communist action will be a crime?

Two promising reactions suggest that the answer is no. The courageous pronouncement by an army commander on Soldier’s Day shows that the ground forces are not willing to make themselves complicit in the plot hatched against them. And the judicial decision, which ordered the documents seized in Marabá to be returned to the army, shows that the judiciary does not want to be an instrument of its own destruction either.

But—have no doubt about it—the scandal surrounding the Marabá documents may be just the beginning. After all, it was through the scandal industry that Adolf Hitler put the German Armed Forces on its knees and transferred the control of the intelligence service to his party. And if there is an unmistakable trait that defines the mentality of the revolutionary movements of all stripes, it is their ability to try again.

Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute, Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This article was originally published in the Brazilian newspaper Jornal da Tarde on August 30, 2001, and translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.

 

 

 

Making Essential Information Available Again

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One of the essential items of the Gramscian menu that now regulates the Brazilian mental diet is information control, which entails the suppression of all facts that could bring harm to the Communist revolutionary project. It took forty years of “occupation of spaces” (a Gramscian technical term) in newspapers editorial departments, publishing houses, and cultural institutions in general to produce this effect, which today can be considered satisfactorily achieved. Inconvenient news, books, and ideas were so effectively removed from the market that the simple possibility that they may actually exist has already disappeared from popular imagination.

If we mention, for example, the Communist aggression that triggered the conflict in Vietnam, nobody knows what we are talking about, because the silly lie that the United States started the war has taken root in public opinion as an unshakable dogma. If we speak of a “revolutionary strategy,” everyone’s eyes fly open, because they are sure that such a thing does not exist. If we allude to plans, already in full swing, to restore in Latin America the empire that has been lost in Communist Eastern Europe, we are immediately labeled as fantasists and paranoids, even though that goal was proclaimed to the four winds by Fidel Castro in the São Paulo Forum.

Of course, all information that could give credibility to our words has been suppressed from the media, bookstores, and ultimately from national memory. Courses on “Revolutionary War”— a subject whose study used to make the Brazilian Army the last stronghold of an alert consciousness against Communist advance—have been abolished even in staff colleges.

Dozens and dozens of books published in the last decade about the new strategies of the Communist revolution have been placed out of reach of the population by an effective cordon sanitaire around the publishing market and cultural media, which today have been almost completely reduced to the status of auxiliary instruments of the leftist strategy of domination. Acting with stealth, getting around direct confrontation, avoiding explicit preaching, that strategy succeeded so completely in dominating people’s minds that many in the news media and cultural milieux repeat slogans without having the slightest idea that they are actually using Communist watchwords.

There are, of course, conscious collaborators. More than conscious: professional collaborators. The Brazilian Central Workers’ Union, the Workers’ Party, the Landless Movement have on their payroll thousands of media communications professionals. It is an army of reporters and editors larger than that of Globo network, Abril publishing house, and of the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo taken together. They suffice to make those leftist organizations the largest journalistic and editorial industries in the country. But the fact is that they do not get paid to write: they get paid not to write. They are paid to “occupy spaces” in newspapers, book, and magazine publishing companies, blocking, by their mere presence, inconvenient words, and spreading, by their everyday conversation alone, convenient ones. Even in this activist elite, few are aware that their function is that of censors and manipulators. Such is the subtlety of Gramscism, which always relies on the effect of that which is implicit and unstated. It is not even necessary to tell these professionals what to do: imbued with the desired beliefs, placed in decisive positions, they will always go in the expected direction, like water down the drain. And all people who simply repeat what they say have no idea of ​​the overall project with which they are collaborating. So automatic and thoughtless is this mechanism that one of the leading experts in manipulation of intellectuals in the Soviet world, Willi Münzenberg, called it “rabbit breeding:” to get it started, you just need to have a couple. The rest comes by virtue of nature. But what has been planted in the newsrooms, with money received from abroad, by the way, was not a couple of rabbits, but rather some thousands of couples. The multiplier effect is irresistible.

Today, it is in the assuredness, in the pompous and arrogant ease with which people who do not know anything about the subject assure us that Communism is a thing of the past while slavishly repeating Communist slogans (being unaware that they are Communist slogans) lies the best guarantee that the plans announced by Fidel Castro in the São Paulo Forum will be conducted with the foolish complicity of millions of quiet and self-satisfied fools.

There is nothing more urgent than making available information that has been suppressed. Only that can restore the possibility of a realistic debate on issues that are now left to be dealt with by the banal imagination of uneducated dilettanti and the consensual engineering of those strategists who manipulate them.

This book is destined to become a memorable milestone in the recovery of this possibility. Here, for the first time, broad enough documentation has been gathered to demonstrate the inescapably conspiratorial, revolutionary, and Communist character of an organization that, in the eyes of the uninformed, still passes off as the embodiment par excellence of a left that is renewed, democratic, and purified of all contamination with the totalitarian past.

The courage, patience, and determination with which its author, Adolpho J. Paula Couto, gathered and arranged all these fulminating pieces of evidence of the leftist perfidy will make him forever target of hatred of the current masters of morals. I think anything more honorable could be said of a good man.

 

Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This article was translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota.