Terrorisms and Globalisms

The Brazilian military has not caught up with the new era in international politics and examines the politics of today with outdated categories.

For more than a decade leftist intellectuals infiltrated at Brazil’s National War College and staff colleges around the country have sought to sell to officers of our armed forces the theory that, with the fall of USSR, Communism is over, the world has become unipolar, and the one and only pole, with its growing ambition of world dominance, is the virtual enemy against which strategic plans of national defense should be turned.

Cowed by persistent campaigns of journalistic slander that accuse them of the worst crimes, by the creation of a Ministry of Defense that excludes them from ministerial meetings, by budget cuts that reduce the armed forces to impotence, by the proliferation of environmentalist and pro-Brazilian Indians NGOs that exclude ever larger areas of Amazonian territory from military surveillance, and so on and so forth, many officers tend to accept that theory, which allows them to glimpse, behind so many humiliations they have suffered, the figure of a culprit: American imperialism.

Starting from these assumptions, they see the reaction of the Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks as another step of the American imperialist advance that puts the world in danger and, naturally, Brazil as well. To give more credibility to that “conspiracy theory,” the latest editorial of Ombro a Ombro, a newspaper of military affairs distributed to thousands of Brazilian officers, even rehashes an old cliché of the anti-American campaign from the time of the Vietnam war, dividing Washington’s ruling elite into “doves,” who want to submit American belligerence to the control of the UN, and “hawks,” who do not accept to be kept on a rein and want to rule the world. The conclusion drawn from this is obvious: national defense should ally with “doves,” giving support to multinational forces that, from Cuba to China and from the European Economic Community and to Mr. Yasser Arafat, want to tear off the wings of the “hawks.” The conclusion is so consistent with the assumptions that it almost automatically imposes itself. There is only one problem: the assumptions are false.

(1) There is no unipolar world. There is, on the one hand, the alliance between American and Israel and, on the other, the bloc of leftist globalism, entrenched in the UN. From a military point of view, the globalists’ fortresses are China—involved in an increasing nuclear preparation on a global war scale—, Russia (that has never ceased to sneakily help terrorists all over the world), a few heavily armed Arab countries, and, last but not least, the worldwide network of narcoterrorist organizations; economically, their stronghold is the European Economic Community, without whose support Arafat’s assaults against Israel would have already ceased for being out of gas; from a political and publicity point of view, the big international leftist media (including the main American newspapers) that trash George W. Bush on a daily basis.

(2) The United States are not a mirror-image of the Soviet Union; they are not a right-wing totalitarian state capable of formulating long-term strategic plans which continue to be faithfully followed down the generations, but rather a democracy, whose foreign policy changes from water to wine after each new presidential election.

(3) All the imperialistic pressures that would have been behind the humiliation of our Armed Forces were applied during the government of the most innocent of the “doves,” Mr. Bill Clinton, and not during George W. Bush (presumably a “hawk”) administration.

(4) At that same time that Mr. Clinton put all those pressures on us and on many other countries he also cut his own country’s military active duty personnel, budget, combat war crafts, and nuclear resources, blocked the investigation into Arab terrorist infiltration, seriously weakened the CIA and FBI, and, in short, did exactly the opposite of what would be logically expected in an imperialistic advance. What is more: elected with the support of Chinese funds for his presidential campaign, he also vetoed investigations into Chinese nuclear espionage in Los Alamos and moved heaven and earth to transfer the control of the Panama Canal, a strategic zone, to China. Finally, after 9/11, he joined in the international left’s outcry that blamed the victims for the terrorist attacks and demanded that the United States, instead of exercising its right of defense, consented in becoming a mere auxiliary force of United Nations. What kind of imperialist Yankee is he? Therefore, seen as signs of Washington’s imperial ambition, the anti-Brazilian pressures from the Clinton administration make no sense at all. Seen as maneuvers intended to turn Brazil against the United States and to strengthen the other pole of global dominance, they make all the sense in the world.

(5) The media campaigns against our armed forces—in parallel with the beatification of terrorists of the 1970s—have always come from leftist journalists who, in terms of international politics, side with that second pole, against the United States.

(6) Our military have not only been materially and morally disarmed. They have been intellectually disarmed: the suppression of courses in “revolutionary war” from the curricula of staff colleges has left two generations of army officers completely unprepared to take action in the context of continental revolutionary violence, today more intense and widespread than in the 1970s. The then Brazilian president is today an enthusiastic supporter of a presidential candidate who, at the meetings of the São Paulo Forum, from 1990 to 2001, signed successive solidarity pacts with Latin-American terrorist organizations.

(7) Most of the NGOs that infest the Amazon rainforest, removing it from the control of the armed forces, have no roots in the United States, but rather in European countries and the United Nations, that is to say: they belong to the other imperialistic pole, that of anti-American globalism (which has the support of Mr. Clinton and all the other doves of the American aviary).

Based on those observations, one can only conclude that our armed forces, and especially the new generations of officers, are the target of a vast and persistent disinformation and manipulation effort, intended to turn them into docile instruments of organized anti-Americanism, of the continental revolution, and of the leftist globalist pole. Today, flattering promises made by four left-wing presidential candidates announce, at the end of two decades of humiliation, the restoration of the dignity of our armed forces. But can there be dignity in someone who sells himself so cheaply to those who did so much to lower his price?