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Olavo de Carvalho
Época, September 22, 2001

Read some of the facts that misinformation tries to cover up

While center-stage in Brazil features a procession of professional liars and amateur idiots alerting against George W. Bush’s “paranoia,” as if the September attacks were delirious images dreamed up by the right to justify the mistreatment of defenseless leftists, the analyses of people studying the affairs are kept far from society, in turn unable to understand the events that will shape their lives, in possibly tragic ways, in the coming years.

One of specialists is Colonel Stanislav Lunev, a name completely unknown in this part of the world. A former member of Russia’s Army administration, he is the highest ranking spy to desert the Soviet military, the GRU, in history. Today he is a security consultant for the U.S. government.

At the beginning of the 1990s, he alerted the CIA that Russia, while dismantling the socialist economic system, still maintained its so-called “special organs” intact – especially the GRU – and that these would continue to develop meticulous plans to wage war against the U.S. He noted that “this war could begin with a diversionary operation, some type of terrorist attack.”

Today, following the attacks, he says: “I have no doubt that Russia is behind these terrorist groups, financing them and supplying them.” It’s true that Moscow has declared its solidarity with the U.S., but it also did so during the Gulf War, even while sending technicians and equipment to aid Saddam Hussein. If not for a secret Russian alliance with the Afghanis, how could one explain that this nation, after losing 1 million of its people in combat with Soviet troops and surviving only thanks to American support, could forget its animosity against the aggressor and turn blind rage against the benefactor?

More importantly, Afghani military commander Gulbaddin Hekmatiyar has always been involved in the Soviet incentive scheme and taken advantage of international drug trafficking, as told to American authorities in 1968 by General Jan Sejna, who abandoned his post as spokesman for the party’s Central Committee in the Czech Ministry of Defense. Sejna provided direct testimony to the deals between Soviets and Chinese, since the 1950s, for flooding the U.S. with cocaine and using drugs to finance the Communist revolution in Latin America, which is today in control of Colombia.

In light of this, Colonel Lunev warns that now the escalation of anti-American violence has barely begun and only an energetic and determined response can stop the plans for full-blown war, as stated Ulema-i-Afghanistan, the assembly of Afghani religious leaders, who urge nothing less than the “total elimination of American through force.” This assembly has no authority to declare a jihad for all Muslims, as it is doing, because that declaration can only be approved by an umma, an international community of educated Muslims, according to Koranic law, and the majority of these leaders are staunchly against a war of extermination. But, as I describe below, so-called “Islamic fundamentalists” are stomping on the fundamentals of Islam: their ideology is not that of Islam, it’s rather a type of “theology of liberation,” an abusive and macabre politicization of the Koran’s message. For this reason, they have no scruples in allying with the assassins of their fellow followers against the one country that, in a moment of agony, extended a saving hand to Muslim fighters.

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, September 22, 2001

“The greatest danger of a bomb
is the explosion of stupidity that it causes.”

(Octave Mirbeau, 1850-1917)

Following the September attacks, a wave of indignation has spontaneously washed over the hearts of Brazilian toward international terrorism. Since then, local academic leaders have dedicated themselves, with all their means and skills, to turn it against the victim. So vast is the mobilization of brain power to that end that, if the same energy were used on useful tasks, Brazil would break its long tradition of having won no prices in scientific research and, for a change, win them all. It’s frightening to see our society, always aghast at the disappearance of public money into the pockets of lawmakers, happily pay taxes to keep an even more useless and perverse caste in place than politicians. More useless, perverse, and expensive. Brazil has more university professors to students per capita than any other country: one for each eight students. One chief for eight little Indians. It might be said that we’re the most educated country on Earth. But, with some much honorable exceptions, each one of those chiefs has his own objectives, a secret agenda unrelated to teaching, culture, and civilization. Pretending to teach, each one merely attempts to promote a Socialist revolution that would make him, Mr. Little Joe, the Minister of State, an officer of the secret police, or at least a commissary of the people. Being an intellectual in this country is to conduct a Gramscian revolution, which is to put intellectuals in power. Being an academic intellectual is to do so while receiving public money. When one of these doctors, with an air of scientific superior impartiality, force into the reader mind the version that the attacks were the work of “extreme right-wing” Yankee forces, and not fanatics goaded by leftist international media, what he is doing is treating you, my friend, like Pavlov’s dog, a circus bear, a worthless little beast designed to dance and wag its little tail for the master, without being able or willing to think. He is lying and manipulating at the service of psychological warfare, which in this or all similar attacks serves to support terrorists and widen the political effects of their actions. He is not an analyst, a student, a professor: rather a celebrated terrorist, who is assigned to the misinformation section for being too cowardly, too old, or too smart to risk his life in truculent enterprises.

In other parts of the world, a counterfeiter would think twice before trying to pass off such a blatantly phony bill. In the world, there are people even in academic caste who know that extreme right militants in the U.S., including doomsday prophets, white supremacists and “tutti quanti”, number no more than 4,000, according to the FBI; that all of their steps are monitored by the police and, in the bottom line, represent the most insignificant political force on the planet; and who know that their only relevance is thanks to the leftist media, which uses them as a scarecrow… In the world, there are people who witnessed the fearful and boasted neo-Nazi movement in Germany dissolve alongside the Communist government in East Berlin that funded it… In the world, there are people who, in the face of the incriminating discourse of the “extreme right,” would soon realize the dubiousness of the term, used to fuse into a semantic cloud, from one side, those criminals accused by the establishment and, from the other, the very establishment: closet anarchists, Nazis and anti-Semites, conspiring with American capitalists and Jews in order to make Jews agree to blow themselves up in the pure goal of creating a wave of anti-left hatred. The image is so childish that a right-minded academic agitator would hardly dare to suggest it to a mature public. But in Brazil, we not only lend an ear to these people, we pay them to reduce us to mental childhood.

Equally powerful in making us complete imbeciles, while slightly less showy, is the general appeal of Fidel Castro’s argument regarding the attacks, which are evil per se, but morally justified as reactions to desperation amid the suffocating omnipresence of American power.

What omnipresence is that? No countries are currently under American occupation, while Lhasa, Tibet, has fewer Tibetans than Chinese soldiers; and in the very country that harbors Bin Laden, it was the Russians and not the Americans who killed a million Afghanis, halting the massacre only when American support tipped the scales toward the Muslims.

And what desperation is that, which turns against the most generous of benefactors? Excluding the events in Kuwait and Granada, the U.S. has for decades, manipulated by the UN, agreed to take part in foreign interventions only when they are intended to help Communists seize power or maintain it. This was what happened, for example, in the Communist aggressions in Angola and Goa. As in Katanga, where UN troops, subsidized and lauded by the U.S. government, laid waste to a rebel province only to integrate it into the bloody dictatorship of Patrice Lumumba, young son of KGB. As in South Africa today, where the UN and the New York establishment, underneath the anti-racist rhetoric, conceal the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by Communists against Boer farmers. And, when this type of policy leads to a massacre of colossal proportion on par with Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 people were slaughtered by hordes intoxicated by equalitarian ideology, not only the State Department and the UN Security Council kept quiet, but the U.S. media made it possible to rebuff the ideologic sense od the events, and reduce it to a “war among savages,” which was actually the logical and foreseeable effect of a long revolutionary indoctrination. With nearly obsessive regularity, since President Roosevelt ignored the Chinese revolution with the dazzling excuse that Mao Tse-Tung was not a Communist but a “Christian agrarian reformer,” and until the suicidal concessions were made in light of Chinese arms build-up by a president elected with Chinese campaign funds, U.S. politics cyclically and increasingly revisits this perfidious and masochistic conduct: support the Communists through nebulous operations which, in a culmination of cynicism or lunacy, are presented to the public as anti-Communist. For the Communists, the benefit is two-fold. On one hand, they receive resources: money, weapons, support from international organizations. On the other, each new event creates a new realistic pretext for the press to speak against the sordid investments in Yankee anti-Communist spending. How could any leftist be “desperate” in such a comfortable situation?

Olavo de Carvalho
Época, September 15, 2001

Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they’re part of the crime.

“We will no longer distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor them,” said President George W. Bush following the September attacks.

There are four ways to harbor a terrorist group. There are the states that arm or shelter them, the false organisms that disguise them, the legal or illegal fortunes that subsidize them, and last but not least the “opinion makers” who support their armed aggression through acts of misinformation and psychological warfare.

The first three forms of collaboration require direct contact with the criminals, but the fourth by definition has a expansive and evanescent nature. A small team may conceive the verbal commands and phony information, but there is no other way the messages can be dispersed  but through a network of informal helpers, wherein the most outlying contributors, seemingly unsuspecting individuals, with no knowledge of the decision makers, merely echo the orders without question what their sources are. From directors to militants, and from militants to “travelling companions,” and on to mere simpletons, the formulas handed down from the commander spread in concentric circles in a controlled, almost quantifiable progression. Organizing and activating this type of operation is a well-developed technique. All totalitarian regimes and parties strive to install training centers for these kind of professionals, especially since the 1930s when Soviet networks of misinformation were established by Karl Radek and grew strongly among Western intellectuals, thanks to the evil genius of Willi Munzenberg.

Those most directly involved in providing protection for the criminals behind the September attacks are surely far from Brazil, in Asia, Europe, and even the U.S. But the network of misinformation and psychological warfare would not possibly go on without reaching here.

Before the last brick of the World Trade Center touched the ground, “specialists” and “international analysts,” all notoriously sympathetic or tied to leftist movements, rushed to the television cameras or to the newspapers to:

1) Soften the horrible impression of a monstrous crime, and legitimize it as the “natural consequence” of the militarism and willfulness of the Bush administration.

2) Highlight the vulnerability of the U.S., above all, and contrast that with the image of the mighty U.S. economy.

The first is misinformation, and the second is psychological warfare.

On one hand, the U.S. has done nothing in the past decade but withdraw its military presence and disarm its forces, reducing stocks of atomic weapons to a fifth of the Russian and Chinese reserves and ceding increasingly larger shares of its sovereignty to the UN. It’s true that George W. Bush is reacting against that. But a complex operation like the September attacks could not have been improvised in the months following his arrival to office. The attack was not a response to Bush’s fervent attitudes, rather it was planned to take advantage of the suicidal complacency of the Clinton administration. And it worked.

On the other hand, there is no defense system that could possibly prevent the type of terrorist attack that shook New York and Washington. If they happened in the U.S. and not in China, in Cuba or in Iraq, that’s simply because only dictatorial regimes train fanatics for this type of kamikaze operation. Therefore  this case does not expose any special vulnerability. Any praise to this vulnerability is a lie designed to discredit the U.S., painting it as a rich and weak country, in order to transform, in the soul of the peoples, admiration into envy and rancor and fear into aggressive anger.

These two opinions, broadcast in the Brazilian media with exemplary uniformity, are not interpretations or explanations of an act of war: they are part of it. The individuals behind them do not distinguish, morally or maybe even politically, from the planners and agents of this murderous operation.