English

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

O Globo, June 16, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

Every time the leftist want to impose a new item of their program, they say it is the only way to cure certain maladies. Invariably, when the proposition comes out victorious, the maladies it proposed to eliminate become worse. The normal thing to do would be, in such circumstances, to lay the responsibility of the disaster on the left. But this never happens, for at once the original legitimizing argument disappears of the repertoire, and is substituted by a new system of allegations, which celebrates failure as success or as a historical necessity which could not be avoided.

No one will understand a thing of the history of the 20th century – nor of this beginning of the 21st – if they do not know this retroactive justification mechanism through which they make the people work for non-declared goals, which would scandalize them if they knew them and that can only be reached through the indirect way of the carrot hanging in front of the ass’ nose.

Some examples will make this clearer.

1) When the Communist Party released its program for the destruction of the “bourgeois” family institutions, comsubstantiating what would latter be the “sexual liberation”, its main allegation, elaborated by dr. Wilhelm Reich, was that homosexuality, sado-masochism, fetishism etc. were fruit of the repressive patriarchal education. Eliminated the cause, this deviant conducts would tend to disappear of the social scene. Well, the last residues of patriarchal values were suppressed from western education between the seventies and the eighties, and what did we see right afterwards? The dissemination, on an apocalyptical scale, of the same conducts they promised to eliminate.  Obtained the result, these conducts started to be celebrated as healthy, honorable and meritorious, and all criticism to them is now frowned upon – sometimes even under penalty of law – as an intolerable abuse and attack against human rights.

2) When the international left started to fight for the legalization of abortion, one of their main arguments was that the great number of abortions was caused by the prohibition, which facilitated the action of charlatans, crooks and all kinds of non-trained individuals. The legalization, it was promised, would force the abortion to be performed in medically acceptable conditions, therefore lowering the number of cases. What was the result? In the first year, the number of abortions in the USA went from 100 thousand to 1 million, and it never stopped going up to this day. At least 30 million babies were already sacrificed, at the same time that the apologists of legalization, instead of admitting the fallacy of their initial argument, celebrate the fact, working to put aside and incriminate any criticism to the new state of things.

3) When the North-American left invented the policy of quotas and indemnification known as “affirmative action”, they alleged it would diminish crime in the black community. After the new policy was made official, the number of crimes committed by black men against white men arose significantly, according to statistics from the FBI. What did the apostles of this “affirmative action” do then? Did they recognize that to reinforce the feeling of  racial identity was to stimulate prejudices and racial conflicts? Nah. They celebrated the raise in hostilities as a progress of democracy.

4) When – wishing to destroy the North-American tradition that considered education rather a duty of the community, of the churches and of the families than  of the State – the North-American left demanded the  bureaucratization of teaching, one of its prime arguments was that juvenile delinquency could only be controlled with an educational action from the State. With Jimmy Carter, in 1980, the USA had for the first time a Ministry of  Education and uniform teaching programs. Two decades later, the delinquency among children and adolescents is not only growing much more than before, but also adopted as headquarters the public schools, turned today into danger zones, to the point where, in the beginning of the year, the Mayor’s office in New York was privatizing its schools because of the impossibility of controlling the violence inside them. In answer to that, what did the left do? Did it admit failure? No. It fights for the statal  uniformity of teaching in a world level.

5) In Brazil, the only way of lowering violence in the rural areas, said the leftists, was to give land and money to MST (The Landless Movement). Very well, the land was given – it was the greatest distribution of land in all human history, with lots of money behind it. Violence has not lessened: it increased a lot. Does the left confess its mistake? No. It organizes violence and celebrates it as the conquering of a new historical stage in the fight for  socialism.

The examples could be multiplied e “ad infinitum” – and notice I deliberately avoided mentioning extreme cases, which happened inside the socialist countries themselves, such as the collectivization of agriculture in URSS, the Great Step Ahead and the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cuban Revolution, etc. keeping to facts that happened in the capitalist world.

The saving promise transfigures into disaster and followed by the change in legitimizing discourse was, in sum, the constant and essential “modus agendi” of the international left along a century, and we do not see any sign that any leftist mentor has any conscience problems with that. Au contraire, all of them continue to promise the solution of the maladies , at the same time they have ready, in their drawers, the future legitimization of the enlarged maladies. They promise to lower drug consumption through liberalization, to control corruption through  “participative budgeting”, to repress delinquency through the unarming of the civilians or through the Leninist “alternative law”, which incriminates rather the social standing of the defendant than his criminal act. They know perfectly well where this all takes us – but they also know that no one would support them if they announced out loud what they really desire.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Época, June 16, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

The stronger communism becomes in Brazil, less can we
talk about it

Never have so many and such good books about communism been published in the world as in these years that followed the dismantling of the URSS. The reason is obvious: the opening, even if partial, of the Files of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, a never-ending treasure for the scholars. It is not amazing that, the barrier of state secret being broken, so many investigators throw themselves into these registers of a dark past to decipher what certainly was one of the greatest mysteries of Human History: the voluntary genuflection of millions of cultured men before the altar of a grotesque, assassin and intrinsically absurd doctrine.

All the paradoxes, all the contradictions of the human soul press and fuse together in the composition of this mystery of iniquity; to understand it so we do not have to relive it is the number one duty of whomever has assimilated Socrates’ lesson, according to which “a life that has not been examined is not worthy of being lived”.

But the amazing thing is not the international wave of curiosity that turned Moscow into historian’s Mecca. It’s the absolute lack of interest that, in Brazil, opposes itself to the divulging of these discoveries.

Faster than thought, in the beginning of the nineties, communism was decreed a thing of the past in Brazil. Whoever had any interest in reminding its crimes and atrocities became suspect of Macarthist fanaticism, or even of monomaniac obsession worthy of psychiatric care. To forget, to silence – or rather, at best, dismiss the matter with half a dozen clichés accepted as the definitive explanation – became a natural law to which only the abnormal could escape from.

But I say that abnormal is a mind capable of judging mere coincidence the fact that this decade of forgetfulness was also the one of greatest expansion of communist influence over the destinies of the country.

I am not referring only to the electoral growth of the left. I refer to the conquest of the monopoly of political preaching in schools (where today the hypothesis of an anticommunist discourse is today inconceivable) and to the consolidation of certain acquired moral rights that are ostensibly denied to the rest of the population.

An openly violent communist movement is accepted today as a partner of the State, without the need even of legal registration. Communist politicians can associate to drug-dealing organizations without ever being investigated. Communist groups can block at will the freeways without anyone seeing in this the obvious exercise in insurrection training it is.

Ostensibly supported by the government, the communists put themselves above the law and besides that detain the almost complete monopoly of the means to investigate, denounce, judge, and condemn. Even before they nominally occupy governmental power, they already are a special class, an omnipotent, arrogant, and intolerant nomenklatura. As consequence, the simple act of writing some articles against them became an insult, a threat, and an unbearable abuse.

This is the reason of the lack of interest I referred to. There is a direct connection of cause and effect between the wordless prohibition of looking at the past and the lightning speed with which it repeats itself before millions of ignorant eyes that, not having known it, cannot recognize it. Communism is “out of fashion” as the clothes that move out of the catwalks to enter general daily use. It was simply needed to keep it out of the horizon of national consciousness so that, without being bothered by inquisitive eyes, it could grow on the shadow of the general indifference of its victims.

That is exactly why I interpret as opposite the inhibiting counsel that recommend that I speak less of communism to look less crazy or fanatic. Before the great tragedy that prepares itself, only a morbidly intimidated observer would abstain from touching the subject not to give the impression he is seeing things. And, honestly, it is not worth it to let yourself go crazy for mere obsession of looking normal.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

O Globo, June 9, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

Since the fall of the URSS, our national left has made efforts day and night to warn our nationalists — especially those from the Armed Forces — against the danger of the unipolar world, and to persuade them to become leftist for the sake of patriotism. There are people that make a living of this, and there are people — even in the Armed Forces — who believe in them. But only a perfect idiot does not realize that the dominant world power that imposes on us the economic policies against which the left fights is the same one that imposes on us the politically correct concepts, abortion, feminism, ecology and all the cultural models that constitute the program of the left itself.

It is much less possible for an average sane mind to avoid noticing that the multimillionaire foundations and multinational companies that subsidize the diffusion of these new models of conduct are the same that, on the other hand, support the implementation of the New World Order and of the economic policies that the apostles of these models claim to execrate.

And whomever notices these two things cannot but reach the conclusion that the unipolar world is even more unipolar than the spokesmen from the left would wish to be known. It is so unipolar that from it come not only the proposals the left hates, but also the ones it loves and personifies. And from it, equally, comes the money used to subsidize the implementation of one thing and the other.

The left, in sum, utilizes a stereotyped vocabulary from the time of bipolarity to deceive the nationalists, disorient them and subjugate them to the global strategy, attracting their attacks to a false target so that they do not realize where the real one is. The essential component of this vocabulary is the old identification of “North-American” with  “conservative-capitalist”, of which we derive, automatically, the confusion of nationalism with statism, the Welfare State and, last not least, Socialism.

It is with the aim of legitimizing this brutal farce that the current discourse of men from the left against the IMF and the New World Order presents these two phenomena as if they were the quintessence of conservative-capitalism and not precisely the opposite — as history demonstrates — just pure socialist inventions destined to strangle, together with economic freedom, political freedom in the world. The IMF and the New World Order are chapters in the history of an overwhelming centralization that sacrifices all in the altar of bureaucratic control and planned economy, idols a thousand times denounced, whose mystical powers the socialist propaganda promises will heal all maladies. Of the first, its own inventor, Lord Keynes, said it was “essentially a socialist conception”. As to the second, it was from beginning to end the creation of the famous Londoner “think tank” of gradualist socialism that, after passing through several denominations, ended up becoming notorious as the Fabian Society. It was one of its most illustrious members, the writer H. G. Wells, who delineated, in 1928, the entire program of the New World Order and published it in his book  “Open Conspiracy”.

“Open” is poetic license. So is “conspiracy”. The Fabian socialism never got involved in attacks, gatherings, or manifestations, much less in basement conspiracies. All it did was to prepare intellectuals to be placed in high-level assessorial positions from which they could, discreetly but without any secrecy, inoculate socialist ideas inside the minds of government leaders. This scheme was invented by the theoretician Graham Wallas, who, five decades in advance, formulated the Gramscian strategy of the “occupation of spaces” and of  “passive revolution” (and to think that Gramsci even poses as a genius!). The magnitude of the effects of this things contrasts singularly with the circumspection of the means. Practically all the great turns of modern economy towards the centralizing and socializing trends of the welfare State were planned by Fabian socialists. Just to give you an idea of the reach of their influence, the government plans from three of the most powerful — and the most state-centralizing — among the presidents of the USA, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson, were directly copied from works of Fabian authors, and even adopted their titles: Roosevelt’s “New Deal” comes from a Stuart Chase book, Kennedy’s “New Frontier” from a book by Henry Wallace, and Johnson’s “Great Society” from a book by Graham Wallas himself.

Regardless of their soft style, rather social-democratic than communist, the Fabian always considered the URSS a valued ally in their fight against conservative-capitalism. Deep down, it was much more than this: deserters from KGB informed that at least one of the books by Sidney Webb, the most famous president of the Fabian Society, was not written by him, but came already written from the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Relations. It is understandable. Much earlier than Gramsci, the URSS had also discovered the virtues of reformist gradualism that, from above and without hardness, socializes the world faster than thousands of Che Guevaras could — these being the authentic scapegoats of the only socialism that always ends victorious.

The supreme advantage of the discreet method is that, when the ingenious state-centralizing plans from unknown socialist intellectuals from the people at last weigh heavily in the pockets of the masses with the immeasurable cost of their foolishness, there always are in the market radical left intellectuals who, ignoring or pretending to ignore all the work of their Fabian partners, lay all the blame of the disaster on…  conservative capitalism!

Let not thy left hand see what thy right hand does, teaches the Bible. Socialism has its own demoniacal version of this teaching: let not thy noisy masses see what thy silent allies do  — and thus, not knowing who oppresses them, they will detonate their fury on the scapegoat that is most convenient to the strategy.

All that is left to know is whether our nationalists — specially the ones from the Armed Forces — will consent to reduce themselves to playing the part of manipulated masses.