English

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Época, June 2, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

For each homicide they denounce, they were accomplices of other 49

The Brazilians that got guerrilla training in Cuba have not only become the forefront of Cuban strategy abroad, but also, obviously, supporters of Fidel Castro’s regime inside Cuba itself. Received there with honors, kept with money from the State, they had very clear functions and activities in the Fidelian power scheme, some as officers of military intelligence, others as symbols for the legitimization and figures for the propaganda of the regime, a role that many still play with cynical devotion.

As any other helper and beneficiary of a dictatorship, they have made themselves accomplices of the crimes committed by it, in the same sense and the very same proportion they accuse of partnership in the crimes of the national dictatorship any individual, here or abroad, that in any way supported the military regime or received favors from it. Morally the only difference there can be between one partnership and the other resides in the magnitude of the crimes practiced by the respective dictatorships. But this comparison is not at all favorable to those that hold today the monopoly of the right to accuse.

Brazil in the dictatorial period did not have more than two thousand political prisoners. Cuba had a hundred thousand. For each left-wing militant arrested by the DOI-Codi, by Dops, in Ilha Grande, 50 other Cubans were thrown in the political prisons of Havana, with the solicitous political and moral complicity of these Brazilians. And what about the dead? The Brazilian dictatorship made 300 victims; the Cuban 17 thousand. For each Brazilian communist killed by the military, 50 Cuban dissidents died.

The difference is not only in quantity. It affects the nature itself of the crimes. Seventeen thousand deaths in a population circa 14 times smaller than Brazil’s can already be considered genocide, the methodic and systematic obliteration of a group, of a class. Genocide with a detail a great deal more pernicious: in Cuba, since the escape of Batista, there was no internal armed resistance. The Brazilian dictatorship killed guerrillas and terrorists. Cuba, with the support of the same guerrillas and terrorists, killed unarmed citizens, peaceful persons that represented no danger at all, most of them for frivolous reasons, many times because of a simple search for a better life.

If it can be considered justifiable for them to denominate “offspring of dictatorship” anyone who collaborated with the military regime, with the same severity and fairness the ones that were beneficiaries of Cuban help must be called  “offspring of genocide”.

But 17 thousand were only the ones who died inside Cuban territory. I am not counting those that armed troops – instructed and financed by the government in Havana, co-sisters of the Brazilian guerrilla – killed in Peru, in Nicaragua, in Colombia. They are 80 thousand in total: for each communist killed in Brazil, their comrades killed more than 49 non-communists in the continent. And they continue to kill. Their sufferings, besides being well and fully compensated through indemnification, were already avenged 49 times over. With what kind of moral authority, therefore, do these people raise their accusing fingers against these “offspring of dictatorship”? Regardless of the intrinsic power of these facts and numbers, the leftist malice will try to neutralize them, alleging that they come out of the mouth of an anticommunist. But that would be to invert cause and effect. I do not think this way because I am anticommunist: I became anticommunist because I became aware of these things.

Even so, I kept these things to myself for years on end, being afraid of jeopardizing people that one day I called “comrades”. If I can be accused of anything, then it is of this craven listlessness of which I finally rid myself, but that made me tarry overlong in telling the truth.  Many, knowing all this as well as I did, still live to hide it under word games, not to protect others, but to protect themselves and the advantages they enjoy today, be it as government officials, be it as opposition leaders. This is all their morals are made of: repressed guilt, transmuted into an insatiable hunger for retaliation and compensation.

Of course that the crimes of the military dictatorship must be denounced, investigated, and punished – but not by this kind of people. Not by this scum.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO

Época, May 19, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

They are trying to lighten up the bad impression of the involvement with drugs

The arrest of Luiz Fernando “Beira-Mar”da Costa in an encampment of Colombian guerrillas, with proof of exchange of drugs for guns, was maybe the most fearsome thing that has happened to the national Left since the death of Carlos Lamarca and Carlos Marighella (the two most famous left-wing Brazilian terrorists). Beira-Mar is a living file of the dangerous liaisons between bandits and the revolution, and because of that some journalists – always so anxious to search in the attics and basements for things to destroy the career of right-wing politicians – are so circumspect and evasive regarding the drug dealer. If he knew anything capable of incriminating Antonio Carlos Magalhães, Paulo Maluf, or any other top right wing politician, the reporters would be on top of him day and night. Since what he knows is against the left, there are in the press people that even protest against the highlight the news of his arrest is getting from in some newspapers and magazines.

Others are not content in simply suppressing the news: they move on to active misinformation. According to a note reproduced in several publications last week, the representative of the United Nations’ Program for the International Control of Drugs, Klaus Nyholm, would have said that the Farc do not act as drug dealers, limiting themselves to charge a tax  “for all the cocaine that leaves Colombian territory”, and that the paramilitary troops of the extreme right, these are the ones that have direct involvement with drug dealing, from which they obtain from US$ 200 million to US$ 500 million per year.

The first part of this statement is true, but Nyholm made it long ago, for it was already used as a citation in a Noam Chomsky article from June 2000. With the falsified date, it serves now as a buffer against the impact of the evidence found with Beira-Mar. But who will this fool? Even if they did not participate directly in the drug dealing, the Farc would be even more criminal than the drug dealers, since they have dominated and reduced them to the condition of subjects, becoming the higher leaders and beneficiaries of this illicit commerce.

As to the second part of the statement, Nyholm simply could not have made it. No one that did not intend to denounce himself as a liar or a mental retard would affirm that the Farc receive a tax “from all cocaine that comes out of Colombia” only to announce, right in the next sentence, that a considerable part of this whole comes from their greatest enemy. Because then the poor fellow would have to explain if the extreme right pays tax to the communist guerrilla or if they have invented a way to avoid paying their dues.

Only the communist hunger to lie can make a journalist so blind to the puerile absurdity of what he invents.  However, it would be imprudent to explain through the radical ravenousness of isolated individuals the leftist bias that deforms a good part of the circulating news. The situation reflects a rational, conscious strategy, bent on the conquest of the media since the sixties, when the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, theoretician of the “occupation of spaces”, entered Brazil. In 1993, CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores – Central Workers Union) already admitted to have in its payroll nothing less than 800 journalists – enough to produce seven editions per week of a weekly magazine like Época! Add to that the ones that work for PT, for MST and the hundreds of millionaire left-wing Non-Governmental Organizations (without anything comparable, even remotely, counterbalancing this phenomenon on the side of the right) – and you will see the class of the journalists widely subjugated to the interests of a political faction that is not famous by the transparency either of its plans to pull down the state, or of the financial means they will use to do that.

Regardless of their allegations of “ethics”, many left-wing journalists are going too far in the practice of the Leninist rule that the ends justify the means. Some of them are not even aware that what they are doing is evil and dishonest. They simply identify the right with evil and feel that lying against it is no sin. But “lying in defense of the truth” was the numbing pretext that led many good men to collaborate with the genocide of a hundred million victims.

OLAVO DE CARVALHO
Época, April 14, 2001

Translated by Assunção Medeiros

Now it is scientific and meticulous

Comparing the censorship from the time of the military government with the Gramscian system of information control that the left has installed in Brazil today is like comparing the management of a neighborhood deli with the scientific administration of a multinational company.

The military censorship, from the beginning, presented itself ostensibly as such and did not make any effort to hide its presence. Everyone knew that verses from Camoens’ Os Lusíadas and cake recipes meant suppressed news. If a newspaper, not to jeopardize itself commercially, covered up the gaps with innocuous news, it did that because it wanted to. No one forced that. The censorship recognized itself as an abnormal and provisory phenomenon, with no long-term ambition to manipulate the conscience of the people.

Second, its reach, at least in the beginning, was more of a police-military nature than political. There was at the time the urban guerrilla, with kidnappings and robberies happening all over the place, and the order was to keep the media from becoming propaganda instrument of the guerrillas. Today we know that they were few and poorly armed, but at the time this was not the impression that they themselves disseminated: if they tried to terrify the government to induce it to feel cornered by a civil war, they did it being perfectly aware that the reaction of any government in theses circumstances would be to implement a state of exception, that would include the control of information. Their reasoning, as usual in the communist strategy, was two-edged: if the government did not react, it would risk being beaten militarily; if it did react, it could be afterwards demoralized by decades of cries against censorship. The immense tear-historiographic production of left-wing academics that even today impose to national conscience a falsified vision of that time was already planned since then: it is the political recycling of the military defeat, the continuation of guerrilla through other means.

It is true that later the cuts became bigger, suppressing political news with no relation to the guerrilla. But, by their own random and aimless characteristics, many of these cuts were the exact opposite of a planned operation: they were the general madness disseminated among inapt and terrified civil servants that, without precise instructions, desperately wanted to show effectiveness. Thirdly, the censorship acted exclusively over the popular media, without interfering in the circulation of books (only a few were forbidden, because they taught the techniques of urban guerrilla) and in academic publications. That is why the time presented today as having the most rigid state control of thought was the time of the greatest blooming of left-wing editorial in all of our History – many times with the financial help of the government itself – and the time of the consolidation of left-wing hegemony in the academic and cultural environment.

Limited objectives, renouncing to long-term influence, awkward execution through uncouth civil servants, almost total abstention from deep interference in the superior sphere of the ideas and culture. Such are the marks that characterized military censorship, to which would be a demagogic exaggeration to give the dimensions of a true manipulation of conscience.

In contrast, the left-wing control of information today aims essentially long term objectives, has at its service the best-trained academic professionals, acts mainly from the top, through the control of ideas and of historical visions that are susceptible of shaping the future, and, above all, is meticulous in its zeal of covering its tracks. The specter of facts and ideas whose circulation it blocks is immensely bigger than the one covered by military censorship, to the point of hiding from the Brazilian student population practically all the production of the conservative thinkers of the last decades and whole chapters of national History. For instance, the participation of Cuba in the direction of our guerrillas, denied for 20 years as a perfid right-wing lie, has now been proven, under general protest, by the courageous study of Denise Rollemberg, Cuban Support to Armed Conflict in Brazil (Apoio de Cuba À Luta Armada no Brasil, Rio, Mauad, 2001).