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.
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