Evil or Stupid?

Evil or Stupid?

English Version — Text in Portuguese in Next Post

Questioned in the debate on television about censorship and a free press, the candidate for the Brazilian presidency—and, in her earlier career, terrorist—Dilma Roussef affirmed that she supported freedom of speech, but she thought it useful to maintain debates about the issue.

What!?  Useful to debate freedom of speech!?  Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Brazilian Constitution!  So we may conclude that Roussef’s Stalinist indoctrination is still operative.

Concurrently, Brazilian President Lula’s advisor, Franklin Martins—a hack who used to work in media companies—said that, after the elections, “good surprises” would be forthcoming for the media.

Evil or Stupid I

Created by Fox News—controlled by Rupert Murdoch, Australian naturalized American, with a political posture of the far right (the correct term could well be “neo-Nazi”)—a “debate” is underway about what Fox News and its followers call a Terror Mosque, to be built in the neighborhood of the two towers of the World Trade Center which was destroyed on 11th September 2001.  It doesn’t matter that the project is not a mosque but rather a cultural center which will include a place where Moslems may pray.  It doesn’t matter that it’s two blocks away from the location of the towers of the World Trade Center.

In the demagogic shouts transmitted by Fox News, there are complaints about the financing of the mosque coming from a Saudi “terrorist” organization whose leader is not named.  And the attack on freedom of speech in the U.S. would be tragic if it weren’t so funny: the leader of the financier of the Terror Mosque has invested US$3 billion in the News Corporation, owner of Fox News!

Jon Stewart, in his inimitable The Daily Show on August 23rd, presented an exposition of this absurd situation.  His “commentators” analyze the motives which drove Fox News to attack a project financed by a shareholder of News Corp. itself.  The commentator wearing a shirt labeled Team Stupid argues that it was stupidity; the commentator with a Team Evil shirt alleges it was evildoing.  Anyone who watches the program concludes it’s the evildoing of Fox News which has seen how stupid its viewers are.

Veja http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-23-2010/the-parent-company-trap

Evil or Stupid II

Who brings a person who calls him or herself “democratic” to seek to limit freedom of speech?  To distrust a free press?  There are at least two sets of motives:

• He Knows He’s Right.  One who has the most absolute certainty that he’s right “knows“ that his policies and opinions are correct.  Logically: anyone who opposes such policies and opinions is mistaken.  Obviously: the best thing is implementation of the policies of He Knows He’s Right.  Therefore: since such policies are correct, it will be better to eliminate opposition to them.  Conclusion: it’s better to impose censorship so that those in error cannot be heard.  It’s the history of dictatorships.

• Bad Guys.  One who’s in command in a society enjoys the benefits of being at the top of the pyramid.  Leadership provides wealth, prestige and the good life.  (If you have doubts about such benefits, ask Brazilian President Lula and his family.  Or Fidel Castro and his family.  Or Robert Mugabe and other African dictators and their families with whom Lula, counseled by the thought-limited Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim—and he in turn counseled brilliantly by Marco Aurélio Garcia, stereotype of the fossilized Stalinist—likes to associate.)  Obviously: once control has been obtained, keep it.  Conclusion: it’s better to impose censorship so opposition to the leadership cannot be heard.  It’s the history of dictatorships.

History broadly shows how the They Know They’re Rights change rapidly into Bad Guys.  The evildoers exploit the stupidity of the voters.  There’s no reason to think it’s different in Brazil.  On the contrary.

Evil or Stupid III

We know the history of free elections won by pretenders to dictatorships.  Adolf Hitler stands out in the last century.  On more recent times, in Latin America, we have Hugo Chávez, responsible for ruining Venezuela.  It will be interesting to see the results of the coming Venezuelan elections, since Chávez’ popularity—product of the economic and social catastrophe in the country, with electric Power scarce and violence at levels comparable to those of Iraq—indicates defeat at the polls.  Will anyone be surprised if the elections are fraudulent?

In Brazil the urns are 100% electronic, with no system of documentation and no reliable verification.  We must trust in the good will of the administrators of the electoral system that the results will not be manipulated.  We have just now received still more news of the violation of the privacy of persons of the opposition party PSDB by persons of the very well computerized—like the electoral system—Federal Tax Authority.  The unscrupulous and illegal acts were committed by persons tied to the currently governing Workers Party.  Will anyone be surprised if Roussef wins in the first round of voting?

Evil or Stupid IV

The excellent text by Mac Margolis, published on 29th August 2010 in the daily newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, follows below.

O Estado de São Paulo — International

The New Clothing of the Authoritarian Left

by Mac Margolis

Sunday, 29 August 2010Inspired by Cuba, Latin American leaders ignore the conquests of democracy and attack the free press, under the pretext of “democratization of the means of communication.”

To the winner, a trip to Havana.  Who can explain why, at a time of the greatest level of democracy in Latin America, authoritarian pressures in the name of “the people” still exist in rulers’ palaces?  With the exception of the small island of Cuba, always Cuba, constitutional democracy is the official political regime from the Rio Grande to Patagonia.  Or, better said, 33 of the 34 nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean subscribe, in principal and by law, to free elections, independent judiciaries and parliaments, and liberty of individuals and the press.  In practice, however, intimidation and repression of speech run wild and the victim is, almost always, the very society which the official power is entrusted to protect.

Abuses exist, even in the most vibrant democracies, but recent events in Latin America have been exemplary.  Courts give orders even in the intimacy of the family, as in the case of the Brazilian law against slapping children (will there be plea bargaining in domestic disputes?).  Governments cook the data to hide problems, as in the distortion of the Argentine inflation of the prohibition of Venezuelan newspapers to publish photographs about the surge in criminality.

And everywhere the media is obliged to defend itself against the excesses of control of society, which is censorship in the plumage of the politically correct (“democratization of information”) with the endorsement of practically all the parties of the left.  For some, it’s the authoritarian rancidity inherited from the times of military dictatorships.  For others, an unhappy cultural habit dating from the paternalism of colonial times.  The worst cases sprout from the most unstable flank of the region — from the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and his Bolivarian Alliance, for which only the right of applause is free.  But the authoritarian reflex is not the privilege only of 21st century socialism.  It prospers wherever the ruler currently entrusted with power imagines himself to be its owner and the sheriff confuses his pistol with the law.  The practice seems to be tailored for the folk dance of the Brazilian political campaign, if the political folk dance had not also been prohibited last week as well.

It’s already worrisome that the excesses of power exist.  What’s really surprising is the official and party condescension for the neighbors which the acts of aggressions provoke.  At heart, societies’ control of the media entrusts the freedom of speech, bedrock clause of republican existence, to political groupings, to corporations and to non-governmental organizations which no one elected.  Since they dared to criticize the heavy taxation imposed on agricultural exports by the Argentina government in 2008, the newspapers Clarin and La Nación have suffered restrictions, unofficial censorship and legal bombardment with the objective of decimating their profit and their power.  In Venezuela, Chávez extinguished, one by one, the signals of radio and television which didn’t follow the Bolivarian script.

However, with the exception of Colombia and Chile, labeled neoliberal and puppets of the gringos, few Latin American voices have been raised against fencing in of the press.  The endorsement of societal patrol of the media was unanimous in the last Forum of São Paulo, the highest level grouping of leftist parties and movements in Latin America which met in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the month.

Explicit or not, a non-aggression pact seems to govern the diplomacy of the countries of Latin America.  This it’s not fashionable to call attention to violations of human rights, to censorship or to persecution of political opposition in sister nations.  It’s better to offer the “conciliatory nature of the Brazilian people” rather than “shaking fingers in front of others noses”, as the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, wrote recently.  “It’s bad strategy to isolate someone you want to convince or dissuade.”

It remains to be seen if the results of this conciliatory DNA will be positive.  The Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, dismissed the proposal of the Brazilian government to mediate the dispute between Colombia and Venezuela which the Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had minimized as a personal disagreement [between former Colombian President Uribe and Chávez].  As to the recent liberation of more than 30 Cuban political prisoners, the hands of the Vatican and the Spanish government, and the courage of the Ladies in White — the daughters, mothers and grandmothers of the politically imprisoned Cubans who defied the repression on the island —were in on the act, but as far as anyone knows not even a Brazilian finger was involved.

Fidel’s fault?  The Cuban Revolution may have entered into a fatal crisis, but its appeal is lasting.  If for a good part of the world ‘Che’ Guevara became a T-shirt and Fidel Castro a Gray ghost, the pair continue sacred in many countries in the Americas.  The left never stopped seeing the island as a species of “Ideological Disneyland”, where fantasies of the beyond survive in a balloon.  Cuba may no longer be the model for politicians of the Americas, but it still enjoys official indulgence and the pilgrimage of devotees, which blow the smoke of the alien revolution.

For those who feel perplexed by this silent consent as to the reductions freedom, the new book by the Argentine political scientist Claudia Hilb is a find.  Silêncio, Cuba (published by Paz e Terra) is a small joy which in 100 pages destroys the idea that tyranny and suffocation of criticism and the blind obedience which took over the Cuban Revolution were behavior detours or unfortunate sacrifices in the long and glorious fight for social equality.  On the contrary, they were a fundamental condition for construction of that radical equality, the work of a revolution which did not recognize differences or rights beyond those it granted.  Silence also speaks.