Re: <nettime> elections in Brazil / media

Thanks for the Current Affairs article, Andre, and for your commentary, Brian. I subscribe to CA, like it and this particular article. Your post led me to share it with a friend in Rio. Here is his response:

The article about Brazil is right about the dangers that we are facing. What it s not accurate is that Bolsonaro’s campaign is "improvised and informal". It is incredibly organized and scary. Steve Bannon is the inspiration (and in fact he is connected with one of Bolsonaro’s sons).

Bolsonaro is bad in arguing, so he avoids the public debates. Basically, the campaign circulates through closed whatsapp groups stirring up particular ghosts for each public: sexual education for children and communism for evangelicals; invasion of private property for rural producers circles and urban merchants; corruption for all of them, communism for all of them (yes, it looks that we are back in the 70s, with communism in its new form, Venezuela). Fake news on an umprecedented scale.

But these ploys work because the economic establishment and the "democratic" right worked to destabilize the Workers Party government since the last election in 2014. By denouncing corruption, they managed to take the PT out of government, but they did not manage to create an alternative candidate for the presidency. The fascist alternative (Bolsonaro) became attractive to the establishment (economic, judicial and the traditional media) when an alliance was made with a neoliberal economist to take care of economic interests (Paulo Guedes).

I think we are not going to change the result. Fascist times are coming. The most corrupt parties are behind Bolsonaro, as are the paramilitary groups that control vast areas of Rio de Janeiro (as militias, parallel groups composed of policemen and firefighters and other people who, with the excuse of combating criminality and drug dealers, operate as protection rackets. And the media, justice system and parties that could not change the hegemony of the Workers Party in an election let Bolsonaro take power in order to smash the PT. We are experiencing the reaction against the steps that we took before.

And the Museu Nacional is in ashes… It is a symbol of the times that are coming.

Via Keith

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 12:19 AM Andre Mesquita <andrelmesquita@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Brian for all insights. My friend Frederico Freitas wrote this article about the causes and the context of this tragedy: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-brazilian-nostalgia-for-dictatorship

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