MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Thou shalt not Kill Democracy

Let’s not mince words: Wednesday’s storming of the United States Capitol building was the work of fascism. That it didn’t and couldn’t succeed, and that Donald Trump is days from being out of the White House, should not blind us to the reality of larger social forces at work.

The Orange Menace possibly finished off his personal political prospects with his pathetic attempt at a putsch — although I suspect the shameless toadying of Republicans seeking to capture his base for future elections will continue — I think Trump’s base isn’t going anywhere. Neither are Trump’s fans among the police.

Suddenly, the United States became one of the Banana Republics its "elite" despises so much. It could be laughable, if it weren't so terryfing. Mai dire mai, as the saying goes…

This brazen attempt at a coup confirms what has always been evident but which some refrained from affirming. Trump is not simply an exponent of a ‘new fascism’ with Bolsonaro and others. He is Fascist pure and simple. A person who supposedly denounces fake news, he and his cronies are past masters at creating it. Sling mud as some of it will stick and give you the pretext to flout any semblance of democratic practice.

You can then use thuggery and whip your lumpen supporters and worshippers into a frenzy and have them engage in a frontal attack on Capitol Hill. The one thing that was lacking was the wearing of black shirts as I suppose this colour is detested by the white supremacists in their ranks. This stage managed attack, reminiscent of the Fascist march on Rome in 1922, assumes the state in the US is gelatinous. Thankfully it is not. Despite its historical reliance on brutal force at home and definitely abroad – Latin America and the Monroe Doctrine - there is still some vestige of democratic posturing and procedure on the home front. I would like to think a successful ‘war of manouvre’ (frontal attack on the state) is still a trifle wishful thinking in that place, though I am not that sure.

However, there were clear signs that Fascism is alive and well in the USA and Trump embraces it. He sees himself as a (pathetic) version of Caesar, who can flout all forms of democratic semblance to assume the single personification of the State, often referred to as Caesarism or Bonapartism. He might then take a leaf out of the history books to demand a plebiscite to secure that. Now this is no real surprise as he is the culmination of years of authoritarian practices spawned globally by the state he represented. This is a state that rides roughshod over democratic aspirations of people abroad and home, a state which engineers coups, direct, through Operation Condor (Chile, Argentina, Brasil) and pseudo legalistic ones (see the White coup against Dilma Roussef in Brasil) and which spawns massive inequalities at home.

Ask Blacks, Latinas/os and Indigenous if the process is democratic for them..or the early immigrants from Spain and Italy shot at by forces hired by the bosses invoking the anarchist bogey. Now it takes one person to exacerbate these tendencies. In my view if the USA is serious about its democratic credentials, he should be impeached and arrested for sedition. I suspect however that Trump continues to excite and arouse so much ‘White Supremacist’ tendencies with his speeches and actions against non-whites that he is not one to be suppressed easily. Who is to say this attempted coup was not abetted by some whose duty it is to prevent it? Am I playing dumb in posing this question? Imagine if this were a BLM attack against the racist state. They have a million more reasons to attack a system that has suppressed Black lives in the US for years. All hell would have broken loose and the area around Capitol Hill would be strewn with corpses as if we were watching the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.

Had this been Renaissance Florence there would have been calls to have Trump hanged in one of his towers as with Jacopo dei Pazzi by the Palleschi inside his family chapel at Santa Croce, following the failed coup against the Medici. Luckily we have come a long way since then and I would not wish this on anyone. But impeachment and charges of sedition are not out of order. As singer and activist Graham Nash, of CSN/CSNY fame, once said, well before Trump was elected President, this is a dangerous man. He is more than that. Beside being a swaggering and ranting bully, he remains a Fascist threat to any semblance of democracy. A sinister straw in the wind.

Under Trump’s aegis in the U.S. and Bolsonaro’s in Brasil, the rot, until then deeply entrenched, has taken over, and there is no turning back.

In both American countries, the genie is out of the bottle now; unfortunately, Bolsonaro’s or Trump’s most ardent supporters are not about to recede back into the darkness from whence they came. Neither are they right now in the US about to become a “silent majority”; not right away, and perhaps not ever.

I’m afraid what happened in Washington last week will happen in Brasília in a couple of years. We must be prepared to react, in Brasil, with the Army (what an irony!). As I’m also afraid that the police may be as lenient in Brasília as it was in Washington DC.

In the United States, they are free from the demented ogre, for the time being. But it is even less likely that more than a few of his “followers” will change their stripes. Their political scene, just like ours in Brasil, is too fractured for that; and American society (just like Brazilian is becoming) is too inegalitarian, too venal and self-seeking, and too much in the thrall of pernicious Evangelical grip to pull itself back up.

Therefore, the task ahead is not to welcome the errant back into the fold, but to contain the damage they do.

That this was coming in the States and is coming in Brasil has been clear for some time, though many chose not to see it…

Just as it would now be premature to speculate about the extent to which the covid-19 virus will change daily life forever, it is too early to tell how broad and pervasive the harm that Trump & Bolsonaro and their underlings have done to the ambient social and political scene in the United States in Brasil and elsewhere will turn out to be.

There are, after all, no reliable points of reference. How could there be? After all, Trumpism is not much like any of the devils we know — say “Reaganism,” say, or “Clintonism,” or "Gaullism" or “Lulismo” It is not a comprehensive or partial ideology, though it can include ideological positions when Trump and Bolsonaro believe that they have something to gain by doing so. And although a personality cult has coalesced around Trump and Bolsonaro themselves, Trumpism and Bolsomionismo have little to do with Trump’s or Bolsonaro’s thinking, such as it may be (as far as I know, they are both mad narcissists devoided of empathy and humanistic principles), or with their reptilian and unlovable personalities.

Few, if any, of their followers admire them – what is there to admire? Few of them even like the men; and I believe that they plainly despise them. They may be dense as can be, and Trump and Bolsonaro are anything but subtle, but even so, a few of them must surely realize that. No matter, though; they consider these “leaders” their tribune, and forgive all the rest.

Thus, for bringing Trumpism into the world and causing it to flourish, Trump the man has functioned more as a catalyst than an inspiration. As well as Bolsonaro.

A catalyst for what? It is hard to say because there is no word in English (or, I’d wager, in any language) that directly captures what Trumpism and Bolsominionismo are. The phenomenon is sui generis, in a class by itself. We therefore need a definition longer than a word or two.

I would suggest this: that Trumpism and Bolsonimionismo are a mean-spirited, profoundly toxic political outlook and attitude, born of insecurity and grievance, that echoes readily perceivable aspects of Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s pathetic way of dealing with the world. I would say too that, despite its importance in real world politics, Trumpism and Bolsominionism are ultimately of greater clinical than political interest.

I would also venture that Trumpism mass appeal and therefore its virulence might diminish in the months ahead, just as the covid-19 pandemic will. However, a year from now and perhaps also many years on, there will still be millions of Americans keeping the faith. In Brasil, too, I’m afraid, after Bolsonaro is gone for good in two years time.

Like that damn virus, Trumpism and Bolsominionismo will remain a peril in the U.S. and in Brasil for a long time to come. Alas.

For I believe that the two biggest, richeest and most influential countries of America have another thing in common – the most selfish and uncultured middle and upper classes of the world. Americans and Brazilians alike accumulate university degrees in order to make tons of money and are hungry for social media "information"; however, they lack empathy; and in the process of self-satisfaction, they allow themselves to be lured by sound bites and tend to neglect to acquire knowledge and to be wise.

And without empathy, knowledge and widsom, humanity,civilization itself - in the full sense of the term - can rapidly collapse. Hence, let us beware. We must not lower our guard. Ever.

PALESTINA

Daily Life under Occupation

As Trump makes his move to stay in power at any cost, the media has been abuzz these days with headline s such as “How Israel Became a World Leader in Vaccinating Against Covid-19.” While the U.S. has vaccinated only 1.67 percent of its population against COVID-19 so far, Israel has already given the vaccine to more than 16 percent of its citizens. In explaining this, the media cites Israel’s highly digitized and “socialized” health care system, along with the fact that the country is small but wealthy (allowing Israel to pay $28 a dose, compared to the $19.50 the U.S. is paying per shot for a Pfizer vaccine). But beyond the headlines celebrating Israel’s vaccination rates, lies a far darker story about health inequality.

Israel has a population of around 9 million. About 20 percent of Israel’s population are Palestinian citizens of Israel. These people can vote in elections, have representation in the Knesset, and are being vaccinated against COVID-19. But, there are another around 5 million Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, without rights, and like the rest of the world, are suffering from the pandemic.

Since 1967, Israel’s settler population has ballooned to more than 500,000, with Israeli settler regional councils controlling 40 percent of West Bank land. Despite the U.S.-facilitated normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco that occurred during the latter half of 2020, and were supposed to have halted Israel’s annexing of the West Bank, 2020 has seen the “highest” number of settlement unit approvals since the settlement watchdog group Peace Now began tracking the figures in 2012.

Despite the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas supposedly being the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is really in charge. Israel controls the borders, currency, central bank and even collects taxes on behalf of the PA. It maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted. Even in areas like Ramallah, which are supposedly under the complete control of the PA, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, to close streets and shops, to burst into homes, and to make warrantless military arrests.

Israel’s distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is far from the country’s only system of inequality. Israeli elections do not include the approximately 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. While the Palestinians in East Jerusalem can vote in municipal elections, they cannot cast ballots in national elections, such as the one slated to take place in March 2021(the fourth in two years).

Perhaps Israel’s most flagrant demonstration of having two sets of laws for two groups of people is its court system in the West Bank. While Israeli settlers, residing there illegally according to international law, are subject to Israeli civilian law, their Palestinian neighbors live under Israeli military law. This makes them subject to statutes such as Military Order 101, which even bans peaceful protest.

According to the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, the PA is solely responsible for the health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. However, those deals were part of the vision that contemplated a more complete peace agreement being signed within five years. Almost three decades later, this larger peace agreement still hasn’t happened and Israel has entrenched its settlement enterprise occupation while flouting international law and dodging its moral, legal, and humanitarian obligations as an occupying power. Providing the COVID-19 vaccine to Palestinians is one of these obligations.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza direly need the COVID-19 vaccine. As of January 7, there were 145,252 active cases and 1,536 COVID deaths in the Palestinian territories. The infection and death rates are climbing dangerously. The situation in Gaza is particularly worrisome. Gaza suffers from electricity cuts that last for 12 hours a day. Thanks to Israel’s air, land, and sea siege, as well as multiple military assaults on the crowded enclave, there is a severe shortage of medicine and medical equipment in Gaza along with significant poverty and unemployment. Quarantining and maintaining sanitation in Gaza is extremely difficult.

A World Health Organization-led partnership has set-up the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility, which is aimed at assisting impoverished countries, and “has pledged to vaccinate 20 percent of Palestinians,” according to the Guardian. But Covax vaccines don’t yet have the necessary “‘emergency use’ approval by the WHO,” the Guardian article added. Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the WHO’s office for the occupied Palestinian territory, who was quoted in the Guardian article, said the vaccines that are part of the Covax scheme aren’t likely to be available for distribution in the Palestinian territories until “early to mid-2021.” According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, the territories have been in a financialcrisis, leaving them next to no funds to purchase vaccine doses. Even when they were able to find the money, the vaccines they attempted to purchase from Russia could not be procured as Russia informed the PA that they did not have enough doses to sell, according to an article by NPR.

In the first week of 2021, the Palestinian Authority began to inquire if Israel would help them obtain the vaccine. So far, Israeli officials have said that they might offer whatever they have leftover to the West Bank and Gaza after vaccinating Israeli citizens and East Jerusalem Palestinians. If that isn’t medical apartheid, I don’t know what is.

Daily Life under Occupation