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
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.
Palestinian
Center for Human Rights
International
Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom
Defense for Children
Breaking the Silence
BRASIL
AOS FATOS: As
declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
