On the 7th October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro, former paratrooper captain in the Brazilian Army and publicly evowed supporter of military dictatorship, torture and murder, was elected President of Brazil.
Bolsonaro, a supposed Christian, and hater of gays, communists, leftists, minorities (who form a majority of Brazil’s population) , environmentalists, and any one else who disagrees with his puerile view of the world, vows to create a Brazil where ‘Brazil (is) Above Everything, God Above Everyone’.
As Pepe Escobar notes; The record reveals Bolsonaro as a racist, misogynist, homophobic, weaponizing thug, favoring a white, patriarchal, hierarchical, hetero-normative and “homogenous” Brazil; an absurdity in a deeply unequal society still ravaged by the effects of slavery and where the majority of the population is mixed race.
Bolsonaro demonstrably has very limited intelligence and psychopathic instincts, and yet a majority of voters enthusiastically supported his election as president. How could that be? Fearful of urban violence , political and systemic corruption and economic failure, they voted for a man who, despite all the evidence to the contrary in his career history, promised economic stability and growth , safety and an end to corruption. Blaming the lack of those things on the reds and all who opposed him, seemed to make perfect sense to a population flooded with media messaging that seemed to confirm those views.
America’s “New Scientist’ has recently stated the sad truth that “Antagonism isn’t absolutely good or bad. Daniel Nettle speculated that all personality traits evolved to have trade-offs, and that’s why variation exists in personality. From an evolutionary perspective, agreeableness has both benefits (attention to mental states of others; harmonious interpersonal relationships, valued coalitional partnerships) as well as costs (subject to social cheating and exploitation; failure to maximize selfish advantage). Nevertheless, because of the existence of such wide variation in this trait, highly antagonistic leaders can arouse and influence wide swaths of people who score high in this trait through their rhetoric and messaging”.
The irony seems lost on his supporters that Bolsonaro as a true fascist ( a supporter of extremist violence and corporate profit above all things ), is so deeply imbedded in military corruption and has such an extraordinarily narrow fundamentalist view of the world that Brazil could well be headed for a nightmare world…
And yet, as FAIR notes, the Western financial and conservative media is waxing enthusiastically about his election as a a great step forward for the free market; and as Pepe Escobar notes, a nail in the coffin of the independent BRICS global financial market structure.
Bolsonaro’s supreme lack of intellectual capacity will give him the capacity to destroy – once and for all – the lifeblood of this planet ; the Amazonian rainforests that are truly the lungs of this earth, and whose indigenous guardians he has pledged to destroy .
As the Guarani said recently: “If indigenous peoples become extinct and dead, the lives of all are threatened, for we are the guardians of nature. Without forest, without water, without rivers, there is no life, there is no way for any Brazilian to survive. We resisted 518 years ago, we fight in victory and defeat, our land is our mother. As long as the sun still shines, and while there is still fresh air under the shade of a tree, while there is still a river to bathe in, we will fight.”
Links
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/29/welcome-to-the-jungle/
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/jair-bolsonaro-quotes-brazil-election
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/brazil-president-bolsonaro-destroy-the-amazon-2018-10?r=US&IR=T
New Antarctica 