No peace, no total war... just permanent friction war
It is not easy to interpret what is happening in Brazil. The right sees the 2016 coup as the end of the bloodless civil war that pacified the country, putting it on the right path, that is, the destruction of the Getulist legacy with the triumphant rise of modernizing neoliberalism. The left, on the other hand, is right to say that it is not possible to pacify the country by donating the oil wealth to foreigners, impoverishing the population and leaving it without rights totally at the mercy of an economic system whose main characteristic is the contempt for human rights .
Under Lula's command, Brazil became the 5th largest economy on the planet. The neoliberal coup took our country to the 14th position among the richest countries. Except for the generals whose salaries have been raised and the bankers who profit more when the state sinks in debt and when they speculate in dollars against the weakness of the Brazilian currency, no one can say that Brazil has really gotten better or richer. Peace is not possible when people are hungry.
Below I transcribe excerpts from three books that, in one way or another, help to understand what is happening in my country:
“The military operation carried out [in Brazil to overthrow Dilma Rousseff and bring Bolsonaro to power] involved three connected elements:
1: the camouflage. Nobody noticed that there were military personnel acting to provoke a set of dissonances. First, this action took place within the Armed Forces themselves, then it was synchronized with other powers, especially the Judiciary; finally entered the population, camouflaged within the electoral campaign.
2: the indirect approach. Like the indirect approach strategy, the military 'operated' through other agents in society, ranging from popular movements to the so-called market, but also, and mainly, Justice. This point must be highlighted: from the moment a hybrid war begins, a series of agents act without having a direct connection with the decision-making center. Hybrid warfare works as a device that triggers behaviors such as schismogenesis. This, in its symmetrical form, triggers a horizontal escalation of the conflict: it increases its spectrum, involves more and more people and groups. Thus, the entire strategy was based on the idea that the fractures were produced by the 'other side' and by 'reversals' of roles, which in military terms are false flag operations, and this pattern was disseminated by various social agents.
3: encryption. So many semiotic bombs were fired that two very important notions were lost in the political process: the perception of who is an ally and who is an enemy; and the notions of time and space: there is no idea when processes were triggered, they do not coincide with events; no one knows what the front is and what the rear is, the entire conflict is decentralized.” (O Brasil no espectro de uma guerra híbrida, Piero C. Leirner, editora Alameda, São Paulo, 2020, p. 260/261)
“… The neoliberal State no longer wants (or can no longer) give the same answers as the liberal-social State regarding the guarantee of security, as this would generate an increase in social expenditure, which it refuses. It also turns against the liberal State and its 'security pact' for a deliberately insecure policy on the social plane. This shift in market logic against protective devices has engendered, for decades, social ills that have been sufficiently documented. In the absence of strengthening the welfare State and equalizing social conditions, which would conflict with its own logic, this State has at its disposal only the generalization of the police and penal response. But it is this contradiction of neoliberal States: they must continue to protect the population while deteriorating their security by reducing the social protections they provide. This double restriction leads to the development of a specific violence of the neoliberal State, which must be analyzed outside the generalities of 'legitimate violence'. To apprehend the moment we live in, we cannot, therefore, limit ourselves to Foucault's analysis of the 'security pact'. Rather, we need to turn to what, notably in the course The punitive society given by Foucault (2013[2015]) at the Collège de France in 1972-1973, gave war a privileged role in the examination of state Strategies. It is not just exceptional events that must be faced within the framework of the 'security pact' between the State and the population: there is a permanent and polymorphic enemy that must be fought.” (A escolha da guerra civil – Uma outra história do neoliberalismo, Pierre Sauvêtre, Christian Laval, Haud Guéguen e Pierre Dardot, editora Elefante, São Paulo, 2021, p. 248/249)
“...the idea of an authentic human being, that is, capable of expressing their individual personality as their most important moral duty, is a real threat to a system that preaches that money and property ownership are the most important human values. The great feat of financial capitalism, as the driving force behind neoliberalism and as an ideological hoax, was to appropriate precisely this concept of radical and liberating happiness on its own terms. This obviously did not happen overnight. It was a relentless ideological warfare until individual creativity, emancipation, and originality were redesigned in terms of finance capital. 'Creativity' becomes a resource for managing people and conflicts within the company, no longer an adventure of self-knowledge. 'Originality' becomes a managerial resource defined in advance for profit purposes. 'Emancipation' turns into the farce that everyone is now their own entrepreneur. Thus, the domain of finance capital is not something that opposes individuals from the outside, but, on the contrary, part of the inside, of the soul and the deepest aspirations of the individual and social imagination. That's what explains its incredible underhanded and insidious effectiveness. This exit from power masquerading as emancipation and freedom was excellent for neoliberalism. In reality, the attack on economic regulation in the name of the free movement of capital and the globalization of finance capital has only created an incredible accumulation of resources restricted to the very rich and their 'functional elite', the now famous 1% of society. This is because, even with a frontal attack on unions and a well-organized attack on the pluralist public sphere – through the direct purchase of the corporate press so that it becomes a neoliberal vehicle – society still remained strangely attached to ideas taken as outdated by the radical neoliberalism, such as liberty, equality and fraternity.
The solution was to cover the neoliberal discourse with the aura of struggles for emancipation.” (A guerra contra o Brasil, Jessé Souza, Estação Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2020, p. 133/134)
Piero C. Leirner detailed how the political, economic, journalistic and cultural war was carried out to overthrow Dilma Rousseff and impose neoliberalism: dissimulation, decentralization and multiplication of attacks. Pierre Sauvêtre, Christian Laval, Haud Guéguen and Pierre Dardot explained the main contradiction of the neoliberal state: the duty to protect the population that is programmatically attacked. Jessé Souza, in turn, exposes the “modus operandi” of neoliberal ideology: reappropriation and transformation of positive characteristics of individualism to make the individual start fighting his own interests.
The three approaches are complementary. However, there is more that can be said. In the ancient world and generally until World War II, there was a clear distinction between peace and war. The conflict between the US and the USSR blurred this distinction, as the two nuclear powers were neither at peace nor at war. The doctrine of mutually assured nuclear destruction created a situation of permanent friction, which provoked eruptions of military and/or political violence in less developed countries.
Hannah Arendt was right when she said that, in that context, war could not be a continuation of politics by other means. After all, in the event of a nuclear conflict between the US and the USSR, both contenders and several of their satellites would be totally devastated, leaving no conditions for the possibility of political space existing or functioning.
The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of the doctrine of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Tensions between the nuclear powers eased and became less visible, but they did not cease to exist. The world is at peace, but the US continues to harass China and Russia. Threatened, these two countries continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals. France and England can no longer disguise that they compete fiercely (and even unethically) to sell their weapons to potential buyers.
We must not forget that the emergence of new nuclear powers (Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) has complicated the picture. The Cold War concept of “mutually assured nuclear destruction” did not cease to exist. It has only been redefined, as a regional nuclear war between India and China or between Pakistan and India will not fail to provoke a planetary catastrophe.
On the periphery of the world, Brazil has totally lost the ability to determine its own destiny. If, on the one hand, the new neoliberal State tries to please the Americans and Europeans by giving up the pre-salt oil wealth, on the other hand, our country will sink completely into misery if it stops exporting food and raw materials to the Chinese. In case of war between the US and China, Brazilians will be without any source of wealth and will not be able to bargain at the end of the conflict.
This explains, in a way, the extreme and covert violence that is being used by the neoliberal State against the indigenous population in particular and against the Brazilian population in general. Foreseeing a "lose lose situation" rich Brazilians do not want to share scarce public resources with the immense impoverished population and decided to exterminate it: “die and the economy grows” is the true economic program of Paulo Guedes and Roberto Campos Neto. However, it seems evident to me that an increase in starving miserable people and families traumatized by the genocide will not be able to pacify the country or to give stability to neoliberalized institutions.
In the past, the objective of capitalism was to organize production and trade to make profits and guarantee the defense of the State. War was a political phenomenon that temporarily destroyed economic rationality. During the Cold War the distinction between peace and war ceased to exist. Currently, the aim of capitalists is to disorganize the market to maximize profits. Permanent war was transformed into economic rationality by other means.
In the specific case of Brazil, the pandemic genocide was not just a government program supported and managed by the Army. It was also a violent transitional solution to class conflict and an additional source of public income for the local elite in a period of international and local uncertainty. When the pandemic ends, the civil war redesigned in 2016 will not come to an end. More likely, it will intensify.