...Para ver as árvores e as flores, não é suficiente não ser cego.
(Fernando Pessoa - Alberto Caeiro)
By Ivonaldo Leite
In 1940 Walter Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Concept of History prompted by the idea that society
lived at that time in a moment of danger. Probably today we also live in a
moment of danger, mainly in Latin America. In Benjamin’s time the danger was
the rise of fascism as a political regime. In our time, the danger is the rise
of fascism as a societal regime.
Fascism societal has several characteristics.
According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it is, for example, a set of social
processes by which large bodies of populations are irreversibly kept outside or
throw out of any kind of social contract. They are rejected, excluded and
thrown into a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, either because they have never
been part of any social contract and probably never will; or because they have
been excluded or thrown out of whatever social contract they had been part of
before. As a societal regime, fascism manifests itself as the collapse of the
most trivial explications of the people living under it.
In general what we call society is a bundle of
stabilized expectations from the subway schedule to the salary at the end of
the month or employment at the end of college education. Sousa Santos is
correct when he says that expectations are stabilized by a set of share scales
and equivalences: for a given work a given pay, for a given crime a given
punishment, for a given risk a given insurance. The people who live under
societal fascism are deprived of share scales and equivalences and therefore of
stabilized expectations. Consequently, they live in a constant chaos of
expectations in which the most trivial acts may be met with the most dramatic consequences.
Today in Brazil there are several manifestations of
societal fascism. But Brazilian societal fascism, unlike of what some
intellectuals think, is a phenomenon with roots in the national history. In
this way, we can remember the case of Galdino Jesus, a Indian Pataxó from
Northeast Brazil. In 1997, he went to Brasilia to take part in march of the
landless. The night was warm and he decided to sleep on a bench at the bus
stop. In the early morning hours he was killed by three middle-class youths. As
the youngsters confessed later on to the police, they killed the Indian for the
fun of it.
The governments of the Workers' Party have failed to
confront that tragic Brazilian historical heritage. The agreements and
conciliations did not even allow to investigate the crimes of State committed
during the military dictatorship.
However, in last times, the manifestations of societal
fascism in Brazil have increased on a large scale. The government Michel Temer
is conniving with them and induces them. There are a lot of facts which
demonstrate it. In this context, intolerance, aggression and disrespect to
other Latin American countries have become frequent.
Probably the most representative example of recent
days about Brazilian societal fascism is the reaction of some segments in
relation to crisis in the prisons. They celebrate the murders of prisoners committed
by criminal organizations. It is almost unbelievable that one does not realize
that if the State loses the control of the prison system the whole society will
be at risk. But fascism and hatred distort the human understanding.
As the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa
said, “to see the fields and the river,
it isn’t enough to open the window. To see the trees and the flowers, it isn’t
enough not to be blind”. Societal fascism cannot see people as human beings.
