30 Sep 22 | Brazil, News and features
It seems incredible but Brazil is becoming a hotbed of fascism, something we thought was more of a European phenomenon. Michel Gherman, a member of the Far Right Observatory, a collaboration between academics from more than 10 Brazilian universities and from other countries, says that Bolsonaro’s election has created a “Disneyland of neo-Nazism in Brazil”, because those who defend him “begin to feel more at ease”. It is true. After the end of the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1980s, the extreme right was ashamed of itself or remained silent. Now its demons are loose, attacking democracy, killing democrats, because it feels protected by the individual in the presidency and the police around him.
To understand some of the reasons for Brazil reaching this state of affairs, it is well worth reading the book Passengers of the Storm: Fascists and Denialists in the Present Time, by professors Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva and Karl Schuster Sousa Leão. Published by Cepe, the second largest publishing house in Brazil, we can learn about the history of fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, which did not remain in the past, because fascisms (that’s right in the plural) work until today on the great masses with irrationality, lies, the implausible and fear, according to the authors. During the research in the book we come to the Brazil of 2022:
“The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, corroborates the authorisation of the indiscriminate use of violence by constructing and using social devices as a tool and policy. When he uses social media to state that ‘reporters should really be beaten’, being replicated by his supporters, seconds later, with the statements ‘journalists should be beaten’ and ‘journalists deserve to be beaten, YES’, he instrumentalises politics through a personal, authoritarian, and charismatic abuse of power that aestheticises sociability with the normalisation of the use of force.”
As early as the election campaign of 2018, Bolsonaro declared, “Let’s shoot the petralhada”, petralhada being a reference to left-wing supporters.
And then came the assassinations.
On Sunday, 18 October 2018 in Salvador, capoeira master Moa do Katendê was killed with 12 stab wounds in the back after defending voting for the Workers’ Party (PT) and declaring himself opposed to Bolsonaro.
In 2019, 61-year-old Antônio Carlos Rodrigues Furtado died of cardiac arrest in Balneário Camboriú, Santa Catarina after being kicked and punched by Bolsonarist Fábio Leandro Schwindlein.
In July 2022, Marcelo Aloizio de Arruda, 50, was shot to death at his birthday party by federal criminal police officer Jorge Guaranho. A Bolsonarist, the killer invaded Marcelo’s private party – which had the PT as its theme and images of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – shouting “here is Bolsonaro”, shooting the host three times.
In early September, according to the Civil Police of Mato Grosso, Benedito dos Santos, a Lula voter, was killed by an attacker wielding an axe.
Before this wave of political crimes committed by Bolsonarists, Brazilian fascism presented both the stimulus and the approval for aggression against democracy. The book Passengers of the Storm says that in 2020 “35 per cent of officers and 41 per cent of military police soldiers throughout Brazil interact on social networks supporting President Jair Bolsonaro”. The authors go on to say, “Their positions in favour of the president, who for at least two years has openly discoursed against several governors, with the Northeast as a focus, make the issue even more politicised and instrumentalised.”
Karl Marx, in writing about the French coup of 1851, noted: “Hegel observes in one of his works that all the facts and characters of great importance in the history of the world occur, as it were, twice. But he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
For Brazilians, we are now in the second phase of the tragic dictatorship that began in 1964. This is presented in two ways: the tragic destruction of lives by Covid, for which the president said he was not a mortician, and by the destruction of the Amazon.
In 2022, there is talk that garimpo (artisanal mining for precious commodities that is common in the Amazon and often illegal) has “lost its shame”. Under Bolsonaro’s barbarism, openly favourable to the interests of this illegal activity in the forest, the defenders of garimpo are circulating in the corridors of power in the Amazon’s capitals and in Brasilia, and intend to fly even higher: to occupy elective positions in the Legislative Assemblies and in the National Congress, in addition to the governors’ palaces.
Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s education system, the persecution of artists and the press are tragic but are farcical at the same time. Bolsonaro is ridiculed for being imbrochable, a man who never loses sexual potency, yet he revels in it and this shows in his shouting and speaking. We have reached the point where the animals speak. This is tragedy and farce in unity, the lowest and grossest comedy.
Bolsonaro, in one of his latest farces, has turned historian. He said, “I want to say that Brazilians have gone through difficult times, history shows us. 22, 65, 64, 16, 18, and now 22. History can repeat itself. Good has always won over evil”.
What are these dates he is referring to? It cannot be Modern Art Week because he doesn’t even know what that is. But how has good always triumphed over evil? With murder, torture and cold executions in the dictatorship? With wars and holocausts? Or with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or with the recent killings of Bruno and Dom in the Amazon? Or does good overcome evil when the forest is devastated? We understand the new language, an absolute inversion of values: good is evil, and evil must be the hope and struggle of the resistance.
For now, we can hope that this barbaric farce can be overcome. We, united, have the streetcar, the ship, the ship of future democracy, whose name is Lula, hopefully winner of the election’s first round. If it is not Lula, then we will sink in the darkness of Brazilian-style fascism.
16 Sep 22 | Belarus, Brazil, China, Iran, North Korea, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is in a period of national mourning, marking the passing of our head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Global media has been transfixed, reporting on the minutiae of every aspect of the ascension of the new monarch and the commemoration of our former head of state. While the pageantry has been consuming, the constitutional process addictive (yes I am an addict) and the public grief tangible – the traditions and formalities have also highlighted challenges in British and global society – especially with regards to freedom of expression.
We have witnessed people being arrested for protesting against the monarchy. While the protests could be considered distasteful – I certainly think they are – that doesn’t mean that they are illegal and that the police should move against them. Public protest is a legitimate campaigning tool and is protected in British law. As ever, no one has the right not to be offended. And protest is, by its very nature, disruptive, challenging and typically at odds with the status quo. It is therefore all the more important that the right to peacefully protest is protected.
While I was appalled to see the arrests, I have been heartened in recent days at the almost universal condemnation of the actions of the police and the statements of support for freedom of expression and protest in the UK, from across the political system.
What this chapter has confirmed is that democracies, great and small, need to be constantly vigilant against threats to our core human rights which can so easily be undermined. This week our right to freedom of expression and the right to protest was threatened and the immediate response was a universal defence. Something we should cherish and celebrate because it won’t be long before we need to utilise our collective rights to free speech – again.
Which brings me onto the need to protest and what that can look like, even on the bleakest of days. On Monday, the largest state funeral of my lifetime is being held in London. Over 2,000 dignitaries are expected to attend the funeral of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, in Westminster Abbey. The heads of state of Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela and Myanmar were not invited given current diplomatic “tensions”. While I completely welcome their exclusion from the global club of acceptability, it does highlight who was deemed acceptable to invite.
Representatives from China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, North Korea and Sri Lanka will all be in attendance, all of whom have shown a complete disregard for some of the core human rights that so many of us hold dear. Can you imagine the conversation between Bolsonaro and Erdogan? Or the ambassador to Iran and the vice president of China?
While I truly believe that no one should picket a funeral – the very idea is abhorrent to me – that doesn’t mean that there are no other ways of protesting against the actions of repressive regimes and their leadership, who will be in the UK in the coming days. In fact the British Parliament has shown us the way – by banning representatives of the Chinese Communist Party from attending the lying in state of Her Majesty – as a protest at the sanctions currently imposed on British parliamentarians for their exposure of the acts of genocide happening against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang province. This was absolutely the right thing to do and I applaud the Speaker of the House of Commons, Rt Hon Lindsay Hoyle MP, for taking such a stance.
Effective protest needs to be imaginative, relevant and take people with you – highlighting the core values that we share and why others are a threat to them. It can be private or public. It can tell a story or mark a moment. But ultimately successful protests can lead to real change. Even if it takes decades. Which is why we will defend, cherish and promote the right to protest and the right to freedom of expression in every corner of the planet, as a real vehicle for delivering progressive change.
29 Jul 22 | Artistic Freedom, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Sri Lanka
Ranil Wickremesinghe, now president of Sri Lanka, attending a presentation at the Annual Meeting 2017 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 17, 2017. Photo: World Economic Forum/ Mattias Nutt/Flickr
I’m writing this on the morning of 22 July while watching footage from the early hours of this morning showing military and police assaulting protesters, journalists and lawyers outside of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face, Colombo. Activists report on social media that protesters and journalists were severely beaten with batons, threatened with being shot. Many of the tents and structures built by the protesters over the last three months at this site were destroyed. This was Ranil Wickremesinghe’s first day in power, after being selected as the new Rajapaksa proxy president in a deeply corrupt vote held by a Rajapaksa-controlled parliament.
Of particular note in this moment is that the protesters had already announced their intention to vacate the site later today, responding to an itself repressive court order. Even by the standards of dictatorial abuse of power, the violence was tactically superfluous. Instead, it was a message to protesters and the nation at large signalling how Wickremesinghe intends to govern, beginning with the brutal, malicious repression of peaceful dissent.
This can be confusing to an outside observer. Much of the commentary about Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa (the brothers who have dominated Sri Lankan politics in recent years) focused on their family: corrupt strongmen who were to blame for the island’s many failures. If the nepotistic, violent Rajapaksas were everything that was wrong about Sri Lanka, it seems as if deposing them should have improved matters. Instead, little has changed. This is for two reasons, both deeply intertwined. The first reason is that Sri Lanka’s structure of governance is deeply warped around the over-empowered office of the executive president, generating a stream of power-addicted despots. The only purpose of that office is to abuse it. One of the calls of the current protest movement is to abolish the office entirely.
The second reason is that the Rajapaksas are far from the only nepotistic, violent political dynasty to hold executive power in Sri Lanka. There are three of note: the Rajapaksas, of course. The Bandaranaikes, whose patriarch invented the racist demagoguery that characterizes Sri Lankan politics to this day, and whose statue overlooks the protest site that was brutalized last night. And there are the Wijewardenas, now headed by Ranil Wickremesinghe, the new executive president of Sri Lanka, who holds the office created forty years ago by his own first cousin once removed, J.R. Jayawardena.
It was Jayawardena who also gave Sri Lanka the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which has been used for four decades to arbitrarily detain and torture. Its targets, as the targets of the Sinhala-Buddhist dominated Sri Lankan state have usually been in the postcolonial period, have primarily been members of the Tamil and Muslim minority populations, though it is a blunt instrument and used as carte blanche by the state. Detainees are nominally accused of “terrorism” but often held without charges for years or decades. Journalists and writers, too, have been frequent targets of this and other legal instruments the Sri Lankan state uses for repression. These are by no means the sole mechanism the state has at its disposal—many journalists and writers have been killed, disappeared, assaulted and forced into exile. But other than the state’s extrajudicial violence, cases under the PTA also demonstrate the depth of complicity from the various arms and bodies of the state in carrying out repression.
A clear example is the case of Ahnaf Jazeem, a teacher and poet. In 2019, after the Easter bombings, the government began arresting hundreds of Muslims under the PTA, often on the most tenuous “evidence,” such as the possession of texts in Arabic. Jazeem, then 25, was arrested under the PTA in May 2020, after these far-fetched “investigations” led police to search his place of work, a private school where he had been teaching and living until the pandemic lockdown. In his quarters, they found copies of his book of poems. This was his first collection, Navarasam, which had been published a few years earlier. The poems were written in Tamil, which the Sinhala police could not read and which, because of the ingrained racism of the Sri Lankan state, were therefore automatically suspicious. Too, the book included art alongside some poems, some of which depicted militants, illustrating (what the police could not read as) antiwar poems. In this context, that was considered sufficient to imprison a poet without charge or trial. Early reports in the Sinhala media did not even identify Navarasam as a poetry collection: it was referred to solely as “an extremist text.”
Jazeem was detained in squalid conditions in the TID building under the PTA, handcuffed even while sleeping, with no access to a lawyer, for months. He was accused of supporting terrorism, the Easter bombers, and ISIS through his teaching and his book. The magistrate’s court had Navarasam rush-translated by the court’s sworn translators, resulting in a highly literal word-for-word translation which was then sent to a group of child psychiatrists at a government hospital to report on whether this text could influence children toward “extremism”. The psychiatrists’ report was mealymouthed, but sufficiently affirmative for the magistrate’s purpose, citing multiple poems as promoting violence and religious hatred.
Navarasam was later translated independently by writers and academics working for Jazeem’s release together with his pro bono legal defense team—which of course took much longer, because proper literary translation of a book of poetry is not something that can be done in a few days to support a trumped-up court case. Here is an extract of one such counter-translation, by Shash Trevett, of one of Jazeem’s poems, “The Thundering Himalayas,” that the psychiatrists’ report specifically cited as promoting violence, leading to Jazeem spending 19 months in detention in total.
If you are brave, you can defeat tragedies.
If you are submissive, failure will follow you.
If, every minute of every day
you think anything is possible
you will own every obstacle in your way
and the world will spread open beneath your feet.
A river is not designed to stand still all day.
It runs towards its desire
to join as one with the sea.
Whatever will obstruct, will obstruct.
What is to occur, will occur.
Whatever lies in its path, will lie there
as the river creeps ever forward.
A rock might block its path
a dam might impede its course
but a river will always overcome obstacles
that hamper its flow.
In order to reach its goal
it will splash and spray.
It will gently dislodge the rock
and set a brand new course.
It doesn’t meet obstacles with violence.
It doesn’t drown them
or split them in two.
Instead, it rises above the rocks
and flows on its way.
If you were to be like a river
you can achieve whatever you wish for.
Even if the Himalayas were to block your way
you will be able to dismantle them with ease.
During that period, more and more writers, activists, academics and organisations spoke up offering readings on the book, both in the original and via its legitimate translations, confirming again and again that the text was explicitly anti-extremist, anti-war, anti-violence, and in fact, specifically anti-IS. Jazeem was finally released on bail in December 2021, but the case is still ongoing and he is required to travel 180 km every month to sign at the Terrorism Investigation Department, even as this grows increasingly difficult due to Sri Lanka’s fuel shortage.
Jazeem was arrested and detained under the PTA without investigators or magistrate being even able to read the book they considered damning evidence against him. The prosecution and its accomplices wallowed in this expedient illiteracy; it was his defenders that had to read poetry, produce counter-translations, argue for a just reading and make the case that truth even matters. In this case as in so many others, the Sri Lankan state’s utter indifference to reality in the service of power, manifests as hypocrisy but is so deeply ingrained in systemic conditions that it’s perhaps better described as perversion.
The Rajapaksa’s genocidal “humanitarian operation” in 2009 remains the nadir, but Ranil Wickremesinghe’s administration today is fully engaged in the same rhetorical manoeuvre, citing “civil liberties” to justify the violent assault of protestors and “political stability” to explain his reappointment of a cabal of Rajapaksa allies and Sinhala-Buddhist extremists to his new cabinet—the very government that had lost their mandate to mass protests, whose resignations prompted Wickremesinghe’s own entry into government to rescue the Rajapaksa throne as it tottered on the brink of falling. Under this Rajapaksa caretaker administration, the quick return of Gotabaya himself seems altogether too likely.
29 Jun 22 | Philippines, Statements
Dear readers and viewers,
We thought this day would never come, even as we were warned in the first of week of December last year that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would be handing down a ruling against us. Because we have acted in good faith and adhered to the best standards in a fast-evolving business environment, we were confident that the country’s key business regulator would put public interest above other interests that were at play in this case. We were, in fact, initially relieved that it was the SEC that initiated what appeared to us as a customary due diligence act, considering our prior information that it was the Office of the Solicitor General that had formed, as early as November 2016, a special team to build a case against us. We were wrong. The SEC’s kill order revoking Rappler’s license to operate is the first of its kind in history – both for the Commission and for Philippine media. What this means for you, and for us, is that the Commission is ordering us to close shop, to cease telling you stories, to stop speaking truth to power, and to let go of everything that we have built – and created – with you since 2012. All because they focused on one clause in one of our contracts which we submitted to – and was accepted by – the SEC in 2015. Now the Commission is accusing us of violating the Constitution, a serious charge considering how, as a company imbued with public interest, we have consistently been transparent and above-board in our practices. Every year since we incorporated in 2012, we have dutifully complied with all SEC regulations and submitted all requirements even at the risk of exposing our corporate data to irresponsible hands with an agenda. Transparency, we believe, is the best proof of good faith and good conduct. All these seem not to matter as far as the SEC is concerned. In a record investigation time of 5 months and after President Duterte himself blasted Rappler in his second SONA in July 2017, the SEC released thisruling against us. This is pure and simple harassment, the seeming coup de grace to the relentless and malicious attacks against us since 2016:
We intend to not only contest this through all legal processes available to us, but also to fight for our freedom to do journalism and for your right to be heard through an independent platform like Rappler. We’ve been through a lot together, through good and bad – sharing stories, building communities, inspiring hope, uncovering wrongdoing, battling trolls, exposing the fake. We will continue bringing you the news, holding the powerful to account for their actions and decisions, calling attention to government lapses that further disempower the disadvantaged. We will hold the line. The support you’ve shown us all this time, and our commitment to tell you stories without fear, give us hope. You inspire courage. You have taught us that when you stand and fight for what is right, there is no dead-end, only obstacles that can only make us stronger. We ask you to stand with us again at this difficult time. – Rappler.com
This statement was originally posted here on the Rappler site
