Brazil's Failed Insurrection: The Dividends Of Propaganda

"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance" -Socrates

Prior to the Brazilian Presidential Election of late October 2022, I wrote an essay for Liberal Currents outlining what the regional, American and international preemptive move and ultimate response should be in the instance that an autogolpe or insurrection of Bolsanaristas were to occur. Historically, I argued that the regional nations of South America, as well as the United States and its international allies, should have come out firmly in support of the Brazilian democratic process and might have even offered UN election monitors–whose job it literally is to watch for improper conditions, returns or behaviour–so as to ensure that the hollow ravings of Jair Bolsonaro would be stifled by reason and procedure.

When, after the first and second legs of the Presidential electoral process, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva triumphed, it became truly reasonable to ask whether–after years of sowing doubt and disdain for the Brazilian electoral process, just in case he were to lose eventually–now former President Jair Bolsonaro might try something similar to what Donald Trump attempted in the United States in the run-up to 6 January, 2021. While Bolsonaro did not concede ever, he also did not stand in the way of the process by which Lula’s administration would be vested with power, transitioning away from his own, ineffective, and wasteful regime. 

Bolsonaro would, in the end, not even stay in Brazil for his predecessor’s improbable succession to a third stint as President of the nation, and would flee to that great bastion for so many former dictators–the United States and particularly, Florida. However, while Bolsonaro left Brazil long before Lula took office in January, has been getting advice from some American fascists, and reportedly stayed with retired MMA champion Jose Aldo before renting his own little place, Bolsonaristas were continuing all the while to fight, spoil and rage for the man and his ideology.

But when those fanatic supporters stormed the Presidential Palace, the Congressional buildings, and the Supreme Court, calling for a military coup to retake the nation from the rightfully elected President, they found no apparatus willing or capable of answering their pleas and cries for utter lawlessness. Hundreds of individuals–over one thousand to date–have since been arrested. Important individuals and at least one minister have thus far been included in these arrests and sackings. The Supreme Court of the nation is even pondering whether to bring the former President up on charges of inciting the riots by use of the same rhetoric long utilized by Donald Trump and leaders like him across the world–both presently and historically.

Furthermore, Lula has noted that he suspects that Bolsonarists within the staff of the Presidential Palace, the police, and the armed forces were involved and attempted to create better, more simple conditions for the coup to take place in. 

The military and police are consistent strongholds of support for autocrats and dictators, as they are often made up largely of reactionary elements, are the legally armed sector of the societies, and have the practical force to initiate and enable violence should they see fit to exercise it. In this instance, enough of them–and at high enough positions within the hierarchy–had not been previously convinced of the success of a coup d’etat when their man, Bolsonaro, was not even willing to attempt an autogolpe with the help of supporters, the police or the military.

The failure of the insurrection–like with Donald Trump–could ultimately spell the end of the wannabe strongman and autocrat. While each man did and said horrifying things while in office, wielding great and immense power over millions of power–as so many leaders across the nation do–their ultimate downfalls look to be coming from their inability to accept democracy and the democratic process. Their deceit and the distrust they’ve sown, their inability to unhand their power once it had been stripped of them by the nation’s people, and their frustration in simply going quietly into the night, could ultimately cost them their own freedom.

While many leaders across history have longed for power, have longed for it so as to wield it, and longed for it so as to wield it in ways they saw as just, righteous or fit, it is autocrats truly that, when beaten or left with the outcry of the public or society to abandon power, cannot bear to do so. These individuals are of course not explicitly particular to right-wing, reactionary ideologies and concepts, but the right wing certainly has their fair share of them; moreover, nations with leaders such as these, even when they swaddle themselves in the language and titles of leftist, socialist or communist ideologies, often behave in ways more in common with reactionary, fascist and autocratic regimes than with the alternative.

But the topic of how nations function versus how nations appraise themselves is another topic for another time. Because leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro presently, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee and Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista in the 20th century, and countless others before and since could not give up power when they were properly going to lose it, their downfalls were assured by themselves–albeit in different ways.

While Trump and Bolsonaro will each likely face repercussions for attempting to convince their nations that the electoral processes were always going to be rigged unless they themselves, their political allies, and their views won, Park Chung-hee of South Korea would not live out his life peacefully—being assassinated in 1977. Fulgencio Batista, meanwhile, appearing as though he would lose his bid for another term as President of Cuba, simply took the country over in 1952 before having to endure years of fighting, which would end with his departure on 31 December, 1958, as Fidel Castro and his followers were closing ever closer to Havana.

While Chung-hee and Batista–two despotic autocrats–utilized more organized force to achieve their autogolpic aims, Trump and Bolsonaro attempted to use that great, consistent ally and weapon of the fascist autocrat–propaganda. In fact, former American Vice President Henry A Wallace stated rather plainly in the New York Times on the 9th of April, 1944, that this weapon was, above all, their favorite to resort to if at all possible; while he explicitly names American fascists, it is not difficult to see how fascists of every unique, domestic variation function with this frame of mind either. 

“…His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Jair Bolsonaro, like Donald Trump in the United States, was able to weaponize his own version of the truth, an alternate reality in which only that which pleases the strongman is reality, and that which does not, simply is not true or real. The weapon, however, does not always disarm whole societies and nations forever; it really just paralyzes them in fits and spells. 

America was in shock for four to five years, while Brazil too, had to shake itself from a trance of four to five years; looking back to the “classical fascist” states too, both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, entranced as many of the citizens had become in both countries, had steady resistance movements as well–through the good times and certainly the bad. The deception of the fascist–in any era, state or nation–can fool some of the people all of the time, and some of the people some of the time, but it cannot fool all of the people all of the time. 

In Brazil, the reality of life under Bolsonaro impressed upon many how much better things had previously been under a leader–imperfect as they all are–like Lula, just as Donald Trump’s reign identified for Americans just how much better average American Presidents were in juxtaposition with a generationally bad and ineffective one. 

In Brazil, the government is now appraising whether that which Bolsonaro ranted and raved concerning for so long is actually criminal behaviour, just as, in the United States, prosecutors and courts consider the same thing concerning Donald Trump; the results of these prosecutorial ponderings will mean a great deal for each nation going forward, and should each man escape accountability for the actions they helped to put into motion, simply because they did not push the metaphorical button or pull any trigger, the consequences would be dangerous for the societies and nations themselves.

People, regular civilians with ideas, notions and opinions, will inevitably say things that are factually incorrect, and, in many nations, it is legal to say things that walk the tightrope of reality so closely as to, on occasion, lean towards the side of deception, if not outright fabrication. But for publicly elected officials to be able to get away with making dubious, unsubstantiated and reckless claims about the media, the electoral processes of each of their nations, and to incite with dangerous language protests that should ever devolve into insurrections because a Presidential nominee fairly lost a fairly held election for that post would be to open the doors of madness for any crank to cause chaos whenever an electoral result did not go their way.

It is a dangerous precedent to allow by the prosecutors and courts of each nation. With the evidence that has been witnessed in the United States and Brazil across the last two years, holding no one accountable would be a death sentence for each polity itself; should Trump and Bolsonaro go unpunished, executive propaganda would go essentially unpunished too. Without accountability, the transitional months between Presidential administrations is nothing more than extra time for disgruntled leaders and their supporters to imagine up some plot to secure power for another–perhaps indefinite–spell of time.

Autogolpic machinations cannot become precedents themselves; casually lying to the people of the nation about their electoral system cannot ever become a normalized trend that is witnessed in the run-up to each local, state, or national election across the Americas and the greater world. The failed insurrections in both the United States and Brazil must each face heavy consequences, and it is those leaders of each movement–whether down the street at a rally, or else at their house in Florida–who must be held to the standards each of their positions absolutely demands of them; their failure to live up to those standards will mark them as examples for those who wish to usurp the demonstrated will of the people in a democracy.