A gushing headline in the New York Times is meant to show (and reassure) leftists of all nations that, in America as well as abroad, the left is far from defeated: Lula Wins Brazil’s Presidency, in Stunning Blow to Latin America’s Right.
(This post's description of the NYT hagiography of Brazil's recent election is followed by an in-depth historical assessment of the left in Brazil and, indeed, in Venezuela, in Cuba, and all over Latin America.)
A week before the mid-terms, the print version of the international edition of the New York Times (see above) goes gaga regarding Luiz Inácio da Silva's (Lula's) alleged win the second round of Brazil's presidential election, describing it as Brazil hands a stunning rebuke to the right. While the original national edition (see at bottom) is slightly less dramatic (Lula's Victory Curtails Right In the Region; incidentally, by the way, I never heard that a word like "in" took a capital letter in a headline), the online title is, as mentioned, Lula Wins Brazil’s Presidency, in Stunning Blow to Latin America’s Right.
Ten paragraphs in the international edition follow, devoted to the heroics of Lula — such as this one: "A stalwart of Brazilian politics, Mr. Lula lifted millions out of poverty through social programs in earlier years as president" — and, indeed, of the entire Brazilian people. After all, it wasn't Lula or his PT party who handed a stunning rebuke to the right; it was the Brazilian nation itself!
Not until the 11th paragraph (the bottom para on the front page) do Ana Ionova and Adam B. Ellick write that there seems to be some kind of hiccup:
Mr. Bolsonaro refused to accept the outcome and said it was the result of foul play, seizing on a narrative that his father also employed after his own electoral loss four years ago.
Shouldn't the Flávio Bolsonaro reaction have been among the top four or five lines? Wouldn't it have been so had the results between left and right been inverted?
Well, if you do click on the links mentioned above, this is the case — at present. The Flávio Bolsonaro reaction is now in the second paragraph, with Donald Trump's statement is in the third. The report has been heavily upgraded and is now far more — what is the word? — nuanced. As it appears now, it is scarcely recognizable from the story as it appeared in the newspaper this morning.
In the original story, there was nary a mention of the fact that Jair's son — unexpectedly — won the first round or, indeed, that their party's candidates then gained an impressive number of seats in the congress in Brasilia — something instrumental in making Lula's victory highly dubious.
It was the first time in Brazil’s history that a candidate who lost the first round of voting came back to win the second.
Indeed: "The strong showing by Mr. Bolsonaro" makes the results even more suspicious. Just like 2020 was the first time in American history that an incumbent president gained more votes for his reelection than for his initial victory and did — supposedly — not win his second election.
Mr. Lula’s victory was even more surprising given that several of the candidates who failed to make it out of the first round were conservatives whose votes were expected to broadly shift to Mr. Bolsonaro.
This should only give rise to more suspicion. Isn't this evidence that Brazil is little more than a banana republic where a coup has been taking place "in front of the world"?
The results showed that far more voters had turned up to cast a ballot on Sunday than in the earlier round, a highly unusual shift. Typically, the number of voters drops from the first round to the second.
Again, same conclusion. Doesn't this prove, or provide evidence, that Brazil went full commie?
Mr. Lula is bound to face resistance at every turn, after voters elected an overwhelming number of Mr. Bolsonaro’s political allies to the Legislature.
Again, the fact that so many of Bolsonaro’s political allies won seats, you wonder how the Times can write such a hagiographic piece without addressing the vast number of inconsistencies.
For a far truer story of Jair Bolsonaro's alleged "defeat" in 2022, check out PragerU's Brazil: A Cautionary Tale.
Related: 16 years ago, Olavo de Carvalho had the inside dirt on the state of communism in Latin America — notably centralized in Brazil's São Paulo Forum, which has been the true strategic command of the Latin American revolution. Graças a Deus, (Thank God) things have changed immensely since 2010, when the following article was written.
… nowhere else has the Right been so utterly destroyed as it has been in Brazil, which is, for this very reason, the headquarters of Latin American revolution. … In this sense, American political analysts are always getting it all backwards: They are alarmed at Venezuela [and Cuba] and do not understand that the headquarters of the revolution is in Brazil.
… Hugo Chavez [then still alive and in power] is only a scarecrow that the Latin American Left waves before the world to distract the attention away from the São Paulo Forum, which is the true strategic command of the Latin American revolution. Cuba and Venezuela are important as shelters for terrorists and drug traffickers. In Venezuela and other Spanish-speaking countries ruled by the São Paulo Forum, there is strong and organized opposition, while in Brazil all that is left is the Left itself, which controls the scene absolutely.
Olavo de Carvalho again, from 2014 — Could It Be that J Edgar Hoover Wasn't as Paranoid — or as Despotic — as the Former FBI Director Is Commonly Depicted?
…/… J Edgar Hoover was supposed to go after mobsters and gangsters, we are told, not "harmless" political operatives who were doing nothing but sharing, entirely legally, their personal opinions.
Wouldn't plans to lead to nationwide-applied "Chicago Way extortion" be a reason for Hoover to treat leftist critics of America with a measure of circumspection?
In that sense, Olavo de Carvalho's thoughts are revealing. The difference between corruption in rightist governments and leftist governments, said the Brazilian philosopher, is that when rightists know they are doing wrong, they try to hide it (and are perhaps even sometimes ashamed), while leftists are proud of their doings and try to write it into law.
When reading the following, remember that the comments apply to a foreign (a Brazilian) worker's party, Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). And yet, ask yourself if they are not — chillingly — familiar.
It is one thing, I said, remembering an old Arab saying, to steal in the weight of the flour, selling 750 grams for the price of one kilo. Another thing is to modify the scale so that never more it accuses the difference between 750 grams and one kilo.
The old corrupt politicians [of Brazil] limited themselves to stealing. The PT transformed the robbery into a system, the system in political militancy, the militancy in a substitute of the laws and institutions, lowered to the condition of temporary impediments to the construction of the great utopia.
The old politicians stole for their own good, individually or in small groups, moderating the audacity of the blows from the fear of the denunciation. PT steals with a moral authority of someone, who arrogating itself the nobleness of a hypothetical future, is already forgiven a priori from all the faults of the present; with tranquillity and fearlessness from he who uses licitly all possible means, they steal since they are the absolute master of all.
Any political party that turns against "the society", promising to rebuild it from scratch — if not to reform the human nature itself — places itself , instantly, above the effective moral criteria in this society, and it cannot submit to them unless in appearance, laughing to themselves, at the naïveté of those who take them as a regular and loyal adversary. It is not possible to destroy the system and to obey its rules at the same time, but it's possible to use these rules just as a temporary camouflage until the destruction is completed. However, the system, as everything that is human, holds equally its dose of injustices, errors, scandals, and its parcel of morality, order, loyalty. All system consists of a precarious balance between disorder and order. No sane intelligence ignores that only it is possible to restrain or to control the former by fortifying the latter. All attempts to change the system integrally, either through the abrupt revolutionary subversion, either through the slow and gradual erosion of the institutional bases, starts for destroying the balance and therefore the order, under the vain promise of a future without disequilibrium nor disorder. The modesty of the objectives, the limitation of the political program to precise points that do not affect the beddings of the system, here is the mark of the honest parties — and this is not, definitively, the make of [a party like the] PT. The dishonesty of this party is measured by the megalomaniac amplitude of its promises.
