Olavo de Carvalho writes compellingly of the current situation in Brazil where most of the leading journalists suffer reprisals from the government and are shuttered.

Brazil's government has enshrined a "worker's paradise" platform while hiding behind a thin veil of market responsibility even as Brazil's weakened democratic principles fade away under the onslaught of a corrupt state worker's paradise.

Scores of harassing, fake law suits and false tax claims are brought against any who question LuLa's regime and proceed in what is a massacre of the media. In Venezuela, significant numbers of journalists mysteriously just die, a phenomenon also observed these days in the KGB-fueled Russia.

Increasingly, Chavez's regime quietly installs state-forced media "buys" from Hezbollah's preferred mouth organ, Al Jazeera en Español across his state controlled TeleSur. In other nations, such as Ecuador the independent media, once quite vibrant before President Gutierrez forced their silence in 2004-05,  has killed itself due to lack of substantive reporting, with a frenetic and hyperactive media rushing to shove cameras in anyone's face for 10 second sound bites but reporting nothing factually relevant. 

Scores of badly trained, vapid and poorly paid scribes of known political agendas have infiltrated all media, replacing professional journalists with any standards and installing hollow "feeds." This is part of what is called today "social democracy." Note that it is not functional democracy but a perverse cut-away that is a clever twist of the phrase and is de facto neo-communism.

In the USA, sweeping political- media influence spreads under the 'new Left' as revered in mouth organs such as MOVEON.org and  The DAILY KOS trumpets Iran and Venezuela today as exemplary "social democracies" where repressive tyranny grows and free speech is shuttered....of the people, by the people and for the people.

When free speech is extolled as a virtue but is heavily regulated- or massacred- by regimes, it is the first phase of functional democracy's surrender. Olavo's is a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation/when a people can do something- and must do something -to defend its core principles- but does not and takes the low road. Functional democracy is not for the lazy.

Tweety goes to jail

Olavo de Carvalho    November 15, 2006

In an article published on October 30^th, I announced: "As Lula has promised for his second term the 'democratization of the media', all the vehicles that remained silent about the major crimes of the president will be now rewarded with the sanctioning of censorship" (see my article http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/061030dc.html , in Portuguese).

Hardly 48 hours had gone by when the Worker's Party (PT) once more proved me right, as it has done for the past 15 years.  PT militants assaulted and intimidated journalists, demanded that state control of the media be toughened, and were base enough to suspend the retirement pension of some recently disfavored journalists.

Among the persecuted journalists, no one was pro-American, Zionist, or conservative Christian.   They were all "fellow travelers", who had spent the last decade helping to conceal the Lula-Castro-Chavez-FARC axis, contributing to idealize the image of the "working-class president" and to fulfill the Gramscian dream of endowing Leftism with the invisible and omnipresent moral authority of a categorical imperative.   They were only punished because, after having served that authority with the best of their efforts, gently swallowing a bitter pill year after year, they reached the limit of the elasticity of their conscience and retreated before the ultimate upgrade in abomination that was required by the government: they didn't want to partake in a massive theft that didn't benefit them.

For this anemic and belated misbehavior – which is the utmost degree of mental independence allowed in Brazil these days – they were labeled as servants of imperialism, children of the military dictatorship, fascist reactionaries, having to suffer the fate that "enhanced democracy" reserves to such deplorable types.   After that, they still hesitate to admit the obvious and, terminally infected with what I call the "Tweety Syndrome" (for a description of its symptoms see http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/041204globo.htm), they insist in asking, as Veja magazine did: "Are these isolated facts or government policy?" It is clear that, as they have persistently done away with the records and documents of the Sao Paulo Forum, they now feel a certain repulsion in confessing that the plans that were announced there are being implemented to the letter. I imagine them soon locked in a communist jail, being interrogated by Cuban officers (as is already happening in Venezuela) and asking themselves, like Tweety: "Have I seen a pussycat?"

It seems indeed impossible to explain to these people that there is some difference between using capitalist modernization in order to consolidate a constitutional regime and using it to finance the discrete construction of a “popular democracy".  It is the difference between Margaret Thatcher and Vladimir Illitch Lenin, but it is hard to see it when one believes in the automatic liberating power of market economy – a hypnotic suggestion that, after the fall of the USSR, communist consultants have hammered into the minds of businessmen in order to disarm them ideologically.   Impregnated by this magic faith, publications such as Veja and the daily Folha de Sao Paulo think that it is possible to get rid of communism by refusing to see it and by severely repressing all anti-communist temptation.   So they got what they deserved, but Tweety's inquiry about the existence or non-existence of the pussycat remains an unsolvable metaphysical question.

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Olavo de Carvalho, 59, taught Political Philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana (South of Brazil) from 2001 to 2005 and is the author of a dozen books. He now lives in Virginia, USA, as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. His weekly columns, published first by O Globo an now by Jornal do Brasil, made him a strongly influent conservative and pro-American voice in Brazilian politics and culture. Website: www.olavodecarvalho.org.