A serious theoretical and political error lies in the fact that adherents of certain doctrines only examine articles and books by those favorable to their flock. Such failure in ancient times was called fanaticism. Catholics didn't read Protestant texts, Stalin's supporter didn't read Trotsky, and so on. A fan of one ideological line does not consult the books of another. And so the phenomenon spreads throughout culture. “Is the movie you watched good?” The answer, positive or negative, always takes into account: does the film expose a thesis favorable to “our” cause? Otherwise the work is terrible. It's not worth paying the ticket to watch it. And in theater, in the visual arts, even in music, the script is always the same: “good or bad?”. As an aesthetic criterion, it may be of low quality. But it effectively fulfills the task of organizing strengthened ranks in the “fight”. The reader stuck to his doctrine suffers from cognitive strabismus: he only sees the narrative of his horde, as he is blind to that maintained by his enemies.
An example of a lucid reader who is at the same time committed to social and political battles is a thinker who is rarely mentioned today, even in imaginary progressive sectors. Karl Marx witnesses an unparalleled amount of readings in scientific history. His work, from juvenile to mature texts, cites the most diverse doctrinal schools. From his doctorate, on Epicurus and Democritus, to Criticism of Economics, the footnotes are full of authors who are the most contradictory to each other. In fact, it is no coincidence that Marx’s texts almost always contain the word “criticism” in the subtitle. Born into the intellectual world after Kantian philosophy, he not only goes beyond it, but also uses it precisely in a materialist sense. Marx did not appreciate Ricardo, Smith, Hegel, Fichte, Rousseau, Feuerbach and a host of authors who defended ideas contrary to his. But he paid due attention to everyone, reading and reflecting on each sentence, each mathematical formula, each sophistry. Before throwing books aside, or ignoring them because they did not coincide with his premises, Marx read them, wrote them down, thought. His example is enough to indicate the relevance of abandoning partisan readings. Marx does not ask himself whether a book is good or bad, but at the same time he knows by heart authors who are not revolutionary like Shakespeare.
The introduction above is necessary because I am trying to discuss a book of circumstances, by an author not appreciated by democrats and progressives. I speak of the confessions and attacks brought by Luiz Henrique Mandetta's volume, A patient called Brazil, behind the scenes in the fight against coronavirus (RJ, Editora Schwarcz S/A, 2020). As expected, the entire book brings together a apology for your life. As in many similar writings, the author presents himself in an immaculate haura and his opponents are given dark colors. Mandetta would be a Quixote attacking deceitful and deceived mills: journalists, military personnel, Bolsonarian doctors, right-wing or left-wing politicians, etc. After reading, all you have to do is sigh, murmuring: “a hero, a saint”. Poliana for his own activity and Machiavelli for that of others, Bolsonaro's former minister goes like a cat over hot coals over the reasons that led him to vote, support and then serve a jejune president and opponent of science and government ethics. It's as if we were facing an unexpected accident. From one moment to the next, a fatal mistake occurs and Mandetta joins forces with a primitive human being, a denialist, without any erudition in any field of knowledge. A praiser of torture who defends eugenics in a crude way. “A black man worth at least 15 arrobas, who isn’t even fit to procreate.” And Mandetta accepts the invitation to be Minister of Health from a person like this, known to him for a long time, because he was a colleague of hers in the National Congress. Altar boy Mandetta's cassock was soiled by the blood expelled in the speeches and gestures (that of the gun is one of the most innocent, let us remember the promise to kill all PT members when he came to power) of his lamentable boss.
It is difficult to believe in the former minister's good intentions, his blessed intentions to save sick Brazil. Is it possible to imagine a doctor steeped in the purest ethics and wanting to save a patient with the help of someone who praises torture? The deaths from Covid were already announced in the gestures of gunmen and others, in fact shared by fanatical evangelicals, as there are many of them in Brazil.
I will not follow the former minister's book page by page. It is there to be read by fascists, democrats, socialists. Chapters of it help to understand the genocidal logic that prevails today in the government and in the national State. The author completes Dorian Gray's portrait of soldiers, diplomats, doctors, bureaucrats and politicians who disgrace our public life today. Thus, his inspection allows us to understand the targets and premises of those who, at Palácio do Planalto, conspire day and night to resume the dictatorial violence of 1964.
I make considerations mainly about the paragraphs that address the political party called, with marketing expertise, Lava Jato. Mandetta sheds unprecedented light on the execrable episode of the so-called Ten Measures against Corruption, a disreputable and immoral decalogue drawn up by Dallagnol and his cronies. I quote Mandetta himself: the project “was born from a campaign by the Lava Jato task force in Curitiba and brought very controversial items such as restrictions on habeas corpus, monetary awards for whistleblowers, and which turned slush funds into a crime with retroactive effect, that is, it would be a crime even for those who had committed the crime before the law came into force, an absurdity in legal terms”. From then on, Mandetta exposes his party colleague and friend (until then...) Onyx Lorenzoni. The latter, in the well-known scheme tit for tat reigning in Congress, received from Rodrigo Maia, recently elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, the gift of rapporteur on the Ten Commandments, I mean the Ten Measures given by Pastor Dallagnol and his acolytes.
Onyx, we know and Mandetta repeats, began negotiating the ten measures with the political parties. Parliamentarians expected the rapporteur to mitigate the Torquemada proposals from Curitiba. But the deputies realized that he “had not alleviated the most controversial articles at all”. Among the measures presented was the provision of a cash reward for whistleblowers, which displeased parliamentarians, says Mandetta. In hidden conversations, the same deputies heavily criticize the entire project and its rapporteur. But the press supports everything and the Public Ministry puts intense pressure on political actors for approval. And Mandetta continues: “Onyx listened, but he didn't hold back from doing exactly what the Lava Jato prosecutors in Paraná wanted. Many deputies had been targets of operations and complained about the arbitrary acts committed by the group from Paraná, which was now the guarantor of the proposed ten measures”.
Mandetta says nothing about the other arbitrary acts committed cum icto by Sergio Moro's cronies. Not a word about the violence suffered by Luiz Inácio da Silva and other left-wing activists. Silence on the subject is predictable. But the passage makes clear Mandetta's preferred option for one-eyed justice. Now comes the comic and dramatic point of the plot: upon being harshly criticized by the deputies, and suffering the same criticism as Mandetta, Onyx shows a recording of the meeting in which he was harshly criticized. “I want to see them put up with the media on top of them,” said the rapporteur/whistleblower. The content of the recording contained “insults against members of the Public Ministry”. And our heroic former minister adds: “The Judiciary and the Public Ministry had a lot of strength at that time, and the Legislature was under pressure”. Onyx's procedure, although not illegal, is viewed negatively by all politicians, for obvious reasons. “In politics it is a mortal sin. Anyone who does this is never called into any type of conversation anywhere again.” “In 2016 Delcídio do Amaral was stripped of his mandate as senator because in the plea he made to get out of prison in Lava Jato, he committed to the Judiciary to secretly record the conversations he had with the senators. He was unanimously impeached because of this.”
As a result of Onyx's behavior and repulsion against the Ten Measures, they were defeated. “It was a massacre.” Not only that, but the project received additions that punished abuse of authority by judges and prosecutors. Onyx was in astral hell in the middle of Parliament. Then came the saving path for him, and he joined the Bolsonaro campaign for the Presidency of the Republic. He played a prominent role in that infamous war of lies, slander, and death threats against the “enemy”. Dancing to the rhythm of gestures that imitated weapons, he contributed to the selection of the current president. And, as his colleague Mandetta, despite having denounced him to his colleagues in Congress (since it was he, Mandetta, the person who told his colleagues about the recorded material) had helped him escape the anger, then universally felt against him, he suggested for the winning captain. He would be the Minister of Health.
Mandetta fulfilled the role of informing his colleague among his peers. Onyx, in turn, prepared a “leak” for the press (with her evident collaboration), at the service of Lava Jato (whose connivance was desired by Onyx). Uplifting comedy/tragedy of sycophants, although unworthy of an Aristophanes because Greek comedies were of a high standard compared to the daily chanchada of the Brazilian State.
Sycophants. It is with these words that I began my speech to the Committee of the Chamber of Deputies in charge of analyzing the Ten Measures. Summoned by the table (at which I had a strategic seat... Onyx Lorenzoni), I began my considerations by remembering Lord Acton's saying: “Power corrupts. The absolute corrupts absolutely.” And then I discussed article 38 of the project, about paid whistleblowers. It's incredible that a text, committed by the aracque vestals commanded by Dallagnol, contains such a corrupting paragraph! The sycophant who betrays something “will be entitled to retribution of up to 5% of the proceeds obtained from the liquidation of these assets”. I asked the representatives present: “Was the drafting of the article reflected in the moral liability that the practice establishes or reiterates?” Silence in the Commission plenary. I went on to the nefarious “integrity tests”, proposed precisely by those who recommended rewarding greater corruption of justice, payment for secret denunciation. And the excerpt concludes: “In the integrity test, the individual is alone, without support from their representatives such as unions and associations, etc., in the face of an invisible power that only responds a posteriori, but must silence the name and conditions of the person being questioned”. And I moved on to the illegal evidence (!) that should be legitimized according to the so-called Catões de Curitiba, as it had been obtained “in good faith”. I showed the mental and mental cowardice that resides in the indecent proposal. I ended by indicating in the project “at least three points that deserve to be reflected on very carefully: first, this problem of the integrity test; second to the issue of good faith, which is just as important; and third, this initial issue (...), the lack of criteria for forwarding an accusation”.
My speech was silenced by the media. In newspapers like The Globe, what I said was cut, leaving just two anodyne lines about what had been said by me. No surprise, given that the clandestine political party called Lava Jato still has the full support of the Globo system today. Here we have an element to recall the question of a communication theorist: “if news is almost infinite, why do newspapers always have the same number of pages?”. Someone chooses, someone pushes away, someone silences, someone censors. The worst scandal of the “free” press is that its professionals, not infrequently, exercise the function of setting up the perennial collection of a dirty Index Librorum Prohibito rum.
But I ask for your attention to the chain of facts, not reported by the press and today “revealed” by Mandetta: Onyx, rapporteur of the project on the Ten Measures, was in collusion with the members of Lava Jato. Onyx was almost the whistleblower of his fellow congressmen to the press, in favor of Lava Jato. Onyx, as payment for a favor from Mandetta, appointed him to the Ministry of Health. It doesn't take an elementary course of logic to argue that the same intermediary between Lava Jato and Congress, between Lava Jato and the press, served as intermediary between Mandetta and Bolsonaro. The nefarious constellation that began to guide Brazilian destinies since 2016 remains as meridian as the Sun. All those who are part of it are complicit in the perverse way in which propaganda in favor of Death was conducted, led by sycophants and corrupt people of all silence.
Neither Mandetta, nor the military placed in key positions in the Federal Executive, nor the members of Lava Jato have the right to wash their hands of the true genocide that Brazil is facing. The ignorance of those who became president promising death and savage repression, the torture and killing of black people, indigenous people and those who did not accept his lethal theses, was evident, it shone like the king star. Agree to make a pact with him who is his equal. This is the case of Mandetta, generals, Sergio Moro and others. There is no Big Bad Wolf, no Little Red Riding Hood in politics. Whoever shares the wolf's den has no right to invoke Grandma's sufferings when she is devoured. If there is a Nuremberg in the future, everyone will be in the dock. To give us the certainty of such a savage policy, the hagiography of himself published by Mandetta serves. Patient Brazil, sooner or later, will know that doctors have signed up in the infected offices of power. Whether they were expelled from it or left out of fear of the Horror is irrelevant. Citizens by the thousands will be exterminated in a practice that contradicts every syllable and consonant of the Hippocratic Oath.
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PS: My speech to the Chamber Committee that studied the Ten Measures drawn up by Moisés' successors in Curitiba can be read almost in full in Website of the Chamber of Deputies, dated 22/08/2016.
Note: This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
