Photo: Antoninho PerriRobert Roman da Silva is a retired professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp. Author of several books, including “Brazil, Church against State” (Editora Kayrós, 1979), “Romantic Conservatism” (Editora da Unesp), “Silêncio e Ruído, a satira e Denis Diderot” (Editora da Unicamp), “Razão of State and other states of reason” (Editora Perspectiva). 

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Photo: Reproduction After the regime imposed in 1964, few academics and politicians believed that in the near future there would be a threat of another civil-military coup. The trust was such that some strategic points passed without major trauma in the 1988 Charter. A battle won by the defenders of status quo authoritarianism was defined in Article 142: the Armed Forces “are intended to defend the Homeland, guarantee constitutional powers and, at the initiative of any of these, law and order”. Anodyne in appearance, this formula allows the public authorities to demand interventions from the barracks in the civil field, to maintain the norm and prevent uprisings. Nothing in this item brings anything new to those who study the history of ancient, modern and contemporary states. Differently from what is foreseen in Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, the summoning of the military branch is now not only attributed to the President of the Republic, but to the three powers. Read the text by Ruth Zimmerling, Germany: parliamentarism and the ghost of Weimar (Scielo). This is a considerable difference, especially if we take into account the hegemony maintained by the Brazilian federal Executive.

Photo: Reproduction
Above, Castelo Branco (right), 1st president of the military dictatorship; below, Costa e Silva signs the AI-5, in December 1968

Photo: Reproduction


Let us leave aside the ability to operationalize the use of force by the three powers. The fact is that the Charter guarantees the legality of military intervention. During the time the main text was prepared, those responsible for that part were divided. Those most averse to direct democracy and popular sovereignty supported the final wording, but wanted greater rigor in the text. Democrats wanted to tone it down as much as possible. And they lost.

I continue with the logic underlying the accepted and promulgated formula. The explicit mention of law and order revisits an ancient history, dating back to the Roman Republic. I refer to the dictatorship. Let us consult the thinkers of the Enlightenment who collect the historical elements, immanent to the problem. Tell Encyclopedia coordinated by Denis Diderot: “as the Romans expelled their kings, they found themselves obliged to create a dictator in the extreme dangers of the republic, as for example when it was agitated by dangerous seditions, or attacked by fearsome enemies”. With other authorities suspended, the dictator had the power of life and death in the city and the army. “But as he could abuse such vast power, which was very suspicious to Republicans, the precaution was always taken to limit his rule to six months.” With Sila, the dictatorship committed terrible crimes. To authorize such villainies he declared himself perpetual dictator, usurping dictatorial force. And the encyclopedist comments: “absolute sovereign, he changed the form of government at will, abolished old laws and proclaimed new ones, became master of the public treasury and despotically disposed of the assets of his citizens”. Cesar, victorious at the cost of much corruption, including financial, resumes his perpetual dictatorship and rules as master of the world and the republic. It ends in the known way.

To explain the facts of the Roman dictatorship, particularly those of Sulla and Caesar, there are immense libraries, from the Middle Ages to the present day. I limit myself to a significant comment on the biography published by Luciano Canfora. When indicating the banditry assumed by Clodius, a uncle macoute of the time, says the historian: “With his (Clodius') aggressive presence on the capital's political scene, the extreme point was reached and that parasitic degeneration of Rome's urban proletariat was realized, a premise not secondary to Caesar's decision to disassociate himself from of traditional politics popularis and its dynamics. When classes break down into the inability not only to assume a directive role but also to adapt to the hegemony of other groups, phenomena of blind parasitism and leadership of violent action emerge that disqualify, often for a period that is sometimes too long, the democratic tradition.” (Julius Caesar, the democratic dictator).

To overcome seditions and “threats to order”, the dictators Sulla and Cesar, but also others apparently more controlled until our times, “put an end to an era of anarchy but also to the 'old regime' that their propaganda discredits by all means . (...) The dictator has and imposes a program that is generally well defined from a political and social point of view, which brings about a violent break with the previous regime. (...) Its main means of action is violence accompanied by more or less intense terror. The instruments of such violence can be the army, or private militias” (Paul Petit, “Dictatures and legitimacy in “Empire Romain”in Dictatures and Laws, org. by M. Duverger).

Scholars of the dictatorial regime, since the ancient era, point out an important point, but little noticed by those who defend that “remedy” for the ills of the State, starting with economic and political corruption. The dictatorial regime is not a means to establish new state and societal structures. He is primarily conservative, if not reactionary. Its mission is defined as negative and its task is to keep the collective away from possible destruction, hence its exceptionality and the salvationist character of its holder, individual or group. This aspect is highlighted by Spinoza, the ethical author of political and democratic modernity: “In moments of distress, when everyone is seized with panic terror (...) faces turn to the man whose victories put him in full light”. (Treaty Political, chapter 8) The terrified free the dictator from respecting the law. In the task of maintaining a status quo, the temporary possessor of absolute command destroys the very thing he was supposed to guarantee. An excellent comment can be found in the book by Marie-Laurie Basilien-Gainche: Rules of procedure and exceptions.

The 1964 dictatorship had as its emblem the fight against corruption and subversion. In the case of the second, the imposed rulers fought bloody battles, with many attacks on democratic freedoms and civil rights. In the case of the first, Congress and politics did not fail to harbor, throughout the dictatorship, notorious corrupt people or facilitators of corruption. The list is long, and can start with Paulo Salim Maluf, ending with Edison Lobão and other sound appeals. It is enough to look at these names that operated the national political order, and still today activate the mechanisms of the State, to realize the planned defeat, which occurred in the authoritarian regime, in the supposed or real fight against corruption. Seeking a dictatorship to destroy corrupt forms is a doubly dangerous and useless task. First, if the regime was designed to maintain law and order in force, in Brazilian cases of the XNUMXth century, law and order were maintained, with all their inequities, twin sisters of corruption. And the regime of force, given its own negative nature, had no legitimacy or objective conditions to build new forms of State and society. Decades of authoritarian rule have not produced better forms of government, political control, justice and citizenship. When the dictatorial State ended, at least temporarily, the country was the same, or worse, than before its establishment.

Dictatorship and coup d'état form a coherent whole. In the 20th century, numerous coups d'état occurred, produced for ideological, religious and political reasons. At dawn, tanks take to the streets. Radio and television stations broadcast reports of the threatened government. Legalism falls silent and proclamations emerge from those who desire power. Patriotic music makes up the emotional appeal to the people. Once the old leaders have fallen, the new ones interrupt public rights to cleanse the country of all corruption and defeat their enemies. “If they were victorious, they would do more or worse than what we did”, the phrase modulates the speech of the new palatians. Few countries emerged from such a macabre dance ready for democracy and were able to rely on political or legal techniques capable of producing a State where different opinions coexist.

The model above leaves in the shadows that the coup d'état is more subtle than the intervention in the barracks. A coup can be bloodless and not suspend all rights. If micrological changes are made to the legal and governmental order, with a small addition or subtraction to the laws, their effect is as disastrous for democracy as an armed “pronouncement”. Together, micro-interventions create ruptures in public and private law, which generates fear and general distrust towards institutions.

In Gabriel Naudé we find the outline of modern coups. To the Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat (1639) order a model to be observed and feared by democrats. According to Naudé, “public good and utility come before private utility”. Coups define “extraordinary acts which princes are constrained to execute against common law, when affairs become difficult or desperate, without observing any order or form of justice.” In the coup “the storm falls before the thunder, the execution precedes the sentence, (...) an individual receives the blow he imagined giving, another dies when he thought he was safe, a third receives the blow he did not expect”. The ruler who lost is punished and then sentenced by the winners.

This is what happened with the Institutional Act No. 1 (AI-1). Having retired the current notions of legitimacy and sovereignty, the text proclaims: "The victorious revolution invests itself in the exercise of Constituent Power. This manifests itself through popular election or revolution. This is the most expressive and most radical form of Constituent Power. Thus, the victorious revolution, as Constituent Power, legitimizes itself. (...) She issues legal norms without being limited by the regulations prior to her victory.”

In institutional Act number 1, it talks about the omnipotence brought by the constituent power. It is impossible to understand that text, which established the 1964 dictatorship, without reading the works of Carl Schmitt, a theorist frequented by Francisco Campos, the father of Polaca and Institutional Acts, from the first to the fifth. “Sovereign dictatorship is the commission of the unconditional action of a constituent power”, says Carl Schmitt in his tremendous The Dictatorship, in the chapter entitled “The concept of sovereign dictatorship”. Faced with news such as the defense of the coup by an active general, something that will necessarily require a regime of force, it is advisable to read Schmitt's aforementioned key book with caution and extra attention. Such an examination is worth much more than frequenting social media. In Schmitt, we have the path of our destiny, as it was defined in the 20th century and as it can be resumed in the 21st century. I conclude: not infrequently, the threat of a coup from the barracks serves to hide the most lethal coups d'état. Today, in Brazil, the scams are condensed into changes in laws, such as social security, labor, ecological and human rights. In addition, of course, to the coups defined by “political reform”. Out of fear or out of love for tanks, many will accept prepared blows sine ira and studio by the corrupt palaces. The rest is silence.

 

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