A professor at the University of Brasília (UnB) presents a lesson plan in accordance with official academic standards, but is threatened with legal action and censorship. The episode is unacceptable in democratic lands. He evokes Spinoza's letter to the Elector Palatine, who offered him a professorship, “respecting the limits of established religion” (1). The thinker refused the honor with immortal words: “I ignore the limits within which my philosophical freedom should be contained so as not to appear to harbor the desire to disturb the officially established religion. Schism does not come from ardent religious zeal, but from diverse passions or love of contradiction that deviates from its meaning and condemns all words, even if they express a right thought” (2). The Brazilian government de facto – if it is de jure one can argue – whether to impose limits on thought, a task of pure physical force.
In politics, names indicate what should be, not what is effective. When the latter deviates from the idealized model, the term no longer serves him. The speeches to save him end in poor lies. If a regime reaches that point, it shows signs of death. This is what happens with “democracy” (3). Defined as dogma, it often disguises tyrannical commands. Benjamin Constant stated: “the people do not have the right to harm a single innocent person, nor to treat a single defendant as guilty without legal proof. He, therefore, cannot delegate this right to anyone.” (Sur la souveraineté du peuple). The warning did not stop many liberals from joining the fascist power that displayed popular support. Today's liberalism gives in again to beam or the sigma.
Caution is important given the polysemy of the words. If in a democratic regime oppositions lose their right to exist, mendacity becomes obvious (4). Avishai Margali points out decent or indecent states and societies. A core chapter of his book is as follows: Being Beastly to Humans (5). Under the fierce power, everyone transforms into human-looking animals. The State that only shows its claws prevents rational adherence, as it generates repulsion and fear. “The only hope for each of us, of not being treated like animals by our fellow creatures, is that all our fellow creatures (...) experience themselves, immediately, as suffering beings and cultivate in their innermost being the aptitude for piety, which in the state of nature occupies the place of 'laws, customs and virtue' and without the exercise of which we begin to understand that, in the state of society, there can be no laws, no customs, no virtue” (Claude Lévi -Strauss) (6).
The Brazilian State, whose basis is a merciless “civil society”, treats citizens without power and money (“differentiated people”) as beasts. The current Planalto team uses force to impose hateful measures against the “negatively privileged” (Max Weber). Labor reform reduces the price of labor and increases the reserve army. The improvement of workers was banned (7). National goods are for sale, from water to techniques paid for with citizenship tax money. No country gives up those elements, but the accumulated assets are handed over to European, North American and Chinese companies.
The indigenous genocide is reborn in the union of ruralists and government. The majority of young people killed are black. Quilombolas are threatened. The disadvantaged insist on living, which requires the police to have more weapons against them. In In 2016, Brazil recorded 61.619 violent deaths. And the parliamentary lobby linked to the arms industry wants more sales to “customers”, conducted in “security” projects presented to Congress. In recent days, women have been sentenced to care for unborn children in infected cells. It took the STF to mitigate the barbarity. The government, to the delight of agribusiness, tried to abolish rules against slavery. Pension reform was only postponed. But the tap of public coffers guarantees support from Congress and “civil society”.
State terror practices resume. Physical and moral abuses by the police resurface in the invasions of public universities. In Santa Catarina, the rector of UFSC was driven to suicide. Nothing happened to repair the attack. The same force violated UFMG in a maneuver whose name mocks the sad hours of the civil-military dictatorship. “Esperança equilibrista” is a song that sings the lament of those tortured and banished because they did not accept their will.
To increase popularity, the government invented a new abuse of the state monopoly on physical force. The intervention in Rio de Janeiro is far from rich or middle-class neighborhoods. After tattooing numbers in German concentration camps, techniques arrive up to date. The registration with obligatory photo of honest people reduces it to the level of criminals. Innocent people are squeezed between police forces and drug traffickers. Hostages, their children die in schools, daycare centers, on the streets.
Censorship attacks the university sector, combined with the unprecedented cut in funds for research and services that still guarantee Brazil a place worldwide. The UnB professor, indicated at the beginning of this article, proposes examining national powers in the classroom after the overthrow of the Head of State. Based on theories exposed from Machiavelli to Gabriel Naudé, including contemporary political science, he names impeachment as a coup d'état. Instead of responding, through its academic defenders, with doctrine and science, the government opens legal proceedings with the excuse that the professor would assume the theses of a political party.
The method is not even new. The National Information Service (SNI), to eradicate opposition to the dictatorship, had offices in the rectory and controlled appointments, research and teaching. A national and international fact, authoritarianism with a democratic veil also operates in the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France). In 2007, a “security and defense” official monitored “sensitive” sociological and sociopolitical investigations, especially those dedicated to Islam. The police officer wrote to researchers to veto opinions or studies. “The CNRS decision leaves the academic world perplexed. Would it be necessary to prohibit research for fear that its results would displease those in power? It’s the same as shattering thermometers to ensure the fever doesn’t rise” (8). We borrowed the authoritarian way from the CNRS. Globalization of the State guardian of ideas.
It is impossible to respect a ministry dedicated to the educational plan, but exposed to mockery for ennobling a performer pornographic. The indecorum does not reside only in the honoree. The censorship of university education is obscene. Such practices return to the cultural terror denounced by Tristão de Athayde after 1964 (9). They mimic Decree 477, AI-5 applied to the university. Everyone remembers Athayde, but the names of the censors and police officers who raped the freedom of the professorship have disappeared. No one will remember the name of the artist who received ministerial honors, few will remember the censorship authority. But most will know who Luiz Carlos Cancellier de Olivo was. Those who, in fields, with Luis Felipe Miguel defend the unlimited examination of facts and ideas, despite the Autos-da-fé. There are strong and weak moments in the history of peoples (10). The Brazilian now will be understood as the era of terrorist state power.
1) Letter from Fabritius to Spinoza (16 / 02 / 1673).
2) Spinoza's response to Fabritius (30 / 03 / 1673).
3) L. Canfora: La démocratie, histoire d'une idéologie (Paris, Seuil, 2006.
4) C. Castilla del Pino (org.): El discourse de la lie (Madrid, Alianza, 1988.
5) The Decent Society (London, Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).
6) Anthropologie structurelle, Deux, cit. by E. Fontenay:Le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité, Ed. Fayard, 1998, p. 483.
7) “Parents have 5 million people looking for a job for at least a year”, Price, 26/02/2018, p. A-3.
8) T. Todorov: “Menaces sur la démocratie”, Le Monde, 14 / 11 / 2009.
9) Xikito Affonso Ferreira: Stories of my grandfather Tristan, (Azulsol Ed. 2015).
10) JGA Pocock: The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine politics though and the Atlantic Republic Tradition.(Princeton. Univ. Press, 2003).
