Thursday, October 11, 2018

Foreign Policy Magazine Charges that Brazilian Presidential Candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s Propaganda Campaign Taken Straight from Nazi Playbook


Foreign Policy Magazine Charges that Brazilian Presidential Candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s Propaganda Campaign Taken Straight from Nazi Playbook

By Julio Severo
In a report titled “Jair Bolsonaro’s Model Isn’t Berlusconi. It’s Goebbels,” Foreign Policy, a U.S. magazine based in Washington D.C., said, “The far-right Brazilian leader isn’t just another conservative populist. His propaganda campaign has taken a page straight from the Nazi playbook.”
Jair Bolsonaro
“He wants criminals to be summarily shot rather than face trial. He presents indigenous people as ‘parasites’ and also advocates for discriminatory, eugenically devised forms of birth control. Bolsonaro has warned about the danger posed by refugees from Haiti, Africa, and the Middle East, calling them ‘the scum of humanity,’” said Foreign Policy, which added, “In these and other statements, Bolsonaro’s vocabulary recalls the rhetoric behind Nazi policies of persecution and victimization.”
In fact, the term “Nazi” appears astoundingly 34 times in the Foreign Policy report on Bolsonaro. Foreign Policy said,
In Brazil and elsewhere, right-wing populists are increasingly acting as the Nazis did and, at the same time, disavowing this Nazi legacy or even blaming the left for it. For post-fascist members of the alt-right, acting like a Nazi and accusing your adversary of being so is not a contradiction at all. Indeed, the idea of a leftist Nazism is a political myth that draws directly on the methods of Nazi propaganda.
According to Brazilian right-wingers and Holocaust deniers, it is the left that threatens to revive Nazism. This is, of course, a falsehood that comes straight out of the Nazi playbook. Fascists always deny what they are and ascribe their own features and their own totalitarian politics to their enemies.
While Hitler accused Judaism of being the power behind the United States and Russia and said Jews wanted to start a war and exterminate Germans, it was he who started World War II and exterminated the European Jews. Fascists have always replaced reality with ideological fantasies. This is why Bolsonaro presents the left’s leaders as latter-day emulators of Hitler when in fact he is the only candidate close to the Führer in style and substance.
What the report did not explain is how Bolsonaro can be a Nazi if he is the only candidate who promised to move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem, while the other candidates promised better relations with Palestinians, who have attacked the Jews just as the Nazis did. Does being pro-Israel mean to be a Nazi? If so, Bolsonaro fits the accusation. I do too.
The report was written by the Jewish author Federico Finchelstein, who has published books on fascism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Jewish history.
I disagree with Mr. Finchelstein’s radical view. What is the ideological nature of Foreign Policy Magazine to publish such radical report?
Probably neocon. Neocons just love to lambast, blast and attack Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Foreign Policy has, not incidentally, several reports treating Putin just as it treated Bolsonaro.
In its report “Putin Wants God (or at Least the Church) on His Side,” Foreign Policy said, “In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has embraced aspects of this Christian imperial ideology, demanding that state officials read some of the religious philosophers who came into their own in the twilight days of the Russian Empire.”
Foreign Policy added, “Russia’s new championing of so-called traditional values, such as homophobia and opposition to feminism and secularism, has received a powerful boost from the Orthodox Church—and from far-right fellow travelers in the West.”
In its report against Bolsonaro, Foreign Policy argued that he also has such traditional values, such as homophobia and opposition to feminism and secularism.
As all neocons do, Foreign Policy repeatedly complains about Trump’s attempts to befriend Putin and Russia as necessary allies against Islamic terror.
Foreign Policy’s criticism, using a Jewish author, of Bolsonaro is unwarranted. If Bolsonaro is as radical as pundits in Foreign Policy in Washington D.C. portray him, what are his enemies? Fernando Haddad, who is facing Bolsonaro in the Brazilian election, is a member of the Workers’ Party, a socialist party that has ruined Brazil. Former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, a star in the Workers’ Party, is serving a long jail term for corruption.
Haddad and his socialist companions seek the promotion of abortion, socialism and homosexuality. In fact, Haddad is the author of the infamous “gay kit,” a material to homosexualize school-children.
Foreign Policy said in its anti-Bolsonaro report, “Bolsonaro, who is also known as the Brazilian Trump, is currently being advised by Steve Bannon in his campaign.”
Bannon is a traditional Catholic with a deep interest in mysticism and esotericism, especially in an obscure French esotericist named René Guénon — an anti-Marxist sorcerer. In sum, Bannon is an adherent of New Age.
Even though U.S. President Trump had Bannon once as one of his advisers, eventually Trump expelled him as an opportunist and betrayer, and he developed a deep hostility toward him, especially after Bannon collaborated in the anti-Trump book “Fire and Fury,” by left-wing writer Michael Wolff.
Today, Trump wants nothing to do with Bannon. So why does Bolsonaro want?
Even though the accusations from Foreign Policy against Bolsonaro were exaggerated, there are actually extremist individuals among his followers. These extremists have been already denounced by his candidate to vice-president. These extremists advocate the bizarre idea that the crimes of the Inquisition against Jews and Protestants are lies and myths, and that actually the Inquisition was a tribunal of mercy.
If Foreign Policy had directed its criticism just to such Inquisition advocates, I would have understood, because Finchelstein as a Jews has every right to condemn what the Inquisition did to the Jews. But Foreign Policy did not attack them. It attacked Bolsonaro.
Even though Bolsonaro has not advocated such bizarre idea, he has nonetheless recommended its most prominent advocate in Brazil, Olavo de Carvalho, who by the way is also, like Bannon, an old adherent and promoter of René Guénon. Carvalho translated into Portuguese one of Guénon’s books, he is the author of several occultist books and the author of many comments against evangelicals, including the infamous declaration: “Evangelical churches have done more harm to Brazil than the entire left.”
I do not know if Bolsonaro is going to do to these two “Catholic” adherents of Guénon what Trump did to Bannon: Expelling.
Yet, Bolsonaro’s victory is not dependent on them. As recognized even by the U.S. Big Media, the greatest chance for Catholic Bolsonaro to win Brazil’s presidency are evangelicals.
Because Brazil is the largest Catholic nation in the world, with 60 percent Brazilians identifying themselves as Catholic, Bolsonaro should be their candidate and have a very easy victory. But Brazilian Catholicism is plagued by Liberation Theology. So it is left to a minority of Brazilian evangelicals, who are overwhelmingly Pentecostal and charismatic, to advocate conservative values.
Bolsonaro is certainly not the best man evangelicals would like to represent them in the Brazilian presidency. But with a socialist candidate ready to persecute them and promote abortion, socialism and homosexuality, no other option is left to evangelicals.
So evangelicals are the best chance for Bolsanaro, whom they chose because of a plain lack of option. I have myself chosen him, for his promises to legalize homeschooling (traditionally criminalized in Brazil) and repeal gun control laws in a Brazil whose Catholic culture has always been anti-gun in the hands of common people. The Catholic culture is so strong that both Bolsonaro and his socialist opponent are Catholic.
It is a very good sign that neocons in Washington D.C. are opposed to Bolsonaro. But it is a very bad sign that he is being advised by adherents of Guénon. And one of them, Carvalho, is so neocon and anti-Russia as Foreign Policy is.
Foreign Policy is just a neocon fakenews media from Washington D.C. It has become a laughingstock because of a Jewish report that does not attack the pro-Inquisition fervor among extremist Catholic right-wingers in Brazil, but labels as a “Nazi” a candidate who promised to move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem. After all, how “Nazi” is such move?
What is Bolsonaro going to do to dispel the preposterous accusations that he is a “Nazi”? Is he going to get soft on abortion, socialism and homosexuality? Or is he using these controversial issues just to draw the powerful conservative evangelical vote?
There is something that Foreign Policy did not mention. Nazism was immersed in occultism — what evangelicals call New Age. In this sense, there is some “Nazi” stuff among Bolsonaro’s followers, the same way there were the same problem in Trump’s circle. Yet, Trump solved this problem by removing the esotericist and surrounding himself with evangelical and charismatic preachers as his advisers.
If Bolsonaro is intelligent, he will not expel or get soft on conservative stances against abortion, socialism and homosexuality to please the FakeNews Media. He will expel exactly what Trump expelled: opportunists and betrayers.
What I can say is that if Foreign Policy and Federico Finchelstein know Bolsonaro closer without their neocon bias, they will definitely condemn not him, but his adherents who advocate the Inquisition. Those they will deservedly call Nazi, because both the Inquisition and Nazism persecuted, tortured and killed Jews. And they will praise Bolsonaro’s pro-Israel stances, including his promise of moving the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem. There is nothing more Jewish, and nothing less Nazi, than this.
Recommended Reading:
Recommended Reading on the Inquisition:

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