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 |
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.
Portuguese version of this article: Revista
americana Foreign Policy acusa que campanha de propaganda de Jair Bolsonaro,
candidato à presidência do Brasil, foi inspirada diretamente de manual nazista
Recommended
Reading:
The Transcendent Power of Neoconservatism in
the U.S. Media and among Left-Wingers and Right-Wingers
Recommended
Reading on the Inquisition:
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