Monday, March 02, 2020

Son of Brazilian President Is Interviewed by Breitbart, But U.S. Readers Are Unable to Understand His Advocacy of a Strange Brazilian History of Anti-Protestantism and Anti-Semitism and the Real Nature of His Conservative Ideas


Son of Brazilian President Is Interviewed by Breitbart, But U.S. Readers Are Unable to Understand His Advocacy of a Strange Brazilian History of Anti-Protestantism and Anti-Semitism and the Real Nature of His Conservative Ideas

By Julio Severo
Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, was interviewed by Breitbart on February 2020. The interview, titled “Globalists Are Trying to Delete Our History,” pointed how he thinks that it is important for Brazil to restore its history.
Eduardo Bolsonaro
The Breitbart said,
Bolsonaro applauded Americans for being aware of their history, lamenting that he could not say the same for many of his compatriots.
“In Brazil, if you go to the streets, asking people, ‘who are the Brazilian founding fathers?’ I can guarantee for you, 90 percent of the people won’t know how to answer this question,” he predicted. “So this is something that we have to rescue and the conservative movement that is getting strong and stronger in Brazil, we are trying to improve, trying to rescue, because a people without memory is a country without culture.”
Because the U.S. public is completely unable to understand Brazilian history, Bolsonaro tried to use comparison, as if U.S. history and Brazilian history had the same parallels. Yet, is his comparison real?
Even being a Brazilian, I would love to see America returning to her roots and history. Yet, would it be good to see Brazil returning to its roots and history?
In the time of the U.S. Founders, there was tolerance. I am holding in my hand the book “The Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of the Men Who Founded Our Country,” by M.E. Bradford (CrossWay Books, 1988). I read it as soon as it was published, and I carry it in all my trips.
CrossWay Books is a major evangelical publisher.
The Worthy Company records 55 Framers of the U.S. Constitution. Two of them were Catholic, and the other Framers were Protestant. For an American reader, there is no surprise that in a U.S. population 98 percent Protestant, tolerance allowed two Catholics to participate in the making of their constitution.
The Worthy Company contains the biographical sketch of each framer, their theology and faith in God.
The generosity of U.S. conservative evangelicals is striking. When I explained to CrossWay Books in 1988 I could not afford their books, they sent me a box of them. Totally conservative and evangelical. Free of charge.
If my conservative articles are a blessing to Brazilian evangelical readers today is because U.S. conservative evangelicals were and have been a big blessing to me.
I have also read “America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations,” by William Federer, on how faith in God is inseparable from true U.S. patriotism. I read all this encyclopedia in 1996.
In Brazil, no major evangelical publisher could publish a history book titled “The Worthy Company” because Brazilian history is riddled with persecution against Jews and Protestants. Jews were persecuted by the Inquisition, which operated also in Brazil.
So Brazilian evangelical readers, like me, found hope only on translations from U.S. books, including Halley’s Bible Handbook, which in its earlier issues showed that faith in God is inseparable from true U.S. patriotism. It showed the faith of George Washington and other U.S. presidents. This handbook also explained what the Inquisition was. I read all this handbook in 1986.
What good is it for Brazilian evangelicals to read Brazilian history? Protestants were the heretics who should be exterminated. In fact, the first Protestants who came to Brazil in the 1500s were exterminated by Jesuits. So it is no surprise that the “Brazilian Founding Fathers” whom Eduardo Bolsonaro intends to rescue had no tolerance for Protestants.
A significant example was Northeast Brazil, colonized in the early 1600s by Dutch Calvinists, who established a society with tolerance for Protestants, Jews and Catholics. This was the first society in Brazil with real religious tolerance, and it had a real parallel with the U.S. In fact, under such Dutch Reformed administration, Jews built a synagogue in Recife, Brazil, the first synagogue in the Americas. Such synagogue would have been impossible in Catholic Brazil, but not in the Dutch Reformed colony in Northeast Brazil.
Eventually, the Dutch Calvinists were expelled. And the Jews who lived in their free society chose to follow them to New York to escape the Brazilian Catholic Inquisition. These were the first Jews in New York, and they founded the first financial system in America.
The Dutch Calvinists left to Brazil massive bridges, museums, theaters and other buildings that stand beautiful even today. This is real history.
The Dutch Calvinists could have built many, many other buildings, but they were killed and expelled. The expelled Jews could have built in Northeast Brazil the successful financial system they build in New York. But Brazilians chose intolerance, anti-Protestantism and anti-Semitism as the foundation of the new Brazil. So it is no surprise that Northeast Brazil has historically been a wasteland of poorness and disgrace.
U.S. history has no Inquisition against the Jews. Brazilian history has the Inquisition against the Jews. How can be U.S. history and Brazilian history parallels? It seems that even Eduardo Bolsonaro, who has revealed his personal wish that he would like to live in the U.S., not Brazil, does not know Brazilian history!
Catholic Brazil fought and exterminated the only and first society with religious freedom and real parallel with the U.S. society. Which side does Bolsonaro intend to rescue — the oppressors or their victims?
When I was a boy studying in a Brazilian school under the right-wing military rule, I was taught that Brazil’s fight against Dutch Calvinists was “patriotism.” Even though Brazilian Catholics celebrate such “patriotism,” I have never done it. In fact, in school Protestantism in history was taught as a religion oppressing, persecuting and killing Catholics. Such was the public-school system in Brazil under military rule.
School history books called Dutch Calvinists “heretic” invaders. There was a Jewish boy in the school and he was ostracized by other students, who used to say, “He is a Jew!” as if being a Jew were equal to be some kind of repugnant individual. I felt much pity of the boy because of the treatment he received from other boys.
I knew what the Jewish boy suffered because often I was mocked just because I was an evangelical. Most boys were Catholics, so in a public school where everything Catholic was celebrated, a Jewish boy and an evangelical boy were seen and treated as abnormal, with all kinds of nicknames.
I cannot imagine how much hatred Jews and Dutch evangelicals suffered in Brazil in past centuries.
The classes began with the teacher forcing students to pray the Catholic Rosary of Hail Mary. As an evangelical, I was not happy to be forced to do it in a public school and also to see my religion be disparaged in history books.
Is such history that Eduardo Bolsonaro intends to rescue?
Even though Jair Bolsonaro won the election because of the massive support of evangelicals tired of seeing socialist policies promoting abortion and sodomy, the Bolsonaro administration has been using such evangelical support as just a platform to strengthen other groups, including monarchists, who defend that Brazil in the monarchical rule was better than today.
During the monarchical rule, Americans and Europeans who visited Brazil said that laziness and corruption reigned in Brazil. Is such “history” that Eduardo Bolsonaro intends to rescue?
During the Brazilian monarchy death penalty was abolished and sodomy was legalized in the 1800s. So Brazil was possibly the first nation in the Americas, under Catholic monarchy, to legalize sodomy. Death penalty was abolished because the rampant corruption affected everything, including the legal system.
It is true that the Brazilian monarch, Dom Pedro 2, was so marveled, when he visited the United States in the 1860s, at the progress of the U.S. society and at how American Protestants worked hard that he invited the defeated confederates to move to Brazil. He was trying to solve the Brazilian tradition of “laziness and corruption.” About 10,000 confederates moved to Brazil. All of them Protestant.
They had to live in separate towns built by them. They had to build separate cemeteries, because they were not allowed to bury their dead in public cemeteries. They had to live separate because even in the 1800s the Catholic Brazil hated Protestants.
During the monarchy, Protestants were banned from holding any public and government office. They were just second or third-class citizens.
This is the Brazilian history. If Eduardo Bolsonaro intends to rescue it, good for him and Catholics. But it is not good for me as an evangelical. A history that persecuted Jews and Dutch Calvinists, a history that ostracized American Protestants, a history that banned Protestants from holding government posts does not represent me.
So is there a parallel between U.S. history and Brazilian history as Bolsonaro tried to show? Only in his imagination.
Brazil has a sad history of laziness, corruption and high taxes that began long before the birth of Karl Marx. So to try to blame all the Brazilian problems on Marxism is just dishonest.
During the military rule, which was right-wing in the Brazilian standard, phone lines were so expensive as a land property. Brazilian cars, which were low quality in comparison to American cars, had a massive tax of 50 percent! High taxes are a terrible tradition in Brazil. Even today, under Bolsonaro, if you buy a car, which remains also in low quality in comparison to American cars, you pay half of its value in taxes.
Bolsonaro cannot blame high taxes on socialists, because they are a cursed tradition in the Brazilian history.
Breitbart’s interview presented Eduardo Bolsonaro as “the representative of the burgeoning conservative movement in his country that brought his father to power last year after over a decade of socialist rule.”
There was no word or suggestion of the massive evangelical support. Censorship? Political revisionism? Bolsonaro has the habit of discarding the role of evangelicals in the election of his father, and he has been rebuked for it by Silas Malafaia, the most prominent evangelical leader in Brazil.
The Latin American pattern is where evangelicals increase their numbers, conservatism reigns. Today, Guatemala is 50 percent evangelical and as soon as an evangelical president was elected, the Guatemalan embassy in Israel was moved to Jerusalem. Even though evangelicals massively voted for Bolsonaro, he is delaying his promise to them of moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem. If Bolsonaro were an evangelical, he would be much more conservative and the Brazilian embassy would have already been moved to Jerusalem in the first year of his administration.
It is just a pity that Breitbart does not understand anything about Brazilian history and politics. If it did, it could present some relevant questions to Bolsonaro, including “why, while U.S. history is marked by Protestant tolerance of Jews and Catholics, Brazilian history is marked by Catholic intolerance against Protestants and Jews?”
He could also ask why Eduardo Bolsonaro does not talk about how evangelicals were fundamental for the victory of his father. “Fundamental” is the exact adjective Jair Bolsonaro used about evangelicals when he was interviewed by CBN in 2019.
The Breitbart reporter said, “The elder Bolsonaro won the presidency on a campaign of family values, individual freedom, and divorcing Brazil from malevolent international forces such as the governments of China…” If she had made a simple Google search, she would see that Bolsonaro visited China in 2019 in the 70th anniversary of its communist revolution. Contrarily to conservatives, who say that China is a communist nation, Bolsonaro called China a “capitalist nation.”
Sure, in comparison to Venezuela, Brazil is a paradise. But in comparison to the U.S. and its history, what is Brazil? If you are unhappy to pay about 10 percent in taxes when buying a high-quality car in the U.S., come to Brazil to pay about 50 percent in taxes when buying a low-quality car!
The whole interview showed that the interviewer knows nothing about Brazil and its history, and it showed, for watchful readers, how ridiculous Eduardo Bolsonaro was by trying to make U.S. history and Brazilian history as a parallel worthy to be rescued by conservatives.
As a conservative evangelical, I gladly support efforts to rescue U.S. history and traditions. But I doubt that U.S. evangelicals, who are the main political base of Trump, would be glad to see the rescue of a Brazilian history where Protestants, including American Protestants, and Jews were mistreated and persecuted.
If Breitbart does not understand anything about Brazilian history, what does Bolsonaro really understand about conservatism? In 2019, he held a gay flag in the CPAC Brazil he funded with over 1 million of Brazilian tax-money. Socialists use tax-money to fund their private ideological events. But real conservatives never do it. One thing the U.S. conservative public does not know about Brazil right-wingers is that they love tax-money as much as socialists do.
For the opportunity he gave for CPAC to hold — and for the massive tax-money he gave to fund — its event in Brazil, they gave him a special time in CPAC 2020 in the U.S.
Tax-funded “conservatism” is not a conservative idea.
Actually, he is riding the massive conservative evangelical wave, but giving no credit to it. Instead, he has been using this wave just as a platform to advance other groups and his own ambitions.
For the sake of U.S. readers who do not know the Brazilian reality, Breitbart should schedule a new interview with Bolsonaro, with necessary and pointed questions. It could also take the opportunity to teach him real Brazilian history.
The important lesson is: It is no coincidence that the largest capitalist nation in the world — the United States — is also the largest evangelical nation in the world. It is also no coincidence that the explosive growth of conservatism in Brazil, which is the largest Catholic nation in the world, follows the explosive growth of evangelical churches in Brazil.
In fact, to counter the explosive growth of socialist parties and movements in Latin America fueled by the Liberation Theology promoted by the Catholic Church, the CIA supported Pentecostalism in Latin America for its Prosperity Gospel that is a conservative and natural enemy of Marxism.
How do Breitbart and Bolsonaro overlook this so obvious reality?
The Brazilian conservative Catholic movement that is politically capitalizing on the growth of evangelicals is stridently pro-Inquisition.
Is the explosive growth of conservatism in Brazil a result of monarchical and colonial Brazil, where anti-Protestantism and anti-Semitism reigned, or a result of the explosive growth of evangelicalism? Without bias, this is a question very easy to answer.
Yet, Breitbart never presented this question to Bolsonaro.
Recommended Reading on Eduardo Bolsonaro:
Recommended Reading on Jair Bolsonaro and Evangelical Conservatism in Brazil:

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