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Marcelo Adnet was the target of the Special Secretariat for Social Communication of the Presidency of the Republic and the Special Secretary of Culture, Mario Frías, after broadcasting a parody on a video of a federal government campaign on “Brazilian heroes.” Frías, who stars in the video, called the comedian “creep,” “filthy creature,” and “fool. The publication of a photo of Adnet by Secom, in which he affirms that he “despises Brazilians” on his official social networks, has provoked a series of Bolsonarista attacks against him.
The case is another sad evidence that the secretariat has acted as a body of political propaganda, but also of repression against critics of the government. It thus reproduces models adopted by dictatorships of the right and left throughout the world.
And remember the worst practices from our own authoritarian periods. Not only those of the last military dictatorship (1964-1985), taken as an example by the President of the Republic, but also those of the former Press and Propaganda Department (DIP) of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship (1937-1945).
The DIP functioned as an instrument of personal promotion for Vargas, his family, and the main authorities of his government. At the same time, it acted in the compulsion of criticism and freedom of expression, in the fight against any idea that Estado Novo considered disturbing of national unity and in the censorship of the arts and journalism.
To defend the personal interests of the president and his assistants, Secom has been accused of political persecution. And hurt the impersonality and probity of the public administration by using an official government account to attack citizens for expressing opinions contrary to those of the president.
Senator Randolfe Rodrigues (Rede-AP) stated that he will sue the Federal Public Ministry and ask the National Congress to investigate the agency’s action. Hopefully Bolsonaro’s new best friend, the centão, allows it.
Marcelo Adnet, unfortunately, was not the first, nor should he be the last
On February 3, for example, the secretary used her Twitter account to attack the filmmaker Petra Costa, director of the documentary “Democracia em Vertigem”. The work narrates the trajectory of the PT governments, going through the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff to the current political crisis. Petra, an Oscar finalist, had criticized the Bolsonaro government on US public television.
“In the United States, the filmmaker Petra Costa has assumed the role of anti-Brazil activist and is defaming the image of the country abroad. But we are here to show reality. Do not believe in fiction, believe in facts,” he published Secom. This generated threats against her from groups of fans of the president.
Secom is also used to attack democracy itself
Like a post, on March 10 of this year, in which he reinforced the “legitimacy” of a Bolsonarista demonstration that would take place five days later. “The demonstrations on March 15 are not against Congress or the Judiciary. They are in favor of Brazil,” he said in a post in which he transcribed Bolsonaro’s sentence.
On March 15, the “legitimate demonstration” called for the closure of the National Congress and the Federal Supreme Court. In front of the Planalto Palace, the participants shouted “AI-5! AI-5! AI-5! AI-5!”, While Bolsonaro greeted them. Promulgated by the military dictatorship in December 1968, Institutional Law No. 5 empowered the president to close Congress, establish censorship, and lower the general baton.
And government social media has been used to put people’s health at risk.
This week, after Bolsonaro argued that “no one can force anyone to get vaccinated” against the coronavirus, setting fire to the ultra-conservative part of his followers, the Ministry of Social Communication reinforced the message. He used an institutional channel to say that no one will be forced to take anything.
In other words, he used public resources on a public platform to advance the ideological position of the president. Worse still, committing a crime against public health. Faced with the negative repercussions, Secom republished. He said that “Brazil is a democracy, the government is liberal and its president is not a tyrant.”
The secretariat knows that when it comes to compulsory vaccination, this does not mean forcibly biting citizens, as was done more than a hundred years ago. But by restricting access to certain rights, for example. The Ministry of Citizenship itself states that keeping vaccinated children up-to-date is a condition for continuing to receive the subsidy.
You know, but adjust the Republican goals to Bolsonaro’s needs. Thus, its function has gone far beyond providing information to guarantee the quality of life of the population. It became a propaganda service in the interests of its leader. And the public becomes private.
Public resources to defend the president and his assistants
DIP helped in the cult of the personality of Getúlio Vargas and in the construction of the idea of ”father of the poor”. Secom is seen as one of the tools for the current president to achieve the same goal, rewriting history if necessary. The massive disclosure of emergency aid, ignoring the paternity of deputies and senators, so to speak.
“What convinces the masses is not the facts, even if they are invented, but only the coherence with the system of which these facts are part”, says the philosopher Hanna Arendt, in the classic “Origins of totalitarianism”. “Totalitarian propaganda creates a fictional world capable of competing with the real world, whose main disadvantage is that it is not logical, coherent and organized,” he says.
Bolsonaro’s fanatical supporters believe in their leader’s infallibility, although he did not acknowledge that he was wrong to treat a pandemic that has killed more than 126,000 people in Brazil as “fantasy”, “hysteria”, “fluzinha”, “chills” . The presumption of infallibility is not based on superior intelligence, but, according to Hanna Arendt, on the belief that it acts as a translator of historical and natural forces. To build this narrative, there is nothing like social media serving the president, with public money.
Bolsonarismo has a revolutionary component, subverting the institutions and speaking directly to its mass. He would take democracy by storm if he could, putting something ugly in its place. Despite this, I do not compare it to Nazism and other totalitarian movements. But the analogy about his advertising practices fits, less because of the analyst’s desire than because of Bolsonaro’s own behavior.
In short, the institutions do not function normally. Unless the “normal” is the slavery of the Colony and the Empire, the persecution and censorship of the Estado Novo and the small case with the life and freedom of the military dictatorship.
On time: all this noise shouldn’t be a “golden shower”, that is, a distraction from other things that matter. As the answer was not given to the question: President, why did Michelle Bolsonaro receive R $ 89 thousand from Queiroz and his wife?
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