Sunday, January 08, 2023

The International Far Right Denial of Democracy

So there I am trying to edit the non-fiction book of blog articles when news comes down the pipe that Brazil - which had just rejected Jair Bolsonaro, a bullying trump-lite President in last year's election - suffered their own insurrection riot of that SOB's supporters. Government buildings - especially the Presidential Palace and the nation's Supreme Court - raided and destroyed. I jumped to the Guardian's coverage for more details (via Tom Phillips and Andrew Downie):

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ordered the federal government to take control of policing in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, after hundreds of hardcore supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court.

The massed attack was a stunning security breach that was immediately compared to the 6 January invasion of the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump in 2021.

“What we are witnessing is a terrorist attack,” the news anchor Erick Bang announced on the GloboNews television network as word of the upheaval spread. “The three buildings have been invaded by coup-mongering terrorists.”

Shocking video footage showed the pro-Bolsonaro militants sprinting up the ramp into the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices, roaming the building’s corridors and vandalizing the nearby supreme court, whose windows had been smashed.

Lula, a veteran leftist, was sworn in as Brazil’s new president last Sunday in celebrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.

But thousands of pro-Bolsonaro extremists have refused to accept Lula’s narrow victory in October’s election, spending recent weeks camping outside army bases across the country and calling for a military coup.

Lula was not in Brasília on Sunday but he gave an angry speech blaming Bolsonaro for the chaos and promising that “anyone involved will be punished”.

It's interesting the rioters waited for Lula to be outside of the capitol - he was in Sao Paulo - to pull off this coup attempt. Also interesting that the organizers did not get any military support in this, relying instead on the state police to guide the protestors instead of stopping them. There's been calls to arrest a security official who may have aided in the staging, who has ties to Bolsonaro and was reportedly seen in Orlando where the ex-President fled to exile (via Adriano Machado with Reuters):

By 6:30 p.m. local time (2130 GMT), some three hours after initial reports of the invasion, security forces had managed to retake the capital's most iconic three buildings.

Brasilia Governor Ibaneis Rocha, a longtime Bolsonaro ally facing tough questions after Sunday's security lapses, said on Twitter more than 400 people had been arrested and authorities were working to identify more...

Rocha, the Brasilia governor, said he had fired his top security official, Anderson Torres, previously Bolsonaro's justice minister. The solicitor general's office said it had filed a request for the arrest of Torres.

Torres told website UOL he was with his family on holiday in the United States and had not met with Bolsonaro. UOL reported he was in Orlando, where Bolsonaro is now staying...

It's too much of a coincidence for Torres and Bolsonaro to be in the same city when all of this went down.

Bolsonaro may be denouncing the violence in public, but he's spent the last months since losing the election acting out the trumpian playbook of refusing to accept electoral defeat, claiming rigged elections, and stomping off in a snit before the changing of the guard to discredit the traditional display of peaceful transfers of power.

Much like how it played out here in the US with trump's MAGA believers, Bolsonaro's supporters - overwhelmed by years of pro-authoritarian Far Right bleating - bought into the lies and reacted with violence.

We now have a January 8th Insurrection to bookend with the January 6th Insurrection.

We shouldn't have been surprised by this. The links between these acts of violence - separated between two nations - made this inevitable. As mentioned before, Bolsonaro and trump consider each other allies, trump in particular happy that a fellow dictator wanna-be won Brazil's election back in 2018. Of course, trump made an open pitch for his buddy in this election cycle. Of course, trumpian handlers like Jason Miller and Steve Bannon were claiming the winning results for Lula were false, and worked with Bolsonaro behind the scenes for whatever purpose. 

This riot in Brazil is part of the overall attempt by the Far Right forces interlinked across the globe - from Russia to Hungary to Iran to Syria to trump in the United States and now Bolsonaro with Brazil - to discredit democratic institutions - installed as liberal methods of forming governments answerable to the people and the law - as weak, broken, and deserving of overthrow.

It's to those wingnuts' discredit that the democratic institutions are pushing back now, defending the system of fair elections against these rioters who are protesting out of fear - that they've been told to fear and hate by their instigators - instead of justice.

Justice should come soon for those (trump and his allies) who stirred up violence here in Washington DC, and justice should come soon for those (Bolsonaro and his allies) who stirred up violence in Brasilia.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

Insurrection. It's what they do. It's how they think. Fascism is never far behind them when they get any say in the running of anything.

-Doug in Sugar Pine