It’s been 1 year since we watched the coup attacks in amazement – 01/08/2024 – Vera Iaconelli

It’s been a year since we watched in amazement the invasion and destruction of the Planalto, Congress and STF palaces in Brasília. Terror announced that lurked in the 2022 elections and that we never tire of denouncing. We did not just campaign against “The” myth, but against any subject who proposes this imposture, freeing its worshipers from taking responsibility for their own actions.

The most common and fearsome example of a Nazi was not the sadistic psychopath, but the bureaucrat who followed the orders of an idol without questioning them. This is what Hannah Arendt denounced, and also the late Contardo Calligaris, in a book released posthumously (“The group and evil: study on social perversion”, Fósforo, 2022).

The Nazi-fascist ideal is that of the bureaucrat, a citizen who justifies violent acts as a necessary evil, at the behest of someone he considers his superior. This is a type of alienation, but we also have the subject who becomes anonymous within the mad mass, giving vent to his repressed impulses, being capable of lynching a person without blinking.

The psychopath, the serial sadist, does not find himself in either of these two forms of mass alienation. He is in charge, he has a method and if he does not feel guilt, it is not because he is alienated from the other’s desire, but because this affection is not part of his repertoire. For him, the other does not have the same status as he attributes to himself, serving only his interests. The psychopath hinders the task of the Nazi-fascist bureaucrat, as he creates chaos and terror where obedience, discipline and rigor are preached. Hence the fixation on the military regime, which seeks to regulate impulses in the name of, let’s say, a greater evil.

Transforming the other into a myth is a way of feeling less helpless in this world without God and it is also one of the most recurrent and dangerous ways of avoiding facing our structural helplessness. Something like “I can sleep peacefully, mom and dad are here”, but outside of childhood. Swap mom and dad for any other mirage and we will have a respite from our perennial anxieties.

Presidentialism lends itself to the creation of myths revealing that we never fully overcome the dream of royalty which, as such, is a right guaranteed by God and transmitted by blood – lineage and violence. All it takes is one slip and the guillotine of cancellation fulfills its function: “the king is dead, long live the king!” But there is no vacuum in power and worship, as we have seen, can be displaced even onto a truck tire.

After a year of the new government, we are fighting to recover what the pandemic and neglect destroyed, celebrating every day the return of the veneer of civility. And the risk is exactly here. The Lula government is a breath of civility, but if there is no intelligent opposition that points out its flaws and limitations, we will be within the logic of the myth. The one we must obey without reflection and responsibility, a mistake we cannot make.

The situation of indigenous communities, for example, remains calamitous and the return of miners is denounced daily by serious institutions. Children are being born with serious health problems due to mercury contamination, women suffer recurrent miscarriages and are exposed to sexually transmitted diseases, just to name a few problems among countless others.

Can we now do without the word genocide, when death and the destruction of ways of life insist? Funds and good intentions without direct dialogue with these indigenous and riverside communities is a vice of those who want to do good, but forget to listen to the interested party. Not listening to peripheral and vulnerable citizens is a mistake we know.

Criticism without reflection is violence, but a government that cannot be criticized becomes a cult.

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