{"id":256075,"date":"2024-03-04T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=256075"},"modified":"2024-02-29T04:34:47","modified_gmt":"2024-02-29T04:34:47","slug":"lula-israels-genocide-and-racism-on-brazilian-corporate-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/lula-israels-genocide-and-racism-on-brazilian-corporate-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Lula, Israel\u2019s Genocide, and Racism on Brazilian Corporate Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

28 Feb 2024 – <\/em>\u201cBrazilian diplomatic tradition relies on solving problems. The \u2018incident\u2019 with Israel takes the opposite direction and affects not only the image of our country but also the course of subjects that actually matter for the population in an electoral year.\u201d With these words, the host of Brazil\u2019s most renowned talk show, Roda Viva<\/a>, closed last Monday\u2019s edition, which had the Minister of Institutional Relations Alexandre Padilha as a guest. It was an exceptionally editorialized closing; normally Roda Viva\u2019s hosts simply say, \u201cGoodbye,\u201d when the show runs out of time.<\/p>\n

The \u201cincident\u201d the journalist refers to is Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva\u2019s speech during the African Union Summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where the Brazilian president compared the current genocide in Gaza to Hitler\u2019s<\/a> mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War. And of course, it includes Israel\u2019s subsequent attempt to humiliate Brazilian diplomacy by declaring Lula persona non grata<\/a> and inviting <\/a>Ambassador Frederico Meyer to the official Holocaust Memorial for public scolding.<\/p>\n

Basically, the host (or his bosses) was stating that Lula was irresponsible, jeopardizing both Itamaraty\u2019s diplomatic tradition and the electoral potential of the so-called democratic camp in the municipal elections that will take place later this year throughout the country. His speech summarizes what has been the most \u201cprogressive\u201d social-democrat reaction of Brazilian corporate media to Lula\u2019s strong statement. More reactionary outlets simply dropped openly genocidal rhetoric and inflated over one hundred congressmen to file an impeachment request against the president.<\/p>\n

Behind a mundane preoccupation with Brazil\u2019s electoral normality, there lies a pure and simple hierarchization of human life. But, for now, let\u2019s stick to their arguments: more than a conceptual mistake, Lula\u2019s speech was supposedly a tactical error, since it happened at the same time as former president Jair Bolsonaro was getting more and more cornered<\/a> for his flagrant participation in a plot to overturn the 2022 elections<\/a> and remain in power via a coup.<\/p>\n

Why should Lula revive a moribund \u201cbolsonarismo,\u201d when Finance Minister Fernando Haddad\u2019s neoliberal agenda<\/a> managed to cool down the markets<\/a> and grow above expectations<\/a>? Why should he ignite a Congress that\u2019s overcrowded with all kinds of fascists? Why should he offer a deviant talking point for the opposition on the eve of the elections, in a country where evangelical fanaticism is on the rise? And more than that, why should he do that right before an immense protest<\/a> in S\u00e3o Paulo that Bolsonaro convened in his own defense? If over 100,000 supporters of the former president managed to fill Paulista Avenue, blame shall not be put on the persistent inaction of our political and media classes, inaction grounded in the 1985 general amnesty<\/a> that acquitted all crimes committed by the dictatorship that had ravaged the country since 1964. No, shame on Lula, whom they see as a Bolsonaro in red.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Brazilian President Lula da Silva<\/p><\/div>\n

Behind the hegemonic reaction, there is a fetishist reliance on an imaginary normality that must be achieved and maintained using one single tool: moderation. It\u2019s what Tariq Ali would call the extreme center, a pseudo-responsible political posture based on the Thatcherian idea that there\u2019s no alternative to neoliberalism, the \u201cnatural\u201d course of \u201chuman evolution\u201d. It\u2019s a brutal inversion of Lenin\u2019s advice, that we should be flexible when it comes to tactics, and inflexible in terms of principles.<\/p>\n

Lula\u2019s statement was based on principles: antiracist, anticolonialist, humanist. What Israel is doing to Gaza is definitely comparable to the lowest standards humankind has ever reached, including the Holocaust. It\u2019s the mass extermination<\/a> of a whole population whose overwhelming majority is comprised of women and children<\/a> specifically because it\u2019s been subjected to systematic assassination for seventy years. Genocide must be stopped now, and Israel\u2019s Prime Minister will not do so\u2014not only because he\u2019s ever been ideologically committed to it, but also because his survival depends on the annihilation of the Palestinian people. He is far too compromised, judicially<\/a>, economically<\/a>, and politically<\/a> to suddenly change course.<\/p>\n

The brakes must be pulled from the outside. And that should be a global priority, otherwise, everyone will have to deal with the moral, political, and humanitarian consequences of having idly watched a genocide unfold in real time. The world had no idea of the extent of the Holocaust until the Red Army liberated<\/a> the extermination camps of Eastern Europe. One could claim ignorance then. Not now. As we couldn\u2019t during the immigration crisis<\/a> of 2015, the ongoing Yanomami extermination<\/a> in Brazil, or the death policy applied by fascistic governments, especially in the United States<\/a> and Brazil<\/a>, during the harsher years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now everybody is watching.<\/p>\n

If the Israeli government has its way and manages to achieve the Zionist Final Solution, it will effectively succeed where Hitler failed. Lebensraum<\/em>, living space for the development of the \u201cAryan race,\u201d was what Hitler sought with the total disappearance of what he called Judeo-Bolshevism from the East of Europe. Lebensraum<\/em> is what the state of Israel is trying to establish by ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip. Lula\u2019s comparison is conceptually accurate.<\/p>\n

But more than that, it\u2019s the only antiracist position possible. Because every colonial project, including Israel\u2019s, is racist by definition. Holocaust, in the Zionist discourse, is an ideological tool, as made clear by Jewish political scientist Norman Finkelstein, another persona non grata in Israel<\/a>. Divorced from the actual holocaust and turned into a historical exceptionality beyond any comparison, Holocaust becomes a carte blanche for its own reenactment. By clearly making the comparison, Lula echoes Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and deconstructs in two simple sentences the exceptionalism that justifies Israel\u2019s colonial endeavor.<\/p>\n

As the late theoretician of N\u00e9gritude would say, \u201c[I]t would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the [B]lacks of Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Brazilian corporate media and political class show how unchanged the last century\u2019s bourgeois remains in the 21st century: even municipal elections in the country have heavier moral weight than the complete and systematic extermination of a non-white population.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

Gabriel Rocha Gaspar is a Marxist Brazilian activist and journalist, with a master\u2019s degree in literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University. For five years, he was a reporter at the French public radio <\/em>RFI, while also working as a foreign affairs correspondent for several Brazilian media outlets. Currently, he is an independent journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was produced by <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Feb 2024 – Lula\u2019s statement was based on principles: antiracist, anticolonialist, humanist. What Israel is doing to Gaza is definitely comparable to the lowest standards humankind has ever reached, including the Holocaust. It\u2019s the mass extermination of a whole population whose overwhelming majority is comprised of women and children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":255927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[547,239,1199,87,865,739,682,88,541,1134,715,1147,427,880],"class_list":["post-256075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brics","tag-brazil","tag-brics","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-germany","tag-hitler","tag-israel","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-lula-da-silva","tag-massacre","tag-nazism","tag-palestine","tag-state-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256076,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256075\/revisions\/256076"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}