Brazil still hasn’t produced its great refounding.
We’ve just completed 200 years of our land’s founding, and our sails have never been so far from its winds, or our ears so deaf to its appeals.
Brazil’s process of independence, from 1808 to 1822, consisted of a transfer, to Brazil, of the ancient Portuguese imperial dream. It’s a templary one, a missionary one, bearing a call to reestablish, here in the Americas, the “Fifth Empire” prophecies foretold, uniting an adventurous sense of faith and a humble, persevering sense of reality—a blend so common to the Portuguese spirit. Inspired by this dream, the process of Brazilian independence had this unusual nature: It was both the creator of something never seen before and the protector of traditions dating to the dawn of time.
Our foundation wasn’t a rupture, but a rebirth. If we probe the word “nation,” we’ll see in it the Latin root “nat,” from which also comes “nascer” (“to be born”) and “nature.” Well, every being’s birth unfolds, necessarily, in two aspects: the continuity of his or her ancestors and the miraculous revealing of something new and unique. This is the nature of nations and individuals. In Brazil, however, it seems we experienced it more intensely than others, back at our country’s birth.
Then we had a brutal rupture: the proclamation of the Republic in 1889—no more than a military “putsch” supported by a large part of the era’s oligarchs, and received with indifference by the people. However, in that careless act, devoid of any heroism, Brazil broke with its past and its future. Ever since, we’ve been picking up the pieces of our ideal, our personality, trying to rescue our past and our future, our origins and projects. Ever since, we’ve been hoping for the moment of a refounding.
While the 1930 revolution did reorganize the power of the elites, it was a textbook case of revolution described by Lampedusa in his “Gattopardo”: change everything ... for it to stay the same. The 1964 movement, composed of military men and civil politicians, under intense support of the people, drew closer to the concept of a refounding, but it soon sank into a defensive, materialistic inertia, and dropped from its shoulders the burden of cleansing Brazil. The 1946 and 1985 transitions do show superficial traits of renewal, but all the while hiding a core of continuity. The pacts of the elites keep changing names and forms, but always retaining the same grip on power—and deaf as always to the country’s faithful calling.
But today, something could be born and reborn, two hundred springs later. For the first time, in exactly two hundred years of independent existence, we behold the possibility of a refounding—a complete reset of the power structures—coming from the people, able to rescue the national spirit, for so long kept in captivity.
The “Brazilian Spring” is in the streets and roads, but above all, in Brazilians’ hearts. It demands the transparency of the electoral process, stained by the Electoral Court’s partisanship throughout the campaign. It challenges the legitimacy of the presidency being carried by a man convicted of having formed, in his previous years in office, a gigantic corruption scheme, and, furthermore, celebrated by organized crime in his alleged status of “pal” to the crooked.
It’s a movement of those desperate as they watch the courts, the Supreme and the Electoral, in their arbitrary decisions, in their now unhidden wish to cancel fundamental liberties. Of those who draw ire as they watch the shamelessness of the “mainstream” media, bent on demonizing and trampling on the people themselves, as they wholly identify with the corrupt elites. A movement of those impatient as they watch the kowtowing and silence of the huge majority of the elected officials, who seem to be merely waiting for “it to pass” to go back to peacefully sewing the quilt of their dealings, made with a patchwork of theft, lies, and moral degeneracy. Those who feel their heart torn in anguish, as they witness the word “democracy” made into a whip that lashes out at the sacred liberty of the people to think, speak, doubt, and demand that from themselves, the people, all power emanates.
The dams of a corrupt system, which for so long have prevented this emanation, can be broken. From the sum of these revolts, one can conclude as follows: Only the complete reconstruction of power, truly coming from the people, will allow Brazil to heal the terrible illness that has taken hold of the country, and that moves to destroy it. The system has revealed itself for what it is, i.e., a dictatorship—a dictatorship of kleptocracy, composed of the Workers Party, the left, the parties in the center of the spectrum, and all of the old rotten partisan mechanisms; of the media, in its cowardice and willingness to concede to the corrupt powers that be; of organized crime; of the artists and intellectuals, with their thoughts already drained by “wokeness;” of the business elite, allied to politics by their “relationship capitalism.” And all of it with the material and moral support of “woke” globalism, China, Russia, and the São Paulo Forum—the great totalitarian Beijing–Moscow–Tehran–Davos–Caracas axis. All of those elements interact and find common ground in the purpose of subjugating the people and establishing a society of control. They repeat in Brazil, with its own characteristics, an ongoing project that has advanced throughout the world—global dictatorship, and the end of free men.
The Brazilian people are starting to rapidly realize that the entire state apparatus—communications, economic, educational, and electoral—is compromised by crime. All its aspects are heads of the same hydra.
It’s what leads the people to wish for something that can be none other than a refounding—the refounding we’ve never had, but that reinstates the original dream of Brazil and the civilizational mission of independence: to not only be another generic country but a great nation of this world.
This old and new mission of Brazilians is, in fact, one also seen by populations worldwide. A Brazilian refounding can become a historical anti-globalist precedent, fighting to save the human essence, fundamental liberties, and dignity in face of global dictatorship, which destroys man’s most intimate feeling, in whose heart, amid lies and slavery, awakens today a memory that he is free, a seeker of truth, and a son of God.