He's been president a week - and already Bolsonaro is damaging Brazil
Eliane Brum
Jair Bolsonaros messianic brand of capitalism threatens minorities and the rainforest that protects the planet
Hes been president a week and already Bolsonaro is damaging Brazil
The world needs to understand what Brazil has become, before its too late. Jair Messias Bolsonaros Brazil is not just another country that elected a far-right president at a time when the worlds most powerful nation is led by Donald Trump. Its not just South Americas version of the current trend of countries sliding into authoritarianism, like weve seen in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. Its not simply a peripheral nation with a pathetic leader. Brazil has become the apocalyptic vanguard that signals how radical this moment is one with the power to worsen the climate crisis at top speed and blight the entire planet.
The election of Bolsonaro is a response to what we might call civilisations new discontent. Maybe people cant identify the source of their anxiety, which has driven up the consumption of tranquillisers and sedatives. The average citizen might apply more familiar labels to the corrosion of their quality of life, air, and water; to a relentless fear of the other; to the feeling theyre walking in quicksand. But whats underpinning this new discontent pervading all areas of human experience is our climate crisis.
Bolsonaro was elected in October, on his pledge to go back 50 years. Fifty years ago, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. For Bolsonaro and his followers, who are outright defenders of torture and the elimination of adversaries, it was a glorious era. Despite the terrifying menace of nuclear war, the world was still a place where science promised nothing but progress and solutions it delivered no bad news, like global warming, that led to limitations on an individuals daily life or on government actions. It was a time when white, heterosexual men held power and knew precisely who they were. They may have faced some resistance from minorities, but they still enjoyed absolute hegemony.
We cannot comprehend what is now happening in Brazil and around the world unless we understand that our culture wars are tightly bound up with humanitys need to say goodbye to 20th-century illusions of power and face a planet made more hostile by human hand. Things will soon reach catastrophic levels if nations and their residents do not unite in a global effort to do something extremely hard and unpopular: impose limits on ourselves to counteract global warming.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/10/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-minorities-rainforest