Everything’s Under Control (Olavo de Carvalho)

Everything’s Under Control
Brazil’s military situation is very simple and clear. Hugo Chávez is assembling an army of one and a half million well-armed men, the largest air force in Latin America, and twenty military bases in Bolivian territory—all of them on the border with Brazil. His allies include, on one side, Kirchner’s Argentine army, and on the other, the FARC and the ELN, whose number of fighters is currently difficult to estimate, but who possess a military budget incomparably greater than that of any Latin American country, except Venezuela.
Brazil is now a defenseless and virtually encircled country. Disarmed, politically intimidated, reduced to penury by budget cuts, and brought to humiliating subservience through twenty years of defamation campaigns, our Armed Forces are in no condition whatsoever to defend the country against the military forces committed to implementing, by force, the São Paulo Forum’s plan: continental integration under the neo-communist banner.
Never before has the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our nation been so seriously threatened. There is no reasonable basis to doubt that, having come so close to realizing their dream of total power, the Latin American revolutionary left will destroy by force any obstacle that cannot be removed by deception or manipulation. This does not mean, of course, that allowing them to win elections will save us from mortal danger. The only difference between the “peaceful path” and the “armed path” is that in the latter, violence is used as a means of taking power, and in the former, as a means of eliminating the enemy class once full state control has been secured. Respective examples are Cuba and Czechoslovakia—where power was taken either through revolutionary war or parliamentary coup, followed in both cases by equally repressive violence.
Those who believe that the electoral success of the left across the continent will cure it of its warmongering instincts are either deluded fools or cunning liars. Electoral victories were precisely the method by which the left protected armed factions, granted them impunity, and helped them grow. The current phase of the process is the unification and expansion of the continent’s revolutionary armed forces under Hugo Chávez’s command. The next chapter will be to use these forces to destroy the last remaining resistances—whether to the seizure of the state or to the indefinite expansion of state power once seized.
The dissolution of national sovereignties is already a fact, as seen in the fusion of Cuba’s and Venezuela’s legal and police structures, and in the use of Bolivian territory as a bridgehead for a potential invasion of Brazil.
Did you hear a single word about this threat in the presidential debates? No. Did you read anything about it in the major newspapers? No. But of course, you read countless articles warning about the danger of U.S. aggression against Latin America, citing as evidence the existence of an American military base in Paraguay… founded in 1948. You read them, and many of you even believed them. Even if you didn’t go that far, at least you failed to realize that those articles—all of them signed by influence agents directly connected to Chávez-affiliated organizations—were already preparing public opinion to accept the rise of the Chavista-communist military apparatus as something harmless, if not as the dawn of a beautiful patriotic hope.
The silence surrounding the real and imminent danger is as broad, persistent, and systematic as the alarmist chatter about the imaginary and fantastical threat.
In every newsroom across this country, the same rule applies as was adopted regarding the São Paulo Forum: total silence. All Brazilian media—including anti-Lula outlets—have become cogs in the revolutionary disinformation machine, dedicated to demonizing the United States to such an extent that, in the name of an impossible American invasion, they at least passively tolerate the occupation of the continent by the Armed Forces of the virtual Union of Latin American Socialist Republics. A journalist contributes to this process every time he sensationalizes alleged abuses against terrorists at the American prison in Guantánamo while remaining silent about the very real and ongoing brutality inflicted upon prisoners of conscience in neighboring Cuban prisons. This double and simultaneous rule of disinformation is followed today, without exception, by all media outlets in this country, including the most anti-Lula ones.
Even Veja magazine, in its international section, provides a weekly quota of anti-American lies, as penance for having told the truth about the Workers' Party (PT) in its domestic coverage.
The plans of the São Paulo Forum go back a long way, and Brazil, instead of preparing to defend itself against them, went as far as re-electing the very man who conceived them. Never has a nation surrendered so meekly—and so far in advance—to such an obviously ill-intentioned enemy.