Saving Communism (Olavo de Carvalho)

Saving Communism (Olavo de Carvalho)

The letter of greeting sent by the FARC to the 13th General Assembly of the São Paulo Forum is the most revealing document in recent times. Anyone who hasn’t read it cannot grasp the depth of the ties linking Brazil’s ruling party to the Colombian narco-guerrilla, nor can they understand the role the Brazilian government has played in reviving the international communist movement. The core of the text is this paragraph:
“By 1990, the socialist bloc was already collapsing, all its structures were crumbling like a house of cards, the enemies of socialism were celebrating [...]. Despair overtook many leaders [...]. It was at that precise moment that the PT launched the formidable proposal to create the São Paulo Forum [...]. This initiative was a lifeline [...]. Sixteen years have passed, and the political landscape is now entirely different.”
There is not a single party affiliated with the Forum that disagrees with this claim: by carrying out an original idea of Fidel Castro, the PT rescued communism from extinction, breathing new life into its moribund body and enabling it — as was declared at the Forum’s 4th Assembly — to “recover in Latin America what was lost in Eastern Europe.” Only its opponents refuse to see this. They are afraid to face the magnitude of their own failure.
While the São Paulo Forum grew, U.S. influence in the region visibly withered, shifting its means of action to international organizations, channeling support toward leftist parties, or settling for economic programs that served America’s enemies more than the American nation itself. Washington’s public diplomacy in the region became so weak that leftist propaganda was able to thrive on local ignorance about American reality — going so far as to attribute to “Yankee imperialism” initiatives that, from Texas to Maine, everyone knows are real threats to U.S. sovereignty.
Take the FTAA, for example. It’s comical to compare the furious speeches of the Latin American left against this “imperialist agreement” with the equally indignant protests of American conservatives against what they saw as a globalist attack on U.S. national interests. Someone here has lost their mind — and it’s not the American conservatives.
Even more comical — or perhaps tragicomic — is watching the left denounce as “American interference” the presence of World Council of Churches agents in the Amazon, when even schoolchildren in the U.S. know that this is an international leftist, anti-American organization that funds revolutionary movements. The primacy of fantasy over reality seems to have risen to the level of a strategic principle.