Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the Brazilian presidential election marks the triumph of a new, digital form of totalitarian movement in which masses are the driver of their own manipulation. But this doesn’t make it less harmful than traditional fascist models

Acker, Antoine

English

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Zurich Open Repository andArchiveUniversity of ZurichMain LibraryStrickhofstrasse 39CH-8057 Zurichwww.zora.uzh.chYear: 2018How fascism went digital: a historian’s perspective on Bolsonaro’s victory inBrazilAcker, AntoineAbstract: Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the Brazilian presidential election marks the triumph of a new,digital form of totalitarian movement in which masses are the driver of their own manipulation. But thisdoesn’t make it less harmful than traditional fascist models.Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of ZurichZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-203848Scientific Publication in Electronic FormPublished VersionOriginally published at:Acker, Antoine (2018). How fascism went digital: a historian’s perspective on Bolsonaro’s victory inBrazil. Berlin: Geschichte der Gegenwart.How Fascism Went Digital: AHistorian’s Perspective onBolsonaro’s Victory in BrazilJair Bolsonaro’s victory in the Brazilian presidential election marks the triumphof a new, digital form of totalitarian movement in which masses are the driver oftheir own manipulation. But this doesn’t make it less harmful than traditionalfascist models.Geschrieben von Antoine Acker am 7. November 2018It is a fact that Jair Bolsonaro, who has triumphantly been elected president of Brazil with morethan 55% of the vote, has publicly approved torture, regretted that his country’s former dicta-torship did not kill enough people, and wished Brazil a civil war with 30,000 dead so as toregenerate itself. But does this make him the leader of a fascist movement? Some historianshave argued that this “imported” denomination overlooks the continuity of a domestic traditionof authoritarianism, and especially, the unresolved heritage of the military regime which ruledthe country from 1964 to 1985. Indeed, the elected president is a former military officer trainedduring this period and has never hidden his nostalgia for this regime. But while the latter was apeculiar mix of state oppression and controlled electoral processes that included a limitedopposition, Brazil also has its own, authentic fascist tradition.In the 1930s, it was home to the world’s second Nazi party, which was affiliated to Hitler’sNSDAP and attracted members from, but also beyond, the country’s German colony. Anothermovement, the “Brazilian Integralist Action”, emerged in the same decade to defend a nationalorder based on catholic, rural and masculine values. It openly claimed its lineage with Italianfascism, as well as including a strong antisemitic current. With a membership of over onemillion persons, in a country of about thirty-five million, it became Brazil’s largest mass move-ment. Bolsonaro’s personal and ideological story is intertwined with the modern heritage ofthese interwar experiences. His friendship with the neo-Nazi Marco Antônio Santos, whoGeschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...1 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43posed with him dressed as Hitler following an invitation to the Rio de Janeiro city council byBolsonaro’s son (himself a city councilor), is well known. Bolsonaro’s campaign slogan, “Brasilacima de tudo” is a literal translation of “Deutschland über alles” (except for the country’sname). This is not just a coincidence, but a watchword imported to Brazil in 1969 by the “Nati-vist Spark” (Centelha Nativista). The latter was a group at the radical fringe of the military,fascinated by Nazi symbols, pushing for more hardline authoritarianism and whose influencesurvived the democratic transition thanks to political personalities like the newly elected presi-dent. Troubling resemblances with interwar EuropeElements that previously precluded a description of the Brazilian military dictatorship as“fascist” are now represented in the discourse and practices of Bolsonaro’s movement. Suchelements include the cult of personality of “the myth” – as his partisans call him – and anesthetics of violence symbolized in the first place by the “Bolsonarist” sign of identification,which consists in miming shooting with both hands. It is troubling how pictures of Brazilianmobs pointing their hands in the air as if these were revolvers recall the collective mimicry ofthe fascist salute. Their candidate’s call to “fusillade” the members of the Workers Party (PT)and the threat of one of his elected deputies to “shoot” left-wing members of Rio de Janeiro’sstate assembly are also in line with the fascist conception of the political competitor as anenemy to be exterminated.  While Bolsonaro has no structured militia, a portion of his mostfervent supporters have behaved like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, committing hundreds of acts ofphysical violence (including at least three assassinations) against PT campaigners, homose-xuals, transsexuals and indigenous people. Swastikas as well as graffiti and bills threateningthe murder of black and LGBT+ Brazilians were displayed on the streets, within schools andeven on the walls of churches, creating a climate of intimidation during the polls.Bolsonaro’s campaign itself was based on the manipulation of the masses through a large-scale industry of “fake news” that circulated on social networks such as Whatsapp and Face-book, slandering left candidates and leaders with accusations of corruption, the sexualizationof children, rape and even Satanism. It produced a culture of moral denunciation and politicalpersecution recalling the darkest hours of interwar Europe. Immediately after Bolsonaro’svictory a congresswoman from his party invited secondary school students to use their cellp-Geschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...2 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43hones in the classroom to film teachers practicing “leftist indoctrination”. The general hostilitytowards the “reds” has turned into a totalitarian delirium, with even Francis Fukuyama beingabhorred as a “communist”, and people in the street being attacked simply for wearing redclothes. This witch hunt against the left – a word emptied of its actual political meaning – hastaken the form of an irrational search for scapegoats for the economic crisis, with troublingresemblance to the first historical stage of fascist harassment against religious and ethnicminorities.Admittedly, there are also good reasons in being cautious before attributing “Bolsonarism” (letus call it that way until the debate is settled) a fascist label. Bolsonaro does not possessHitler’s dogmatic substance, and his approximative syntax shows him far from Mussolini’sfamous writing skills and capacities of intellectual articulation. He is another avatar of the enig-matic international success of far-right figures (Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen,and USA’s Donald Trump), whose mediocre appearance and unpolished language contrastsharply with the rhetorical sophistication of traditional fascist leaders. Another notable diffe-rence in the current Brazilian situation is the absence of a mass party –  the Social Liberal Party(PSL), which Bolsonaro only joined in March 2018, was just one of the few small groups whichoffered to make him their presidential candidate. Only during the final days of the campaign didit grow to become Brazil’s second political party, and it still lacks the structured rituals andmilitarized organization of historical fascist movements. Finally, Bolsonarism does not seem todisplay pretentions of territorial expansion in the way European fascisms did. But this latterpoint must be discussed in the geographic context of Brazil, a country of 8.5 million squarekilometers whose vast interior has always been considered by local authoritarian movementsas a huge void to be conquered and brought into submission, in order for the nation to surviveand grow. Hence Bolsonaro’s promises to amplify deforestation and dismantle indigenous terri-tories could be as well interpreted as a tropical version of Lebensraum.Why historians should mind the veryshort termWhile this geographic context can help situate the PSL’s political platform as a “brazilianized”variation of fascism, the historical context of the present always remains somewhat harder tograsp for historians. Most of the profession had seen the authoritarian drift of Brazilian institu-Geschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...3 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43tions coming since the unconstitutional impeachment of elected President Dilma Rousseff in2016, but the result of the first presidential round caught everyone by surprise. A week before,Bolsonaro was still not the favorite, and most of the progression which led him to 46% of thevote was built in the last forty-eight hours. Of course, there are long and medium termexplanations for this rise, and these belong to the kind of causalities historians are used todealing with. Such strands are the spirit of revenge of a reactionary elite whose prosperity lieson the structural heritage of slavery, the socially downgrading power of the harsh economicdecline of the past four years, and the collapse of the political system amidst huge corruptionscandals. The growing adhesion of evangelical priests to Bolsonaro’s project of restoring apatriarchal family order also played a significant role towards the end of the campaign. Theirinfluence is itself the result of fifty years of local community presence in socially segregatedneighborhoods, under the auspices of churches which have been able to appropriate the toolsof the entertainment industry and digital world to propagate their dogma.But these historical developments do not suffice to explain the electoral Blitzkrieg that tookplace in many parts of Brazil, for example in the state of Rio de Janeiro where support forBolsonaro’s hard-line ally and candidate for governor Wilson Witzel grew from 14% (in the pollmost favorable to him) to 41% in less than twenty-four hours. What historians have not beenable to detect is the power of digital technologies to duplicate and accelerate the effects ofsocial and political evolutions, which the profession is not trained to analyze in such a shorttimeframe. According to data published on October 28 by the polling institute Datafolha, 65%of Brazilian voters acknowledged having informed themselves politically through “news”received on Whatsapp, and 47% admitted to believing these news items.The rise of a digital, “on the spot” fascismIn this context, Bolsonaro’s campaign was able to invent a new form of fascism, of which socialnetworks were the birthplace. The stunning rapidity with which lies could spread digitally madethe fascist mass party as an instrument to manipulate society obsolete. To be sure, this opera-tion was patiently planned from the top, as shown by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, whichrevealed on 18 October how hundreds of businessmen involved themselves in massive elec-toral fraud at the service of the PSL. In complete illegality, companies paid up to four milliondollars each to acquire users’ data, to create Whatsapp groups and bombard millions of privateGeschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...4 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43accounts with defamation of PT candidates. But the point is, once such a poison is introducedinto the digital world, mass manipulation quickly becomes a participative process powered bythe masses themselves. Through their cell phones, Brazilians distractedly forwarded to theirrelatives, friends and colleagues, “fake news” fabricated to influence their vote, amidst a flowof emoticons, personal messages, and other, non-political information. This construction of an“on the spot” fascism, rendered fluid by means of interactivity, may also dispense Bolsonaroand his clique from constructing a governmental apparatus of surveillance and repression inthe future. As the Brazilian journalist Fausto Salvadori wrote in one of the best analysesproduced after the second round, who needs censorship and a political police when schoolstudents film teachers with their cell phones? And, perhaps in an attempt to envisage theworst case scenario, one could add – who needs planned techniques of state violence, whenhundreds of thousands of anonymous “trolls” use the internet to propagate calls for raping ormurdering members of ethnic and sexual minorities? – as has happened in the past weeks.For similar reasons, the traditional fascist orator also has no reason to be in the world of socialnetworks, in which communication consists in quick sentences, sometimes with a strictlylimited number of signs (Twitter), and a language cleansed from syntaxial complexities. Digitalrhetoric does not produce charismatic tribunes, but “influencers”, who speak everydaylanguage, make themselves noted by provocative declarations creating “buzz”, and stagethemselves through Instagram pictures and live videos made from their hospital room or theirhome sofa, as in the case of Bolsonaro during the campaign. As classical historians of fascismhave pointed out, there can be many kinds of fascist movements. Bolsonarism is the first totake a digital form. But this does not make it less totalitarian in its project of political persecu-tion, as became clear in the PSL leader’s almost surrealistic speech on October 22. While thespeech was attended by thousands of supporters on São Paulo’s main avenue, the candidateaddressed the mob virtually, filmed by a cellphone as he was standing in random home dressin a place which seemed to be the laundry room of his personal residence. The speechcontent, however, belonged to fascism of the most gruesome kind, especially as Bolsonarointimated to his political opponents to “leave the country or go to prison” and promised to“send them all to Ponta da Praia” (a military base which functioned as a center of tortureduring the dictatorship).Geschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...5 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43 Now is time to apply the fascist labelSince the late 1980s, the emergence of right-wing populism in Europe’s electoral landscapehas led to an increasing use of the “fascist” comparison in politics and the media. Many histo-rians thought to compensate for common exaggerations by applying the fascist label tocontemporary movements strictly sparingly. Now is the time to use this label again, for Bolso-naro is not just the “Trump of the tropics”. He champions far-right totalitarianism, but in acontext of digital connectivity that makes dictatorial plans much less discernable than in thetime when these used to be embodied by traditional fascist structures. To recognize Bolsona-rism as digital fascism is not a matter of academic jargon, but of using an adequate historicalcomparison that informs us about the risks of what is currently happening: fascism producesbloodshed, especially when the international community fails to identify it in its early stage.Dieser Artikel ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbarAntoine AckerAntoine Acker teaches and researches in the field of global history at theUniversity of Zurich. He is the author of a book on Volkswagen in the Amazonand several contributions about Brazil's international connections during theperiod of the military regime.URL: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians-perspective-on-bolsonaros-victory-in-brazil/Copyright © 2021 Geschichte der Gegenwart. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.Geschichte der Gegenwart » How Fascism Went Digital: A Historian’s P... https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/how-fascism-went-digital-a-historians...6 von 6 07.06.21, 12:43

How fascism went digital: a historian's perspective on Bolsonaro's victory in Brazil

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How fascism went digital: a historian's perspective on Bolsonaro's victory in Brazil

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