Weakened but dangerous US prepares new coup offensive in Latin America

 
Weakened but dangerous
US prepares new coup offensive in Latin America

The new offensive is a response to the rapprochement of several Latin American countries in relation to China and Russia, in the sense of conforming a bloc of oppressed countries

    Published on: 06/29/2023 by Diario da Causa Operaria

On June 20, the US Secretary of State was in China, where he met with President Xi Jinping, amid growing tensions between the country and China. The meeting resulted in statements to seek a way to ease the conflict between the two countries, which has been intensifying in recent months. For his part, Xi Jinping declared that China has every interest in creating a stable relationship with the US. However, this would depend on a “ rational and pragmatic attitude ”.

A day after the meeting, on Tuesday (20), Joe Biden, US president, referred to Xi Jinping as a dictator, when talking about the case of the Chinese balloon that flew over the US before being shot down by military fighters. The following Tuesday (27), Biden makes a new statement, saying that China has “ colossal problems ”, without giving further explanation. In a way, explanations are not necessary in this case. Biden's statement is a reflection of imperialism's attitude towards China, in the sense that the Asian country's economic growth is not tolerable, much less the expansion of its relations with several Latin American countries, seen by the US as its backyard.

With the weakening of imperialism, which has been occurring in geometric progression since the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, intensified by its disastrous action against Russia, an action that provoked a serious inflationary crisis not only in Western Europe, but also in the United States itself, China has been taking advantage of the space to increase its presence in Latin America, solidifying ties with the oppressed countries here, especially with those who have an antagonism with imperialism, namely, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras and even Brazil.

In light of this, signs are appearing everywhere that imperialism, in particular the US, is preparing a new offensive against Latin America, in order to deepen its dictatorship and prevent the formation of a strong and cohesive bloc of Latin American countries. with China (and also with Russia). After all, the more the alliances between the oppressed countries solidify, the worse the situation of the imperialists becomes.

Among the signs of the offensive, the Organization of American States (OAS), or rather “the Ministry of Colonies of the United States” (to paraphrase Fidel Castro) approved a resolution calling for “ democracy ” in Nicaragua.

In the resolution, the government of Daniel Ortega is required to “ stop all violations of human rights and respect civil and political rights, such as religious freedoms and the rule of law” and to “abstain from all forms of intimidation and harassment against journalists, media, religious communities and non-governmental organizations , respecting their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly ”.

The imperialist organization creates a false story that Nicaragua is a dictatorship and that people are being persecuted because Ortega is supposedly a dictator. However, as cynicism is part of imperialism's modus operandi , no mention is made of the fact that those arrested in Nicaragua are the same ones who were paid by imperialism to overthrow the Ortega government through an attempted coup d'état disguised as popular mobilization. , in 2018. The coup attempt resulted in the death of hundreds of workers and left-wing militants, especially members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Ortega's party).

Reading the excerpt from the resolution quoted above, its pro-imperialist and coup-promoting content is clearly seen. The OAS wants the government of Nicaragua to let the lackeys of imperialism (NGOs, in particular) act freely to overthrow the Ortega government and promote neoliberal devastation.

In line with the OAS resolution, the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided to reopen an investigation into crimes against humanity allegedly committed by the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

As with the false accusations made against Nicaragua, the alleged crimes against humanity would have occurred in 2017, when imperialism promoted a new attempt at a coup d'état (again using the method of street mobilizations) against the Chavista government. The ICC, as the imperialist body that it is, also shares the cynicism and falsification. No condemnation is made against the Venezuelan right and extreme right (the lackeys of imperialism in the country), who attacked and murdered dozens of people during the coup attempt.

Speaking of the Venezuelan right, imperialism found a Juan Guaidó in skirts to act in its next coup offensive against Chavismo and the Venezuelan people. María Corina Machado, who is being called the “Iron Lady” by the bourgeois press (the same nickname as the ultra-reactionary Margaret Thatcher), is already driven by imperialism and its NGOs with a view to the next presidential elections. According to the coup leader's statement, “ I want to talk to Venezuelans who felt deceived. Do not be afraid. The time has come to close a cycle of hatred in the country”. Apparently, imperialism wants to use identity demagoguery (first woman president), added to the pacifist demagoguery of the fight against hatred, which is used to resurrect a traditional right in opposition to the growing social polarization that is seen around the world , a result of the sharpening of the class struggle.

Imperialism had already declared its intentions in relation to Venezuela, when Nicolás Maduro visited Brazil, when he was very well received by President Lula. All the imperialist and pro-imperialist newspapers promoted a slander campaign against Maduro, and, moreover, condemned Lula for his just attitude towards the Chavista leader.

Taking Maduro's visit as a hook, Global Americans , a front organization for the CIA, published on its website an article written by a trusted person, in which it condemns Lula's attitude towards Maduro and Venezuela and, likewise, all the president's foreign policy, which moves towards forming a strong and cohesive bloc with China, Russia and other oppressed countries, in order to oppose the world dictatorship of imperialism. Due to Lula's more nationalist position, Global Americans , that is, the US, attributed the nickname “ illiberal ” to the president and his government, basically a softer way of calling him a dictator.

Adding up all these facts, and several other precedents, it is possible to confirm with certainty that imperialism, led by the USA, is preparing a new offensive of coups d'état in Latin America.

Only the revolutionary organization and mobilization of the working class and the masses can stop imperialism from destroying our nations and enslaving the Latin American people.

Source: https://causaoperaria.org.br

 

 

USA, Europe and Asia Central Asia, another front of imperialism against Russia

USA, Europe and Asia
Central Asia, another front of imperialism against Russia

In the first half of 2023, both the European Union and the United States were visibly active in Central Asia

    Published on: 06/29/2023 by DCO

 

In the first half of 2023, both the European Union and the United States were visibly active in Central Asia – which is considered by some to be Russia's “soft spot”. Many politicians and diplomats from Western Europe and the United States frequented the region and tried to woo the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan to their side in the ongoing conflict with Moscow.

The West wants to convince these states to support sanctions against Russia and block parallel imports into the country. He promised compensation for financial losses. Furthermore, Western European leaders see countries like Kazakhstan as a source of natural resources that could replace Moscow.

With all this recent attention, Central Asia is becoming increasingly aware of its own political importance – but will this lead to it breaking off relations with Russia, as the West hopes?
frequent guests

Last week, the 10th EU-Central Asia High Level Political Dialogue took place in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan. This small diplomatic event was devoted to creating roadmaps for resolutions adopted at the much larger summit attended by Central Asian leaders and the President of the European Council, held in the Kyrgyz city of Cholpon-Ata in early June.

Over the last year, visits by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, to Central Asia have become regular – a region that, until recently, was of little interest to Brussels. The first EU-Central Asia summit attended by the Belgian took place in Kazakhstan less than a year ago, in October 2022 – just eight months after the start of Russia's offensive in Ukraine. The next summit involving the EU leadership and the five Central Asian countries will take place in Uzbekistan next year.

It may seem that this year's event is a response to the China-Central Asia Summit held in Xi'an in the second half of May. But in fact, Beijing seems to be lagging behind its Western European competitors who held the EU-Central Asia Economic Forum in the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, at the same time. High-ranking representatives from their governments participated – along with people from the European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, OECD and private organisations. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were represented by their heads of government, the Uzbek delegation was headed by the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Turkmen delegation was led by the Minister of Finance and Economy.

Representatives of the US State Department also  made  a considerable number of trips to Central Asia. In February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. His assistants at the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu and Uzra Zeya, are also frequent guests in the region. In March, EU Sanctions Envoy David O'Sullivan visited Kyrgyzstan. In April, he paid a working visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan accompanied by Elizabeth Rosenberg, Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the US Treasury Department.

Interaction between Washington and Central Asia takes place mainly within the “C5+1” format. It originated in 2015, when former US Secretary of State John Kerry initiated a dialogue at the level of foreign ministers from five Central Asian countries and Washington. Since then, meetings between the US Department of State and these countries have been held annually. RT US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits the Khast-Imam cultural ensemble in Taschkent, Uzbekistan, on March 1, 2023. 

The purpose of this cooperation is no secret to anyone. From the early days of the project, pro-Western media in Kazakhstan  admitted  that it is  “yet another '1+C5' format”  and is  “another framework proposed by an external actor seeking to bring Central Asian states under its orbit of influence . ”

But why have contacts between West and Central Asia become so frequent and regular recently?
Old bonds, new goals

After the start of Russia's military offensive in Ukraine in February last year, the US and EU  introduced  several sanctions packages against Moscow, including restrictions on imports of hundreds of goods from Western countries. In response to the restrictions, Russian authorities legalized parallel imports – that is, without the permission of the brand owner. Such trade with Russia's neighboring countries has increased a hundredfold, and by the end of last year, 2.4 million tons of goods worth more than $20 billion were brought into the country using this mechanism.

According to  the Forbes edition of Kazakhstan, the country's exports to Russia increased by 25% last year compared to 2021. The Financial Times indicates that the number of washing machines exported from Kazakhstan to Russia increased from zero in 2021 to 100,000 in 2022. Exports of computer equipment, monitors and projectors totaled US$375.4 million, and shipments  increased  more than 400 times last year, reported a Kazakh journalist.

At the end of April, speaking at an exhibition in the capital of Uzbekistan, Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov noted that the volume of trade between Russia and Central Asia increased by 15% last year and amounted to more than US $42 billion. Central Asia is one of the top regions in the world when it comes to growing trade with Russia. For example, the volume of trade with Uzbekistan grew by more than 25%.

It is impossible to say that this growth is due only to parallel imports. However, such an increase has never been observed before. RT European Council President Charles Michel meets the leaders of the five Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – during the second EU-Central Asia summit in the city of Cholpon-Ata, c. km from the capital Bishkek on June 2, 2023.
Indirect evidence shows that Central Asian countries are trying to make the most of the opportunity to meet Russia's import needs. In April, warehouses in the area were almost full, and rents increased several times. In early spring, demand from Russian companies increased by 40-50% to almost 400,000 square meters. At the time, the business media   unanimously concluded that this was directly linked to the creation of logistic chains for parallel imports to its big neighbor.

Thus, the US and the EU are doing everything they can to prevent Central Asian states from being Russia's main partners to avoid sanctions.

Noting that in 2022 EU exports of goods to Kyrgyzstan increased by 300% overall and 700% in the field of advanced technologies and dual-use items, Kyrgyz political analyst Azamat Osmonov pointed out that Brussels is getting  irritated  .

“Western representatives do not believe that the consumer appetite of the Kyrgyz people has suddenly grown to such an extent,”  said the expert.
carrot and stick

At the EU-Central Asia Summit in June, Michel promised the leaders of the five former Soviet republics that Brussels would not impose sanctions if their countries violated restrictions against Russia. However, completely different rhetoric was heard during the EU-Central Asia Economic Forum a few weeks earlier.

In addition to the traditional green agenda – in addition to transport and digitization issues – some topics that had nothing to do with the economy were also raised at the event. Despite Brussels' assurance that the aim of the summit was to establish trade and investment relations, the conflict in Ukraine has become one of the main topics.

European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis  threatened  to stop the import of sanctioned goods into Russia via third countries and vowed to  "identify organizations that continue to undermine our efforts"  and punish them. RT Second European Union Economic Forum – Central Asia in Almaty, Kazakhstan on May 19, 2023. 

In the summer and autumn of last year, the EU  repeatedly offered  to compensate certain countries for trade losses (including in the Central Asia region) and invited them to support sanctions against Russia. But in recent months, the most substantial offer from Brussels represented a proposed investment of €20 million ($22 million) to build satellite earth stations. Furthermore, in May of this year, instead of offering to make up for severed trade ties with Russia, the EU only got more threats for its refusal to follow US and EU sanctions against Moscow.

The US has been even more active in using its 'stick'. In April, its Department of Commerce  imposed  export restrictions against companies from Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Armenia and other countries  “for trying to evade export control[s]”  and buy American products for Russia's needs. Subsequently, the European Commission also proposed sanctions against companies from several countries, including two Uzbeks and an Armenian, for providing dual-use items.

EU and US efforts partially influenced Kazakhstan, which introduced several parallel import bans. In April, to avoid secondary sanctions, Astana  launched  a tracking system for all goods entering and leaving the country. This has also complicated deliveries from Uzbekistan to Russia, as the cargo passes through Kazakhstan. As a result, supply chains are moving to Kyrgyzstan, China and the UAE, and the cost of affected imports in Russia could increase by 10-12%.

In late May, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin  warned  Central Asian countries that they would face significant losses if they followed through with sanctions. He emphasized that the Russian side does not dictate foreign and domestic policy to other states, but only in those cases  “when it does not go against mutual obligations, including those within [the framework] of the CSTO  [a military alliance]  , the EAEU  [a trade bloc of the EU]  and the CIS  [a group of former members of the USSR]  ”. He expressed confidence that Central Asian states are well aware of this.

"Artificial destruction of ties with Russia may result in more serious damage than the expense  of  notorious secondary sanctions,"  he told the Central Asia Conference of the Valdai International Discussion Club.
Are things really that bad?

Russian political analysts believe that Central Asia will remain important to the West not only in terms of anti-Russia sanctions, but also as a springboard for possible future military action against Moscow.

“The West is interested in deploying its military bases in the Central Asia region to threaten Russia's 'weak point'. Moscow is not prepared for major military actions here, unlike its western borders, where the enemy usually comes from,”   warns   Maxim Kramarenko, head of the Eurasia Policy Institute. “This could be a springboard used to pose a real threat to Russia.”

RT Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon and Turkmen President Serdar Berdymukhamedov in Astana, Kazakhstan. 

So  far, this warning seems premature, as the West cannot even force the region to fully comply with sanctions. Central Asia reaps enormous benefits from the current economic situation, but if it refuses to cooperate with Russia, it will be countries in its own region, not Moscow, that will suffer the main blow, says Central Asia expert Azamat  Osmonov  .

“Russia receives electronics, agricultural products, medicine, spare parts for cars and other technologies through these countries. If it is possible to ban these products, the Russian market will quickly feel a shortage. But Central Asia will lose the most. Russia can also supply these products through other post-Soviet republics, not to mention China and Türkiye,”  he said.

Moreover, according to Alexander Knyazev, Doctor of Historical Sciences and one of the leading researchers at the MGIMO Institute of International Studies at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, the serious consequences with which Western countries threaten Central Asia are greatly exaggerated.

“The threat of secondary US and EU sanctions and their likelihood are exaggerated, as is their importance. In political terms, such sanctions against any country in the region would automatically make that country join the camp of Western opponents and make it a closer ally of Russia and perhaps China”, believes the  expert  .

He adds that  “the West's attempts to turn Central Asian countries against Russia, as happened with Ukraine, will not succeed”.
A restless future

The West may not have the ability to pull Central Asia to its side, but that doesn't mean it will give up on such attempts in the future. In this sense, western countries are using their traditional “soft power” tools: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the media.  

“In Bishkek alone, 18,500 of these organizations are registered. Unlike the constitutive documents, many of them interfere in the political life of the country, including funding the organization of political rallies in Kyrgyzstan,”   reads   a note to the bill on strengthening control over NGOs that was submitted to the Kyrgyz Parliament. 

The concern of local parliamentarians, however, did not prevent the work on these clippings. In early June, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) allocated a first tranche of US$12 million to the non-profit organization KazAID, which will distribute the funds among Kazakh NGOs to “increase society's resistance to disinformation  ”  and  “increase the media literacy of the population.”

This is the first installment of the planned $50 million package indicated in the program's budget estimate. In addition, another $15 million was spent on USAID projects in Kazakhstan in 2022.

A significant part of this money goes to funding local journalists who start to promote a pro-US agenda among the population. For example, one recipient of USAID grants is the Central Asia Media Program (MediaCAMP). It is supervised by the American NGO “Internews”, which was banned in Russia in 2007.

This NGO has settled comfortably in Kazakhstan, where it has been active for over five years and  “works with Central Asian media partners, [the] academic community and civil society  ”.

The scope of its activity is very wide. According to the   USAID  website , “the project trained 2,830 media professionals across”  Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In addition, it reports that  “more than 10,500 young people  ,  adults and elderly people from the three target countries  …  participated  in the  [  so-called]  media literacy activities”.

It remains to be seen when the media workers and grant recipients in question will start promoting a policy of secession from Russia in their own countries. However, there is no doubt that sooner or later this will happen. After all, the official “US Central Asia Strategy 2019-2025”  clearly states  that  “Central Asia is an important geostrategic region for US security interests ”.

Source: RT
Diario da Causa Operaria 

Bolsonaro’s trial is totally political”

 
Rui Costa Pimenta:
“Bolsonaro’s trial is totally political”

In the Political Analysis of the 3rd, the national president of the PCO comments on the left's support for the anti-democratic persecution against Bolsonaro and many other topics

    Published on: 06/28/2023

In the Political Analysis of the 3rd of this week, a program that airs every Tuesday on the official channel of Rádio Causa Operária , on YouTube, the national president of the Partido da Causa Operária, Rui Costa Pimenta, commented on several issues that have arisen in recent weeks in the national and international political scene. The themes are raised by the presenters and also by the viewers who watch the program live and send questions through the chat .

The first topic commented on in the program was the issue of Bolsonaro's ineligibility trial, which is being processed over the last few days at the TSE. Rui Costa Pimenta comments on an article in the online newspaper Esquerda Diário , which says “Bolsonaro must be tried for all his crimes against Brazil. The revocation of their political rights is fair, but it is not enough”.

The analysis of the president of the PCO is to highlight the great political confusion of the left, which believes that it is correct to use the judiciary power to “settle scores” with its political enemies. Even if it is considered that Bolsonaro, like many other former presidents, could be tried for his crimes against Brazil, this would not necessarily be for what Bolsonaro is most criticized in the press. In the case in question, Bolsonaro is being condemned for something completely nonsensical and his judgment is completely political. According to the process, his crime would be that he met with ambassadors and said that Brazilian ballot boxes are easy to be defrauded.

Rui recalls that the left should not support this type of precedent, since it is a political condemnation, for a crime of opinion, and that very soon it could turn against the left or Lula himself. Furthermore, from a political point of view, the extreme right can easily use this case to portray Bolsonaro as a political persecutor, and the burden of being the persecutor will fall on Lula and the PT, not on the judiciary, which has a very negative effect in the eyes of the population.

Another point to be questioned is the efficiency of the “political struggle” method. One has to wonder whether the persecution of Bolsonaro will work. And it's very simple to conceive that this certainly won't work. The bourgeoisie may be condemning him now, but eventually a crisis arises on the political scene and the bourgeoisie calls Bolsonaro back to act.

It is evident that, when seeing a person being politically persecuted, the population will wonder why this is and will observe that those who persecute Bolsonaro are not the labor movement or the peasants, but the powerful, the STF, and this will generate a very negative. Therefore, it is necessary to fight Bolsonaro with the weapons of the left, of the labor movement, of the working class.

There was also comment on the plenary “against Lula's fiscal framework, the temporal framework, for the repeal of labor, social security and new high school reforms”, called by more coup-mongering sectors of the petty-bourgeois left. The groups that called were mainly PCB, PSTU and other associates. Rui highlighted the amalgamation made by them, mixing a series of claims with “Lula's fiscal framework” in the call for activity, making it clear that they wanted to impute to Lula other things that are not his responsibility.

The time frame, for example, is not Lula's creation, the government is even against the frame. At this moment, the time frame is being voted on by the National Congress. Furthermore, the claim against the Fiscal Framework itself is confusing, it does not propose anything in its place. It's just a negative claim.

Other facts commented on: the movement takes place at a time when the Lula government is being severely attacked by imperialism, the claims and criticisms on the part of that left are very harsh, showing that they are already intending to form an opposition against the government. Rui also comments that it is very unlikely that this policy will work. According to him, the groups came out too early in an attack against the PT, there is no prospect that the population will follow this policy.

Rui also commented on the statement by Flávio Dino, who stated that “Asian hegemony is a threat to democracy”. In Rui's opinion, this would be an attack against the Lula government. This is a position that comes directly from the North American intelligentsia regarding the Lula government, which is negotiating with China on several fronts and also has a position of support for Russia. According to Rui, “It is a caninely pro-imperialist policy”. It is a demonstration that Dino is a PSDB-style politician, in addition to making statements against Lula in an open and not subtle way.

Many other topics were commented on the program, and stay tuned for the next edition of the Political Analysis program of the 3rd , on Rádio Causa Operária on youtube, now at a new time: Tuesday, at noon.

 

 Source: Diario da Causa Operaria (thanks comrads)

Interview with Varvara Kuznetsova (pt)

Entrevista com Varvara Kuznetsova, 

por Rafael Dantas e Eduardo Vasco. 

Causa Operária na Rússia. 

From Diario da Causa Operaria

https://causaoperaria.org.br/

 

 

The Liberal Order is already dead

 The liberal order is already dead
Chaos will reign even if Putin retreats

BY Paul Kingsnorth
February 17, 2022

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist. His latest novel Alexandria is published by Faber. He also has a Substack: The Abbey of Misrule.

 

In the summer of 1990, I stood where the wall had been and wondered at what had happened to Europe. I wasn’t alone: the rest of the city, the rest of the continent, was wondering too.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.


The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.


This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.


So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

 

Source 

Unherd

 

Is there anything left to conserve?

 Is there anything left to conserve?
The chickens of modernity have come home to roost

Essay
BY Paul Kingsnorth 

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist. His latest novel Alexandria is published by Faber. He also has a Substack: The Abbey of Misrule.

 

“The whole modern world”, wrote G.K. Chesterton, “has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Welcome to 2023

But what can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer depends on what you were trying to conserve in the first place. In Britain, which has been at the speartip of the modern revolution for centuries, all that was solid has been melting into air since at least since the Enlightenment, and the consequence has been the loss of almost everything that the likes of Edmund Burke, who already had his back up against the wall two centuries ago, would have considered worth conserving. Across the modern world, the process has been the same: something I have described as a great unsettling.

In this unsettled world, the notion that the West is declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide is reaching a crescendo. Multiple reactions are underway to try and shore it up. The chickens of modernity, which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano.

But if you want to argue about how to conserve or defend “the West”, you first have to know what it actually is. And to do that, you need to revisit its origin story.  

This story starts in a garden, at the very beginning of things. All life can be found here: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening’’ an image I’ve always loved. Everything, here, is in communion with everything else.
 

At the centre of this garden grows two trees, and one of them imparts hidden knowledge. The humans, the last creature to be formed by the creator, will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain this knowledge and be able to use it wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation, they are only partially formed. If they ate from the tree now, the consequences would be terrible.

“Do not eat that fruit,” the creator tells them. “Eat anything else you like, but not that.”

We know the next part of the story because it is still happening to us on an hourly basis. “Why should you not eat the fruit?” asks the voice of the tempting serpent, the voice from the undergrowth of our minds. “Why should you not have the power that you are worthy of? Why should this creator keep it all for himself? Why should you listen to him? He just wants to keep you down. Eat the fruit. It’s your right. You’re worth it!”

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and we fall out of the garden forever. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The Earth is our home now.

This Earth is a broken version of the garden. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we can’t see any other other way out, and anyway we need something to do with our big questing brains. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.

There comes a time when the creator takes pity. After so many centuries of humans eating the fruit again and again, He stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Being human, we react first by torturing and killing him. But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice, and his sacrifice gives us a path back home. If we follow that path, we can come back into communion again, and be as we were intended to be, which is to say holy — a word derived from the Old English halig — which means whole.


That’s the story. Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among the ruins, and you have been all your life. They are the remains of something called “Christendom”, a 1,500-year civilisation in which this particular sacred story seeped into and formed every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in this story’s image.

But we can’t live for long among ruins. Humans are builders, and Nature abhors a vacuum. God abhors a vacuum too, I think, and whether we like it or not  and mostly these days we don’t — humans need God. This is why every human culture, forever, everywhere, has directed its gaze towards the divine.

This is what we should understand if we are going to think or talk about “conserving” or “returning” or “restoring” anything. If you want to “defend the West”, you are talking about defending Christendom and the values it created, and/or the post-Christian liberal culture it gave birth to, which itself was based upon those values.  

Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror. Chesterton, again, took issue with Marx on this one. “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people,” he wrote. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” This is the process which Christianity used to condemn as “idol worship”, and today’s West is at it in spades.

A lot of people who talk about “defending the West” these days are either trying to defend red in tooth and claw capitalism — the system which has done more to destroy culture and eternal values in the West than anything else — or they’re trying to defend free speech, individualism and the right to be rude on the internet. I would suggest that these things in themselves were the results of a settlement designed, in the process now known as “the Enlightenment” to replace the West’s original sacred story with a new, human-centred version.

This was the liberal settlement. It assumed that humans were disaggregated individuals who could roam the world speaking freely, consuming freely and imposing a rational science-based order on the world, the better to achieve progress. It combined the moral values and universalism of Western Christianity with rights-based individualism and a faith in science and technology, and it brought with it a new origin story, to replace the one about the garden and the snake.

This new story told of how we were saved from superstition and ignorance by the holy trinity of modernity: Reason, Science and Technology. Along the way, we stopped believing silly stories about gods and monsters, which had been made up by our ignorant ancestors before we could see the harsh but bracing reality that the universe is just a meaningless swirl of matter-energy which came from nothing for no reason, and human beings are just gene-replicating machines. Now here we are, working out how to rationally manage the whole show. Now, here we are, a new kind of being: post-religious Man.

I grew up sort of believing this story. I thought religion was over and we had moved beyond its stupid superstitions. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I believe something else: that in a significant sense, everything is religious.

I became a Christian — an Orthodox Christian — in 2021, much to my own surprise and initial horror, after a very long search for truth. The subsequent immersion in the Christian story gave me a much clearer sense of what was happening around me in the 2020s. Most of all, they gave me an understanding of the sacred underpinning of human culture. Marx claimed that the history of all hitherto existing society was a history of class struggle, but it looks to me more like a history of religious belief. “Belief”, in fact is the wrong word. A better one might be “experience”, or “immersion”.

The more I attended the divine liturgy, the more I realised that what I had once dismissed as silly superstition was in fact the stuff of life. In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Again: everything is religious. The only people who believe otherwise, in fact, are a few people in what we liked to call our “secular” corner of the world. We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game.

So if everything is religious, but our old religion is dead, and the thing we tried to replace it with — rational, secular, humanist progress — is failing because it doesn’t meet real human needs, then where are we? What is coming next?


A good person to ask is the perennialist thinker René Guenon, a favourite of our new king. Guenon was a Frenchman who became a Muslim, migrated to Egypt and dedicated his life to trying to save the West from its own materialism. He predicted that, save for a turn back to religion, the early 21st century would see the arrival of what he called the “Reign of Quantity”: the age of pure materialism in which we now live, in which every aspect of life would be be measured, quantified and subject to scientific assessment and technological management.

Crucially, in the Reign of Quantity, religious feeling would become quantitative too. Humanity will never be able to shake off its desire for transcendence, but it will become unable to manifest that desire on any level other than the material. The object of worship during the Reign of Quantity, then, will not be some mysterious, untouchable, numinous force outside of creation: it will be the force of will in the material realm.

This, I think, is where we are today: the religious impulse is manifesting in material form, primarily through the use of technology to promote the human will. This phenomenon, which I like to call the Machine, is a material manifestation of the human desire for liberation through technology, in which all forms are dissolved in favour of the final and only sovereign: the independent rational individual, freed from the obligations of history, community and nature.

In the Orthodox Christian worldview, all of us are icons of God. Humanity was made in the image of the creator, and even though we endlessly fail to live up to this responsibility, it  gives us a clear point of reference. We know what humans are, and what the world is for. Once that story goes, what is the still point of the turning world? Nobody can agree. The only reference point in the post-Christian, post-liberal West is whatever we happen to want or feel. And since consumer liberalism has taught us that desire is not something to be transcended or controlled, but something to be surrendered to immediately and then valorised, reality itself becomes open to endless redefinition. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong or real?

But let’s go back to our founding story again: back to the garden. What does our current state look like from that perspective? To me it looks simple enough, and I think it would have done to a citizen of Western Christendom too. We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator. This is hardly a new development: the Bible is effectively an 80-book warning against it, and most other religions have their own cautionary tales. Once you reject God, you are fated to try and replace him.

This is where our path is now leading us, and it is, I think, the main reason that the waters of age seem so disturbed. Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the “transcending” of everything from gender to biology, the growing of food and babies in labs: openly now, we seek to break all given limits, remake nature, build the world anew. We seek to become gods. The people who are building our new digital Tower of Babel are very open about what they are up to. If you don’t believe me, let them explain it for themselves.

Transhumanist writer Elise Bohan, detailed a conversation she once had with a biologist at a conference on the future of transhumanism. “He looked me in the eye,” she says, “and whispered to me: ‘We’re building God, you know,’ … I looked back at him and I said: ‘Yeah, I know.'”

Similar sentiments are expressed by transhumanist philosopher Martine Rothblatt, who claims, “We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful and beneficent. Geoethical nanotechnology will ultimately connect all consciousness and control the cosmos.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head of engineering and philosopher-general of of the robot apocalypse is more succinct. “Does God exist?” he asks. “I would say: not yet.”

To return to where we started, we might say that transhumanism — the silicon manifestation of our new faith — aims not so much to eat from the tree of life, as to genetically engineer a new one, and plant it wherever the hell we like. We are on the verge of a revolution now, and it may make the Enlightenment look like a tea party. The entire basis of reality is being rewritten, or so we tell ourselves. Whole generations are growing up with a closer relationship to screen-based abstraction than to manual work or to the natural world. They have been convinced that the world is our playground, and that everything from history to human nature to sexual dimorphism can be changed at will.

We are consciously making ourselves post-human, even as we strive to make the world post-natural and post-wild. If the age you live in is starting to take on the flavour of a war over the very meaning of reality itself — which is to say, a religious war — well, that’s because it is.

What, in this world, can we possibly “conserve”? Nothing. In a culture which does not agree that nature exists, or that we have some basic, shared assumptions about reality, the question barely even makes sense. The challenge now is not to ask what we can “conserve” or “restore”. We have to go much further back. We have to dig down to the foundations.

Our challenge now is to choose our religion. Try to avoid the challenge and your faith will be chosen for you: you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age: the quest to build the digital Tower of Babel. The attempt to “build god” and replace nature through technology. The path of the snake.

What can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? Pray. 

Source

Unherd

Canudos Rebbelion - Brazil social and spiritual war

It's more than a century that Brazil officaly, i.e, the state, fight against its own population, using the most comonly the police to terrorize the people. Its very common prejudices to take the poors as bandits, criminals. Their true guilt? To be poors. When not racism is in case. Sometimes in Brazil slums if you are black collored, negro, preto, tição, negão, and of course, poor, automatically you would be a criminal, a malandro, a capoeira. 

As we have previous posted about Godfather Father Cicero, cancelled by the vatican as a priest, here we write about another Brazil case envolving the censorhip, or better to say, the repression of brazilian population. The Rebbelion in the Backlands, Canudos War. It was from this episode in Brazil history on, that the slums, poor habitations of brazil's cities would be called "Favelas". Because favela, faveleira, is a plant, most full in the region of the northweast Bahia backlands, in the land of Canudos. And when the soldiers come back from Canudos War, their started to name in Rio de Janeiros the slums in the mountains calling them "favelas". 


                                            (image: favela - Cnidoscolus quercifolius)

The Rebbelion of Antonio Pilgrim of Christ


In the northeast backlands of Brazil, the interior of the state of Ceara to Bahia,  there were in the 19th century a man called Antonio Conselheiro (the Counselor), a Pilgrim walking in repentence for his sins seeking the mercy of Jesus Christ. He was a type of simple man who worked on the tribunal of the interior of Brazil as scrivain. It was then in the 19th century one of the most poor miserable region of Brazil. He lived a family drama himself, family war against other family, revenges and muderers. Also, his wife was caught in adultery,  veryle Antonio lived a drama that destroyed his life. He then left his city, his possesions, and started his pilgrimage of repentence seeking Jesus Christ salvation way. He was catholic, and so he took all of the Catholic Church teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven and would transmit it in conversation with the humble people who he would met in the backlands during his walkings. He would give gospel inspired words to people, and so soon the humble people started to call him Counselor, Good Jesus, Good Antonio Conselheiro of Jesus Christ. He did preach also repentence beforehand the Divine Law of our Lord Jesus Christ for the Salvation of humans souls, ascestims and fasting he would propose.

By the villages he passed by he helped the poor, he would organized population to do comunitariam works, to build churches, to build cemiteries, to dig wells, where it was needed. Always signing this work as christian charity, in his gift of preaching and counseling based on the gospel. He became famous among the backlands population,and they liked him very much. Also many almost anonimous catholics priests would allow him to preach in the churches in the villages, nowhere lands, as he had a gift, a talent to do so, a charisma to talk to people and preach the Kingdom of Heaven. 

By the end of the 1889, the military deposed the Brazil Emperor Dom Pedro 2 and formed the Republican United States of Brazi. There were many changes in society,  as the Brazilian Empire was a catholic empire, linked to Portugal aristocracy.  The Republic broke with the church-state union, implementing modernizations, as the civil marriage. Also the republic imposed new taxes, that was very burdening on the poor people. The world was changing by the modern political revolotions, where of course played a major role such societies as freemasons and modern thinking, as protestantism. 

                        (image: Conselheiro charge stoping the Republic - it shall not pass")

Antonio Conselheiro started to say that was not right. that the Republic was political injust coup, that the Emperor D. Pedro 2 had the divine right to rule. That the modernizations happening in Brazil was a plan of the masons, the protestants, and of the AntiChrist. A prenounciation of the End Times. 

And then the problem began. 1895–1898. Many people started to follow him a a guide througt the changes that was happening in Brazil.  The movement would grow to about 20.000 souls he gathered around himself, and marched through the caatinga to a empty farm, a no man land, in the a region called Canudos. And started a village there, that he called "Belo Monte" (Beautiful Hill). They builded 1 church and 1 cathedral. Some of the population would pray all the day long, the rosary, the masses, the devotion,  while others would work. All things were comunitarian, there were not private property. It also was not allowed alcool and prostitution. It was a Messianic City, of catholic observation.

                                       (image: historical drawing of Canudos village)


The Roman Church started to be worried for Antonio was not ordained, and so was not under roman control. The R. Church sent a mission of two Italian Franciscans to Belo Monte. They confessed the people, but also tried to dissolve the city, saying to the people that the Church not approved it, so the Catholics fidels should leave it. But the people said "No, we will stay with Antonio Conselheiro, you are traitors of the antichrist, of the republic, of the civil law and not of the law of God".

Then the Franciscans missionaries... cursed the village of Belo Monte, and made a relatory to the roman bishop condemning the movement. The Church called the State Governor saying that the whole thing was out of control, asking the State to intervene to de-arrange the city.

Then the Governor sent a police battalion to repress Belo Monte. But was defeated. Then Another. And a second time it was defeated. Then they called the Federal Government who sent the federal army. And they were defeated a third time. Then the Federal bought new guns, machine guns  and canons from Belgians Austrians militar industry,  they reformed the army, and reunite the entire federal force, from all states of Brazil to go to the war against Antonio Conselheiro and Belo Monte. And in this forth time they won after a very hard battle. The federal force completely destroyed the city, and killed the population almost entirely. While the war was going, the women and children would be praying inside the churches. The army acted with great cruelty, killing cuting the throat of the prisoners. It was very dramatic.  Euclides da Cunha wrote the fatality of Canudos as it follows:
“Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in recorded history, it resisted until the last man was down. It had been conquered inch by inch in the literal sense of the words. It fell on October 5, at dusk, when its last fighters fell dead, every last one of them. There were only four left: an old man, two full-grown men, and a child, facing a raging army of five thousand soldiers.
We will forgo describing the last moments. They are impossible to describe. The story we are telling was a deeply moving and tragic one to the very end. We must finish it hesitantly and with humility. We feel like someone who has climbed a very high mountain. On the summit, new vistas unfold before us, and with that greater perspective comes vertigo.
Should we test the incredulity of future generations by going into detail about the women who flung themselves on their burning homes, with their children in their arms?
What words are there to express that from the morning of the third nothing more was seen of the able-bodied prisoners who had been taken the day before? “Among them was Pious Anthony who had surrendered to us in trust and who had given us so much valuable information on this obscure event in our history.
The settlement fell on the fifth. On the sixth they finished the task of destroying and razing the houses—a total of fifty-two hundred by the last count.”

 Euclides da Cunha. “Rebbelion in Backlands”

This is a little about Canudos Was and Antonio Counselor Pilgrim of Christ. But is also a little piece of the situation of poor population in the global south, third world. In Brazil slums, favelas, in brazilian narco-trafic nation, it still continues to day the war the the state acts against its own population. 

          (Photo: Flavio de Barros' 19th photograph of Canudos Prisoners taken by the Army"

Further Reading:

Robert M. Levine : Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897




Global South Great Christian Saint - Godfather Father Cicero Romão

 Have you ever heard about a priest called Padre(fr.) Cicero Romao. ?
 

He is a myth in Brazil, always with a black stole and a hat, white hair, old man, being called by many
“Meu padin padre Cicero” (“my godfather father Cicero”). Fr. Cicero is from northeast Brazil, Crato, Juazeiro do Norte, Ceara, and in northeast he is most praised by the common people - as a saint.




He was born 1844 in the state of Ceara, in the backlands, in the municipality of Crato.
Since childhood he was a catholic devote, and when young he choose to became priest, going to the seminary where he studied with french priests leaning latin and being instructed.
He was ordained in 1870. People tell that since the seminary he was not looked upon with good eyes by the church officials because his personality was strong. 

He got back to his city Crato, and in a place, like a district, he celebrated a Christmas mass in 1871. And that place would became later under his influence the village of Juazeiro do Norte. He founded a capela and worked as pastor to the faithful, and was very dedicated to the most poor, indeed.

There is a legend that one day Cicero got a dream, a vision, after a hard day of exhaustive work confessing people, he saw the Lord Jesus with the 12 apostles at a table, as in holy meal, when suddenly enters the room a lot of poor people, with their needs, with sackcloths, almost as beggars. Christ then said that he was disappointed with humanity, but would yet do a last sacrifice to salve it. But manhood would need to repent. And turning to the poor people, looked to Cicero and said “you. Fr. Cicero, take care of them!”

Well, this is told, but perhaps is legend.

He really was a priest of the community in Juazeiro do Norte, Ceara, fomenting piety among people, with devotions like the sacred heart of Mary, and sacred heart of Jesus, the promises, andcatholic devotions very used by catholics back then in the late 19th century.
 
In 1889, during the mass, he was giving communion to a woman called Maria de Araújo, and when he put the host in Maria’s mouth, it bleed. In another occasions, happened the same with Maria, only with Maria - when she received communion, blood was found in her mouth.

And then it started all. A miracle occurred. A eucharist miracle, the host turned to blood. 

The blood of Jesus? Everybody was moved, the people gathered around, believing it a signal, a miracle, a wonder! People would come from all around to see Maria de Araújo, to see the signs of blood. And it what so thatstarted grow the belief that Fr. Cicero Romao was a special.



The roman church officials became worried. They tried to do some verifications, analisis. The first said it was true, a eucharistic miracle, but the bishop did not liked the result of the investigation. And called for a second Then others came and said it was forgery, mischief. The bishop was angry, called fr. Cicero to obedience, to clarify what was happening. Well, the bishop was against it. And make a relatory to Rome-Vatican, and Rome stood with the bishop against it, saying to the catholic church not aprove it as a miracle, and to cancel the movement of devotion that was beggininng around it. 

And so fr. Cicero was suspend, forbidden to celebrate. 

And then he entered to politcs, becoming the mayor of the city of Juazeiro do Norte. Where he would play political roles in the Brazilian natinal history of the first decades of 20 th century. 



But even with official suspension of the Roman Church, the devotion to fr. Cicero as a holy man became increasingly popular. And many gathered around him, and he was a godfather to many men and women. Well, Brazil was then a very poor country, many miserables, and they fond in Fr. Cicero a person who could help them. With food, and many everyday problems, they would go to Fr. Cicero asking for help. And Cicero would do something, find a job, find a house, provide food, and charities. Also it is told that Cicero would give counsels, based on the gospel wisdom.
Like these words of him:


“Who had killed, don’t murder anymore.


Who had stolen, don’t rob anymore”


“Live a fraternal life, 

Forgive, 
as Mary forgave the death of her son”

 

          (image: Francisco Brennand painting)

Maria of Araújo was completely repressed, She died as a beata, but her buried her tomb was violated and they took away her body, and it was never more found. It is like they were trying to erase the story. Really the Romans did not want it a miracle to be in Brazil.

 Fr. Cicero, as it obeyed the church, at the same time he maintained himself in permeant tension with it. And died in this tension. 

After his death, he became even more popular. They created a romaria, a religious procession to his city, Juazeiro do Norte, and many devotes would go there to ask Godfather Father Cicero - Meu Padin Padre Cicero - a blessing, a intercession, as seeking the help of a saint. Yes, to many he was a saint, even today to many he is a saint. The Saint of Juazeiro.

There is a lot of supernatural cases that is told about. There are people who tells that he appear, as a ghost, and bless, and do miracles in Brazil backlands, and help whoso call for him. So many Brazilians, especially of northeast Brazil testimony supernatural phenomenas and blessings they received from him.
Its very true that to many brazilians Fr. Cicero is important, and they really love him. For the bad tongues, backbitting, usually form the prostestants, he is just another roman catholic idolatreous phenomena. 

                    Photo: brazilian presidents Dilma Rouseef and  Lula and Fr. Cicero statue

 

In recent years, the Vatican is reviewing Fr. Cicero Case.
In 2015 the pope Francis edicted a reconciliation, and in last year, 2022, Fr. Cicero as considered officially a servant of god, a beato. The brazilian devotes want him to became canonized as a saint, and they are struggling the vatican bureaucracy for the realization of this.

But he is acclaimed by the devotes already as a saint. The Saint of Juazeiro
Of course the protestants in Brazil do not like it, as usually they would not allow people to have rosary, statues, or saints in their houses. That is very popular in northeast comon people, usually the poors.

But of Fr. Cicero of course is part o brazilian history of the last century
he is a myth in Brazil.

                       (Photo: Statue of Fr. Cicero Romão in Juazeiro do Norte, Crato, Ceará)
 

 

Romaria sound (called bendito de Padre Cicero e de Nossa Senhora Luz das Candeias)

A journalist report on television: (turn on the legends, translation, not work well)

 Further Reading:

Brazil Greateast folk saint to be beatified
https://religionnews.com/2022/09/07/padim-cico-brazils-greatest-folk-saint-to-be-beatified/