We publish an unofficial translation of the Weekly Editorial of The New Democracy .
When Luiz Inácio chooses the policy of appeasement to deal with the military crisis, he is allowing all favorable conditions to be reestablished for the military High Command to return to the offensive later on.
While investigations prove that a considerable part of the High Command of the Armed Forces and senior officials, even in minority, mobilized to consummate the military coup, president Luiz Inácio reiterated his guidance: not to promote acts or events condemning the 60th anniversary of the coup of 1964.
To prove the error of this government policy, it would be enough to mention how the reactionary sectors of the ruling classes received it. Representing the military right, the ultra-reactionary Hamilton Mourão had no doubts: “He’s right, that’s the past,” he said, referring to the military coup and the fascist military regime.
Estadão [newspaper], used to criticizing Luiz Inácio, was quick to defend him: “Lula acts correctly” by refusing to talk about the 1964 coup in its 60 years, in line with “an imperative of governability in a context of wounds waiting to heal” and “it is also a way of honoring the current military command, also architect of pacification”, he stated in the editorial “Lula’s accommodation with the military” (March 17). Speaking of wounds, it is simply pathetic that Estadão, which has already advocated for the government to reopen the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances (CEMDP), something that Luiz Inácio refuses to do, capitulates by echoing this government’s cowardly complicity.
Only the reactionary ideologues – committed above all to the continued exploitation of the people and the Nation – and the opportunists, whose mentality has been emasculated by decades of subservience and conciliation with the enemies of the popular masses, believe that appeasement will lead to the stabilization of the country.
Even before Bolsonaro, the High Command changed the results of the elections (2018) by taking away Luiz Inácio from the race, through blackmail during a habeas corpus vote on that candidate in the Supreme Court.
As we see: long before Bolsonaro took the presidency – and independently of him – the latent wound of the coup was again manifesting itself acutely, especially because it had not been properly treated since 1988, when the previous appeasement with the gorillas and transition with the Amnesty military regime of General and Unrestricted Amnesty, led in which there was no punishment, no change in the high military officials, nor in the training curriculums, nor in the doctrine of the Armed Forces, which they followed, all these years, glorifying the 1964 coup as a legitimate movement and even as “democratic revolution”, and when it was removed from the front of management of the old State, it took back the belief that the Armed Forces were the Moderating Power and guarantors of the “Democratic State of Law” – and, therefore, also guarantors of its restriction or even suspension, as Bolsonaro shamelessly tried to do.
When Luiz Inácio chooses the policy of appeasement to deal with the military crisis, he is allowing all favorable conditions to be reestablished for the military High Command to return to the offensive later on. When the masses rise up in defense of their rights, which is inevitable, the gorillas, as the Moderating Power they believe in, will rise again threatening the Country with military intervention to save the Nation from “disintegration”. Because they were not seriously confronted when they were demoralized and weakened, the gorillas will find favorable ground for a new coup escalation.
Appeasement with the military leadership only feeds the coup!
For genuine, progressive and revolutionary democrats, as well as the popular masses in struggle, there is no other path left than to forcefully raise the campaign to denounce the 60 years of the ignominious coup of 1964 and the coup, whether in the form of institutional rupture or in the form of “Moderating Power”. Compromises with fascists and coup plotters are not acceptable – which would only lead us to coup and fascism.