Editorial Note: We reproduce below the Editorial of the first edition of the A Nova Democracia newspaper. This reprint has a double meaning. First, we pay a posthumous tribute to José Moreira Chumbinho, author of this Editorial and one of the main formulators of the editorial line of AND. Secondly, we affirm the currentness of our analysis fifteen years ago.
Fausto Arruda, President of the Editorial Board of AND
We live in the prelude to the Third War. The military operations are not concentrated in Europe, as in previous wars. As its scope of action extends to Europe, Asia and Africa, and now through Latin America, the atmosphere of conflict is perennial and overwhelming. The new partition imposes war on all peoples, stirs up the internal contradictions between the classes of all countries, and the imperialist strategy no longer adds anything but the hatred of all nationalities. People’s resistance becomes the main trend. Either one eliminates imperialism from the face of the earth or it will eliminate much of humanity.
Imperialism is obliged to manage all the countries and the contradictions that it stirs up or helps to root. Its unstoppable hunger for profits has continually deepened the relations of exploitation and brought to its ultimate consequences the maximum profit. As a result, the US war of prey evolved into the “all three” of the Japanese army in World War II: “Burning everything, stealing everything, killing everyone.” Their weapons gain new traits with disabling agents designed to undermine the physical and intellectual capabilities of every people on the globe.
Under US hegemony, the dementia of monopoly capital succeeded in expanding the semicolonial and semi-feudal condition in the world, and at times revived colonialism itself. In Latin America, denationalization is one of the fundamental aspects of the economy today, while imperialism demands from the native presidential candidates electoral platforms adequate to the monstrous plans of repression against the districts neglected by the public power and peasant camps. He demands (and obtains) these traitors to vow allegiance to the Bank and the Fund’s directory, which means to continue the policies of national subjugation, following the interests of the latifundia oligarchies and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Within the bounds of current statehood, and with the candidates who, in essence, compete for single-party election, absolutely nothing can change in the policy of deterritorialization, denationalization, foreign debt, exploitation of the Brazilian people’s workforce, devastation of resources In the imposition of the mythical technological packages that deepen the destruction of the productive forces.
The Brazilian people do not need frustrations to become aware. However, not even in football, preferred and consecrated sport of the Brazilian people, as it also appears in this edition, workers manage to get rid of the disappointments and lessons of fascism, revealing that there is more corruption than sport, and that its stars, direct or indirectly, rely on Nike and other foreign corporations and their managers.
Believing that it is possible to adjust the intellectual faculties of the masses and to develop the power to produce alterations in their consciousness, the New Imperialist Order creates the world in its image and perfection, it fabricates perverted information in the form of tepid news, perpetual depoliticization, staggering stories, threats and insults to the people, abolishes all information about revolution and science. Having the communication companies in its hands, the club of the greatest potentates of the world makes the apology of geographic, social and political fatalism, the propaganda of crime (presented as the most damaging part and preferably the only form of violence), the precocious sensuality, promiscuity, loathe for others, family quarrels, exaggerated individualism, fear, mysticism, the false idea of the end of nations. The world financial capital press is the purest expression of the universal hecatomb which it announces itself.
The systematic opposition, pure and simple, never reaches the level of a political program and is inconsequential and opportunistic. There is nothing worth bogging down about denunciations if there is no prospect of a profound transformation of society. It is necessary not only to think concretely to build a new authority and to reject the doctrine of future power, to unleash the relentless fight against everything that proves reactionary in the economy, politics, culture, everything else that imprisons the country, because it is necessary to build a new Brazil in the broad political, economic and cultural planes; Free, sovereign, prosperous, progressive, cult. And nothing new can happen if, by extending the breadth of national independence and the united front, the classes that constitute our people do not forge their emancipation.
