Loud words have been swarming recently in defense of the democracy, in different editorials of the press monopoly. “Democracy” just like the one we live in, of course: a minority of big bankers, large contractors, large merchants, large industrialists, multinationals and landlords exploiting and denying fundamental rights to the vast majority, the people’s classes. However, even the support of the press monopoly to this ‘democracy’ is quite volatile and flexible, converting in certain moments in defense of fascism. History has proved it.
Nevertheless, in the context of the fierce struggle within the ruling classes between the right-wing, apparently ‘legalist’ who wants a mild military coup and a military regime civilian masked, and the extreme right-wing (fascist and that wants a wide open military regime), the historic revisionism and its relativizations are propagated to make the press monopoly look like an “uncompromising” democracy.
Nevertheless, a fact that is not very often remembered is the unconditional support of the press monopoly for the military business regime instituted in Brasil, in 1964. Those governments, it is necessary to remind, were a vorulent reaction of the big bourgeoisie and landownership in direct collusion with the Yankee imperialism against the appeals to the base reforms – agrarian, political, educacional and political – made by the PTB president, João Goulart. With the exceptions of the most left-wing dissidents, the press monopoly on the whole supported the disassembly process of the Brazilian Nation, demonstrating its umbelical relationship with the putrefied ruling class of the old State. Even though Bolsonaro had remembered about Globo Network’s venality in his election campaign, to point out its supposed “hypocrisy”, the fact is that Folha de São Paulo and Estadão, Zero Hora and all the other press vehicles have supported these machinations. On April 2nd, 1964, it was stamped on the newspaper’s cover, O Globo: “Democracy resurfaces”. With a hysterical celebration of the removal of the president and the arrival of the military to the old State administration.
Not satisfied with supporting the coup, Globo Network maintained its indulgence to the installed government until its last years. In 1984, in the final year of the so-called “redemocratization”, the Globo monopolist, Roberto Marinho, prouded stated in an editorial: “ We participated in the 1964 Revolution, identified with the national aspirations for the preservation of the democratic institutions [ … ]. We have remained true to its objectives”. And continues to praise the project of submission to the international capital as a real “impressive advance” in the economic field. Globo’s commitment to national dependence to foreign powers becomes clear.
Several of those newspapers “self-criticized” themselves in their later editorials, mainly due to the 50 years of the military coup, in 2014. Yet the attempt to justify the unjustifiable is remarkable: “ justified the military intervention for fear of another coup, to be delivered by President João Goulart, with broad support from the unions”, states the 2013 O Globo editorial. They made their mea-culpa, obviously; after all, it is not good for those institutions to have such a nefarious past, when one needs to counter fascist radicalism that predicts an open dictatorship and will drag Brasil into an unclose civil war, launching a mass crowd to the radical struggle for their rights.
But have they changed their class character? In the face of a revolucionary scenario for the benefit of the people’s classes would the press monopolies abdicate to support reactionary attacks on the “democratic legality”? Their hypocrisy is indeed remarkable for, while they say democracy is “an absolute value”, that when at risk it can only be saved by itself, they do not even feel embarrassed to support, as they have always done, the exception regime of fascist terror against the revolutionary people. Already their supposed “legalist intransigence” it is not even necessary for the revolution to be waged so that they can deform it, nickname it reactionary and “dictatorial”, in favor of the repression denial of rights, as it is clear in the current coup d’état underway, unleashed by “Lava Jato” by white means and maintaining the face of democracy, as AND has reported to exhaustion. Such facts, in themselves, dismantle this hypocritical narrative.
Nowadays, the press monopoly, without exception, is committed to a single project: the growing and uninterrupted dismantling of the Brazilian Nation in its subjugation to imperialism and the reinforcement of its bureaucratic and semifeudal capitalist supports. So, let’s shout: the truth is hard, the press monopoly supported the dictatorship! #
Sources:
- https://oglobo.globo.com/brazil/apoio-editorialo-ao-golpe-de-64-foi-um-erro-9771604
- https://www.infomoney.com.br/política/relembre-o-editorial-de-roberto-marinho-apoiando-a-ditdura-e-a-retratacao-da-globo-em-2013/
