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 I have been saying for a long time now that a large part of history's illustrious leaders are poor devils who are supported by grandiose or supposedly grandiose fictions. The nazism fiction made a frustrated painter into one of the most powerful warlords of last century, who in a dozen years changed Europe's geography and threatened the whole planet.
His name was Adolf Schikelgruber Hitler and, to Europe's chagrin, what he needed is his life was for someone to throw a rotten egg at him when he was still a young activist. This providential egg perhaps would spare humanity from the Second War. But it was never thrown.
Schikelgruber was, without a doubt, when alive, the most beloved man in this planet. In spite of having killed millions of human beings, his enthusiasm fascinated a whole nation. When you see the rapt look with which the German contemplated him, his defeat and suicide must have provoked seas of tears .
Joseph Vissarionovitch Djugatchivili, mediocre Georgian former seminarian, better known as Stalin, gave continuity to Lenin's massacres, that added, in total, 20 million deaths.
Backed by socialism's sublime ideals, his death generated a sea of tears not only in the Soviet Union as in the whole world. That without mentioning those who didn't believe his death. After all, a god cannot die. His death brought forth tears as much in Moscow as in Porto Alegre, as much in Paris as in Berlin.
As French historian Jean Rostand used to say, "Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god". The cult to the great murderer was such that he was revered as the Peoples' Little Father.
In Brazil, whose ambitions are not excessive, a small dictator deserved the tears from the south to the north of the country, Getúlio Vargas. There were tears left even for a lesser imitator of the caudillo, Leonel Brizola.
After all, every public man has his hosts of believers, and the river of tears generated by his death always overflows beyond the margins of the family and of those close by.
In this last and tearful week, there were tears left even for communist leader Miguel Arraes, another one who fought to transform Brazil in an immense southern Cuba.
That his family would cry, it's understandable. What's incomprehensible is that leaders of all the parties, some of them presidentiable, adopted the role of weepers before the corpse of the old Bolshevik.
Death has a transfigurating power. The whole press, in an unanimous euphemism, transformed the communist into a "socialist leader". The newspapers colleagues seem to have adopted the politically correct primer of Nilmário (Nilmário Miranda is the Chief of the Brazilian National Secretariat for Human Right, which published last year a booklet on proper use of sensitive words).
Even more difficult is to understand for who and why those grown men of the PT in Congress, cry inconsolably when they were made aware of what everybody - except them - already knew. That the PT has been dirty since its origin.
The party appears in Brazil as a sanctuary for the defeated of the century. And it's born as a lie, starting with its own name. It just replaced the word proletarian - so dear to the murderous doctrines that served it as base - for worker.
Well, this word has a manual work connotation, but those who really bet in the PT were intellectual workers, academicians and college students, the catholic church's base ecclesial communities, public workers and a penitent middle class, contaminated with mauvaise conscience in view of its parsimonious welfare. The only worker who remained for the PT flag was Lula.
Worker but not much. Lula retired roguishly at the age of 42, through the obscene statute of the special retirement for political amnestied, that rewarded all the communists and alike who conspired against their own homeland.
He spent about two decades without working, paid as the PT's apparatchik, the only party in the country that compensates militant professionals.
Naturally, invested with such noble functions, Lula could not live as a petty worker. He bought then, in circumstances that were never fully explained, a penthouse in São Bernardo do Campo. The press denounced the fact, but it was lenient.
In a country where getting rich with public money is the norm, a penthouse more or a penthouse less does not constitute a stain in the trajectory of a leftist leader. What should be an impediment to any candidacy, has become a perfectly forgivable peccadillo.
Lula's presidential campaign starts with a murder, that of Santo André's mayor Celso Daniel. The press denounced the fact, but the PT managed to characterize the crime as a common one and not political.
In a country where common crime is the norm, one corpse more one corpse less would not affect the rising of the self-proclaimed most ethical man in the country.
It's true that in the wake of Celso Daniel there were six corpses more. But what are seven corpses when we have at stake a project of national salvation? Historical details, nothing more than details.
With the ego inflated for becoming the star of a bourgeois party, arising from a Marxistoid bourgeois intelligentsia, Lula did not even care to get an education. Thirsty for power, he made do without even a minimum administrative experience in some city hall, so he would at least understand what's a payroll.
He went on directly from paid idleness and functional illiteracy to the Nation's supreme leadership. Well, an apple tree does not give peaches. What should we expect from a scoundrel without scruples, who spent his whole life parroting words he couldn't understand, but that he would become a white version of Idi Amin Dada, the dullard and ridiculous dictator from Uganda in the 70s?
Brazil may not be Africa, but we'll get there one day. Smack in the 21st century, with pretenses of modern nation, Brazil ended up having for president the exotic figure of the Supreme Ignoramus. Lula ascended to power mounted in a fiction, the obsolete Marxist fiction that it's the proletariat's duty to redeem humankind. Powerful, those fictions.
For whom do the tardy Magdalenes in Congress cry? For Lula's political death it won't be. After all, the will and arrogance of the country's most ethical man generated resentments and irreparable divisions in the party.
It won't be for the death of a dream either. The dream had already died in 89, with the Berlin Wall's fall. If it weren't enough, it got its death certificate two years later, with the Soviet Union's dissolution.
The PT, heir of the Bolshevik tradition, did not have a bright future ahead. (See the bull's subtleness in a china's shop adopted by the PT members: its predominant faction chose the name of "majority field." Majority is the translation of the word Bolshevik. The Menshevik (the minority) went to the P-SOL).
It was just a life extension for the dream, just enough time for the concentric waves of the Wall's fall to arrive to this Brazil, so far away physically and culturally from the planet's decision centers.
If petistas (PT activists) dreamt a day of resuscitating the Soviet utopia in Latin America, they were naïve children who still believed in the Marxist dogma that history moved towards communism, dogma that history itself sent to its trash can at the deathbed of the last century.
Why do the Magdalenes cry? In my opinion, for a single reason: they knew that their tears would be on TV and that the Congress Inquiries' broadcast have the high ratings of a soap opera.
Would you find a petista crying by himself before his mirror, in the privacy of his home? I doubt. Tears without television do not redeem neither do they garner votes.
Amidst all that, the country's most ethical man makes a parallel that raises our hopes. He compares himself to former President Getúlio Vargas, who committed suicide in the presidency. Go ahead, companion! Up to the end.
It would be the only way to escape with certain elegance from your contemporaries' judgment. Lula might finish his days with a martyr's aura, instead of the opportunist's blemish that already sticks to his skin.
He would deceive the new generation for a few more years, but nothing more than that. He would only deceive until the waters of the history lake lowered and the men of the future could see with exemption this sad period of Brazil's political life.
But I cannot keep this hope. Suicide is a gesture for men who never lost their sense of shame. What is not the case with our embarrassing character.
Janer Cristaldo - he holds a Ph.D. from University of Paris, Sorbonne - is an author, translator, lawyer, philosopher and journalist and lives in São Paulo. His e-mail address is janercr@terra.com.br.
Translated from the Portuguese by Arlindo Silva.
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Should a man not repent but give himself to despair and end his life? Surely, this is not a Christian way of seen things.
I understand that he made mistakes; either because he is naive and uneducated or because he did everything knowingly and maybe thought that would be for the benefit of the country. It is noticeable that he is also given to the erroneous use of words and had shown bad approaches when expressing his opinion. We knew for a long time that the actual president is not intellectually well discipline although he have shown that he is good at heart.
Let us say we remove him from power and chose somebody else with a much bigger brain than Lula. Who can guarantee that he/she will not continue the same shameful political process we have today or even worse? Do we have anyone in our country capable of doing better? If so, where can we find this wonderful unnoticeable leader?