Al-Sahaf is Normal

Olavo de Carvalho
Jornal da Tarde, April 10th, 2003

Deputy Alberto Fraga’s (PMDB-DF) denuciation that the current president of the Republic got elected with financial help from the Farc only came to the knowledge of some readers because, breaking through the general blockade, I gave the news in my article. That part of the public who did not read it still ignores the issue, although the CPI (Investigative Parliamentary Committee) called by the deputy to clarify the case already counts with the support of 114 parliament members, in need of only 58 more signatures to start the most explosive public investigation ever made in this country.

Few events in the last month had the spotlight as much in our newspapers and TV news programs as the anti-US marches. But, since the beginning of March, huge pro-Bush manifestations have been happening in numerous American cities, without one, not even one word about it being mentioned in the Brazilian media.

During a decade, hundreds of books and articles, filled with statistical proof, denounced the existence of a liberal bias in the American media – and not one word about it was written in our newspapers. But as soon as the leftist Eric Alterman decided to mumble against that criticism, he was immediately flattered in the Brazilian press, which, to make things worse translated “liberal bias” as “viés liberal” instead of “viés esquerdista”.¹

These examples are enough to show to which point the public in this country is deprived of basic information and deceived on a daily basis by an army of journalists without scruples, subservient collaborators of the international machine of totalitarian misinformation.

But, not being satisfied by closing the borders of the country to news or ideas that might contradict the dominant orthodoxy, these people still have the guts to add flattery to the lies, leading Brazilians to think that the misinformed ones are not them, but... the Americans! Articles and reports, in a dazzling succession, force on our compatriots the concept that the truth about Iraq is known only by them, while the US news agencies are under the iron fisted censorship of George W. Bush, publishing only what he wants. And, the Brazilians, increasingly provincial day by day, do believe.

The new normative model for Brazil is Mohammed Al-Sahaf – the Iraqi Minister of Information who told us about the complete expulsion of the Americans from Baghdad while, precisely at the same time, they were peeing in Saddam Hussein’s presidential toilet.²

It is true that I, personally, still have some room to protest. But how many readers will have the intellectual courage to consider the hypothesis that an isolated journalist tells the truth, while the whole rest of the class lies? Such independence of thought is not demanded of the masses, who trust the educated elite like school boys trust their teachers. Antonio Gramsci was right when he considered that a couple of intellectuals were more useful to the communist cause than a multitude of proletarians. He used to say that once the conscience of the masses had been conquered by the leftist elite, not even censorship would be necessary: anyone who would contradict the majority would be considered mad. And, in this case, of course, the mad one is me. Al-Sahaf is the normal one.

It is true also that in the Jornal da Tarde I am not alone. Here we have J.O. de Meira Penna, Alberto Oliva and a few more outsiders. But that only makes this newspaper the exception that confirms the rule.

A brief opinion poll in the Brazilian editorials would be enough to show that there, instead of a proportional representation of the many political options that are necessary to keep an impartial coverage of the facts, what we find is a depressing ideological uniformity: “right-winged” journalists are inexistent – and things have been like this for so long that nobody sees anything abnormal in that.

It is the normality of Al-Sahaf.

That, of course, does not mean that everything that is published is praising the government. On the contrary, there is a lot of debate amongst leftists, and the transposition of these debates to the papers provides a verisimilar illusion of democracy. But this merely reflects the “strategy of scissors” conceived by Lenin, in which the internal divergences of the left slowly take the place of the real pluralism, addicting the public to a bionic mockery of freedom and reducing all non-leftist parties to ornamental appendices for some factions of the left, until the day they become useless and disappear.

NOTES:

1. Liberal, in the US means leftist. Besides the conservatives, there is still a third political ideology which is called libertarians. In UK, the word “liberal” is still used for that group that the Americans call “libertarians”. The Portuguese language refers to these political ideologies in the same terms of British English, therefore: Conservatives = Conservadores, Leftists = Esquerdistas, Liberals = Liberais. Translating from American English we would have in Portuguese: Conservatives = Conservadores, Liberals = Esquerdistas, Libertatians = Liberais. The translation made by the Brazilian newspapers, then, is either too incompetent, not understanding even the basic terms of the topic it will discuss, or it is plainly a lie made to misinform and cultivate the myth of “neoliberal” evil. – Tranlator’s Note. Back
2. Toilets which had golden handles by the way. – Translator’s Note. Back

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca