The fascist guru of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho, died after contracting Covid. Olavo, as his followers call him, was a denier of the pandemic and a firm and consistent anti-vaccine. After his death, Bolsonaro said that he “had awakened many” and presented him “as one of the greatest thinkers of our country and a philosopher”.
It was none of those things. Olavo de Carvalho was a propagandist, a great enemy of Brazilian and Latin American democracies and a faithful sign that we live in times of crisis in which the most absurd ideas and lies occupy the center of the world political scenario.
Olavo de Carvalho was a character that seemed to be taken from the imagination of the book “Nazi Literature in America”, by Roberto Bolaño. Like Luiz Fontaine de Souza, a Brazilian fascist character invented by Bolaño, Olavo de Carvalho was the author of an abysmal number of books with delusional titles and without any academic credibility. Among the most peculiar, it is worth mentioning one of the most famous by way of illustration, “The Minimum You Need To Know To Not Be An Idiot”.
His books consecrated him. The illusions of grandeur of this intellectually pretentious agitator dazzled a large number of fans. Steve Bannon, for example, said that “Olavo is one of the great conservative intellectuals in the world.” To explain it in American terms, the Brazilian “intellectual” represented a combination of Bannon and Stephen Miller, but more daring and esoteric.
Olavo presented himself as an academic outsider, although nothing he said had scientific rigor. Basically, almost nothing was true. In addition to being a profound discriminator of diversity, he was a flat-earther and climate change denialist.
He hated Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei and even more Isaac Newton. In addition to being a supporter of Donald Trump, he was an enthusiast of the Capitol Hill invasion, which he described as a people’s struggle against a globalist and communist elite.
Among some of his most prominent statements, he claimed that Biden was a “mental retard” and that Kamala Harris was an agent of the Chinese Communist Party. He even said that “not even Mussolini imagined that in the future fascism would be reduced to defending the anus” and as if that were not enough, he warned that Pepsi Cola is made with cells from human fetuses.
How can a character as grotesque as Olavo have such an influence in Brazil and in the world? Olavo de Carvalho was the intellectual leader of a new generation of militants and politicians on the Brazilian extreme right.
Although his style was characterized by daily confrontation, including with former and recent allies such as the Russian right-wing extremist Alexander Duguin, his ideas constituted the main ideological guide for the construction of the electoral campaign and the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
With the beginning of the current Brazilian government, the presence of its followers (or if you like, its disciples) in strategic positions, such as the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs, became evident. Even the Palmares Foundation, originally designed to promote Afro-Brazilian education and culture, was converted into a front for the persecution of the Afro-Brazilian movement.
These spaces were strategically occupied by believers in search of a cultural war against supposed enemies of the ideas defended by Olavo de Carvalho, based on reactionary, anti-enlightenment precepts and with a clearly fascist theme.
Conspiracy theories such as “cultural Marxism”, “globalism” or even the denial and relativization of slavery or the defense of the Inquisition, have become a component of agitation and propaganda by militants and members of the Brazilian government who seek to propose a new model of national identity, based on Christian fundamentalist values.
While Olavo de Carvalho incorporated ideas and trends from radical sectors such as the effervescent American Christian right from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, the conspiracy-minded, hierarchical and, not infrequently, openly anti-democratic cosmovision revived traditions of historic extreme-right organizations and of Brazilian fascism.
It is not surprising, therefore, the similarity between some fascist intellectuals, such as the integralist Gustavo Barroso, whose ideas circulated in the fascist, religious and military sectors in 20th century Brazil.
It was the media close to Olavo de Carvalho that served as a space for the celebration of fascist symbologies such as the “Brazilian version” of Joseph Goebbels, embodied by Roberto Alvim, then Bolsonaro’s Secretary of Culture.
The phrase “Olavo is right”, so close to the Mussolinian, “Il Duce ha semper ragione”, stamped on T-shirts and posters at street demonstrations, was another of the Olavist slogans invoking the fascist tradition.
By retaking part of these ideas, and bringing them to the national political field, Olavo de Carvalho and his followers also claim a long tradition of Brazilian and Latin American political thought that treats, from their mythologies, politics as a battlefield. permeated by persecutory actions against political enemies.
From these categories, politics becomes a weapon and instrument of the fascistization processes of right-wing populisms. His legacy, which will undoubtedly be the subject of dispute among his most prominent followers, was to give prominence to his far-right ideas. He was not an original thinker, but a diffuser of the absurd and authoritarian nonsense that, however, was applauded by many Brazilians.
A great enemy of democracy has died, but his ideas, which already belong to the long history of Latin American fascism, will live on.
*The original version of this text was published in Clarin, Argentina
Source: Folha
