And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world. But the dynamics as far as why he won are quite similar, in that it was driven not by a sudden far-right ideology conversion on the part of this population in Brazil, but anger and desperation and hopelessness about the failures of the establishment class.
AMY GOODMAN: During an interview with a Brazilian television program back, oh, like almost 20 years ago, Jair Bolsonaro said, "Through the vote you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC [then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war innocents die." Talk about his stances, Glenn Greenwald, on many issues, from LGBTQ issues to women's rights, etc.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, that's why I say he's a real throwback to the kind of far-right movements of, say, the '60s, '70s and '80s than he is this more updated, modernized version. So, if you look at far-right leaders throughout the West, you don't really see much of a focus on, say, abortion and LGBT issues. If anything, sometimes the far right in Europe co-opts those issues as a way of inciting xenophobia against Muslims, saying Muslims are regressive and want to drag the country back thousands of years in terms of social issues. Whereas Bolsonaro is kind of this much more old-school fascist, where a major part of his campaign was depicting LGBTs as a direct threat to children, saying that the reason LGBTs want to infiltrate public schools is because they want to convert people's children into being gay so that they can have sex with them -- an obviously highly inflammatory claim to make about a marginalized population in a society that's already pretty conservative on social issues.
But the much graver threat is the fact that he explicitly reveres and wants to replicate the worst elements of the military dictatorship. When he stood up, very recently, in 2016 on the floor of the Congress and voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff, he specifically said he was doing it in honor of the notorious colonel who tortured not only dissidents in general, but Dilma specifically. So this is the kind of regime he wants to reinstate. Whether he'll be able to do that is a looming question, but that's definitely his intention.
AMY GOODMAN: Foreign Policy has a headline, "Jair Bolsonaro's Model Isn't Berlusconi. It's Goebbels." Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. I mean, that's what I think the Western media is only now starting to come to grips with, is that he really isn't even placeable on the standard ideological spectrum that has come to define even this new right movement that has obviously succeeded in the U.S. and the U.K., with Brexit, and is flourishing in many places in Western and Eastern Europe. He's far more extreme than that.
Whether Nazi comparisons and the like are healthy or productive is something I'd prefer to leave to the side, because that tends, just generally, to obfuscate. I prefer to use Nazi analogies for people who have actually committed genocide. But I think that the threat that he poses to just basic human rights, the right of dissent and the ability to have an ongoing viable democracy can't be overstated.
AMY GOODMAN: And President Trump applauding him, the significance and the importance of the U.S.-Brazilian relationship, Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think that we all know now how President Trump sees the world, which is in this very simplistic framework where people who say good things about him are people that he likes and people who say bad things about him are people that he hates. And Jair Bolsonaro is somebody who has consciously modeled himself on Donald Trump. His children, when they came to New York, met with Steve Bannon. Trump -- Bolsonaro himself has saluted the American flag and talked about how much he loves the United States under Trump. I'm sure he was very effusive in his praise of Trump when he spoke to him, and therefore Trump's current posture, in his childlike manner, is to view Jair Bolsonaro as somebody that is an ally and a friend and somebody worthy of praise for that reason alone.
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