Youth and massacre

The National Secretary of Youth in the Temer government defended "a massacre every week." Regarding the massacre in Manaus, where 56 people died, he said that "they should have killed more." The Temer government stated that these opinions "do not represent those of the government."

These opinions definitely do not represent the youth of any part of the world, much less the Brazilian youth, who are among the most progressive on the planet.

A government that appoints someone with such views as National Secretary of Youth offends all the youth in the country, revealing itself to be a government against young people, as well as a coup government and therefore illegitimate, as is indeed the case with this government of old, male, white, rich, corrupt, and incompetent people.

Michel Temer appointed someone to represent Brazilian youth in his government as National Secretary of Youth—someone who could easily be the National Secretary of Massacres, if such a position were created. He announced that the man who wanted more deaths in massacres "resigned" in light of the scandal caused by his statements, a resignation the government agreed to, and that they will look for another secretary.

It is impossible for this government to find someone who legitimately represents the youth within its ranks, because it neither knows, nor is aware of, nor respects the major Brazilian youth organizations, such as the National Union of Students and the Brazilian Union of Secondary School Students. It has no idea of ​​the just reasons that led Brazilian secondary school students to occupy approximately 1.100 schools in 22 states of the Federation. It considers this to be chaos, and to solve this very serious problem, only one thing occurs to it – to use the police.

The secretary who resigned, although not yet officially, spoke of his ideal of "one massacre per week." The government clarified that this is not his opinion. Thank goodness.

But, before 2018 had even begun, we already had three massacres, more than one per week: the Manaus massacre, with 56 dead; the Campinas massacre, with 12 dead, 9 of them women; and the Roraima massacre, with 33 dead, most of them decapitated. It is the hatred disseminated in all of them, the misogyny revealed in a well-written letter from the murderer of the second massacre, the cruelty of the decapitations in the third massacre.

Former Rio de Janeiro Secretary of Public Security José Mariano Beltrame, a public security expert, drew attention to other serious risks associated with these events. Because criminal organizations operate within overcrowded prisons, Beltrame says there is a danger of these atrocities spilling onto the streets. The Roraima massacre was a response from the so-called First Command of the Capital (PCC) to what happened in Manaus. And there are indications that this is spreading to neighboring countries.

This shows that the problem is serious, and it is a dramatic manifestation, at a specific point – the Brazilian prison system – of the disease that is corroding society as a whole, with the proliferation of far-right ideas, such as anti-feminism (which calls the Maria da Penha Law the "Slut Law of Penha"), religious and sexual orientation intolerance, the "non-partisan school" movement, corruption, the use of the supposed fight against corruption to cover up corrupt cronies and dismantle social integration policies, the loss of self-esteem of the Brazilian nation with the surrender of our riches, the liquidation of our large-scale engineering projects and their replacement by foreign engineering.

We need to be aware of the seriousness of the crisis that is afflicting us. We must not be deceived, nor lose our way.

In Germany, during a period of great crisis at the end of the 1930s, these far-right ideas took hold of the masses, who began to see their enemy as their friend, and the hooded enemy as their friend, their leader. The man who presented himself as pure, incorruptible, a defender of order and zero tolerance for those who were not of the "pure" race, or were communists, or Jews, or had diverse sexual orientations, rose to power amidst thunderous applause. That was Hitler.