What explains the fact that there are still supporters of Bolsonaro's Nazism?

Last night (January 26, 2023), as I arrived at Luanda airport to catch my connecting flight back to Brazil, another passenger in a similar situation shouted at the top of his lungs: "It's sad to return to a land that elected a thief as president."

 Unable to control my impulses, I retorted in an even louder voice: "But it's very good to return to a country that knew how to defeat a Nazi and genocidal militiaman who is in the service of the devil."

 As is tradition among Bolsonaro's Nazi-supporting followers when openly confronted, the aforementioned citizen didn't utter another peep and pretended he had nothing to do with the conversation.

 This account, in the tone of a personal complaint about a minor altercation of little practical relevance, aims to illustrate in an intelligible way the types of people who persist in supporting the most perverse and diabolical political ideology ever known in the history of our country.

 As the cited example makes clear, we are not referring to people of meager means, with few opportunities to be properly informed and easily manipulated. On the contrary, we were dealing with someone endowed with all the resources to be very well aware of the reality experienced by the Brazilian people and to know the magnitude of their recent victory against the forces of Bolsonaro's Nazism. But, neither is this a typical representative of those whom this political current prioritizes.

 We are talking about an international traveler who, almost certainly, belongs to our middle class. This deduction is based on their ability to purchase an international air ticket to travel to Europe and the fact that they do so (as I also did) via an alternative route which, although much longer and more tiring, has a much lower monetary cost than direct flights. In other words, if they were poor, they wouldn't travel to Europe for leisure; if they were rich, that is, upper class, they wouldn't travel in economy class on this not entirely comfortable route.

 When a banker, a major agribusiness entrepreneur, or a large shareholder in the financial market expresses their agreement with the political vision and governing style of Bolsonaro's movement, there is little to be surprised about. They are simply acting in accordance with their real class interests, since Bolsonaro's movement is characterized by the defense of values ​​that are dear to big capitalists—in other words, to those who live off the exploitation of the labor of the popular majorities.

 So, what could lead a middle-class person, who seems to have absolutely nothing concrete to gain from Bolsonaro's political proposals, to identify with this far-right political current, which is the Brazilian version of Hitler's Nazism?

 It's not so difficult to understand why a poor person living in extreme poverty might end up voting for certain politicians who, ultimately, are primarily responsible for their destitute condition. There is no doubt that absolute poverty never serves as a stimulating factor for social awareness. In fact, the opposite is true: the more pronounced the state of social degradation of a human being, the more likely they are to be manipulated and induced to take positions that clash with their own interests.

 It was no coincidence that the Bolsonaro government decided to heavily utilize funds from the Auxílio Brasil program to brazenly buy the votes of a large portion of our poorest population. Undeniably, Bolsonarism achieved significant success in this regard. Had it not been for this, its electoral defeat would have been by a much larger percentage margin.

 However, while attracting a segment of the poorest segments of society can be achieved through direct purchase, offering small, momentary benefits, gaining the support of sectors of the middle class requires far more sophisticated methods, operating much more on an intellectual level than in the realm of material gains. If a stark analysis of their concrete material gains and losses under far-right political regimes were conducted, they would conclude that the middle class as a whole has almost nothing to gain from them. The main, and almost only, privileged groups benefiting from the policies of governments like the Brazilian Bolsonaro-style Nazi regime are the exponents of big capital.

 Therefore, one of the primary concerns of theorists serving big capital in their relationship with the middle classes is to divert attention from issues dealing with the real causes related to the struggle for wealth produced in society. Instead, they seek to inflame existing anti-popular prejudices within our middle class and use them to foster a delusional hatred against the most needy, so that these are seen and felt as the real cause of all the problems afflicting this intermediate population.

 Thus, for example, instead of fighting for the government to expand its role in public medicine and prepare a more robust and significant budget for this area, which would allow for the satisfaction of the needs of the popular majorities and offer greater job opportunities for its professionals, many doctors are led to defend the expansion of the presence of private medicine as if it were a product like any other on the market. A very similar phenomenon occurs in relation to public education. Therefore, it is not uncommon to find teachers openly defending the privatization of school education.

 Similarly, we could cite the case of people who call themselves Christians, but who, in fact, behave as staunch enemies of everything that the image of Jesus represents and symbolizes. No one who considers themselves a follower of Jesus and possesses a normal capacity for reasoning would align themselves with the nefarious preachings of those merchants of faith who dedicate themselves to an indecent religious manipulation with the aim of transforming Christianity into a tool much more aligned with the construction of the devil's work, and not Jesus'.

 Considering that Jesus lived and died fighting to build a world of justice, solidarity, equality, love, and peace, how can we accept that his legacy is distorted and put at the service of true bandits who dedicate themselves to accumulating fortunes for themselves, who strive to maintain a state of oppression in which selfishness, greed, armament, hatred, and war prevail? In truth, we can assure you that those who act in this way should be called SHEPHERDS OF THE DEVIL, never followers of Jesus.

 It is necessary to question those who dedicate themselves to employing certain words with the aim of perpetuating their self-deception. As we know, it is not easy for human beings to serenely accept conceptions that, deep down, they consider wrong and unworthy. Therefore, many try to appease their crisis of conscience by attempting to deceive their own minds so that they will give a benign reinterpretation of certain evils committed or intended.

 Perhaps this is what drives Bolsonaro's "Christian" supporters to justify the genocide against the Yanomami people with the argument that it is a defense of our country, since this indigenous people is not essentially part of our nation, as they live and move through the territories of Venezuela and Brazil. In this way, the killing and extermination that Bolsonaro's supporters promoted among the Yanomami would be justified in the defense of our Brazilian identity. It is true that Hitler and German Nazism expressed similar justifications for their genocides.

 On the other hand, Bolsonaro supporters (but also bourgeois liberals) are uncomfortable with the use of the expression "coup d'état" when referring to the deposition of the constitutional governments of 1964 and 2016. To ease their conscience, they cling to the terms "Revolution of March 31, 1964" and "impeachment of Dilma Rousseff." However, for our people, softening the words does not eliminate the pain and suffering caused by these real coups d'état that the ruling classes spearheaded.

 The breaking of the 100-year secrecy imposed by the Bolsonaro government on the accounts of the presidential corporate credit card allowed evidence of fraud and theft of public money to come to light. And we are not talking about amounts equivalent to the price of the much-talked-about triplex in Guarujá (the one they said belonged to Lula, and for which he spent 580 days imprisoned in Curitiba). In the case of the corporate credit card of the leader of Bolsonaro's Nazism, the amounts of unjustified expenses far exceed twenty times the price of the aforementioned triplex. But this is a subject that Bolsonaro supporters do not want to remain on the agenda.

 To get rid of this undesirable situation, the disinformation machine of Bolsonaro's Nazism is back in full swing. The point being emphasized now is the impropriety of Lula presenting himself as a representative of the people, given that he was occupying hotel rooms with daily rates of around 7000 reais. Bolsonaro supporters ask: How can someone speak for the poor while spending so much money on their lodging?

 What Bolsonaro's Nazism fails to clarify when trying to alleviate its pangs of conscience is that it was the prohibition imposed by the previous Bolsonaro Nazi government that prevented Lula from accessing the official residence at Granja do Torto during the transition period, forcing him to rent rooms in a large hotel. Or should Lula have used a room in his own house, or Janja's, to receive all the visits from foreign emissaries and statesmen, as well as to organize the inaugural meetings of his new government?

 In short, these are the reasons that allow me to understand the motivation of that fellow flight attendant mentioned in the first paragraph. They also serve to support the explanations that justify the actions of those supporters of Bolsonaro's Nazism who are not part of the dominant elites of rent-seeking or agribusiness exploitation. They are mostly members of our middle classes, who were led to Bolsonaro's Nazism due to the stirring up of their latent prejudices against the most needy sectors of our society.

 The great merit of the ideologues of Bolsonaro's Nazism, especially those known as the DEVIL'S SHEPHERDS, is knowing how to instill in certain middle-class groups a feeling of hatred and anger so blinding that it drives them to commit all kinds of atrocities against the groups identified as their mortal enemies and as the primary target of their fury. In the case of Bolsonaro's Nazism in our country, the main victims are the unionized working masses and the political parties associated with defending their interests.