Lunan Peak
Police violence in Brazil
On August 23, Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia published an opinion article on Al Jazeera titled "Brazil's Never-Ending War against the Poor," accusing Brazilian police of abusive violence and calling for an overhaul of the country's security architecture.
Garcia begins by writing that violence — especially state-sanctioned violence — is part of the daily lives of many Brazilians, especially for the unfortunate poor who live in slums and have "the wrong skin color."
He argues that poor blacks and browns living in precarious conditions are the preferred victims of the Brazilian police – a force that appears to be working not to eradicate poverty, but to eradicate the poor.
On July 21, 2022 local time, the police of the Rio de Janeiro State of Brazil confirmed that the bandit operation carried out in the Alemão slum community in the northern district of Rio de Janeiro on the same day caused a total of 18 deaths.
In Brazil's slums, residents have been living in fear of "police action" — or more accurately, the fear of being indiscriminately killed by automatic weapons and helicopters in the streets of narrow residential neighborhoods. If a police officer happens to approach – whatever they do or don't do – they may be threatened, beaten, imprisoned, killed or simply "disappeared". They know that their houses could be invaded at any time, their property confiscated, their lives upended — all with the full support of their own governments and other state agencies.
On 24 May, 25 people were killed in a police operation in the Cruzeiro slum of Rio de Janeiro. On July 21, another police raid in the Complexo do Alemao neighborhood of the same state claimed the lives of another 18 people.
These are just fragments in a longer chain. According to a study by researchers at the Federal University of Fluminese, between May 2021 and May 2022, 182 people were killed in at least 40 different police operations in Rio de Janeiro alone.
These deadly actions were fully supported by Brazil's far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who often praised the bloody actions of the police in the slums and proudly declared that all those killed on the spot were "criminals" and "thugs" who have now been "neutralised." In fact, activists and international organizations have stressed that only a small percentage of those killed in these operations have issued arrest warrants in their names. Slum dwellers often talk about people being "hunted down" by the police, sometimes even executed after surrendering. But to the Brazilian government, these details seem irrelevant.
While Bolsonaro and many of his supporters often try to justify the bloody, apparently illegal actions of the Brazilian police, claiming that they are fighting violent, heavily armed and dangerous criminals, the police have killed more than just so-called drug dealers and gang members.
For example, on May 24, the same day as the fatal attack on the Cruzeiro slum, in the northeastern state of Sergipe, federal highway patrol officers smothered an unarmed black man named Genivaldo de Jesus Santos in the trunk of a police car. Witnesses recorded images of the reality of officers pushing Santos to the ground and then forcibly leaving him in the back of the police car, a cloud of white smoke rising from the SUV. According to his family, the 38-year-old handcuffed man suffered from schizophrenia. One could hear his screams, and he stretched out his legs out of the car and pedaled for a moment until he didn't move.
Neither the actions of the police in the slums nor the killings of poor and vulnerable black Brazilians like Santos by law enforcement officers are surprising or difficult to explain in Brazil.
Garcia went on to discuss the institutional and cultural soil in which these police violences are rooted. In Brazil, he argues, a culture of guilt and guilt of the poor and the poor is deeply entrenched and inevitably leads to racial atrocities by the police. Coupled with the failure to adequately train the security forces and the reluctance of the authorities to even acknowledge the existence of the problem, this culture of guilt for the poor has turned the police into perpetrators of State-sanctioned acts of violence, whether voluntarily or passively.
Police training is poor, and the culture of "learning by doing" on the streets fuels misconduct and passes it on from generation to generation. Police claim that criminals often have better guns and equipment, causing police officers to often fear for their own lives, which increases the lethal nature of their interactions with the population.
It was clear that they were undertrained, under-equipped, and always filled with fear, and the Brazilian police felt they were waging a war that could only be won through pre-emptive violence.
However, the lack of training, funding and support for the police can only explain a small part of the problem. The Brazilian police acted in this way — seemingly to wage a deadly war against the poor — mainly because it was created for that purpose.
Historically, the police force was established in Brazil not to ensure public safety, as we understand it today, but to control, suppress and intimidate slaves.
Brazil's first slums appeared in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century and grew exponentially after the end of slavery. Over time, poor migrants fleeing armed conflict have also joined these former slaves and their descendants. Soon, similar slums began to emerge and spread to other parts of the country. From the outset, the police force was designed to protect the elite and their property and way of life from dangerous "civilians", and they quickly focused their attention on slums.
David Nemer, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, wrote in his book Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazi: "Ever since settlements on hillsides began to be seen as the domain of dangerous and marginalized people, Prejudice is engraved. ”
Brazil's elite has long believed that the slums were a place that needed to be controlled, and that the poor had to be monitored. The police, as the guards of these elites, have taken on the responsibility of controlling the slums through intimidation, abuse and violence. As Cecilia Oliveira, a journalist who specializes in public security issues, puts it: "The atrocities of the police are linked to many factors in the construction of Brazilian society and to Brazil's failure to liquidate its history from slavery to dictatorship." ”
Today, the culture of maintaining slums by violent means continues, also because of the lack of law enforcement against misconduct and abuse of power by law enforcement. Oliveira argues: "The Office of the Prosecutor has not performed its function of supervising police activities, the judiciary has not performed its function of protecting victims of abuse who have resorted to court, and the state government has not managed its agents, which is a complete system that allows the police to do whatever they want." Someone offers cheap solutions to complex problems, and the lives of blacks and poor people are the price. ”
Brazil's security forces are spreading terror in slums, brutally killing vulnerable black citizens during traffic jams because they are designed to be such — they are not trained, equipped, or encouraged to manage these communities in any other way.
Garcia concluded by writing that in Brazil, the bloody war against the poor and vulnerable will never end unless those in power take action to overhaul the country's security architecture and build a police force that is willing and capable of truly protecting, rather than intimidating, the population. As long as Bolsonaro and his supporters are in power, police violence in the slums will inevitably continue for the foreseeable future, and people will see more police killings like Santos's murder.
The far-right party in the Italian election
Italy will see a general election on September 25, and the far-right party led by Giorgia Meloni is likely to come to power. On August 25, Dabid Broder, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, published a political commentary on its website titled "Italian centrists fail to declare war on the far right," arguing that Merloney's victory was due to an indulgent media and that the Italian center-left failed to answer how to get the country out of its secular stagnation.
Giorgia Meloni
Broad first analyzes the current election. He said the coalition government, dubbed "center-right" by the Italian media, had nearly 50 percent support in the polls ahead of next month's general election, almost guaranteeing a majority of seats in parliament. But Brod argues that the "centre-right" rhetoric is an overstatement, with the two main parties in the coalition — Giogegia Melloni's post-fascist party, Fratelli d'Italia (about 24 percent of the vote) and the second-power Matteo Salvini's Alliance party (about 14 percent of the vote) — combining their sweeping tax cut program with a flurry of hate propaganda, fiercely opposing immigrants, LGBTQ "lobby", "ethnic substitution program", etc.
The Italian Brotherhood Party is not necessarily the most popular party. In the polls, it is on a par with the center-left Democrats, who are in a weaker position to convert votes into seats due to a lack of major allies. Democrats insist they will continue the work of the bipartisan government led by Mario Draghi, which was formed last February to allocate funds for European recovery. Former ECB President Mario Draghi's majority also relies on Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, the League party and the eclectic Five Star Movement. However, with these forces withdrawing their support in July, the Democrats are struggling to support themselves.
This, in turn, has recreated a typical optical illusion typical of Italian politics, with a recent wave of right-wing opponents claiming they are triumphing over a perpetually hegemonic left, even though italy has little left voice. Draghi's cabinet is the latest in a series of grand coalitions and "techno-governments" in recent decades, including democratic support, who are staunch guarantors of institutional stability. But given that the fundamental picture of all Italian politics is declinist-neoliberal, the 2022 campaign will once again be waged between the neoliberal-managerial center-left and the far-right outsiders who claim to end a decade of left-wing rule.
In the context of continued turmoil in the party system, staying outside the Draghi government will certainly help Italy's brothers win over right-wing voters. Its approval rating was just 4 percent in 2018, and about half of its current support has just been converted from the League Party, which rose to prominence during Salvini's tenure as interior minister in 2018-19. Since February 2021, however, agreements between other major political parties have given Melloni room for a monopolistic critical role, and in doing so has underscored its "constructive" approach, namely hostility toward the "left" but not to Draghi itself. Italy's fraternal party also regularly emphasizes its loyalty to the European Union, NATO and its arms supply to Ukraine as a sign of its "Atlanticist" identity.
Some on the center-right eventually became unhappy with draghi's government.' So early in the campaign, Democrats courted figures such as Renato Brunetta, a longtime ally of Berlusconi, and in response Brunetta quit the Italian Forces party. Just as Democrats in the United States are looking for moderate, "never Trump" Republicans, a certain center-left mentality involves trying to find responsible right-wingers to act as interlocutors, even if it means that some people (especially Berlusconi) have played an "evil" role, and the center-left hopes to stop him in a "less evil" vote. The only problem is that over time, "evil" only gets worse.
Broad observed that many Italian media outlets could not tolerate the act of "demonizing" Meloni. Expert Paolo Mieli asked at the start of the campaign: "Can't we go two months without talking about history?" However, no one actually claims that the Italian Brotherhood Party plans to launch a "march to Rome" to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Benito Mussolini's rise to power. Even Democratic leader Enrico Letta has maintained friendly relations with Merlone in recent years. However, there is clearly something unusual about the ambitious future prime minister, who insists that the "nostalgic people" in her party — referring to officials who use the logo and banners of the Nazi puppet regime Republic of Salou — are "traitors to the cause."
Ironically, as a student of the famous Mussolini biographer Renzo de Felice, Mielli wrote several books on 20th-century Italy, but his call to stop talking about history was widely adopted by the state media, which often showed obvious amnesia, ignoring the fact that the Italian Brotherhood Party was the successor to the neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded in 1946. Nor does it heed the racism of the party's officials, the praise for fascism and its links to more radical groups, all of which sophistry calls "digging holes" in question. This was unanimously supported by journalists from the right-wing daily, who insisted that since "fascism is not coming back" — literally, it certainly won't come back — it's a dead question entirely.
There are some signs that the candidates' past will come back to haunt them, although this did not happen to the post-fascist camp. Raffaele La Regina, a Democratic candidate in Basilicata in the southern region, had to withdraw last weekend after he was exposed as questioning Israel's right to exist in 2020. Major daily newspapers such as The Corriere della Sera and Republic rather oddly point out that politicians' past social media posts are now becoming a tool for election propaganda. Even so, it depends on whether they feel ashamed or not. Merloney has repeatedly claimed in the past that The Hungarian Jewish "usurers" George Soros is "funding a plan to replace Europeans ethnically," but none of this has caused trouble for the current campaign.
If the Italian fraternal party gains a foothold in the government, the real threat it poses is not so much a "return to fascism" as it is in typical (far-right-wing) countries like Poland and Hungary, where norms are eroded and official organizations slander critics and minorities. In fact, the Polish right is a model for The Melloni party more than Hungary,000, and since the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Polish right-wing seems to have gained new legitimacy within the EU's ruling circles. Meloney has praised Vladimir Putin in the past, but she leans more toward the "Atlanticist" stance than the Alliance party, despite the fact that her party is closer to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and the Trump faction in the U.S. Republican Party than to the incumbent Washington administration.
While Meloney is unlikely to seek a break with the euro or the European Union, her government could do lasting damage on both fronts. One is the call for a maritime blockade of migrant vessels, a sensationalism that is not only illegal but could also result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The second is various plans to amend Italy's constitution, including vague and all-encompassing means to suppress left-wing critics, such as criminalizing "justifying communism" or "Islamic totalitarianism." In addition to the anti-fascist "prejudice" that overturns the current constitution (which is rarely enforced), there is also a plan to turn Italy into a presidential republic, replacing the current parliamentary system with a top-heavy executive.
The real problem, Brod argues, lies in socio-economic policies.
Given her lead in polls, Merloney's campaign has been fairly low-key, in fact, she has focused almost entirely on responding to accusations from the left that she is fascist-related. A video she released to international media showed the seriousness of Italy's discussion of these issues — she made a statement to the camera without questions from reporters — in which she insisted that fascism had "become history" and denounced the "Anti-Semitism Act of 1938" and the "dictatorship." This choice of wording is not even as sharp as the historical Italian social movement leader Gianfranco Fini's sweeping critique of the past in the 1990s-2000s, apparently to avoid condemning the (new) fascist tradition itself. She insists that the left talks about history because they have nothing to say about the government's plans.
In fact, there is an extreme lack of real advice for the next five years in both main camps. The Democratic Party's search for most of the fictional centrist votes (and the rabble-rousers of small neoliberal parties that claim to represent the "Third Pole") are also incidental to this problem. While Italy's fraternal parties regrouped right-wing voters to the new leadership, the center-left seemed paralyzed, consolidating its defense of an economic model. Italy's economic growth has been stagnant since the late 1990s, while some of the effects have been addressed through temporary subsidies and relief measures. This is not only a question of eurozone membership (which is not challenged by any major political forces), but it is closely linked as governments are caught in a cycle of low investment, weak productivity growth, heavy public debt, and structurally low levels of employment.
That's not to say that Meloney is really interested in talking about the economy. The centre-right proposal marks an across-the-board cut in taxation and bureaucracy, though more of the burden will be placed on non-EU citizen-run businesses that are seen as solely responsible for Italy's huge tax evasion loophole. The Italian Brotherhood's proposal to promote employment — tax cuts for companies that hire additional employees (run in Italy) — is nothing more than a plaster on structural economic weaknesses and certainly won't make up for the job-seeker allowance it proposes to abolish. Within the right-wing coalition, the Union's flat tax rate of 15 percent — which could create a hole of 80 billion euros in public accounts — is so outrageous that we wonder why the party doesn't propose a 10 or 5 percent tax rate. The appearance of Former Berlusconi-era Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti on the candidate list of Italy's fraternal party is a clear indication of the party's lack of dramatic economic policy measures.
There are more or less forces on the Democratic left that are trying to incorporate social policy into the campaign. One is Giuseppe Conte's Five Star Movement, though a bit of Don Quixote. At the start of the last parliament, the party was a weak ally of Salvini's Union party, and now it has made defending the job seeker allowance introduced in 2019 its flagship policy. After a tortuous political path and the departure of former leader Luigi di Maio, the party's likely votes fell from 32 percent in 2018 to 10 percent. In addition to the green left forces allied with the Democratic Party (notably Abubacar Sumahorro, an Ivorian-born farm workers organizer), there is an independent left, the Unione Popolare, led by the former mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris. The list was formed shortly before the elections, but they seem unlikely to be in parliament.
Brod concludes by writing that observing Italian politics, we often cannot help but conclude that, apart from the fierce rhetorical polarization and the recurrence of historical symbolism, the real alternative is not so dramatic. In fact, Italy's economic malaise is long-term and cannot be reduced to a single moment of crisis: the decline in citizens' loyalty to political parties dates back more than 30 years, and we will not see a dramatic shift. However, with a breakthrough in a party where many leaders openly preach white nationalist conspiracy theories and defend fascist war criminals, the current moment does present new dangers. Meloni released a video of a woman allegedly raped by migrants on Sunday (August 21), revealing many of her true elements. While we don't want to see her in power, that prospect looks slim.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Luan Meng