Thread by @mariliacout

1/ BRAZIL'S FORMER PRESIDENT LULA IS FREED FROM PRISON - not a small victory for global democracy

I am assuming you (reading this) are not Brazilian but you know something about the country, ...

aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/b…

2/ such as the fact that today it is ruled by a far-right fascism-sympathizer. It sounds a bit like Trump, right? Because it is. And it (Bolsonaro's presidency) is a piece of the same global political puzzle: the rise of the far-right.

3/ Regardless of one's approval of president Lula, or even whether they believe he "misbehaved with the public thing", defending Lula's release became a political filter. If you didn't defend it, it meant that you certainly didn't understand the big picture.

4/ Brazil's Judicial Power was hypertrophied and perverted before there was any means to control it, not to mention that this cancerous growth happened in tandem with the loud resentment-fueled misinformation campaign.

5/ The result was president Dilma's impeachment (and over 90% of Brazilians don't know the alleged violated item that justified the impeachment, given the weight of the misinformation campaign), president Lula and several other people's arrest.

6/ "CORRUPTION" is a common item in the right-wing's base disapproving discourse about the previous democratic or left-leaning government. A serious, big red flag. It has been so in Brazil, Chile and look at your average MAGGA: "Obama was corrupt" (and Kenyan and Muslim).

7/ If you ask the interviewee to name a case, usually there are two or three items, most of them imprecisely remembered. That's because the "matter-of-fact" ceased to matter.

8/ The result is that protocol and procedure are adjusted to whatever interpretation of reality brings the RW base together.

9/ The bottom line here is that I don't care (and I think neither should you) whether there was mishandling of the "public thing" or not.

10/ When the whole legal apparatus used to handle a political crisis, against the background of an inflamed crowd, is hypertrophied and politicized, the expectation of justice is gone.

Everything else is the fruit of some type of poisonous tree.

11/ Make no mistake: this was a big blow to the far right. They may be feeding the growth of the militias in Brazil (militias are illegal para-military organizations which operate in urban environments) ...

12/ ...but Lula's release is symbolic to the actions of confronting the far-right ruling country now.

#LulaLivre
#BrazilianDemocracy

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