Laigle’s Forum

Want to know the fate of the US in a few years? Just watch Brazil.  The similarity in the trends are astonishing, particularly the way the parties of the “right” grovel before the Left.

Brazilian President Lula has the reputation in the US of being something of a moderate, supporting leftist ideals on the one hand while maintaining the free market on the other. This little sop thrown toward market economics has enabled Lula to fly under the same radar that exposed the antics of the more flamboyant Hugo Chavez.

But behind the Lula mask is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist.

On the surface, one might think what is happening in Brazil has nothing to do with us.

One would be dead wrong.

As Olavo de Carvalho has pointed out before on this site, what is happening in Brazil today is a depressing reflection of what can easily happen in the US tomorrow, ie, the loss of the free market - and it will, unless we wake up promptly.

What Mr. de Carvalho has noticed and so many others are missing, is that our nemesis is not the hard Left, but rather the lukewarm right.

Look at the unmistakable similarity between Brazilian and US politics, for example. Quote:

At variance with the general chatter of those who fancy themselves the keepers of public opinion, all research shows the decidedly conservative preferences of the Brazilian people, who, thanks to a gross miscalculation of the parties on the “right,” are excluded from political representation.  The votes of the silent majority are up for grabs for any candidate with the courage to speak on its behalf.  Meanwhile, the politicians who should do this prefer to make like good little boys for the beautiful people on the left, in exchange for nothing more than minimal guarantees for the free market. 

The Brazilians are a dead ringer for us, only just a few years further Left. The only thing that may save us is taking a lesson from what has happened there (and, for that matter, in Europe). But will we? American conservatives are becoming so isolationist that many refuse to pay attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world, in the false belief that the universal laws that govern human behavior will somehow spare us.

To borrow from Ben Stein: is anyone paying attention out there? Anyone? Anyone?

Donald Hank

The formula for poverty

by Olavo de Carvalho

In 2003, Brazil ranked number 58 in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.  In 2008 it ranks 101. The direct relationship between economic freedom and prosperity is the most obvious thing in the world.  Anyone who doubts this need only check out the 10 first and 10 last ranked on the heritage list.  At the top, Japan and Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, United States, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.  At the bottom, North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Libya, Burma, Turkmenistan, Iran, Belarus, Bangladesh and Venezuela.  And Brazil is much closer to the latter than to the former, because this scale goes from one to 157 and Brazil has the uneasy distinction of being at the bottom third of the list.  Above Brazil we find Japan, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Taiwan and Spain.  Below us are Bolivia, Angola, Vietnam, Nigeria and Rwanda.  Now I finally understand the slogan of the late Dom Helder Camara, who became the world icon of leftist generosity:  “preferential option for poverty.”  It doesn’t mean helping the poor - it just means staying poor.

The Heritage Foundation Index demonstrates with utmost clarity that the Lula administration is strangling Brazilian capitalism even as it banks on it to finance its social programs and guarantee the good image of the government among international investors.

Meanwhile, in liberal circles, there are still those who swear that the socialist option of the governing party is only a stage prop to placate the “radicals,” and that Lula is at heart a proponent of the market economy.

Obviously, neither Lula nor anyone in the PT (Workers’ Party) is socialist enough to believe in the complete suppression of private ownership of the means of production.  The international Left has long desisted from this idea, one of the most idiotic ever to occur to the human mind.  What the left wants now is direct control of the economy, through taxes and restrictive regulations, and even so, only enough to guarantee the main thing: domination of the public mind, the dictatorship of psychological engineering.  But the Brazilian government has already exceeded this minimum.  On the other hand, the prudence and circumspection with which the cultural controls it wants are slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly imposed is remarkable.

In truth, it does not have to show its hand very much in this area.  The so-called “opposition parties” are surpassing it, imposing, on their own initiative, the politically correct regulations required by leftwing trends.

Depressing example: even before the PT came to power, when “anti-homophobic” policy was still only a faint suggestion in the federal sphere, the governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, took the pains to endorse state law No. 10.948 of 2001, which penalizes “offensive or discriminatory action practiced against the homosexual, bisexual or transgendered citizen.”  This law has just been enforced against the citizen Juliano da Silva of the city of Pontal, who called a homosexual with whom he was arguing a “fag.” The law does not stipulate against calling a non-homosexual this, making it clear that the insult will be punished only if it has a foundation in truth.  Thus, before calling someone a “fag,” you had better make sure he’s not one.  Politically correct legislation is transforming the Justice Department into a travesty, catering only to the despotism of activist groups.  The leftist groups that propose these bills know perfectly well that their only objective is to dismantle the system from within, creating the atmosphere of chaos and anarchy necessary for the total takeover of power by one of the factions - to the exclusion of all others - to go unnoticed, and this is exactly what is happening.

The “liberal”[1] opposition takes the bait and winds up serving as a channel to implement these policies, either because it is fool enough to take seriously the moral pretexts adorning them or because it believes political correctness pays off in terms of votes.  In the first case, it is a victim of moral naïveté, but in the second case, it lapses into political stupidity that is hardly excusable in individuals who have any experience with elections.

 In Brazil, gay activism, the abortion platform and things of that kind never garner votes for anyone.  They may guarantee some applause from the media, but who says the media are as influential as they give themselves credit for?  At variance with the general chatter of those who fancy themselves the keepers of public opinion, all research shows the decidedly conservative preferences of the Brazilian people, who, thanks to a gross miscalculation of the parties on the “right,” are excluded from political representation.  The votes of the silent majority are up for grabs for any candidate with the courage to speak on its behalf.  Meanwhile, the politicians who should do this prefer to make like good little boys for the beautiful people on the left, in exchange for nothing more than minimal guarantees for the free market.  It is clear that the more moral and cultural ground they give, the more minimal these guarantees become.  The free market is never a law unto itself.  It depends on cultural, moral and psychological conditions that, once they are annulled in favor of political correctness, provide a left wing government with all the means of bringing capitalism to its knees without the capitalists themselves daring to complain or even figuring out what is happening, namely, cultural hegemony and ultimate control over consciences, especially those of the adversary.  The alacrity with which so-called liberal politicians sign on to the cultural propaganda of the left illustrates the success of the Gramscian strategy of “passive revolution” in Brazil, defined as a dialectic opposition in which “only the thesis develops all of its potentials in the struggle until the supposed representatives of the antithesis are captured”

The furious regulatory activity of the Lula government in the Heritage Foundation’s list points to something the whole world ought to know: when you give up everything in exchange for the free market, you wind up losing the free market as well.

Translated by Donald Hank (zoilandon@msn.com)

The author, Olavo de Carvalho is a noted correspondent for several major Brazilian newspapers. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

To comment or schedule an appearance, contact the author at: olavo@olavodecarvalho.org

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[1] The term “liberal” in Brazil is used to mean what in America is referred to as “conservative” or “libertarian.”-Tr.

Engineered confusion

By Olavo de Carvalho

The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) demonstrated that contradictory stimulation is the quickest and most efficient way to break down the psychological defenses of an individual (or handful of individuals), reducing him to a state of devoted credulity in which he will accept as natural and true the most absurd commands and the most incongruous opinions.

This works almost infallibly even when the stimuli are of a purely cognitive order and without a great deal of emotional involvement (contradictory sentences uttered in a camouflaged sequence so as to create subconscious confusion).  But it clearly works much better if the subject is subjected to the impact of sufficiently strong contradictory emotions to quickly create a state of intolerable psychological discomfort. This discomfort itself serves as camouflage because the victim does not have time to determine that the contradiction comes from the source and not from within himself, so that guilt and shame are added to the state of distress.  The automatic reaction that follows is the desperate search for a new equilibrium pattern, that is, a broader feeling that seems to include, in a dialectic synthesis, the two emotions initially experienced as contradictory and which simultaneously alleviates the feeling of shame that the individual experiences toward the source of stimulus, which at this point he accepts as his critical observer or judge.

If the reader examines the leftist discourse with some attention, he will see that it manages to inspire in the public both fear and compassion at the same time.  This duality of feelings is not contradictory in itself when each of the feelings is situated on a different plane, as in the case of a Greek tragedy, where the spectators feel compassion for the hero and fear of the cosmic machinery that oppresses him. However, if the object of fear and compassion is the same, you simply don’t know how to react and enter a state of “cognitive dissonance” (term of the psychologist Leon Festinger), a state of mental atonia that predisposes to passive subservience.

I say fear and compassion, although these are never simple and unequivocal emotions but rather complex emotional webs that trap the victim at the same time, making him incapable of verbally expressing the situation and suffocating him in a murky atmosphere of confusion and impotence.

In revolutionary politics, contradictory stimulation assumes the form of terrorist attacks intended to intimidate a population, accompanied simultaneously by intense sensitization campaigns showing the sufferings of the revolutionaries and the poor population that they nominally represent.  The destruction of farms by the Landless Movement is an apt example. The assaulted class is paralyzed between two sets of contradictory feelings - on the one hand, fear and rage, or the impulse to react, to flee or seek protection; on the other hand, extorted compassion, guilt and the impulse to ask forgiveness of the aggressor.

It is no coincidence that the first scientific description of this mechanism was the work of an eminent Russian psychologist.  The use of contradictory stimulation was already a tradition in the revolutionary movement when Ivan Pavlov started to investigate the subject precisely during the years in which the Russian Revolution was under preparation. His studies were immediately absorbed by the Communist leadership, which began using them to elevate revolutionary manipulation of the mind to the level of a highly precise, efficient social engineering technique capable of extensive operations with impressive control of the results.

Over the last four decades, with the transition of the revolutionary movement from the old hierarchic structure to the flexible organization in informal “networks” with immense financial support, the use of contradictory stimulation ceased to be the exclusive domain of the Communist Party and spread throughout all sorts of auxiliary organizations - NGOs, media enterprises, international organisms and cultural entities - the revolutionary nature of which was not declared ex-professo, making the tracing of the unified strategy throughout the whole a very complex problem, transcending the horizon of consciousness of the usual entrepreneurial and political leaderships and requiring the intervention of specialized studies. In general, social libertarians and conservatives are formidably under-equipped to cope with the situation.  They endeavor to win over the public by logical arguments in favor of democracy and market economy, when the actual battlefield is situated far below this, in an obscure area of irrational emotions controlled by the adversary with all the latest refinements of rationality and science.

In future articles I will illustrate the use of contradictory stimulation by various “social movements”: feminist, gay agenda, abortion, atheist, environmentalist, etc.

Translated by Donald Hank (zoilandon@msn.com)

The author, Olavo de Carvalho is a noted correspondent for several major Brazilian newspapers. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

To comment or schedule an appearance, contact the author at: olavo@olavodecarvalho.org

Why Americans should pay attention to Olavo de Carvanlho

by Donald Hank

Conservatives take essentially two different approaches in dealing with the Left. One approach is based on the assumption that the Left is open to ideas and can change its mind in an honest debate under the light of reason. The naive fall into this kind of thinking, hearing the Left talk about “change,” for example, and believing that they are capable of change themselves. They also see the shallowness of the Left’s arguments and think all they have to do is argue back and all will be well.

The other, more complex, approach, taken by keener observers and veterans of the culture war like Ann Counter, for example, is an approach based on the certainty that the Left enters into debate only when it knows it will walk away with the prize. In the column, Why must Christians be nicer than Jesus?, regarding the debate between Richard Land, a supposedly conservative Christian, and ultraleftist ”Christian” Jim Wallis, I remarked that Wallis would never debate with anyone unless he were certain his opponent would pull his punches. My suspicions were confirmed by looking at Dr. Land’s web site, which heaps copious praise on the likes of Al Gore. Thus the question was not whether the right or the left would win, but rather, which leftist would win.

I know of no other conservative activist who understands the Left’s below-the-belt tactics and unwillingness to debate with intelligent conservatives better than author and philosopher Olavo de Carvalho.

Recently, when a philosophy professor from a prestigious European university emailed a small group referencing a statement I had made at Laigle’s Forum expressing the idea that the Left are iconoclasts and are in no way interested in debate with traditionalists, I realized that it is probably not a coincidence that two philosophers on different continents would be capable of seeing this so clearly, and that the reason almost certainly lies in the fact that they are, precisely, philosophers.

Exactly why this is so is not yet entirely clear to me, except that philosophers, unlike run-of-the-mill conservative writers or intellectuals, are particularly focused on definitions; and definitions, as I wrote in the column Define and conquer, are the prize in the war of ideas. Thus we can debate brilliantly, but if we subconscriously allow the opponent to impose his redefinitions on us, he will win the long-term war even though appearing to lose the battle.

One thing certain is that philosophy is a neglected subject in the West and precious few conservatives dedicate their lives to its study. This fact has perhaps led to a situation in which conservatives often operate mostly or exclusively on seat-of-the-pants wisdom or common sense. The ultimate expression of this is seen in the slogan: God, guns and guts made this country great.

Every time I see this slogan on a bumper sticker, while I smile at the disarming simplicity of it, I also rebel against it.

The fact is, these were not the only factors that produced Thomas Edison, the Wright Brother and Booker T. Washington, for example. The missing ingredient in that slogan is brains. And because brains is often missing in the public dialogue, conservatives can’t define who we are, a tragic flaw, because it is in fact the Left that has no clear-cut definition of its movement. Its salient feature is that it prefers death to life and slavery to freedom. In a recent column at WorldNetDaily, Joseph Farah criticized conservatives for their inability to define themselves. Indeed we have failed miserably at this, a failure that has led many of us to follow the dimmest of stars of our constellation, such as the Bushes, into areas that were the very antithesis of what conservatives have always intuitively believed in. We were beguiled into following G.W. Bush into globalism because we couldn’t see the leftward tilt to that movement, although it was as plain as the nose on our faces. So we allowed the Left — in the person of RINOs — to redefine us rather than correcting that definition like the good watchmen we purport to be.

What we failed to see is that redefinitions of fundamental issues, movements, policies, ideologies, cultural institutions, religious doctrines, philosophies and the like are always made by the Left. It cannot be otherwise. So a person calling himself a conservative cannot be what he claims to be if he says conservatism must change or has changed.

In the column mentioned above, Farah, frustrated at the stalling of the conservative movement, refuses to call himself a conservative, but does not tell us what name he would prefer over “conservative.” Indeed, it is a dilemma. Yet, the name conservative is, I think, a perfectly fitting term. It merely lacks a definition.

We will talk about this at a later time.

Mr. de Carvalho sees through all the revolutionary claptrap and avoids the mistake of believing the Left is sincere in its debate. He has said so before at this site and has given us lessons on how to deal with the Left. This puts him light years ahead of those who believe we can win simply by being right and demonstating the same (if only such dreams were true!).  Mr. de Carvalho shows us that there is rather a deeper-lying psychological layer beneath the rational debate, and it is in this murky subterranean layer of the mind where the fight must ultimately take place. It is here that we must bring our light of truth to bear.

How well we learn Mr. de Carvalho’s lesson on the mortal duel of the ideologies, namely, death and slavery vs life and freedom, will determine the future of America. Or whether there is in fact such a future.

Donald Hank

Olavo de Carvalho is a respected journalist with a wide following in his native Brazil and is an increasingly popular public speaker in this country.  Mr. Carvalho provided Laigle’s Forum readers with an eye-opening article on the CFR and the Forum of Sao Paolo back on May 27, 2006, followed by several others including one linked by WorldNetDaily, which has been one of our biggest hits ever, garnering 3,400 hits the very first day it ran.

Laigle’s Forum is the first to present the following article to the English speaking world.

In this next article, Mr. Carvalho gives us a perspective of the international intrigue of the Sao Paolo Forum, an arm of the shadow government analogous to the SPP here in its intent to circumvent public input in matters affecting sovereignty.

President Lula, guilty by confession

Olavo de Carvalho

Diário do Comércio, September 26th, 2005

Translated by David Carvalho and Donald Hank

I should be grateful to President Lula. When practically all the national media makes an effort to cover up the activities of the Sao Paulo Forum or even to deny its existence, labeling as a “madman” or “fanatic” anyone who denounces them, cometh the very founder of the entity and does the job, proving by his own words the most depressing suspicions and some even worse.

The presidential speech on July 2, 2005, stated in the fifteen year anniversary of the Forum and reproduced in the government’s official site, is the explicit confession of a conspiracy against the national sovereignty, an infinitely more serious crime than all crimes of corruption perpetrated and covered up by the current government; a crime that, by itself, would justify not only impeachment but also the imprisonment of its perpetrator.

At the distance at which I find myself, I have only now become fully aware of this unique document, and yet the editors-in-chief of the major newspapers and of all the radio and TV news broadcasts in Brazil were there the whole time. Though aware of the speech since the date it was made, they remained silent, proving that their persistent hiding of the facts was not the result of distraction or pure incompetence: it was subservient, Machiavellian complicity with a crime, of which they expected to enjoy profits unknown.

The meaning of these paragraphs, once unearthed from the verbal garbage that wraps it, is crystal clear:

“As a function of the existence of the Sao Paulo Forum, comrade Marco Aurelio has played an extraordinary role in this effort to consolidate what we started in 1990… This was how we, in January 2003, proposed to our comrade, president Chavez, the creation of the Group of Friends to find a peaceful solution that, thank God, took place in Venezuela. And it was only possible thanks to political action between comrades. It was not a political action of either a State with another State, or one president with another president. Some will remember, Chavez attended one of the forums we held in Havana. And thanks to this relationship it was possible for us to build, with many political divergences, the consolidation of what took place in Venezuela, with the referendum that installed Chavez as president of Venezuela.

“In this way we could act, together with other countries, with our comrades of the social movement, of those countries’ parties, of the union movement, always using the relationship built in the Sao Paulo Forum so that we could talk without appearing to do so, and so that people would not understand any political interference taking place.”

What the President admits in these excerpts is that:

1. The Sao Paulo Forum is a secret or at least undercover entity (”built… so that we could talk without seeming to do so, and so that people would not understand any political interference taking place”).

2. This entity is actively involved in the internal politics of many Latin-American nations, making decisions and determining the course of events, at the fringes of all supervision by government, parliaments, justice and public opinion.

3. The so called “Group of Friends of Venezuela” was but an arm, agency or facade of the Sao Paulo Forum (”as a function of the existence of the Forum… we proposed to our comrade president Chavez.”..).

4. After being elected in 2002, he, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, while having abandoned pro forma his position as president of the Sao Paulo Forum, giving the impression that he was free to rule Brazil without commitments with ill-explained foreign alliances, kept working underground for the Forum, helping, for instance, to produce the results of the Venezuelan referendum of August 15, 2004 (”thanks to this relationship it was possible for us to provide the consolidation of what took place in Venezuela”), without giving his voters the slightest satisfaction for this.

5. The orientation in vital issues of Brazilian foreign policy was decided by Mr. Lula not as President of the Republic at meetings with his ministers, but as an attendee and advisor of underground meetings with foreign political agents (”it was a political action between comrades, not a political action either of one State with another, or of one president with another”). He put loyalty to his “comrades” above his duties as a president.

The President confesses, in short, that he subjected the country to decisions made by foreigners, gathered in conferences of an entity whose actions the Brazilian people would not be made privy to, much less understand.

The active humiliation of the national sovereignty could not be more evident, especially when one realizes that the attending entities of these decision-making meetings include organizations such as the Chilean MIR, kidnapper of Brazilians, and the FARC, Colombian narcoguerilla, responsible, according to its member Fernandinho Beira-Mar, for the annual injection of two hundred tons of cocaine into the national market.

Never before has an elected president of any civilized country showed such complete disdain for the Constitution, the laws, the institutions and the entire electorate, while giving all confidence, all authority, to a conclave swarming with criminals, in tracing the nation’s destiny and its relations with its neighbors behind the people’s backs. Never before in Brazil was there as brazen, complete and cynical traitor as Luis Inacio Lula da Silva.

The greatest proof that he consciously eluded the opinion of the public, keeping them ignorant of the operations of the Sao Paulo Forum, is that, as the elections approached, fearing my constant denunciation of this entity, he told his “advisor for international affairs,” Giancarlo Summa, to appease the newspapers by means of an official note from the Workers Party stating that the Forum was just an innocent debating club, devoid of any political action (see http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/10192002globo.htm). And now he boasts of the “political action of comrades,” performed with resources from the Brazilian government and hidden from Congress, justice and public opinion.

Compared to such an immense crime, what importance can the Mensalao and the like phenomena have but as a means of financing operations that are only part of the overall strategy of transferring national sovereignty to the secret authority of foreigners?

Can there be greater disproportion than between ordinary cases of corruption and this supreme crime for which they served as instruments?

The answer is obvious. But why then did many readily denounce the means while agreeing to keep covering up the ends?

Here the answer is less obvious. It requires presorting. The denouncers are divided into two types: (A) individuals and groups committed to the Sao Paulo Forum’s scheme, but not directly involved in the use of these illicit means in particular; (B) individuals and groups unrelated to both things.

The rationale of the former is simple, to whit: off with the rings, but keep the fingers. Once it has become impossible to keep hiding the use of illicit instruments, they agree to throw their most notorious operators under the bus, in order to keep perpetrating the same crime by other means and agents. The content and even the style of the charges leveled by these people reveal their nature as pure decoys. When they attribute the Workers Party corruption, which started as early as 1990, to settlements with the IMF signed in 2003 on, they show that their need to lie does not shrink even before the plain and simple material impossibility. When they cast the blame on some “group,” hiding the fact that the ramifications of the criminal structure extended from the Presidency of the Republic to the rural town halls, implicating practically the whole party, they prove that they have as much to hide as those who were charged at the time.

More complex are the motivations of group B. In part, it is composed of characters devoid of fiber, physical and moral cowards, who would rather focus on the lesser details for fear of seeing the continental dimensions of the overall crime. There is also the subgroup of the intellectually weak, who stake their bets on the “death of communism” nonsense and now, in order not to contradict themselves, feel obliged to reduce the greatest coup scam in the history of Latin America to the more manageable dimensions of an ordinary corruption scheme, depoliticizing the meaning of the facts and pretending that Lula is nothing more than a  Fernando Collor without a jet ski. There are those who, out of either opportunism or stupidity, collaborated way too much with the rise of the criminal party to power and now feel divided between the impulse to cleanse themselves of the stench of the bad company they kept, and the impulse to lessen the crime to avoid the burden of their complicity in it. There are also the pseudo-wise guys who aided and abetted the enemy, blinded by the insane illusion that it is more viable to defeat him by gnawing at him from the edges than by lunging a death blow in his heart. There are, finally, those who truly understand nothing of what’s going on and, parroting Brazilian speech patterns, just repeat what they hear, in hopes of blending in.

I earnestly ask all the flaming anti-corruption accusers of recent weeks - politicians, media owners, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, judges, and military - to examine carefully their own consciences, if they have any left, to see into which of these subgroups they fall. Because, aside from those few Brazilians of valor who supported in timely fashion the charges against the Sao Paulo Forum, all the others will inevitably fall into one of them.

It would be absurd to blame only Lula and the Sao Paulo Forum for the Brazilian moral decay, forgetting the contribution they got from these fair-weather moralists, as eager to denounce the parts as they are to hide the whole picture. Nothing could have fueled national self-deceit more than this marvelous network of complicities and omissions born of motivations that, while varied, converge into the same result, namely, the creation of a false impression of transparent investigations, and a facade of normality and lawfulness even as the entire order crumbles, invisibly gnawed away from the inside.

The destruction of order and its replacement by “a new pattern of relationships between State and society,” decided in secret meetings with foreigners - such was Mr. Lula’s confessed objective. This objective, as he said in another part of the same speech, must be attained and consolidated “in a manner such that it can be sustained, regardless of who is governing the country.”

What is perceived from the behavior of Mr. Lula’s critics and accusers is that, in this general objective, he has already emerged victorious, regardless of the success or failure that he may have in the rest of his term. The new order whose name may not be spoken is already in place, and its authority is such that not even the president’s fiercest enemies dare to challenge it. All of them, in one way or another, have already committed themselves at least implicitly to put the Sao Paulo Forum above the Constitution, the laws and the institutions of Brazil. If they complain about looting, embezzlement, vote buying and bribes, it is precisely to avoid complaining about the transfer of national sovereignty to the continental conference of “comrades,” like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, the Colombian narcoguerillas and the Chilean kidnappers. It is like a rape victim protesting the damage to her hairdo, neglecting to mention, even politely, the rape itself.

Perhaps the deeds of Mr. Lula and his wretched Forum would not have wrought such vast damage in Brazil as this total inversion of proportions, complete destruction of moral judgment, and total corruption of the public conscience. Never before has such a profound agreement between accusers and accused been seen that would indulge the crime, denounced with so ado, so as to succeed in the overall objectives “without seeming to do so and so that people would not understand.”

Olavo de Carvalho is a correspondent for various Brazilian newspapers. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

To comment or schedule an appearance, contact the author at: olavo@olavodecarvalho.org

By Donald Hank

The next column, by Olavo de Carvalho, scheduled to appear within a day or two, will need some introduction. First, for those of you who follow the US media, I need to point out that Lula is the president of Brazil. The only thing said about him recently was from a few months ago when President Bush visited Brazil and made nice with Lula, promising him the US would buy a few billions of dollars worth of his ethanol. No, you the fuel buyer did not agree to this. Your nice president agreed for you. You will buy.

What the press didn’t tell you at that time or any time, and what Bush could care less about, is that President Lula, a communist sympathizer, is one of the biggest shysters on the South American continent and has aided and abetted not only Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, mightily helping to get him elected, but also the narcoterrorists and kidnappers of the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Army) and other criminal organizations on the continent.

Lula did this in part through the Forum of Sao Paolo, which he himself originally denied ever existed, even though he was one of the most influential organizers. Recently, however, as Olavo de Carvalho points out, Lula now not only admits it exists but that he was there and made great efforts to undermine democracy precisely by means of this instrument. Although I trust Mr. Carvalho’s painstaking research, I needed to see this with my own eyes, so I went and checked the official web site publishing Lula’s speech, which admits this. Sure enough. It is all there just as quoted in Mr. de Carvalho’s article (see below).

Now nota bene: President Bush and his fellow neocons also denied the existence of meetings held in Canada to promote the North American Union. He knows we know he was there, because the meetings were reported in the world press. But he denies - or denied (but later admitted) - that there are plans to embark on a North American Union.

Like fellow globalist Lula, Bush will almost certainly some day boast of his success in pulling the wool over the eyes of constituents and subjecting the US to a continental government that will spell the demise of US sovereignty. Globalists are true believers in their cause. Those among them who call themselves Christian point to numerous statements by “Christian” leaders denouncing “nationalism,” based on tenuous interpretations of scripture, failing to point out that by nationalism, what they actually mean is sovereignty, a vital component in the existence of all nations! Thus these pious leaders tell us, or at least imply, that closed borders are un-Christian and the entire Third World has a claim to a piece of our territory and our national product - your income. Thus, for all of their piety, these clerics are traitors.

The globalist pattern described by Mr. de Carvalho below, namely, lying and then admitting one lied, is bound to repeat itself here.

As I have said before, globalism is the new communism.

It may surprise some readers to read that, as mentioned above, President Lula, after carefully concealing the very existence of the leftist Forum of Sao Paolo, would suddenly come out and vaunt his role in it as well as the duplicity of the Forum organizers, thus:

“In this way we could act, together with other countries, with our comrades of the social movement, of those countries’ parties, of the union movement, always using the relationship built in the Sao Paulo Forum so that we could talk without appearing to do so, and so that people would not understand any political interference taking place.”

What struck me is that the initial cover-up displays the same pattern as that of the NAFTA Superhighway, a similar globalist venture, which was at first denied by all those complicit in its planning, but then showed up on a web site maintained by the Canadian government.

Ron Paul quotes the SPP web site as admitting:

“The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America represents a broad and ambitious agenda.”

But most stunning of all is Bush’s admission, despite constant subsequent denial, at Baylor University, that a union along EU lines is in fact in the works.

Why do leftwing activists, whether the old-fashioned communist, or the post-modern globalist variety, first lie and then admit, nonchalantly, or even boastfully, that they lied?

No explanation is possible for such seemingly irrational behavior, unless, that is, one admits the monstrous hypothesis that the global elite is the new communist elite. In this case, the following excerpt, the concluding chapter of the Communist Manifesto, explains this odd behavior:

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

Of course, if you set out to subjugate an entire nation to globalist policies, then you must tippy-toe at first. But then when the trap has sprung, as it did in Europe, for example, you lower the boom.

Will the North American Union be achieved by forcible overthrow?

The answer is yes, if we let it happen. Force does not necessarily presuppose violence. Forceful overthrow is the injection of countless willing minions like the McCains, the Kennedy’s, Clintons and the Bushes, into the political process by subterfuge, using polished marketing techniques in the media, independently of the will of the electorate, and then simply watching them do their destructive work. Conspicuously, conservatives have no candidate this fall, and this is by design, not accident.

The media, including the radio talk shows and Fox News, all had a hand in suppressing the truth about the impending North American Union, and the highly suspicious furtiveness of the SPP meetings in Canada.

They sanitized it, marginalizing as dangerous radicals anyone who dared to speak out against it.

That is how you get a job done when you are determined to overthrow the will of the people, whether here or in Brazil.

Once Olavo de Carvalho’s article appears at this site, we will have a better idea of how nations are taken over by the power elites on the Left.

It is up to us as a free nation to resist.

But do we have the will or the wisdom to do so?

 by Olavo de Carvalho

At the time of this writing, the Republican Party is torn between Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee and war veteran John McCain.  The Democrats have not yet decided between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The American electoral picture is thus divided between three enigmas and a frightening certainty.  No one has the faintest idea of what to expect from the first three should they be elected, but the last has the resume necessary to complete the job of dismantling the American presidency, a job that was started with brilliant success by her husband with the aid of Chinese spies, thieving lobbyists, Miss Monica Lewinsky, and drug dealers of the FARC — who struck it rich with the famous Colombia Plan — and last but not least, a plethora of intelligence agents placed in the CIA to serve the Clinton family instead of the American state.  The major advantage in favor of Hillary Clinton is that, as Paulo Francis would say, everyone had already seen this movie and knew who would die at the end.  At a time of such uncertainty, this could generate some votes.

Huckabee presents himself as the “social conservative,” but at the same time supports stem-cell research, putting his voters in a major quandary.  What he has in his favor is that nothing as catastrophic is expected of him as is of the other three.  If he manages to prove he is harmless, he might still have a chance against McCain.

Only John McCain knows what is going on inside his head. He has already proven he is capable of changing his mind in an instant and throttling forthwith anyone who opposes the change.  Conservatives say he is the most Democratic of the Republicans, that he is impossible to clearly distinguish from Senator Ted Kennedy, and that he can scarcely suppress an orgasm whenever he sees a tax increase; but on the left there are those who swear he is to the right of George W. Bush, that he is the hawk’s hawk, and the first thing he will do in the presidency is bomb Iran and unleash World War III (or IV).  Perhaps all of this is true, but certainly, none of it is good.  Of the four candidates, he is still the one best positioned to be elected, but it is a sure thing that many of his constituents will vote for him in fear and trembling, realizing they are doing so only to prevent one of the parties from dominating the presidency along with the Senate, the House and the majority vote in the Supreme Court, making it omnipotent (Americans instinctively hate this).

As for Senator Obama, he is certainly less interesting than the reasons many Americans have for voting for him.  If someone is constantly accused of a defect to the point of developing a complex about it, he will most likely wind up with the opposite defect.  If applied skillfully, the trick is almost foolproof.  Accuse a guy of being a skinflint and he will become a compulsive spendthrift.  Accuse him of being a male chauvinist and he will wind up being henpecked.  While racism in the USA has been a very geographically limited phenomenon, the whole country has been accused so much of racism that Americans in general wound up sacrificing their dignity to a grotesque fad of political correctness.  And now many of them feel obliged to vote for Barak Hussein Obama only to show that they are nice.  The senator speaks beautifully, but so far no one has been able to discern in his discourse anything that remotely resembles an issue.  In the most substantive scenario, there appears to be some promise of a campaign similar to that of his opponent Hillary Clinton, if not that of the Republican candidates.  Like McCain, he promises to deliver Osama bin Laden’s head, that is, of course, if he can find it.  Like Mrs. Clinton, he promises free medical care for everyone (not only for the poor, handicapped and aged), but without ever thinking of explaining from whom he will get the money to do this, or for that matter, how he will fill the gap in the budget, which is already reckoned in the trillions.  The senator has specialized in adolescent exhortations of the type “we’re going to change the world,” because he knows that no one expects him to actually do something in the presidency, only that he’ll be there as a symbol.

A symbol of what?  The ancient Latins said nomen est omen, “the name is prophecy.”  Barak Hussein means “blessed descendent of the Prophet,” and there is conclusive evidence that its bearer is lying when he says he was never a Muslim (Daniel Pipes made that clear here and here).  It is more or less as if, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the USA had elected as its president a guy named John Paul Ho Chi Minh, educated in Hanoi, the son of a party member, who swore he had never been a Communist and became offended when anyone doubted it.  Obama’s candidacy is a calculated provocation, serving as a gauge to assess the depth of the acquired habit of politically correct self-censorship now infused in the minds of Americans willing to be thrown into the oven to avoid offending the cook.

A significant detail illustrates this to a tee: when the senator listens to the national anthem, he does not place his right hand on his heart as protocol demands but literally shields his private parts with both hands, and everyone feels too inhibited to say that this is an insult.  A similar test was conducted in Bill Clinton’s time.  The president took the liberty of transforming the White House into a brothel, lied shamelessly and cried right wing conspiracy whenever anyone thought ill of anything.  The air of indignation on Democrats’ faces when they defended the scoundrel’s honor was touching.  In both cases, the most cynical ban on perceiving the obvious is imposed in the name of morality, instilling in public opinion the habit of revolutionary inversion.  All of this seems quite extravagant, but it is a masterpiece of high precision psychological engineering.

The panorama of this election is dismal in all aspects.  Mitt Romney displayed the stature of a statesman precisely in his withdrawal speech.  He said the present election was about major issues, not administrative routines.  Never has the USA had to decide on such grave matters with such lightweight brains to bear the responsibility.  The disproportion between the problems and the cast of characters is tragicomical, but the comedy will pass away and the tragedy will become reality.

The blame for the present situation is shared equally between the Democrats, who put their own political ambitions ahead of the security of the USA, and George W. Bush, who refused to notice this, preferring to embark the country on an illusory national union against the foreign enemy.  The union didn’t last three weeks.  Any intelligent observer could have seen this, but Bush staked everything on the patriotism card without noticing that the patriotism of his adversaries was completely fake.

In the American tradition, public officials, particularly higher ranking ones, have always been proud to serve the State, regardless of which party was in power.  Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has broken with this tradition, supporting, in the bureaucratic network, militants who served the party, not the state, the people or the nation.  We also saw this happening in a certain country.  Isn’t it the same thing?  And we all know how it ended.  Since 9/11, George W. Bush’s war plans have been boycotted from within by the clintonistas in the State Department and the CIA, who thus produced unsustainable situations, the blame for which was shifted to the president.  The story is told in detail in the book by Kenneth R. Timmerman, Shadow Warriors, the Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender (Crown Forum, New York, 2007), and anyone who does not know it will never understand what is happening today in the USA.  Refusing to acknowledge evil is just as shameful as what caused it.  George W. Bush incurs the costs and responsibility of having deserted the internal battle through the subterfuge of an overseas war.  Bush’s timidity (or surrender) destroyed it all. “Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie” [through delicacy I lost my life], said Rimbaud.  But this prophecy, unfortunately, applies not only to the person of the current American president.  It is an entire people who risk misfortune to avoid the indiscretion of naming the names of their enemies.

Translated by Donald Hank (zoilandon@msn.com)

The author, Olavo de Carvalho is a correspondent for various Brazilian newspapers. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

To comment or schedule an appearance, contact the author at: olavo@olavodecarvalho.org

Olavo de Carvalho is a respected journalist with a wide following in his native Brazil and an increasingly popular public speaker in this country.  Mr. Carvalho provided Laigle’s Forum readers with an eye-opening article on the CFR and the Forum of Sao Paolo back on May 27, 2006.

Laigle’s Forum is the first to present the following article to the English speaking world.

The weakened American soul

By Olavo de Carvalho

From Diario de Comercio, Jan 14, 2008

The dominant discourse in the mainstream media, show business and universities in the USA today is so frankly anti-American that it is only in details of style - if that - that it can be distinguished from the defamation campaigns undertaken by the USSR in the 50s and 60s.  The American elite boasts of having won the Cold War, but it seems as if it was dominated psychologically by the vanquished enemy and wound up believing everything the enemy said against it.  The posthumous vengeance of the Soviets gleams in the pages of the New York Times, at prime time on CBS, and in the films by Michael Moore and George Clooney with a splendor that not even Willi Muenzenberg, the genius of communist disinformation, would have dared dream of.

Whatever is said against the American government, against the American military, and against American culture, seems to enjoy automatic credibility today, so much so that it can be shouted from the rooftops without the least fear of an exasperated response, to the extent that any pro-American word must be prefaced with politically correct precautions for fear of the inevitable and vociferous retaliation, if not of a lawsuit.  To follow the American debate is to confirm daily the prophetic sense of the verse by William Butler Yeats: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Something has changed radically in the heart of America in the second half of the 20th century, and has changed precisely in the direction in which the country’s bitterest enemies would have wanted it to change.

How was this possible?  The agents of change want us to believe that it was all a spontaneous, natural and inevitable process, lending the course of the transformation the authority of an impersonal historic law that only the small minded reactionary would dare to question.  But many years ago I realized that impersonal laws of history are almost always mere camouflage for human actions that want to pass unperceived so that their effects take on an aura of divine mystery.

The change that weakened the American soul was precipitated by three major disinformation operations that, because they were launched from Washington and not from Moscow, managed to deceive the entire nation and forge a new “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense of the word), whose influence not even the most conservative and patriotic completely escape.  On these three occasions, the lies carefully elaborated by the government itself to cast onto the United States the blame for the malicious actions of its enemies not only became official truth, uniformly repeated today by the media and the education system, but spread around the world, creating the monstrously deformed image that today feeds and legitimizes anti-American hatred everywhere.  It may seem absurd that government officials would choose to participate in the defamation of their own country to avoid problems with the USSR or to save their own electoral image, but that is exactly what three American presidents did, two of which, ironically, are portrayed by leftist rhetoric as exemplary embodiments of anti-communism and “Yankee imperialism.”

The three operations were conceived in the high spheres of the Democratic Party, but at least one of them had intense Republican collaboration.  Three recently published books, one of which I already commented on here and the other I mentioned in passing, finally reveal what happened behind the scenes on these occasions, the incredible machinations of politicians and journalists, who for the sake of short-term gains, unhesitatingly favored the enemy and bequeathed to future generations an increasingly morally weakened country.

The first of these episodes was the operation carried out by the Truman administration — and faithfully pursued by Eisenhower — to deny or cover up the massive presence of Soviet agents in high posts of the American government, particularly in the State Department, and also in technical and administrative functions, where they had access to secret information of a military nature.

This story is told in detail with extensive documentation by M. Stanton Evans in “Black Listed by History.  The Untold Story of Senator Joseph MacCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies,” New York, Crown forum 2007.  If you can’t read the book, you can listen to a good resume presented by the author at the Heritage Foundation, with a commentary by Herbert Rommerstein, the one personally responsible for major investigations into Soviet infiltration in the USA (see Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy).

To get an idea of the strategic risks involved in this situation, suffice to say that practically the entire tone of North American policy in China during the communist revolution was set on the basis of reports fabricated by Soviet agents who infiltrated the American diplomatic service in Beijing.  By means of prodigious falsifications, these agents managed to persuade the Washington government to withhold needed aid from their ally Chiang Kai-shek and support the communist troops of Mao Zedong, who without this would never have managed to overthrow the Chinese government and install the bloodiest of genocidal dictatorships the world had ever known.  American Ambassador Patrick Hurley saw through the ruse and warned Washington in time, but his messages were ignored.  Feeling sullied, Hurley asked to be relieved of his post and was replaced by General George Marshall, who believed in these stories as if they had been revealed gospel.  Marshall was not procommunist, obviously, but if his behavior in this case was not a clear-cut example of what Eric Voegelin called “criminal stupidity,” I don’t know what could fit that category.  Following the record genocide of 70 million people, the Chinese government, having accumulated atomic bombs with the money generously supplied by American investors, is today the number one security risk for the USA.

Alerted to these and other innumerable cases of Soviet infiltration, the Truman administration opted to kill the messenger, and did everything it could to give the impression that the only serious danger for America was anti-communism, particularly that of Senator Joe McCarthy, whose demonized image still remains vivid in world memory.  To obtain this result, Harry Truman’s shock troops unhesitatingly covered up the essential documents, which, revealed only now, show that, in essence, all the accusations made by McCarthy were true and even modest in comparison to the real dimensions of the problem.  Besides suppressing evidence and protecting itself behind false testimonies, the Truman administration, instead of dismissing the suspects, preferred to support their careers, enabling them to rise in the hierarchy and continue offering services to the Soviet dictatorship with American taxpayer money.

An entire culture of anti-McCarthyism, supported by textbooks, cinema and journalism, grew out of this enterprise of intentional falsification.  The consequences of this extend to the present day, making Americans, repenting of sins they never committed against communists, sense greater fear of a possible “return to the McCarthy era” than of a joint assault of Chinese generals and Islamic radicals.

I see the second episode of the series when Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.  Not only the White House but also the CIA and the FBI knew that Oswald was a fanatical communist and that his intention in shooting Kennedy was to frustrate any American initiative against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Chilled at the prospects of a national outbreak of anti-Communist revolt targeting the Democratic Party and reviving suspicions of the Harry Truman era, President Lyndon Johnson did what he could to turn the attention of the Warren Commission away from this sensitive point, explaining Oswald’s crime not as the result of his ideological convictions but of generic motivations such as emotional instability, family problems, etc.  As unbelievable as it seems, the commission agreed to analyze the most famous political homicide of the 20th century without mentioning politics.  Coming to the president’s aid, the chic media and enlightened intellectuals then produced a copious literature of pseudo-sociological claims that placed the blame for the crime on the “American culture of violence” and other vapid generalities which, in their final conclusion, were laid to the charge of conservatives.  The anti-American discourse of the new left, which was then starting to gain prominence, thus received powerful backing from the very government of Washington at which it directed its hysterical eloquence.  This discourse wound up incorporating itself in “common sense,” to the point that today it is routinely repeated by the mainstream media without anyone noticing anything out of place.  The book that described this enormous psychological mutation that was born in the highest spheres in Washington and spread throughout the American culture is Camelot and the Cultural Revolution.  How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American liberalism, by James Pierson (New York, Encounter Books, 2007).

The biggest irony in all of this is that Lee Oswald, a convert to communism since adolescence, could in no way be considered representative of the reactionary trends supposedly responsible for the “American violence” that would have prompted him to homicide, much less the fanatical Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, who in 1968, assassinated the ex-president’s brother, Robert Kennedy.  It is not by coincidence that we now know Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was from head to toe a brainchild of the KGB (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/comartin/israel/pacepa-wsj.html), but at the time, this tireless myth factory of the leftist elite was able to make two crimes committed by procommunist agents against two notoriously anti-Communist politicians appear to be the handiwork of the “reactionary right,” and to have this rigorously inverted version of reality embed itself in the American psyche so deeply that it would take many decades to uproot it, if indeed it were at all possible.

The third big lie, also definitively incorporated in the rituals of America’s pseudo-moralistic masochism was also the work of Lyndon Johnson.  After having hampered the action of American troops in Vietnam by all possible means, Johnson drew the logical conclusion from his own strategy, transfiguring the victory into a defeat.  On January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese army of Ho Chi Minh launched a major offensive against the Americans and South Vietnamese.  The idea was to occupy all at once the cities of South Vietnam, starting with the capital, Saigon, instigating a general uprising with the help of Vietcong fighters.  Militarily, the offensive was a monumental failure.  The Communists lost, in a few days, 50,000 soldiers and all the objectives that they had conquered.  Even the famous attack on the American embassy in Saigon was a failure.  Not a single Vietcong was able to enter the building — they all died at the gate.  Meanwhile, since the American army followed the standard procedure for such occasions, quickly evacuating the civil servants by means of helicopters on the embassy rooftop, the images of the evacuation were shown on American TV as evidence of general panic and a sure sign of the imminent defeat of South Vietnam.  When President Johnson saw these scenes being interpreted this way by veteran TV news commentator Walter Cronkite, he reasoned “if I’ve lost Cronkite I’ve lost the nation.”  The North Vietnamese commander, General Giap, showed how right that was when he admitted that his main weapon against South Vietnam was the American media.  By endorsing the legend of the American defeat, Johnson brought down on his country a humiliation that the elegant media and prattling intellectuals have been celebrating incessantly since then as a just punishment meted out to the reactionary, fanatical and violent people who persecuted innocents in the MacCarthy era and assassinated two Kennedys…

Only now, with the first volume of the book consecrated to the Vietnam War by historian Mark Moyar is the reality of the victory artificially disguised as a defeat beginning to appear.  Read ‘Triumph Forsaken.  The Vietnam War 1954-1964″ (Cambridge University press, 2006).

No other country in the world has had as many traitors per square mile as the USA.  All of the anti-American mythology circulating in the world originated in Washington and New York — with nothing more than initial light shoves him from the KGB. The fact that the USA managed to survive such devastating lies hurled against the country by its own government officials and its most renowned intellectual leaders is something that can be explained only by the residual persistence of the people’s fondness for American traditions.  It is true that we Brazilians need not come to North America to learn about a good people governed by swindlers.  But the nagging question in my mind is whether these swindlers in Brazil would have risen as high as they did without the aid of the swindlers in Washington.

Translated by Donald Hank (zoilandon@msn.com)

The author, Olavo de Carvalho is a correspondent for various Brazilian newspapers and hosts a Portuguese-language talk show (www.blogtalkradio.com/olavo) on Mondays at 5 p.m. EST. He has spoken before the Hudson Institute, the Atlas Foundation and the America’s Future Foundation.

To comment or schedule an appearance, contact the author at: Oakwoodwolf3@aol.com