Lula Fawkes Day

BC PIRES

Remember, remember the fifth of November/The gunpowder, treason and plot/I know of no reason/ why gunpowder treason/ Should ever be forgot…Remember, remember Bolsanaro covid and 700m Brazilians died/ I see no reason why antivax BS should ever be retried.

THE WORLD is in a better place today than on Sunday because Lula won the Brazilian election.

With luck, on the other side of the pond, that hate-filled crackpot posing as the British Home Secretary might be sacked for the second and final time and the world will be on a positive roll.

Keep this up for another week and our most powerful weapon, love, might just have a chance to turn back the tide of rightwing hate that has poisoned human society since 2016.

It’s hard for them to discern, because it was sold to them as patriotism, but what the man who killed almost a million Brazilians and butchered the rainforest gave his supporters was permission to hate. It’s all that people like him have ever needed.

From the time we started living together, hate (the only emotion that threatens love for sheer firetrucking power) has been exploited by ruthless men as the best way of making themselves rich and powerful. It’s only because cruel men needed to unleash hatred to gain power that Jewish people became the original blind hate.

And you can jump-start hate using anything.

Black people have been the most trustworthy tool used to open hatred since the Jews, but there are always the LGBT, women and children. Indeed, cruel men don’t even need a real enemy, just a common imaginary one.

Read 1984. Or look at lifeboats in the English Channel: that proud clown Suella Doolahin dreamt of sending the most vulnerable people on the planet to Rwanda by the jumbo-jet-load!

The worst thing is how see-through it has been all along. This is what happens the moment you get people to stop thinking about issues and get them to start feeling about them. The obliteration of thought began in earnest in 2016, with the two most stupid and unlikely victories of emotional manipulation over clear thinking.

In June, the English – not British – Vote Leave campaign, lying through its teeth, persuaded enough old English people that, because they now felt they hated Europeans, it was a smart thing to do to leave the European Union – the very thing that, over half a century, made Britain the world’s fifth most powerful economy!

There are still people in England who will declare that Brexit is a good thing, even though, despite the appointment of no less a genius than Jacob Rees-Mook as Brexit Opportunities Minister, the Vote Leave Cabal could not find a single one.

For the very good reason that there isn’t. It’s not cryptic. It was never unclear what would happen: put up trade barriers between yourself and the richest single market which is right on your doorstep, and you will make yourself poorer.

Again, there was never any mystery about Trump. He led racist white Americans in saying out loud what, they had known before, they should have only whispered to one another. Like Hitler before him, Trump brought out the very worst in humanity…And the people he enabled began to believe they were really superior to the people they began to believe were destined to crush.

What is happening to the Republican Party this week is the same thing that happened to the National Socialist Party in Germany in 1933: the evil people, subsumed in hatred, are making a grab for power. If they succeed, we will become nostalgic for the Holocaust.

The world has had a good week so far. But the acid test comes with the American midterm elections next week. The forces of evil, powered by the most stupid people on the planet – Christians who think that Donald Trump was sent by God to save babies – may yet crown the Devil while singing hymns of praise to him.

Good will win in the end, like in all the good stories.

Try to get yourself on the good side before it does. Celebrate the day our guy Lula Fawked evil.

BC Pires is stemming the fascist tide using an old mop and a squeegee