Brazil - Brasil - BRAZZIL - The US Terrorism Attack Had a Disastrous Coverage in the Brazilian Media - October 2001


Brazzil
October 2001
Terrorism in the US

Blame the victims

If someone offers his condolences and, right after,
adds some however, though or but he is in reality
saying "my condolences" but negating it soon
after with an "it serves you right."

Alberto Dines

It's time for grammar, among other things, to lower our blood pressure. The political simplism that preceded the Black Tuesday doesn't seem to have been interrupted after the slaughter. It's intact and unharmed, fueling resentments, ready to ignite sacred wraths and holy indignations. The majority of the Arab and Islamic leadership were categorically sympathetic to the victims' families or to the American people. Without attenuation or justification. They were hurt by terrorism as much as those murdered. Fidel Castro, for so long assaulted by American arrogance, was also unequivocal in his solidarity. He said what he felt, period.

But in the rhetoric of our cordial celebrated society, infected with commas and detours, it was inserted as an attenuating resource—a little particle usually destined to link parts of a phrase. Disguised as a pause between two ideas, it has a deleterious, disaggregating function. Without even being touched by the death of so many Brazilians, some of the brief and formal laments for the catastrophe were followed by a disturbing and insulting but.

In the innocent conjunction it's revealed the volcano of rancor still had not been calmed, curtailed or purged by last week's blood bath. Here comes the grammar to remind us about things we don't pay attention to when using the language. Conjunctions are used to link sentences: when additive they work as reinforcement—this is the case of the stubborn and—when adversative they establish the contrast between the respective meanings. If someone offers his condolences and, right after, adds some however, though or but he is in reality saying "my condolences" but negating it soon after with an "it serves you right."

The political "show" presented by the PT (Workers' Party) on TV this Thursday was perfect in every sense, including its mention of the terrorist attacks: neither but nor half but. The repudiation to the violence was brief, clear and the grief, sincere. But the PT is a Party that's getting ready to exercise the power, and it is able to extirpate emotions, choose words that express them and, by and large, avoid the pitfalls of phrasing. It's able, more than anything else, to immunize itself against the poison of the discourse's ambiguities.

This consternation was not shared by the majority of militants or associates who marched through the papers' pages of smoldering rage and wrath, clearly satisfied with the getting even shown in such a spectacular way on TV.

Rapidly grieved, the six thousand missing—including the 17 Brazilians—were soon compared to the dead in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hanoi, Chile, to which were added the hungry masses of Africa and Latin America's legions of poor wretches. Swinging between justification and vigilantism, with the decisive help of buts, the cruel vindictive arithmetic illustrates a moral relativism from which certain leftists—or pseudo leftists—were still not able to escape. Nor will they escape soon while they continue intoxicated by the dogma that the end justifies the means.

From this spiritual daze don't escape people anointed in international contests: people awarded the Peace and Literature Nobel prizes, tenured professors and illustrious individuals in all sciences and knowledge, rationalists and aestheticians, Marxists and aristocrats. Historians trained to look at humankind under the perspective of centuries—and the journalists used to immediately interpret its spasms—surrendered themselves to the amok unchained by terror. Even bankers so cautious in their emotions and investments took out of the closet their Crusaders' banner.

Incapable of being horrified or feeling pain, and therefore incapable of humanizing themselves by suffering and solidarity, the fiery harbingers of the "we are even" are blowing up all bridges that lead to dialog and tolerance. The xenophobia that only now they notice had been pulsating for a long time in their totalizing and totalitarian speeches, in the way they divide the world between those who deserve compassion and those who deserve condemnatory passion.

George W. Bush is the least desirable person to lead the U.S. at this moment. There is no doubt about this: all of his appearances (starting with a speech in a Florida school in the morning of the assaults and ending ten days later with the speech to Congress in Washington) widely expose his unpreparedness, an intellectual void and a psyche that only knows how to express itself through clichés. The uncomfortable realization cannot lead us to an alignment with fanaticism, terrorism or with those cynical invocations destined to minimize, excuse or justify the barbarism committed Black Tuesday.

In the current evaluations an elementary data is being forgotten: the assaults were not accompanied by public declarations, ultimatums, conditions or demands. The absence of public statements or authorship indicates an indiscriminate war against all, against humankind. The initiators of the crime are not from the left, not even progressive. They are neither agents of the savage capitalism nor revolutionary, reformist, ecologist, thirdworldist or antiglobalizationist. They don't want a strong or minimum state. They don't want states, laws, codes, norms for living or respecting. Besides killing indiscriminately they are intent on sowing hate, igniting fires, exacerbating suspicions, and prevent any possibility of understanding, approaching or tolerance.

In displaying grief with half sincerity or full insincerity, the lucid commentators with their adversative conjunctions and the moral relativism are only vouching for violence as political language. In reality, they are condemning the victims as the only guilty ones for what has happened

Alberto Dines wrote this article for Jornal do Brasil where he signs a column. He became a journalism professor after directing major newspapers and magazines in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Lisbon (Portugal). He is the author of several books and the creator of Observatório da Imprensa, an Internet site and TV program that presents criticism of the Brazilian media. You can reach him at dines@jb.com.br

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