Pillage and desecration Washington and Brasilia

Let’s shatter, let’s burn

On August 24 410 A.D., the Visigoths, led by Alaric, seized Rome. At the time, 800.000 people lived in the city. For three days the goths, who years later would populate the Iberian Peninsula, plundered, raped, enslaved and killed. Nothing uncommon, a sack as any other. Never in Rome, though. Never in Rome, caput mundi, capital of the world and heart of civilized life. It was the first time in 800 years the city was taken by a foreign army. The event sent shockwaves through the ancient world, from the British islands to the Levant. Something that stood for a thousand years had suddenly collapsed.

The sack of an imperial city is a spiritual happening, a profanation. From the imperial perspective, Rome was light in a dark world, a light that only grew expanding its borders away. Alaric and his Visigoths, who ultimately came from darkness, could now be seen ransacking the very temples and palaces of ancient consuls and emperors, the world upside down.

The events of January 6th 2021 in Washington, recently replicated in Brasilia the 8thof January 2023, are reminiscent of these symbolic implications. Both events were attempted coup d’états in the form of direct assaults on the seats of government.

These attacks, previously and repeatedly announced, were the final act of trumpism and bolsonarism in power. Both were Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s culminating point in their attempts to retain power illegally after their corresponding electoral defeats in 2020 and 2022. Of all strategies deployed, this was the most spectacular and meaningful with thousands of people as the instrument.

The perpetrators occupied the seats of power – Congress in the US, all three branches in Brazil – for several hours in which they devoted to pillage and destruction. In Washington, the mob was looking for vice president Mike Pence and democratic congressmen, especially congresswomen, to kill them.

The law enforcement agencies in charge of protecting the buildings welcomed them. Should it have been any different? The mobs were not only commanded by Mr. President. They are known as authentic cheerleaders for any repressive institutions in existence.

From within as from without, mobs are as intense and intimidating as it can be. Fattened and incensed by hate speech, these crowds fulfill the same purpose of any armed institution: provoking fear. That, and the fact that they used bombs, make them, strictly speaking, terrorists.

Breaching through either insufficient or manifestly eager police perimeters, the hordes captured the sacred places of the polity. Along with Trumpers went the libertarians, addicted to weapons as much as to segregation, whose purpose is the annihilation of the federal government. Once inside, all was rampage, circus, and excess. The immediate goal was to cause as much damage as possible, let’s shatter, let’s burn. The mob was particularly merciless with everything apparently artistic and intelligent as well as with the relics of federal citizenship.

An image stands out in the footage. In the midst of this chaos, a bolsominion (a Bolsonaro follower) defecates in what appears to be an office. Quite a message. The place has been desecrated. Other participants screech and writhe violently as if in their Pentecostal services. Bolsonaristas actually improvised a mass right there in Congress. These are actions of people out of their minds, symptoms of insanity, a mental epidemic with the capacity to seriously disrupt the political order. And there is the message: theocracy or death, dictatorship or civil war.

Although the mob as an instrument is generally untidy and even unpredictable, there were clear practical purposes in these attacks: our beloved leader has been deprived of his rights by means of fraud, we will reclaim power or take revenge. In the American case, there was a direct intention to block by all means possible the certification of decrepit Joe Biden as president.

Many members of both crowds were convinced that capturing the buildings would spark a national insurrection. As if by magic, the republican order would fall apart, the armed forces would take power and the beloved leader would come back or never be gone. Others simply lacked the cognitive capacity to understand what the heck they were doing, dressed for carnival, that day in Congress. They were instruments, like hammers, weapons or dildos, for a coup. For reasons obvious enough to the rest of us but of impossible comprehension to Trump and Bolsonaro followers, their efforts were far from becoming an existential threat to the federal order.

It must be said that Trumpers got feet away from getting their hands on the supreme legislative authorities of the country. In Brazil, magical thinking was more manifest. Bolsonaro’s successor, Lula – a communist who lost a finger years ago when eating children for breakfast – was already sitting president and miles away from Brasilia. Congressmen and supreme judges were also absent that day. All three facilities were empty. Doesn’t remind us of those late 90s millenarians who went to the desert to wait for Jesus or the aliens?

The twilight zone

A chauvinist friend of mine – could have been French, from Medellin or from Buenos Aires – was boasting not long ago about the beautiful historical buildings of his city – could have been French or from Buenos Aires. He beheld and complained. “What use I have for them? I cannot get in there. I want to get in, get to know them inside, have a look around”. Many rioters did exactly that in the US Capitol; they improvised sightseeing tours in the temple of democracy. There are many more, millions more, who are sick of living in a world that is not theirs.

If you are a radical socialist, an anarchist or something near, the images of extreme right plunder and destruction in the most venerated locations of the democratic circus arouse uneasy feelings. Neither the socialist nor the anarchist would break a window in the name of someone like Trump or Bolsonaro but they certainly dream about stirring up and changing everything.

Ten years before January 6, it was the dissenting and critical Occupy Wall Street masses who reclaimed the seats of power. Also ten years before January 8 in Brasilia, it was the Jornadas de Junho masses, a popular uprising outraged by public transportation tariffs, storming the Brazilian Congress; they could not gain entry but managed to climb the roof, which the bolsonaristas also did past January. So you can see pictures of both crowds 10 years apart on the roof of Congress. Only this time they broke in. This is what happens when the political order is unwilling to admit profound popular demands. When the door doesn’t open, it is the window that shatters or the wall that falls down.

One has to commend the intruders for their disposition to get out of their dull lives and do something historic. They feel bored and out of history, unimportant people in important numbers. Just like my friend who wishes to see the inside of those historic buildings that adorn his city, those who now invade the sites of representative democracy feel dispossessed. They burst in because they don’t take that democracy as theirs.

In truth, it is not theirs. It is true, as bolsominions pseudo-think that whoever rules Brazil, it is not the Brazilian people. But to think that government is in the hands of homosexual pervert communism is just bonkers. It is true, as Trumpers believe, that a tiny elite, which may include the Clintons, control the world. They are just too dazed by the entertaining industry to grasp the complexities and intricacies of the puzzle much less to recognize what is obvious, that the degenerate Trump is in it.

These hordes feel that something has been stolen from them but they don’t know what it is nor who is to blame. They want to find the culprits. If the crooks are good at hiding, they fake them as they fake their heroes and messiahs.

What do they want? Money and guns to travel to the twilight zone or an unknown dimension. Unlike conservatives, classical fascists, socialists, anarchists or liberals, these hordes do not have utopias, long term goals nor minimally structured ideas of how society should work. They may have pseudo-ideas or even anti-ideas if such a thing exists. A wall, a massacre, a beating, that is the full extension of their credo’s realization as they are unable to imagine for real.

What do they want, then? They want psychopaths leading authoritarian regimes for an indeterminate time with purposes of social cleansing. Everything they are unable to comprehend or deem ugly, they will eliminate or harm as hard as possible. When Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections, his cattle went to the streets to stone teachers, artists, homosexuals, anyone looking too smart or wearing red. Just a few weeks ago, one of these extremists went to a kindergarten and ax in hand murdered four children.

They think their vehicle to the unknown dimension is a time machine. Thus, they want to burn books, ban arts, reinstitute slavery and other bondage systems, transform public schools into highly profitable military Pentecostal churches, and erase all science since Pythagoras. We’d better not give them more ideas.

Trumpism and bolsonarism are the parody western liberal capitalist democracy apologists use to define their foes; an ensemble of theocentric fundamentalists, chauvinist fascists, communists ready to send everyone to the Gulag, chaos loving anarchists, and the bullied children coming back to school to kill everyone.

Chaos in an instant

When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the Emperor was 300 miles away, in Ravenna. Rome had ceased to be capital of the empire in 286, about the same time the empire began to split into East and West, the former with capital in Constantinople, the latter encompassing the Italian Peninsula.

The Visigoth sack was not intended as an antiimperialist retaliation. It was rather an episode of the complicated German-Roman relationship. According to circumstances, Romans would assimilate, employ or expel the Germanic peoples who, in turn, behaved alternatively as allies, subjects and enemies of Rome. Germans Romanized, Romans Germanized and everyone Christianized. Above all, and long before Alaric, the Empire fell and split.

To modern observers, the Western Roman Empire did not have many chances of survival in 410. To 5th century contemporaries though, Rome was still capital of the world. It is not unusual that narratives and worldviews outlive for centuries the material conditions that produce them. Thus, the sack of Rome shook the world despite its imperial decadence. Just like that stomach drop indicating that you are not about to but already falling.

All around the Mediterranean Sea in 410 people felt the unsettling stomach drop signaling a sudden loss of security. Saint Jerome, one of the most important thinkers alive at the time felt it. What is the point of any social order, its laws, taxes, and borders if it’s unable to offer security – or at least perception of security – so that citizens can carry on with their lives? The collapse of any society’s symbolic heart makes citizens lose the spiritual grounds they hold on. Thus, when a State loses control of its commanding position there is a momentary illusion of life without State, chaos in an instant.

Law enforcing institutions devoting to oppression of minorities is injustice and institutional violence. Power fading away in borders and peripheries is somehow expectable. But a political system being unable to maintain security in its very heart is outright weakness.

Seats of government are often protected by expensive defense systems which work uninterrupted for years. Challenges to those systems are highly unusual among other reasons because these places have little strategic importance. They are symbols. Yet, one day there is an attack and pluf! The place has fallen to an openly anti-republican deranged crowd that desecrates it for hours. The political system with its expensive military aircraft and its hypertrophic GDP has been ridiculed.

Given its imperial condition, the American case is more serious. In the official narrative, Congress serves as a beacon to world democracy enlightening the darkness of barbarian, less civilized peoples. Well, for a few hours, that light switched off and they found themselves in the shadows as the rest of us.

Every day since the riots, the challenge to the political system has endured and the bosses remain unpunished. In Brazil, Lula’s minister of defense is a Bolsonaro sympathizer himself. Hence, here is guy in charge of the institutions he contributed to undermine. It’s hard to overestimate the depth of the political challenge when the system seems clearly intimidated by terrorist insurrectionists. Obviously, arresting one or two thousand partisans will do very little to stop the anti-republican factions.

Sometimes things cease to exist long before we realize. When the Western Roman Empire finally fell, some 70 years after the Visigoth sack, it had been lifeless for decades. The emperor was merely a token of prestige for the new Germanic kings. Any political system is just a story that subsists as long as people believe it.

The fact that there are hordes with enough numbers and confidence as to assault the seats of government does not only cast a shadow over the solidity of republican institutions. It also signals malfunctions in the powerful propaganda machines that legitimize those institutions. These mobs are the consequence of erosion in the official narratives as told by political leaders and mainstream media. Official lies expired for millions so they have found new ones.

Alternative belief systems are on the rise, Trumpism and Bolsonarismo included. This doesn’t mean that the State, the republic and representative democracy will disappear tomorrow. Neither Trump nor Bolsonaro are serious alternatives; they are no alternatives at all. Their followers didn’t come to create a new order but to stir things up, create chaos and provoke hatred. These are novel social illnesses which will coexist with the political system in its fall. Slow or fast, loud or silent, that fall is inevitable.