“I went to a quilombo. The lightest Afro-descendant there weighed seven arrobas. They don’t do anything!” At that point, he was a federal deputy and was preparing to run for the Presidency of the Republic the following year, from which he emerged victorious.
“If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a firearm in their home,” said Bolsonaro, applauded by around 300 members of the Jewish community.
This episode was a spark for the Jewish historian and sociologist to launch into reflections that resulted in the recently released book “Dialogues in Difficult Times”.
“Bolsonaro turns into a racist in the Jewish club using references typical of Nazism”, says Gherman, professor at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).
From this state of perplexity, which grew in the following years, he had the idea of preparing a book on the instrumentalization of religion by . He invited a black theologian and pastor to the project. The mediation of the conversation between them was the responsibility of the journalist, a reporter for Sheet.
In addition to this dialogue, the book includes an article by Gherman on politics and religion today and another by Pacheco on the same topics.
Right at the beginning of the conversation, Albuquerque, creator of , remembers that her two interlocutors are in a place of discomfort: “Packed between the extreme right, which colonizes Judaism and evangelism in Brazil, and the left, which still has a prejudiced or condescending view of religion.”
According to Gherman, we are facing a new type of anti-Semitism, which he calls “philosemitic”, supported by myth and directed at just one type of Jew. In the booklet of this more radical installment, “the imaginary Jew is not only not discriminated against but also becomes a reference, he is canonized”, he says. On the other hand, the historical Jew, immersed in contradictions, must be fought.
Later in the book, an Enlightenment legacy comes into debate, according to which religion and politics should not mix. For Pacheco, member of the board of the Institute for Religious Studies (Iser), the Brazilian left is wrong to insist on a separation that, in practice, will never be established. The extreme right, on the other hand, understood the mobilizing capacity of religion.
“It is very difficult to imagine a great revolution, a great disruptive popular movement, especially among black people, that is not crossed by religion”, he states.
For them, identified with the left, this field fails to rely on rationality as the driver of political clashes. “Voting doesn’t go through ideology, it goes through affection. How do I get to that feeling?”, asks Gherman. According to the UFRJ professor, it would not have appeared in Brazil if it were not for the
They differ, however, on other topics, such as the strength of Bolsonarism. For Pacheco, the succession of anti-democratic actions has weakened the current led by Bolsonaro, which tends to pave the way for a right-wing favorable to the rules of the game. Gherman, however, argues that Bolsonarism remains vigorous. “It was the Bolsonarist perspective that informed the extreme right.”
In his article in the second half of the publication, Pacheco unravels the concept of opacity politics, which determines the existence of delimited spaces, in which those who are different are placed under suspicion. It also discusses the manipulation of Christian religiosity carried out by
In his text, Gherman defines the new extreme right as “a global phenomenon, which operates through a dualist, anti-Enlightenment and conspiracist political grammar. It is based on the return to an idealized past and the constant creation of a state of emergency to justify the fight against the enemy”.
The challenge for the left, according to him, is to understand the seduction that these narratives exert.
