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Brasil Paralelo is a big neocon media company from Brazil, created in 2016, dedicated to making alleged political education videos. One of it latest releases is the documentary “Unitopia”. The first episode, lasting more than an hour, is available for free on YouTube.
The subject is the intellectual corruption of Brazilian universities. Most of the time, Brazilian neocons’ approach consists of a vague denunciation that blames the communists. The documentary was no exception, but its vagueness was still revealing: it aims to say that the university’s big problem is a harmful ideology (communism) that causes racism (against Jews). Mutatis mutandis, it is the same reading that woke people make of any institution that they do not dominate. They just exchange communism for fascism and racism against black people for racism against Jews.
In the neocon’s mouth, and also in the documentary, “communism” is a vague term. After all, what is the ideology that causes a hostility towards knowledge and critical thinking in Western universities? The ideology of the New Left, also known as identity politics or wokeism. This ideology is known to have a triad of oppressed sacred cows: women, black people and LGBT people. As a result, everything associated with these groups is good, and everything associated with their opposites (men, whites and cis/straights) is bad. One of the consequences of this is the invention of woke racism against white people.
The best example of this is Evergreen State College in Washington. In 2017, students decided that on a certain day white people should not attend university. Prof. Bret Weinstein protested against it and wanted to defend his point of view, but he was silenced by the mob of students and ended up going viral. The students truly believed that he was a far-right white supremacist and a Nazi, even though he was a left-wing Jew. What mattered was his white skin, aggravated by his male sex and heterosexuality; and, if he didn’t want to join the mini-Apartheid, he could only be an extreme right-wing radical. The college could not guarantee his physical integrity, nor that of his wife (who also taught there) and both resigned.
After the Jordan Peterson affair in 2016, I believe that the Evergreen affair, “starred” by Bret Weinstein in 2017, was the most memorable in the English-speaking world. As Jordan Peterson’s took place in Canada, the most memorable one in the U.S. is Evergreen’s. However, the case does not appear in the documentary at all. What appears as an example of intolerance are the very recent protests calling for freedom for Palestine.
The Evergreen case serves to illustrate the severity of the racial divide on U.S. campuses. Spaces exclusive to non-whites are not uncommon on campuses in that country. In Brazil, with all its bizarre things, I have never heard of this. It seems to me that, of the woke triad, the one that causes the most violence here is LGBT, as there have been recent cases of female students afraid of being punched by transvestites in the women’s bathroom. If we take a longer period, however, what gives more occasion for beatings are right-wing events, the best example being the screenings of a film by Josias Teófilo at federal universities in Brazil. It’s not difficult to be beaten by leftists at a Brazilian university, but I’ve never heard of anyone being beaten for being white.
The documentarist ignores that the U.S.A and Brazil are different countries. The left is far from being a monolith (if it were, Bret Weinstein would have no problems). However, if one relies on the documentary, it seems that everything is one: Brazil, the U.S.A, the left.
The documentary begins by describing the Sokal hoax in order to show the lamentable state of universities. It does not mention, however, that Alain Sokal is a very red Marxist physicist, who even taught in Sandinista Nicaragua. Like Bret Weinstein, he is a secular Jew – secular Jews tend to be left-wing. Alan Sokal is alive and writing, residing in England. His articles appear in The Critic, and he wrote one condemning the repression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, stating that conservatives who said they were in favor of freedom of expression are hypocrites. The argument is based on Mill’s infamous On Liberty, because Mill was so consensual in the U.S.A that even old Marxists born there cite it as a sacred text.
The Sokal affair became his book Fashionable Nonsense, in which Sokal condemns the intellectual foundations of the New Left. The book arrived in Brazil not through a translation by Olavo de Carvalho (a neocon cult leader), but rather by the communist and anti-Zionist Jew Max Altman, whose son incited the few pro-Palestine protests that took place on Brazilian campuses.
Such protests tend to be led by left-wing Jews, because Israel politicizes Jews. In Brazil there are few Jews (and many many Lebanese); so it makes sense that there are few pro-Palestinian protests here. In the U.S.A, protests end up bringing together left-wing Jews and pink-haired anti-Semites. This is predictable because of the modus operandi of wokeism, and because the U.S.A, being a racist country, tends to express everything in terms of race. If the Evergreen case had happened after October 2023, it is possible that Bret Weinstein would have received anti-Semitic slurs; that he was accused of being male, white, cis, straight and Jewish/Zionist.
The Palestinian cause only came into fashion on October 7, 2023. The woke march on universities has been going on for a decade. Still, Brasil Paralelo chose Palestinian cause to represent leftist intolerance. The usual spectator of Brasil Paralelo is ignorant, believes in propaganda and does not know that there are many left-wing Jews. If they find out that Israel was founded by socialists with the support of Stalin, they will fall faint in the ground. These right-wing people love Israel and madly hate the Supreme Court, but they don’t know that its most woke minister, Luís Roberto Barroso, is a left-wing Zionist Jew.
Let’s look at the supposed causes of the problem. Journalist and political scientist Gabriel de Arruda Castro uses his own experience at U.S. universities (and only in the U.S.) to confirm that it is much calmer there than at University of São Paulo, for example. After this hyperbolic speech, professors from Brazilian universities with administrative experience appear. From the way their speeches are presented, it seems that it is all the fault of Florestan Fernandes, who would be a kind of leader who commanded both the politician José Dirceu and the president Fernando Henrique Cardoso at the same time. In fact, the latter is presented with a soundtrack of terror and suspense, with the implication that he is as red as Lenin.
A question remains: how is it possible for Brazil to import ideologies from the USA, to have the same problems as the USA, but the main cause is the person of Florestan Fernandes? Did he work in customs?
It is widely known, even by the Right, that Florestan Fernandes was a Ford Foundation poster boy, just like the “communist” Fernando Henrique Cardoso. And everybody knows very well that the Ford Foundation is not Chinese or Russian; it is rather American. Given Wanderson Chaves’ research, discussed in this article, the fact is that the Ford Foundation was at the service of the CIA. Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and others were funded because the CIA approved their activities, not the KGB.
After Stalin’s death, the CIA decided to finance a left compatible with the “Doctrinal Program of the United States”, which can be read here. Basically, CIA decided to fund a liberal democratic left, rather than a communist one.
In the documentary, a Brazilian professor in the U.S.A tells a story of censorship led by a religion professor, who promoted it very successfully on campus. The documentary doesn’t dig into anything. If it would do it, however, it would find out that theological liberalism is more important than Marxism in the formation of the U.S. left. More precisely, the most important is the Unitarian Church, which spread theological liberalism to other Protestant denominations and even to Judaism. The Brazilian left and the North American left have very different histories. The philosophical root of wokeism is a certain Protestant denomination (unitarianism) that took over Harvard and the Rockefeller Foundation, and that secularized its philosophy. It is not Marxism. In this regard, I recommend the book Liberal Suppression by Philip Hamburger.
If unitarism practically became a state doctrine, Marxism was, in the U.S.A, repressed by McCarthyism. And here I cannot help but point out a primary error by biologist and journalist Eli Vieira, who uses absolute numbers to prove that wokeism is worse than McCarthyism. He says that, from 1947 to 1957, the number of university professors fired as communists was between 100 and 150. From 2014 to 2023, cancel culture would have caused the dismissal of 150 to 200. Now, he omits that the number of universities and professors more than doubled between these two periods; so, in order to say that wokism is worse, it would have to be a dismissal more than twice as big.
Part of the U.S. right asked why universities only had their donations cut when they tolerated woke anti-Semitism, but nothing happened to them when they tolerated woke racism against whites (in addition to feminist misandry and LGBT misogyny). I don’t know of a satisfactory answer to this question. Does Brasil Paralelo adopt the same blindness? Brasil Paralelo asks for money saying it does not receive government funding. It would be good to emphasize: it does not receive funding from the Brazilian government. As it hides more than it shows, it’s good to ask where its financing comes from.
