An Attempted Coup

Fanatical Bolsonaristas invade the Brasilian parliament

Like a scene from a tropical zombie film, yellow clad barbarians chanting the fascist slogan ‘god, family, and homeland’, rampage through the three main institutions of Brazilian democracy, defecate on carpets, break windows, and smash precious works of art. January the eighth, it was my birthday,  that in a cruel irony from now on will always be associated with an attempted coup and an attack on an icon of twentieth century modern architecture. The comparison with 1930s Europe is not lost. One of the hall marks of the both the Nazi and Stalin regimes was an assault on a perceived intellectual elite that included the targeted destruction of abstract works of art and the banning of satirical  modernist literature, forms of culture considered incomprehensible and detached from the everyday life of the ‘people.’ The images that flooded the screens of hysterical Bolsonaristas joyfully engaged in a carnival of destruction was deeply shocking but all too familiar. It brought to my mind a truly chilling photograph of well-dressed Nazi youth gleefully throwing books into a funeral pyre.