Printed books, in addition to their honorable utilitarian functions, immediate or not, make up an important collection of documents and testimonies of the culture and history of different human societies. For these same reasons, books are published, collected, preserved, disseminated, guarded, recommended, coveted, lent, republished and, it must be said, controlled, prohibited, censored, and destroyed.
There are no Human Rights without democracy; without a Republic, dictatorship, ignorance, contempt for public policies, health, and education prevail; without the Democratic State of Law, only the autocratic, authoritarian, abusive and denialist forms of Humanity itself thrive.
Even though the Federal Police have said that there are no masters in the barbaric murders of the English journalist Dom Philips and the Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira, who are the actors interested in the physical elimination of opponents, defenders of nature, and the codes of social life?
"Brazil needs a Constituent Assembly (National Constituent Assembly) in 2023!" – say some sectors dissatisfied with the reforms induced in the Federal Constitution of 1988 and with the worst institutional and social results provoked.
Without virtues, vicissitudes can either occur as "alternatives" or as mere instabilities; vicissitudes without virtues run through the logic of exclusion. But what will be the political cost? Let's imagine a war in which the commanders say that they were neither wrong nor right, in the choice of means and strategies. Even if all war is unnecessary, how many people would have died, unnecessarily, by the mistakes of the command?
War is a human typology. But it's not the worst side of the human being, it's just its expression/extension. We are just that: belligerents. This may shock some, but humanity is just that: wars x wars. What varies over time are the justifications or interpretations. What does not change is the fact that war is a constant, a kind of prehistoric social fact.
President Jair Bolsonaro seems to be somewhat confused on how to tackle the Ukraine-Russia conflict in a way that aligns with his interests. This essay discusses his new move on framing the conflict as an opportunity to reduce Brazilian dependency on fertilizing exports. This framing resulted in the approval of urgent character for processing the lar project PL 190-2020, which will open indigenous territory for a mining concession. If the law is approved, this can put the indigenous communities in bigger threat as well as push for an unsustainable model of extractivism development within Amazon.
Taking stock of 2021 is a hard task, especially for Brazilian justice. However, if we needed an image to depict such a challenge, it would be the ocean waves pounding the rocks on the shore, the perpetual drive against barely movable obstacles.
Resilience implies this ability to adapt to the “emergence of the new Fascism” (the “new wild beast”), with the intention of monopolizing and exponentially using technical resources as political inputs for disaggregation, intimidation, and social and military control.
We celebrate a lot in 2022. We have come a long way, but there is still an even longer way to go. We welcome the year with a new special edition in the blog and have others already planned for the year.