Monday, October 31, 2022
Via Washington Post // Lula defeats Bolsonaro to win third term as Brazil’s president
Lula defeats Bolsonaro to win third term as Brazil’s president
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| Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva holds the hand of his wife, Rosangela da Silva, after winning the presidential run-off election in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Oct. 30. (Carol de Souza/AFP via Getty Images) |
RIO DE JANEIRO — Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reclaimed the office Sunday on pledges to defend democracy, save the Amazon rainforest and bring social justice to Latin America’s largest nation, defeating Brazil’s Trumpian incumbent in a remarkable political comeback some three years after he walked out of a prison cell.
The victory for Lula, who served two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, returns a leftist titan of the Global South to the world stage, where his progressive voice will stand in sharp contrast to that of right-wing — and now one-term — President Jair Bolsonaro. For Latin America, Lula’s return to the Planalto Palace adds the regional giant to a streak of wins by the left: Lula joins a club of leaders who have now bested the political right in Colombia, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Argentina and Mexico.
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His win, which followed a slugfest of a campaign in a deeply divided country awash in fake news and explosive rhetoric, came amid allegations of official suppression of the vote by Bolsonaro’s allies in the police.
Overall, the race sounded strong echoes of the 2020 showdown in the United States between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It pitted Bolsonaro, 67, a staunch Trump ally, against Lula, 77, a stalwart of the traditional left who moved to the center during the campaign. Lula’s strength lay in female and low-income voters — particularly the Northeast, heavily populated by people of color — but also in social progressives and power brokers disturbed by Bolsonaro’s authoritarian bent.
Lula has pledged a unity government to work on mending the breaches in Brazilian society of the kind that, in an era of toxic politics, have taken root in democracies across the globe. The margin — Lula won by less than two percentage points — was the closest in Brazilian history. It was the first time an incumbent ran for a second term and lost.
“We have reached the end of one of the most important elections in our history,” Lula told supporters in São Paulo. “An election that put face to face two opposing projects of the country and that today has only one winner: the Brazilian people.
The city’s famous Paulista Avenue became a sea of pro-Lula celebrants. “Lula is a myth. The Brazilian Mandela,” said Jussara Brito, 50, a nurse who said she saw too many patients die from the coronavirus, which Bolsonaro dismissed as a “little cold.” “Seeing Bolsonaro leave is a relief. He is a murderer,” she said.
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In the capital, Brasilia, hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters gathered in the Esplanada, where a man with a loudspeaker urged the crowds not to concede and to wait for their “leader’s statement.” “We are with you, President Bolsonaro,” he said. “Lula thief, you belong in prison!” the crowd chanted in unison. Late Sunday, reports emerged of Bolsonaro loyalists blocking roads.
In Mato Grosso, the company that manages highways in the state said at least four stretches of a highway were blocked. In Santa Catarina, Bolsonaro supporters also cut off a stretch of a highway across the state, according to the UOL outlet.
“Lula will not be our president,” says a woman in a video from the Mato Grosso protest shared by O Globo.
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| A supporter of Brazil's President and presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, cries on Oct. 30. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters) |
As voting unfolded earlier in the day, Brazil’s most bitterly fought election since the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1985 descended into allegations of police attempting to suppress the vote. The Federal Highway Police, an organization closely allied with Bolsonaro, allegedly set up roadblocks to delay voters in the country’s impoverished Northeast and other centers of support for Lula.
Highway police director Silvinei Vasques had earlier posted a call to vote for Bolsonaro on Instagram, the newspaper O Globo reported. It was later deleted. Sen. Randolfe Rodrigues, a Lula supporter, demanded his immediate arrest. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s chief election official, ordered Vasques to stop the operations immediately or face personal fines of nearly $100,000 per hour.
Later Sunday, however, Moraes sought to calm concerns of a broader effort that could taint the vote. He said checkpoints had delayed, but not prevented, voters from casting their ballots, and he would not extend voting hours. “There was no prejudice to the right to vote … There is no need to overstate this issue,” Moraes said. “There were no cases where voters went home.”
Despite the statement from Moraes, who has frequently locked horns with Bolsonaro, Lula’s Worker’s Party demanded an extension of the polls in the 560 places where it said “illegal” police operations had taken place.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court announced the result just before 8 p.m. Brasilia time. Bolsonaro did not immediately concede the race, and uncertainty remained over whether he would. As recently as Friday night, he said, “whoever has the most votes wins. That is democracy.”
But he and his supporters also laid the groundwork to contest a loss with months of allegations of fraud. Bolsonaro summoned foreign diplomats in July to cast doubt on electronic voting. Some analysts predicted that Bolsonaro, who followed much of the Trump playbook during his rise to power and while in office, could do the same in defeat: refuse to concede and declare Lula’s presidency illegitimate.
Another parallel: Bolsonaro’s loss comes as the specter of criminal investigations hangs over him and his family.
Some of Bolsonaro’s allies encouraged him to concede. Speaking to journalists late Sunday, Moraes said he had called both candidates to inform them of the result before the court’s announcement of the winner, but suggested the conversations had been short and to the point. Bolsonaro, he said, had responded “with extreme politeness.” He described the elections as clean and secure, and insisted there was no “real risk” the results could be contested.
In the United States, the contest took on the feel of a proxy war between Democrats and Republicans. In a letter to President Biden, congressional Democrats warned that Bolsonaro’s “reckless and dangerous rhetoric about electoral fraud raise[s] serious fears” that he will try to “impede a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.” Trump, meanwhile, endorsed Bolsonaro, telling Brazilians in a video shared on the incumbent’s Twitter account on Saturday that “you have a chance to elect one of the great people in all of politics and in all of leadership of countries.”
Biden was quick to recognize Lula’s victory Sunday.
With 99.99 percent of the vote counted, Lula was declared the winner with 50.90 percent of the vote. Bolsonaro had 49.10 percent. The transfer of power is set for the first days of January.
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| A supporter of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva displays stickers on his face while gathering with fellow supporters in Brasilia on Oct. 30. (Diego Vara/Reuters) |
The candidates sparred over who would offer more assistance for the poor and who would raise the minimum wage. But they also became deeply mired in the culture wars now emblematic of modern democracies plagued by polarization. For Lula, the job of national healer will not be easy.
Many economists and political analysts view Lula as a pragmatic elder statesman, but Bolsonaro’s core supporters revile him. Danya Dorado, a 44-year-old housewife, who waved a flag with Bolsonaro’s face in Brasilia, described herself as “anguished” by the results — which she did not believe to be true. “I am ready to fight for my country because I do not want my children and grandchildren to live in a second Venezuela,” she said.
Election Day in Brazil became a global experiment on the power of misinformation. False narratives spread by Bolsonaro and his supporters in public comments and on social media insisted Lula would close churches and open unisex bathrooms in schools. Lula dismissed those claims as blatant lies, but many Bolsonaro supporters at the polls Sunday steadfastly believed them.
“We can’t just have one bathroom for a kid to use with men of my age,” said Mario Antonio Castro, an actor who voted for Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro’s Flamengo neighborhood. He said he’d also heard that Lula was offering “beer and steak” to those who voted for him.
Others saw a civic duty in voting out Bolsonaro, who in recent days claimed that Lula’s strong support in the Brazilian Northeast — a region with a disproportionately large population of people of color — was due to high “illiteracy rates” there.
“I’m a Black woman and I am a mother of three kids,” said Vanda Ventura, a 49-year old stylist who voted in Rio. “The government in Brasilia does not represent me.” Asked if she thought Black people in Brazil would vote for Bolsonaro, she said: “Not the Black people I know. … The Black people who want liberty, who want to go to college, and want to grow and who want food will not vote for this genocidal man.”
In the capital, national tensions came to a head at a downtown polling station, where several voters wearing the telltale colors of their candidates — green and yellow for Bolsonaro, red for Lula — squared off in slur-shouting screaming matches, signaling the deep polarization in the country.
“Bolsonaro out!” a young man wearing a red shirt shouted at the polling station at the University Center of Brasilia. “Maconheiro!” — a derogatory word in Portuguese that roughly translates as ‘stoner’ — the woman shouted back.
The same woman engaged another Lula supporter in a similar shouting match, leading police to intervene. Leonardo Rodrigues de Jesus, Bolsonaro’s nephew and a former chief of staff for his eldest son, told a Washington Post reporter that a man shouting at a woman was “precisely the kind of leftist behavior” the country needed to get rid of.
Critics say Bolsonaro, a former army officer, has undermined democracy by stocking the prosecutor’s office and police with loyalists while appointing current and former generals to his cabinet and other senior posts. If he had won the race, they feared, he might have sought to expand the Supreme Court, a body he has said is biased against him.
Lula, casting himself as the defender of Brazil’s young democracy, garnered the backing of center-right leaders and former opponents, including former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Bolsonaro, known for a blunt manner that included insults aimed at women, people of color and the LGBTQ community, connected with supporters through fiery social media posts. As the coronavirus pandemic hit the country hard, he suggested vaccines could turn people into “reptiles,” falsely claimed a link between the vaccine and AIDS, and touted unproven treatments against covid-19. Bolsonaro dismissed the virus as a “little flu” and told Brazilians to stop “whining” and get back to work. He often berated the free press.
During the first televised debate in the current campaign, Brazilian journalist Vera Magalhães asked him about the country’s coronavirus vaccination rate. “I think you go to sleep thinking about me,” Bolsonaro responded to her. “You have a crush on me.”
But Bolsonaro often reserved his harshest comments for the man he saw as his personal nemesis: Lula.
A former shoeshine boy from a poor northeastern family who lost a finger at age 19 in a factory accident, Lula became a union leader and co-founder of the left-wing Worker’s Party. After three failed runs at the nation’s highest office, he won his first term as president in 2002 and reelection four years later.
His victory initially rattled investors, who feared the rise of a radical leftist.
Lula would calm those fears by dragging his party toward the center while he leveraged the global commodities boom of the 2000s to increase social spending and launch programs that reduced the hunger rate, lifted millions out of poverty and sent the children of poor Brazilian families to university for the first time. Former U.S. President Barack Obama called him “the most popular president on Earth.” He left office in 2011 with a second term in 2011 with an approval rating above 80 percent.
His administration was marred by political scandal, including a vote-buying case in Congress that engulfed members of his inner circle. Claims have emerged that Lula knew about it. He has maintained he did not.
In 2018, Lula turned himself in to serve a 12-year sentence on separate charges of accepting bribes from one of the country’s major construction companies. Though Lula maintained his innocence, his arrest kept him out of the 2018 election that Bolsonaro won. To the outrage of Bolsonaro, who has called Lula “a nine-fingered thief,” he was released from prison in 2019 when the Supreme Court ruled he had been denied due process. The charges against him were annulled two years later.
“They didn’t lock up a man,” he declared on the day he was freed. “They tried to kill an idea. But an idea can’t be destroyed.”
During the campaign, Lula largely spoke in broad themes. He promised to fight hunger and poverty and to slow the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, which accelerated under Bolsonaro, and suggested an increase of taxes on the rich. Few observers believe he is likely to propose massive spending plans or take radical steps to redistribute wealth.
“Lula understands well that all policies have to be fiscally sustainable and that large budget deficits will backfire in his attempt to be progressive in social issues,” said Paulo Calmon, a University of Brasilia professor.
What Bolsonaro does next will be key. Some say he might leave the country to avoid the possibility of prosecution for alleged crimes including a bloated vaccine deal at the health ministry and mishandling the pandemic. Others expect him to remain in Brazil, transforming himself into a formidable opposition leader who will seek to undermine Lula and stoke national divisions as he bides his time for the next election.
Bolsonaro can count on a loyal base of outspoken national lawmakers, as well as powerful governors in some of the country’s largest states. His most powerful weapon remains an army of digital followers, which he has wielded as a weapon to build or destroy political careers.
In governing a divided nation, Lula might benefit from the nature of Brazilian politics. Victors may draw lawmakers who did not back them during the campaign to fall in line with pork barrel spending and backroom deals.
But some observers see a wild card this time around.
“The nature of the right in Brazil has changed,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo. “All they cared about before were office positions and resources, so Lula could run an administration even with the help of the right. But there’s a new kind of right, a super ideological kind of right, a Bolsonarista kind of right. And the pro-Bolsonaro movement is not about political pragmatism. It’s about total loyalty and submission to what Bolsonaro thinks is right.”
Via White Crane Institute // HALLOWEEN
2020 -
HALLOWEEN -- The modern holiday of Halloween has its origins in the ancient Gaelic festival known as Samhain ("Sow-in" or alternatively "Sa-ven", meaning: End of the Summer). The Festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is frequently regarded as 'The Celtic New Year'.
Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Whether or not the ancient Celts considered Samhain to be the beginning of the new year, or just one point in the cycle of the seasons, the living traditions in the Celtic lands and the diaspora regard it as the "Celtic New Year" and it continues to be celebrated as such. For instance, the calendars produced by the Celtic League begin and end at Samhain/Halloween.
The Ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and cause havoc such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, where the bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them. When the Romans occupied Celtic territory, several Roman traditions were also incorporated into the festivals. Feralia, a day celebrated in late October by the Romans for the passing of the dead as well as a festival which celebrated the Roman Goddess Pomona, the goddess of fruit were incorporated into the celebrations. The symbol of Pomona was an apple, which is a proposed origin for the tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween
The carved pumpkin, lit by a candle inside, is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. This is an Irish tradition of carving a lantern which goes back centuries. These lanterns are usually carved from a turnip or "swede." The carving of pumpkins was first associated with Halloween in North America, where the pumpkin was available, and much larger and easier to carve. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their home's doorstep after dark.
The jack-o-lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard drinking old farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree, and trapped him by carving a cross into the trunk of the tree. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack which dooms him to forever wander the earth at night. For centuries, the bedtime parable was told by Irish parents to their children. But in America the tradition of carving pumpkins is known to have preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration, and the tradition of carving vegetable lanterns may also have been brought over by the Scottish or English; documentation is unavailable to establish when or by whom. The carved pumpkin was associated generally with harvest time in America, and did not become specifically associated with Halloween until the mid to late 19th century.
This “in between time” has long been one which Gay people have taken on as their own holiday, reveling in masks and costumes. There are reasons Halloween is so closely associated with Gay people, some of which author and long-time White Crane contributor, Arthur Evans explained in his wonderful series of lectures in San Francisco in the mid-1970s which later became his book, Witchcraft and The Gay Counterculture. Here is a brief excerpt:
One Celtic male deity … is the horned god, “one of the most basic of the Celtic god types,” whose worship goes back to the Stone Age. He is often associated with the Mothers, as well as with sex, animals, and nature. He also seems to have links with male shamans. His great antiquity is shown by a Stone Age painting in Ariege, France, which shows a man dancing in the hide of an animal and wearing the antlers of a stag. And in the eighteenth century, construction workers inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris uncovered a four-sided Celtic stone altar dating from Roman times and bearing the figure of a bearded male deity with antlers. The stone was inscribed with the word Cernunnos, which means “The Horned One.”
The horned god was especially linked with male sexuality and often appears with an erect cock. Moreover, when erect, he is sometimes portrayed in the company of men, not women. A drawing of the horned god from Val Camonica, Italy, shows him holding a ceremonial collar ring in one hand and a horned serpent in the other. He is being worshiped by a man, and the man has an erection. This picture is reminiscent of early art scattered throughout Europe. The men often have erections and appear together in groups without women. In view of the Celts’ notoriety for homosexuality, these facts suggest a Gay element in the workshop of the horned god.
The horned god was also lord of the dead and the underworld. To the Celts, who believed in reincarnation, darkness and death were parts of the cycle of life and rebirth, and death was the very place where the creative forces of nature brought about new life. Because of this connection with the underworld the horned god was often shown as black in color. But this blackness was not considered evil, as Christianity later viewed it.
The depiction of the Celtic male god as an animal with horns is understandable in terms of the economy and religion of the times. Stone age Europe was dependent for its very existence upon the hunting of reindeer, red deer, and elk. Among the first animals to be domesticated were sheep and goats. Ancient Europeans, like all nature people, worshipped the animals they depended on, in contrast to modern, “civilized” people who objectify and destroy animals with all the impersonal violence that only scientific industrialism can devise.
The Celts dated the feast days of their religion according to the changing of the seasons, the breeding habits of animals, and the sowing and harvesting of crops. As in Judaism, feasts began on the night before the holiday. The four greatest Celtic holidays (with their Irish names) were Samhain (November 1); Imbolc (February 1); Beltaine (May 1) ; and Lugnasadh (August 1). These holidays were celebrated with ritual sexual promiscuity.
As it happens, these dates correspond exactly with the holidays later attributed by medieval Christians to witches. The Christians called these days, respectively, Halloween, Candlemas, Walpurgisnacht, and Lammas. Two other holidays were also celebrated by both Celts and witches: the winter solstice, December 21, surviving as the Feast of Fools; and the summer solstice, June 23, surviving as Midsummer Night. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in the late sixteenth century, has echoes of this holiday. The play is full of magic, faeries, human and animal sexuality. It features a leading character named Puck, or Robin Goodfellow – a descendent of the horned god.
Ritual transvestism associated with the old holidays continued in Europe down to modern times. “May Day sports perpetuated the practices, including even transvestism, and…in Wales, there existed, into the nineteenth century, a peasant dance and march with a garland, led by a dancer [a horned god figure] called the “Cadi.” In the twentieth century England such celebrations as the Helston Furry Dance, the Morris Dances, and the Peace Egg Mumming Play continued the tradition. In the Homanay celebration in Scotland, “the boys wore skirts and bonnets, the girls, hats and greatcoats.” The feast of Fools, a remnant of the old pagan religion, has persisted into modern times with clerics “wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of the office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, or disreputable men, or minstrels. They sing wanton songs.” Today many Gay people throughout Europe and America observe Halloween as a Gay holiday with transvestite celebrations. Originally, Halloween was one of the great holidays of the old religion – the Night of All Souls.
Excerpted from The Evans Symposium: Witchcraft & the Gay Counterculture and Moon Lady Rising, Arthur Evans,
© 2019 White Crane Books, ISBN: 078-1-7322844-0-1
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering
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Via Daily Dharma: Feeding Our Demons
When
we understand how to feed our demon’s real need with fearless
generosity, the energy tied up in our demon will tend to dissolve and
become an ally.
Lama Tsultrim Allione, “Feeding Your Demons”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
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