Comment by chbint
1 year ago
Most Brazilians agree that censorship is wrong. The problem is that "censorship" is a vague word.
We lived in an actual military dictatorship until 1985. A dictatorship that engaged in real hard prior-censorship. Music, news, and pieces of art were all subject to a military collegiate body that would decide what could and could not be published.
What's going on now is very, very different. Brazil, like most European countries, thinks that if you commit a crime through what you say, you can and must be held accountable. No one is being prevented from expressing their opinion.
> We lived in an actual military dictatorship until 1985. A dictatorship that engaged in real hard prior-censorship.
> What's going on now is very, very different.
In the months leading up to the elections, the judges censored a documentary about Bolsonaro before it was published. A priori censorship.
We are living in the exact same kind of authoritharian regime our parents lived through. The difference is our parents knew they were being oppressed.
I believe this requires context:
1) The producers of the documentary in question are a politically active group and well-known supporters of Bolsonaro.
1.1) They are also known for producing (and earning money from) content that spread misinformation, conspiracy theories and the like.
1.2) They always could, and they still can, produce and disseminate this kind of morally questionable content without being disturbed. They were never subject to a priori censorship, for we are not living under a dictatorship anymore.
2) In 2018, during the presidential campaign, Bolsonaro was the victim of an attack (stabbed). The suspect was arrested red-handed.
2.2) After that, a thorough investigation was carried out by the federal police (our FBI, so to speak) that concluded the suspect had mental issues and acted alone. There was no one "behind" the attempt.
2.3) Bolsonaro's personal lawyers, who followed the investigations, saw no elements to question nor to require further investigation, and in the criminal sphere, that's the end of the story.
2.4) However, as we could all expect, Bolsonaro politically exploited his attack. Up to this day, he or his supporters occasionally claim or imply that "this politician" or "that organization" is behind the attack he suffered. None of these claims can be grounded in the investigations carried out by the Police, and he never presents any evidence, not even circumstantial ones, for any of these claims. Long story short: he won the 2018 elections.
2.5) However, in 2022 there was no ongoing investigation anymore. Therefore, if he wants to point the finger towards someone, he has to do it by ignoring the conclusion of the investigations.
3) In 2022, while trying to get reelected, 6 *days* (not months) before the elections, the producers of the documentary in question (whose name is "Who ordered Bolsonaro to be killed?"), tried to release it online. The obvious goal was to exploit the attack politically in order to help Bolsonaro's reelection.
3.1) During the elections, as in many European countries, Brazil has specific rules designed to prevent economic abuse and fight disinformation that could cause a harmful imbalance in the electoral contest. You can't, for instance, accuse your adversary (or people from his campaign) of committing a crime without evidence (specially if the crime in question is something like ordering a murder) a few days before the election in the hope that people in shock vote for you. However, political supporters and campaigners use lots of well-known techniques to try to bypass these rules. One of them is to present Campaign information in the form of a "documentary".
4) That's why the electoral authorities preempted the producers from releasing the material 6 days before the election day as they planned. It could be released freely the day after the elections. And it was. It is there for anyone to see since then. That's what happened. Nothing like the heavy prior-censorship to which every journalist, artist and citizen was subjected to during our military dictatorship a few decades ago.
I hope this helps those interested in understanding Brazil's recent turmoil.
You seem to think this is some kind of valid excuse for the judge-king's behavior. In fact it only makes it worse. You do realize that, in the course of prohibiting censorship, the constitution makes it a point to explicitly mention political censorship, right?
I couldn't care less what the goal of the documentary was. I witnessed these judges censor it and as far as I'm concerned censorship equals dictatorship. It's that simple. If they did it with political motivations, that only makes it worse.
And I don't care for the judge-king's censorship of "misinformation" either. I'll judge for myself, thank you very much. I don't need his "help" to determine right from wrong. He's been doing this ministry of truth thing for around half a decade already and it's seriously tiresome. This is the same guy who censored accusations of communism against Lula, a self-admitted socialist. Censored the people who associated him with his dictator friends, and then we had to watch him roll out the red carpet for the Venezuelan one.
15 replies →
> (If) you commit a crime through what you say, you can and must be held accountable. No one is being prevented from expressing their opinion.
Freedom from speech isn’t the “right” of the people to express opinions. Freedom of Speech is a an explicit restriction on what the government is allowed to do after you speak, and more precisely, in response to unpopular speech.
Seems logically equivalent. If you have the right to express your opinions (no qualifier here, so they can be popular or not), that means no one can do anything to you (unless you commit a crime, of course). Perhaps one could argue that "speech" encompasses more than "opinion", but then the issue would become terminological.
Anyway, Brazil has freedom of speech in the very sense you've mentioned here. Unpopular speech is not a crime.
So no country have freedom of speech? Because in the U.S a person can't say that they will kill someone... Pretty sure that's a crime, right?
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