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Comment by nickserv | Hacker News Reader

A big difference between Brazil and the USA is that until 1985, Brazil was a dictatorship. The kind that "disappears" and tortures journalists and political opponents.

So lots of people still alive today remember those days and understand the danger of politicians like Bolsonaro. People like the current president Lula, who was imprisoned during the dictatorship.

The USA on the other hand, has never had a dictatorship in living memory. It's even debatable whether pre-independence it was a dictatorship, and in any case it is so far removed from the present that it has no impact on everyday life.

Maybe for this reason there is a feeling of "it can't happen here". An exceptional ism that is not unwarranted given the incredible social and economic progress made.

But this attitude is perhaps the most dangerous one can have towards fascism.

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You overestimate how much people remember of the dictatorship, my parents were very much pro-Bolsonaro and they lived through the dictatorship.

Fact is for most of the population, especially the poorest, the dictatorship was not as oppressive directly against them. The secret police was going after intellectuals and universities. And censoring media of course. The average person only cared because the dictatorship was running the country economy into the ground.

This is true as well, and in fact not uncommon for a dictatorship to have decent support as long as the economy is good. See: China (although unlike Brazil I have no direct experience there).

It's also a well worn play book at this point to have people vote against their interests when given some enemy: religious or ethnic minorities, atheists, immigrants, a foreign power, etc...

In any case I completely agree with all your points. Just that the situation is even more dangerous when the society has no experience dealing with dictators.

Yes. People in postcommunist coutries are always the first to give up on democracy. While they want own freedom, they tend to be bothered by freedom of others and many have nostalgia for "order". They see corruption as an opportunity and autocracy facilitates that.

This makes me feel so doomed and sad about US future meh.

Same here in Portugal.

My parents were in their early-to-mid 20s when the dictatorship ended here, and my mom speaks fondly of our dictator Salazar. She lost 2 out of 12 brothers and sisters — 3 months and 4 years old, respectively — to perfectly curable diseases, and 2 others are crippled because of health complications when they were children. None of the 10 that made it to adulthood studied past the 6th grade. My dad was sent to a Catholic boarding school 300 km away from his mom when he was 10, because she couldn't feed him; he only studied until the 4th grade and started working when he was 11 years old.

My mom votes for Chega, the far-right party, and my wife is an immigrant (and I'm an ex-emigrant). She resents her life, and Chega rides on that resentment. It's very painful to see loved ones drift into this hate.

Plenty of people remember the dictatorship quite fondly. It was a time when Brazil tried pretty hard to develop its own industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers at some point, that bit of history has even been posted here on HN. The Lua programming language was born in the military dictatorship. Their goal was to replace technology imports with national versions.

Before the economic recession and hyperinflation, Brazil enjoyed an economic boom: the so called "brazilian miracle". Many brazilian industries became successful during those times. Including the steel industry my city is built around.

Today Brazil is just the world's soy farm. To put it mildly. The country of wasted potential.

> until 1985, Brazil was a dictatorship

It's a dictatorship today. Has been since at least 2019. The unelected supreme court is ruling the country.

> The kind that "disappears" and tortures journalists and political opponents.

Nothing's changed, that's still the case today. Plenty of journalists, opponents, judges dead in mysterious circumstances. Including the judge who mysteriously died and made room for Alexandre de Moraes, who the USA would go on to sanction via Magnitsky. Even Bolsonaro himself suffered an assassination attempt.

> People like the current president Lula, who was imprisoned during the dictatorship.

Yeah, because he's a socialist who openly schemes to install socialism in Brazil. You know, the exact thing the military dictatorship wanted to prevent.

He was also imprisoned during our democracy for record breaking corruption, before the supreme court threw out all the evidence and set him free to take out Bolsonaro.

> The USA on the other hand, has never had a dictatorship in living memory.

They've never had presidents that openly admit to plotting to install socialism in their country either. Good thing they have the CIA to get rid of such subversives. Socialism should be criminalized, just like nazism.

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