Getúlio Vargas and the Middle Class Revolution

Getúlio, in turn, was not a nationalist and much less an aristocrat of the spirit, but rather the most fanatical of Getulistas...

< Homage to the Counterrevolution of 1932 >

One of the most famous repeated lies, and therefore considered the absolute truth by the most uneducated masses, is the totally stupid cliché that Getúlio Vargas, the dictator, was the best president in Brazil. To begin with, Getúlio Vargas was only elected president in 1951; before being a scammer. For many, the victory in the elections was the confirmation of the excellent government of the pot-bellied dictator, but for us – heirs of the 1932 counterrevolution – this election endorsed the power of idiotization caused by populism.

Some Getulistas would even like to claim that their favorite evil created, perhaps like a God, Eletrobrás, Petrobrás, and even the Post Office (yes, even the Post Office - I've heard that). Could it be that Getúlio Vargas also wrote the Odyssey? The Correios were created in 1663. The Companhia Brasileira de Energia Elétrica, in 1909 and the oil extraction laws began in 1858, with the Marquis of Olinda. Industrialization began with Rui Barbosa and his Policy of Encilhamento, which despite high inflation, achieved an extraordinary GDP growth, guaranteeing the best performance in the history of Brazil in terms of fixed capital goods for the Old Republic.

If everything was going so well, why would our man, who looks like an 8-month pregnant woman, want to take a hit? The real reason: he lost the election and appealed. Reason given: election fraud. Now, only 5% of the population voted in those elections (only nobles). There was no fraud. This is every scammer's lame excuse. Minas, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Sul succumbed to envy and violated their richest sister, the beautiful São Paulo at the time. Ironically, Getúlio Vargas had a pathetic macroeconomic performance, with the average GDP even worse than that of Sarney, the financial fragility greater than that of Figueiredo, the volume of investments lower than that of Lula, and finally, according to the renowned work of Professor Reinaldo Gonçalves from UFRJ: "Developmentalism in Reverse", Getúlio Vargas had greater external vulnerability than Dilma Rousseff had.

Another point seems fundamental: how was the 1930 Revolution possible in terms of feasibility? The conjuncture used we all know; it was the crisis of 1929 and the murder, for reasons of passion, of João Pessoa. However, the great mistake of the Old Republic, our aristocratic public thing, was to extend the imitation of the American State system, the National System, essentially Developmentalist, to also imitate the Federalist State Form of Alexander Hamilton. Since the ordinances of the Kingdom, our form was Municipalist, the Municipal Republics (as they were called and well described by master Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira) and Federalism, in contrast, became the mausoleum of the Old Republic. Getúlio, used the power of the state armies to strike, but he himself, in 1936, removed the military autonomy of the Federated States, so as not to suffer the same evil that he inflicted on others.

Furthermore, understanding who our pregnant protagonist's enemies are is essential: men who freed slaves, abolitionist landowners; men with the ideal of Marechal Deodoro and Marechal Floriano, who despite the "iron hand", gently passed power to the Civilians, setting a military example for the world that, as we know, was not followed by the protagonist of this chronicle. Mr. Getúlio Vargas, and his authoritarian, bureaucratic and Weberian State, are enemies of the powerful and exuberant model of the anthropophagic integral man of cultures proposed by the Modern Art Week of 1922. He implanted a model of an alien State, totally different from Brazilian customs, placing jeopardize national security by disbanding state armies. Finally, he persecuted the São Paulo aristocracy, weakening the richest state in the country.

As if all the betrayal by our sole dictator wasn't enough, just as Hermes da Fonseca tried, in the Politics of Salvations, our "embarrassed" pot-bellied man managed to disarm the landlord colonels, former members of the National Guard, and therefore weaken our power of reaction against foreign force.

Realize that it is much more difficult to invade a country whose farms each have 200 armed jagunços than a country that has only its army. In fact, Mr. Getúlio Vargas only wanted his own power and not Brazil's. Just like a repressive and self-centered mother, our dictator was just (said to poor left-wing Pink Floyd listeners): "another brick in the wall". Who knows?

The CLT, also placed on a pedestal as a feat of our "authoritarian mother", deserves an idiosyncratic analysis:

From the moment the worker is reduced to a specific function, a specialty, a profession, we also cut his soul in half or more. As we said before, this human is no longer psychosocially whole, as proposed by the brothers Oswald and Mário de Andrade, but an instrument of the State, in the form of a mixed economy, or as an employee of private profitable companies. A new fantastic and insidious way of enslaving was invented. The citizen will not be complete, but he will have labor rights. And to be a professional, you need to train, not in what you like, not in what will increase your health, but in what interests the boss and the Dictatorial Corporate State.

On the other hand, the landed elite and military vanguard of the old republic valued the citizen with complete psychosocial structure, also the afro-descendant, and, the greatest proof of this, is the abundant number of colonels from the black hinterland, the most famous of them being the implacable Horácio de Mattos, mysteriously killed by Getulistas after having negotiated disarmament. By the way, if there is one thing that Getúlio invented, together with his racist police chief Filinto Muller (who would later participate in the 1964 coup), it was to equip the police to repress political enemies. All this internal energy to threaten, persecute, imprison, torture and kill compatriots, made our cowardly dictator forget to develop our armed forces against external enemies. In 1945, we no longer had the vigorous São Paulo elite as our leader, but were at the mercy of the hegemony of the North American bourgeoisie, without even participating in the arms race that preceded the War.

In the end, the Revolution of 1930 is essentially a middle-class revolution, in which the technician wants to rule over the engineer; the nurse in the doctor, and – as a nickname: "tenentismo" – the lieutenants wanting to command the generals. For its absolute illegitimacy, for its pathetic intellectual subversion, Vargas needed to be authoritarian; in fact, far from the aristocracy there are no customs, etiquette or common sense. Getúlio Vargas, this “weak Napoleon”, like drunken men who only have the courage to beat their own family, who was representative of these semi-vulgar, average, mediocre categories, could never govern with dialogue, but with ordinary stupidity.

Moreover, the pregnant dictator was more bitter about losing the elections than the slaveholders were about losing their slaves. Even the Conservatives were less radical and hundreds of times more nationalistic than Mr. Getúlio because, even losing the slaves, they did not lose their patriotism. Brazil was more important to those old nobles. Getúlio, in turn, was not a nationalist and much less an aristocrat of the spirit, but rather the most fanatical of Getulistas. He didn't know how to lose, he would like to be the "sun president" and he committed suicide precisely because of that. Fools are also Getulistas, but I don't like the solution proposed by the idol: self-sacrifice for Brazil.

Patriotic Greetings,

Douglas Mattos.

Philosopher.