Pilha and Herzog confirm Brazilian society is no longer worried about human rights

Journalist Rodrigo Pilha (above with former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva) was severely tortured while in the custody of the Federal Government for being framed under the new National Security Law, summarily, accused of waving a hand-painted flag in the Praça dos Três Poderes in Brasilia with the inscription “Genocidal Bolsonaro”. You don’t need to be a legal expert or have any notion of justice to know that this is an absurd arrest in legal terms. It is the right of Pilha or anyone else to take to the streets and complain that friends, acquaintances, and relatives are dead or dying because of the Bolsonaro government’s inaction regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

It turns out that the absurdity of Rodrigo Pilha’s arrest now has not only a political persecution component typical of #lawfare. Pilha, who is forbidden by the courts to give interviews (another absurdity among so many absurdities), revealed to some acquaintances that he suffered typical torture practices in prison, from physical punishment by beatings to psychological suffering. Forced to return every day to the penitentiary and the care of his jailers by order of the Justice, Pilha is under total threat of death.

“Torture never again” expresses the pure sentiment that the civilizing process would lead to the general understanding that it would be inadmissible to subjugate any person by the imposition of another’s a will, in any considerable socially acceptable environment. It became a slogan, motto, and title of a historical book, which synthesizes through personal examples the cases of much suffering and deaths caused by these practices promoted by the Coup of 1964.

“Torture never again” became a plea for the rescue of the humanity that exists in every human being. Torture is a heritage of the middle ages, systematized to obtain rhetorical confessions. Those words in which the inquisitor makes a charge, whatever it may be, stick. Under torture, it is often said that the person assumes to be Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, depending on the time of the year. This is the only reason why torture subsists: the pain caused to the victim forces him to confess to anything, such as lies and/or betrayal.

Pilha has nothing important to confess to being treated as a threat to national security. The most serious alleged accusation against him, recalled by his torturers in prison, is that he was a “petista”. Thus, there is no longer the human being Rodrigo Pilha, but the embodiment of what he would represent as an enemy of the Brazilian state.

The child-eating “communist” of the propaganda era of the repression apparatus of the Mammonist-military dictatorship now gives way to the “petista” of the Military-mammonist dictatorship. Once again, this system of persecution and torture is based on the employment of the scoundrels, X9s, and “dedoduros” spread in public and private spaces, waiting for the chance to incriminate any Christian and take him to the ordeal of accusations admittedly without proof and crimes.

The Rodrigo Pilha case reminds us of another tragedy of Brazilian irrationality and brutality: the Wladimir Herzog case. Tortured and murdered inside São Paulo’s DOI-CODI, an Army organ for repression and elimination of people shouted as “subversives”, journalist Wladimir Herzog immortalized the phrase: “When we lose the capacity to be indignant with the atrocities practiced against others, we also lose the right to consider ourselves civilized human beings”. It seems that, due to the lack of repercussion of the Pilha case, the right to consider oneself a human being in Brazil is already extinct.

For Pilha, it would be an option to ask for political asylum in some embassy. Better this than to appear hanging from a prison window implying that he committed suicide in prison, as the press did with Herzog’s death.