Brazil Apart
1964-2019
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Leading English-language account of the fall of Lula’s Workers’ Party and rise of Bolsonaro and the New Right
What does Brazil’s lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America’s largest country, and how has it come about? Always something of a world unto itself, Brazil became, under the Workers’ Party from 2003 to 2016, “the theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major state.” Bucking the global trend towards a tighter neoliberalism, former steelworker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva swept aside the broken promises of previous years to invest in social transfers, defying vituperations in the Brazilian media to become the most popular ruler of the age. But in a second spectacular reversal, a parliamentary coup d’état against Lula’s successor—backed by forces in the judiciary and a youthful New Right—has been consolidated by Bolsonaro’s 2018 capture of the Planalto. With the PT’s lodestar now behind bars, a weighing up of his legacy, and of the contrasting Bolsonaro regime, is urgently needed. Brazil Apart is the sharp-edged, comprehensive analytic account required.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Sonabend delivers a spirited account of the 43 Group, an organization founded by Anglo-Jewish soldiers to fight the revival of fascist groups in post-WWII England. Though a 1940 crackdown banned former member of parliament Oswald Mosley's British Union and other pro-Nazi groups, as the war progressed and the threat of German invasion diminished, Mosley's followers reemerged to spread their anti-Semitic and anti-Communist views. In May 1946, four Jewish ex-soldiers fought with a fascist speaker and his bodyguards at a London park; later that month, they detailed the encounter in a letter published in the Jewish Chronicle. Drawing other veterans frustrated by the unwillingness of the British government and mainstream Jewish groups to oppose what they called "anti-Jewish activities," the "ragtag band" became "a real anti-fascist organisation," Sonabend writes. (Accounts vary as to whether the group's name was arbitrarily chosen or based on the number of people at its first official meeting.) Members, including future celebrity hair stylist Vidal Sassoon, created a sophisticated intelligence operation and engaged in violent street battles with fascists. Sonabend's granular level of detail may be best suited to readers with a specialized interest in the subject, but he presents an eye-opening portrait of the era's political and social turmoils. Modern-day antifascists will find valuable lessons in this movement history.
