BRAZIL
The conservative president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, lost election to former president Lula da Silva. The election was close but, by virtually all accounts, it was legitimate.
Bolsonaro has support that exceeds that of Donald Trump, in the U.S. Millions of Brazilians just couldn't believe that he had lost the election. There were demonstrations in front of military bases, people asking the military to take control and keep Bolsonaro in office. Bolsonaro himself expressed skepticism of the process of democracy similar to that of Donald Trump while he was U.S. President. It should come as no surprise that Trump and Bolsonaro are friends.
What could be going on here? Brazil has been looked to as one of the world's largest democracies.
To understand this we have to understand what we saw in "The Theory Of Kings", April 2022. With modern constitutions and democracy it may appear that the world has mostly done away with kings and queens, or at least confined them within the constitution as "constitutional monarchs".
But we haven't. Societies have been ruled by kings and queens and emperors for thousands of years, and they are not going away just because a constitution has been drafted. All that we do today is call monarchs by different names.
The French Revolution, of 1789, did open the modern political era by having the king and queen of France overthrown and guillotined, and replaced by a republic. The objective of the revolution was to eliminate kings and queens altogether, but it was only a partial success.
Not too many countries are monarchies today, and the majority of those that are tend to be constitutional monarchies. But instead of actual kings we get demagogues that act like kings, and are really kings in all but name. Even in democracies these demagogues tend to alternate with truly democratic leaders. The democratic leaders represent after the French Revolution while the demagogues represent before the revolution.
Again being that monarchy has been only partially eliminated since the French Revolution my belief is that a country is better off having a constitutional monarchy, rather than no monarchy at all. A country with a constitutional monarch is less likely to end up with a demagogue ruler that acts like a king.
To understand the un-democratic support behind Jair Bolsonaro we have to understand that Brazil was at one time an empire, and before that it was an autonomous kingdom as part of the Portuguese Empire.
Brazil's capital of Rio De Janeiro was once actually the capital of the entire Portuguese Empire, when Portugal itself was threatened by the forces of Napoleon the capital was moved to Brazil. After Brazil gained independence from Portugal it became an empire itself, rather than a republic, and for a time ruled what is now Uruguay.
To show how important the French Revolution is in opening the modern political era the Brazilian Empire was ultimately overthrown, and Brazil became a republic, in 1889, which is the centennial of the French Revolution.
So to understand the undemocratic support behind Jair Bolsonaro we have to understand Brazil's history of being an empire and that he is really Dom Pedro III.
ISRAEL
Israel now has it's most religious and right-wing government ever. What is happening is really simple. We saw in the posting "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", January 2017, how it was the Iranian Revolution, which began in 1979, that turned the tide of the world moving, apparently inexorably, away from religion toward secularism back toward religion. But this applies to all religions, not only Islam.
The Iranian Revolution has arrived in, of all places, Israel.
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