EXTREME POLITICS

The film “BOPE: Tropa de Elite” is rocking Brazil right now. Despite leaking to the internet and (more importantly) to Brazil’s vast network of street DVD dealers weeks before, it hit theaters nationwide this past weekend and is breaking records.

The film’s explosive success and the way it resonates with practically everybody in all corners of Brazilian society make it certain to have a profound influence on the subject it tackles: society’s response to corruption, crime, and drug use.

Since BOPE’s protagonists are elite Rio police who shoot drug dealers, kill for revenge, summarily execute corrupt police and freely use torture–sometimes on children–this is a very scary possibility.

BOPE

People are always concerned about the more immediate problems: earning a living, avoiding disease and warfare, keeping criminals away.

When crime becomes too vicious, people get rid of it the only way they can — by finding a government more vicious than the criminals. And if dissidence becomes illegal? Well, don’t be a dissident.

Most people are disconnected from politics except as it immediately affects them. As a result, they could care less about abstruse topics like human rights, international politics, and free speech. How does free speech help you earn a living, unless you work in newspapers?

BOPE is just the latest in a series of such events. Interestingly, one occurred first in the USA, where the “war on drugs” allowed police to become paramilitary — something that nation had up until then resisted.

Extreme politics: the action taken by those who care about our future but believe conventional politics cannot stop its decline, so we must seek other, often taboo, options like anarchy, greenism, libertarianism, nationalism, communism and fascism.

This is what I want to write about here.