The Brazilian president's son serves as a lawmaker in the chamber of representatives for the Social Liberal Party, an economically liberal, rabidly anti-communist party. The politician caused a minor diplomatic spat between Brasilia and Beijing in March after accusing China's communist "dictatorship" of unleashing the global coronavirus pandemic.
Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro has introduced a bill
to outlaw the creation of, sale, distribution or display of items containing the hammer and sickle or five-pointed star "for the purposes of propaganda of communism," equating the symbol with the Nazi Swastika, and proposing from 9 and 15 years in prison for violators.
In a
series of tweets about the bill, the lawmaker explained that he was
inspired by a 2015 Ukrainian law by the country's post-Maidan coup government which "prohibits communism and Nazism with a focus on freedom."
Bolsonaro stressed that his bill "aims to prevent genocides, which are the result of Nazism and Communism, just as the penal code criminalizes the murder of an individual."
The bill also proposes
renaming any streets, squares, public buildings or institutions named after any communism or Nazism-related persons, events or ideas.
"In justifying the project, I use factual examples of these misfortunes: the Holodomor in Ukraine (1st image) perpetrated by the Soviet communists, and the Holocaust carried out by the German Nazis (2nd image)," Bolsonaro added. However, his Twitter followers immediately pointed out to him that the image he posted of the Holodomor actually appears to be from the Bengal famine of 1943 in India, which was a British colony at the time.
Comment: According to the Omsk doctor who treated Navalny (before he was shipped off to Germany, before multiple agencies tested his blood finding nothing, and before one government-associated lab "identified" novichok in his sample), if Navalny was poisoned with the alleged Soviet novichok, others around him would have been affected too. He reiterated that no traces of toxic substances were found in his kidneys, liver, lungs.
But NATO and EU leaders are calling on Russia to conduct a full and transparent investigation into the alleged poisoning. Biden (via whoever writes his tweets) jumped on the idiot train with this:
Yes, hold the Putin regime accountable for whatever we say they did (truth about the matter in question be damned).
That said, once more Russia is backed into a corner and put on the defensive because of western-created narratives brought to you by their intelligence services. Paul Robinson, for example, argues that it is now in Russia's best interest to conduct such an investigation. Regardless of the Russian government's guilt or innocence, those against Putin (both outside and within Russia) will use any continued denials that Navalny wasn't poisoned, and any refusals to investigate, as evidence of guilt. If Navalny was poisoned, and it was either some rogue element of the Russian system, or some private individual or group, Robinson writes: Or, more likely, as with the Skripals, he was never poisoned with novichok in the first place, and the blood samples were contaminated by military/intelligence agencies who got their hands on the samples for "testing". But in this case, again as with the Skripals, it becomes almost impossible to defend yourself against such accusations because the culprits have "catapulted the propaganda" and already determined the narrative.
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