Reviews for The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985

The average rating for The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-25 00:00:00 Wilfried Tepper i dont like reading books by non marxist historians because they tend to have weird politics but i was a bit surprised by this one. skidmore does a pretty good job writing about the brutal dictatorship years for a western audience. he does this thing i like where he writes real historical figures as sort of storybook characters. it helps humanize these people and bring those events to life. this is very good when you are trying to get through a rather dense telling of events. this is very bad when some of those humanized people are responsible for the torture of uncountable people. skidmore also has a huge hate boner for the communist parties at all stages of the dictatorship. marighella and his crew were the only people he had a grudging sort of respect for, and of course. as a brazilian communist reading this with bolsonaro in power, its hard not to respect the guerrillas so perhaps i am biased in that sense. but all the communists' internal arguments were displayed as incompetence or bad faith. rather than demonstrating any of the understanding he showed the liberal politicians, or even the military government, skidmore mocked and belittled these people who were being picked off one by one or massacred en mass. this engaging, airy tone persisted with the people in the military who were subjecting these supposedly incompetent communists who were being sexually and psychologically tortured. even if you believe that guerrilla warfare is inherently bad, i think acting that its worse than 25 years of state terrorism, often against innocent people, often against women and children, often just because a soldier could, is somehow less bad. but this is a digression. later when lula and the trade unionists came onto the scene, he deliberately made it sound like the communists werent themselves involved within those very trade unions and instead outsider ivory tower elitists. while its true that lula was never a communist, he never had any particular issue with them. yet skidmore really wants you to know that lula is NOT a communist, he is BETTER THAN a communist, and communists DID NOT have anything to do with the end of the dictatorship etc...man...we get it. normally i dont get up in arms about anticommunism like this from a bourgeois historian but its pretty goddamn insulting given how many of the deaths during the dictatorship were communists. brazil is known for having a relatively low (official) body count during our dictatorship but a good portion of people who were disappeared or murdered were communists, so it makes this endless whining about how ridiculous and silly the commies were a little more insulting to me than it usually is. i mentioned earlier about an official body count and while brazil is known for having a low official body count, deaths from forcing indigenous people off their land is typically not counted in the dictatorships death toll. specifically, the transamazonian highway gets discussed quite a bit since its one of the things dictatorship apologists love to uphold as a net positive even though in order to build it, thousands of indigenous people had to be displaced and killed. but skidmore just acts like the natives there were like...i dunno, gently scattered and not literally napalmed out of existence in some cases. while i very much appreciate skidmore for bringing this up (even among the left within brazil, what happened to indigenous people during the dictatorship doesnt really take center stage as often as i would like it to), i think the sheer level of violence against native people during the dictatorship kind of gets glossed over. and given how graphic he gets at some points maybe he could have talked about this a little more. ill give him the benefit of the doubt because when this book was written, im not really sure if the extent of the anti indigenous extermination was widely known. it sounds like all i have are negatives but i like to write about things that stand out to me. my experience with this book was overall positive. skidmore gets dry at times but i think thats just the nature of having to handle complicated economics discussions in order to set the scene for the average layperson. i dont know shit about economics and honestly it bored me to death, but the context was vital. i cant necessarily blame him for that. i alluded to this earlier but his writing does become quite engaging. its like reading a story. my favorite part was when he hyped up tancredo neves and i had to stop myself from laughing out loud on the train because i knew the guy was gonna fucking DIE before he had a chance to even take office. i dont know why i found that so funny. i guess someone who knew absolutely nothing about brazil would read that expecting neves's glorious democratic reign and then turn the page and find out he died and be like 'what the fuck' lmao but i also expect thats how people felt at the time too. i asked some of my relatives how they felt at the time (i was born in 1990 so i completely missed that drama) and they all pretty much told me that they thought he was pretty old but they didnt think the was going to fucking die before even taking office lmfao. this is so funny to me and i cant explain why especially because in hindsight it probably was a moment where everyones futures were up in the air. im giving it four stars for petty reasons (the anticommunism lol), but its competently written and thorough. skidmore passed relatively recently and there are few gringo bourgeois historians who dedicated themselves to brazilian political history like he did (perry anderson being the only other that comes to mind). id pick this up if youre curious about brazilian history and need some context for how we got to this point.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-02 00:00:00 Mary Anne Enriquez The best history of a unique form of dictatorship