Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, is often associated with the motto: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.” Although he may not have said the exact phrase, this principle guided his strategy of manipulation.
Goebbels used incessant repetition to consolidate Nazi lies within German society. Through films, radio broadcasts, newspapers, and posters, false narratives—such as the supposed Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany or the “stab-in-the-back myth” after World War I—became widely accepted as reality, justifying the actions of Adolf Hitler’s regime.
This motto was put into effect with the total centralization of German media. Goebbels applied the concept of “Gleichschaltung” (“coordination”) to eliminate opposing voices and unify all cultural production under Nazi control. Without alternative sources of information, the German population was continuously bombarded with carefully crafted lies, repeated relentlessly. The mastermind behind the Nazi propaganda and lies machine portrayed, for example, the invasion of Poland as a defensive measure, a false justification that, because of repetition, seemed plausible to many. The constant reiteration of these lies completely blurred the line between truth and fiction, allowing the regime to manipulate public opinion on a large scale.
Well, Alexandre de Moraes’ Brazil has just put Goebbels to shame. It’s not hard to imagine the minister from one of humanity’s darkest eras looking astonishingly at the justice from one of Brazil’s darkest eras and saying: “I am in awe!”
The latest gambit by Moraes and his private police would make any member of the Gestapo envious: attempting to incriminate regime opponents not only with lies after lies, but, when these “don’t become truth,” even with tireless repetition, distorting them to the most pathetic degree—so absurd that we even begin to question our sanity.
In yet another week filled with news that seem to have been taken from an Orwell novel, the Federal Police announced this Thursday, November 21, that Filipe Martins, former advisor for international affairs to Jair Bolsonaro, “simulated going to the USA to hide from the police.”
Yes, you read that correctly: Filipe Martins, who was imprisoned for more than six months based on the allegation that he had left the country without registration, circumventing the immigration system, is now being accused of, in fact, “simulating records” to deceive the Federal Police and make them believe he had left the country.
For a long time, the thesis of Moraes’ police and the justice himself basically claimed that Martins had left Brazil and entered the United States of America without being seen by anyone, since there was no documentation of either exit or entry, and came back unseen again—since he was arrested at his fiancée’s residence in southern Brazil. Practically the new Houdini.
The chronology of the persecution of Filipe is worthy of a movie. After proving with airline tickets from Brasília to Curitiba that he had not traveled outside Brazil, the former advisor’s defense proved through documentation from Orlando customs police that Filipe Martins’ last entry into the USA had been on September 20, 2022, at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. On that occasion, the former advisor accompanied then-President Jair Bolsonaro to the UN General Assembly.
After the official information from the U.S. Immigration Department became news in Brazil, curiously “a new entry” for Filipe was “found in the system” of American migration—this time in Orlando. However, in the “new entry” Martins’ name was incorrectly registered (it was spelled “Felipe” instead of “Filipe”). The passport number entered was also wrong; it was an old number from a diplomatic passport that had been lost and canceled by Filipe himself two years earlier.
Martins’ defense immediately pointed out the glaring errors in the new record, sending copies of his valid document and showing the impossibility of Filipe having entered the United States on that date, even more so with a canceled diplomatic passport. The agency responded that it would correct the information, but instead of removing the entry that the defense proved to be inaccurate, it merely replaced the data in the system with Filipe’s current data.
Martins’ defense then contacted the American federal authorities, and an investigation was formally opened by higher authorities. Three weeks later, the case was closed, attesting that there were anomalies in the procedure and that the new fraudulent record should be immediately removed.
And now, what to do? After the “most absolute certainty” that Filipe Martins had left Brazil without due immigration registration—and for this reason, his arrest was ordered—the new thesis of the Federal Police and Alexandre de Moraes takes a 180° turn and tries to pass the buck they themselves created to Filipe, claiming that he simulated records to trick the Federal Police into believing that he had left the country.
Come on! It’s either one thesis or the other—the two just don’t intersect! In fact, they cancel each other out! If Moraes and his cronies in the Federal Police opt for this new path, they will simply be admitting that they kept Filipe Martins imprisoned based on a lie that they themselves concocted. They will also be admitting that they were negligent and arrested the former advisor without conducting any due diligence to investigate the “suspicion” they had regarding him.
The strange turnaround by Alexandre de Moraes and the Federal Police increases the list of questions that need to be answered urgently, starting with the most intriguing of them:
Who tried to falsify Filipe Martins’ entry into the United States?
But there are others:
- Does the Federal Police or someone linked to the institution have any involvement in this fraud?
- Why only now, after Donald Trump’s victory, has the migration thesis been changed—and so radically?
- Who would fear that the Trump government investigated the agents that attempted to falsify Filipe’s entry into the USA—an entry never succeeded by an exit?
- Is the Federal Police really going to try to push the problem onto the U.S. government, as if the grotesque judicial abuse they committed against Filipe Martins were the result of a bizarre plot in which someone presents two passports upon entry to the USA (Filipe’s only passport at that time had been canceled prior to the alleged trip) and is not immediately arrested?
One thing is certain: after Joe Biden’s chaotic open border policy, Trump was elected with an uncompromising national security agenda—and thus, this matter will be treated as a national security case. You don’t circumvent the American immigration system with fraudulent insertions without severe punishments—in this case, for a serious federal crime.
Despite Filipe Martins’ tormentors having lied and distorted the truth—and even their own lies—, they still haven’t managed to identify his crime, press charges, or produce evidence for the supposed crime that no one knows.
And the most absolute insanity of Alexandre de Moraes doesn’t stop only at the thesis that Filipe traveled to the USA—which he didn’t do, since he was arrested in Brazil—and now that he didn’t go but pretended he did. Filipe Martins, after being illegally imprisoned for six months, continues under an extensive list of restrictions: he cannot go out at night or on weekends, he cannot leave the city where he lives with his fiancée, he cannot post on his social networks, he cannot give interviews, in addition to needing to appear weekly at the local forum. One of Moraes’ political prisoners is also wearing an ankle monitor without ever having been tried and convicted and continues to be watched by the Federal Police. His freedom is constrained, and he continues under unjustifiable censorship, persecution, and abuse.
According to the famous scandalous dialogues of the Brazilian Judiciary involving Alexandre de Moraes’ two aides, Airton Vieira and Eduardo Tagliaferro, the conversation mentioning a possible censorship of Oeste magazine posed a “problem”—Tagliaferro allegedly warned that he had not found anything wrong with the magazine—only “journalistic publications” that “weren’t saying anything too much”—and that he wouldn’t know how to fulfill the request from his boss, Moraes, for them to find something abominable on the news outlet. Then, Vieira replies to his comrade with the naturalness of a Stalinist: “Use your creativity… lol.”
Perhaps we should change the words on our flag from “Order and Progress” to “Use Your Creativity.” It seems to be our current motto.
In the Brazil of those condemned to 17 years in prison for the crime of writing “lost, dummy” with lipstick on a statue, we now have another horror—a citizen who, without committing any crime, was accused of having left the country without passing through the immigration system, but now is being persecuted for not having left the country indeed but having pretended to leave. The curious thing is that, after all this magic, Filipe, the Ninja, “was hiding” in his own house and was arrested there. A far-fetched plan.
Crazy stuff.
Creativity abounds.
Meanwhile, Brazil pays for the crime of “When he [Moraes] obsesses, it’s a tragedy.”
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