Brazilian congressman and president’s son Eduardo Bolsonaro wants to introduce prison sentences for the production, sale or distribution of the hammer and sickle and five-pointed star imagery, classifying it as a hate symbol.
Bolsonaro Jr. introduced his bill on Tuesday, September 2, in commemoration “of the invasion of Poland by Nazis and later communists.” The congressman said that the idea behind the potential law is “to prevent genocides, which are the result of Nazism and communism, just as the penal code criminalizes the murder of an individual.”
And he wants the punishment to be comparable to one for a serious crime – from nine to fifteen years in prison. Bolsonaro’s legislative effort also includes a plan to rename any public places or institutions currently bearing the names of communism or Nazism-related persons, events or, even, ideas.
Bolsonaro Jr.’s project came on the heels of him causing a diplomatic conflict in March between Brazil and the People’s Republic of China. The lawmaker called the communist party’s rule a “dictatorship,” and blamed it for the Covid-19 pandemic.
Both the congressman and his father Jair Bolsonaro are outspoken anti-communists, along with the crux of their respective parties, the Social Liberals and the Alliance for Brazil. This fact has notably increased tensions between the country and some of its neighbors like Cuba and Venezuela.
Eduardo Bolsonaro even attached some anti-communist materials to his bill announcement on Twitter. One gruesome photo got some extra attention. Bolsonaro claimed they were the starved victims of the Holodomor, a famine which happened in Soviet Ukraine in the ‘30s and is widely believed to have been caused by the government.
Twitter users eagerly jumped at the chance to take the president’s son down a peg, and pointed out that the image was captured in British colonial India, during the Bengal Famine in the ‘40’s.
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