Por Reinaldo Azevedo

E continuamos a assombrar o mundo com nossas provas inequívocas de modernidade. O International Herald Tribune publica uma notícia da Associated Press sobre as maravilhas dos livros didáticos distribuídos no Brasil (link aqui). O texto segue abaixo, num inglês tão fácil, que dispensa tradução. É de morrer de vergonha. Vejam que, na referência ao facínora chinês, selecionaram justamente aquele trecho que mistura maoísmo com revista Caras.

BRASILIA, Brazil: The editor of an eighth-grade text book that praises the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong and Cuba’s communist government is crying foul after the Brazilian government stopped using the book in public schools.

Without saying why, the Education Ministry said Wednesday it has stopped using “New Critical History” by Brazilian academic Mario Schmidt. The textbook has been distributed free since 2002 to nearly a million students.

The book’s publisher, however, says pressure from conservative critics doomed the book.

Schmidt’s “book has been criticized for more than 10 years by the angry right,” said Arnaldo Saraiva, an editor for Nova Geracao.

Nova Geracao sold 10 million copies of Schmidt’s textbooks in the past decade — 9 million to public schools, Saraiva said.

“New Critical History” speaks of Mao as “a great statesman and military commander” who “loved innumerable women and was loved by them.”

The book also describes the former Soviet Union as a country without unemployment, inflation or hunger.

“Free medicine, rent equal to the cost of three packs of cigarettes, great cities with no abandoned children,” Schmidt wrote. “For us in the Third World, it’s almost a dream, isn’t it?”

The text also says that while some Cubans hope that U.S. investments will return once Fidel Castro is gone, “there’s a chance Cuba again will have the poor districts and abandoned children as in the time of Fulgencio Batista,” the rightist dictator whom Castro overthrew in 1959.