Em meio a imagens borradas e contornos misteriosos: a televisão como questão de segurança nacional nos discursos da Escola Superior de Guerra na ditadura civil-militar (1966-1984)

Abstract

The Escola Superior de Guerra is a military institution of higher education created in 1949, linked to a Cold War-related conjuncture; in order to “form elites to solve the nation's problems”. The institution is fundamentally militarized, but it had a direct connection with a certain portion of civil society. We understand ESG as an important center for the formation of official discourse and public policies in the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985) in this institution were written, for example, the manuals of Educação Moral e Cívica and OSPB. Given this place of the institution in the dictatorial governments we intend to problematize television as a matter of national security in ESG's discourse for a political project of modernization of Brazil and claiming legitimacy of the civil-military dictatorship. Analyzing ESG's writings, student work, textbooks and lecture transcripts, we noticed a latent concern with television, especially since the 1970s, when the commercialization of the device began to gain strength in Brazil. For ESG, TV represented both a latent force of modernization that could not be ignored and a threat to the morals and morals of Brazilian society. In the context of the Cold War the “red danger” was also the “internal enemy”, the threat of television was largely the understanding of ESG graduates, their possibility of being appropriated and used as a tool in the spread of communist values. Television programming would, in this sense, be subject to the appropriation of the enemy to attempt to convert society. Drawing on Motta's concept of conservative modernization, we intend to understand this relationship of possibility and fear towards TV at school and how this tension generated discourses that attempted to legitimize the regime's authoritarian practices.