6 Lessons from the 600,000 – Folha de S. Paulo, August 7, 1968

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

“Aggiornamento” and “encounter with history” are expressions we run into all the time, but whose concept remains obscure more often than not. However, one core idea is always clear within this obscurity: being “up to date.” A self-respecting “up-to-date” person thinks they know present-day reality and are in sync with it. The “encounter with history” is an encounter with the present, particularly what the present offers that is different and contradictory to the past.

For the fanatics of “aggiornamento” and “encounter with history,” the word “tradition” gets a bad rap. For conscious or unconscious evolutionists, nature has no fixed and immutable elements, nor does the natural order rest on perennial principles. The present’s position concerning the past is not one of dynamic and improving continuity, but complete negation, all-encompassing rupture, and integral and renewing demolition. So, it is understandable that for partisans of this revolutionary type of progress, tradition is an insult to the present, a stubborn and daring expression of the desire for survival of something that has lost its right to exist due to the implacable action of time.

Without analyzing this way of seeing things, which I consider indefensible, it seems essential to note that, to be consistent with his position, an “aggiornamento” extremist must first strive to have a most lucid notion of reality. Because if he has to be in sync with reality, it is essential that he sees exactly where reality stands.

In this sense, the current campaign to collect signatures that the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property is promoting with its Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan TFP counterparts, reveals data that the “aggiornamento” hotheads cannot see because of their prejudices. Six properly explained and concatenated realities will surprise many observers even outside the milieus in which progressive “snobbery” blows most strongly:

1 – People today often do not reject tradition but are attracted by it. Experience has shown that the picture formed by TFP’s red standard with its heraldic rampant lion, around which young people of all classes wearing suits and ties collect signatures, arouses consideration, trust and sympathy in large sections of opinion. They are delighted to see young people proclaim and defend Tradition and see it as a guarantee of fruitful stability for the present and seriousness and dignity on the road to the future.

2 – Countless Brazilians see the effort to steer the country toward the left, particularly the radical left, as evil. Their aspirations for true progress are not consistent with a leftward turn. It is an error to identify “aggiornamento” with “opening up to the left.” Today, countless people reject the infamous “political opening.”

3 – Although Brazilians are still profoundly Catholic, or rather because of it, the leftist infiltration of Catholic circles discourages and dismays them, so the “opening up to the left” is highly contraindicated to gain their confidence and hearts. The leftist “new religion” Father Comblin advocates as a pastoral means of attracting the masses alienates them. They don’t want the subversive and anti-clerical “makeup” that the professor from the Theological Institute of Recife and his supporters seek to inflict on the majestic face of the Church. They reject the revolutionary reforms the Belgian cleric wants to subject Brazil to.

4—Demonstrations against the TFP campaign are rarer in the poorer neighborhoods. Only one or two isolated provocateurs appear during these collections in one neighborhood or another, such as Osasco, Vila Maria, S. Caetano or Santo André. TFP young men let them speak; they do so in isolation and retreat into indifference or general disapproval without turning away those signing our petition. In Brazil, leftism does not carry the popular classes.

5 – Conversely, hostile manifestations toward TFP’s petition are less rare in “plush” neighborhoods, where a small but dynamic minority wages a campaign of insults, systematic oral defamation, and continuous hate speech. This does not prevent the vast majority from supporting the campaign.

6 – Therefore, leftism in Brazil is a tiny bourgeois phenomenon. It is the morbus of an irrelevant bourgeois minority—or rather, “clerical-bourgeois,” since the TFP young men have also received manifestations of disconcerting hostility from churchmen.

Here are the 6 great lessons from the courageous and cohesive attitude of the 600,000 Brazilians who have signed the TFP petition from north to south.

They give a true sense of what today’s Brazil wants and doesn’t want to be. All authentic “updating” must be done according to this image, not according to the mirages of leftist progressivism.