Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Part III, Chapter III

C. An Unpretentious Contribution

We know full well that panoramic views — always vast and summary — lend themselves to many objections.

Necessarily abbreviated due to the constrictions of the present chapter, our overview is but an unpretentious contribution to the studious reflections of people gifted with that daring and unique finesse of observation and analysis which, in all epochs, enables some men to foresee tomorrow.

D. The Opposition of the Banal

Others, instead of using foresight, will simply do what banal and timid souls have been doing throughout the centuries. Smiling, they will term such transformations impossible. Why? Because they clash with their mental habits; these transformations violate common sense, and for banal men, history normally follows the path of common sense.

Pope Leo X and Louis XVI, King of France

So, in face of these perspectives, they will incredulously and optimistically smile, just as Leo X smiled about the trivial “quarrel of friars,” which was all he saw in the nascent First Revolution. Or they will smile like the “Fenelonian” Louis XVI smiled when he saw the first ferments of the Second Revolution in splendid palace salons, lulled at times by the silvery sound of the harpsichord, or glittering discreetly in bucolic ambiences and scenes like his wife’s Hameau. His smile was no different from that of many high — and some of the highest — dignitaries of the Church and of Western temporal society before the manipulations of smiling post-Stalinist communism or the upheavals announcing the Fourth Revolution.

If one day the Third or Fourth Revolution, aided by ecumenical progressivism in the spiritual realm, takes over the temporal life of humanity, it will be due more to the carelessness and collaboration of these smiling optimistic prophets of “common sense” than to all the fury of the revolutionary hosts and their propaganda.

COMMENTARY (1992):

Opposition From the “Prophets of Common Sense”

These are strange prophets indeed, since their prophecies invariably amount to affirmation that nothing will happen.

Eventually their various forms of optimism conflicted so flagrantly with the post-1976 facts that, to retain them, their adepts adopted the fallacious and totally hypothetical hope that the recent events in Eastern Europe will lead to the definitive disappearance of communism and therefore of the revolutionary process it spearheaded until recently.