As Brezhnev and Nixon Embrace – Folha de S. Paulo, June 24, 1973
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Let us go back to a time when the broad outlines of the international landscape were still clear. Consider, for example, the world’s “psycho-political” situation twenty years ago.
The expression “psycho-political” may seem pedantic. However, I can find no other that conveys what I mean with equal precision. That is, a situation arising not from obscure and arbitrary combinations among professional politicians, but from a very firm and defined psychological state of public opinion. By its very nature, a “psycho-political” situation has more consistency and durability than situations created by the manipulations of career politicians, which can be made and unmade at the whim of ever-changing personal interests.
On the other hand, a psycho-political situation can be changed—if at all!—only through a long propaganda process that sometimes takes decades and tons of gold. For this reason, in political matters, I have always given incomparably more importance to psycho-political scenarios than to what I would call politicking. From this perspective, I will attempt to briefly describe the situation in the world twenty years ago.
Our globe was clearly divided into two zones.
On one side stood the bloc of nations subjugated by international communism, a philosophical sect with implications for history, economics, sociology, and politics. This sect seized power in Russia in 1917, at the end of World War I. As a result of World War II, it extended its rule over Central Europe, China, parts of Korea, and Indochina. Shortly thereafter, it prepared to conquer the island of Cuba, in the heart of the Americas.
The other bloc comprised nations that rejected the preaching of the communist sect. This rejection was driven by the instinctive horror that the communist doctrine and regime aroused in what remained of residual sanity and righteousness among men of various religions, historical traditions, and races. More specifically, the nations comprising the Christian world were shocked by the communist impact, for no doctrine was more diametrically opposed to communism than the Good News preached by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Among Christian nations, absolute fidelity to the Good News belongs exclusively to Catholics. Hence, within the Christian world, the Catholic world was the spearhead in the fight against communism.
Of course, the antagonism between the two great blocs did not produce an exclusively ideological or religious conflict. It was also fueled by economic, political, and cultural rivalries between the two great superpowers.
On the other hand, the reasons uniting the nations of each bloc to their respective superpowers were not only ideological. In the West, they also included political, economic, and social ties. Some of these ties existed in the Red bloc, with the decisive reinforcement of communist police and military power, ready to crush any desire for autonomy in any discontented province, nation, or state.
However, on a psycho-political level, the essential factor in the opposition between the communist world and the free world was ideological. Despite spending rivers of money on doctrinal proselytism and on agitation and disturbances of all kinds, the communists had never managed to win an election in the free world. Yet the vast majority of the electorate everywhere consisted of manual laborers. These workers did not reject communism for complicated economic or social reasons they barely understood, whose articulation left them indifferent. They did so thanks to a powerful and implicit perception that a world built on the denial of the ideals of religion, family, property, and homeland would be the height of disorder and misfortune.
This perception created a barrier against communism, a barrier of horror that hindered the expansion of communism more than all the West’s dollars and military defenses. Even if communist armies dominated an anticommunist country, they would face the risk of entire peoples rising up against them, as Spain did when Joseph Bonaparte’s revolutionary armies invaded; as the Mexican “Cristero” movement did against the tyrant Calles in the early 20th century; and later, as the Spanish people’s “Alzamiento” did, overthrowing communist domination.
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In the minds of the great masses of the West, the horror of communism was reinforced by their horror of communists. “Tell me who you go with, and I will tell you who you are,” says the old proverb. “Tell me what you think, and I will tell you who you are,” one could say with even more reason. Intuiting this latter truth, the peoples of the West clearly understood that only a fanaticism dedicated to denying all truths and principles of order could lead someone to devote their life to implementing communism. Materialistic, sullen, brutal, bloodthirsty, the communist was seen as the very embodiment of evil. It should be added that Marx’s disheveled appearance, Lenin’s feline gaze, and Stalin’s treacherous, bear-like figure greatly contributed to shaping this moral profile of the communist, which people’s common sense also deduced from the communist principles themselves. This was an additional and powerful factor in the creation of a barrier of horror against the sect that plunged Russia into endless bloody religious and political persecution, which gradually spread to all the lands where the red flag was successfully planted.
To break down this horror barrier in the public opinion of free peoples, the Kremlin’s skillful propaganda was insufficient to convince them that technical progress and economic prosperity were gaining the upper hand in Russia. If this were true, the free peoples thought, why did the Soviets forbid Westerners from freely visiting the communist paradise? Why did they prevent Russians from traveling freely to the West? For example, nothing is easier in the free world than traveling and even moving from one country to another. Why do our states fear nothing from this complete freedom? It is because they have nothing to hide from their visitors and no reason to fear that their subjects will emigrate en masse to neighboring countries. However, we are quite certain that we have not reached the peak of prosperity and order! What a miserable situation the subjects of communist states must be in to be kept within their borders at bayonet point!
Above all—and we cannot emphasize this point enough—the barrier of horror against communism drew its greatest strength from the conviction of all non-communist peoples that it is an obviously false, completely unnatural, monstrous, and absolutely ruinous ideology composed of irreligion, sexual promiscuity, community of goods, and the denial of all national sovereignties.
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In recent days, the weight of collective impoverishment has forced it to reveal what Russia had still managed to hide. It groans with misery and is compelled to reach out to its adversary, begging for bread, capital, and technicians, under penalty of succumbing to popular outrage.
Paradoxically, at a time when Russian failure, repeated by Cuban and Chilean failures, should be reducing the international prestige of communist regimes to zero, they are approaching world domination more than ever!
This is easy to see when Nixon welcomes Brezhnev as an equal, if not as a timid host to an ally about to become a suzerain.
How did this astonishing collapse come about? Through the weakening of the psycho-political barrier of horror.
Twenty years ago, in their respective spheres, the Church and America were the two greatest anticommunist powers. Today, each is engaged in a mysterious process of self-destruction. Although disunited, hungry, and ragged, the communist world seems to take on the air of a winner because both are destroying themselves. How did these two processes of self-destruction begin? What role does their great beneficiary, international communism, play in them?
The barrier of horror in the free world is being dismantled thanks to these self-destructions, but not only. The invasion of a selfish, optimistic, and short-sighted foolishness undermines our peoples’ will to resist. Once again, who is responsible for this tragic fact? What role does the great beneficiary, international communism, whose adepts are never foolish, never short-sighted, and always selfish, play in this?
These are primarily psycho-political questions, the answers to which may shed light on the deepest causes of the decline of non-communist nations and the rise of communist prestige.
I intend to answer at least some of them in my next article. With Brezhnev and Nixon embracing, these questions are timely.
