by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Nemo summus fit repente: nothing extreme is done suddenly. This adage, well known to traditional Catholic moralists, expresses a truth of common observation. Usually—in the moral as in the intellectual realm—great ascents or declines occur in stages. Narrow-minded or simplistic anticommunists would do well to apply this principle to their socio-political outlook.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
In other words, communism is such an enormous collection of errors, all of them extreme, that few reach its dark shores without traveling a long intermediate path. And once this path is completed, the equally long road back is difficult. Rare are those who undertake it.
This observation leads to a first conclusion. Anticommunism is not primarily repressive; that is, it does not punish those who profess communism or curtail their freedom. The primary fight against communism is preventive. It is important to prevent people from embarking on the long journey that gradually leads to communism.
As is obvious, this means that anticommunist action can be considered effective only when it includes the early diagnosis of the first symptoms of gradual communization, as manifested in a person bitten by the communist bug. This involves difficulties Machiavelli vividly described in these terms: “Doctors say of consumption [tuberculosis] that in its early stages it is easy to cure but hard to detect; and later, when it is easy to detect, it has become hard to cure” (The Prince, chap. III).
Detecting someone’s early subconscious inclinations toward communism or its veiled, insidious propaganda should be the primary concern of any effective anticommunist action.
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Thus, the brochure published by the Security and Information Division of the Ministry of Education and Culture is correct when it states—quoting Mao Zedong—that for the expansion of communism, “one sympathizer can be worth more than a dozen activists. A university professor who, without being a member of the Party, lends himself to serving the USSR, is worth more for the influence he exerts on students than a hundred communists who put up posters.”
Sometimes, the sympathizer or university professor who “serves” the Soviets is not a communist. However, just as a person can transmit the germs of a disease without being sick, so too can a Christian Democrat or a progressive transmit communism without explicitly realizing that they are leaning toward it.
Thus, all forms of leftism are “communismogenic.” To consider them harmless is like underestimating the mosquito when the goal is to prevent yellow fever.
In this vein, everything that contributes to the deterioration of the sense of beauty prepares souls to receive the ideological inoculation of communism. For the taste for beauty brings with it the aspiration for the most beautiful, and ultimately for the sublime. Fundamentally imbued with a sense of egalitarianism and, therefore, averse to all that is noble and elevated, the communist mindset cannot help but hate beauty and, even more, the sublime. The admirer of a Gothic cathedral or a castle finds in his soul a natural resistance to communism. This is because towers rise upward, while communism tends downward. In this light, the cathedral of Brasília, eager to sink into the bowels of the earth rather than soar into the heavens, takes on special meaning.
Above, Cologne Cathedral (Germany) and below, the cathedral in Brasília