Beneficial for Distinguished Brazilians – Folha de S. Paulo, February 17, 1974

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

The brochure titled “How They Operate,” recently released to the public by the Security and Information Division of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), has received widespread press coverage. I wanted to comment on this work immediately, but I could not due to urgent matters, including Cardinal Mindszenty’s tragic dismissal, so I am doing so now.

In general terms, I consider the MEC publication remarkable for its quality, patriotic in inspiration, and well-timed. This does not mean I agree with everything in it. I believe the subject matter covered in the brochure needs further development, which I hope the MEC’s Security and Information Division will provide in other works. Let me give an example. It is true that communist propaganda seeks to promote malicious anti-government sentiment. It would be advisable for the MEC to make it clearer, at the appropriate time, that not all anti-government action is inspired by communists or benefits them. How can we distinguish the communists’ poisonous anti-government sentiment from that of a legitimate and loyal opposition? This is a fine topic for the intellectual, or team of intellectuals, who produced the MEC brochure to develop.

I feel very comfortable raising this issue because, as is clear, neither I nor the TFP, whose National Council I chair, has any political ties to the government or the opposition. While we applaud many of the government’s measures against the communist onslaught, we do not consider ourselves bound by every aspect of its social and economic policy developed in recent years.

Thus, when President Medici began implementing land reform in the Northeast, I did not hesitate to state in the Folha columns that the TFP’s position on the agrarian reform laws in force had not changed, that is, as stated in the now-historic book Agrarian Reform, a Question of Conscience. I refrained from insisting on the subject only because I noticed the farmers’ inertia and the complete apathy of their professional associations.

I would like the author or authors of the MEC brochure, who have more than enough talent and culture for this, to draw in another work the line between attitudes such as this—which one can legitimately hold in other fields as well, without being anti-government—and the chicanery and flawed anti-governmentism the brochure lucidly denounces.

I make these considerations at the outset so I do not have to revisit them and can devote myself unreservedly to examining all that is excellent in the brochure.

If one were to analyze all the brochure’s positive aspects, the comments would be so numerous they would fill a pocketbook. I do not intend to go into such detail in this short article, so I will analyze the work published by the Culture Division of the Ministry of Education from a special angle: the benefit that many of the best Brazilians can derive from it. They have such a narrow view of communism and its goals and methods that their anticommunism is narrow-minded and insufficient. They strike me as people who would respond to a toxic gas attack by brandishing a sword or firing weapons from the Paraguayan War.

I hope that a careful analysis of the MEC brochure will open the eyes of these distinguished patriots, whose better-guided efforts could greatly benefit the country.

To save space, in my next article I intend to list the theses of what I would call narrow-minded anticommunism.

To those who believe in some of these theses, I strongly recommend not only reading but also studying the MEC brochure. In this way, I am helping ensure that this work circulates as it deserves.