Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites146 may be considered the ideal continuation and development of Revolution and Counter–Revolution.
In an essay entitled Revolution and Counter-Revolution Twenty Years After,147 Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira describes the appearance, after the Communist Revolution, of a less ideological and more tendencial IV Revolution that programmes the extinction of the old models of reflection, volition and sensibility to arrive more rapidly at the ultimate goal of the Revolution: the establishment, on the ruins of Christian civilization, of a “tribal” and anarchical society, obedient to the Prince of Darkness. The return of the human model presented by the “traditional elites” can be, according to the Brazilian thinker, the main antidote to this extreme decline of society. If the Sorbonne Revolution, in 1968, was an explosion of universal importance, that accelerated the unhealthy germs of proletarianization of society, the impulse to continuous perfection, that characterized the Middle Ages and the following centuries, could today be reborn if the nobility found within it the meaning of their historical mission.
“Should the twentieth-century noble remain aware of this mission and, animated by Faith and love for a well-understood tradition, do everything to fulfil it, he will achieve a victory of no less grandeur than that of his ancestors when they held back the barbarians, drove Islam beyond the Mediterranean, or smashed through the gates of Jerusalem under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon.”148
In the conclusion of his last book, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira thus describes the ruinous prospect of the long Revolutionary process:
“This process has advanced relentlessly, from the waning and fall of the Middle Ages to the initial joyful triumphs of the renaissance; to the religious revolution of Protestantism, which remotely began to foment and prepare the French Revolution and, even more remotely, the Russian Revolution of 1917. So invariably victorious has been its path despite uncountable obstacles that one might consider the power that moved this process invincible and its results definitive.
“These results seem definitive indeed if one overlooks the nature of this process. At first glance it seems eminently constructive, since it successively raised three edifices: the Protestant Pseudo-Reformation, the liberal-democratic republic, and the Soviet socialist republic.
“The true nature of this process, however, is essentially destructive. It is Destruction itself. It toppled the faltering Middle Ages, the vanishing Old Regime, and the apoplectic, frenetic, and turbulent bourgeois world. Under its pressure the former U.S.S.R. lies in ruins
— sinister, mysterious, and rotten like a fruit long-since fallen from the branch.
“Hic et nunc, is it not true that the milestones of this process are but ruins? And what is the most recent ruin generating but a general confusion that constantly threatens imminent and contradictory catastrophes, which disintegrate before falling upon the world, thus begetting prospects of new catastrophes even more imminent and contradictory. These may vanish in turn, only to give way to new monsters. Or they may become frightful realities, like the migration of Slavic hordes from the East to the West, or Moslem hordes from the South to the North.
“Who knows? Will this actually happen? Will this be all? Will it be even worse than this?
“Such a picture would discourage all men who lack Faith. Those with Faith, however, can already hear a voice coming from beyond this confused and grim horizon. The voice, capable of inspiring the most encouraging confidence, says: ‘Finally, my Immaculate Heart will triumph’.”149
Notes:
146. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobreza e elites tradicionais análogas. Eng. tr. Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII, York (PA), The American Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property, 1993. The book was also translated into Spanish, Italian, and French. It has received the approval of various personalities among whom four cardinals, Mario Luigi Ciappi, Silvio Oddi, Alfons Maria Stickler and Bernardino Echeverría, and two famous theologians, Fathers Raimondo Spiazzi and Victorino Rodríguez.
147. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution Twenty Years After in Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 123-66 (with an update to the III part by the same Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira).
148. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites, p. 116.
149. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites, pp. 130-1.