Communism: The Great Strategic Shift – Folha de S. Paulo, January 23, 1972

 

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

 

My desire to publish an invocation to Our Lady of Aparecida on the 150th anniversary of independence led me to delay sharing additional comments on the “invisible communism,” which General Souza Mello addressed admirably in his salute to the Navy.

I know many anticommunists who cling to an outdated notion of the enemy we fight together. They see communism’s rise to power as always and necessarily unfolding through the following stages:

1. An initial group of supporters, typically comprising intellectuals, students, and workers, is formed.

2. This core group aims to expand its membership by spreading the ideas and works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many others.

3. Thus, they develop a significant communist movement through persuasive proselytizing and begin to attract the masses. This success stems from two distinct yet interconnected forms of activity.

a) Ideological proselytizing is promoted through major channels, including newspapers, publishers, radio, television, and the organized Communist Party.

b) Agitation, such as strikes, sabotage, terrorist attacks, etc.

Large-scale proselytism (item “a”) should draw the masses to the Communist Party. Agitation seeks to intimidate and halt the elites, thereby encouraging the masses’ offensive to be more assertive. Again, the hope of success mainly relies on ideological contagion. The elites would never be intimidated by agitation if they did not see that the masses had been influenced.

4. Finally, having won over the nation, the Communist Party would seize control of the State by the swiftest means. Even before gradually achieving electoral victory, it would bypass the usual stages by orchestrating a dramatic “night of the long knives,” during which its hitmen would kill members of the ruling class amid a revolt by workers, peasants, soldiers, and others.

This roughly describes what happened in Russia during the transition from tsarism to communism. That’s why scenes of bloodshed, such as those from the Russian Revolution, remain a constant nightmare for many anticommunists.

They are so fixated that they see only this as the path to power for communists, viewing only force and perhaps defensive violence as the real obstacle and considering harmless the so-called “invisible communism” which the Commander of the Second Army warned his listeners about with clarity and fearlessness.

Although this picture hasn’t completely vanished, a fundamental fact has become outdated, and we risk losing our ability to understand anything in our days if we don’t consider this phenomenon.

I do not deny the risk of a communist coup seizing power. However, I have increasingly observed that the communists, who once believed that a radical and clear ideological spread was sufficient to justify their use of force, have realized that circumstances have changed. Now, only widespread indoctrination of the communist mentality among the masses can garner the support needed for their coup; without it, the coup would be powerless.

In this context, the well-known magazine Est-Ouest, the mouthpiece of the Association d’Études et d’Informations Politiques Internationales in Paris, published in its issue no. 475 on October 16, 1971, a substantial article by Fréderic Raven titled “Comparative Evolution of Electoral Forces and Communist Party Membership in Western European Countries After 1945.”

The author states that the numerical data in his study come from various official communist publications. The study’s estimates were based on authoritative sources, particularly Branko Lazitch and the State Department’s annual review, World Strength of Communist Organizations, published in Washington.

Examining the data from Est-Ouest on CPs in the main European countries behind the Iron Curtain, we see that after the post-war rise of communism, CPs in Europe experienced a period of stagnation or even decline. During that quarter of a century, they used the most advanced and costly propaganda tools to boost the growth of various Communist Parties, but all they achieved was failure. This indicates that the masses rejected communist doctrine whenever it was preached with radical clarity.

* * *

Peak Election Results Plus Most Recent Election Results

Country             Year    %      Year    #Votes

West Germany 1949   5.7    1969   195,570 0.6

Austria               1945    5.4    1971    60,756 1.3

Belgium             1946   12.7    1968    172,686 3.3

Denmark           1945   12.5     1971    39,326 1.4

France                1946    28.6 f  1968    4,435,357 20.0

Netherlands       1946   10.5    1971    246,569 3.9

England               1945    0.4     1970     37,996 0.1

Italy                      1948    31.0   1965     8,550,000 27.0

Norway                1945    11.9   1969     22,520 1.0

Sweden               1944     10.3    1970     236,653 4.8

* * *

Not to mention, outside the European continent, the defeat of the Broad Front in Uruguay and, in recent days, the defeat of the Popular Unity in the populous Chilean provinces of O’Higgins, Colchagua, and Linares.

* * *

The evidence couldn’t be clearer. Today, open Marxist propaganda only maintains a stagnant or declining electorate, making it impossible for the masses to provide the necessary support for violent action. When they can’t win them over directly, the communists try to make them receptive through indirect means.

We are all familiar with the vehicles of this action: progressivism, protests, sexual aggression, Christian democracy, socialism, etc.

It would be an exaggeration to say that every member of these movements is a communist in the strictest sense of the word. However, that is precisely what makes the communist technique so clever. With it, they rally a large, mixed group within these movements, only some of whom are actual communists. The rest are sympathizers of communism to varying degrees. Some among them are moving toward communism, driven by conflicting impulses of the soul, similar to the clash of virtue and vice in the soul of a young girl just starting to stray or a young man in the early stages of the dark path of drug addiction. This wide coalition of genuine communists, those in early development, and subconscious pro-communists can form the base needed to support the “night of the long knives.”

Therefore, anyone who believes that any country can sit idly by, sleeping or smiling, once violent communists have been defeated and the Communist Party silenced, while invisible communism continues to spread, is relying on a scenario more than twenty-five years old.

Today, the choice is obvious: either we include the fight against invisible communism alongside traditional suppression methods, or we are preparing for tomorrow’s surrender.

A tomorrow that might not be far away.