The Improvident Team – II – Folha de S. Paulo, December 4, 1973

 

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

 

In the first part of this article, published last Sunday, we saw how blind the team of Western leaders has been to the danger posed by Arab oil blackmail, inspired and directed by Moscow.

However, mere retrospective reflection is not enough in times of such great danger as this. It is useless to limit ourselves to lamenting such omissions. What should be done now? That is the question that matters most.

If the West is not to bow to Russian-Arab imposition, the only way out is to resist at all costs. Not out of love for Israel, but to show the Arabs that it will not bow to oil blackmail.

To this end, public opinion in some countries has shown encouraging signs. In France, a recent survey found that 70% of the population would rather endure the harsh winter than capitulate to oil pressure. In Germany, a survey found that 57% of the population believes Europe should not give in to the Arabs. Furthermore, in all countries immediately threatened by oil rationing, the masses are showing a serenity that invites analysis. How much the communists would like them to take to the streets to demand that their governments capitulate immediately, ensuring them a fat and warm winter. However, no voices are raised in this regard. This is truly astonishing in our world, which a superficial observer would say is focused exclusively on well-being!

But the test will be hard. And public opinion today is accustomed to reacting only when prompted by the so-called media.

This means that if the leaders of Western public opinion—clergy, intellectuals, journalists, radio and TV personalities, politicians, and financiers throughout the West—unite to encourage the people to heroism, we will witness the dignified scene of a vast coalition of nations accepting severe material deprivation to preserve the basic moral values of their civilization.

But if this unanimous agreement does not materialize and the ruling teams (and I deliberately do not call them elites) continue in their comfortable complacency and do not immediately prepare for this with a large-scale public awareness campaign, then, through their own fault, our civilization will risk sinking into tragedy and barbarism.

God forbid I should fall short of the truth on such an important matter. It is not true that the leadership teams of the West’s great and super-great merely failed to foresee the danger. They emboldened the adversary.

Not long ago, when Western capitalism, represented by some of its highest political exponents, such as Nixon and Willy Brandt, and leading figures in the private business sphere, flooded Russia with grain and began providing it with machinery and credit on a large scale, why did they not demand, in return, a complete renunciation of influence in the oil zone?

It is either one of two things: Either the Russian communist government absolutely needed the West’s help to avoid a terrible internal crisis, or it did not.

If it had needed it, it would not have refused all the concessions demanded of it in the oil zones.

If it wasn’t needed, why did they supply even more to an already powerful adversary? And why did they supply it to the point of subjecting the entire West to dangerous inflation?

Why so much suicidal nonsense? Out of sympathy for the adversary?

How, then, can this sympathy be described?

Or was it a desire to gain his sympathy? In that case, here is the answer to this childish candor: Russia puts a revolver to the chest of these naive people. It is oil blackmail at its worst.

* * *

The tragic and decisive question remains. Will this immense team of great and super-great, highly short-sighted people be able to sustain the morale of the peoples of Europe and America throughout a severe crisis, thereby preventing them from being “Finlandized”?