Yesterday, So Long Ago – Folha de S. Paulo, October 25, 1980
by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
1980 is coming to an end. In two months, everyone will be looking forward to the holiday season. And so, the classic and inevitable retrospectives will happen to reflect on what has been left behind. For my part, I’m starting today.
Can we genuinely describe 1980 as a journey for the world? What actually comes through is the feeling of a huge slip: a year where events staggered from one fall to another, everything unexpectedly collapsing and then rising again just as suddenly—so that, ultimately, nothing is permanently broken, but everything is clearly traumatized.
I’m not talking about myself or about ‘my’ 1980. I wouldn’t dare take up the reader’s time with such a trivial subject. I’m talking about Brazil and the world. For example, I’m talking about you, my reader.
Yes, you, because the phenomenon I describe on a global scale appears to repeat at the individual level.
When I see people on the street and look at photographs of groups or crowds in newspapers, I get the sense that countless humans are caught in this strange rhythm of daily life.
Maybe this explains why our memory of the past seems less strange.
Anyone traveling peacefully aboard a yacht, surrounded by sincere, interesting, and cheerful friends, would find their memory pleasantly filled at night with the small events of the day: the splendid blue of the sea, a particularly elegant seagull in flight, a liqueur that tasted unusually fine, a song that struck the ear with unexpected charm, the smell of the sea air or the scent of flowers delighting the senses, a picturesque story told by one companion, a revealing confidence shared by another, the sudden brilliance of a metaphor that arose in conversation, the clarity of an argument with which one instantly agreed. All of this belongs to the small and delightful realm of everyday life. Each moment is a tiny episode, a little flower. A day like this becomes a bouquet of forget-me-nots, each bloom representing an hour, a half hour, perhaps only a quarter hour. It is a long, slow, carefree day, and by its end, the events remain so vivid that they seem to have happened only a moment ago. Paradoxically, in this slow passage of time, the morning’s impressions stay as fresh as those of the afternoon. When time moves gently, the past continues to live with pleasant clarity in each new moment.
How different the passing of time feels in those phases when it hurtles toward 1980, shaken by repeated tumbles. Each shock seizes the present so completely, with such vehemence, that the mind is carried on the black wings of apprehension toward a hostile future, and the past vanishes from view. When it finally returns, it is so faded and torn that it resembles a shapeless bundle of rags—nothing like the once-pleasant bouquet of forget-me-nots.
Given this weakening of memory, what happens in the morning can seem oddly distant by evening. When you wake up facing a bill you can’t pay, or a visit to a radiologist who might tell you whether you have cancer, or walking a street infested with pickpockets because your job leaves no other choice—and how many people live with one or more of these worries at the same time—the present and the future take up your full attention so much that yesterday, half-forgotten, feels like it belonged to a year ago.
What can be observed daily can also be said of a month or even a year. When 1980 rings out its last chime and slips into the past, many of the emotions you experienced so intensely, reader, will seem so distant, so far away to you…
Yes, to you, whom I can only see as one of the countless drops that make up the sea of public opinion. How often has the media called on this sea to react passionately to some urgent issue! How relevant those issues were! Yet, how distant their echo is by the end of 1980.
In 1979, Rhodesia—along with South Africa—stood as one of the principal anticommunist bastions in southern Africa, two political dams meant to keep the advancing communist tide from reaching the Cape of Good Hope. The strategic importance of this barrier was evident: the Cape’s position made it a vital link in global maritime trade. Yet by late 1979, Rhodesia’s moderate Prime Minister, Abel Muzorewa, was swept aside [when the Lancaster House Agreement restored British authority over the territory, ending the short-lived Zimbabwe‑Rhodesia government]. In the elections that followed, the Marxist ZANU movement, led by guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe, rose to power.
One of the two bastions falls, and the world is momentarily stunned. Yet the new communist government refrains from imposing sweeping reforms, and global attention drifts elsewhere. Rhodesia, however, remains deeply traumatized: legally, everything has collapsed, while in reality, little has changed, but the shock is immense and continues to shape the nation’s inner life. Of the two anti‑communist bastions, only South Africa remains standing. Rhodesia did not fall in the literal sense, but it is finished, forgotten, and left behind. And how long it feels since all this happened!
The Moscow Olympics. No one was unaware that the communist regime was profoundly police‑like; the very existence of the Iron Curtain testified to the degree of genuine imprisonment in which those people lived. Yet the jailer suddenly decided to appear friendly and, for that purpose, disguised himself as an artist. He staged “beautiful” Olympics, and the publicity machine began to exclaim: Look how friendly, how artistic the Soviet leaders are. Such refined people cannot be harsh jailers. Surely the Iron Curtain is no longer what it once was.
It was a massive propaganda stunt—one that was hard to expose effectively at the time. Now, it’s impossible to do so because the whole topic of those Olympics has long faded into the past. So long ago…
John Paul II is coming to Brazil. Everyone has high expectations of him. The socialists want him to overthrow capitalism; the capitalists want him to condemn communism; the progressives want him to encourage the modernization of liturgy and morality with new hopes. The anti-progressives want him to approve the Tridentine Mass. Side by side, fueled by contradictory hopes, millions of people applauded him as if a new era were about to dawn. Second half of October 1980: how all this is already fading into the mists of the past…
John Paul II is visiting Brazil, and expectations are rising everywhere. Socialists hope he will criticize capitalism; capitalists hope he will condemn communism. Progressives look forward to encouragement for liturgical and moral “renewals,” while anti-progressives long for approval of the Tridentine Mass. Side by side, driven by hopes that contradict one another, millions applaud him as if a new era were about to dawn. And now, in the second half of October 1980, how quickly all of this is already fading into the mists of the past…
I set aside the less universal developments. While Iran and Iraq clash, few remember the Shah, lying on his fortune in a misery faintly reminiscent of Job on his dunghill. The last Shah—born amid the splendors of the Arabian Nights—vanished in a catastrophe that, like the year 1980 itself, proved irretrievable.
All of this took place only yesterday, so to speak—yet it already feels as though ages have passed.
