Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

"Folha de S. Paulo", April 15th 1982

In their recent Message on French self managing socialism, the thirteen TFPs thoroughly demonstrated that it is, like it or not, very useful to the worldwide ideological imperialism of the Reds. Self managing socialism is an access ramp to communism, rather than a barrier to it.

Open communist proselytism hasn't yielded anything for a long time. The West rejects it. It is like a tumor whose growth has been stopped. The only thing left to socialism was to advance camouflaged. Indeed, since 1945 it has successively tried a number of camouflages. Even though each new camouflage enables the socialists to temporarily dupe a considerable number of useful innocents, people gradually catch on and it loses its power of attraction. Thus, if communism wants to advance secretly, it must keep switching its camouflage.

Let me go back to the unlonged for period after World War II: There is an obvious continuity between the policies of the "extended hand," peaceful coexistence, the dropping of the ideological barriers, detente, eurocommunism, communism with a human face, and the "missionary" expansionism of human rights. To use a culinary metaphor, an internal thread links all these slogans like a spit through pieces of meat, tomato, bacon and onion. If this comparison is so prosaic as to shock the reader, let me give you a more poetic one (which is less suitable, since we're talking about communism and socialism): This continuity is like the thread through the pearls of a necklace. It consists in benevolence and spirit of collaboration with communism and in the inexorable and meticulous execration of everything anticommunist. This is the characteristic common to all these camouflages. Now, when someone has unlimited benevolence for someone else and is a relentless adversary of all his opponents, what is he if not the discreet but efficacious ally of that someone else?

The Message of the TFPs demonstrated that self management is nothing but the last piece of meat on the spit, or the last pearl in the necklace. Without camouflage, communist imperialism will not advance anywhere. French public opinion, well alerted, perceived that self-management is nothing but camouflage and rejected it in the recent regional elections. In turn, this rejection of the self managing camouflage in the very land which served as a center to spread its influence, froze and put on the alert all the sectors of world opinion that had been allowing themselves to be contaminated by this camouflage since the socialist-communist successes of 1981. This contamination was going on unchallenged. The first document against self management to be published worldwide was the Message of the TFPs. It came out when the tenors and prima donnas of the left were still singing the aria of self management. But, more subtle than Mitterrand and his team, they noticed that part of the public was not following them, and began to sing softer. Now, with their defeat in France a warning to other countries, self management is frozen all over the world.

How then will Communism advance? Will the communists forge ahead and continue to become more isolated as the French socialists and communists appear to be? Or will they try yet another camouflage? Don't they realize that the public has perceived that all this is nothing but a disguise? Don't they see that the whole West rejects them? Won't the resounding defeat of the German socialists in the recent elections in Lower Saxony dissipate the obstinate illusions that might have survived their defeat in France?

Let's watch closely to see what trick or juggling act the socialists and communists will perform in France and Germany during the next few weeks. In this way we will know beforehand which wile, guile, or death rattle they'll try to use to "overcome" the effects of their defeat.

While this is not the time for forecasts, it is really difficult to see what way out Moscow's ideological imperialism has now that the self-managing camouflage has been demoralized.

If Mitterrand continues making confiscations, he will not only raise against himself (as I pointed out in my last article) the ever more compact and indignant majority of the French; he will implicitly confirm the denunciation that the thirteen TFPs were the first to make to world opinion, profoundly lethargic until then.

It is quite true that voices of discontent were heard in France before the Message was published. But they were voices of Frenchmen directed specifically at the French public and dealing with circumstantial and essentially local aspects of government conduct. Voices, therefore, of too limited a scope to forewarn the public opinion of the West against self management on a doctrinal and universal plant.

The confirmation of the Message by events could create around it the same atmosphere that Allende's demise created around the book Frei, the Chilean Kerensky, by my unforgettable Fabio Vidigal Xavier da Silveira.

Certainly no socialist government or party in the world could be indifferent to this kind of backlash that a defiant socialist government is liable to provoke.

But if this government is not defiant, it will spell catastrophe for socialism in France and the world, and socialism would come tumbling down from its place on the crest of the wave. The greater the height, the greater the fall.

Can socialism effectively resort to new camouflage as a way out? Can camouflage still be used after all this?

World opinion, I believe, is not that blind yet.