Study Before Speaking, by Olavo de Carvalho

Diário do Comércio, August 13, 2013

The shortest path to the destruction of democracy is to foster banditism through culture and then try to control it through civilian disarmament. The national left has been consistently following this dual path for at least five decades, and has always known perfectly well what the result would be: social chaos, followed by a hardening of the regime if it is in power, or insurrectional agitation if it is out of power.

This strategy is old, classic, immutable, but the pretexts with which it is legitimized according to the conveniences of the moment have been varied enough to disorient the audience, who engage in animated and sometimes fierce discussions about the pretexts themselves and never grasp the unity of the project behind them. Sometimes, as happens in Brazil, it doesn’t even realize that there is any relationship between the two simultaneous paths.

Mentally cowardly people sell their mother to avoid the risk of being labeled “conspiracy theorists.” They lower themselves to the point of vehemently defending the “theory of pure coincidences,” according to which actions happen without authors.

Imagine, then, the fear these people have of recognizing something that in the rest of the world is already a blatant obviousness: that communism did not die in 1990, that it is today stronger than ever, especially in Latin America. Thirteen years ago, when Jean-François Revel published his last book, La Grande Parade, no one in Europe or the United States contested him on this point, which in Brazil is still an esoteric secret.

There are even those who deny that Dilma or Lula are communists, but they do so because they don’t know exactly what a communist is and, like liberals in general, imagine it’s a matter of ideals and ideologies. In fact, a person is a communist not because they believe in such and such things, but because they occupy a place in an organization that acts as part or heir of the communist revolutionary tradition, with all the plethora of ideological varieties and contradictions contained therein.

The unity of the communist movement, especially since Antonio Gramsci, the American New Left, and the reshuffling of the communist parties after the dissolution of the USSR, is more strategic than ideological.

In fact, this movement, whose extinction seemed imminent and inevitable with the fall of the Soviet Union, was able to thrive and grow remarkably since the early 1990s only because it renounced any homogeneous doctrinal self-definition and refined the technique of articulating into a strategic action unity the most varied currents and dissidences whose coexistence was impossible until then. Sincere or feigned convictions, therefore, have no importance whatsoever.

For someone to speak with some authority about the communist movement, they must first have studied the following things:

(1) The classics of Marxism: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong.

(2) The most important Marxist philosophers: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Althusser.

(3) Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski.

(4) Some good books on the history and sociology of the revolutionary movement in general, like Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington, The Pursuit of the Millenium, by Norman Cohn, The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin.

(5) Good books on the history of communist regimes, written from a non-apologetic viewpoint.

(6) Books by the most famous critics of Marxism, like Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Raymond Aron, Roger Scruton, Nicolai Berdiaev, and many others.

(7) Books on the strategy and tactics of communist power grabs, on the underground activity of the communist movement in the West, and especially on “active measures” (disinformation, agents of influence), such as those by Anatolyi Golitsyn, Christopher Andrew, John Earl Haynes, Ladislaw Bittman, Diana West.

(8) Testimonies, in the greatest number possible, from former agents or communist militants who tell their experience in service of the movement or communist governments, like Arthur Koestler, Ian Valtin, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz.

(9) Highly valuable testimonies about the human condition in socialist societies, like those by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vladimir Bukovsky, Nadiejda Mandelstam, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Richard Wurmbrand.

It’s a reading program that can be completed in four or five years by a good student. I do not know, on the right or on the left in Brazil, anyone, absolutely anyone, who has completed it.

There are so many people in this country wanting to give their opinion on the subject, almost always with an air of wisdom, and no one, or almost no one, willing to make the necessary effort to give some substance to their words.

No honest leftist will do it without renouncing their belief forever. No rightist, without recognizing that they were presumptuous, a fool, and in many cases, a useful idiot - sometimes even more useful and more idiotic than the leftist mass.

The left thrives on the exploitation of ignorance, both its own and that of others. Wherever it exercises hegemony, the commandment to never read the works of opponents and critics prevails, but to spread deformed and caricatural versions of their ideas and biographies, so that the militant youth can hate them in the illusion of knowing them. Universities that profess to teach Marxism courses excel in this point to the limit of pure and simple mind control.

The right, well, the right cultivates its own forms of self-delusion, about which I have already spoken enough in this same newspaper. Maybe I’ll return to the subject in another article.