Enigma, Gossip, and Drip-Drip – Folha de S. Paulo, November 30, 1987

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

In my article “Representative Government and Chronic Ignorance,” I highlighted a common trend in contemporary debate to focus on personal attacks, hearsay, and gossip rather than on serious documentation and well-founded argumentation, while disregarding — or even neglecting — issues that have real intellectual significance and are crucial for shaping our country’s future.

An example I mentioned was the TFP, which has been the subject of fourteen fierce smear campaigns over its twenty-seven-year history. None of these campaigns attempted to disprove any of the thirty-five works written by members or volunteers of the organization, or by figures connected to it. However, more than one of these works has received praise from leading figures in the national and international cultural spheres and has achieved impressive print runs in our country, as well as numerous editions on nearly every continent.

What is happening right now is important. The TFP is releasing two timely works that directly address issues capturing the public’s attention.

I will mention only one of them, briefly and without comment, as I am its author. It is titled Draft Constitution Anguishes the Country. I note that its sales in the greater São Paulo area have averaged 1,083 copies per day — 20,580 copies in nineteen days — a truly exceptional figure in our country.

I would, however, like to highlight what is happening with another work, authored by the distinguished TFP member Dr. Atílio Guilherme Faoro, titled Agrarian Reform: ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Rural Slum,’ or ‘Kolkhozes’? — A Mystery Unveiled by the TFP (Ed. Vera Cruz, 198 pp.).

In this well-illustrated book — which has also achieved significant sales — the author debunks, with intelligent and clear reasoning, the myth that agrarian reform will bring rural workers the bucolic happiness imagined by supporters of agrarian reform sentimentality: a charming little house, complete with its classic coconut tree, where the owner lives peacefully and comfortably with his family amid the tranquility and fertility of the countryside, working as the only manual laborers on the small plot from which they earn their livelihood.

Atílio Guilherme Faoro clearly demonstrates that “the situation that will arise with the agrarian reform will make the living conditions of rural workers and their families objectively worse than they are today” (p. 13). Consequently, he concludes that “agrarian reform is … an assault on rural workers, whose living conditions will become even more grueling and unjust” (p. 14).

To reach these conclusions, the author carefully examined the Land Statute and its supplementary legislation, as well as the current National Agrarian Reform Plan. He gathered texts from experts and prominent Brazilian agrarian reformists, and compiled approximately 90 news articles from 27 Brazilian newspapers on the outcomes of existing agrarian reform programs and the government’s future settlement guidelines. He also noted the similar failure of agrarian reform in Poland, China, and Cuba — countries that leading proponents still present as models for Brazilian agrarian reform (see pp. 147–149). Additionally, he recalls the failure of Stalin’s “kolkhozes” in the 1920s in Soviet Russia (see pp. 79, 81, 143, and 146). Based on all this, the author concludes that the rural settlements now advancing through agrarian reform will likely lead to a “slumification” of living conditions for Brazilian workers (see pp. 92, 99–126).

The high quality of this work received clear and praise-filled recognition in a letter sent to the author by Dr. Silvio Rodrigues, professor of Civil Law at the University of São Paulo School of Law. He is an honorary doctorate recipient from the University of Paris XII School of Law and the author of a well-known legal opinion affirming farmers’ right to armed self-defense during land invasions.

Apparently, this work of undeniable value reshapes the entire Brazilian land reform debate. Until now, leftist propaganda has presented the issue with a strong class-struggle overtones in the Marxist style: farmers versus manual laborers. The former are portrayed as idle parasites feeding on a miserable proletariat, and agrarian reform would, with a sword of justice, suppress this monstrous situation by “eliminating” the parasites. Opponents of land reform, in turn, have responded by noting that, in the vast majority of cases, the alleged misery is merely an exaggeration of leftist propaganda, and by defending — on moral and legal grounds — the right to property that agrarian reform seeks to extinguish.

Mr. Faoro’s work introduces a completely new dimension to the issue, creating a dilemma for land-reform advocates: if they truly champion manual laborers’ rights, they must recognize that these rights are closely connected to those of farmers, with whom they should stand united against the government’s agrarian reform policies. If the current leaders of the land-reform movement refuse to adopt this stance, they must admit that their fight is not really for rural workers but is instead driven solely by a strongly socialist ideology, to put it mildly.

For their part, from this point onward, rural landowners only have the simple task of uniting with their workers against the land reform wolf trying to devour them all. In the eyes of the public, they thus reclaim their true role as natural allies and protectors of manual laborers (let the opponents of “social paternalism” howl at these words; I merely shrug my shoulders).

Mr. Faoro’s work was distributed to all the congressmen and senators serving in the National Constituent Assembly. To my knowledge, however, not a single mention of this important book was made in the debates of that body. Additionally, its first edition sold out in forty days, reaching 173 cities across thirteen states. Despite this, among the various professional associations representing rural landowners across Brazil, not one took the initiative to send the author even a brief, modest letter of praise or solidarity.

While these associations waste a rare opportunity to advance the cause they genuinely invest huge sums in, they overlook the book that challenges agrarian reform with the decisive power of a bulldozer.

Why do they act this way? I choose not to answer, as it remains a mystery to me. I recall Lenin’s remark that one day the capitalists would sell to communists the rope they would use to hang them.

What does all this have to do with the gossip discussed in my latest article? I believe that, in many cases, gossip significantly contributes to creating this unusual anomaly.

From another perspective — outside the land reform controversy — the gossip that has haunted the TFP since its earliest days continues to drip in a dull, steady stream. A stream of gossip that the public now watches with the growing indifference it has earned.