by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
From the very start of my contributions to this newspaper’s well-known “Trends/Debates” section, I wondered what kind of topics to write about. Purely cultural ones? Or both cultural and current issues?
While both types were appreciated on the page, I chose the latter. Since then, I haven’t submitted a single piece without this dual focus.
Standing on the verge of an impending storm—whether it is still just a threshold or already the storm itself—I feel compelled to discuss a matter of the highest and immediate urgency.
I argued in a recent book.[1] that Brazil possesses not merely the three classical branches of government—Executive, Legislative, and Judicial—but two others that today exert an even greater influence on public opinion. The Fourth Branch is the Media, whose prestige rests less on the discernment of truly educated readers than on the credulity of the naïve. The Fifth Branch is the CNBB, which—save for rare and honorable exceptions—derives its weight far more from its sway over the gullible than from the adherence of genuine men of faith.
Now, since the Fourth and Fifth Branches are predicting roughly the same thing both explicitly and implicitly about our near or even immediate future, something is happening.
For example, both branches express deep concerns about the effects of those (still unannounced) measures in President Figueiredo’s “package”: urban unrest will gradually escalate to a boiling point. Meanwhile, statements from the 4th and 5th branches suggest that the foul smell of rural guerrilla warfare’s gunpowder and blood seems ready to erupt, starting in the jungles of Araguaia.
What issue could be more pressing than the looming threat of urban and rural guerrilla warfare?
It’s not my place to end urban or rural guerrilla warfare, but I can offer commentary to encourage a preventive mindset among Brazilians whose voices could still help stop this evil.
Russia’s “long arm” remains the only clear agent amid the nation’s chaos. I do not believe it benefits Russia to ignite a full-scale civil war at this moment. The Reds understand that our ruling classes still hold too much power for such a conflict not to lead to their defeat eventually. Recently, “Comrade” Gregório Bezerra, a notable Brazilian Communist Party leader, told the city of João Pessoa’s A União newspaper, “despite the help the Church provides to the Basic Christian Communities, the ‘colonel system’ will stay for a long time. As long as the masses in the countryside and the city are not truly organized and aware, rural colonels will still control our countryside” (Collection of interviews with Jornal de Domingo, 2/2/1983).
Aware of this, the communists have no choice but to deploy a widespread network of local guerrilla groups across Brazil from north to south. Individually, no single guerrilla group would be very impactful. It would only cause concern among the conservative classes living in nearby areas. Over time, as violence escalated, people would become somewhat accustomed to living with it. And by the time it covered the entire country, they would be ready to surrender. The urban and rural guerrilla strategy would thus gradually weaken the anticommunists’ will to resist.
This tactic hits close to home for many of the country’s ruling elites, including tycoons.
The latter are common among those who boast the most and are most “promoted” by the Fourth Branch and favored by the Fifth Branch. They even like to call themselves “Christians.”
This unsavory breed of tycoons harbors a mindset that, paradoxically, leaves them dangerously close to the grasp of communism. For each of them, their industrial parks, banks, stores, or farms are the very center of their universe. As long as nothing disrupts this tiny cosmos, they believe the world is perfectly safe. Try to show them their mistake, and they seem to freeze. They dislike listening. The customs of others intimidate them; their own culture sees no farther than tomorrow. Foresight is anathema to them. To enjoy the small pleasures of authority during the week and the distractions of the weekend—that, to their minds, is enough. They lift not a finger to alert the public to the communist threat. And they recoil even more strongly from the idea of awakening themselves.
It so happens that this sort of nabob is flanked, just beneath him, by a class of “nababettes” who waste away in bitterness because they are not nabobs themselves. To soothe their wounded vanity, they labor to persuade the “sub‑nababettes” below them that they, the nababettes, are, in fact, authentic nabobs. They sustain this illusion by imitating the worst specimens of the nabob class precisely in what most typifies them—namely, their defects. Thus, the contagion spreads, seeping through whole sectors of the various strata of the bourgeoisie. And this makes it exceedingly difficult for the latter to adopt, in the face of national catastrophe, the grand and spirited collective posture that might finally open the country’s eyes to the religious vacuum (to say only this) that reigns in the CNBB and in the BCCs, and to the consequent hollowness of their influence over the masses. In short, the Fifth Branch is an empty shell—contrary to what nearly the entire Fourth Branch insists.
Are these empty words? No. They are a sober observation of reality — a reality about which nearly everything has already been written, yet most members of the Fourth and Fifth Branches stubbornly refuse to see it clearly.
I can demonstrate to any reader, with overwhelming evidence, the truth of what I say about the Fifth Branch. One only needs to train a telescope on the Araguaia jungle to spot Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, carrying out his “deeds” and spreading his slogans—an ecclesiastical agitator who seems to believe himself endowed with the stature to attempt in Brazil, whether by law or by force, the same revolution that in his native Spain advances through the curious “entente” between the Pasionaria and the King.
But all this is for another article…
[1] Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira – Gustavo Antonio Solimeo and Luiz Sérgio Solimeo, AS CEBs … Das quais muito se fala, Pouco se conhece – A TFP as descreve como são [The BCCs—Much Talked About But Little Known—the TFP Describes Them as They Are], (Editora Vera Cruz, São Paulo, 1982, 256 pp.).