Unperceived Ideological Transshipment and Dialogue

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Introduction

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1908. He received his doctorate in Law from the Law School of the University of São Paulo. He was Professor of the History of Civilization at the University College of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the Colleges of São Bento and Sedes Sapientiae of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.

He distinguished himself since his youth as an orator, lecturer and Catholic journalist. He wrote regularly for the Catholic weekly Legionario as well as for the monthly Catolicismo and the large daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

In 1960 he founded the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradi-tion, Family and Property (TFP) and served as the President of its National Council until his death in 1995.

TFPs and similar autonomous organizations were later founded in twelve other countries in the Americas and Europe, inspired by the book Revolution and Counter-Revolution and other works of Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.

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Legislative measures, media and political debates all have their role in promoting the liberal agenda. However, one very effective tool is the simple word. The careful crafting and spinning of a single word or expression carries a world of ambiguous meanings that gradually shapes the thinking and mentality of the unwary victim.

How words change thinking is the subject of a this digital release of the book, Unperceived Ideological Transshipment and Dialogue by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. The American TFP is now offering this brilliant study on its website at a time when telecommunication and the Internet make the manipulated word ever more powerful. The work makes a case study of the word "dialogue" and its use toward dissolving differences between opposing sides of an ideological debate.

Today this same ploy is used to breakdown the resistance of those who defend Catholic morality or oppose warming relations with the communist regimes of China, Cuba or Vietnam. The study is an excellent tool to unmask such word twisting.

Former President Clinton's spin on the word "is" shows just how elastic word crafting has become. Words like "tolerance," "empowerment" and "diversity" are all part of a politically correct lexicon that proposes a whole agenda that includes homosexual "marriage" and abortion. The expression "constructive engagement" is the keystone to American policy toward China. This term invites the listener to overlook religious persecution and human rights violation and "build upon diversity" and "manage specific differences." In the ecclesiastical sphere, similar terms are used to bridge the chasm between the Catholic Church and Christian sects.

To understand the profound process behind the use of what Prof. de Oliveira calls "talismanic" words, Unperceived Ideological Transshipment and Dialogue is an invaluable work that will give the reader the insight needed to oppose the often imperceptible use of words to change thinking.

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1. Twisting Words in the Service of Communist Propaganda

The many meanings given to the word dialogue in certain circles has sounded false to our ears for some time. We have observed that in the daily speech of these circles and in certain press commentaries the word dialogue is used in an artificial and forced way around a fixed point of legitimate residual meaning. Furthermore, it is used in such disconcertingly daring ways and with so many underlying meanings that we felt an urgent need, as if dictated by conscience, to protest against such a flagrant violation of the rules of good speech.

Little by little, the impressions, observations and notes we gathered here and there made us feel that the diversiform twisting of the word dialogue had an underlying consistency that appeared to be something intentional, methodical and planned. In addition, we had the feeling that, besides dialogue, this included other words frequently appearing in the lucubrations of progressivists, socialists, and communists, such as pacifism, coexistence, ecumenism, Christian Democracy, third force, and so on. Once subjected to similar twisting, these words began to form a kind of constellation, supporting and complementing each other. Each word was, as it were, a talisman designed to work its own psychological effect over people. And it seemed to us that the overall effect of this constellation of talismans was such as to work a gradual but deepening transformation in people's souls.

From our observations, it was clear that this twisting was always done with the same objective: to weaken the resistance of non-communists by giving their souls a propensity towards condescension, sympathy, non-resistance, or even surrender. In extreme cases, this twisting even succeeded in transforming non-communists into communists.

As observations revealed to us a distinct line of consistency and an invariable internal structure in the multiform and disconcerting use of these words as efficacious and subtle as a talisman, we began to suspect that if someone were to discover and explain what this line of consistency and logic was, he would unmask a new and widely used artifice employed by communism in its incessant psychological war against non-communist nations.

However, this was not the immediate reason why we decided to make a special study of the matter; it was rather the experience we shall now describe.

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2. Unmasking a Process

In 1963, we published a study entitled The Freedom of the Church in the Communist State. Translated into several languages, this study made its way through the Iron Curtain. Mr. Zbigniew Czajkowski, a director of the "Communist-Catholic" movement "Pax" of Poland, deemed it necessary to immunize the Polish public against this study by publishing an open letter to us in Kierunki and Zycie i Mysi, Warsaw magazines to which he contributes and in which he attempted to thoroughly refute our work.¹ We answered through Brazil's well-known cultural monthly Catolicismo, thus giving rise to a whole debate which is still not concluded.

In one of the points of his argument published in an article in Kierunki and reprinted in Catolicismo (no. 170, Feb. 1965), Mr. Z. Czajkowski enumerated the advantages that he saw in the simple fact that we were debating. Such advantages supposedly resulted from arguing as such, even though we did not come to an understanding. Between the lines of what the Pax journalist wrote about the advantages of our debate was an imponderable, yet very real, Hegelian influence. And - a small thing but rich in perspectives - applying Mr. Czajkowski's Hegelian and dialectical premise to all those words whose distortion and misrepresentation impressed us, the meaning of this same distortion and misrepresentation became clarified in a surprising manner. The point of reference explaining and ordering the entire panorama of our previous impressions and observations thus became clear, and the guileful process of psychological warfare, which until then we were only able to glimpse, was laid bare.

Whereas Mr. Z. Czajkowski alluded properly to "debate," by means of an understandable association of ideas it occurred to us that everything he said about the matter was exactly like what we had heard or read about dialogue. Thus, the word's varied and enigmatic meaning became clear.

So the importance of certain words, and especially of the word dialogue, as artifices of psychological warfare, was unveiled to us.

The studies resulting from this discovery led us to write the present work, which we submit for the reader's evaluation.

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3. Implicit Ideological Action, the Central Feature of the Process

It is important to emphasize at the outset that the process in question is designed to predispose those naturally refractory to explicit forms of Marxist preaching in such a way as to make them favor communism's tactics and doctrine and finally transform them into "useful idiots," if not convinced communists. For this very reason, the process works on mentalities in an implicit way.

A characteristic and essential note of this process is that, throughout or almost throughout its course, its patients do not perceive that they are undergoing a psychological action caused by someone, nor do they realize that their impressions and sympathies are leading them toward communism. In varying degrees of clarity, they know that they are "evolving" ideologically. But it seems to them that this evolution is a process in which they themselves are gradually discovering or deepening their knowledge of an appealing "truth," or constellation of "truths," without the aid of anyone else. As a rule, during nearly the entire process these patients never realize that they are little by little becoming communists. If at a certain moment this danger were made apparent to them, they would ipso facto recognize the abyss into which they are falling and would step back.

Only in the final stage of this "evolution" does the patients' interior transformation become so evident that they realize they are tending towards communism. But at this point their mentality has so "evolved" that the hypothesis of becoming adherents of communism no longer horrifies but rather attracts them.

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We call this phenomenon - or rather, this subtle process of communist propaganda - unperceived ideological transshipment. We propose to succinctly describe its essential aspects and, since it is used in different ways, to study especially its application in what we call the stratagem of the talismanic word. We will then illustrate the study of this stratagem with a concrete example or, more specifically, describe how the term dialogue is used to make innumerable non-communists inadvertently evolve towards communism.

The phenomenon of unperceived ideological transshipment has various modalities. It can either develop in all its fullness and radicality by leading the patient all the way to accepting communism, or take on a less ample and radical mode, e.g. when its victim merely becomes socialist instead of communist. In both cases, the transshipment is ideological in the strict sense of the term.

The process also may be directed only at theories and methods of action, rather than at a whole philosophical conception of the universe, of life, of man, of culture, of economics, of sociology, and of politics, such as Marxism is. Thus, a fiery anticommunist can be "transshipped" into one who wants only to make accommodations, concessions, and retreat. This transshipment is "ideological" in the diminutae rationis sense of the word.

We thought it necessary to show, at the end of the study, how the action of the talismanic word and the process of unperceived ideological transshipment can be stopped or even prevented by a timely word of warning to the incautious.

To continue, click here.