3.         METAMORPHOSED HATRED AND VIOLENCE GENERATE TOTAL REVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

            To grasp more clearly the scope of these immense changes in the communist panorama, it is necessary to analyze, as a whole, communism's great present-day hope, namely, revolutionary psychological warfare.

            As we have already said, international communism – though necessarily born of hatred and turned by its own internal logic to the use of violence exercised by means of wars, revolutions, and assassinations – was compelled by great, profound changes in public opinion to dissimulate its rancor and to pretend it had desisted from these means.

            Now, if such desistance were sincere, international communism would have denied itself to the point of self-destruction.

            But this is far from being the case. Communism uses the smile only as a weapon of aggression and warfare. It does not eliminate violence but transfers it from the field of physical and palpable operations to the field of impalpable psychological actuations. Its objective: to gradually and invisibly obtain the victory in the interior of souls that it could not win through drastic and visible means, according to the classic methods, because of certain circumstances.

            Of course, this is not a question of carrying out a few sparse and sporadic operations in the realm of the spirit. On the contrary, it is a question of a true war of conquest – psychological, yes, but total – targeting the whole man and all men in all countries.

COMMENTARY

Revolutionary Psychological Warfare: The Cultural Revolution and the Revolution in the Tendencies

            With the Sorbonne student rebellion in May 1968 numerous socialist and Marxist authors generally came to recognize the need for a form of revolution that would prepare the way for political and socioeconomic changes by influencing everyday life, customs, mentalities, and ways of living. This modality of revolutionary psychological warfare is known as the cultural revolution.

            According to these authors, only this preponderantly psychological and tendential revolution could change the public’s mentality to the point that would permit implementing the egalitarian utopia. Without this mental change, no structural change could last.

            This concept of cultural revolution encompasses what the 1959 edition of Revolution and Counter-Revolution termed the “Revolution in the tendencies.” ⁷⁴

            We insist on this concept of total revolutionary psychological warfare.

            In fact, psychological warfare targets the whole psyche of man. That is, it acts on him in the various powers of the soul and in every fiber of his mentality.

            It targets all men: partisans or sympathizers of the Third Revolution as well as neutrals and even adversaries.

            It uses any means. At each step it needs to have at its disposal a specific factor to lead each social group and even each man imperceptibly closer to communism, however slightly. And this is so in every area: in religious, political, social, and economic convictions; in cultural attitudes; in artistic preferences; and in the ways of being and acting in the family, in the workplace, and in society.