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| Olavo de Carvalho |
The way to achieve this objective is laborious and expensive, but simple in essence: it is a matter of attacking the honor of the unfortunate person from so many sides, through so many different means of communication and with such a variety of contradictory accusations, often intentionally absurd and ridiculous, that he, feeling the lack of viability of a clean debate, ends up preferring to retreat into silence. At that moment, he is politically defunct. Evil has won another battle.
The technique was first tried in the 17th century. So heavy was the load of scorn, mockery, urban legends, and sham historical-philological research that was thrown at the Catholic Church that priests and theologians came to think that it was not worth defending a venerable institution from such vile and malicious accusations. The result: they lost the battle. The contrast between the virulence, vileness, and omnipresence of anti-Catholic propaganda and the small size, timidity of the defense or counter-attack speeches has marked the image of the era to this day with the triumphant physiognomy of the Enlightenment and the revolutionaries. Worse, it covered them with an aura of intellectual superiority that, after all, they did not possess at all. The Church continued to teach, to care for souls, to protect the poor, to help the sick, to produce saints and martyrs, but it was as if none of this had happened. To give you just an idea of the numbing power of the “spiral of silence”, it is enough to note that during this period, only one Catholic organization, the Society of Jesus, made more contributions to science than all the materialist detractors (of the Church) put together, but it is the latter who have entered history – and remain there to this day – as champions of scientific reason in the fight against obscurantism. (If this statement of mine seems strange to you and – as they say in Brazil – “controversial”, it is because you still believe in semi-illiterate teachers and semi-literate journalists. Instead, you would do well to remove your doubt by reading John W. O'Malley, org., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and The Arts, 1540-1773, 2 vols., University of Toronto Press, 1999, and Mordecai Feingold, org., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, (MIT Press, 2003).
It was not until almost a century after these events that Alexis de Tocqueville discovered why the Church had lost a war that it had every chance of winning. He is credited with the first formulation of the theory of the “spiral of silence,” which, in extensive research on the behavior of public opinion in Germany, Elizabeth Noëlle-Neumann came to fully confirm in The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin (2nd ed., The University of Chicago Press, 1993). To remain silent in the face of a dishonest attacker is as suicidal an attitude as to attempt to refute his accusations in “elevated” terms, giving him a dignity that he does not have. Both of these things throw you straight into the vortex of the “spiral of silence.” The Church of the eighteenth century committed both of these errors, just as the Church of today is committing them again.
The very filth, the viciousness of certain attacks, are designed to coerce the victim, instilling in him a repulsion to engage in discussions that sound degrading to him and thus forcing him either into silence or into a display of superior cold politeness that cannot help but seem like a simple improvised camouflage of unbearable pain and, therefore, an admission of defeat. You cannot stop an attack by refusing to lay a finger on the aggressor or by politely demonstrating to him that what he is doing is prohibited by the Penal Code.
The lessons of Tocqueville and Noëlle-Newman are useful not only for the Catholic Church. Along with it, the most maligned communities in the world are the Americans and the Jews. The former would rather pay for crimes they did not commit than resort to a lack of good manners towards their most perverse detractors. The latter defend themselves a little better, but feel inhibited when the attackers come from within their ranks – which happens with alarming frequency. No entity in the world has more internal enemies than the Catholic Church, the United States and the Jewish nation. Because they have lived in the “spiral of silence” for so long that they no longer know how to get out of it – and even cultivate it on their own initiative, coming to meet their enemies.
The only effective response to the spiral of silence is to break it – and you cannot do this without breaking, along with it, the image of respectability of those who have fabricated it. But how do you expose a false respectability in a respectful manner? How do you denounce evil, deceit, lies, crime, without going beyond the limits of a simple “debate of ideas”? Those who commit crimes are not ideas, they are people. Nothing helps the empire of evil more than the fear of resorting to “personal attacks” when absolutely necessary. Aristotle taught that one cannot reason with someone who does not recognize – or does not respect – the rules of the search for truth. Those who want to maintain an “elevated dialogue” with criminals contribute to the trivialization of crime. These are the first who, in the impossibility of an honest debate, and fearing to fall into the sin of “personal attack”, retreat into what they imagine to be an honorable silence, surrendering the terrain to the enemy. The technique of the “spiral of silence” consists in inducing them to do exactly that.Translation : Anca Cernea
Source: http://inliniedreapta.net/dereferinta/spirala-tacerii-si-banalizarea-crimei-olavo-de-carvalho/
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