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0 pointskragen4y ago0 comments

Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler, modeling his policies explicitly and in some detail on Mussolini's, and when he had to flee Argentina, he went to Franco's Spain. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power largely on their opposition to socialism, though they did of course attempt to co-opt its more popular policies (and in the case of Hitler even its name), and Franco's opponents in the Spanish Civil War were anarchists who were very explicitly extreme left wing. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party, who immediately started killing each other --- like, literally at the airport when his plane came in. (This is not a literary invention by Garcia Márquez; it actually happened historically.) Perón sided with the right-wing factions.

Perón is hard to pin down: he adopted the most popular socialist policies with even greater enthusiasm than Hitler did. It's true that he welcomed fleeing Nazis, but he also welcomed fleeing Jews. The clearest aspect of his political alignment is that he was authoritarian and anti-elitist. But I think it's a clear mistake to identify him as a "left-wing populist".

As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.

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mrjangles4y ago

>Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler

So was FDR. In fact, FDR openly modeled his economic reforms on fascist Italy also. Today he is still held up as one of the most famous left-wing American politicans. Absolutely no one claims he was right wing.

Again, this is just more of the same. Before WWII, "National Socialism" was the future of the world and supported by leftists everywhere. The Nazis worked closely with both the Soviets and the Chinese. For the first 2 years of WWII, the Soviets and the Nazis were on the same side taking on the whole of Europe together. After the war it "wasn't real socialism."

>. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party

Killing each other is what left wingers are famous for. In Soviet Russia the Trotskyites accused the Stalinists of being right wing and they both spent a lot of effort trying to kill each other. This doesn't mean that Stalin was actually right wing, it just means that this is how the left talks - all hyperbole, no reality.

kragenOP4y ago

It's true that FDR was left-wing, that he expressed admiration for Mussolini, that Stalin persecuted Trotsky and his followers, and that for 22 months the USSR and Germany were invading other countries instead of fighting each other.

The rest of your comment is Holocaust-denialist-level pseudohistory, as is obvious to anyone who reads literally anything from the time period or anything about it by real researchers or talks to anyone who lived through it.

cryptonector4y ago

Argentina was quite rich, relative to the rest of the world, in 1950.

kragenOP4y ago

Kind of, though nothing like our golden age of the 01920s. But we didn't have high levels of literacy or lots of expert machinists; we were still living off our ag exports and creating unprecedented levels of economic inequality. And then Perón redirected us towards North-Korea-style autarky and cult of personality, purged the universities of ideological dissent, and valorized ignorance: Haga patria, mate a un estudiante, and alpargatas sí, libros no. Economic development became impossible. The post-Perón dictatorships were just as anti-intellectual.

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0 pointskragen4y ago0 comments

As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.

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mrjangles4y ago

>Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler

>. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party

kragenOP4y ago

cryptonector4y ago

Argentina was quite rich, relative to the rest of the world, in 1950.

kragenOP4y ago

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