Kerry Bolton

Juan Peron is quite a fascinating character, as are the many varities of Peronism across the political spectrum in Argentina. Political figures that defy the standard left-right spectrum are especially interesting to me, this book being written by an author of the new far right only adding to my curiosity. I did learn some interesting things from 'Peron and Peronism' but I didn't find it to be a very balanced narrative. Juan and Eva are hardly criticised at all, despite there being fair reasons to do so, though given that the author favours Peronism so strongly this isn't too much of a problem. What is a problem is the author taking advantage of the chaos of opinions spawned by Peron's pragmatic alliances and fairly amorphous social philosophy, aswell as the wide range of interpretations ranging from the extreme left to the hard right to status quo centre, to paint Peron as a saint of the 'third position' alongside Hitler, Mosley, Thiriart and others.

This isn't necessarily untrue, but it paints a very one-dimensional picture that does not tell the whole story. Most annoyingly, the author makes several attempts to cast Peron as a champion of "anti-zionism" or "anti-jewry", which all seems to be conjecture. He makes no mention of the abundance of Jewish refugees welcomed into Argentina during world war two and casts Peron in kind of an unjust light that could wind up doing his memory more bad than good.

As for Kerry Bolton, he is a curious figure of the new far right. He does try to make a distinction between anti-semitism and anti-zionism (sometimes annoyingly called 'anti-jewry') when speaking postivively of the axis powers. His appraisal of Stalin as both an enemy of Marxism and champion of nationalism and autarky is very interesting, and I agree with some of the things he has to say about NATO, the IMF and neoliberalism generally. But his embrace of everybody from Mosley to Yockey, and his obsession with the Poncins-like myth of Jewish Marxist freemasons instigating revolutions to bring about a soulless, material new world order can make him hard to take seriously or to even expect honesty from his retelling of history.

The book is a very dry read too. Long samples of Juan's speeches (going several pages) that were not intended to be read back as philosophy and are not pleasant to read through, a kind of incoherent ordering and unclear purpose (other than to align the ghost of Peron with far right third positionism) made 'Peron and Peronism' a struggle to finish.… (meer)