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A Celebration of the Dumbest Political Virtue

Argentina’s Day of Loyalty — or something like that.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
4 min readOct 18, 2022
Photo by Erika Fletcher on Unsplash

Put the word ‘loyalty’ on Unsplash and get a picture of a Golden Retriever.

My family had one of those dogs, and let me tell ya: they’re the best, most beautiful, lovable dogs. Just look at that face. You just want to hug it.

But smart, they are not.

That’s what they have in common with people who blindly follow a political leader.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It’s that time of the year again: Argentina’s ruling Peronists gather to celebrate the truly stupidest of all political virtues: the Day of Peronist Loyalty, October 17th.

It’s a commemoration of the day in 1945 when the masses gathered on the square in front of Argentina’s presidential mansion, the Casa Rosada, to demand the liberation of their leader, General Juan Domingo Perón. (Evita’s husband, you may have heard of him.)

Perón had been jailed by the military government that had seized power by coup in 1943 — that he had become a part of. Such an integral part, actually, that he held three cabinet positions in it as VP, Secretary of Labor, and Minister of War.

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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