Antifascists, antiperonists, anticomunists: antitotalitarian modulations in Argentinian liberal-conservatism (1936-1962).

Abstract

This article aims to show different modulations of thought and political action of the Argentinean liberal-conservative groups in the central decades of the 20th century. First, it shows an internal division of the right-wing elites in the face of the phenomenon of fascism, particularly after the Spanish Civil War. This ends up separating the liberal-conservative sectors from the nationalist-reactionary ones. From then on, liberal-conservatives will gradually take shape around an anti-fascist identity that enables new alliance frameworks and that are strengthened with the rise of Peronism, which they understood as untimely fascism or proto-fascist demagogy. However, as some allies defected and the Cold War became more acute, among liberal-conservatives a broader antitotalitarianism took center stage, which equated Soviet communism with the nazi-fascist experience. When the Cuban Revolution embraced Marxism-Leninism, the liberal-conservatives stopped thinking of Peronism as a proto-fascism and began to observe it as a threat of introducing communism through the totalitarian encounter among diverse anti-liberal phenomena.