Last week's bizarre scenes of violence in Argentina during the reburial of former populist President Gen. Juan Domingo Perón, who died more than three decades ago, raise an interesting question: Is Latin America too fixated with its past and not focused enough on its future?...It's not an academic question. Wherever you look in the region, you see passionate -- sometimes violent -- national debates over historical issues. It's something that is not seen, at least with the same virulence, in much of the rest of the Western world....Latin American Too Obsessed With Past, Andres Oppenheimer, Miami Herald, 10/25/2006
It's not so strange, Andres. Semi-religious devotion to the avatars of bad ideas, which the Peróns represented for Argentina, is a rite widely observed on the Left. If it were not so, most on the Left would be satisfied to be academic antiquarians, scholars in the study of dead worlds, going to lunch with classicists and historians. But, though Leftists rarely engage in the kind of shooting rallies seen in support of the ghost of Juan Perón, they are as fiercely opposed to both historical precedent and challenges to their ideas. As such, they are just as blind to the future as worshippers of Peronism in Buenos Aires.
Luther
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