Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s perfect combination of ignorance and unflappable confidence shone forth once again this weekend as she welcomed what had been intended as an unflattering comparison between herself and famous Nazi sympathizer Evita Peron, the late first lady of Argentina.
“She’s got talent. Now, that’s the good news. The bad news: She doesn’t know anything. She’s got a good sense, an ‘it’ factor, which is pretty good, but she knows nothing. But with time, she has real potential,” Trump said of Ocasio-Cortez, according to the forthcoming book American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War.
The president added, “I called her Eva Perón. I said, ’That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.’”
Any ordinary person would react negatively to that comparison, knowing full well that the Perón regime knowingly sheltered Nazi war criminals, including Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann and the “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele. But Ocasio-Cortez is no ordinary person. Rather than dispute the characterization, she embraced it, tweeting out glossy, heroic-sounding quotes attributed to the late Argentine first lady.
After all, whatever Trump considers to be bad must be good, right?
“I know that, like every woman of the people, I have more strength than I appear to have.”
– Evita Perón https://t.co/IH7y7C54ip
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 7, 2019
“I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina’s wealth and power in their hands. So the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go.”
– Evita Perón
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 7, 2019
It is possible (and most likely) Ocasio-Cortez has no idea about the dark side of the Perón legacy. Then again, it is also possible she knows full well about the regime’s efforts to harbor Nazi war criminals, and that she chose simply to react in an opposite manner to Trump because she believes all “defiance” is good even if self-defeating.
“It’s Pavlovian,” Hot Air’s Allahpundit theorizes. “Trump seems to think Evita was bad? Well, then, Evita must be good. Or at least good enough that it’s worth embracing part of her image purely for the sake of showing defiance. Defiance, always, is the key.”
At any rate, whether intentional or ignorant, the congresswoman’s embrace of the Eva Perón characterization is amusing, given her recent efforts to convince the public that she understands well the seriousness of comparing U.S. immigration detention facilities to Nazi concentration camps.
Now, as to the Perón legacy. First, there is what historians know for certain about the regime’s complicity in harboring the worst of the worst of Nazi Germany’s war criminals (via the Washington Post: “‘It’s true that the Argentine government, under the command of Nazi sympathizer Juan Domingo Perón, did bring in hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis. ‘In those days, Argentina was a kind of paradise to us,’ Nazi Erich Priebke remembered in 1991. And it’s true that some major Nazi operators escaped there, including Adolf Eichmann, a Holocaust mastermind arrested in 1960 in Buenos Aires and later executed in Israel.”
Then there is this report from the Chicago Tribune: “Peron’s top officials, Argentine documents show, hired Horst Fuldner, an Argentine-born captain of Adolf Hitler’s feared SS, to coordinate the entry of at least dozens of Nazi war criminals to Argentina after World War II and help bring in some of the 40,000 other Germans who entered Argentina from 1945 to 1955. Most of the Germans have never been investigated for Nazi ties.”
Then there is this from the New York Times:
And the investigators say the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents they have studied in the last eight months show not only the Government’s policy of welcoming Nazi war criminals, but also its efforts to impede the search for and prosecution of them by other governments.
Second, there is what historians strongly suspect of Eva Perón herself, which is that she personally coordinated efforts to have Nazi war criminals quietly relocated to Argentina.
As it turns out, there is a lot more to Eva Perón and her authoritarian, Nazi-sympathizing husband than the Madonna movie allows. But I am sure Ocasio-Cortez knew that, expert that she is.
