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THE TWENTY TRUTHS OF THE JUSTICIALIST MOVEMENT (1940s)

(These are the twenty truths that Juan Perón stated formed the core of his Justicialist political movement.  Note how different they are from a classical liberal attitude toward the nation and government.)

Here are the twenty fundamental truths of the Peronist Justicialist movement.  I have wanted to put them in one place so that each of you can engrave them in your mind and your heart; so that they are sent out as a message of love and justice to all parts; so that they can be practiced honorably and loyally; so that you live happily according to them, and also that you die happily in their defense, if that is necessary.
----Perón

The Twenty Truths:
1. True democracy is when the government does only what the people want and defends only one interest: that of the people.

2. Peronism is essentially popular. Any political circle is anti-popular and for that reason is not peronist.

3. The peronist works for the Movement. Anyone who in name serves a circle or a caudillo, is only one in name.

4. There does not exist for peronism more than one class of men: those who work.

5. In the New Argentina work is a right and is a duty, because it is just that everyone produces at least as much as one consumes.

6. For the peronist there is nothing better than another peronist. 

7. No peronist should feel that he is more than he is, nor less than he should be.  When a peronist begins to feel that he is more than he is, he begins to change into an oligarch.

8. In political action the scale of value of each peronist is the following: first the Fatherland, later the movement and later the men.

9. Politics for us is not the end, only the means for the good of the Fatherland, that is the happiness of its children and national greatness.

10. The two arms of peronism are Social Justice and Social Welfare.  These embrace the people with justice and love.

11. Peronism desire national unity and not strife. It desires heroes but not martyrs.

12. In the New Argentina the only privileged ones are the children.

13. A government without doctrine is a body without soul.  For this reason peronism has a political, economic, and social doctrine: Justicialism. 

14. Justicialism is a new life philosophy, simple, practical, popular, profoundly Christian, and profoundly humanist.

15. As a political doctrine, Justicialism realizes the balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community. 

16. As an economic doctrine, Justicialism makes real the social economy, putting capital to the service of the economy and that to the service of social well being. 

17. As a social doctrine Justicialism achieves Social Justice, that which gives people their rights in the social order.

18. We want an Argentina socially Just, economically Free, and politically Sovereign.

19. We constitute a central government, an organized state and a free people.

20. In this land the best that we have is the people. 
 

(Translated by T.M. Edsall)