The real Che Guevara

[Sandokan]

Part 6

Terror as a revolutionary weapon is an element of Bolshevism.

Yes, that’s what the man who trained them in Mexico says, that they had this plan to achieve absolute power. And, of course, they get all this inheritance from the KGB and its satellite secret services. There is a very interesting book, El soviet caribeño, by César Reynal Aguilera, which argues that it was all a plan prepared by these services so that Fidel Castro could take over the resistance movement against Batista, which was not a communist movement. My parents belonged to that movement and were profoundly anti-communist. The truth is that without that support Castro could not have taken power, and once he had the island in his hands, he organised a secret and counter-intelligence service along the lines of the KGB. They no longer shot people but sentenced them to exile and long prison sentences—there are still more than a thousand political prisoners—and maintained absolute control of an island where nothing works.

Che was absolutely merciless and willing to encourage mass murder as a mean to his end of a communist revolution. “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.” The imposition of a socialist state always ends with mass murders, intolerance, mass poverty, crime and awful quality of life.

 

[Sandokan]

Socialism is a secular, civic religion for leftists. Che was a little Stalin. A poster boy for Antifa. Now we know where Antifa gets their inspiration. I wondered how young Americans idolize a man who wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on their homeland.

 

[Bodi]

The statement about Guevara and courage is idiotic. Guevara can be very criticized as a murderer, but there's a point to understanding him more as well. He was radicalized when he travelled South America and saw great poverty, and when he was working in a hospital in Guatemala in 1954 when the US overthrew the government.

Che Guevara: Road to Radical

His face is known all over the world. With his long thick hair and charismatic stare, Che Guevara is globally recognized as a symbol for revolution and rebellion. He was the young medical student who sought to free the world not only from disease but also from oppression, poverty, and corruption...

stmuscholars.org

Right.

Che Good.

USA Bad.

Your posts are the same old same old...

 

[Bodi]

No, Che was not nice.

Your comment is ridiculous. He didn't drown puppies...

 

[uptower]

Christ on crutches, not more of this.

I guess it's been a quiet week...

 

[Hamish Howl]

This thread was boring on post one. Nobody on this Earth gives a damn about a dead revolutionary.

Necro-ing this thread was beyond the pale. There's no excuse for this shit.

 

[Sandokan]

Che has become a symbol of rebellion, a t-shirt. Is it possible to put an end to that?

Not as long as t-shirts continue to be sold—but the incredible thing is that the Che Guevara campaign, which was born with the aim of giving a romantic image of the Cuban revolution, has managed to make it frowned upon to criticize Cuba. It has surpassed those initial expectations and has created other myths of social justice or a great quality of life in a paradisiacal place.

According to Vargas Llosa in his book “The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand,” wrote “Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand.” All types of merchandise bearing Che face or name are marketed by big corporations and small businesses.

 

[Manc Skipper]

I enjoyed his "Motorcycle Diaries" A coming of age description of his travels around South America during his impromptu "gap year"

 

[Sandokan]

Che became a pop culture icon, the patron saint of progressives who wear his picture. Among them, he became a symbol of countercultural rebellion against capitalism. But in an ironic twist of history, Che owes his posthumous pop culture success to old-fashioned property rights.

 

[Sandokan]

Should we love Che Guevara? (slate.com)

Don’t applaud The Motorcycle Diaries.

BY PAUL BERMAN
SEPT 24, 2004

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
Click link above for full article.

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won.

 

[Sandokan]

Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.

 

[uptower]

Why now?

 

[The Mark]

Can his reputation survive the publication of his own words?

In December 1953, he wrote to his aunt from San José, Costa Rica, “I have sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.” [1, p. 62]Another letter to the same aunt was signed with the words "Stalin II." [2, p. 167] More important was the fact that when Guevara visited the USSR in his capacity as one of the most important leaders of the victorious Cuban revolution in November of 1960, he insisted on depositing a floral tribute at Stalin's tomb[1, p. 181]. It is important to remember that this was more than four years after Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes.

This from Che Guevara's Guevara journal of his travels through Latin America: “I now feel my dilated nostrils, savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood, of enemy death; I now tense my body, ready for the struggle, and I prepare my being as a sacred place so that in it resounds with new vibrations and new hopes the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat.” The Motorcycle Diaries omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form the film.

A phrase in a letter to his wife on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking in Cuba, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: “Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty.” It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people.

[1] Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Vintage, 1998).

[2] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997.

Now that you mention it...what the hell IS his reputation.

I don't even know.

Apart from some vague bits about him leading a revolution with ideas based on communism in some way? A violent revolution, I think.

 

[gman]

Now that you mention it...what the hell IS his reputation.

I don't even know.

Apart from some vague bits about him leading a revolution with ideas based on communism in some way? A violent revolution, I think.

Those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it.

 

[Sandokan]

It is true that Che was a supporter of the hardline pro-Soviet faction. In 1965 at the International Conference of Algiers, Che criticized d the Soviet Union policy by adopting what he called “the law of value.” Because of that, the Soviet ambassador in Havana complained to Castro about the anti-Soviet behavior of Che.

 

[Sandokan]

Che established Cuba's first labor camp in 1960 in the province of Pinar del Rio, to confine people who had committed no crime punishable by law, revolutionary or otherwise. He said: “We only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway.” This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey.

 

[Sandokan]

The film gives us no idea of what happened after the Cuban Revolutionary government took power. Quite a lot did happen. We all know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, which deserves its own four-hour movie, hopefully directed by someone other than Soderbergh. We also all know that hundreds of thousands of people left Cuba in the early 1960s. People have never stopped leaving.

 

[Sandokan]

The film did a huge injustice to history by excluding La Cabaña (among many other things). I believe
that the reason Soderbergh did it, was because it would have shocked many Che fans. and impact the box office revenue.

 

[Sandokan]

There should have been scenes with Che sitting atop El Paredon smoking a cigar while the fire rang out. There should have also been several scenes where Che personally executes people and even a scene where he is sitting there eating his steak looking out the window while the firing squads go on. By omitting these Soderbergh set himself up for a hail of rightful criticism.

 

[Sandokan]

Benicio Del Toro, a talented actor, is miscast as Ernesto Guevara; he has none of the cocky swagger and sarcastic humor of the real Che. He looks chronically depressed throughout the film. No one would follow Del Toro’s Che, except to a pharmacy to make sure he refilled his Zoloft.

At times the other actors, who unlike Del Toro are portraying Cubans, don’t even seem remotely Cuban; at other times the attempts of these same actors to behave and sound Cubanazo, chico, are hokey and forced.

 

[CLAX1911]

Right.

Che Good.

USA Bad.

Your posts are the same old same old...

America bad party

 

[Sandokan]

Carlos Santana’s chic t-shirt on Oscar night displayed the symbol of a regime that made it criminal to listen to Santana’s music! Cuban American saxophonist, Paquito D'Rivera, was offended by Carlos Santana wearing a Che t-shirt while performing at the 2005 Oscars Award ceremony and wrote a public letter to his colleague.

 

[Sandokan]

About That Che T-Shirt (fee.org)

Lawrence W. Reed | October 8, 2019

Think twice about adding a Che Guevara T-shirt to your Christmas giving this year.

Let’s say that all you knew about Adolf Hitler was that he painted scenic pictures, postcards, and houses in Vienna, loved dogs and named his adorable German Shepard “Blondie,” and frequently expressed solidarity with “the people.” You might sport a T-shirt adorned with his image if you thought such a charismatic chap was also good-looking in a beret. But your education would be widely regarded as incomplete.

If you later found out that the guy on your T-shirt was a mass murderer, you might ask your oppression studies professor why she left out a few important details.

This hypothetical resembles a real-world phenomenon seen today on numerous college campuses. Fifty-two years after his demise in Bolivia—on October 9, 1967—the maniacal socialist Ernesto “Che” Guevara is still making headlines and spoiling perfectly good clothes.
Click link above for full article.

According to Ciro Bustos, Che’s right-hand man in the guerilla struggle in Argentina and Bolivia, in his book “Che Wants to See You”, Che Guevara was a “synthesis of pathological sadism and fundamentalist extremism.” He also said, “I saw one young guy in a Che T-shirt and I asked: 'Why have you got Che on you? Was it because he was a fighter?' He couldn't answer. It's just an image now. Nothing more.”

 

[Sandokan]

Guevara was a “synthesis of pathological sadism and fundamentalist extremism.” The French writer Regis Debray, author of "Revolution in the revolution", wrote about the Che that: "He was adept of the totalitarianism up to the last body hair.” Che impulsive cruel behavior inflicted physical and psychological pain on others to assert his power. He literally interpreted the Marxism doctrine and engaged in arm struggle to enforce it.

 

[Sandokan]

According to Vargas Llosa in his book “The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand,” wrote “Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand.” All types of merchandise bearing Che face or name are marketed by big corporations and small businesses.