Living
Colour. Here's
the video. Not my favorite tune by them (for example
Broken
Hearts, Broken
Hearts [acoustic], What's Your Favorite Color?,
Open
Letter To A Landlord, Funny
Vibe & Love
Rears Its Ugly Head get more play on my music
engine) but it is a good example of what they're capable of, &
generally I dig their sound cause they're a damn good band.
Without going
into too much detail (I am psuedononymous after all) I was someplace
doing non-gun nut things & saw a very pretty woman. I viewed her
from the back & side at an angle & could tell she was very
attractive. She also looked a little lost & I was almost
contemplating walking up to her & striking up a conversation (or
attempting to). Then she turned around & after I noticed her
smile what I saw disgusted me so much I gave up any notion of
communicating with her. It wasn't her face or body or the way she
styled her hair; she had a t-shirt on with a pic of Hitler. & it
was not a satirical thing at all; it seems she admired him.
Now y'all are
with me right? It'd be a waste of time to approach her when her
"hero" is such a polar opposite of anyone I'd respect. The
correct thing to do would be to simply shun her right?
But it wasn't
Hitler on her t-shirt. It was another mass murderer who was not as
talented at his craft (but was just as brutal) as Hitler. The face on
the shirt belonged to Che
Guevara.
Paul Berman
penned an article entitled The
Cult of Che; Don't Applaud the Motorcycle Diaries.
Now why on earth would young people who seem reasonably intelligent
wear a shirt featuring "The Butcher of la Cabaña"? Well
it's something like the principle expressed in one of my favorite
Reagan quotes:
What they see in
that two-bit wanna-be thug isn't the petty tyrant who used force to
impose his vision on his (& other) people. What they see is a man
of vision who saw the oppression of capitalism & risked all to
fight against it. They see the Time article which grants him the
martyr status he always wanted. (you can find it here cause I'll be
damned if I hotlink that piece of journalistic tripe
http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/mao.html )
They remember
this:
"At the
risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is
guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a
genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
& not this:
"The great
lesson of the guerrillas' invincibility is taking hold among the
masses of the dispossessed. The galvanization of the national spirit;
the preparation for more difficult tasks, for resistance to more
violent repression. Hate as a factor in the struggle, intransigent
hatred for the enemy that takes one beyond the natural limitations of
a human being and converts one into an effective, violent, selective,
cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be like that; a people
without hate cannot triumph over a brutal enemy."
Or this:
"I ended
the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of
the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal. He gasped for a
little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I
couldn't get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he
told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: 'Yank it off, boy,
what does it matter.' I did so and his possessions were now mine."
* Diary entry from Sierra Maestra on the shooting of fellow Eutimio
Guerra which he suspected of passing on information (1957)
(All Guevara
quotes are from the
Wikipedia entry)
Guevara would
have been as bad as Hitler or Stalin or Mao if he'd been any
good at what he was trying to do. But he was a punk. A brutal punk to
be sure but he failed. When he was killed ("murdered" as
The Times article puts it) he was trying to get his revolution on in
Bolivia. Now according to the Berman article linked above he hadn't
been able to recruit any of those Bolivian peasants he was allegedly
fighting for.
"...It
always seemed odd to me that people wanted to associate themselves
with someone they knew so little about. In reality, supporting Che
was just about making a statement - of sticking it to companies,
America and the West.
Making Che
Guevara into someone worthy of admiration is the most successful
thing the 'Left' has managed to do in the past fifty years. This is
the man who had no shame in murdering innocent civilians, was a major
human rights violator, and put gays (who were 'deviants'), religious
minorities and other undesirables into concentration camps. Some
hero."
But I've seen
the following attributed to Guevara (though I cannot find any source
or citation):
"I fight
not out of hate but out of love"
Bullshit. The
only love he fought for one that of his own power & ambition.
"Is a
Che t-shirt on the Christmas wish list of someone you love? If you
love truth, justice and basic human rights don't fulfill that
request. Give your loved one a quick history lesson instead...a
complete Che Guevara portrait would include an executioner's
soundtrack. As a biographer wrote: '... Che, as supreme prosecutor,
took to his task with a singular determination, and the old walls of
the fort rang out nightly with the fusillades of the firing squads'."
Anthony Daniels
in an article called The
Real Che relates the following:
"With
few exceptions, the devotees of the cult of Guevara know little about
him or what he actually stood for. This has always been the case. In
1968, only a year after Guevara’s death, a professor of
international relations at San Francisco State University, John
Gerassi, published a collection of Guevara’s speeches and essays,
in whose introduction he relates the impact news of the death of
Guevara had upon his students:
On October 9,
1967, the first news of Ernesto Che Guevara’s alleged death reached
the United States… . I was approached by a nineteen-year-old coed.
She had tears in her eyes and a 'Make Love Not War' button on her
breast. 'You don’t really believe it, do you?' she asked. 'I mean,
he couldn’t really be dead, could he?' … [T]here were many
liberals and many pacifists [in the class], in addition to the
radicals. And yet to all … the news of Che’s possible death was
very upsetting and very personal. Che had obviously caught their
imagination. They respected and admired him. They knew very little
about his life… . But they knew enough to know that he was an
idealist… . Thus it became apparent to me, as we talked that day,
that these liberal and pacifist students felt, incredibly, as if Che
had died for them."
& Mr.
Daniels makes a very valid point about the
film The Motorcycle Diaries:
"...It
is as if someone were to make a film about Adolf Hitler by portraying
him as a vegetarian who loved animals and was against unemployment.
This would be true, but again would be rather beside the point."
The fog of time
and the strength of anti-anti-Communism have obscured the real Che.
Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as
Castro's primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over
summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir.
He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of
the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the
reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed.
Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless
citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would
suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer,
Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as 'a combination of Beria and
Himmler.' Anthony Daniels once quipped, 'The difference between
[Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris'."
Sean
O'Hagan in a piece called Just
A Pretty Face? quotes Christopher Hitchens:
"Che's
iconic status was assured because he failed...His story was one of
defeat and isolation, and that's why it is so seductive. Had he
lived, the myth of Che would have long since died."
So more or less
what probably explains the fascination with Guevara is simple
ignorance. The kids with the Guevara t-shirts simply don't know who
the hell he was. they only know what they think he was - a
romantically tragic figure who lived & died for his ideals. &
that'd be all well & good but his ideas included constructing
labor camps for artists & writers who didn't get this whole
revolution thing, not to mention putting bullets into people who were
not under arms or posing a threat - they just simply disagreed with
him.
I have some
ideas & principles that'd I'd fight for. Some of them I'd kill
over & some of them I'd die for. But not one of those involves
imposing my will on anyone else (except the one about imposing my
will to live on anyone who tries to kill me, but that's a semantic
point). & generally it is good to have ideas or principles that
mean more to you than your own well being does. But it's the
substance of those ideas that matter.
If you'd kill
someone over your desire to have the coolest shoes on the block I'm
going to judge you as being morally bankrupt. If you'd die to keep a
neighbor of a different ethnicity from being herded into a cattle car
by an oppressive government then I'd have some admiration &
respect for you.
Guevara - I
cannot stress this enough - the boy was a punk. A mark ass ig'nent
thug-wannabe scraggly headed punk. He wasn't any different than the
guy Capone had running around the neighborhood collecting protection
money. The only thing to be regretted about his death is that it
didn't come much sooner in his life.
His ideals &
goals, if realized, would have enslaved everyone under his dominion.
Marxian beliefs when realized afford the greatest tool of the tyrant
that modern day man has known. In order to exercise enough power to
control an economy to that degree you necessarily have the power to
control the individuals within that economy & most people do not
have the will power to resist using that control. Sure, they
rationalize it; it's just to hasten the ideal state, etc... but they
use it just the same. & to the same ends. Those ends are
invariably the limitation & in some cases the extinction of
personal freedom. Whether it's the main goal or just an unintended
consequence is irrelevant.
He is seen
possibly as a rebel fighting for the Rights of the people, but in
actuality he was a rebel who disrespected the Rights of those he
claiemd to be fighting for. Such is the way with most Marxists.
But Guevara
lives on the chests of young men & women across this country.
There's an anti-Guevara movement (which I understand is especially
strong among Cuban born Americans) but it pales next to the cult of
Che that seems to spring up anew every year from the colleges.
I must point out
this
anti-Guevara site complete with anti-Guevara
t-shirts. & here's an
amusing story from Babalu Blog about wearing an anti-guvara t-shirt
in Miami. Here's a site with more
anti-Guevara t-shirts.
But perhaps my
fav anti-Guevara merchandise can be found here.You'll
see it at the top. It says: "My American revolutionary kicked
your commie revolutionary's ass!" I’d buy it & wear it
the next time I’m in Boulder, but I’d hate to be filmed for an
episode of “When Pacifists Attack”.
So next time you
see someone, especially a youngster, wearing a Guevara t-shirt, try
to take some time & explain who Guevara really was. It's better
to believe that these kids simply are ignorent of history. The
alternative is to believe that they know who Guevara was & want
us (as in us capitalist Americans) to die as badly as he did, which
would really ruin my faith in the american fast food system.