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Speaking of Cuba....

Nick Gillespie does an excellent video takedown of the repugnant sympathy for Che Guevara expressed amongst Hollywood's "elite" and demonstrated by the proliferation of his image in popular culture generally.

Gillespie focuses on the inexplicable commercial icon-ization and artistic elevation of this
mass-murdering Cuban communist, who has become a merchandising sensation.



Interesting that the image of this butcher Guevara has become the epitome of that which he sought to stamp out in Cuba : free enterprise and free expression.

Certainly the ahistorical (or just the idiotic) among us have every right to glorify this bloodthirsty killer in films, or on t-shirts and other assorted shlock...or even on the wall of their presidential candidate's campaign office.

But no self-respecting 'liberal' (or human being, for that matter) would go near Guevara with a 10-foot shit scraper - much less associate themselves with and glorify the image of this evil and thankfully-long-dead psychopath.

Oh and if you think such sympathy is limited only to murderous communists of old, take a gander at Michael C. Moynihan's blistering evisceration of Hollywood's # 1 dupe for Cuban communism and the country's present-day criminal tyrants, Raul and Fidel Castro.

Here is a great line from Moynihan's article, which focuses on the reality of present-day Cuba's continuing repression of free expression, through the lens of Cuban dissident musicians :

"Porno Para Ricardo are a
Cuban band and their singer, the growling, snarling 39-year-old Gorki Aguila desires political freedom more than "free health care." "

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
What mass murdering did Che engage in?
Tyler Nixon said…
What do you consider mass? I consider mass to be large numbers of people, but they need not be killed simultaneously or in the same circumstances.

Perhaps I should have said Che was just a very prolific serial killer, since it seems most of his victims were technically killed one at a time.

Either way, the man was a monstrous criminal.

The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand
July 11, 2005
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The New Republic

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535

"...In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine.”

Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture...."

And on and on...
Tyler Nixon said…
Behind Che Guevara’s mask, the cold executioner

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2461399.ece
Anonymous said…
When can we lift the ban and visit Havanna to experience a real mid 20th century city?

That is what really is important.

That and a real Mojito.
Delaware Watch said…
Were these men executed for desertion? Hell, the American revolutionaries did that.
Tyler Nixon said…
So, 18th century battlefield justice is your standard for Che?

Dana, Guevara personally murdered people in cold blood and not just for "desertion". He oversaw political executions.

Sorry but he is no better than were the low-level Nazis or Stalinists or Maoists who murdered political opponents all in the name of the "state".

I am sure Che would have been a much more prolific killer had not the Bolivians cut him short with a taste of his own summary execution 'justice'.

Why you would want to rationalize or justify this homicidal psychopath is inexplicable to me, other than that he is a leftist revolutionary.

Perhaps you cling to a (quite overly-)romanticized view of what went on in Cuba a half century ago to install the present totalitarian dictatorship. I am sure the Nazis provided free health care too.
Delaware Watch said…
"Why you would want to rationalize or justify this homicidal psychopath is inexplicable to me, other than that he is a leftist revolutionary."

That's a cheap shot since you know that I oppose the death penalty for any crime. My point is that the killing of people who desert during battlefield conditions is never equated w/ "mass murder," which signifies killings like genocide or persons belonging to a particular party, etc. If killing deserters is mass murder, then the US patriots during the Revolutionary War were mass murders. I don't think that, but according to your logic, you apparently do.
Tyler Nixon said…
Are you saying he only executed "deserters"? You would have to define that term pretty damn broadly, to the point you might be confusing it with (political) dissidents. Does crossing Guevara amount to desertion in your calculus?

Even if it was desertion (and you are the first I have seen make this claim about Guevara's many killings) when is summary execution, even for "desertion", ever NOT murder?
Tyler Nixon said…
By the way, comparing bloodthirsty thug Che Guevara to the American rebels, to fabricate some moral equivalency for Guevara's overseeing the murder of political prisoners, not to mention his own personal killings, cuts no mustard with me in the slightest.

Why won't you answer Guevara's butchery in moral terms, not by bizarre comparisons to antiquity to fabricate some absurd military justification for his murdering. Even if his victims were 'deserters', that would still make Guevara a homicidal war criminal.

This man wrote about blowing a man's brains out and taking his possessions for "passing information". Guevara was a savage to be remembered only with total ignominy.

Maybe I am getting you wrong here. Are you trying to say he was not a murderer or just that was not a MASS murderer?
Delaware Watch said…
"This man wrote about blowing a man's brains out and taking his possessions for "passing information".

Passing information is the act of a traitor. We execute traitors--the law is still on the books.

I am saying he was not a mass murderer by conventional standards but a murderer nevertheless. I don't think anyone should be murdered/executed for any reason. That goes for our death penalty, the US revolutionaries murdering deserters & traitors and the Native Americans who sided w/ the British, the Cuban revolutionaries who executed the ruthless Batistas after the revolution, the Indonesian pogrom against Communists which the US financed and tacitly supported, etc., etc.
Tyler Nixon said…
Fair enough, Dana.

By the way, the man who Guevara describes muurdering was only suspected by Che of passing information.

My whole point is that this is not someone to be rehabilitated much less glorified as an icon, any more than Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy.

Guevara's murdering certainly is a pittance in comparison to the type of mass murdering we got from Mao, Stalin, Hitler, et al.

Maybe I am picky, but just one cold-blooded pre-meditated murder is my threshhold for when a person, revolutionary or otherwise, becomes an evil criminal worthy of nothing but condemnation and contempt.

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