Posted on 06/14/2005 11:46:33 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Had Che Guevara not been executed by Bolivians in 1967, he may well be celebrating his 77th birthday this week. Or he may have endured a bloody death at the hands of other enemies. Had he lived, Western college students almost certainly would not be walking around campus mindlessly displaying his likeness on flaming red T-shirts. A dead martyr is much easier to lionize than a living dictator.
Though he died nearly 40 years ago, Guevara is still sparking controversy. Rolling Stone magazine reported last week that guitar legend Carlos Santana was protested at his June 1 Miami concert. The reason? He performed while wearing a Che T-shirt at the Academy Awards. Cuban exiles, one of Guevara's legacies, were none too happy about that.
Santana's lame apology to the Miami residents who fled the terror state Guevara helped create illustrates the contortions Guevara's fans have to undergo to defend their idolization. "[The shirt] was worn to honor the soulful young man portrayed in The Motorcycle Diaries and had a profound political epiphany during a journey across South America," Santana said in a statement. "It was not meant to be an endorsement about a man who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba."
Revering a man who had split so many skulls requires the splitting of hairs. Without such compartmentalizing it would be impossible for those who call the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay a "gulag" to continue idolizing the man who helped create Cuba's real gulags -- the labor camps Fidel Castro used to detain, and worse, his political enemies.
That Guevara, a mass murderer and totalitarian, has generated such reverence and idolatry among the left while real heroes of democratic revolution toil in obscurity is one of the clear signs that the left wing in America still hasn't let go of its deeply felt sympathy with Communism. Cuban dissident Gustavo Arcos Bergnes is 78, which makes him a contemporary of Castro and Guevara. A founding member of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, Bergnes was wounded fighting with Castro during the revolution of 1959. He was Castro's ambassador to Belgium, but he was imprisoned after he questioned the dictator's increasing grip on power. No Western college students bear his face on their chests.
The organizers of last month's pro-democracy rally -- Felix Bonne, Marta Beatriz Roque and Rene Gomez Manzano -- are not the subject of fawning Hollywood films, though they have all been imprisoned for promoting democratic revolution in Cuba. A slogan chanted at last month's rally: "Down with Fidel!" When Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, organizer of the Varela Project, a petition to bring about civil rights in Cuba, accepted his Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Union in 2002, Oliver Stone was not there to chum up beside him.
During this week marking Che Guevara's birthday, let's dishonor his memory by paying respects to the people who deserve to replace him among the pantheon of liberal heroes: the pro-democracy revolutionaries who struggle every day to overcome Guevara's legacy of oppression and totalitarianism.
Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.
Holy smoke, I just did a search on him to see if I could find him, and look what I found...It looks like he got his azz sued off. He didn`t take the picture. Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/09/16/cheguevaraphoto.ap/
Carlos rocks, but c'mon... Imagine a slightly different shirt: "The shirt was worn to honor the soulful young man who painted postcards in Austria, it was not meant to be an endorsement about a man who killed millions..."
Since Che's become such a Po(o)P Culture hero around the mindless college and Liberal crowd, I enjoy wearing my shirt into as many bureaucrat & Yuppie coffee hangouts as possible.
It never fails to snap a few heads around. I just hang in the weeds for an offhand comment.
That would be Gerard Malanga.
By the way, it's not copyrighted. It was originally a rip off of the Warhol, but then Warhol claimed it as his own, etc. etc. big art world mess.
That's one reason why it spread. No coyright, anyone can make them. The same deal with the "smiley" face that isn't copyrighted.
I would like this opportunity to again compliment the Bolivian Army on the great job they did wasting that piece of scum.
My 13 year old nephew was wearing one. I asked hm if he knew whose face that was on his shirt. He said no, so I told him. Then I asked if he knew what this guy was, what he did for a living, and he said no. So I explained to him that the guy was basically a murderer for Castro whose job at one time was to go out, find people that Castro wanted dead, and have them killed.
Didn't seem to faze my nephew much. I think he still thought the shirt was cool.
There are these pieces of graphic art that aren't copyrighted that somehow take on unintended meanings in society. The Smiley face was a promotion for an insurance company -- the guy who designed it just died a couple of years ago.
Another one is the silhouette of the reclining woman that you see on mudflaps and decals from New York to Arkansas and Florida to Seattle.Her "official name" is Slick Chick.
She grew out of WWII nose art from planes.
Che falls into that category. No copyright, easy to produce and vague meaning that has all but been lost.
Fortunately, I don't look to musicians, a remarkably unworldly lot, for political wisdom. I can be a John Lennon fan without thinking "Gee, I wish Lennon's political ideas came to pass." Politically, Lennon, like Santana, like most musicians, was a bozo.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
History seems to have proven you very wrong. Take a look at the life of the average Chilean, versus the average Cuban.
Yes, and I'm sure the embargo against cuba has nothing to do with that either. It forced them to completely sell out to the soviets bolshevik communism which of course always fails. Chile has gotten its act together only recently, and has the benefits of a more liberal market and good trade agreements (not even going to talk about pinochet's reign)
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History seems to have proven you very wrong. Take a look at the life of the average Chilean, versus the average Cuban.
Yes, the great economic success of other Communist countries supports your argument.
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