Posted on 11/25/2008 2:15:50 AM PST by Man50D
On Friday November 21st, while strolling through Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Commentary Magazine's online editor Abe Greenwald noticed a statue and did a double take. "Is that...Che Guevara?"
Indeed! There was no mistaking it: a statue of "El Che" by German artist, Christian Jankowski. Upon investigating the matter, Abe Greenwald learned that, "the sculpture is not intended to depict Che Guevara," but rather a street performer from Barcelona's Las Ramblas who idolizes Che Guevara and makes a living mimimg him. "Which I'm sure makes all the difference in the world to the families of Che's victims," Mr Greenwald wisely adds. " There's no mistaking who that statue depicts."
Most New Yorkers seem unaware that but for the grace of God thousands of them would have been Che's victims too.
"If the missiles had remained (in Cuba),We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims." - Ernesto 'Che" Guevara, November 1962.
Imagine a monument to Hideki Tojo at the Arizona memorial in Peal Harbor. Imagine one to Luftwaffe Chief, Herman Goering in London's Hyde Park. Heck, imagine one to Osama bin Laden in New York. In the fall of 1962 only Khrushchev's prudence and the FBI's competence saved New York from a Che-instigated murder toll that would have dwarfed Pearl Harbor's, London's during the Blitz , and 9/11's -- combined. The planning and will for the fiery mass-murder of thousands of New Yorkers were certainly there, only the means were foiled at the last minute. Morally speaking, this leaves the man honored in Central Park's Doris C. Freedman Plaza (from Nov. 20th 2008 till May 2009) culpable of crimes bin Laden envisions only in his sweetest dreams.
"The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!" raved Ernesto "Che" Guevara in 1961. "Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies' very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! We must keep our hatred against them [the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysms!"
Compared to Che Guevara, Ahmadinejad sounds like the Dalai Lama. After his 'whoopin 'hollerin reception at the U.N.'s General Assembly in December 1964, New York society's reception for Che Guevara -- with cocktail parties at "Bobo" Rockefeller's Manhattan suite and softball interview on Meet the Press -- shamed the sorry treatment accorded Ahmadinejad on his visit last year. If only Ahmadinejad had planned to incinerate his hosts (then boasted about it) he might have gotten a much warmer reception in New York. 40 years later he might even get a statue.
On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI discovered that Che Guevara's bombast had substance. They infiltrated and cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba's "Foreign Liberation Department" at the time.
A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, AL-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children, actually -- given the date and targets -- probably mostly women and children, were to be incinerated and entombed.
Cuba's agents for this Manhattan Thanksgiving bomb plot were members of the Cuban mission to the United Nations working in concert with members of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, an outfit that became much better known a year later when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines.
Incidentally, at the time of the Manhattan terror plot, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee also included among its members, CBS correspondent Robert Taber, (an early version of Dan Rather who conducted Castro's first network television soft-soaping on Aug. 30, 1957) along with The Nation magazine co-owner Alan Sagner. In 1996 President Clinton appointed the obviously unbiased Alan Sagner head of the head of the scrupulously even-handed Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at a time the FBI had long outed The Fair Play for Cuba Committee as a Castro-funded front group.
Oddly, Alan Sagner, even with his impeccable Clintonista and Castroite pedigree, remains unrecruited by Obama? But it's early yet. Give him time.
Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev had foiled their plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" they dreamt of yelling at the Yankee "hyenas" in October of 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev) they might have pulled it off. Guevara's quote at the head of this article is ample proof. Che thought he was speaking off-the-record to Sam Russell of Britain's Daily Worker's at the time.
Despite the diligent work of Camelot court scribes and their ever-eager acolytes in the MSM, publishing and Hollywood, Nikita Khrushchev himself makes hash of their Camelot boosterism. The Butcher of Budapest admitted that Fidel and Che's genocidal fantasy was a much bigger factor in his decision to yank the missiles from Cuba than Kennedy's utterly bogus bluster, threats and "blockade," during those famous "Thirteen Days."
But don't misinterpret Che Guevara's bluster with actual competence, much less courage. His stock in trade was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys -- bound and gagged is how he demanded his victims. On Oct. 8 1967, upon finally encountering armed and determined enemies, Che quickly dropped his fully-loaded weapons and whimpered: "Don't Shoot! I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"
Che Guevara's regime also shattered, through executions, jailings, mass larceny and exile, virtually every family on the island of Cuba.
Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Che Guevara's Gulag as Alexander Solzhenytzin suffered in Stalin's Gulag. But please, please, please don't bother looking for any History Channel, NPR, or 20/20 interviews with these heroes. They were victims of the left's premier poster boys, you see.
The regime Che Guevara co-founded stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 percent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe.
Under Che Guevara's rule "change," indeed came to Cuba.
"Those Americans," snickered Brazilian president Janio Quadros in 1961 as he watched Castro and Che make monkeys of Camelot by setting up a Soviet regime 90 miles from U.S. shores, "are just like women. They have a masochistic streak. The more you slap them around, the more you get out of them." (Ladies please! I'm quoting a famously eccentric and long-dead Brazilian President. The sentiment is not mine!)
Quadros mistook Camelot's "Best and Brightest" for Americans in general. But he certainly nailed New York's Council for the Arts and the Bloomberg team. Had the wishes of the man commemorated in that Central Park statue prevailed, Central Park itself might still be radioactive, and the charred remains of many Central Park frolickers (not to mention Doris C Freedman, many members of the New York Arts Council, and perhaps Michael Bloomberg himself) would all fit in a milk carton.
Disgraceful
Remove!
In a country that would reward terrorist with tenured professorships, and that would elect a man president who attended weekly meetings of a racist organization, what’s one statute honoring a blood thirsty killer.
Send it to Bezerkely...they like crap like that.
Most New Yorkers seem unaware that but for the grace of God thousands of them would have been Che's victims too.
"If the missiles had remained (in Cuba),We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims." - Ernesto 'Che" Guevara, November 1962.
There is a Lenin statue in Seattle. It deserves to be decapitated.
If I lived around there, each day I'd sprinkle the statue with bird seed to attract pigeons...lots and lots of pigeons.
Lenin in Seattle?
OPINION: Maybe it can be shipped to Berkeley, also and they can start an Anti-American museum.
You read my mind, fieldmarshalj.
KRISTINN, FREEREPUBLIC.COM: We have kids that wear Che Guevara shirts here in the United States.
MATTHEWS: Yes, but they're kind of cute at this point, aren't they? They're not about somebody out to get us now. I think there's a difference. I mean, that's kind of camp almost, isn't it?...is Che Guevara the symbol of hate in the United States anymore?
KRISTINN: Yes.
MATTHEWS: I don't think so. I mean, a lot of our kids wear them. I see kids wearing them all the time, even my kids wear them. It's like a Robert Marley T-shirt at this point.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11943459/
_________________________________________________________
Matthews: Obama Speech Caused 'Thrill Going Up My Leg'
"During MSNBC's live coverage of Tuesday's presidential primary elections, after the speeches of Barack Obama and John McCain had aired, Chris Matthews expressed his latest over the top admiration for Obama's speaking skills as the MSNBC anchor admitted that Obama's speech created a 'thrill' in his leg"
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2008/02/13/matthews-obama-speech-caused-thrill-going-my-leg
_________________________________________________________
Che flag sends 'disturbing' message about Obama
Candidate attracts 'people who think mass murderers are romantic revolutionaries'
February 13, 2008
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
The Fox TV affiliate in Houston has captured images of a volunteer in a campaign office for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama working in front of a flag featuring the image of Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary who became Fidel Castro's executioner after the communist takeover in Cuba.
And while the Obama campaign has issued a statement placing a modest distance between the campaign and its "volunteers," the issue of such an image on display in an office operating on behalf of a man hoping to be commander in chief of the world's last remaining superpower is raising alarms.
Even Obama supporters have been forced into corners because of the issue, with one likening the Texas state Republican Party to Guevara, to whom have been attributed hundreds of executions of anti-Castro leaders.
Under the heading "Barack Guevara," Investor's Business Daily raised some of the more pointed questions, to which the campaign responded only with a statement: "The office featured in this video is funded by volunteers of the Barack Obama Campaign and is not an official headquarters for his campaign. ..."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56293
_________________________________________________________
http://store.che-lives.com/t-shirts.php
_________________________________________________________
Park Avenue Gets a Mao
By KATE TAYLOR | September 8, 2008
The final piece of the Asia Society's exhibition "Art and China's Revolution" was installed over the weekend: a 10-foot-tall sculpture of a Mao jacket, by the artist Sui Jianguo, which will stand on a median in the middle of Park Avenue at 70th Street until mid-November.
The sculpture, called "Mao Suit," is made of corroded steel and weighs 5-and-a-half tons. It is part of a series of Mao jackets — shown without the head or hands of their famous wearer — that the artist, who is in his 50s, began in the late 1990s and has made in a variety of materials, from steel to resin to colored plastic, the Asia Society's museum director, Melissa Chiu, said.
When Mr. Sui first exhibited the sculptures at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he teaches, they were controversial, Ms. Chiu explained.
People "saw it as being somewhat critical of Mao's policies, because it has a very wide bottom, so it suggests that Mao was quite plump," Ms. Chiu said. "The reading was that [the sculpture] suggested that Mao was prosperous and bourgeois."
As the series progressed, the controversy died down, Ms. Chiu said. She herself sees "Mao Suit" as a complex representation of Mao, neither wholly positive nor sharply negative.
"Mao is considered the father of modern China," she said. "Yes, his policies exacted suffering among his people: There is a common saying about Mao being '70% right and 30% wrong.'" But for people who lived through the revolution, she added, Mao "was an inescapable part of their lives."
That Mr. Sui chose not to include Mao's head and hands "suggests an absence," Ms. Chiu said. "So perhaps the sculpture is part critical, part just an acknowledgment of their experience."
"Mao Suit" is on loan from the artist. It was sent by boat to New York, in a 20-foot container, the associate director of communications for the Asia Society, Elaine Merguerian, said. The Asia Society worked with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to find an appropriate spot for the sculpture, and then with the Department of Transportation to make sure that the weight was properly distributed, since the median is above the no. 6 subway line.
"It's the first time we've ever done something on Park Avenue," Ms. Chiu said. "It gives us an opportunity to extend the exhibition."
Good idea.
Next time i’m in CP I’ll do that.
I don't do PhotoShop. =o)
WOW!!!
I can honestly say that today I have learned something pretty fundamental here in the FRee Republic. Thanks for posting!
As a foreigner I had always thought that America’s treatment of Cuba since — what was it? 1962? — was anally retentive and way over-the-top. And I had also always viewed Che Guevarra as some bad-head communist hippie from Latin America that smoked too much dope and caused ructions in South America, until he got bumped off by his own mates...
...and today I find out that in actual fact, he was more like the Beatles-era Osama bin Laden and that he had hatched a plot with the Cubans to incinerate thousants of you Yanks in New York City!!!
Suddenly a whole bunch of pieces clicked together: they don’t teach this stuff to foreigners (or probably even to American kids these days) so of *course* Che Guevarra is perfect for wearing on a tee-shirt as some sort of icon-of-rebellion.
No wonder you Yanks hate the guy: he was a terrorist that tried to kill American women and children. He didn’t just talk about it, he actually gave it a go. And no wonder you isolate Cuba: they are a terrorist rogue nation.
CLICK.
Thanks for the education. I bet there are millions of people in the Western world who do not know what I just learned today.
*DieHard*
Maybe they should put up a statue with Mel Brooks doing his wacky Hitler impersonation....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.