40 years since the execution of Che Guevara, it's still worth celebrating, says Marc Sidwell
I belong to a Facebook group called "Che Guevara was a murderer and your T-Shirt is not cool". It has 10,935 members. It's not nearly enough. To celebrate the anniversary of his death, why not join up and get on the right side of history?
Sartre once said Che was "the most complete human being of our age". But Sartre was, of course, French.
Here are some of Che's rebellious bon mots:
"Youth should learn to think and act as a mass."
"Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates"
"It is criminal to think of individuals!"
Here is a list of 216 of his recorded killings between 1957 and 1959 without due process -- there were many more that aren't documented, and certainly many hundreds over his full career. That's when he wasn't burning books or railing against homosexuals, long hair and rock and roll.
So let's celebrate the very happy anniversary of the end of a brutal and sadistic freedom-hating, forced-labour celebrating bigoted square. Join the Facebook group -- or buy this T-shirt instead.
Che is dead. Let's party. But not like this.
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Submitted by dominichilton on Tue, 2007-10-09 10:42.
Simon Denis (not verified) | Tue, 2007-10-09 11:59
I quite agree that "Che" was a revolting little man. However, the left are in themselves immune to complaints of this kind because for them, the end justifies the means and the end is utopia, nirvana, an inexplicable quantum leap into love and fulfilment and universal fruitfulness. In short, they are crazed. True, they have less and less excuse to think in this way, given the evidence, but they have moved away from any notion of proof. For them the whole real world is merely an epistemological trick performed by the capitalist establishment. No idea drawn from calculation or experience is valid, as far as they are concerned. To them, the spontaneous mind is intimately corrupted by "false consciousness". This doesn't mean that we can't try to tear the scales from the eyes of your ordinary, deluded Joe but it is the hallmark of such a person that he doesn't much care about beliefs. For him, practical considerations come first and last and the rest is just troublesome detail. Explaining the pseudo-mystical mindset of the left is especially troubling, being all but unbelievable. So he goes on, sporting T-shirts with Che on the front, mixing him up with a trendy, good looking actor called Gael Garcia Bernal.
As for your point about Sartre - unworthy. Raymond Aron - one of the great anti-totalitarian thinkers - was also French as were de Tocqueville and Constant and Bastiat, great generals in the army of Freedom.
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