Get Up to Speed on Che
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
There's a rather lengthy article about Che Guevara you might want to read through over at Capitalism Magazine. A few brief excerpts should show you why I like it.
On the importance of the judiciary, Che intoned:
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," [Lewis] Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)!""Pure hate", eh? Isn't there some stupid lefty bumper sticker that says, "Hatred is not a family value." Well, then, hippie, why is your daughter running around in a Che tee shirt?
Or watching The Motorcycle Diaries, which somehow failed to mention the following heart-warming passage:
Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!In addition to noting Che's bloodthirstiness, the article examines the following: the number of political executions he ordered or performed (which put Nazi Germany to shame), his torture methods (which a few people at Amnesty International could stand to familiarize themselves with) , his ineptitude in battle, and his writing style, whose description I liked:
As a professional duty I tortured myself with Che Guevara's writings. I finished glassy-eyed, dazed, almost catatonic. Nothing written by a first-year philosophy major (or a Total Quality Management guru) could be more banal, jargon-ridden, depressing or idiotic.The author, Humberto Fontova, then provides three examples. He knows of which he speaks.
Some aspects of the writing style of this article, like several examples of dated slang, I found distracting, but it is overall an excellent and badly-needed debunking of someone whose pop culture status is possible only because pop culture is so thoroughly saturated with Marxism.
-- CAV
4 comments:
Gus, Che's reckoning is long overdue. His illegitimate glorification by spoiled, immature students has much in common with your 'Ecoterrorists Shift Tactics' (below). Both groups were originally lead and encouraged by folks like the doctor and lawyers now running the Dem. party.
When emotional excesses overtake reason, the same leaders emphasize only that their cause is just. Rarely does substantive debate or dialogue ensue.
Do you understand how educated, intelligent men like this, with all the priveleges of liberty, can disdain good will toward their fellow citizens so often?
Vigilis,
All men are moved by their deepest convictions. Recall that in the ecoterrorist post that animal "rights" activists equate killing animals with murder and thus see killing human beings to prevent such deaths as justifiable.
A good education and the benefits of liberty cannot make men good and they cannot make men automatically accept the idea that freedom is good, or even the ideas upon which such a conclusion is based. And no culture negates free will.
Gus
Gus, if people, especially U/S/ citizens do not appreciate their historical advantages, paid for by their recent ancestors, education has failed them. If people expect Utopia, education has failed us all.
Vigilis,
I really like the way you put that, and so hate to disagree with you, but....
The fact that so many people buy into the Che cult is actually testimony to the power of our educational system to spread ideas, like Communism.
It is the philosophers, who rationalized so many demonstrably false and destructive notions, who have failed us, as have the intellectuals who transmitted and popularized their ideas. Education has not failed us per se.
I am not praising our educational system, which is overall deficient in many respects (and has failed us in that way), but merely noting that it has been effective in that measure.
Gus
Post a Comment