Che Guevara

Betancourt: Revolutions Not So Nice

by Kathryn Ciano on October 8, 2010

in International, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty

After six years in FARC captivity deep in Colombia’s jungle, Ingrid Betancourt is over revolution and ready for cake.

From the NPR story on All Things Considered:

Betancourt says her time in captivity dispelled any romantic illusions she had about the FARC and their mission. “I am of a generation where we like Che Guevara, you know, the very romantic kind of revolution thing,” she says. “And in a way, I thought that the FARC was kind of a romantic rebellion against a system that… I didn’t like either.”

In the course of human events men are indeed occasionally required to overthrow the system in place.  History books and legal lit are all written by a revolution’s victors.   Yet the majority of revolution is this Che bloody hell: guerillas and lawlessness and theft.

Ingrid Betancourt went through hell. Ignorance insulated by a socialistic culture may excuse her admiration for Che. Yet it is just this type of admiration that perpetuates a guerilla mentality in much of the world.

Politics aside, Che Guevara was a brutal murderer who tortured his ideological counters. Rather than promote a liberty-friendly environment, Betancourt spent her career supporting structures that permit guerillas like her captors to exist.

Che Guevara was no more a “romantic revolutionary” than were the guerillas that tortured Betancourt. In many critical ways FARC is identical to Che Guevara’s revolution. As long as people hold on to the notion that these revolutionaries are “romantic,” many, many more people will suffer the same hell that befell Ms. Betancourt.

Che Guevara was a mass murderer.  Killing in the name of ideology is not above the law.

Photo Credit: NPR

Politics and . . . pizza

by Fran Smith on November 9, 2009

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (see CEI’s video celebrating that), it’s interesting to note that a pizza parlor in Shirlington, VA is promoting heroes of communism and Marxism.  And the source of that information is none other than the Washington Post’s Reliable Source today, which records an email exchange between a customer objecting to posters of Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara on the walls of Busboys and Poets restaurant and the owner’s response praising those two icons.

The customer, Bradley Blakeman, should have known that his pizza would be served with a side dish of leftist politics.  After all, the owner of B&P, Andy Shallal, makes no bones about his commitment to leftist causes on his website.  And he emailed back to his disgruntled customer (and the Washington Post) that

Guevara and Lenin “represent the struggles of working people. . . . They fought against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few.”

To be sure, that’s a fairly narrow way of looking at both of these figures. To some prominent scholars, Che is known for his “murderous collectivism,” while Lenin is widely regarded as one of history’s mass murderers.

It doesn’t sound like Blakeman will be a repeat customer at Shallal’s restaurant, but if comments on the Post article are any indication, Shallal will have no trouble finding fellow travelers.  Here’s one, for instance:

The lives of Che and Lenin are known and respected in every town of every country in the world in spite of the millions of words written and billions spent trying to rewrite history.

And that is because the struggle they dedicated themselves to is the same struggle working people all over the world today are still fighting.

If only that poster would read a bit of that history, including what the Berlin wall represented.

AIG Chief Loves Vicious Left-Wing Terrorist?

by Hans Bader on March 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

AIG Financial Products CEO Gerry Pasciucco wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara — the Cuban “revolutionary” and henchman of Fidel Castro who tortured children and called himself “Stalin II” (after Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who tortured, murdered and starved to death more than 20 million people). Maybe it reflects his ideological leanings. Pasciucco has given a lot of money to liberal politicians — $2300 to Obama, $2000 to Chris Dodd, Connecticut’s ethically-challenged senior senator, $1000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $1000 to liberal Ned Lamont, who unsuccessfully tried to bump off Joe Lieberman (D-CT) from the left.

I guess I should expect leftists to end up running what is essentially a nationalized company (taxpayers have spent $170 billion to bail out AIG). But it’s not a good sign. Freddie Mac was badly managed, but when the Feds took over, and started emphasizing liberal political goals over profitability, they really ran it into the ground, and Obama made it run up $30 billion in additional losses just for bailing out irresponsible mortgage borrowers.

Obama famously told Joe the Plumber he would “share the wealth around.” And he has done so on an unprecedented scale. Goldman Sachs, the wealthy Wall Street firm that is one of the biggest liberal donors, received billions from the taxpayers that it didn’t even need, through the AIG bailout, which was used to pay off AIG’s customers at absurdly generous rates (undercutting claims that AIG managers like Pasciucco have done such a good job that they deserve a fat bonus).

And the Administration has redistributed trillions more in wealth through a proposed budget that is expected to increase future budget deficits by $4.8 trillion, a pork-filled, economy-shrinking $800 billion stimulus package, and a trillion dollar toxic-asset buy-up program that will plunder taxpayers to enrich politically-connected banks (all of which contradict Obama’s campaign promise of a “net spending cut“).

After blocking limits on pay that would have covered just AIG, Congressional liberals are now moving to impose pay caps on all publicly-traded companies, not just those that receive federal funds. Companies will now have an incentive to curry favor with their Congressional masters by making lots of additional campaign contributions — just the way AIG did, giving most of its money to liberal lawmakers since 2003).

Meanwhile, the EEOC, charged with enforcing workers’ rights, is systematically violating federal labor and employment laws.

Soderbergh: Historically Illiterate or Willfully Ignorant?

by Ivan Osorio on January 8, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, International

In a new interview, Steven Soderbergh, the incredibly overrated Hollywood director whose new paean to the disgusting Che Guevara is getting a lot of attention these days, claims an ignorance of history that, if willful, smacks of seeking to avoid ugly facts — and if not, is just plain dumb.

When I started, though, I had a blank slate, which was either a perfect way to start, or a terrible way to start. I really didn’t know anything, and I’m not Latino, so I was truly a kind of agnostic about Che.

Agnostic? Now imagine if someone described himself as “agnostic” toward, say, Joseph Stalin. Moreover, whatever else he was, Che Guevara was a major historical figure, so not knowing anything about him should be a source of embarrassment to any allegedly educated adult.

Soderbergh portrays the making of his film as a process of discovery on its subject, for which he should be congratulated. Yet his description of this “process” seems selective and confused. Soderbergh’s explanation of his treatment of the most infamous episode in Che’s life — his directing of firing squads at the La Cabaña prison– meanders between meaningless contortions, antiseptic amorality, and self-congratulation at his talking to detractors.

I’m going to Miami tomorrow, and you know, there’s a lot of discussion about what happened after the revolution at La Cabaña, and why isn’t there more of that. It’s interesting to talk about. I like to talk about it. There are obviously people who are very anti-Che and for whom there’s just no amount of atrocity you could show that would satisfy them.

He is a murderer to them. He is irredeemable, and it’s hard. And sometimes you can have a reasonable conversation about it, and I can talk to them about context. And I can talk to them about balance and my reasons for showing the two periods that I show, and addressing the issues of the executions in the way we do. But some people literally can’t… Like I was having a discussion with this journalist in Europe, and he said, “I don’t know how you can make this film and not address the executions.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you know, those things happened.” And I said, “It’s in the film. It’s in the UN. He says in a close-up, ‘We execute people. We’ve never denied it, and we’re going to keep executing people because this is a fight to the death.’” I go, “Did you not see that?” And he was like, “I don’t remember that.” And I thought, “Wow. Wow. How do you not remember that?” The point being that Che knew that killing is part of this, and he was willing to kill and willing to be killed. So now it just becomes a matter of balance.

Balance? Again, imagine the reaction if someone sought to bring “balance” to a cinematic treatment of the Gulag.

In the end, Soderbergh comes across as the kind of self-styled intellectual who would minimize atrocities by depicting their authors as “complicated” figures — as if the notion that murdering your political opponents is wrong weren’t in fact simple.

For a dose of sanity, see Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s book. The Che Guevara Myth. As Vargas Llosa noted in a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor last summer:

While it is true that he executed hundreds “from the Batista regime,” he also executed people not connected to the regime. Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who served at “La Cabaña” at the time, told me that among the 800 prisoners there were some journalists, businessmen and merchants.

Guevara sent many young Latin Americans to their deaths thinking they were martyrs for a secular religion. With the exception of Cuba, every revolution he set up was crushed, including guerrilla efforts in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Haiti, and his homeland, Argentina, where Guevara’s followers brought about a military reaction that cost tens of thousands of lives. He also meddled in the Congo in 1965, where he allied himself with two butchers—Pierre Mulele and Laurent Kabila. Eventually, he had to flee the country. His fatal incursion in Bolivia failed to ignite a peasant revolution and caused the deaths of many companions, as well as his own.

Guevara’s other feats include setting up forced labor camps (Guanahacabibes, 1961). He helped turn Cuba into a Soviet puppet, and he ruined the island’s economy, first as head of the Central Bank, and then as minister of industry by diverting resources to industries that collapsed soon after they were created. He also reduced the sugar harvest (Cuba’s mainstay) by half, thereby creating the need for severe food rationing.

In the end, Che’s global revolution-making cost him his own life at an early age. In this regard, his admirers have a point that he left this world with much unfulfilled potential: Imagine how many more people he could have killed.