Beautiful obscenities, continued



Vox Felisi is exploring The Greatest Myths in History, and part 4 is They Dreamt A Pure Dream

The left movement in the West needed desperately a mascot and a lure for all the young ones to become cannon fodder for their street actions, to stay “relevant”, to slow down the process of going into historical and political oblivion.

From this perspective the earlier death of one Ernesto Guevara on October 9th, 1967 became a god sent blessing.

From the left’s point of view Guevara must have been a perfect material for a secular saint.

Firstly, he was cold dead.

This was a great advantage since a dead person could not spoil his image by giving an unexpected press interview or by writing amendments to his memoirs.

Secondly, he died fairly young and so too many wrinkles, potbelly, Parkinson’s disease and similar problems could not spoil his image.

Many people also considered him extremely handsome and he wore his revolutionary fatigues well.

To put it bluntly he was eternally young and his appeal to young recruits to the socialist cause could have been much greater than for example Nikita Khrushchev’s (not a handsome man by any standards).

Additionally, Guevara was not Russian and therefore not directly associated with compromised Stalinism (apart from that his name was much easier to pronounce than for example Tuchachevsky).

Guevara’s education and his middle class background also became very strong selling points among middle class, college and university recruits.

We have to remember that the appeal of the socialist revolution in the West reaches mostly the middle class “intellectuals” not the so-called working class, which is far too pragmatic for this kind of nonsense.

Felis also links to Samuel Farber’s article, The Resurrection of Che Guevara, who talks about Che and the “harsh but not brutal” (Che’s words) concentration camps,

Perhaps arguments could be made to justify, or at least to provide extenuating circumstances, for his behavior at La Cabaña. No legitimate arguments can be made to defend Che’s principal role in setting up Cuba’s first labor camp in the Guanahacabibes region in western Cuba in 1960-1961, to confine people who had committed no crime punishable by law, revolutionary or otherwise. Che defended that initiative with his usual frankness:

[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway. Whether long-standing militants or whatever, they should go to jail. We send to Guanahacabibes those people who should not go to jail, people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a greater or lesser degree, along with simultaneous sanctions like being deprived of their posts, and in other cases not those sanctions, but rather to be reeducated through labor. It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions are harsh but they are not brutal…(p.178)

Clearly, Che Guevara played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of arbitrary administrative, non-judicial detentions, later used in the UMAP camps for the confinement of dissidents and social “deviants”: homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses, practitioners of secret Afro-Cuban religions such as Abakua, and non-political rebels. In the 80s and 90s this non-judicial, forced confinement was also applied to AIDS victims.

Just last Monday I was writing about the AIDS incarcerations.

Too bad movie critics can’t bother to find out the truth about the hero of the latest road movie.