Icons of Ideology: Che Guevara

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Ben Froland in Articles

Che on Che action.

You’ve no doubt seen his image on a t-shirt. It’s an image so fashionable in youth pop culture that you can actually buy a t-shirt with an image of this man wearing his own t-shirt on it. Of course we are talking about revolutionary rock star Che Guevara. Unfortunately most occupants of those t-shirts know little to nothing about Che and what they think they do is likely a fairy tale.

Mr. Lynch aka "Che"

Despite being most famous (or infamous) for his exploits in Cuba, Che was born in Argentina to a father of Irish descent and a Marxist mother of Spanish descent. As a result, Che’s full name is Ernesto Rafael Guevara Lynch De La Serna which would have made him simply “Mr. Lynch” like his father. Not the most exciting of names but better than the nickname of ” Cancho”, or pig, that his youthful peers would give him due to his lack of bathing. He would retain his aversion to hygiene throughout his life.

But what about Ernesto’s nom de guerre, the ubiquitous and prestigious “Che?” The term “Che” is used by Argentines much like “dude” is in the States or “chico” is in Cuba. Ernesto used the term to punctuate his sentences so frequently that his Cuban counterparts started calling him Che. In short, Che is the South American equivalent of fictional deadbeat Jeff Lebowski. The Dude (Che) Abides.

Fast forward to January of 1957 and we find Che riding the communist coattails of Fidel Castro in the hills of Cuba. Up to this point, Che has done nothing in his life that has been the least bit remarkable, but today that will change. Castro orders his personal bodyguard, Universo Sanchez, to execute suspected Batista informer Eutimio Guerra. This is the first known execution of an “enemy of the revolution” and a somewhat reluctant Sanchez hesitates. Che does not. The relatively unknown foot soldier and medic strolls up to Guerra, places his pistol to his head, and fires. “I fired a .32 caliber bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain that came out through his temple” Che would later write in his diary.

Che has at last found something that he enjoys, something he is good at. So much so that he wrote his father to tell him: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I put a bullet in a man’s head and watched him die slowly, I discovered that I really like killing.” Not killing on the field of battle mind you, but killing the defenseless. Castro was sufficiently impressed with his new executioner that he would later put Che in charge of La Cabana prison where he would use those skills daily on the people of Cuba.

Jon Lee Anderson, the author of “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,”  has stated “I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent.” Really? Let’s enlighten Mr. Anderson with the example of Colonel Cornelius Rojas who disappeared one evening in 1959. Rojas was a police officer, philanthropist, and devoted family man. He came from a long line of brave Cubans who fought for the independence of their country. After a week of frantically searching for the missing paterfamilias and fearing the worst, this is what three generations of his family witnessed on Cuban television.

Colonel Cornelius Rojas

The proud Rojas had bravely walked to the wall himself, faced the firing squad without a blindfold, and ordered them to fire himself. “FUEGO!” His wife immediately collapsed at home and fell dead of a heart attack after witnessing his brutal murder at the hands of Che’s firing squad. The shock also sent his pregnant daughter into labor and she bore the executed Rojas’ grandson prematurely that same evening. This is the legacy of Che Guevara, kidnapping innocent men without informing the families and executing them on television without trial, still wearing the same street clothes as when they were abducted.

Che apologists such as Anderson continue to espouse a man who himself stated “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”  And kill he did. Che’s victims included gays, rockers, young boys, hipsters, pregnant women, and the mentally retarded. The Cuba Archive continues to perform the difficult task of documenting the names and dates of those executed without due process by Che.

Despite the gallons of blood spilled in La Cabana, Che still longed for killing on an even grander scale. After the Cuban Missile crisis in November of 1962, Che told the London Daily Worker “If the nuclear missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City … We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims … We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm.”

After a brief stop in the Congo to “lead” a group of monkey-skin clad  cannibals, Che eventually travels to Bolivia in 1967 with delusions of starting a revolution there. He tricks a few people into joining his tiny group and leads them around in circles in the jungle, experiencing the same successes there as he did in Africa, which is to say none at all. He instructs this group to fight to the death should they encounter any resistance. The “rebels” soon do encounter a group of Bolivian rangers and dutifully follow Che’s orders, fighting to the last man.

Che on the other hand had no stomach for fighting or dying. He and a Bolivian miner named Willy moved methodically towards the rangers until they were within earshot. According to Bolivian General Luis Teran, Che then yelled loudly “I surrender! Don’t kill me! I’m worth more alive than dead!” A fully armed and nearly unscathed Che then raised his carbine and surrendered to only two Bolivian rangers. So much for Che’s fabled machismo.

Che Meets His Maker

Che tried desperately to convince the Bolivian authorities of his value but they were uninterested in his prattle. Ironically his case was even pleaded by a Cuban-born CIA agent named Felix Rodriguez who did believe Che held useful information. The Bolivians would have none of it and on October 9th, 1967, Che was executed. His hands were cut off to facilitate fingerprinting and ensure positive identification and his body was buried in an unmarked grave.

There is simply too much evil in Che to capture it all in a single article. He was a murderer, an abuser of animals, a narcissist, a coward, a military failure, an economic imbecile, a racist, and a deserter of two wives. And yet he still has his followers.

Useful Idiots

Today Che is a pop culture icon, a darling of the entertainment world, and still the toast of liberals everywhere. These useful idiots strut around donned with merchandise and tattoos bearing his likeness, blissfully ignorant of the real Che. So how is it that a man as vicious and despicable as Che could become the poster boy for freedom, love, and peace? It was no accident.

By the late 1960′s, Cuba’s once vibrant country was in shambles. The promises of liberation by Castro and Che had resulted in a total economic collapse and a starving population. Castro needed to put a smiley face on his regime and he picked the now “martyred” Che.  According to Lieutenant  General  Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official ever to be granted political asylum in the United States:

In 1970, the Castro brothers shifted Che’s sanctification into high gear. Alberto Korda, a Cuban intelligence officer working undercover as a photographer for the Cuban newspaper Revolución, produced a romanticized picture of Che. That now-famous Che, wearing long, curly locks of hair and a revolutionary beret with a star on it, and looking straight into the viewer’s eyes, is the logo advertising Soderbergh’s movie.

“Guerrillero Heroico”

It is noteworthy that this picture of Che was introduced to the world by a KGB operative working undercover as a writer—I. Lavretsky, in a book entitled Ernesto Che Guevara, which was edited by the KGB. The KGB entitled the picture “Guerrillero Heroico” and disseminated it throughout South America—Cuba’s area of influence. Italian millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, another communist romantically involved with the KGB, flooded the rest of world with Che’s picture printed on posters and T-shirts. Feltrinelli became a terrorist himself, and he was killed in 1972 while planting a bomb outside Milan.

So the iconic picture most associate with Che was nothing more than communist propaganda. And what of the writings of such luminaries as Jon Lee Anderson? His sources are primarily KGB and Castro approved books and documents bereft of any accounts from the Cubans who were actually brutalized by Che. To paraphrase author Humberto Fontova, this is like chronicling Hitler using the writings of Joseph Goebbels while dismissing Anne Frank as a heretic. If you want a true account of Che’s Cuba, go to the Versailles restaurant in Miami and the Cuban exiles having their coffee will enlighten you.

T-shirt Mocking Che

There is hope that a younger generation is finally looking past the fabricated window dressing of Che’s image. Some sport satirical T-shirts that spoof the original while Australian rockers “The Clap” mock the Che Guevara T-Shirt wearer who has no Cuban friends and knows nothing of the man. “You didn’t know that he wasn’t the singer of a political rock band.”  Share the video with an ignorant undergrad and you may even foster some independent thought.

Icons of Ideology: Introduction

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Ben Froland in Articles

Famous Advertising Logos

We live in the most marketed to culture in history. The days of billboard signs and radio/television commercials as standalone vehicles are long gone. We now see ads everywhere including at the gas pump, in public restrooms, on websites, in our e-mail, and even in text messages.

The average individual will see 3000 marketing messages a day. This astonishing rate makes the young  particularly susceptible to this bombardment. A newborn child will be subjected to nearly 20 million of these messages before they reach adulthood.

Most marketing messages are created without any malice intended. A smart business will let the market’s needs or desires determine what it produces. Therefore marketing is a method for the business to communicate to individuals in the market about the product that meets their needs.

Less scrupulous marketers will take a different approach. Donald Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz, has identified an approach many of these cutthroat marketers use:

Step 1: Convince people that they are miserable, and

Step 2: Convince them that they will be happy if they buy this possession.

Sounds a lot like a politician peddling entitlements, doesn’t it?

Propaganda Posters Featuring Mao and Stalin

The worst forms of marketing can actually be used to convince people to favor causes that are detrimental to them. This illusion painted to deceive the public is usually referred to as propaganda. For these ads, a figure or cause is grossly misrepresented to the individual to compel them to change their point of view.

To counter these influences, self-reliant Americans traditionally possessed a healthy amount of skepticism. Current generations, unfortunately, have allowed themselves to offload some of their personal responsibility with the mistaken belief that someone else (a government agency, a private business, the press) will look out for their interests. This has lulled us into a lethargic state where we are all too receptive to marketing and propaganda, no questions asked. For example:

Do you believe the food you eat is healthy because the government tells you so? Have you ever signed anything you didn’t fully understand or hadn’t read completely? Do you ask your doctor questions or just leave your medical decisions to them? Do you believe everything you see or read in the news? Earlier generations would never have done so. If you do, you should consider taking a more active role in your own life.

The most effective marketing/propaganda campaigns have powerful images or slogans that are instantly recognizable. In the arena of ideas there are numerous icons that individuals parade around on T-shirts, signs, and flags. Many of these people, unfortunately, have been fleeced or have just never taken the time to study the history behind the image that they revere so much.

Icons of Ideology

The Graph will be presenting the origin, history and meaning behind some of the most widespread icons of ideology present in America. If you didn’t know that Che Guevara was of Irish descent, stay tuned. Want to know why a rattlesnake became an early symbol of America and now the Tea Party movement? We’ll have that too. Prepare to be educated, enlightened, and empowered.