I wrote before that I wasn't surprised that Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord responsible for the massacre at Beslan School No. 1, took Che Guevara as a role model. Paul Berman, author of the recommended Terror and Liberalism, reminds me why in this piece from Slate:
Effective, violent, selective (shoot the kids in the back), cold blooded killing machines pushed beyond their natural limitations -- the boot wearing choice of discerning totalitarians everywhere. Posted by Ideofact at September 24, 2004 11:29 PMChe was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale. (emphasis added)
I must be too young...or have lived a sheltered life.
Though this is not the first time I have heard about Che Guavera, this is the first time I have seen him quoted or explained.
Certain columnists I read regularly refer to Che Guavera often--but I've never seen anyone do some homework and actually quote Che, or quote a serious article about him.
He sounds like he is of the same ilk as Castro (Latin-American Communist). And his statements agree chillingly with the actions of those at Beslan.
Posted by: steve h at September 27, 2004 04:47 PMWell, that's what's intriguing, and that's part of Paul Berman's thesis -- that the Islamofascists derive a lot of their ideas from the same sources as Che.
Why his picture ends up on t-shirts sold in suburban malls is beyond me.
Posted by: Bill at September 30, 2004 12:21 AMQue VIVA CHE!! CARAJO!
Posted by: Alej at October 20, 2004 08:28 AMWhat would we think of Che if he had not been assassinated? I suspect we would group him amongst "revolutionaries" such as Castro, who let us remember, was part of the same movement.
Posted by: henry Ferguson at October 24, 2004 03:20 AM