Book Review: 'Exposing the Real Che Guevara'

[Κασσάνδρα]

This essay is also published at NeoConstant, a blog I write for.

Humberto Fontova has written a must read book: Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Fontova himself was born in Cuba. Luckily, his family was able to leave Cuba and escape Communism, though his father was detained on the day they were scheduled to leave. Fontova, his mother, and siblings had to leave his father behind to get out. Fontova's father later was able to get to Miami and reunite with his family. Though everything worked out for the Fontova family, things didn't work out for thousands of other families, due to a man named Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Che Guevara is revered as a hero nowadays. All of us have seen those people sporting the Che shirts and other ridiculous Che paraphernalia. (Jonah Goldberg reports in his book Liberal Fascism having seen a Che onesie for a baby--luckily he, unlike most people, knows the truth about Che and likens it to a "Himmler sippy cup"--see pg 194.) But this man, Che Guevara, is not some rebel who fought for equality and rights for the poor. He is not someone that anyone in their right mind should idolize. Che Guevara was a murderer, simple as that. He had countless thousands of Cubans executed. And yet, in a cruel twist of fate, somehow this criminal is remembered in such a good light.

Che was a Communist in the purest sense of the word. He wanted everyone else to live poorly, while he, a top member in the Communist Party, lived in a mansion that he stole from its rightful owner. He tolerated no dissent: anyone who criticized him or those in power was more often than not arrested, tortured, and executed by a firing squad, all without a proper trial. And age or gender did not matter: Che had no qualms about executing women and children as well as men.

Che was not only violent, he was stupid. He had little military experience, despite the lies propagated by the left that he was an excellent guerrilla warrior. He knew nothing about fighting--before a battle, he actually managed to shoot himself in the head with his own pistol. Unfortunately, the wound was not fatal or damaging. He later proved his military ineptness in Congo and as a commander of a guerrilla force in Bolivia. He himself admitted to close associates that he didn't was not knowledgeable militarily. He was also a coward: he surrendered in Bolivia with his pistol fully loaded, begging his captors not to kill him.

Che finally faced justice on October 9, 1967. He had been captured in Bolivia a few days earlier and the soldiers received orders to execute him. In an excellent turn of events, Che was shot without having a trial, just as he had ordered so many thousands of innocent people to their deaths. I cannot think of a more excellent example of poetic justice: this murderer who executed so many people without a fair trial meeting his end in a similar manner.

It is time we stopped revering a criminal. I would argue that Che's crimes ought to be characterized as crimes against humanity and their perpetrator treated as such: a murderous criminal. You wouldn't buy something glorifying Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich, would you? No one decent would speak about these men in a complimentary way, either. Che is as bad as any of those three men--it's time for us to force the left to face the facts about Che Guevara.
Birdbrain

[FairDinkum Profile]

Thanks for that.

Some more info:

The bitter truth about Che Guevara

the distribution of such beans was reduced under Guevara and Castro's regime to half of the pre-revolution ration for plantation slaves. Humberto Fontova recently made this point in his book Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolise Him.

I'm considering making a short digest of Fontova's book to hand out to anyone wearing a ubiquitous Guevara T-shirt. I'm pretty sure most of the people wearing the shirts don't actually support the jailing of poets, homosexuals and roqueros (kids who like to rock out). Guevara's own musician grandson fled Cuba after he and his rock'n'roller friends had been terrorised one too many times by the Cuban fuzz for the popular charge of "pre-criminal dangerousness".

This catch-all charge dates back to the establishment by Guevara of Cuba's secret police whom he trained with help from the KGB and Stasi. Guevara was a man whose interest in justice is best summed up in his own words, as quoted by Fontova: "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."

...The digest may also include the fact that Cuban women had three months' maternity leave before the revolution but not after. Cuba had more female university graduates than the US before the revolution but not after. Cubans had the eight-hour day before the revolution but not after.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22069309-7583,00.html

The truth about modern legend Che Guevara, by the man who hunted him down

Guevara, who helped Fidel Castro win power in 1959 then oversaw the trial and execution of hundreds of "war criminals" from the previous regime, had been in Bolivia in a bid to spread the revolution.

He and his 50 fighters were trapped on October 8 1967 after a tip-off from a farmer.

As 200 American-led troops closed in, said Mr Rodriguez, Guevara shouted: "Don't shoot. I'm Che Guevara - I'm worth more to you alive than dead."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486423/The-truth-modern-legend-Che-Guevara-man-hunted-down.html

Exposing the real CHE GUEVARA

Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the mainstream media celebrate Che as a saint and a sex symbol - a selfless martyr with a love of humanity second only to Jesus Christ’s.

But their ideas about Che - Fidel Castro’s henchman whose face adorns hipsters’ T-shirts, posters, and ad campaigns - are based on a murderous communist regime’s outright lies.

As Humberto Fontova reveals in this myth-shattering book, Che was actually a bloodthirsty executioner, a military bumbler, a coward, and a hypocrite. This biographical account proves it’s no exaggeration to state that Che - who was captured and killed nearly forty years ago - was the godfather of modern terrorism.

And yet Che’s followers naively swallow Castro’s historical revisionism. They are classic “useful idiots.” the name Stalin gave to foolish Westerners who parroted his lies about communism’s successes.

Humberto Fontova interviewed the few people still alive who interacted with Che and can tell the truth about him, while overturning the myths and legends. In this book you’ll learn:

--How Che longed to destroy New York City with nuclear missiles. (So why does Angelina Jolie sport a Che tattoo, while denouncing violence as a U.N. ambassador of goodwill?
--How Che promoted book burning and signed death warrants for authors who disagreed with him. (So why did Jean Paul Sartre praise him as a “perfect” man, and why did Time Magazine name him one of the 100 most influential people of the century?)
--How Che made amazingly racist statements about blacks. (So why do Jesse Jackson, Jay-Z, and Mike Tyson say nice things about him?)
--How Che persecuted gays, long-haired rock and roll fans, and religious people. (So why do Carlos Santana, Madonna and Johnny Depp think he’s so cool?)
--How Che, the devoted Communist, loved material wealth and private luxuries. (So why do the mainstream media still depict him as an ascetic?)

http://freethemarketman.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/exposing-the-real-che-guevara/

The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand

Che’s lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The contradiction between his passion for travel—a protest of sorts against the constraints of the nation-State—and his impulse to become himself an enslaving state over others is poignant. In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: “He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural.” He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people’s lives and property, and to abolish their free will.

In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling—a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: “The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them.” This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others’ territory was central to Guevara’s politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people “who feel there is no place for them in the new society.” This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-like, about the “New Man” that he and his revolution would create.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535


Some link pages:
Che Guevara Was a Murderer and Your T-Shirt Is Not Cool
http://heathwcasey.blogs.com/heath_w_casey/2007/11/che-guevara-was.html
http://www.trenblindado.com/links.html

[AntiState Profile Website]

Meh, name one hero that wasn't an arsehole in some way... That's right, you can't.

I can see the point of bagging out the idolisation of Guevara but I also think it's hardly worth it. Yes, we all know that Nationalists can't "morally" get away with wearing shirt images of controversial Nationalists, yet people can wear shirts depicting murderous Communists and be considered trendy. Frankly, who cares?

How about we find a few heroes, make some shirts and make a big deal of wearing them around? Instead of whinging about people wearing Che shirts, let's make up some Nationalist shirts depicting our figures - Nietzsche, W.L. Pierce, Evola, Strasser etc. LET people attack us, let the media revolt and then we can make a commotion out of the double standard. What then can the Establishment do? Well, they can ban political shirts, or they can ban one sides shirts or eventually all political shirts will be considered non-PC, or political shirts will become popular... Each scenario is a different path but really, it's win all 'round for us!

My point; stop attacking and whinging, go beyond the initial issue and create a solution.

[Casapound Profile]

Meh, name one hero that wasn't an arsehole in some way... That's right, you can't.

I can name a dozen or so who were not cowards. Che wasnt one of them.

My point; stop attacking and whinging, go beyond the initial issue and create a solution

Id wear a T-shirt of Evola, Strasser? No thanks, * that nazi bastard.

[AntiState Profile Website]

I can name a dozen or so who were not cowards. Che wasnt one of them.

Yeah but that just further proves my point.

Id wear a T-shirt of Evola, Strasser? No thanks, * that nazi bastard.

More went on in the head of Evola than ever did in the head of Marx or Guevara. As for Strasser, he wasn't a Nazi, he was killed by Nazis - what is wrong with the concept of Blood & Soil?
For once I was trying to appeal to a everyone, can we get back to the point I was trying to make? Do you agree?

[Casapound Profile]

As for Strasser, he wasn't a Nazi, he was killed by Nazis -

He was a nazi before he was killed by nazis, sorry AS.

Plus he was a statist as well wasnt he?

More went on in the head of Evola than ever did in the head of Marx or Guevara

Evola was a genius, plus he was insane.

Makes a good combo sometimes. He didnt really need to go around wearing that Monocle did he?

[AntiState Profile Website]

They were examples off the top of my head, simply to illustrate my point. Any heroes or figures will do, as long as it's controversial and raises discussion in the same way Che does.

As for Strasser, he wasn't a Statist, he was a national agrarian of sorts, so as decentralised as possible; the Yeoman sort of ideal. Of course, we're not entirely sure of the practice of his ideas as he never had the chance. I'm not a Social Nationalist but the ideas of Blood & Soil are inherently Nationalist, actually, it practically defines Nationalism.

Evola, Strasser and the rest were hardly perfect, the fact that we recognise this puts us a step above many Reds. Every movement needs some sort of figures worthy of mention or heroes, I was simply illustrating with some common examples; if you don't like the ones I suggested, offer some better ones?

[Casapound Profile]

sadly ned kelly would be the only thing with the same amount of face recognition.

Probably not ideal for the purposes of breaking with the past, but there is potential there.

[FairDinkum Profile]

I think it is good to critique the mythology of the leftists and the Multiculturalists when we can (not making it a priority though). It's all part of the Culture Wars.
They have stamped their cultural brand all over our country and we need to critique their icons whilst building our own. It helps to get people out of the Establishment's ideological quicksand.


Ned Kelly would be good. Not perfect of course (I believe he did have some sort of criminal record). 

Henry Lawson, Jack Lang, John Curtain.

Maybe even Robert Menzies if you like.
Although he may not be too suitable, but I think he was the last PM to uphold the White Australia Policy... well, he might have been a bit iffy on that one too.

Australians don't really have a lot of "political heroes".

[Casapound Profile]

I believe he did have some sort of criminal record

really?

Its been done however, thats the problem, although not an overpowering problem.