Commies Aren't Cool

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Almost nothing makes me more angry than seeing slack-brained children wearing shirts emblazoned with the picture of Che Guevara. It's hard to blame the ignorant kids- but very easy to blame the left wing propaganda machines for installing a murdering communist thug as a pop-hero.

Front Page has an exhaustive piece on this "hero" that points out, in vivid and painful detail, just how much of a criminal this man was.

[[ "Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"
 
Che Guevara wrote these lines while in his early twenties, before he had gotten his hands on any such enemy. The passage appears in Che's Motorcycle Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford -- the only film to get a whooping standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. It seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form his touching tribute.
 
 Two weeks after Che entered Havana and took his post at La Cabana fortress, Castro saw his instincts as a personnel manager fully vindicated. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. "We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (firing squad.)" Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: "We don't need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

In that very month, January 1957 Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra who he accused of being an informer for Batista's forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone's surprise, Che Guevara -- a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time (not yet a comandante -- volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.
 
Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel by Castro's rebels. Suddenly without warning Che stepped up and fired his pistol into Guerra's temple. "He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine." Che wrote in his Diaries.
 
Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa', at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."
 
This attitude caught Castro's eye. More executions of assorted "deserters" informers" and "war criminals" quickly followed, all with Che's enthusiastic participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a 17-years old boy totally green to the guerrilla "war," hence his easy capture. First Che interrogated him.
 
"I haven't killed anyone, comandante," the terrified boy answered Che. "I just got out here! I'm an only son, my mother's a widow and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month...don't kill me!" He blurted out when he heard Che's unmoved reply, "Don't kill me!--why?"
 
The boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit and murdered.

"Arbenz didn't execute enough people," was how Guevara explained the Guatemalan coup's success.
 
Fidel and Che didn't want a repeat of the Guatemalan coup in Cuba. Equally important, the massacres cowed and terrorized. Most of them came after public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood, bone and brain spattered firing squad. ]]

Fidel's Executioner

Next time you see one of those shirts, try to restrain yourself from ripping it off of the idiot... it will only get you sent to jail. Instead, ask the "cool" person if they are aware of who, and what, the man on the shirt was. I guarantee that the answers will range from "I have no idea" to "He was a revolutionary hero." Then try to reasonably and briefly educate them. Won't always work... but at least we try.

The left has succeeded wildly in their history revision with this one. We have to try to combat it- even if it's one idiot at a time.

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