Belated Che Day.
I would say, “Happy Che Day,” but unless you plan to overthrow the US government or execute hundreds of prisoners without trial, then it’s unlikely your celebration would be very true to the legacy of Che Guevara. Maybe as passive participants in bourgeois oppression, we could commemorate him by shooting ourselves in the head?
This Robert Scheer article in The Nation is fascinating. First, because the only negative words about Guevara are asides that he was “flawed” and that it’s “fortunate” that current revolutionaries “prefer” the ballot to the gun. The linguistic sleight of hand is also classic Nation material: “Little was reported about…why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.” There’s no evidence in the article that Guevara actually tried to help the poor in any way except by killing their alleged oppressors, but that doesn’t matter to Scheer. He has no trouble creating an equivalency between an empirical fact and an unjustified, self-serving claim by Guevara.
But the best example of Scheer’s shell game is in the fourth and fifth paragraphs: “Che was a Cuban Communist” trying to “spread his evil message…right?” No, because “Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold.” Catch the fallacy of equivocation there? “Cuban Communism” just changed meanings! In the first example it means an evangelical ideology dedicated to spreading itself, while in the second it means a conservative, immobile tyranny. So what we’ve just been told is that Guevara was NOT trying to “spread his evil message”… as proven by the fact that he became disillusioned when Castro STOPPED trying to spread the “evil message.” Something’s wrong with that logic. (The second definition also makes me think that Scheer’s one of those who believes Communism never really existed, so it can’t be blamed for Communists’ atrocities.)
But this is all immaterial, because if you read the article again, you’ll see that it isn’t really about Guevara at all. It’s about the horrible misdeeds of the US, and the point of the article is for Nation readers to nod in sympathy as Scheer confirms what they’ve already known, that the US is stupid and evil. Guevara has no independent existence or agency—and certainly his victims don’t—because he’s only there to show up US crimes and mistakes. Talk about dehumanizing the Third World.
on October 11th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Ridiculous. I hate how the left is willing to demonize Pinochet for his crimes (and rightly so) but gives any socialist South American thug a pass because they were trying to help the poor by executing all those people.
on November 28th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
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