Insomniac
Footballguy
That was the highest number I saw but it easily could have been more. There's no shortage of terrible autocratic regimes in Central and South American history on both the left and the right.
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Republican / Conservative Opinion Toward Che Guevara? (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Joe Bryant
- Start date
Seems to be a great guy. Helped Cuba flourish for 50 plus years under the utopia of Communism:.
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.
Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.
But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.
Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.
But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”
I’d be shocked if any right-leaning people familiar with Guevara had a favorable opinion of him. He was a muderous dictator-enabling Marxist tyrant.
The more interesting question, I think, would be how many left-leaning people have a favorable opinion of him. I know some do, which I’ve always thought was weird. The “murderous dictator-enabling tyrant” part really ought to outweigh any left-versus-right stuff.
The more interesting question, I think, would be how many left-leaning people have a favorable opinion of him. I know some do, which I’ve always thought was weird. The “murderous dictator-enabling tyrant” part really ought to outweigh any left-versus-right stuff.
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
So is that shirt made by people that like AOC or dont like her?
timschochet
Footballguy
You’re guessing wrong.
David Ben Gurion never had anything to do with murders or mass murders or ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity to the best of my knowledge.
Some would argue that other Israeli PMs have, in particular Menachem Begin (for actions taken by Irgun at his orders before and during the 1948 War) Ariel Sharon (for the massacres at Sabit and Shatilla and the forced resettlement of Palestinians in parts of the West Bank) and Netanyahu (for the forced resettlement of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem.)
But all of these claims are controversial and open to intepretation, and I personally wouldn’t put any of these leaders even on the level of murderer as Che.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Dedfin
Footballguy
How do you explain the mass murder of so many Palestinian civilians? Or maybe that didn't happen? I really don't know.
Insomniac
Footballguy
I think most of the favorable opinion of him is due to the fact the t-shirtwas pretty cool. Not as cool as Steve McQueen, but then again what is? I understand his Motorcycle Diaries book was pretty good too. ( never read it myself) Still as I stated earlier he was a bad guy. He was a minor player in 20th century history, worse than Charles Manson, not as bad as conservative icons like Franco and Pinochet.
rustycolts
Footballguy
I don't think they put an emphasis on history in school anymore. To be fair though I think we did most of the in depth stuff in AVC.
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Insomniac
Footballguy
For me it was a long time ago but the US History courses I took up to high school concentrated a lot too much on colonial history and ran out of time for 20th century history, which I thought was more relevent. I understand now this was deliberate because more recent issues are more controversial.
timschochet
Footballguy
In my last post I mentioned the 3 events that are considered the worst crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people (aside from the formation of Israel itself): the massacre at Deir Yassin, the massacre at Sabit and Shatilla, and the forced resettlements and occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Each of these events is extremely complicated and controversial and subject to furious debate.
Yes, I don't think any history class I took made it past WWII.
I don't know about Che Guevara because of history class. I know about him because of pop culture.
timschochet
Footballguy
Interesting factoid: the origjnal London show of Evita featured a song about Che Guevara’s early life and career in Argentina. The show’s creators, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, had the song removed when it came to New York because they feared that American audiences didn’t know who Che was and would simply be confused. By the time the play reached America, “Che” had morphed from an actual person to a sort of Greek Chorus: not really present but there to comment on the life of Eva Peron.
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Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
Insomniac
Footballguy
Why? I can't imagine there are many history teachers that find the colonial era more important or interesting than WWII and it's aftermath. At least where I lived a key factor was 1 member of the school board who was frequently given a forum in the local paper. I remember his name but I don't remember anyone else on the school board. He was a member of the John Birch Society. There were constant battles over books he wanted to put in the school library that argued the Rockefellers were really communists. I can only imagine what he would have done to any teacher that covered Joseph McCarthy objectively.
Just a note, even though the guy was a complete crackpot, I ran into him 20+ years later at a bar down the street from where he and I lived, He had been a minor league baseball player locally and if you avoided politics he was an OK guy to talk to.
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
Insomniac
Footballguy
So there are a lot of people that are wrong about what's important in US History.
Officer Pete Malloy
Footballguy
Insomniac
Footballguy
If I were to rank topics that should be covered in US history classes in order of importance it would be
1. Civil War cause and aftermath
2. WWII and aftermath and why it turned the US from one of the major powers to the pre-eminant world power
3 The Industrial Revolution including growth of big nationwide business and the labor movement
4. American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention.
...
757. Colonial History
But that's just my opinion.
I would rank American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention #1, and colonial history would be associated with that.
I can't imagine an American history course not touching on WWII, whether because it's too controversial or otherwise.
I do think some American history classes when I was in school (mid-80s) intentionally stopped short of Vietnam in part because it was still kind of controversial.
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BassNBrew
Footballguy
Da Guru
Fair & Balanced
Good read on that topic.
In Steven Soderbergh's Che, Benicio Del Toro takes the title role of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the bearded, asthmatic (though cigar chain-smoking) Argentine doctor who became the poster boy of Fidel Castro's Cuban communist revolution, which took power in Havana 50 years ago this month.
Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, meanwhile, is a vehicle for Tom Cruise and a distinguished British supporting cast – Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp and Eddie Izzard – to strut their stuff as the German officers who came close to killing Hitler in July 1944. Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the handsome aristocrat who planted the bomb and subsequently led the putsch that tragically failed to overturn Nazi rule.
Apart from their film-star good looks and the fact that they both perished by firing squad, Guevara and Stauffenberg have almost nothing in common: the diminutive middle-class doctor, despite his bourgeoisie origins, became a ruthless Marxist who identified himself with the struggle of Latin America's toiling masses in general, and with Castro's revolutionary vanguard in particular.
The towering Stauffenberg, in contrast, was a nobleman proud of his family's ancestry; a conservative army officer who became a reluctant revolutionary because of his revulsion at what the Nazis had done to Germany.
It is a sad reflection of the warped moral mirror of our time that it is Guevara, the squalid killer and totalitarian tyrant, who remains, more than 40 years after his death, the iconic emblem of ignorant idealists the world over. His hirsute features still stare swooningly from thousands of walls and millions of T-shirts.
Meanwhile, Stauffenberg, the war-crippled soldier who sacrificed his life trying to free his people from a cruel dictator, is practically unknown to the mass of filmgoers outside his own country.
But a glance beneath the surface glamour of Alberto Korda's 1960 beret-and-curls photograph of Guevara is enough to expose the less-than-romantic reality. At the time he posed for Korda's camera, Guevara was jailer and executioner-in-chief of Castro's dictatorship. As boss of the notorious La Cabaña prison in Havana, he supervised the detention, interrogation, summary trials and execution of hundreds of "class enemies".
We know from Ernest Hemingway – then a Cuban resident – what Che was up to. Hemingway, who had looked kindly on Leftist revolutions since the Spanish civil war, invited his friend George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, to witness the shooting of prisoners condemned by the tribunals under Guevara's control. They watched as the men were trucked in, unloaded, shot, and taken away. As a result, Plimpton later refused to publish Guevara's memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries.
There have been some 16,000 such executions since the Castro brothers, Guevara and their merry men swept into Havana in January 1959. About 100,000 Cubans who have fallen foul of the regime have been jailed. Two million others have succeeded in escaping Castro's socialist paradise, while an estimated 30,000 have died in the attempt.
There is little mention of this in the deification of Castro's Cuba among the West's liberal classes. The glorification of Guevara in Che and the earlier The Motorcycle Diaries film conveniently ignores it. Nor has the BBC found room, in marking the revolution's half-centenary this week, to expose the reality behind the rhetoric.
Che made no secret of his bloodlust: "It is hatred that makes our soldiers into violent and cold-blooded killing machines," he wrote. But he fell out of love with the revolutionary catastrophe he had created. After helping to ruin the island's economy as minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank, he flounced off to bring revolution to Bolivia's peasantry. They turned him over to the army, who shot him in October 1967.
Stauffenberg, too, died at the hands of his enemies, shot down after his bomb had failed to kill Hitler. He, too, was a failed revolutionary, but the sort of society that Stauffenberg was risking his life to create was the opposite of the tyranny embraced by Che. Stauffenberg wanted a return of the rule of law; political plurality; an end to the Nazi methods of arbitrary arrest, and torture and concentration camps; and the resumption of a culture guided by the values of Christian civilisation: the exact opposite of Che's vision.
Guevara and Stauffenberg: two very different heroes. It is sad, but given the state of our society, somehow not so surprising, that we choose the wrong man to adorn our T-shirts.
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