I’m gonna need some clean up before I go on a t-shirt. ¡Hasta la muerte siempre!
Yesterday was Dead Che Day! In all the excitement, we missed it. But fortunately, he’s still dead today. Every day since October 9, 1967 is Dead Che Day around here, and it’s a matter of sheer delight to us that he’s, well, dead. He may be the role model of douchebag college students on six continents, but he’s toasting in Hell, and that’s a fair trade in our book. Although the thousands of Cubans, Congolese, Bolivians and various odds and ends he had shot might have wanted him to suffer more. C’est la guerre irregular, n’est-ce pas?
Did he Fight Like a Girl?
“He’s resting. He’s pining for the pampas.”
The Daily Caller didn’t think so. They think the girls are better, and have a slide show entitled “9 girls with guns that would make better freedom fighters than Che Guevara.”
Why nine? Because that’s how many bullets executioner Mario Terán plugged him with before the Communist revolutionary, writhing on the floor and biting on his wrist to keep from crying out, finally succumbed to fate.
*Snork*.
And we thought we were cold.
A REAL freedom fighter in a beret — Didi Nearne.
Unfortunately, the slideshow falls light-years short of the snark. The selections they made show why you should never give an assignment like this to an intern who’s never gotten beyond sighs and self-abuse vis-a-vis real physical women; every one of the nine is some fictional character from some recent Hollywood cartoonish ultra-violent show, except for one fictional character from a cartoonish 1970s classic.
Che deserves better, and worse, than that. He deserves to be compared to real women, not the teenage spankatorium-vision characters that Hollyweird offers up. Our nine real-world women who make better freedom fighters than Che?
Judith, Slayer of Holofernes, Circa 450BC, Biblical/Apocryphal character.
“Hai Ba Trung,” the Trung Sisters, Vietnam, AD 39.
Boadicea, warrior queen of the Britons (well, the Iceni), AD 60.
Molly Pitcher (real name probably Mary L. Hayes), Battle of Monmouth, 1778.
Hélène Studler, organizer of escape and evasion nets, France, 1943-45.
Sophia Magdalena Scholl, German Resistance “The White Rose,” 1942-43.
Monica de Wichfeld, Danish Resistance, 1942-44.
SOE Radio Operator Didi Nearne, Croix de Guerre, 1945.
Army Sergeant Monica Brown, Silver Star medic, 2007.
You’re welcome to suggest your own: we could have while nines of nines, 99s of 99s, and they’d all be better that that Argentine blowhard. How hard would it be to find nine more WWII resistance characters? Nine more national folklore heroes? Nine more GWOT girls? Easy. And any one of them could take Che with one hand tied behind her back.
How bad was el Che as a freedom fighter? He sucked. Like the turbines of Glen Canyon suck.
Mythbusting Che in Four paragraphs
Ché takes aim with a Stechkin APS… probably at the back of some innocent’s head.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa covers Che in some depth for the Independence Institute, and contrasts him with another historic Argentine, Juan Bautista Alberdi (to Che’s detriment). But for us the best part of Vargas Llosa’s takedown was four paragraphs that accurately describe Che’s military legacy, or lack of one:
Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the history books as a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the fight against Batista—taking the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train with heavy reinforcements—is seriously disputed. Numerous testimonies indicate that the commander of the train surrendered in advance, perhaps after taking bribes. (Gutiérrez Menoyo, who led a different guerrilla group in that area, is among those who have decried Cuba’s official account of Guevara’s victory.) Immediately after the triumph of the revolution, Guevara organized guerrilla armies in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti—all of which were crushed. In 1964, he sent the Argentine revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti to his death by persuading him to mount an attack on his native country from Bolivia, just after representative democracy had been restored to Argentina.
Ché is a pop-art icon, but he was a lousy guerilla.
Particularly disastrous was the Congo expedition in 1965. Guevara sided with two rebels—Pierre Mulele in the west and Laurent Kabila in the east—against the ugly Congolese government, which was sustained by the United States as well as by South African and exiled Cuban mercenaries. Mulele had taken over Stanleyville earlier before being driven back. During his reign of terror, as V.S. Naipaul has written, he murdered all the people who could read and all those who wore a tie. As for Guevara’s other ally, Laurent Kabila, he was merely lazy and corrupt at the time; but the world would find out in the 1990s that he, too, was a killing machine. In any event, Guevara spent most of 1965 helping the rebels in the east before fleeing the country ignominiously. Soon afterward, Mobutu came to power and installed a decades-long tyranny. (In Latin American countries too, from Argentina to Peru, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.)
The name Laurent Kabila may ring a bell. Yes, he’s the fat, corrupt blood-diamond entrepreneur who overthrew the fat, corrupt Mobutu and precipitated 20 or so years of Congolese civil war. Kabila’s son, Joseph, former commander of Kabila’s child soldiers, inherited the de facto Kingdom of the Congo on Kabila’s assassination. (The country’s paper title is”Democratic Republic of the Congo” and it holds sham elections). Joseph Kabila is an improvement on his violent, incompetent father in one way only: he is not fat.
Back to Che.
Ché, sniveling in his brief captivity. American Félix Rodriguez, left.
In Bolivia, Che was defeated again, and for the last time. He misread the local situation. There had been an agrarian reform years before; the government had respected many of the peasant communities’ institutions; and the army was close to the United States despite its nationalism. “The peasant masses don’t help us at all” was Guevara’s melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Even worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who had no stomach for guerrilla warfare after having been humiliated at the elections, led Guevara to a vulnerable location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che’s capture at Yuro ravine, soon after meeting the French intellectual Régis Debray and the Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, both of whom were arrested as they left the camp, was, like most of the Bolivian expedition, an amateur’s affair.
Vencer o morir, eh, wise guy? You get “morir.”
Guevara was certainly bold and courageous, and quick at organizing life on a military basis in the territories under his control, but he was no General Giap. His book Guerrilla Warfare teaches that popular forces can beat an army, that it is not necessary to wait for the right conditions because an insurrectional foco (or small group of revolutionaries) can bring them about, and that the fight must primarily take place in the countryside. (In his prescription for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves for women the roles of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista’s army was not an army, but a corrupt bunch of thugs with no motivation and not much organization; and guerrilla focos, with the exception of Nicaragua, all ended up in ashes for the foquistas; and Latin America has turned 70 percent urban in these last four decades. In this regard, too, Che Guevara was a callous fool.
Frankly, based on the statements of the Bolivians who killed him we’d accept “bold” but resist the term “courageous” for Che. He begged for his life and offered to deal his comrades away. It was too late; the Bolivians had his comrades, and had no interest in preserving his life.
Vargas Llosa calls Che “The Killing Machine.” That’s probably more a title of Che’s aspiration than actual achievement. True, he was able to order the execution of some thousands of bound prisoners in Havana, but so did many other revolutionaries. As a guerilla leader, he excelled most at getting his own men killed.
His actions in Bolivia are those of a man who had not read his own book. (We suppose it’s possible; someone else could have written the book for him). But he’s gone, and we’re here.
To celebrate Dead Che Day. Every day!