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

July 11, 2005
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The New Republic

Che Guevara: Communist Icon, Capitalist Commodity

Art Carden, Contributor

http://www.forbes.com

Ironically, anticapitalist crusader and left-wing icon Che Guevara has turned into a brand name revered by people the world around, which brought me to Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty (The Independent Institute, 2006). Llosa, who is a senior fellow at the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute, has combined three previously published articles into a short (67 page) book that evaluates the Guevara legacy and assesses the prospects for liberal reform in Latin America.

Llosa introduces the book with an anecdote about how he first realized that something might have been amiss when he saw a poster of Che Guevara on a friend’s wall next to “a picture of ‘Comrade Gonzalo,’ the genocidal leader of Shining Path,” a Maoist organization in Llosa’s native Peru. Gonzalo was a tyrant whose wrath had affected Llosa “firsthand.” His goal is to right wrongs and correct falsehoods as he sees them, arguing “that intellectual and political deceit — the bondage of the mind — represent the first step toward oppression.” Thus he embarks on an exploration of the mythology of Che Guevara and the tradition of liberalism in Latin America.

Llosa argues that Guevara replaced Batista’s tyranny with his own. After taking Havana, “Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people: proven enemies, suspected enemies and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Guevara slaughtered some of his enemies and tortured others by simulating executions. During his time in charge of La Cabana prison, Guevara oversaw numerous summary executions.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2011/05/31/che-guevara-communist...

THE REAL CHE GUEVARA_A MURDERER and A COWARD

Che Guevara: Communist Hero, Racist, Mass Murderer

Che Guevara was an international terrorist and mass murderer.

During his vicious campaigns to impose communism on countries throughout Latin America, Che Guevara trained and motivated the Castro regime’s firing squads that executed thousands of men, women and children.

“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. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall! (El Paredón)” –Che Guevara

“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! Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become … ” - Che Guevara

Ironically, those that worship at the altar of Che by wearing his image on cheap t-shirts or waving around posters with his grizzled, murderous image, would consider themselves to be religious “anti-racists”. These people epitomize what Lenin said of the “useful idiots” that communism uses to achieve its aims internationally. Communism is not really concerned with “racial equality”; communists are concerned with centralizing power in their own hands, and killing anyone that gets in their way. The “anti-racism” shtick proffered by the communists is only a ruse, designed to dupe poor and disgruntled minorities into agitating for communist and revolutionary causes. In the end, everyone shares in the same communist misery, no matter their race or ethnicity.
http://antiantifa-usa.blogspot.com/2008/11/che-guevara-communist-he...

"Castro had him execute people that opposed their politics, later Castro turned on him but Castro racked up 16,000+ murders, 100,000 imprisonments and 30,000 deaths of people trying to escape Castro's oppression."

Killer Chic: Hollywood's Sick Love Affair with Che Guevara

Consider some of the people who have recently brandished or invoked Guevara’s likeness as a beacon of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In Lebanon, demonstrators protesting against Syria at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri carried Che’s image. Thierry Henry, a French soccer player who plays for Arsenal, in England, showed up at a major gala organized by FIFA, the world’s soccer body, wearing a red and black Che T-shirt. In a recent review in The New York Times of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis noted that “the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader,” and added, “I guess Che really does live, after all.” The soccer hero Maradona showed off the emblematic Che tattoo on his right arm during a trip where he met Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in southern Russia, protesters denouncing cash payments of welfare concessions took to the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, treats visitors to a section devoted to Latin America in which half the shelves are taken up by Che books. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who battles drug crime in Mexicali, wears a Che sweatband because it makes him feel stronger.

At the Dheisheh refugee camp on the West Bank, Che posters adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A Sunday magazine devoted to social life in Sydney, Australia, lists the three dream guests at a dinner party: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung Kwok-hung, the rebel elected to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, defies Beijing by wearing a Che T-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, President Lula da Silva’s adviser in charge of the high-profile “Zero Hunger” program, says that “we should have paid less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara.” And most famously, at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, and Santana showed up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is firing up people whose causes for the most part represent the exact opposite of what Guevara was.

Mercedes-Benz Uses Communist Madman Che Guevara to Sell Luxury Cars

Mike Gonzalez

January 11, 2012 at 3:08 pm

There’s something about Che Guevara that convinces older European men that they will become cooler through association with his “brand.” We saw that again yesterday when Mercedes-Benz Chairman Dieter Zetsche launched a new car under a banner picture of Guevara. Years ago, an equally desperate Anglican clergyman tried to stem dwindling congregations with a poster of Guevara wearing a crown of thorns. The hip slogan? “Meek and Mild? As if.”

Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure.

http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/11/mercedes-benz-uses-communist-ma...