Monday, February 18, 2008

A Refreshing Perspective on Che Guevara

From Jeff Jacoby's op-ed at the Boston Globe in "What Would JFK Do?":

"The lionizing of Che, a sociopath who relished killing and acclaimed 'the pedagogy of the firing squad,' is not just 'inappropriate.' It is vile. No American in his right mind would be caught dead wearing a David Duke T-shirt or displaying a poster of Pol Pot...

What [Che] cherished was hatred and murder: 'Hatred as an element of struggle,' he wrote in 1967, '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.' It was a sentiment he expressed repeatedly - and lived up to.

...As chief prosecutor of the new regime, Che oversaw the bloodbath, ordering hundreds of executions in the first months of 1959. Those he killed...included 'former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon their democratic beliefs.'

...Che didn't scruple at the death of innocents. 'Quit the dallying!' he ordered Jose Vilasuso, a conscientious government lawyer who was seeking evidence against several prisoners. 'Your job is a very simple one. Judicial evidence is an archaic and secondary bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from revolutionary conviction.'


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