Friday, October 26, 2007

Che

Quite a romanticized figure, Mr. Guevara de la Serna. I tend to lean more toward's this depiction of him from slate.com, "Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel."

From Mere Comments, a blog from the people at Touchstone magazine:

Sarah Baxter of London's Sunday Times tells a hilarious story about the far left's uneasy alliance with the jihadist far right:

*** QUOTE ***

The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union."

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God.

*** END QUOTE ***

It's the Hitler-Stalin pact all over again, the second time as farce.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks, Joseph. I see people wearing Che t-shirts all the time, and I want to ask them if they even know who this guy was.

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