POLITICS: Terrorist, Sadist, and Left-Wing Saint
Fund, John H.
ORTY YEARS AGO, The American Spectator helped drag conservatism out of its stodgy past and enlivened it with a dash of brio.Writers such as P.J. O’Rourke, Ben Stein, and Greg Gutfeld helped...
...While he set up show trials to execute opponents, with himself acting as the sole judge, he found time to ban Santa Claus as an “American imperialist import...
...ORTY YEARS AGO, The American Spectator helped drag conservatism out of its stodgy past and enlivened it with a dash of brio.Writers such as P.J...
...Butler has told friends he is “thrilled” to own the precious strands and plans to display them in his store...
...The movie, which portrays the saintly young Argentine on a trip he took through Latin America in his pre-revolutionary days, went on to win critical acclaim and an Oscar...
...Cho comes across as healthy compared to Che, though you don’t see Cho T-shirts around, while Che T-shirts are everywhere...
...Che is seemingly on display everywhere, as the classic 1960 photograph by Alfredo Korda of him bearing a fierce expression and wearing a revolutionary beret adorns everything from T-shirts to CD cases to swimwear...
...Happy 40th...
...Consider: a lock of his hair was just purchased by Bill Butler, a Houston-area bookstore owner, for the very capitalistic price of $119,500...
...Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of The Che Guevara Myth, says that Che was in reality the architect of Cuba’s infamous labor camps, which housed dissidents, gays, and devout Catholics...
...O’Rourke, Ben Stein, and Greg Gutfeld helped redefine conservative chic in the pages of the Spectator...
...He bragged there was “not a single discrepancy” between his own worldview and that of Mao Tse-tung, who killed 70 million of his own people while Che was still alive...
...By coincidence, 1967 also marked the beginning of radical chic, in the person of such non-eminences as the Black Panthers, Leonard Bernstein, and Abbie Hoffman...
...Somehow I doubt either movie will tell the full brutal truth about someone who has become a symbol of wild, youthful rebellion...
...But there is hope...
...Congratulations to Bob Tyrrell and the staff of The American Spectator for fighting the good fight and advancing the cause of liberty...
...AT&T has yanked cell phones with Che’s image on them from shelves after complaints...
...Fontova says one “could take Che Guevara’s writing and put it alongside that of Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student killer, and you can’t tell the difference...
...But Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the revolutionary partner of Fidel Castro who was executed by Bolivian soldiers 40 years ago this fall, lives on in a big way...
...Robert Redford helped fuel the myth of Che with his 2004 movie The Motorcycle Diaries, which had to be screened for Fidel Castro and Che’s widow to secure their permission for its release...
...At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people’s lives and property, and to abolish their free will,” Vargas Llosa writes...
...But much more work needs to be done to destroy the myth of Che Guevara...
...Ignorance and reflexive anti-Americanism accounts for most of it,” says Fontova...
...He practiced that hatred himself, describing in his diary the satisfaction he felt in executing peasant Eutimio Guerra, a suspected informant, with a single .32-caliber shot to the head...
...He once commented with disgust on the ordinary Cubans who fought alongside him in the Sierra Maestre hoping the revolution would lead to a Cuban democracy: “I discovered the evident anti-communist inclinations of most of them...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator’s Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...That’s something The American Spectator has done an excellent job of dispelling for 40 years—which is an excellent reason to toast its staff on this special anniversary...
...It’s criminal to think of the needs of the individual...
...Mr...
...Author Humberto Fontova points to evidence that Guevara, the chief instigator of Castro’s revolutionary efforts overseas, was involved in a November 1962 terrorist plot that would have had 500 kilos of TNT blow up Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s, and Grand Central Station on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year...
...Castro’s agents P O L I T I C S 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Terrorist, Sadist, and Left-Wing Saint by John H. Fund F for this bomb plot were members of the Cuban mission to the United Nations working in concert with members of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, an outfit that became much better known a year later when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines,” writes Fontova...
...After the revolution entered Havana in 1959, Che was blunt about what it all meant: “All right, it is dictatorship,” he shouted...
...J O H N H . F U N D DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 “Osama bin Laden on a poster doesn’t look cool, whereas Che Guevara looks like Jim Morrison...
...SOWHAT ACCOUNTS for the curious blind spot that Che Guevara has created in the minds of so many left-wingers...
...It has now inspired two more movies about Che’s life that will be released next year...
...Osama bin Laden on a poster doesn’t look cool, whereas Che Guevara looks like Jim Morrison...
...As the British newspaper the Independent put it, “if the small lingering band of communonostalgists who still revere Che were honest about continuing his life’s work they would have to form a group called ‘Left-Wingers for Creating a Universal North Korea.’” The Cult of Che was born 40 years ago when some left-wingers knew what he represented...
...Now it survives only because of ignorance...
...Despite a bloodstained record that left only misery in its wake, Che remains a popular icon of liberal culture...
...LAWRENCE AURIANA GAETANO FILANGIERI PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 40th ANNIVERSARY...
...Che was constantly fretting about the insufficiently tough-minded thoughts of his comrades...
...Fontova, who has written Exposing the Real Che Guevara, says Che’s own writings mark him as a cold-blooded killer...
...They are now mostly forgotten...
...After Cuban-American customers asked if the store planned to sell Pol Pot pajamas next, the company issued a statement: “We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort...
...He was also a sadist who loved to simulate executions as a form of torture...
...He wrote in his will in praise of the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines...
...Target dropped CD cases with Che’s face on them last Christmas...
...Che was made of sterner stuff...
...They pick up the story after Che discovers Marx and follow him through the Cuban revolution, then to his fomenting of unrest in Africa, and then to his death in Bolivia...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
