Ericka Andersen goes a little further than most when she bravely
asks a liberal friend what is up with the Che fetish. The
friend answers:
Che was a doctor who took a trip on his bike all around SA and
worked as a volunteer in a rudimentary jungle hospital in Sao
Paolo, Brazil and later decided to change his life goal from
being a physician to being a revolutionary in the name of the
voiceless…
He is the symbol of outrageous bravery who said "Shoot, coward,
you’re only going to kill a man" right before he was executed
and who believed in the immortality of the revolution to save
the masses of unequal citizens.
He and Castro killed many too, but they did it for an ideal, a
belief that many Liberals accepted and preferred to imperialism
deaths. He traveled and spent his life, truly to fight for what
he believe was right, equality of the people and his image is
now ubiquitous…
Equality of the people... to be shot in front of a wall for being
gay? Or to starve?
The left has a morbid fascination with mass murderers, to be
sure. Che, Fidel, Chavez, Lenin have all received plaudits on
account of their tireless struggle for "equality," that is,
"equality" of everyone else. Do all liberals feel this way? Maybe
it's just a majority. But I'm surprised there's no chill effect.
If Tom Cruise's latest flick, Valkyrie, were sympathetic
to Hitler, and showed how Hitler was really just a courageous man
who wanted to bring Germany back to its former glory, the
directors would never heard the end of it (and rightly so!). Yet
what was different about Hitler? He, like Che, sought to
extermine those he deemed unfit. They both did so systematically.
The difference is that one had a fondness for open collars and
cigars, while the other one was big on Wagner.
People who speak well of Pinochet on the right usually make sure
to put it in the context of how he was also a dictator and human
rights violator. But the dialogue from the left rarely gets into
the messy details of Che's life -- they just prefer to ignore the
bad parts and portray it as all unicorn giggles and sparkles.
