If cowardly sadistic imbecile Che Guevara could become famous, there is hope for all of us

Humberto Fontova talks about the real Che Guevara:

The whole thing starts with the cachet, the coolness surrounding the Cuban revolution. At the time, the United States was the biggest fuddy-duddy, Leave-it-to-Beaver country in the world. Then, all of a sudden, you had these long-haired revolutionaries down in Cuba - they were the first hippies, the first beatniks. Look at Che Guevara in those years. Take off the beard and you've got Jim Morrison. Raul Castro used to carry his shoulder-length blond hair in a ponytail. Camilo Cienfuegos looked like another Jerry Garcia. There was that coolness cachet, plus all the misconceptions about what Cuba was like prior to these guys. [...]

Che Guevara's diaries. Those are the same diaries that he kept as a young man when he was traveling in South America. They were published in Havana. It's very interesting because Robert Redford chose to omit many fascinating items. For instance, in those diaries - the original ones - Che Guevara has a passage where he says, "crazy with fury, I will murder any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savoring the sweet odor of blood and gunpowder." Naturally, for some reason, that was left out of Redford's heart-warming movie.

All you have to do is take Che Guevara's writing and put it alongside that of [Seung-hui] Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, and you can't tell the difference. Cho comes across as healthy compared to Che Guevara. Yet I haven't seen too many Cho t-shirts around, while there are lots of Che t-shirts. [...]

It has dawned on me that what I have written is actually an inspirational book and that what I give are inspirational talks. Because if Che Guevara - a coward, a sadist, an imbecile - can see his picture become the most widely reproduced picture of the century, then folks, there's hope for all of us. It is astounding that a man who was so completely worthless should become so idolized. And that only happened because he hooked up with Fidel Castro, the most effective propagandist in modern history, and he's still at it.

Fontova has a lot more to say about Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, the first Stalinist hippies of the sixties, in two parts: Part 1; Part 2.


Technorati Tags: Communism, Tyrrany, Cuba, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro