Paul Berman on "The Cult of Che"

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; 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. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale. . . .

Paul Berman, "The Cult of Che" Slate.com, Sept. 25, 2004.

Berman is author of Terror and Liberalism, which builds a liberal rationale for the war on terror and critiques leftist intellectuals as Noam Chomsky who "who have applauded terrorism and tried to explain it as a rational response to oppression." (Publisher's Weekly). . . Another book to add to my reading list.

I had a Che t-shirt in college; bought it in Ireland, of all places. Haven't worn it in ages.

Update: Ken Wheaton has a good post on this as well, musing:

[Che] fought. And he fought. And he fought. He worshipped war. It would cause one to wonder why American "pacifists" would sport Che shirts and banners ... if one didn't realize that such pacifists, especially college kids, were historically ignorant. And the rich irony here is that Che hated Americans, especially well-meaning middle class Americans.

Update: "The Real Che", by Anthony Daniels. The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 2. Oct. 2004.