September 24, 2004
Che = totalitarian
One more post before hitting the library.
Paul Berman has an article on Slate in which he decries the elevation of Che and his legacy in the upcoming movie The Motorcycle Diaries. Money quotes:
"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."
"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."
Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, a book which is now at the top of my reading list.
Ernesto Che Guevara also succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class American teenagers to go to their high schools wearing really lame t-shirts.
Posted by: hugo at September 24, 2004 5:35 PMYeah, I never got that part either. Always seemed kind of dumb, in that pretentious sort of way.
Posted by: ryan at September 25, 2004 12:40 AM