When I see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, I assume they’re either woefully misinformed about him, or they are informed and are an actual piece of shit. Fuck Che Guevara. Let’s piss on his grave.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: October 9, 1967--
Born Ernesto Guevara in 1928 in Argentina, he had the same birthday as Donald Trump and sat at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Left or right, extremism is bad. And Che, which was a nickname given to him because he said “che” all the time as a language filler the same way Canadians say “eh,” was definitely an extremist.
He had some good beginnings. Che was a medical student disgusted by the poverty he witnessed, blaming capitalist exploitation of the Americas. He was further radicalized when the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Guatemala in 1954. He ended up in Mexico and met Fidel and Raul Castro and was instrumental in helping the brothers overthrow the Batista regime to begin the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
But in Cuba and afterward he would prove to be a murderous totalitarian who cared little for the working class. Put in charge of a prison, he went on an execution spree of supporters of the previous regime. He founded Cuba’s labor camp system that intellectuals were rounded up and placed in, a system that years later was used to incarcerate gays, people with AIDS, and anyone who spoke against the government. Guevara was a big fan of the murderous dictator Stalin.
Che was a brave fighter with a messiah complex. After a time in Cuba, he got bored with trying to help Marxism work and decided to export Marxist revolution around the world solely for the sake of revolution. Mostly he got a shit-ton of people killed, including himself. The revolutions he set in motion were brutally crushed. He ended up in Bolivia leading a small group of guerrilla fighters, none of whom were Bolivian peasants, in an effort to overthrow the government. It didn’t go well. He was captured and executed on October 9, 1967.
Che inspired tens of thousands of middle-class Latin Americans to drop out of school and start their own guerilla rebellions instead of, you know, seeking more effective and sustainable methods of political change. These violent insurrections accomplished nothing but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people because they gave local governments an excuse for brutal oppression to combat the civil wars Guevara inspired. There are wiser ways of resisting totalitarianism than charging headlong into the lion’s jaws with little more than a stick in your hand. These unsuccessful rebellions got a lot of innocent people killed in the resulting government crackdowns.
Sorry this doesn’t jibe with the romantic myth of Che as freedom fighter. He was a self-professed “killing machine” who saw violence as the only solution, when more practical methods of sustained opposition to oppression likely could have done far more for the advancement of democracy in Latin America across the decades.
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